Saraswati Park
Anjali Joseph

To my grandparents

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Acknowledgements

Read On …

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

He held out the book and pointed to the margin. ‘Do you have more like this?’

The bookseller looked distracted. It was nearly five: a tide of commuters would soon spill past the stalls, towards Church-gate and the trains that would take them home. The heat lingered but already the light was changing: it was finer, more golden. From the sea, at the end of the road, there spread a pale brightness, as though the street and the bookstalls were a mirage that would disappear with the sunset.

The thin young bookseller glanced at the open page, where handwritten notes in blue ink danced next to the sober type. ‘You’d have to check,’ he said. ‘I can’t say.’

‘What’s your name?’ the customer persisted. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow in his fifties, grey-haired, with steel spectacles on which the last light glinted; there was something pleasant about him.

The bookseller raised an eyebrow. ‘Uday,’ he said. He turned to stare past the customer’s shoulder. At the Flora Fountain crossing, they had started to flood this way: the white-shirted, briefcase-carrying tide. The traffic light held them back.

‘I work just nearby,’ the customer went on. ‘At the post office, the GPO, near VT station. I’m a letter writer, Mohan Karekar. You’re new here, I haven’t seen you before?’

The bookseller grunted, his eyes on the approaching crowd. ‘I’m looking after the stall for my brother,’ he said.

Mohan put the ten-rupee note into his hand. ‘If you see more like that, with the writing on the side, keep them for me,’ he said. He walked into the pressing wave of commuters. He was taller than most; the bookseller saw the back of his steel-coloured head for a moment. Then a fat man with a briefcase stopped at the stall. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face all over.

‘Da Vinci,’ he said urgently.

The bookseller bent and picked up two copies of the pirated book, each with a slightly different cover. ‘Complete,’ he responded. ‘Every page is there.’

Mohan walked through the crowd, crossed the wide junction, and passed under the long porch of the American Express Bank. The arcades were a nightmare at this time of day, but he navigated his way through the continuous stream of people.

Where the arcades ended, outside the McDonald’s, he waited for the traffic to pause. There was an extraordinary sky today: a bright, deep blue like butterfly wing, with streaks of orange that reached towards the west; it was framed by one of the arches. No one seemed to have noticed; there were trains to be caught.

He crossed the road and walked between the stalls selling office clothing – consignments of white shirts, spread out helplessly on tables – past the bus stand and the side entrance of the station, to the tarpaulin and the gnarled, mythic-looking banyan tree where the letter writers sat, next to the pigeon shelter. It was all right; their tables were chained and padlocked in place, and one of the others would have left his things – sealing wax, muslin, packing needles, the directory of postal codes – at the shop nearby. He patted his shirt pocket, where his train pass was a reassuring flat surface; in his back pocket his wallet was undisturbed.

A group of pigeons flew out of the old tree and into the sky, their wings making the sound of wind on the sea; they crisscrossed each other and made for the west. He tucked the new book under his arm and returned to the station, where a Harbour Line train was pulling into platform two.

When he woke in the morning his wife was still asleep. In the half-light he saw the back of her neck, a few inches away. At the nape, fine hair curled; one shoulder rose under the sheet into a hillock that sheltered her face. The perfume of her neck, which had astounded him when they’d been newly married, was unchanged: intense, overripe; lotuses mixed with ash.

He extricated himself gently from the cotton sheet, which seemed to have become needy during the night. He padded into the bathroom, switched on the water heater, and went to the kitchen. It was good, this moment of silence before the machinery of the day began. It had been different when the children were young: Lakshmi would be up early, making tea and breakfast, and sending them for baths. There would be regular catastrophes: someone needed card paper; someone else had a form to be signed. Now all he had to do was float to the kitchen, still in his kurta-pyjama, and make his tea, and a cup for his wife. The habit irritated her, because she wouldn’t wake for another hour, but he hadn’t been able to come to terms with making tea just for himself, as though she didn’t exist.

In the gloom he moved about, putting water to boil, adding sugar, then crushing a chunk of ginger with the kitchen pliers. At this time, soon after he’d woken, incongruous characters moved through his consciousness: his elder son, Gautam, aged about sixteen, rushing out and saying he didn’t have time for breakfast; the man from yesterday’s book, Lambert Strether, who had just arrived in a foreign city with a vague but important task to execute. The water hissed. Mohan reached for the tea leaves.

Birds were singing stridently outside; the grey covering over everything was slowly being plucked away as the light came. He strained the tea into two cups and covered one, which he took into the bedroom and left on the table next to his wife’s head; he opened his mouth to say ‘Tea’, but thought better of it and went to the living room. Amid the clutter of the big table, the old alarm clock, whose pale green enamel paint had broken into rust spots, said six o’clock. It continued to tick, a loud, busy noise, as he moved towards the window.

He sat in the cane chair; from here he’d be able to watch the lane awake. The boys who took in ironing were opening the door of their blue tin hut, at the mouth of the lane, near the watchman’s shack. One of them brought out a kerosene stove to make tea; another, bare-chested and holding a plastic mug, went off in the direction of the empty plot. The first of the morning walkers appeared, a middle-aged man in white t-shirt and navy shorts. He began to march doggedly up the lane.

Mohan went to the bathroom and emerged half an hour later, quietly happy after the usual encounter with the white tiles, the morning sunshine, and the clear, warm water. Lakshmi got up when he opened the cupboard to take out a clean shirt.

‘Every day,’ she observed. She picked up the covered cup of tea and regarded it at arm’s length. She sighed. Mohan began to do up his buttons. The shirt was crisp; it hung at a polite distance from his body. He started to roll up his sleeves, and followed her to the kitchen to point out, ‘But I didn’t wake you.’

She poured the tea into the saucepan and lit the gas. Her eyes were still heavy. ‘That’s what you think,’ she said. ‘You think I don’t hear you, clanging about in the kitchen.’ She covered her mouth and yawned loudly, a cry of weariness at the tiresome nature of the world.

‘I don’t clang,’ he said.

His sleeves were neatly rolled; he felt satisfied, clean and ready for the day; his mind moved ahead to the train, where he might get a seat, feel the breeze on his face, and be able to read.

The tea began to bubble; with a faint expression of distaste Lakshmi removed it from the fire and strained it into the same mug. She drew her housecoat about her and went into the living room.

When the train pulled into VT the station was alive but not yet swarming. Mohan walked away from the grand building and its light, high-vaulted hall. At the bus stand he moved through the queues and made for the GPO. How strange it had been, years earlier, when the letter writers had been forced to shift from its shaded colonnade, first to the pavement outside, and then under the tarpaulin at the kabutar khana. He had missed the shapes of people passing through the stone arches all day and the light as it changed – by afternoon, the figures in the colonnade became shadows with bright outlines. But he’d grown attached in turn to the sound of the pigeons when they took off and landed; their little kurr! kurr! of protest and, he sometimes thought, happiness.

He wasn’t the first to arrive. When he returned from the stationery shop with his possessions, Khan, the oldest of the remaining letter writers, had already unlocked the tables and sat drinking the first cup of tea, the Urdu Times spread in front of him. He was an irascible, balding man with tiny spectacles; although dark-skinned, he often seemed to redden in the sun. Mohan sat down, stowed his tiffin under his table, and arranged his pen tray; he put the torn red postal ledger into the drawer in the table and laid out the stack of electronic money order forms and a small pot of gum. He opened his book. Soon, to the sound of kurr! kurr! above him, he was deep in an elliptical, drawn-out conversation between Lambert Strether and Maria, a woman Strether had just met. The flow of commuters outside the tent increased.

‘Uncle.’

He recognized the woman, who was in her early thirties. Today she wore a bright green sari. She beamed at him; he smiled, and took up a money order form. Two thin gold bangles on her arms chinked among the glass ones.

‘Uncle, two thousand five hundred rupees.’

He uncapped a pen. ‘Name of the addressee?’

‘Ganesh Solanki.’

‘Name of the village?’

‘Bhandari.’

‘Chhota post?’ She named a town that no one in the city would have heard of. ‘Bada post?’ A slightly larger town.

