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He knelt down to be on a level with the boy and asked tenderly, 'Are you tired? Do you want to go back to the hotel? We don't have to see this.'
The boy shook his head.
'Do you want a Parle's Orange Kream?' he asked, widening and rolling his eyes to simulate the representation of temptation in the advertisements.
The boy shook his head again.
Behind him, on a grass verge, a hoopoe was flitting across. He said, 'Look!' and turned the boy round.
The boy looked dutifully but didn't ask what it was.
'It's a hoopoe. You won't see this bird in New York.' He supplied the answer gratuitously.
The boy asked, 'Is this a moss-o-moll-lom?'
'No, sweetheart,' his father laughed, 'it's not a mausoleum. It's a palace. You know what a palace is, don't you? A very good and powerful king lived here. His name was Akbar. I told you about him last night, remember?'
'That was Shajjy-han, who built a big big marble stone on his wife and she died and he was very sad and cried all the time.'
Every time he spoke, the American accent made his father's insides go all squishy.
'No, this is different. Akbar was his grandfather. Come, we'll look at it. It's a different colour, see? All red and brown and orange, not the white that we saw earlier.'
They passed some ruined cloisters, then a triple-arched inner gateway, solidly restored and, slightly further from it, a big domed building that was awaiting restoration work. Touts, who had noticed a man and a small boy get out of the car, descended on them.
'Guide, sir, guide? Good English, sir. Full history, you won't find in book.' Not from one voice but from an entire choir.
Beggars with various forms of crippledness materialised. From the simplest pleading, with a hand repeatedly brought up to the lips to signify hunger, to hideous displays of amputated and bandaged limbs, even an inert, entirely limbless, alive torso laid out flat on a board with wheels – this extreme end of the spectrum of human agony filled him with horror, shame, pity, embarrassment, repulsion but, above all, a desire to protect his son from seeing them. How did all these other people drifting around him appear to be so sheathed in indifference and blindness? Or was the same churning going on inside them? Truth was, he felt, he was no longer a proper Indian; making a life in the plush West had made him skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal. He was now a tourist in his own country; no longer 'his own country', he corrected himself fastidiously. He suppressed the impulse to cover the boy's eyes with his hands and said impatiently, 'Sweetie, can we move a bit faster, please.' It came out as a command, the interrogative missing.
Men came up with accordions of postcards, maps, guidebooks, magazines, photos, toys, current bestsellers in pirated editions, snacks, rattles, drinks, confectionery, tinsel, dolls, plastic replicas of historical buildings, books, whistles and flutes ... He kept shaking his head stoically, a tight half-smile on his lips, and ushered his boy along.
The child, distracted one moment by a tray of carved soapstone figures, then another instant by a flashing, crudely copied replica of an inflatable Superman toy, kept stalling to stare.
'Baba, Baba, look!'
'Yes, I know. Let's keep moving.' He was so relieved – and grateful – that the cheap toys had diverted the child's attention away from the suppuration and misery that he almost broke step to buy one of those baubles.
That small manifestation of interest was enough. The loose, dispersed assembly of touts and peddlers now tightened into a purposeful circle.
'Babu, my child is hungry, hasn't eaten for four days.' The shrivelled girl with matted hair in the woman's arms looked like the living dead; she had no energy or will to swipe at the flies clustering on a sore at the corner of her mouth.
Excerpted from A State of Freedom: A Novel by Neel Mukherjee. Copyright © 2017 Neel Mukherjee. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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