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The first time the officer with the fish lips brought down the leather strap, Abdul screamed before it landed—a howl that had built in him since early morning, when he had raced to the police station to surrender.

Running through the airport, he had hoped he might be able to explain what had happened the previous evening with Fatima, or at least offer up his own body to protect his father from violence. Maybe, bent over a wooden table, he was taking blows that would otherwise have landed on his father. He wasn’t sure. The only clear thing was that the officers were not listening. They didn’t want a story of hot tempers and a crappy brick wall. They seemed to want Abdul to confess to pouring kerosene on a disabled woman and lighting a match.

“She’s going to die, and it will be a 302,” an officer told Abdul, with what sounded to the boy like delight. Abdul knew that a 302, in the Indian penal code, was murder.

Later in the beating—how much later, he couldn’t say—he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice. She seemed to be just outside what the officers called the reception room of the station. “Don’t hurt him,” she was begging at considerable volume. “Do this peacefully! Show kindness!”

Abdul didn’t want his mother to hear him scream. He tried to gather his self-discipline. No point looking at his handcuffs. No point looking at the fat-lipped officer or those sharp creases in his regulation khaki pants. He closed his eyes and tried to recall some key words from the last time he had prayed.

His efforts did not help him maintain his silence. His screaming, then his sobbing, rang out onto the road. But afterward, watching the shiny brown shoes move away, he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t uttered a sound. Although his mother’s wails had become deafening as he was being beaten, that in itself was not conclusive. Given his mother’s tendencies, she’d probably been wailing all day.

The good thing was that her distress was now coming from farther away. Maybe the officers had dragged her off for being so loud. The airport management had improved the grounds of the old bungalow that housed the police station—fronted it with pink flowers and tropical plants, their leaves as shiny as the new police jeeps parked nearby. Abdul hoped his mother was retreating fast past this strip of garden. He wanted to think of her at home.

The large cell in which he was being kept housed seven other prisoners, including his father, who had taken his own beating in front of Abdul. The place was nothing like the sparse jail cells in movies Abdul had seen in the Saki Naka video shed. Rather, it contained metal chairs, a large, handsome wooden table with a laminated top, and four new steel cabinets—the nicest cabinets Abdul had ever seen. Godrej brand. Painted bronze and sky blue and smoke blue. Two cabinets had shiny mirrors embedded in their doors. It was like being in a cabinet showroom, except for the tension and the screaming.

The Sahar Police had a more typical holding pen elsewhere in the station. The room where Abdul and his father were kept was what repeat inhabitants called the “unofficial cell”—a large office where police paperwork was supposed to get done. As a matter of official record, the Husains had not been arrested, were not in custody. What happened in this office was off the books. The room’s best feature, those being held agreed, was a small window through which friends or relatives could relay cigarettes and consolations.

Abdul kept waiting for Sunil or Kalu the garbage thief or some other boy to look in, ask if he was okay. He imagined his answer. Not okay. He imagined reassuring replies. No one but his mother came to see him, though. By the third day, he had stopped expecting that anyone else would.

“Why did you do such a thing to a cripple?” The officers asked him the same question again and again.

Abdul had his pathetic answer. “Sir, I am such a weakling I would have told you, after so many slaps, but I haven’t done it. We only all threw insults at each other.”

He had his other pathetic