Mohan opened the directory to check the postal code. While he flipped through the torn, closely printed pages, she wrapped the free end of her sari around her right shoulder, and swayed on one foot, looking into the crowd. It was hot now, full mid-morning sun. The flowery, synthetic scent of her talcum, mingled with perspiration, drifted to Mohan, and he looked up for a second before lowering his eyes again. Got it: 811 307. She would be a different person at work, he thought, copying the code into the form: heavily made up, standing in a doorway and calling out to the men who passed, but this morning, up early and neatly dressed, she was a figure of efficiency, a working woman.

He gave her back the form, which she would have to take to a counter inside. She smiled and took out a roll of notes from her blouse; she held out a twenty-rupee note. He nodded, but her bright green sari was already bustling its way into the sun. As it receded the flash of viridian made him think of the parrots that used to come in a sudden swoop at dusk and roost in trees near the old house at Dadar.

For a while he sat and watched the world, framed at the upper edge by the fringe of the tarpaulin – hairy bits of rope and a jagged piece of packing plastic, once transparent, now grey, hung down. Beyond this, all around the letter writers, life persisted at its noisiest. A fleet of cockroach-like taxis in black and yellow livery waited at the junction outside the GPO. When the lights changed they all, honking, took the u-turn. A man on a cycle passed; he carried a tangle of enormous red ledgers, each wrapped in plastic, atop his head. The gold on their spines flashed in the sun.

A luxury coach lumbered by; it was bound for Rajasthan. Mohan read the inscription on its side: Pushpa Vihar. The bus was nearly empty – it’d pick up returning Rajasthanis throughout the city before it left in earnest – but a few curious faces peered out at the start of their long journey. There was a small silver altar on the dashboard, and strings of black pompoms hung from the rear bumper to protect travellers from evil looks. A young man hung out of the doorway, enjoying the breeze on his face.

The morning was always so beautiful here. The location of the shelter, which hid under its dirty tarpaulin and the gnarled, ancient-looking banyan tree, meant that only those who knew about the letter writers came to find them. The workers in the offices, hotels and restaurants in Ballard Estate, Horniman Circle, and the inside streets of Bazaargate passed every day and were used to seeing the writers. But disoriented-looking white tourists, their belongings trussed to their backs and their money strapped to their waists, would pass, stand near the shelter, which served as a traffic island, and peer in; they’d be affronted because they couldn’t work out what was going on inside. Khan would call out to them, showing off: ‘Hello? Yes, Madam?’

And there were the pigeons, who spent their day moving with apparently frantic urgency from tree to tree. They’d suddenly all take off from the banyan here and rise, wings flapping madly, before heading either to the taller banyan outside the GPO, or the trees in Bhatia Baug in front of the station. If you looked up you saw the birds themselves – in passing, one or the other would casually drop a chalky blot on the road below. But if you remained gazing ahead, you saw only their shadows, which fluttered and moved with even more delicacy and life than the real birds: their silhouettes would rise, flap their wings and return to roost in the shadow of the tree.

He was starting to feel pleasantly hollow – that meant it would soon be time for lunch – when a small, familiar figure with a pot belly hailed him cheerfully. Kamble worked as a peon at the sessions court; he had been to deliver an order at the municipal corporation building. He sat on the stool next to Mohan, smiled, and took out his handkerchief to mop his face and the top of his head, which glistened in the humidity. Mohan passed him the water bottle; the other man leaned, in a friendly way, on one wooden arm of Mohan’s chair, a thing of tubular steel and disintegrating plastic webbing.

‘Getting hot now,’ Kamble observed. He tilted his head back to pour the water directly down his throat; a gold ring on one fat finger winked at Mohan.

‘Busy day?’

Kamble put down the bottle and wiped his mouth. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Summer session. Just a few cases: anticipatory bail, chain snatching, one foreigner who got caught’ – and here he waved in the direction of the GPO’s enormous dome – ‘posting marijuana to herself.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘When it didn’t arrive she came back from abroad to ask what happened to the parcel. Strange how people always think they won’t get caught.’

Mohan chuckled. Kamble replaced the lid of the water bottle. He relaxed and leaned back on the chair arm, and his eye fell on the book on Mohan’s table. ‘Hey, the BMC is moving the booksellers today, you heard?’

‘Moving?’

‘Evicting them. Part of the anti-hawker thing.’

‘But what are you saying?’ Mohan held onto the small desk as though it was about to fall.

‘Come, you want to come and see? I’m walking back. One of the peons in the BMC was telling me. The trucks went this morning.’

Mohan stumbled up. He looked around; most of the letter writers had arrived. Khan nodded at him. ‘Yes yes, you go.’

‘I’ll go and come,’ he muttered. He reached for the book, then left it where it was.

‘Don’t walk so fast, re!’ Kamble ran after Mohan, who had shot out in front of a taxi. The driver was outraged; he braked, gave the horn a long blast and leaned out of the window to question Mohan’s relationship with his family. The letter writer ignored him and hurried on. They crossed the road and headed into the arcades, which were shot with hot strips of sun.

‘Look,’ said Mohan suddenly. ‘None of these people has a licence either.’ He stopped and waved at the hawkers, thin young men in tight shirts and jeans, belts with exaggerated buckles; they folded their arms and eyed him in return.

Kamble shrugged. ‘It’s part of what they’re doing everywhere, they say it’s to clear the main roads so people can walk more easily in the morning,’ he said apologetically. He put a hand on Mohan’s arm and smiled at one of the more aggressive looking hawkers.

‘Corruption. The booksellers have been there for years – people who take the train stop there on their way to office.’

‘Well –’

‘Quickly!’ Mohan had seen a bus, rolling to a halt a few yards ahead; he pulled Kamble after him through a white stucco arch and they dashed for the stop.

‘You want to take the bus? But –’

‘It’ll be faster.’ They climbed aboard as the bus began to move, and pushed their way down the narrow aisle between the humid bodies of the other passengers.

The bus took an age to cover the short distance. Finally it reached the stop just before Fountain: they pushed their way to the front and jumped down. Mohan was sweating; the back of his neck prickled. ‘Come on,’ he said. His head pounded. They darted across the first road, waited at the crossing, and started to cross the second, but as he hurried he felt a small release at his right foot: the strap of his sandal had broken.

Two green municipal trucks were parked near the junction. Mohan’s hand flew up to clutch his head. Men in dusty blue uniforms were picking up books by the armful and throwing them into the back of the nearer truck. His broken sandal flapping, he ran towards them.

‘What are you doing? You can’t do this! Stop! Wait!’ The man ignored him, and grinned at the drama. Mohan saw the thin bookseller from the day before. ‘Where are they taking them?’ he asked wildly.

‘Some warehouse or godown, I don’t know where. I don’t know how we’ll ever get them back.’ The young man stood still, his arms full of thrillers; he looked adrift, as though he had no idea what to do next.

‘Here, I’ll take some.’ Mohan started to scoop up the volumes scattered around them.

‘Oye, you can’t do that,’ the BMC man said. ‘They’re being confiscated.’ He picked up another armful and walked to the truck. A policeman, smacking his stick into his palm, strutted up. ‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘Move on!’ He was bored, Mohan noticed; probably he wanted his lunch.

‘Come on, re,’ Kamble said. He took Mohan’s arm and tugged at it. Only a few books remained, lying on the ground and beside the railings. Mohan handed those he held to the young bookseller. One fell from his arms and Mohan stooped and picked it up, touched it to his forehead in apology. It was a business book, with confident red letters on the cover: Master of Your Own Fate.

Mohan, still clutching the book, allowed Kamble to pull him towards the crossing. ‘My sandal’s broken,’ he muttered.

He went home early, feeling dazed and unreal. The outer door was closed because it was the afternoon and a time of rest; the flat was warm, silent, and sleepy. His wife opened the inner door.

‘I thought it was you! You’re not well?’

‘Don’t attack me right at the door,’ he said wearily. He came in, and closed the outer door with a soft click.

‘Another book,’ she said.

He walked past her and deposited the books on one of the jars that covered the old table in the living room. He went to the kitchen, reappeared with a steel tumbler of water and sat down heavily; he rested his elbow on the small fringe of available space on the table and drank. When he’d finished he set down the tumbler, rubbed his forehead, removed his spectacles, and pinched the top of his nose.

‘Are you feeling unwell?’

‘No.’

‘Then what happened?’ Her voice had become sharp, but she hovered close to him.

He waved towards the books. ‘The BMC moved the booksellers away today – took all the books and threw them into a truck. They’re taking them to a godown somewhere.’

‘Just like that?’

He nodded.

