Back to page four. A boxed item says Nigambodh Ghat has been inundated by the flood waters of the Jamna. People should take their loved ones elsewhere. Perhaps for the first time, the electric crematorium will be earning dividends. I have nothing much to do. So I decide to take a look before joining my cronies at the Coffee House, I go by Purana Qila to the Ring Road. I leave the regional Headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) on my left, the prime cause of Delhi’s ill-health, the filtration plant, on my right. Its four chimneys belch smoke all round the clock and provide WHO brochures their best illustrations for environmental pollution. They shower Delhi with soot. Its filtered water gives Delhiwallas Delhi belly, hepatitis, cholera, dysentery and other intestinal disorders. From the top of the overbridge I catch a glimpse of the Jamna licking the lower road of the old iron bridge and rolling its muddy waters past Gandhi’s samadhi and the Velodrome. At the roundabout near the bridge is a police barrier: the bridge is closed to vehicular traffic. I turn round and drive into the electric crematorium. Sweepers are busy sweeping the road and the hall. Three corpses of beggars are put on a wheel-borrow behind the building to await disposal when bookings have been taken care of. The clerk in the office looks at his wrist-watch and asks me, ‘Has the body arrived? There are three bookings for the morning. I’ve fixed them an hour apart.’

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?’