THIS PHOTOGRAPH is of the ‘chicko’ from the houseboat next door, famous if for nothing else, for moving his boat off too soon on one occasion before I had transferred my weight into it, leaving me dangling from the wall steps with the lower half of my anatomy submerged in the water. The children manipulate these shikaras with great dexterity from about the age of three. They cadge for cigarettes from the same age but the first words they utter are not mammy or da-da (or the Indian equivalents) but, “Baksheesh, sahib.”