She went into the kitchen, came back with a bottle of cold water and a jug and refilled the tumbler, half with the iced water and half with room-temperature water. He closed his hand around the tumbler.

‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ she said thoughtfully, and put one hand on her hip. ‘We’re running out of space for all these books anyway.’

He stared across the landscape of clustered jars. The table was old, from the house at Dadar; it was good Burma teak, and beautiful when polished, but they’d never used it properly. Over the years it had become a receptacle for jars of pickle, bottles of sauce and squash, tins of drinking chocolate, papers, paperweights, and all kinds of other objects that, someone had reasoned, were about to be in use. What a waste, he thought.

‘Oh, I had to tell you,’ she continued. ‘Your sister called.’

He looked up. ‘Vimla?’

‘How many sisters do you have? Milind’s transfer order has come through. They’ll have to leave in a few days.’

‘Oh.’

‘And they just found out that Ashish can’t take his exams this year, he has to repeat.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Attendance,’ she said.

He put on his spectacles again, diverted for a moment. ‘Always something new with that boy,’ he said, almost admiringly. Fecklessness was not a quality one had been encouraged to develop, or that one celebrated in one’s offspring; still, it cut a certain dash.

‘So they were wondering if he can stay with us till next year.’

Mohan smiled. ‘Of course, where else will he stay?’

‘With your brother?’ However, she smiled.

‘Ha!’

Lakshmi sighed. ‘It’s going to be a lot of extra work. And also expense.’

‘But we have the money from the printing shop. And what Megha’s been sending, we haven’t even touched that.’ His income from his daily occupation had never been considerable; in recent years it had dwindled to a trickle.

She nodded, then frowned. ‘You know that I’m fond of Ashish. But it’s a big responsibility. We’ll have to make sure he studies, attends regularly when college starts. You’ll have to speak to him. Make him understand he needs to be sincere.’

Mohan snorted. ‘I’m sure his mother’s spoken to him comprehensively,’ he said. He drained the second tumbler of water, put it into his wife’s hand, and went inside to change his clothes.

Chapter Two

Seven in the morning, Ashish thought he must be dreaming. He stood under the big notice boards and read the names of suburbs he had rarely visited: Belapur, Titwala, Vashi, Panvel, Andheri. It was too depressing.

Most of his possessions were in a large suitcase at his feet; he clutched a cardboard box filled with books, cassettes and compact discs that he had rushed around retrieving when his uncle arrived at six. His parents had been too harried to become sentimental; they would be flying to Indore in the afternoon and some of their things had already been sent by road. Ashish, with similar efficiency, had been plucked out of his life and sent to live with his aunt and uncle.

Now he stood inside the grand station, which was light, quiet, and almost cold at this hour. Pigeons fluttered in the sulight, high above the vaulted ceiling. A few red-coated porters passed at a brisk little jog; a long-distance train must have been arriving. Mohan had gone to buy a ticket for Ashish. He came back, put a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and slipped the two-inch rectangle of yellow pasteboard into his shirt pocket. ‘Come, that’s our train. Can you run?’

They began an awkward trot. The elder man ran easily, despite the aged VIP suitcase he carried, and the boy skipped lopsidedly behind him, trying not to spill the contents of the carton, which slithered, skittish, and threatened to make a leap for freedom.

The wide platform was clear; the horn sounded; at the same magical moment the train began to pull out. Mohan heaved in the suitcase, jumped on, cried, ‘Here!’ He took the carton from Ashish and pulled him on by the wrist.

The heavy train was already moving fast. It drew away from the station and into the warm, bright sunlight just outside. Ashish looked down: this was the place where the tracks intersected, then separated again.

Saraswati Park was settling into its Sunday. A few people were outside the vegetable shop; a woman negotiated with a man who stood behind a handcart covered with large, green-striped watermelons; the rickshaw turned into the lane.

‘Take a right – up a bit – no, stop. Yes, here.’ Mohan dragged the suitcase out and paid the rickshaw driver, who stared unabashedly at the four-storey building. Its yellow paint was peeling. The name Jyoti was stencilled in dark red letters on the gatepost. Ashish staggered out of the other side of the rickshaw, still clasping the carton, and followed his uncle into the small entrance with its wall of pierced tiles. He had come here regularly as a child, but not recently; the last occasion he recalled was his cousin Gautam’s wedding three or four years earlier. Now everything came back to him: the names on the plate at the foot of the stairs (Gogate, Kulkarni, Gogate, Gogate, Prabhu, Kamat, Karekar, Dasgupta) and the double doors – the inner ones were open and the outer doors had a large ornamental grille from which Sunday cooking smells came into the stairwell. Withered garlands of auspicious leaves hung from the lintels, and, outside several of the apartments, pairs of sinister looking red footprints marked the time, years before, when the lady of the house had arrived as a new bride.

When they reached the third floor, panting, Mohan put his hand into the grille of number 15 and opened the catch. He turned to beam at his nephew. ‘Come,’ he said.

Lakshmi appeared, in her post-bath outfit of clean salwar kameez, her hair still loose. ‘Wait!’ she said dramatically to Ashish, who paused at the door, taken aback. She held a comb in one hand and raised it like a ceremonial item. The scent of her hair oil, amla, floated to him. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘with the right foot.’

Ashish grinned foolishly and rebalanced himself. He stepped over the ledge, right foot first, and his aunt smiled and closed the outer door behind him.

‘You never made me do that before,’ he mumbled.

‘But then you were only visiting,’ she said.

Mohan had melted into the passage with the suitcase; he now reappeared. ‘Come,’ he said. Still holding the carton, Ashish followed him. The peculiar smell of the dark corridor returned vividly: a mysterious amalgam of old calendars, dust, and superannuated cockroach repellent sachets, with their intriguing round perforations. The room at the end had been Gautam and Ashok’s. Ashish strode towards it with a new-found audacity, Gulliver in Lilliput. A collection of his cousins’ comics was neatly piled on the lower shelf of the bookcase; a cricket bat, badly cracked, leaned against the desk.

His aunt opened the steel cupboard proudly. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I cleared it out for you.’ The cupboard seemed to have shrunk; the stickers welded to the mirror in the door were now at Ashish’s eye level. One showed the West Indian batsman Viv Richards making his famous on-drive; the other was a logo of a red fist, thumb pointed perkily upwards. Behind them, his reflection wavered: knife-thin, suspicious looking. He tried to smile at himself. The effect wasn’t reassuring.

Mohan patted him on the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Take off your shoes, wash your hands and have some breakfast.’

They left Ashish in the room, the door open, and he sat on the bed and untied his shoelaces. The cold floor felt smooth and clean under his feet. He looked around the room, so familiar and yet new.

From the kitchen, he heard the rumble of his uncle’s voice.

After lunch his aunt and uncle disappeared into their room where, with the door open, they lay on the bed, immobile. His aunt slept curled to one side; his uncle lay like an Egyptian embalmed under a sheet. The fan, on a high setting, made the pages of the book on Mohan’s chest flutter.

Ashish fidgeted, and fiddled with his mobile telephone. He pressed, repeatedly, the key that cleared the display: each time it illuminated anew, a bright green. There was no message from Sunder. What was he doing at this moment? Ashish imagined him eating lunch in a hotel coffee shop, or playing a computer game; watching a movie on an enormous flat-screen television. It was possible that Sunder was bored too, but even his boredom was exotic: it would take place in a vast, air-conditioned flat.

Ashish wandered, examining the well-known apartment with a detective’s eye. The flat had its own, specific virtues that he couldn’t imagine Sunder appreciating: the cane chair with a high back, where his uncle liked to sit and read in the evening, in the bright circle of light emitted by a hundred-watt bulb; the woven rope footstools, which had a piece of old tyre at their base; the reading table piled with books and papers; the bookshelves. There were Marathi novels and short stories, pirated thrillers from the pavement, translations of Sherlock Holmes into Marathi (the action had been transposed to Bombay), P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Nancy Drew, Henry James, and, on the bottom shelf, behind the cane chair, a few more esoteric titles. He pushed the chair aside and squatted to look at them. The shelves here smelled pleasantly musty, of an organic, reechy dust. He pulled out a volume with a yellow spine: I’m OK, You’re OK. Another, with a black cover: The Silva Method. A third, battered-looking, with only a few vestiges remaining of the original red jacket: Become a Writer. He carried them off to his room; they’d help to pass the afternoon.

