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window, Swami watches the fields giving way to fetid plots of wasteland, to hideous corporate company headquarters, to fields again, to a row of tottering roadside stalls, then more benighted
plots. The car is approaching the outskirts of Madurai, where the morgue is located, and Murugesan, driving, has not made a tactful job of explaining why Swami is being asked to confirm that the
body being held there is the white man’s corpse. It is clear to Swami that he is being used by Mullaipuram Police as a diversionary pawn in a game of political pressures.
Only because no
one is interested in what I do or say am I being asked to do something and say something
.
    “Good news about this boy,” Murugesan offers in a conciliatory tone, after some hesitation, wobbling the steering wheel fractionally so that a small stray puppy in the road ahead
might – with a bit of luck – pass under the speeding car without being squashed. It’s the first thing either of them has said for ten minutes.
    The car jolts slightly.
    “What is he like, this boy?”
    “Gnngow,” Swami answers.
    “Oh-oh,” Murugesan says, nodding.
    I don’t know, is what Swami had tried to say.
Don’t pretend to understand me, Murugesan…
    As a driver, Murugesan is in a realm of his own. He is so superior to the slapdash norm as to be an impressive menace on an almost moment-by-moment basis, routinely forcing other road users to
give way or join him in death. This is the only aspect of the journey Swami takes any pleasure in. Each time a near-miss situation arises, he hankers after his life’s conclusion, where he
imagines sanctuary might lie. But no, when Murugesan overtakes a lorry on a blind side, then the oncoming drivers lurch to their side of the road in horror, and when Murugesan hurls the car here
and there to avoid being squeezed between two buses, he somehow always makes the gap.
    Murugesan is feeling anxious about Swami’s silence. He doesn’t realize that Swami is feeling disempowered and offended. He thinks that his old friend is suspicious about something.
But why, he wonders? After all, Swami’s been around, he knows the score, he understands that in the application of law and order – especially as interpreted through the eyes of the
Mullaipuram police – justice can sometimes take a circuitous path… What is he up to, this old friend of mine, Murugesan asks himself – what’s going on in that old head of
his?
    “So then,” he says emphatically, screeching the car into the hospital car park. He jumps out of the car and walks round to Swami’s side to help him out.
    It is a while since Swami has been to the Johansson Memorial Post-Mortem Centre attached to a private hospital in Madurai – not since he was a serving police officer, clogged up in an
interminable case involving two vicious and vengeful family clans in an ever-simmering, fifty-year land dispute.
    Inside, once they have passed from the 35°C heat of the corridor to the constant 4°C cold of Mortuary Two, Murugesan walks patiently beside the shuffling, shivering Swami, leading him
past shrouded bodies on slabs; here and there a foot or a hand pokes out from under the shrouds. A pair of mortuary attendants are playing cards on the floor; they leap up sharply and run to assist
– Dalits, wrapped up in their ragged mufflers and their mended woollen balaclavas. Murugesan waves them away, and they stand together, watching the police officer and his disabled companion.
No one has a kind word for these fellows, even though their responsibilities can be onerous. Sometimes they have to conduct post-mortems themselves, cutting the bodies open crudely, yanking the
organs out, and shouting what they discover to a doctor twenty metres away. That doctor, disdainful of some low fellow’s dirty old toddy-sozzled kicked-to-death carcass, will be hunched over
the post-mortem paperwork, filling it in briskly, not even looking up from his forms. It is the kind of thing that