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prostitute, or the lost scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families.’
    ‘Wouldn’t wealthy parents have gone looking for you?’ Eleanor had wondered. Prabir had hinted at revelatory dreams of scheming
     evil uncles and fake kidnappings gone wrong.
    Rajendra had survived as a beggar for almost five years when he first encountered the Indian Rationalists Association.(Outside the family – Prabir had had this drummed into him from an early age – the organisation was never to be referred to
     by its initials, unless they were swiftly followed by some suitable clarifying remark.) They couldn’t grant him the protection
     of an orphanage – their resources were stretched too thin – but they’d offered him two free meals a day, and a seat in one
     of their classrooms. This had been enough to keep him from starvation, and to save him from the clutches of the Mad Albanian,
     whose servants prowled the city hunting down children and lepers. Prabir had had nightmares about the Mad Albanian – far too
     disturbing to share with Eleanor – in which a stooped, wrinkled creature pursued him down alleys and into open sewers, trying
     to wash his feet with a cloth drenched in lamb’s blood.
    The IRA’s avowed purpose was to rid the country of its mind-addling legacy of superstition, along with the barriers of caste
     and gender that the same gibberish helped prop up. Even before they’d begun their social programmes – feeding and educating
     street children, teaching women business skills and self-defence – the Calcutta Rationalists had taken on the gurus and the
     God-men, the mystical healers and miracle workers who plagued the city, and exposed them as frauds. At the age of twelve,
     Rajendra had witnessed one of the movement’s founders, Prabir Ghosh, challenge a local holy man who made his living curing
     snake bites to save the life of a dog who’d been thrust into a cage with a cobra. In front of an audience of a thousand enthusiastic
     believers, the holy man had waved his hands over the poor convulsing animal for fifteen minutes, muttering ever more desperate
     prayers and incantations, before finally confessing that he had no magical powers at all, and that anyone bitten by a snake
     should seek help from the nearest hospital without delay.
    Rajendra was impressed by the man’s honesty, however belated; some charlatans kept bluffing and blustering long after they’d
     lost all credibility. But the power of thedemonstration impressed him even more. It was common knowledge that many snakes were not poisonous, and that a shallow enough
     bite or a strong enough constitution could enable some people to survive an encounter with a truly venomous species. The holy
     man’s reputation must have flourished on the basis that he’d ‘cured’ people who would have survived anyway – each success
     a joyous miracle worth trumpeting loudly, to be retold with embellishments a hundred times, as opposed to each sad and unsurprising
     death. But this simple trial had cleared away all the confounding issues: the snake was poisonous, the bites were deep and
     numerous … and the victim had died in front of a thousand witnesses.
    In the minute’s silence for the dog that followed, Rajendra had chosen his vocation. Life and death were mysteries to him,
     but no mystery was impenetrable. The earliest attempts to understand these things, he reasoned, must have foundered against
     obstacles that seemed insurmountable, leaving behind failed systems of knowledge to ossify or degenerate. That was the source
     of religion. But someone, somewhere had always carried on the search in good faith; someone had always found the strength
     to keep on asking: Are the things I believe true? That was the legacy he’d claim. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains,
     Parsees and Christians, from the most sincere self-deluding mystics to the most cynical frauds, could never do more than parody
     the search for truth. He would put the