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walked along the hallway to the room,
his
room now, with Anand’s brawn hurrying him on. Once inside, he stood in the shadows and faced his captor. Even in this low light he could see himself again in Anand’s sunglasses.
    ‘Sleep now – you won’t get much of it around here.’ Anand turned to leave.
    ‘Wait!’ Eli almost shouted. ‘I want to know …’
    Anand looked at him impatiently.
    ‘What’s a
chutiya
? Auntie Lakshmi kept calling me a
chutiya
…’
    ‘A
chutiya
, yaar, is someone who can’t think past a
chut
, a girl’s … But speaking more broadly …’
    ‘She can’t call me —’
    ‘Auntie-ji can call you whatever the fuck she wants, yaar. And in this case I would say the shoe fits …’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why?’ Anand’s voice boomed as he stepped closer, in his face. ‘Because a
chutiya
, in plain English, yaar, is a fool.’
    Anand left, slammed and locked the door from the outside. Eli stood in the darkness, listening to Mozart mixed with street music and noise, from all the sorry lives coming together and being torn apart. He closed his eyes, leaking tears, and wished that everything would be different when he opened them. He’d heard of G.B. Road but wasn’t sure where it was; he knew that kids disappeared here. Like they did in South Africa, chopped up for muti, or in America, tortured and raped and buried in a cornfield or something. Then he thought of the girls living here, working here, and of meeting them, soon perhaps. It made him feel slightly less alone.
    Though it was mid-summer he felt intensely cold and crawled under the single sheet on his bed, pulling it over him like a tent. Hiding when it was impossible to hide. He tried to drag from memory what had happened to him at the Delhi train station, how he got here. But it was all a blur. A black hole, a dark, demented rabbit hole that he had fallen down.



Chapter 7
    Eli lay in his bed and waited for them to come for him. No clue what time it was; they’d taken his watch, along with all his other things. Left him just the clothes on his body, his black jeans, Zoo York T-shirt and striped boxers, his sneakers and socks. His clothes hadn’t been washed since he arrived; he’d been permitted only one bath. He could barely stand his own smell, ripening in the morning heat. He studied the nails on his left hand, ignored the dirt but noticed how long they were: couldn’t play with those. With his eyes closed for a moment he could see his guitars – the classic black-and-white Epiphone, the tobacco Washburn acoustic – the shapes of his life. He longed to hold each one, to make them sing and cry and wail under his touch. His fingers played a few riffs, in the air. Here, deep in the lair of this crazy bitch, there was nothing beautiful to hold on to.
    Not quite awake, he tried to think of home. Home had changed a lot over the years; they had moved from house to house like gypsies, when bad fortune had driven them out and on, in the search for new work or, in his mother’s case, for a new place to light her fire. Everywhere disappointed her after a while. He thought of their small house by the sea, which had held them the longest, and wondered if he would ever see it again. Hopefully his mother wasn’t there. Hopefully she was with his father, looking for him, getting closer. It pained him to think of his dog Max, maybe home alone, faithfully waiting for him.
    He didn’t like where his thoughts were going, so he got up and went to the door, still locked, of course. Then he went to the window and peered out through the grillwork. The shopkeepers below were just rolling back their metal storefronts, banging like dozens of garage doors. As they did every morning – he’d counted four since he’d been here. Their junk intrigued him: all sorts of bathroom stuff, but mostly toilets, toilets and more toilets and signs everywhere to advertise them. The whole street was a toilet, as far as he could tell. He nearly smiled at the