I’ve always liked the awkward young men and I’m no casteist, god no. I like boys, circumcised, uncircumcised, washed, unwashed, touchable, untouchable, straight, bent, curved, I mean, it’s all love, isn’t it, in the end?

He talks in proverbs. There’s nothing I can say in reply.

Isn’t violence a failure of the imagination, after all? And that failure, isn’t it stupidity?

Because now there’s time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I’ll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in the sunlight like vampire dust.

How will the ships navigate without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted, was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate, unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did.

If you want a moral, here it is: what god giveth, he taketh away. In this story art is god. And if god is art, then what is the devil? Bad art of course.

God has it in for the poets, that’s obvious, but the Bombaywallahs hold a special place in his dispensation.

We’re waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here.

All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay.