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for milk. Drinking milk was viewed in my aunt’s house as the secret to growing tall. Committed to this goal, my cousins drank great quantities of it at competitive speeds. Everyone’s nanny brought their child’s special milk mug to the house as if it were a piece of professional sporting equipment.
    I didn’t mind drinking milk, but I wasn’t used to the amount drunk at my aunt’s house. I hadn’t brought a mug, and hoped that if I delayed the process I might be able to slip away with my mother before the points from the licence-plate game were counted. So, as the others ran back to the house, I clambered over a small mound and went to the boundary wall. I unzipped my trousers and started to pee. I was concentrating on the small frothy puddle forming before me when I looked up and saw my first cousin similarly relieving himself. He saw me too, and after staring intently in my direction, his face turned to horror. I looked round to see what had alarmed him and began to say something, but he turned his head away, muttering to himself. Then, squeezing out a few last drops, he pulled up his zip and fled. He ran up the mound and down into the garden, screaming, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’
    He had chosen his words well. I felt their embarrassment even before I understood their meaning. ‘ Nanga ’ meant naked; it was a nanny’s word used to instil in children the shame of running around with no clothes on. It was used in little ditties to make the point clearer and its resonance was deep. Susu was a little boy’s penis. And though I knew each word my cousin had spoken, I couldn’t piece together the meaning of the sentence. Why had he said that my penis was naked?
    I zipped up my trousers and ran down the hill after him in the hope of figuring out what he meant before the others did. I reached the lawn as the news was being broken to the rest of the cousins, who collapsed, coughing and spluttering, when they heard. They were not quite sure what it meant, but the nannies screeched with laughter.
    The commotion was so great that the adults were drawn out on to the veranda. Again, my cousin yelled, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’ This time, seeing all the adults, including my aunt, laughing, I laughed too, louder than anyone else. The cousins, who earlier had been perturbed rather than amused, were now also laughing. The time for explanations had passed and I decided to ask my mother in private about what the nannies had dubbed my hatless willie. Fortunately, amid the disruption the licence-plate game had also been forgotten and when my mother turned up, she found me agitating to leave before the others remembered.
    In the car, as my mother drove from roundabout to roundabout, like in a game of joining the dots, I agonised over the day’s discovery. I could now tell the difference between my susu and my cousin’s, but its implication was impossible to guess.
    The truth turned out to be more implausible than anything I could have invented. If there was a link between the missing foreskin and my missing father, it was too difficult to grasp. My mother had always explained my father’s absence by saying that he was in jail for fighting General Zia’s military dictatorship in Pakistan, but she had never mentioned the missing foreskin until now. My idea of my father was too small and the trauma of the day too great to take in the information that he came from a country where everyone had skin missing from their penises.
    It was a loose, but not disturbing, addition to my life. I felt oddly in on the joke and laughed again. The sun slipping behind Safdarjung’s tomb, the little car climbing up the dividing flyover with my mother at the wheel; it was too familiar a view of the world to change over a susu without a hat.

    I grew up with a sense of being Muslim, but it was a very small sense: no more than an early awareness that I had a Muslim-sounding name, of not being Hindu or Sikh and of the circumcision. In Delhi, my