He woke up later, drooling on his arm. His feet were cold. Why was it so quiet? Then he realized: the noises of water pipes gurgling, of feet running up and down the corroded cast-iron stairs, and the whole building rattling around him every time a bus or truck passed on the road outside; these had been left in Esplanade Mansion. Here there was only the sound of birds chirping, implausibly cheerfully. He sat up and examined the phone. Still no message. Was it because of what had happened on Wednesday? The servant, coming into the room with glasses of cold lemonade on a tray, had given them a funny look. But they hadn’t been doing anything, just lying on the bed and reading the same book. When Ashish hadn’t seen Sunder in college for three days he’d called him, but there had been no answer. He ached to know what had happened, what would happen; during the last year, their friendship, so odd and circumstantial, had been hesitating on the edge of something else – but he couldn’t be certain. Surely it wasn’t all in his imagination?

There was a shout from outside. He wiped his mouth and went to the window. Boys were playing cricket in the lane. A small child ran up to bowl a tennis ball at a much older boy, who whooped and hit it hard; the ball landed, making a joyous thump, on the bonnet of a car halfway down the lane and the watchman got up and began to walk, with the detached enjoyment of someone playing a well-known role, towards the cricketers.

Ashish rubbed his eyes, turned off the fan, and went into the living room, from where he could hear voices.

‘Tea?’ His aunt came out of the kitchen and smiled at him.

‘Hm.’

He sat down, still half immersed in the dense warmth of afternoon sleep, and peered at his aunt and uncle. Mohan was drinking a steaming cup of tea and reading the newspaper. Ashish leaned his elbow on the edge of the table and allowed himself to re-enter the world.

‘Here.’ Lakshmi mami put a cup in front of him. He recognized it: it was tall and had a blue handle; a fey character called Little Boy Blue danced about on the front. All his cousins and sometimes he had been force-fed milk with protein powder in this cup, in the belief that it would make them strong.

Mohan grunted and folded the newspaper.

‘Anything interesting?’ Ashish asked.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mohan dispassionately. He brightened. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Ashish smirked; he recalled this meant his uncle wanted to visit the snack shop at the edge of the market, and buy hot samosa.

‘Let him finish his tea at least,’ Lakshmi mami intervened.

Ashish immediately adopted a hangdog expression and put the cup to his mouth. ‘It’s hot,’ he whimpered, making for the television. He found the remote, put on a music channel, and began to watch the video of a new song that blared, cancelling out the birdsong and the cries of the cricketers outside.

‘No hurry,’ said Mohan. He got up and began to drift around the living room in a conspicuously bored way.

The last light was golden, like something in a film; it fell carelessly across the dusty leaves of the old banyan in the empty plot, here and there picking out the new, shiny green ones. Television aerials cast extravagant shadows.

A chubby, frizzy-haired girl whom Ashish thought he recognized was pretending to walk for exercise. She dawdled down the lane, her mobile pressed to her ear.

‘I know,’ she said into the phone. ‘Seriously!’

As they passed, she smiled at both of them, and Mohan reached out and patted her head with the flat of his hand.

‘Madhavi, Dr Gogate’s daughter. Do you remember her?’ he asked Ashish quietly.

‘She used to be a little fat girl?’

‘Well, a little healthy maybe.’

‘That’s exactly what he said!’ Madhavi said. Her voice followed them for a yard or two after they rounded the corner. They crossed the small roundabout, where Ashish saw two stray puppies play-fighting, rolling in the dirt next to a heap of rubbish.

‘We’ll go to Matunga one Sunday for dosa if you like,’ Mohan said.

‘Mm,’ Ashish agreed. He had changed into his Sunday clothes, a t-shirt and shorts made comfortable from much washing. The evening air was soothing on his skin.

‘Your parents will reach this evening, we can call them when we get back.’

‘Okay.’ He scuffled along. He didn’t miss his parents; he wasn’t sure if he would. But already he missed town: on a holiday like today, outside Esplanade Mansion the streets were as quiet as the inside of a cup, and at such times the city always seemed to belong to him alone.

‘So,’ Mohan cleared his throat, ‘college doesn’t start for a month, a little more than a month?’

Ashish’s ears pricked up at the mention of college, but he kept his head prudently down. ‘Yes, in June,’ he said.

‘Ah. Hm.’

They continued to amble along the second lane, where the bungalows and apartment blocks were low-rise and set back from the road. Next to a broken culvert, bright green weeds flourished illegally.

‘Your parents were surprised about your attendance record,’ Mohan said.

Ashish looked at him. Mohan looked away, and waved at an unattractive grey bungalow on the left. The gatepost was marked Iyer. ‘Famous doctor lives there,’ he remarked. ‘Heart surgeon. Son is also a doctor. Dermatologist.’

‘Hm.’

Mohan frowned. ‘I don’t want to lecture you about your studies,’ he said. Ashish, holding his breath, flapped on in his rubber slippers. A rickshaw, containing two laughing young people, went past; the exhaust made explosive, farting noises.

‘It’ll be nice for all of us if you have a good year,’ Mohan said finally. He sighed, laughed, and pulled Ashish closer to him so that he could perform a familiar manoeuvre of affection and exasperation: he put his left hand on Ashish’s head and clouted it with his right. This was the only punishment he’d ever managed to inflict when his children, nephews and nieces reported each other’s misdemeanours to him.

Ashish grinned, but not too much. ‘Yes Mohan mama, don’t worry,’ he said obligingly.

His uncle snorted. ‘You have no idea. You should have heard your grandfather talk about studies, doing well at school…Vivek mama had it worse than I did, of course.’ He smiled.

They were passing a dilapidated beige bungalow. ‘He used to write, your grandfather,’ Mohan said suddenly. ‘Did you know that?’

‘No,’ Ashish said. His uncle was smiling, as though he had pulled a forgotten rabbit out of an old hat. ‘Do you mean stories?’

‘Stories, essays, little things. I don’t know what you’d call them. On Sundays he would get up early in the morning. When we woke up, he would be writing and he’d carry on all day.’

‘So he didn’t take you all out, you didn’t do things?’

‘It was his writing time.’

Ashish tried to digest this image of his grandfather, whom he mostly knew from photographs; there, he seemed like a grimmer, more stolid edition of his uncle: white shirt, trousers worn somewhere around the nipples, those small spectacles, slicked-back hair. ‘Did he publish anything?’ he asked.

‘No. One of his friends was a writer of short stories, a very clever fellow, Nandlal Gokhale. My father showed Gokhale some of his stories once and he took them away to read. But he said that they weren’t good enough to publish.’

Ashish frowned. ‘But I’ve never heard of this Gokhale.’

‘He’s not so well known now,’ Mohan said.

‘So how does anyone know that he was right about grandfather’s writing?’

Mohan’s pace seemed to slow. ‘Well – he was a man of letters,’ he said.

Ashish was still mildly indignant. ‘Do you have any of grandfather’s stories?’ he asked, though he was a slow and reluctant reader of his mother tongue.

Mohan shook his head. ‘No, re. It’s possible that there were some papers and they got lost when we left the house at Dadar. But I think he burned them, some time before he died.’

Later in the evening Ashish was sitting at his desk when there was a knock at the door. His uncle came in. ‘Your aunt says dinner’s ready,’ he said. ‘Come soon. Oh – you found this book.’ He wandered further into the room and picked up Become a Writer.

‘Yes, what is it?’ Ashish asked. ‘I haven’t really looked at it, I started these ones.’ He pointed to the pirated copies of I’m OK, You’re OK and The Silva Method. They were near-perfect facsimiles, but their thin paper and flimsy covers made them seem interestingly insubstantial, as though they belonged to a more temporary world to which they would one day return.

‘I bought this a few years ago, from a man sitting outside the Museum,’ Mohan said slowly. ‘He was next to the other hawkers, you know, the comb-and-keychain guys. But all he had was three peacock feathers and this book, in the same state as now.’

‘How much did you pay?’

‘I don’t remember. Too much. I didn’t bargain, he seemed in a bad way.’

From the other room came the cry, ‘It’s getting cold!’

‘Come on,’ Mohan said.

Ashish scrambled up, and stuck a ruler in his textbook. He had the disconcerting feeling that someone with immense, vacuum-black eyes had stared at him for a moment from the darkened window of the empty flat opposite.

