Traveling with a sex tourist to the Uzbek city of Tashkent. Excerpted from the forthcoming book If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai.

In 1974,  a pair of four-year-old cousins wandered into the jungle near India’s border with Myanmar. The boy was found five days later, temporarily incapable of speech. The girl was gone. For decades, stories echoed through villages of a “wild-looking woman,” sometimes striding beside a tiger. Thirty-eight years later, she returned.

Sheikh Amer Hassan’s parties were notoriously debauched, evidence of a growing permissiveness in Karachi high society. His murder by a pair of young brothers surprised few.