The car rumbled through the gathering dusk, lost down the maze of dirt roads.

The venerable Hindustan, based on the old 1950s Morris Oxford, had been the staple car of the sub-continent for decades. This one, a plum pudding on four wheels, had seen better days. The left headlamp was broken and the beam of the right veered skywards. Its suspension was soggy and their backsides felt every knock and jolt. Sanjay could see his father’s patience becoming more frayed.

‘So driver, do you have any idea where you are now?’ Dutt snapped.

The driver registered the sarcasm. ‘Yes, in five minutes we’ll be on the trunk road.’ He then started humming a song to himself, allowing his head to nod to the tune. It was an old Bollywood number about a man who has an unfaithful wife. Everyone in the company knew about the scandal of the senior auditor’s wife, Preeta Dutt. She had been a pretty young thing, in fact far too fresh as events turned out. Rumour was that she had cuckolded him with several members of the tennis club before having a nervous breakdown. The gossip was that she’d been found wandering around the streets naked and had been confined to her bedroom where she subsequently killed herself, along with her newborn baby. The brat in the back had found their bodies. The general feeling was that any decent man with a sense of shame and honour would have left the company and
started on a clean slate elsewhere.

The humming was not lost on Dutt. He seethed inside. Ever since his son Sanjay had been born, he had always harboured secret doubts about the boy’s true paternity. There was nothing about him in his features. His complexion was several shades lighter than his own; wheaten, like his mother’s. And he too was strange, just like her. He had her slight frame and big black eyes, but his face was marred by a hair lip. The boy repelled
him, with his stuttering and his hideous facial expressions. He flicked a glance over his shoulder at him sulking on the back seat. Sanjay caught the contempt in his father’s expression and wrote him a message of hate with the tip of his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

‘Jeldee! Jeldee! Quick! Quick!’ snarled Dutt, smacking at the dashboard as the car strained up an incline in low gear. Sanjay could see the driver grumbling to himself. He half turned to Dutt and gave the auditor a supercilious stare before returning his attention to the road.

The road was straight here and the driver put his foot hard down on the accelerator. It was beneath his dignity to change into a higher gear. The car gradually trundled up to thirty-five miles an hour, then forty. On the unlit road, fireflies flashed into the beam of the one drunken headlamp before hitting the windscreen, like intermittent drops of rain. Sanjay decided this was his chance.

‘S-t-t-top, I’m f-f-feeling sick,’ stammered a whine from the backseat.