‘So did you see the man again?’ he asked, following his uncle down the dim passage.

‘See him? No, I don’t think so,’ said Mohan vaguely.

It was nearly dark; the in-between of dusk had been replaced by the bright electric light of indoors, and it was as though the lane outside had completely disappeared. By chance, Mohan was still holding the tattered paperback, and when they reached the drawing room he put it down on a chair. Food was already on the table; they sat down.

Chapter Three

In the train, Mohan sat as usual, hands resting on his knees, his arms straightened like cantilevered posts. Tilak Nagar came and went, with the coconut palms near the station, and GTB Nagar, where there was a school, and shacks next to the railway line. At Kurla, something or other was always going on – children chasing each other across the tracks, or a ticket collector who’d caught three defaulters, tied their wrists together with cord and was making them walk behind him in a line so that they didn’t run away laughing.

Mohan sat on the left of the compartment; the morning sun flooded through the window and onto his face. It was hot and humid, the summer coming to a peak. Though he wasn’t next to the window, a vestige of the breeze reached him now and then; it was warm and had that city smell: a mix of rotten flowers, fish, and laundry drying in the wind. The house in Dadar returned like a presence, an early memory from the days before he’d started school. After his bath, wearing nothing but his shorts, he would be put to sit on the landing in a patch of sunlight. It was always there at that time of day; it seemed to wait for him. He would sit there, warming his legs and looking out towards the front room, where the sun paused in a panel of the window. The light played in the blue and yellow glass and came through to him, undisturbed and liquid. He could hear his mother’s voice in the kitchen, and felt his hair drying in wisps; in the street, the wastepaper man called out.

There was a rising and falling sequence of clicks, like the rattle of an insect. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ the voice had the unignorable nasal timbre of the train vendor. Mohan opened his eyes. It was a boy of about thirteen – he was thin, with dusty skin, enormous dark eyes and gummy lashes; a dirty cloth bag was slung over his shoulder. He had a pair of elliptical magnets that he was throwing up in the air and catching again. The magnets attracted and repelled each other as they twisted and fell; their surface was too shiny for them to stick, and the friction produced the insect noise.

‘Go away,’ said another passenger. ‘Who’s going to buy things like that at this time of day?’

It was early for such toys: they normally appeared in the evening, when the mind turned more naturally to leisure, and to one’s family. But he watched the shiny magnets flying up, and twisting around each other as they fell, and wished that he could think of a child for whom to buy them. Ashish was too old; there was no one, really. ‘Twenty rupees, twenty rupees,’ urged the boy; he’d seen the interest in Mohan’s eyes, but Mohan shook his head regretfully. This was a new toy, its arrival another movement in the life of the city. The fashion in these toys, or the ones sold on the street, the narrow advertisements pasted under the luggage racks, these had their own seasonality; they marked the passage of the year as clearly as a change in temperature, the appearance of lanky red flowers on the gulmohar, or yellow bloom on the rusty shield bearer.

At Sewri the boy jumped out of the carriage. Mohan watched him run along the platform, barefoot and jaunty, on his way to another compartment. He thought of Ashish, who’d asked the previous night to be woken early; he was going to start studying in earnest. Two hours after Mohan had put a cup of tea on Ashish’s desk this morning, he’d been about to leave the house. Ashish had emerged into the living room, hollow-eyed, and sat at the table drinking a fresh cup of tea; he’d looked exhausted and appalled, like a child born too early. He’d get into a routine, no doubt. But despite himself, Mohan began to worry. Things had a way of happening; in his case it had been his father’s death just when he was finishing school. The family business wasn’t in a great state then, and he’d had no choice but to start work.

The train was moving again, drawing near the dusty yet magnificent Cotton Exchange building, marooned in the middle of an empty plain. The big textile companies still had offices here, but no real dealing took place – the trade, which had swept into the city like a tide, bringing with it mills, factories, and jobs more than a hundred years earlier, had receded some time ago. Now, construction work went on nearby. As the train passed, he saw the stall where thin, sunburnt workers stopped for tea.

The printing shop, which his brother had taken on, made a reasonable profit. It specialized in minor work: the annual reports of clubs and associations, wedding invitations, jobs for the small businesses in the area where they’d grown up. Mohan’s share of the income and the money from the sale of the old house had made it possible for him and Lakshmi to buy the flat in Saraswati Park, then a new colony in a part of the city they hadn’t really known existed. And it had allowed him to persist with his work, the point of which no one in the family saw. ‘You had to do those odd jobs when Baba died – messenger in that agency – then this strange letter-writing thing,’ his brother said. ‘But when we started the business again you should have joined in, taken responsibility.’

He frowned; Vivek had phoned yesterday while he and Ashish were out. When Mohan called back his brother reminded him they hadn’t met for several months. ‘Come and see us some time,’ he’d said, and Mohan murmured something about Saturday next week; it wasn’t an obligation he could avoid. This weekend, too, a visit from his brother-in-law loomed; it had been a few weeks since Satish had come over, and this Sunday was his birthday.

The train stopped at Reay Road. The wide platforms were nearly clear and a bare, scrubby field stretched out beside the station. There were a lot of empty spaces in the city that people forgot, and in them, forgotten people carrying on their lives: the dockyard and mill workers, or the port trust employees, who were part of the city’s story but nearly invisible now.

Mohan sighed and thought of his earlier Saturday routine, which had often included a wander through the bookstalls between Fountain and Churchgate. This, so different from his children’s studies, had been the way he’d educated himself. There was a special magic that operated in the books he found; the thing he needed frequently came along without his having to look for it. His mind went covertly back to his other existence, the one in his chair, at home in the evenings, under the naked bulb. He sometimes felt he left himself there, unseen, while an automated version of him went about the daily routine. Those people and emotions, the ones from the pages he turned, were always so clearly present. And there was the feeling of following in the footsteps of other readers, those who’d scribbled in the margins; he’d many times come close to doing the same.

The next station was Dockyard Road, a rather charming stop on the crest of a slope that looked as though it belonged elsewhere, in a hill station perhaps; then dusty Sandhurst Road, and Masjid, filthy and busy, right next door to VT.

He was a little late this morning; when he sat down at his table most of the others were there. There had been fourteen of them in better times; now there were, on and off, eleven letter writers, of whom at any given time perhaps eight were at work, ranged round the old fountain.

Soon after the boy from the Sainath Tea House made his first round with a small metal plate on which he carried hot glasses of tea, another regular appeared. This was a cripple, with maimed legs and shortened arms. He looked as though he was in his twenties, and crawled surprisingly fast on his hands and knees; his pelvis, the only part of his body that was clothed, lurched between his legs like a cranky motor between twisted pistons. He skirted Mohan and came to a halt, smiling expectantly, in front of Bablu, the youngest letter writer. Bablu was a mere child, in his late thirties; he had been at the job only twelve years. He looked over the top of his table, saw the cripple, and passed a few coins down; the other man took them and, satisfied, went away wordlessly. This happened every day at the same time but none of the letter writers commented. Mohan sometimes amused himself by spinning out scenarios: the two boys were brothers, but by different mothers; the more fortunate one knew that only his good luck had saved him from his brother’s fate…the baroque suppositions made him smile, mostly at himself.

He’d been thinking again about the woman in the green sari, partly with a simple fascination, as when a particular face, or a gait, something alluring about a woman walking past, caught his eye. But then he’d begun to think of her in a different way, giving her a name that wasn’t the one he’d written on the money order form, and picking up a thread in his mind about her story, where she’d come from, how she’d arrived in Bombay, what she felt about her life, the kind of room she might live in. These details lingered in his head, and he looked up absently into the traffic to see two green parrots shoot past the GPO and towards Bhatia baug, making an elegant arc of speed through the air, their feathers flashing electric green as they corkscrewed. They were gone before he could be quite sure he hadn’t made them up, but he smiled again, suddenly feeling luckier.

The day extended, shapeless, because the usual bookstall excursion wasn’t there; the thought of the blank pavements between Fountain, Churchgate and the University made him feel strange, as when in a dream you open a favourite volume only to find page after page unaccountably empty.

Soon enough customers came along – first, a man who wanted to fill out a passport application. When he had taken the completed form and gone, Mohan leaned back in his chair and watched the shadow pigeons take off, wheel wildly, then land in the shadow tree, and merge into its substance. Later, a shadow leaf would seemingly tear itself out of the tree and fly up, into the sunlit sky.

