Curtain Call at the Lantern

By day, Club Kaleidoscope was a warehouse with the lights up: cables on the floor, a bucket of mop-water, a sound system as big as a garden shed. Posters covered the walls: Bhangra & Bass, Sundays; Punjabi drums and electric guitar, a genre that hadn't existed before somebody put the two together.

Anisa Rahman stood on a stepladder, hanging a banner. "You're the detective. Come in. Mind the mop."

"You run this place."

"I run a room where a lot of people who aren't supposed to mix, mix." She came down the ladder. "The Sentinel called it a 'cultural challenge' last year. Bit of a reach for a Sunday night in a warehouse."

Jonah looked at a wall of photographs: teenage lads in turbans dancing beside girls in hoodies, an old man on a stool with a dhol. "Everybody here's a bit of something else," he said.

"Everyone's ethnic," said Anisa, "if you ask them what they've inherited. The word only gets used about other people."