Why had Shiva become a doctor? Why, to please his father, and why a psychiatrist? To please his father still more. Surely this is what Dilip Mukti had been calling upon him to do for all those miles of tarmac and steel? To use the highest faculties of reason to map out the irrational, segregate and annihilate it? The monkeys would be caged, the elephants put to work, the tigers shot and the snakes handled. The entire, ever-incholate, shape-shifting bestiary of Hindu belief would be fit meat for his heir’s career as a psychological vivisectionist?
— Will Self, ‘Dr Mukti’ in Dr Mukti & Other Stories of Woe. London: Penguin, 2009, pp. 105–6.