That afternoon he was coming to the end of his lunch – its components neatly laid out on his table, three different small boxes for daal, vegetable and chapatis – when a familiar figure, knife-thin, appeared in his field of vision.

‘Eh, Ashish!’

The boy approached, slowing as he got nearer the tarpaulin. Four men looked at him interestedly. He smiled in a measured but general way and came to a stop near his uncle.

‘Come, sit here.’ Mohan patted the stool next to him.

‘No, I just…’

‘Sit!’

Ashish sat down, reluctantly. But when he’d moved into the world under the tarpaulin, only a metre distant from the road, he began to look about him with curiosity.

Mohan waved towards him for the benefit of the other letter writers. ‘This is my nephew Ashish, my sister’s son. Studying at Elphinstone College.’

Khan smiled at Ashish and examined him closely through his tiny glasses. ‘You are studying…’

‘Yes.’

‘Which stream? Which year?’

‘Um, third year BA.’

A doubtful look passed over Khan’s face. ‘BA?’ he repeated incredulously, as though it was hard for him to believe anyone could be such a malingerer.

‘Arts,’ muttered Ashish.

‘Literature,’ said Mohan firmly. ‘He’s studying English literature.’ He put a hand on one of the boy’s thin shoulders.

‘Um, Mohan mama, can I have the key?’ Ashish murmured rapidly. ‘I don’t have one yet, mami said to get it from you in case she was still out.’

The boy from the tea house reappeared with another round of glasses.

‘At least stay and have tea with me,’ Mohan said. ‘Have you had lunch?’

Ashish looked embarrassed, and also unencouraging. ‘I’ll eat at home,’ he said.

Mohan hadn’t yet eaten his puran poli; he’d been saving it till the end because it was his favourite sweet. ‘Here,’ he said, putting it into the boy’s hand. ‘Eat this and have some tea. Anyway, I shouldn’t have all these things at my age, I’ll get fat.’ He patted his stomach and grinned.

Ashish, now that he had been forced into staying, sat quite contentedly and munched the puran poli.

‘You don’t know how busy it used to be, earlier. People coming all the time, we didn’t even have time for lunch until four o’clock,’ Khan told him. Ashish sipped his tea and nodded sagely.

‘Hm.’ Mohan cleared his throat. The boy, even as a child, had had a gift for sitting still and doing little that had easily allowed them to be close. Mohan watched a couple of buses turning the corner from the GPO towards Ballard Estate and seemed to see them as Ashish did: big harmless animals, some thing like oversized water buffaloes, their engines breathing and hydraulic brakes hissing as they turned. The boy looked at the curved frontage of the nearby buildings and Mohan’s eyes followed his and noticed, today, how the air conditioners were suspended from the facade in metal cages, like strange, rusting offerings.

‘So, what work did you have in town?’ Mohan asked.

‘I had to check something in the library,’ but he wasn’t carrying any books, ‘and I met a friend.’

‘Hm.’

Ashish’s tea was over, and his reverie had passed. ‘Well,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’ll go.’ He nodded at the other letter writers.

‘See you at home!’ Mohan called, and waved. He continued to look after the thin figure as it receded towards the station.

‘So you think he’ll pass this year?’ Khan asked. He pushed his spectacles up his nose and reopened the morning’s paper.

‘Definitely,’ said Mohan resolutely. ‘Very intelligent boy. And he’s studying hard, now.’ He cleared his throat and remained staring into the brightness for a while.

He reminded himself as he dressed that Sunday that lunch should go well no matter what. Satish was coming over for his birthday; Lakshmi had for days been planning what to cook, muttering to herself to use less salt since her brother suffered from high blood pressure; a present had been bought and wrapped. Mohan pulled out his Sunday clothes – a sort of t-shirt with a collar that Megha had given him, and old, comfortable trousers – and resolved not to be provoked by Satish. He put on his sandals without disturbing his wife, who lay sleeping under the fan. It was turning so frenetically in the early morning high voltage that the sheet covering her stirred, and exposed the instep of one foot.

As he went down the stairs he noticed the smell and coolness of the air. Sunday morning in Saraswati Park and all over the city was a time of languor. The routines and efforts of other days were performed, but at a smaller scale and a slower pace; suddenly, there was time to live.

He padded into the lane. The usual figures emerged from their gates, coming towards the shops for bread and milk; today they were dressed not in neatly pressed trousers and shirts but in voluminous t-shirts and shorts. An older man wore white kurta-pyjama. A couple of ghostly forms still promenaded at the end of the lane, taking their morning walk, but there was absenteeism, and a sense of festivity even in the movements of the stalwarts.

As he crossed the circle he remarked again the bizarre advertisements for the limb replacement clinic that sponsored the garden in the middle of the road. Three other men were waiting at the tiny snack shop that had recently opened and begun to sell idlis in the morning. Because it was the first Sunday since Ashish had arrived he bought jalebis too. When he got home, the brittle coils of fried translucent dough, sticky with syrup, sat in a tangle on a plate at the edge of the table, waiting for Ashish to wake up. Mohan boiled the new milk, hummed, and made tea for three.

Satish’s fingers were precise and long. They undid the package, carefully detaching the tape from the paper, which was dark blue with golden stars printed on it. He was sitting in the cane armchair; in this moment it had come to resemble a throne.

‘Oh, an alarm clock!’

Lakshmi’s face shone and then trembled slightly. ‘You said yours had stopped working,’ she said.

‘Oh, that old thing,’ Satish said. His voice conveyed that the clock had been incalculably precious to him, and was irreplaceable. He held up the plastic box that contained the new one, which was silver and sleek, with a white analogue face.

‘Such a nice new clock,’ he said. The glow from his sister’s face returned. ‘Looks expensive,’ he went on.

‘No no,’ said Lakshmi, rather proudly.

‘So many functions.’ He turned the box at arm’s length to peer at the lettering on the back. ‘What’s this: snooze?’

‘Yes, and you can also set it to ring at the same time every day.’ She reached out to indicate a button on the side.

‘Almost too nice to use,’ said Satish decisively. He seemed to be talking to himself, but his voice was quite audible. Mohan, who had been standing near the chair to witness the small ceremony, felt the familiar mix of emotions that his brother-in-law so easily aroused: he wanted to hit him, but he also felt like laughing, so neatly had Satish turned the situation around. But then there was his wife’s face. Mohan became aware of an insect buzzing increasingly loudly as it banged against the glass of the balcony door; he reminded himself not to speak, and drifted towards the kitchen as though to check on something.

Behind him, he heard Satish’s soft, educated voice: ‘Yes, it’s too good for an old bachelor like me. You’d better keep it here, I wouldn’t know how to look after it.’ As Mohan went into the kitchen he turned and saw his wife’s face, which was shocked, like a child’s after it has been slapped. Ashish had gone to the balcony and was using his slipper to try to flick the insect, still buzzing irately, off the glass door and into the warm afternoon.

‘The daal is interesting,’ Satish said. Lakshmi began to smile. ‘Completely tasteless,’ her brother mused. ‘I wonder how you managed it.’ Her face darkened, and she looked down at her plate without appearing to see it.

It entered Mohan’s head to say, ‘If you don’t like the food, get out of my house and don’t come back.’ He didn’t, though; such a spat with Satish’s elder sister’s husband had left him unable to visit her house until she died five years later.

‘Give me the daal,’ Mohan told Ashish instead. He helped himself to more and continued to eat in silence, thinking about Satish and what had become of his early promise. He’d been exceptionally bright as a young man, but his father had favoured the elder children, and Lakshmi, who was the youngest. The crowning injustice had been when Satish, after graduating, had got a job with a British-run textile company. His father had told him to give the job to the eldest brother, Bhaskar, who hadn’t, anyway, kept it for long; he was indolent and good-natured and had married and moved to Nagpur, where he became a college lecturer. It was an incredible story, Mohan reflected, working the daal into the heap of rice on his plate. It was hard to imagine such a thing happening today. Which employer, for one thing, would hire one brother but accept another as substitute? He squeezed a little lime onto the rice and daal mixture, and sprinkled salt over it. At some point Satish’s hopes had given way to sourness; he had never married, and after he retired from his own post as a lecturer in law, seemed to spend his time devising small ways of upsetting his siblings.

