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Guzdar young lady was above reproach; Mr Sethna had been correct in defending the mistreated girl’s virtue. The steward was such a fanatical Zoroastrian that Farrokh’s fiercely opinionated father had described Mr Sethna as a Parsi who carried all of Persia on his shoulders.
    To everyone who’d suffered his disapproving frowns in the Duckworth Club dining room or in the Ladies’ Garden, old Mr Sethna looked like a steward who would gladly pour hot tea on anyone’s head. He was tall and exceedingly lean, as if he generally disapproved of eating, and he had a hooked, disdainful nose, as if he also disapproved of how everything smelled. And the old steward was so fair-skinned – most Parsis are fairer-skinned than most Indians – that Mr Sethna was presumed to be racially disapproving, too.
    At present, Mr Sethna looked disapprovingly at the commotion that engulfed the golf course. His lips were thin and tightly closed, and he had the narrow, jutting, tufted chin of a goat. He disapproved of sports, and most avowedly disliked the mixing of sporting activities with the more dignified pursuits of dining and sharp debate.
    The golf course was in riot: half-dressed men came running from the locker room — as if their sporting attire (when they were fully clothed) weren’t distasteful enough. As a Parsi, Mr Sethna had a high regard for justice; he thought there was something immoral about a death, which was so enduringly serious, occurring on a golf course, which was so disturbingly trivial. As a true believer whose naked body would one day lie in the Towers of Silence, the old steward found the presence of so many vultures profoundly moving; he preferred, therefore, to ignore them and to concentrate his attention and his scorn on the human turmoil. The moronic head mali had been summoned; he stupidly drove his rattling truck across the golf course, gouging up the grass that the assistant malis had recently groomed with the roller.
    Mr Sethna couldn’t see Inspector Dhar, who was deep in the bougainvillea, but he had no doubt that the crude movie star was in the thick of this crisis; the steward sighed in disapproval at the very idea of Inspector Dhar.
    Then there came a high-pitched ringing of a fork against a water glass – a vulgar means by which to summon a waiter. Mr Sethna turned to the offending table and realized that
he
, not the waiter, was being summoned by the second Mrs Dogar. She was called the beautiful Mrs Dogar to her face and the second Mrs Dogar behind her back. Mr Sethna didn’t find her especially beautiful, and he most adamantly disapproved of second marriages.
    Furthermore, it was generally admitted among the members of the club that Mrs Dogar’s beauty was coarse in nature and had faded over time. No amount of
Mr
Dogar’s money could improve his new wife’s garish tastes. No degree of physical fitness, which the second Mrs Dogar was reputed to worship to excess, could conceal from even the most casual observer that she was at least 42. To Mr Sethna’s critical eye, she was already pushing (if not past) 50; he also thought she was much too tall. And there was many a golf-loving Duckworthian who took offense at her outspoken, insensitive opinion that golf was insufficient exercise for anyone in pursuit of good health.
    This day, Mrs Dogar was lunching alone – a habit of which Mr Sethna also disapproved. At a proper club, the steward believed, women wouldn’t be allowed to eat alone.
    The marriage was still new enough that Mr Dogar often joined his wife for lunch; the marriage was also old enough that Mr Dogar felt free to cancel these luncheon dates, should some matter of more important business intervene. And lately he’d taken to canceling at the last minute, which left his wife no time to make plans of her own. Mr Sethna had observed that being left alone made the new Mrs Dogar restless and cross.
    On the other hand, the steward had also observed a certain tension between the newlyweds