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his toes and peered through the door eye.
At first he was cool as a man looking down the barrel of a shotgun, but when he saw the world become remote and threatening, through its cold lens, he began to lose his nerve.
    There was something so unprotected about this flat. The limp chain between the door and frame that could so easily be axed away; the neighbours who could hear and be heard, and yet pretend not
to have seen when it counted; and yes the judas planted in the door suggesting security, but through whose dwarfing lens murderers and tradesmen would appear alike.
    When Udaya returned, she found Rehan transformed. Staring at her, he said, in a tone borrowed from his grandmother: ‘But, Ma, aren’t you worried
what people will say about a woman living alone?’
    Udaya laughed, making him angrier still. ‘You’ve been spending too much time with your nani.’
    ‘She’s right, you know. People could say you’re a keep.’
    ‘A keep? A keep!’
    She took hold of him by the wrist, as if to give him a tight slap, then without saying a word more, dragged him down the humid stairs.
    When they arrived back at the house, Udaya, wishing to speak to her mother, was surprised to find her in a meeting. This was strange, not only because it was Saturday, but
because she had never had any meetings before, especially not with men in suits, and trays laden with jalebis and samosas. Udaya recognized one of the visitors as Mr Cicada, the accountant. The
other was an elderly gentleman with a stern moustache and a margin of fine white hair bordering the shiny expanse of his head.
    ‘Kailash Nath ji,’ Udaya’s mother said piously, ‘meet my daughter and grandson.’
    The elderly man smiled into his moustache, bowing slightly.
    Udaya, recognizing the name as that of a famous Delhi contractor, was forced to swallow her anger and return the greeting.
    Her mother, in the meantime, smiled knowingly at Rehan and gestured to a large box wrapped in garish paper.
    ‘Nani,’ Rehan gasped.
    ‘Yes, baba Re, it has come in. My ship has come in.’
    Rehan tore open the parcel and was within seconds moving his pantheon of gods, which till then had sat on a ledge near the cooler, into the plastic ramparts of Castle Grayskull.
    The subject of the flat was dropped for the moment.
    *   *   *
    The rains were the worst Delhi had seen in a decade. They sent children dancing through puddles, they brought out black umbrellas and bicycles, they flooded underpasses; the
Suzuki was stranded; Rehan floated paper boats in protest outside the house and tortured earthworms. He had apologized to his mother, but he still refused to move to the flat.
    He had also become obsessed with the newspaper’s coverage of the twins’ grandmother’s murder. He could only read slowly; and, eventually, tiring of the story’s text, he
would focus on the grainy, black and white images of the apartment block the old lady had lived in. The Times of India printed the image of the narrow, four-storey building – not unlike
the one Udaya had shown Rehan – over and over again. The sight of it in bright sunlight, its entrances and windows black, never failed to chill him. He began to have terrible dreams.
    One night, his mother was a mad Medusa with floating hair riding in the back of a jeep with a strange man. In another she was the girlfriend of the man in the leather jacket, plotting the old
woman’s murder. Rehan would wake up in the bed next to her, crying and gasping, recounting his dream as quickly as possible so that she could defuse it.
    Udaya, watching him in this state, caught between nightmares and fixations, became convinced that his fears had other depths. In Delhi, in those days, on the cusp of change, child psychiatry was
a rare thing, and it carried a stigma. But the dreams became so violent, the obsessions so unrelenting, that she began asking around.
    *   *   *
    Rehan had gone to the birthday party of his friend Karim Javeri. The