To Mohan’s surprise, Ashish began to talk. The boy smiled at Satish who, caught off-guard, smiled back. ‘Satish uncle, I was reading in the newspaper about that case of a Hindu Undivided Family where one of the married daughters changed sex to become a son, what do you think about it?’

Satish laughed; his face became quite attractive. ‘So you read the newspapers, is it? That’s more than many law students seem to do. Well, it’s an interesting case, since there doesn’t seem to be a precedent at this level. But if we go back to the basic concept of the HUF there are two main considerations –’ and he went on talking for some time, while Ashish nodded, his face intelligent.

Mohan chewed a mouthful – the daal wasn’t tasteless, it was comfortingly bland – and thought of the flat in Grant Road where Satish lived. This was where he’d return after spending the afternoon and early evening with them. Mohan had been to the place some years earlier; it was in a dingy building, not very far from the post office, and more resembled a chawl, a workers’ tenement, than a modern apartment block. The main room contained some books, jostling for space in and on top of the shelves, and a steel cupboard for papers and clothes. There was a desk, and a dusty wooden chest of drawers topped with a newspaper, a comb, a hair brush, Satish’s steel watch. The bed was narrow. There had been a sense of monasticism in the place, but without any of the rich stillness that might imply. ‘This is a room a man might kill himself in,’ Mohan had thought, surprising himself.

There was a pause in the conversation. Satish had rounded off his explanation, Ashish had made a joke, and both their faces were flushed with amusement. Mohan pushed a jar towards his brother-in-law. ‘Lime pickle?’ he said. Their eyes met.

Satish smiled – he had, after all, a charming smile – and reached out a thin hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

In the evening, Mohan sat in the circle of light from the hundred-watt bulb above the cane armchair. Become a Writer lay on his lap, unopened. He remembered the pitiable face – dark, thin, desperate – of the man he’d bought it from. A few days later, Mohan had been in a bus on Marine Drive when he’d seen what appeared to be the same man, standing on the parapet and looking down at the waves. The wind blew the white clothes around his thin figure. Noon: it was blindingly hot. As the bus passed, the man had half turned. He’d seemed to see Mohan, and their gaze had held for a moment. Don’t jump, the letter writer had thought. Then the bus hugged the curve of the road, and the man was no longer in view. There was no way of knowing whether he had stepped back, onto the pavement, or forward, onto the rocks.

When Mohan had seen the book last Sunday in Ashish’s room he’d had the feeling that something big was about to happen, and with it, something bad. Neither of these things was negotiable, so it should have been obvious that it was pointless to think about them. He ran his mind over all the usual augurs: the train notice boards, the advertisements in the compartment, the faces of the other passengers and of his customers in the last few days, even the toys being sold on the street stalls. But he remembered nothing remarkable. Instead he found himself thinking of his father, at his desk on a Sunday, that inviolable time; his white shirt very white against the dim room, and books gathered on the table around him. Maybe Ashish had been right; maybe Nandlal kaka hadn’t known what he was talking about; maybe Mohan’s father could have published his stories?

That Sunday Nandlal kaka had come to lunch and afterwards the children had fallen quiet when their father brought out a manuscript, a bundle of pages tied up in a purple ribbon like legal documents. A week later, Mohan’s father had left to meet Nandlal, but when he returned had simply gone into his study, quite silent, and closed the door. The incident had been so terrible, and yet never discussed, that it was as though it had slipped underwater, never to be seen again.

Chapter Four

When Ashish ambled towards the grocer’s at ten thirty the next morning the dosa man was already at his stall, under a tree near the roundabout. He was growling at two put-upon young men. One was sweating, and chopping onions; the other scrubbed the enormous griddle on which, at mealtimes, the dosa man would drop a splodge of batter, then, using a knife so large that it resembled a ploughshare, sweep it into a thin circle that sizzled while it crisped. For now, the lackeys sweated and the dosa man stood in the shade, arms folded; between blasts of sarcastic sounding invective he smiled to himself. He was very dark, with the brave moustaches, flourishing sideburns and bouffant hair of a south Indian film star.

Ashish walked back from the grocer’s carrying a packet of semolina wrapped in newsprint. It was hot; the early freshness was gone and he smelled traffic fumes in the air and felt the sun on his face.

He was exhausted. The first time he’d woken it had still been dark; he’d been startled by a moment of dead silence and then by the screaming. It was birds, he realized after the initial horror, shouting about something; perhaps, incredibly, the dawn. Not just the crows, pigeons and seagulls that he was used to, but many more: mynahs, koyals, and another that let out insane, rising whoops then waited for an answering burst of mad laughter.

There was too much space in the room. He’d got up again, gone past the bookshelf, peered out of the window suspiciously and seen no one in the darkness below. This is where I live now, he’d thought, but it had seemed unreal.

When day broke and he saw the first figures in the lane, walking for exercise, he felt better. The crisis seemed to have passed, and he slept in the pale, early light, his body cool and soothed under the fan.

There was another memory of having woken, but this was more vague, like a dream one has when sleeping on a long-distance train: mashed memories of the sulphur-yellow overhead light, the swaying of the bogey, and the abiding sense of transit. When he woke it was with an erection, and in the middle of a confusing dream in which he and another boy, possibly Sunder, chased each other in the colonnade of the college.

From another room, he heard his uncle’s voice, and his aunt laughing.

He ducked into the bathroom, locked the door with relief and set about waking up.

By the time Ashish had bathed, Mohan had already left for work. Lakshmi had discovered that there were ants frolicking in the semolina and sent Ashish out for more; she was going to make him breakfast.

He let himself back into the house now, handed over the semolina, and sat at the table drinking tea and flicking through the newspaper.

His aunt came to talk to him. ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes,’ she said, and her face lit up. She wiped her hands on the cloth she had been holding and sat down near him. He was fond of his aunt; unlike his mother, she had a soft face that seemed to crease easily. She was often vague, unless she was angry, and then she was extremely specific.

‘It’s changed a lot here, you must have noticed,’ she began to tell him sorrowfully. ‘Gopal building, that probably hadn’t been reconstructed the last time you were here.’

‘Oh yes, the white one.’ It was almost opposite, a six-storey tower that stood out next to the small, faded 1960s blocks in the rest of the lane.

Lakshmi made a ‘what can you do’ grimace. ‘These builders are offering a lot of money – they pay you to let them redevelop and take the FSI and then they put up a taller building and sell the extra flats.’

‘Hm.’ Ashish drained his tea and, slightly bored, covertly eyed the newspaper’s city supplement, where the image of a popular film actress on the masthead had been misprinted; the blues and yellows were marginally separated instead of overlaid, and her famous smile, as a result, was scattered.

‘We’ve also had offers,’ Lakshmi went on. ‘But luckily the Gogates, you know, they own three flats, they don’t want to sell. None of us does really, at least not so far. You can’t tell when these people start offering more and more. And then there’ll be construction work going on endlessly – something’s going to start soon, in the empty plot, a builder’s already bought it. I don’t know if they’ll begin now, or wait till after the rains.’

A toasty, pleasant smell came out of the kitchen. She got up and hurried inside; there were sounds of the lifting of a lid, and the scraping of a spoon. She came back with a plate of the hot upma, which smelled delectably of ghee and a roasted red chilli.

‘Here, eat well. You should, since you have so much studying to do,’ she remarked, and, unsure whether the comment was pointed or just another part of her morning conversation, Ashish nodded and picked up the spoon. His aunt put on her spectacles, frowned, and went back to the kitchen. She reappeared with a cup of instant coffee, picked up the city supplement, and moved towards the living room window.

In his room, he half closed the door and wandered around, inspecting the drawers, the bookshelves, the old comics. Later, when lunch smells began to float down the corridor towards him, he panicked. His books waited officiously on the desk, next to a jumble of pens. He sighed and sat down. It was best to be methodical – first of all, he’d draw up a timetable.

Half an hour later, he’d wedged his shoulders and elbows at awkward angles, the better to concentrate, and found a ruler. He was nearly done with plotting out the grid, which accounted for each day in half-hour units from six a.m. to midnight.

‘Ashish!’

He threw out a medium-distance grunt.

‘Lunch!’

Carefully, he finished colouring in the last of the green squares that denoted time allotted to bathing and ablutions in the morning, from seven to seven thirty.

