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life. The American workday is coming to an end, and mine is beginning in earnest. I have to be alert as all the call-center girls and boys are leaving their offices for their homes. This is when I must be near the phone.
    I don’t keep a cell phone, for obvious reasons—they corrode a man’s brains, shrink his balls, and dry up his semen, as all of us know—so I have to stay in the office. In case there is a crisis.
    I am the man people call when they have a crisis!
    Let’s see quickly if there’s anything else…
…any person having any information or clue about this missing man may kindly inform at CBI Web site (http://cbi.nic.in) e-mail ID ([email protected]), Fax No. 011-23011334, T No. 011-23014046 (Direct) 011-23015229 and 23015218 Extn. 210 and to the under-signed at the following address or telephone number or numbers given below.
DP 3687/05
SHO—Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi
Tel: 28653200, 27641000
    Set into the text of the notice, a photograph: blurred, blackened, and smudged by the antique printing press of some police office, and barely recognizable even when it was on the wall of the train station, but now, transferred onto the computer screen, reduced to pixels, just an abstract idea of a man’s face: a small creature with large, popped-out eyes and a stubby mustache. He could be half the men in India.
    Mr. Premier, I leave you for tonight with a comment on the shortcomings of police work in India. Now, a busload of men in khaki—it was a sensational case, after all—must have gone to Laxmangarh when investigating my disappearance. They would have questioned the shopkeepers, bullied the rickshaw puller, and woken up the schoolteacher. Did he steal as a child? Did he sleep with whores? They would have smashed up a grocery shop or two, and forced out “confessions” from one or two people.
    Yet I bet you they missed the most important clue of all, which was right in front of them:
    I am talking of the Black Fort, of course.
    I begged Kusum many times to take me to the top of the hill, and through the entranceway, and into the fort. But she said I was a coward, I would die of fright if I went up there: an enormous lizard, the biggest in the whole world, lived in the fort.
    So I could only watch. The long loopholes in its wall turned into lines of burning pink at sunrise and burning gold at sunset; the blue sky shone through the slits in the stone, while the moon shone on the jagged ramparts, and the monkeys ran wild along the walls, shrieking and attacking each other, as if they were the spirits of the dead warriors reincarnated, refighting their final battles.
    I wanted to go up there too.
    Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world—the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten—has written a poem where he says this about slaves:
    They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.
    That’s the truest thing anyone ever said.
    A great poet, this fellow Iqbal—even if he was a Muslim.
    (By the way, Mr. Premier: Have you noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.)
    Even as a boy I could see what was beautiful in the world: I was destined not to stay a slave.
    One day Kusum found out about me and the fort. She followed me all the way from our home to the pond with the stones, and saw what I was doing. That night she told my father, “He just stood there gaping at the fort—just the way his mother used to. He is going to come to nothing good in life, I’ll tell you that right now.”
    When I was maybe thirteen I decided to go up to the fort on my own. I waded into the pond, got to the other side, and climbed up the hill; just as I was on the verge of going in, a black thing materialized