SECTION B: PROSE ANITA DESAI: In Custody Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing. Read this extract, and then answer the question that follows it: He hung around the Inter-State Bus Terminal on Ring Road for a long time, not daring to enter the city walls and search out Murad's office in Kashmere Gate and so set in motion the events of the day to which he knew he would not measure up. What vainglory to have accepted Murad's challenge, to have agreed to a task for which he was not qualified, for which he had neither the experience nor the confidence. He realized that he and Murad were no more than a pair of undeveloped, clownish students who could not hope to pass the examination of life. Clowns: that was how Nur would see them when they impudently burst upon him, uninvited, self-invited, and put to him their presumptuous questions and requests. This reminded him – he clutched at his pocket – was the questionnaire still there? The questionnaire he had been working on night after night ever since Murad's visit? Yes, he could feel the wad of papers under his fingers, consoling in their number and solidity. He was a scholar after all, and a lover of poetry. There was that. Sighing, he drew out a cigarette from between its folds and went towards a teashop to light it at the smouldering length of rope that hung from one of the doorposts precisely for this purpose. Seeing him there, the teashop owner called, 'Come in, come in. Don't stand outside. You need a cup of tea after your long journey, my son,' and although Deven had resolved to spend nothing on extras, to keep to only the most essential expenditure, he was led by the teashop owner's suggestion just as helplessly as he had been led by Murad's, and he shambled in to sit down on a wooden bench along the wall and accept a glass of sweet, milky tea: he did, after all, need something to see him through the most momentous day of his adult life. Certainly he had never felt more inadequate and the measure of his inadequacy must be in proportion to the importance of the task that had been set him. By whom? By Murad of the betel-stained teeth, the toothbrush moustache, the fiddling, shifty, untrustworthy ways? Impossible. He saw the hand of God as clearly as if it were the shaft of dust-laden light filtering through a hole in the corrugated iron roof of the teashop and striking the handle of a ladle with which the owner was stirring a great pan of steaming milk upon a small charcoal fire. When he had drunk to the bottom of the glass, he saw a dead fly floating in the dregs of his tea. The gasp he gave was only partly of horror at the teashop owner's filthiness and the wretched standards of hygiene in his shop. Or even from a fear of typhoid and cholera. It was the revelation that all the omens of the day had come together and met at the bottom of the glass he held between his fingers. In it lay the struck dog, the triumphant crows, the dead fly - death itself, nothing less. Coming together in the separate prisms of the fly's eye, drowned but glittering in the tea, it stared back at him without blinking. Putting down the glass, he got up and crept out of its way quietly while the teashop owner shouted jovially at the passengers who were tumbling out of the next bus: 'Come this way, friends, come this way. Here you will find pakoras fried in purest oil, sweets made of purest milk, and the tea with most sugar. This way, friends, this way!' [from Chapter 2] How does Desai vividly convey Deven's state of mind at this moment in the novel?