“I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”

“Sold you?”

“Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”

“There’s no slavery in India.”

The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.

“Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”

“Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”

Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.

“I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”

I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”

“Oah, I have no caste.”

“No caste? What do you mean, all India has some kind of caste.”