Fiction: In her forties and divorced, Maya is enjoying a halcyon spell in Bombay, the city she loves

Irked with herself, bothered faintly by the cobwebby rain that by turn films her skin and peels off it, she hastens up the street.

Her stride is palpably jerky: one leg is prey to a sporadic twitch, its ankle apt to catch. The drizzle has turned the macadam underfoot into a glossy slate, lightly pinpricked. The street is bestrewn with the fresh corpses of leaves, twigs, sprigs: the wrack created by this evening’s storm.

Not one of those journeyman little squalls during which little of note happens, she recalls with pleasure, but an hour-long apoplexy of thunder, lightning, cloudburst. The storm had petered out a couple of hours ago but the sky, though no longer louring with menace, still hangs low, fleecy as a kitsch ceiling.

In the wavy mirror the wetted tarmac makes, she catches downsideup glimpses of herself. Her pumps’ kitten heels tap out a brisk tattoo: the wide, flowy maw of her skirt now yawns away from her shins, now snaps in at them, screening off the upper reaches of her frame.

Deep below the tarmac there gleams a gibbous moon, just as much in a hurry as is she, scudding past armadas of ragged cloudlets. How semisolid and malleable it...

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