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sheep peered from their rickety cages unaware that the man who greeted them so warmly was the restaurateur. Apart from ferrying people around the hamlets that speckled the hills beneath us, it would sometimes bring goods from the city ordered by some of our more enterprising retailers, and carry away small quantities of our village produce. Pushkara was known mainly for its yak’s wool hats, reputedly among the least itchy in all of India, a special concoction of bats’ droppings distributed to herbalists in the South, and a piquant tea, popular with the cognoscenti of the village but spat out, generally, by those who didn’t know any better. More recently, Bister’s Brocades had become a significant export, described by Malek as a speciality re-labelling service by which garments purchased from the city had their labels replaced with odd-sounding alternatives such as ‘Gucci’, ‘Versace’ or ‘Pierre Cardin’, and sold back for six times the original price. In spite of Pol’s repeated attempts to explain it to me, I had concluded that retail would forever remain a pursuit that defied reason.
    Once the doors had been wrenched open, visiting uncles would brace themselves for the onrush of elated relatives, while the driver retired with a bidi, leaving the shopkeepers to scramble over his intractable knots. Scrawled across the side of the bus, in blue and yellow letters, was the phrase, which I always thought slightly paradoxical, ‘Long Live Brahman The Immortal!’.
    Pol’s father was usually waiting with a clipboard and his clerk, Mr Chatterjee, to find out how much of his cargo had gone missing on the way. Mr Chatterjee enjoyed being out of the office since it gave him a chance to talk to people. In fact, Mr Chatterjee loved talking to anyone whether they were listening or not, the latter being more likely since his universal ex-communication on the grounds of working for Malek. Even at home, simple questions to his wife such as, ‘what about these socks?’ were met with a stony silence. He tried talking to himself for a while, but found the predictability of response frustrating. Now he only talked to himself with others present which was, at least, communication of a kind.
    On this occasion he was trying to ascertain why a batch of saris had mysteriously, if not unexpectedly, failed to appear. The more vehement his inquisition, however, the more nonchalantly the driver, puffing on his stick, slipped into that blessed equilibrium wherein no amount of berating from Mr Chatterjee, or anyone else for that matter, held any meaning. Sometimes Malek would jump up and down shouting, ‘I know what you’re up to, you stinking bloody thief.’ Which only made the driver smile more.
    I had gone to collect some medicines I’d ordered from the Pharmaceutical Rep who came to the clinic from time to time. We’d run perilously low on fruit pastes after an especially virulent outbreak of foot fungus, while our re-useable mouth swabs had all but lost that essential fluffiness with which they came endowed. I was checking my list when something struck me as odd. Everything had gone suddenly quiet. Even the children, who had scampered through its plumes of blue smoke, stood in mute clusters staring at the bus. Malek Bister, hitherto in mid-tirade against all those thieving bastards along the road who were now the proud owners of premium saris they’d bloody well filched, had stopped abruptly, the cigar falling out of his mouth.
    A man was standing by the steps, gazing round with a face like nothing I’d ever seen before. It had two eyes, obviously, and the mouth common to most human beings, and animals too I suppose, but there the similarity ended. His hair, neither black, henna nor any recognisable colour, was an indistinct shade of stale chapatti. His blotchy skin, where it hadn’t peeled, was pink and wet. He was portly like a businessman, his