“But before the shriek, before the body and the stain, and the flicking on of the bare bulb, before Poonam Aunty fainted and collapsed in a bundle next to her husband's dead body, before she recovered her senses and started shrieking again, there was a celebration at Saith’s house, the only Hindu house in the whole country – and I was invited.”

There is a particular kind of angst, a wanting and waiting, at the periphery of a language.