It was an act of nature. Or God. Or fate. Perhaps all three. What everyone did know was that the tree had crashed onto the roof of one house and tipped up the foundations of the other. It had stood between those two homes for just over sixty years and with the disregard that nature has for walls-as-boundaries had sunk its roots deep into the ground of one property and curved itself over the gables of the other. The two houses had been locked in a no-speaking spell for almost thirty years. A slight had passed between the oldest man of each house - who had said what had been lost somewhere in the dim decades of the argument, but the cudgels of the fight had been taken up with great enthusiasm by the next generation (and the next). A promising friendship between the youngest daughters of each family broke off, the sons began ignoring each other when they backed out of the driveway, the children obeyed the cement line between the two properties as though it were an electric fence.

She waits, holding her breath, but he says nothing more. All this time Bird’s gaze hasn’t left the city below, the dense milling swarm of it. One hand still rests half raised, as if he’s propping himself up on air, or trying to grasp the edge of the skyline. She waits, lets the moment breathe and drift, trusting it to find its own way to land.

Why did you leave, he says at last.

It is easier to ask these things up here, somehow, where everything except them is small and far away.

She spreads her arms wide, as if to dive, tips her head back, closes her eyes. The moonlight catches in her hair, frosting it with silvery glints. For a moment, frozen there, she looks like the figurehead of a ship, sailing boldly forward into strange new waters. Then her hands drop to her sides, and she turns back again.

I’ll tell you, she says. I’ll tell you everything. If you promise to listen.

In the daylight he looked out of the window, searching the countryside and noting its changes. On their right distant hills were rising again, looking lush and dark. The air above the hills was thick and opaque, secreting a promise. On the parched plain through which the train was labouring, the light was clear. As the sun rose the air became gritty with dust. The scorched and dry plain was still covered with patches of dead grass which the rains would transform into lush savannahs. Clumps of gnarled thorn trees dotted the plain, which was darkened by scattered outcrops of black rock. Waves of heat and vapour rose from the burning earth, filling Yusuf’s mouth and making him heave fire breath. At one station, where they stopped for a long time, a solitary jacaranda tree was in bloom. Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug. Beside the tree was a two-roomed railway store. On its doors hung enormous rusty padlocks and its whitewashed walls were spattered with laterite mud.

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.

If they hadn’t happened to meet in the two months, out of a lifetime, when he was idling, they’d never have got together. It was practically false pretences. She didn’t know why he even wanted it. Just for shags and someone to have around when Roland was busy? That unfair thought brought out its own contradiction: she knew why he wanted this. It was the same reason he was so attentive to what she thought of him. They’d never spoken about it, but every page of his personality was watermarked with the memory of loneliness. That made her feel for him. And he was good. There was no doubt he was good. And maybe, in fact, when you thought about it like a grown-up, that need in him, and that goodness, were forces powerful enough to keep a relationship impregnable for decades. It was like when you were hiring: drive was more important than qualifications. You wanted them hungry. They would become what you needed.