That image is only a few days old on the newsprint: US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Security Council with that small vial as proof of Iraqi bio-terror, making the American case for war a great humanitarian cause. The vial was an effective prop: look, Saddam land is a vast laboratory of death, for us it is now strike or be Saddamised. To make his moral manifesto against the Evil more Apocalypse-friendly, the Secretary could have read out from I. Allan Sealy's new novel The Brainfever Bird: "Presently his blue-white redhead's skin with its high pink tones turned grey, then it turned black. It began to give in places, so he looked like the victim of a stabbing, not the jab of a needle. Towards the end the abdominal organs began to come away from their moorings. When he turned over they tended to remain where they were, like parcels in a sack. Gravity was tearing him apart, from the inside. Germ warfare is the opposite of firebombing. It works from the inside out, in silence. It takes its time."

THE BRAINFEVER BIRD By I. Allan Sealy Picador India Price: Rs 425 Pages: 360

Wondering what happened to Sealy? After the sprawling Anglo-Indian saga of The Trotter-nama, a scene-shifting moment in Indian writing in English that should have made Sealy a superhero but somehow didn't; after the dark-glasses, fur-cap parody of matinee power in Hero; after that soul-searching stopover in The Everest Hotel, is Sealy capturing the zeitgeist with a bio-thriller? Nothing of that sort, in spite of the flap jacket preview that calls the book "a tale of international intrigue and biological weapons". That tale is just a prop, an ambitious one nevertheless. The real story that powers the novel is a different kind of warfare-emotional, existential and very lonely, and it takes place in the shadowy backyard of the city peopled by orphans, freaks and fabulists, all playing out a script written by a master puppeteer. And the backdrop is what gives this novel of tender epiphanies and stoic withdrawals, of alternative dreams and unsolicited sacrifice, a historical appeal and a newness that is as fresh as today's headline-or Powell's much-photographed vial.

QUIET MASTER: Sealy

EXCERPT

As the needle slips in Lev feels the sting of spirits like a finer pain threaded inside the jab. He looks away out of old habit, the boy inside the man, till the scientist forces himself to look directly at the spot. Meschersky. God! First the pricked finger, then the face, then the whole disintegrating man. Tracking so quickly he has to blink away the vision...

It is the post-Soviet wreckage: disillusion that burst through the perforated idyll of the empire. Sealy has travelled where usually only the masters of airport editions dare to tread. He goes to St Petersburg, what he calls the White City, as a compassionate hawkshaw, and finds a human residue of the Fallen Lie, worthy of taking home, to Old Delhi, the Red City. Lev Repin is an unemployed scientist of the now redundant state's biological weapons programme, currently making a living as a chauffeur at the Indian Consulate. He has the knowledge, and is ready to sell. He finds a client in the Indian government and flies down to Delhi. On his way from the airport, Lev is waylaid and the briefcase of deadly bio-secrets is gone. What follows is not some kind of K-in-the-Castle, not really despite the invisible power and inaccessible doors, but a love story: Lev meets Maya; or, From Russia with Germs, on the doorstep of an intimate illusion.

Maya is a puppet artist, and, as the novel makes its way through the back alleys of Old Delhi to a resolution that is more Dostoevsky (and it climaxes in St Petersburg too) than Jack Higgins, the Russian becomes her pet puppet, animate, stuffed with the rotten leftovers of history. And germs are conspiring to add new deadly twists to his freedom script, to make him a plague master in, of all places, Old Delhi. It is a clash of freedoms: Maya, a rebel and a voluntary exile; and Lev, freedom's disillusioned child. Then there is Morgan, serial charmer and television hero, a Russophile who can quote Akhmatova and Mandelstam, a stereotype who redeems himself in a manner the old Russian black comedy would have called poetic justice. If it is a puppet show featuring such wonderfully imperfect characters, Sealy has achieved masterly perfection in choreographing the show. Masterly because Sealy does more than capture the flavour and fables of Old Delhi, complete with Karim's and wrestling matches, and the day-after disillusion of New Russia. His real triumph is in unravelling the scarred minds of the liberated. Especially so in the story of Lev, for whom liberation rhymes with loss, and it is more personal than political.

This is Sealy's comeback novel, a quiet, controlled work unlike Maya's puppet show. And what about the briefcase with secrets of biological weapons? Read on, and you will realise that what matters is not whodunit but howdunit in the drama of rogue germs of desire, unbound by science or history.