It made sense to steal from the title of Amitav Kumar’s book, since I was meeting a man who didn’t believe in rule-books and I was learning from him, how to bend mine a little. Plus, I do call him a bigot to his face.

“Muslim-slayer,” I said this time, with the necessary jocularity, so he could think of it as a ‘joke’, and privately, know it was true. The laughter allowed him to save face in front of his three friends who accompanied him to our lunch. And from that standpoint, it was actually very funny. That a man who called me his ‘sister’ — ‘behena,’ is someone I called a ‘Hindu fundamentalist’ to his face. In the five years we have known each other, he saw me write a book called The Anatomy of Hate, about the perpetrators of the 2002 Gujarat riots. And he was accused in one of the ten worst cases from that pogrom.