I tell him, I am not a mourner, just a tamashbeen (a sightseer). He gives me a dirty look and says acidly, ‘If you like this kind of tamasha, take my job.’

I get out of the crematorium just in time. Coming in from the other side is a hearse laden with wreaths followed by a long cavalcade of cars with military markings. Old soldiers also die.

The Coffee House is crowded. My journalist friend and our political adviser have their faces covered with their newspapers as if they are not on talking terms with each other. I join them, they put down their papers. ‘Say brother, where have you been all these days?’

I tell them of the number of relations and friends down with viral fever and conjunctivitis. And my servants.

‘You are lucky you haven’t got AIDS,’ says the Sikh journalist. ‘Knowing what you are upto with all these foreign cunts, you’ll be the first Delhiwalla to get it.’

‘Thanks,’ I reply, ‘you look out for yourself. It’s sods like you who get AIDS. Straight sex does no harm to anyone.’

‘Do you have anything else besides sex on your minds?’ reprimands the politician. ‘Here in Delhi people are dying like flies and all you can think of is sodomy and fucking foreign women. Are you one bit concerned about the future of your city?’

‘No,’ we reply in a duet. ‘As far as I am concerned it can go to hell,’ I add. ‘It is no longer the Delhi I grew up in and loved. You Punjabis who invaded us in 1947 have buggered it out of shape.’

‘Be more serious,’ he advises me. ‘We had no choice in 1947 except coming to Delhi. It is the others coming in every day who are creating the problems. Do you know 70,000 pour into Delhi every year from all over India? As if Delhi is the nation’s orphanage. Where are they to be found homes, schools, hospitals? Do you know thirteen lakh Delhiwallas shit in the open because there are no lavatories for them?’

‘You start a movement restricting shitting to once a week,’ suggests the journalist, ‘I promise to put it on the wire service.’

‘It’s no use talking to fellows like you—absolute waste of precious time,’ says the politician getting up. ‘Mark my words, Delhi is a dying city. The more it has of people like you, the sooner it will die. For this prophecy, you pay for my coffee,’ he says as he strides off.