We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefu’s relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.

They even went to Bangkok, where Reza had lived for some months as a teenager, living with his father’s agent there in the days before their affair went bad. It was a calm beautiful port town then, with canals and riverside boulevards, not the teeming behemoth it became later. People from all over the world congregated there: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Europeans. To Hussein it was an incredible journey, an unbelievable journey, and images of that time have stayed with him all his life. And even though he only told them to me as stories, they’ve stayed with me too ever since. To this day I imagine a walk he’d described across the courtyard of a temple on the royal island, I imagine the austere tranquillity he described, and the overwhelming authority of the temple dome. I have seen a photograph of the temple since coming here, but it revealed nothing of the beauty Hussein described.

We spent the night in Mombasa with one of Sefu’s relatives and then took a bus to Malindi the following morning. Being back on the coast was like being at home, or more than that, like recognising that here I had a place in the scheme of things. So much of what I had learned in Kampala was crushing, glimpses of the extent of my ignorance, and the self-assured puniness we lived with. Back on the coast, I felt part of something generous and noble after all, a way of living that had a part for me and which I had been too hasty in seeing as futile raggedness.

13. Something Shining

“The deranged scavenger who talked to the luxury hotels stopped accusing the Hyatt of plotting to kill him. Instead, he pleaded to its nonreflective blue-glass front, “I do so much work, Hyatt, and earn so little. Will you not take care of me?”” (Boo, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”,

15. Ice

Mumbai’s wealthy were also hopeful in the months after the terrorist attacks. Many

had begun to engage in politics for the first time, intent on bringing about government reform. Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private

security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.

The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.

Ten young men had terrorised one of the world’s biggest cities for three days – a fact that had something to do with the ingenuity of a multi-pronged plot, but perhaps also to do with the government agencies that had been operating as private market-stalls, not as public guardians. The crisis-response units of the Mumbai Police lacked arms. Officers in the train station didn’t know how to use their weapons, and ran and hid as two terrorists killed more than fifty travelers. Other officers called to rescue inhabitants of a besieged maternity hospital stayed put at police headquarters, four blocks away. Ambulances failed to respond to the wounded. Military commandos took eight hours to reach the heart of the financial capital – a journey that involved an inconveniently parked jet, a stop to refuel, and a long bus ride from the Mumbai airport. By the time the commandos arrived in south Mumbai, the killings were all but over.

Parliamentary elections would be held at the end of April, and middle- and upper-class people, especially young people, were registering to vote in record numbers. Affluent, educated candidates were coming forward with platforms of radical change: accountability, transparency, e-governance. While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had.

When they were deciding whose place to go back to, he said they could go to his, but she should know he lived with his parents. She was amused again, said “very unusual” and kissed him, lightly holding his face between cool, pale hands. At her flat, which was decorated like an adult’s, with paintings and wooden furniture, he felt like a mortal who’d climbed Mount Olympus and with one outstretched, trembling hand, touched the breast of a god. It became one of his favourite memories, making him smile whenever he thought of it. But it never occurred to him to ask her out again. In later years, he couldn’t understand why. He suspected that this was a chance of happiness blithely overlooked.