Automatically, with his mind elsewhere, trying to pin down a memory of a childhood that had been stirred like some brute creature beneath the mud of a lake, Bhola tugged at the cord as at the string of a kite. Out from behind the folds of the lungi emerged a rather phallic-looking leathery cosh into the edge of the tip of which had been pierced a golden ring through which passed the red cord. Instantaneously he recalled his first love, Gopinath the family cook, and realized that the cosh was the sadhu’s phallus with perforated foreskin.