Lakshmi was probably a better cook than his mother; she was usually in a better mood, and that seemed to affect the food. And she was less stingy with the oil, salt and chilli; Ashish’s father, though he had turned fifty only last year, already had cholesterol, and the doctor had hinted darkly at ‘BP’.

Ashish had hogged slightly too enthusiastically at lunch, and now he sat slumped at the desk and eyed the bed and its handloom cover, which was striped, with a prominent slub. It would feel reassuringly rough against his cheek while he slept; but he looked at the bright squares of the study timetable and sighed.

He stared into the sun. A little later, some boys came out to play football in the lane. They seemed to be engaged in a strange dance whose purpose was to cover every inch of the lane with the ball, which slipped between them as though attached to their feet by lengths of elastic. It never got away, nor was it ever caught. Occasionally it flew up, and was knocked down by one of the players, who used his forehead; another dived for it. Ashish read:

The date is out of such prolixity:

We’ll have no Cupid hoodwink’d with a scarf

Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,

Scaring the ladies like a crow-keeper;

No, nor without-book prologue, faintly spoke

After the prompter, for our entrance:

It was enough. He couldn’t understand, and had been a fool to try. At the same time as the words drew him in with their rhythm, they barred his passage. Lath? Tartar? Without-book prologue? He should have stuck to the books of notes that everyone else used to pass. His eyes wandered outside, where the football was making a lovely long curve towards the goal at the mouth of the lane. The watchman grabbed the ball and waved the boys out of the way; Dr Gogate’s new car turned in.

Ashish bent his head down to the page.

The date is out of such prolixity:

His elbow leaned on the desk and his cheek found a resting place in the palm of his hand. He looked into the sun and wondered what had become of Sunder, but the question didn’t seem as urgent as a few days ago. For diversion, he went looking for the book that his uncle had picked up.

‘Aren’t there any family photos?’ he asked his aunt in the afternoon.

‘Photos? You mean of your mother’s childhood?’

‘Yeah, from the old house.’

She paused, and blew on her tea. ‘I’ll have to see, they’re probably in the chest here. You want to see them?’

‘Hm,’ Ashish nodded.

‘We’ll ask your uncle when he gets home.’

‘Okay.’

But a little later, he heard her calling to him from the living room and left Romeo and Juliet to wander out. She had removed the ornaments from the top of the tea chest and opened it; bits of newspaper, cloth, and a few albums lay on the low table. Her face was amused. ‘Come, see?’

He sat next to her on the floor, and they began turning the enormous pages, on which card-like black and white prints were affixed by decorative corners. Here was Mohan mama, about six years old, swinging on the gate of the house at Dadar: he looked small, skinny, and mischievous, but ultimately well behaved. Ashish’s mother was in another picture, a young child, pugnacious in a frilly frock with a large bow at the waist. His grandparents, looking young and self-conscious; his grandfather wore a suit, his grandmother wore a nine-yard sari and carried a baby, presumably Vivek mama, in her arms. Various other cousins, aunts and uncles; his aunt speculated about their identity.

They heard the door catch: Mohan was home.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. He took off his sandals and came to stand near them, tentative but eager.

‘He wanted to see some of the old photos,’ Lakshmi explained.

Mohan reached down and took the picture Ashish was holding. It had a white border and scalloped edges, and showed a formal group. A plant stood in one corner; on a sofa sat a woman in a sari, now the ubiquitous six-yard variety, holding a toddler on her lap. Two boys stood next to her; at the side was her husband, his hand on the elder boy’s shoulder.

‘That’s my grandparents with my mother, Vivek mama and you, isn’t it, Mohan mama?’ Ashish glanced up; his uncle’s face was inscrutable.

‘Yes, the three of us and our parents. Look at your mother’s face.’

‘Hm.’ Ashish reached up for the photo. The toddler, fatkneed, had the familiar aggressive expression. ‘So Vivek mama was about twelve. You must have been six or so? Everyone looks so different.’

Mohan snorted. ‘It was a long time ago.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ Ashish said. ‘You all seem more serious or something.’ The photographs were different, say, from those of him and his sister growing up. The figures here regarded the camera with greater intensity; they seemed more present than people in pictures today.

His uncle looked down at him. ‘Well, these photos were taken in a studio, we had to pose. Best clothes, a lot of waiting. Your mother used to get very bored and start shouting.’

‘I bet.’ Ashish looked back at the photo. The elder boy, Vivek, already looked pompous; he was sticking his small chest out, and his brilliantined hair showed the marks of a comb. Ashish’s grandfather seemed preoccupied; his grandmother was a definite entity, as though the photographer had drawn a thin black line around her. The middle child, his uncle, appeared to be elsewhere. His eyes were remote, and his smile engagingly goofy, as though he were gratified to have been included. Already, he looked like a person used to spending a lot of time on his own.

‘Can I have this?’

Mohan looked startled.

‘Can I keep it in my room?’ Ashish modified.

‘I suppose. There’s no frame.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’ He thought perhaps he should explain why he wanted it. ‘I don’t really have any old pictures of the family,’ he said. It would be a warning, he thought, feeling a kind of self-doubting impatience towards the boy in the photo. Wake up! he wanted to shout at him. Get on with it!

‘All right, take it.’ Mohan started to put the other photos in an ancient envelope that he slipped into the back of the album. He wrapped it in a piece of old sari that acted as its shroud, and replaced it carefully in the tea chest; he shut the lid. Aha, thought Ashish: only people who’ve had truly happy childhoods can afford to forget about them. He went to his room and stood the photo on his desk, against the window ledge.

After dinner he prowled around his uncle, who was sitting in the cane chair reading.

‘Mohan mama.’

‘Hm.’

Ashish circled the chair. The light glinted through his uncle’s steel-coloured hair and onto his scalp, which showed, oddly pale, at the crown.

‘Have you ever thought of writing something?’

‘Ha! Apart from letters and money order forms, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

No answer. Ashish continued to hover about the chair, dragging one rubber slipper along the tiles until it squeaked. His uncle lowered the book and looked at him.

Ashish grinned. ‘I was looking at that book, Become a Writer. You should try writing some stories, you know, short stories. You must know a lot of stories, from all the people you meet.’

Mohan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s a very different thing. It’s difficult to be a writer, not everyone can do it,’ he muttered.

‘Yes, but you already write a lot anyway.’

‘That’s different.’

‘And also you read so much.’

His uncle regarded him for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared. Unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘I was published once,’ he said. ‘Have I ever shown you?’

‘No!’

‘Hm, I wonder where it is now. It was in a magazine.’ His face had begun to gleam. ‘Come, I think it might be in your room.’

He bustled out of the living room and into the kitchen. Ashish had just begun to follow him when Mohan reappeared with the stepladder. He went into Ashish’s room and planted it between the bed and the window.

‘Do you want me to do that?’ Ashish mumbled, but he enjoyed the sight of his uncle hurrying up the pyramid-like stepladder, which creaked loudly under his weight. In the upper reaches of the shelves near the bed Mohan began to rummage in various piles of paper.

‘Chhi,’ he said perfunctorily. The dust here was thick and silky; it floated down to the floor in flakes. ‘Got it.’ He descended the ladder, his face triumphant, eyes bright, and a dirty smear on the bridge of his nose. Ashish, long-suffering, folded up the stepladder and carried it back to the kitchen. When he’d restored it to its dark corner he hurried to the living room. His uncle stood under the bare bulb; he had gingerly unfolded the ageing, brittle newsprint.

‘See, here.’

Ashish bent, and read:

Dear Sir,

I am a faithful reader of the Junior Diplomat and I am writing to ask you print more short stories.

Yours faithfully,

Mohan V. Karekar (age 4½).

‘Aged four and a half! Mohan mama!’ Ashish crowed. He was still more entertained when his uncle removed the paper from his grasp. ‘We used to get the Diplomat every Sunday, and I loved reading the Junior Diplomat, the children’s section, it was very popular. Here, this paper’s old, it’ll crumble.’ Carefully, he refolded the page and put it on the reading table.

‘So you were already published at four and a half?’

Mohan smirked, and sat down in the cane armchair. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ he said. He opened his book again.

Ashish had heard a familiar music in the distance; he listened, part of his brain thinking it might be a song he knew. Then he ran towards his room: it was his phone.

Later that night, he was about to go to sleep when an electronic shrieking began in the flat below; it was in the room underneath his. He cocked his ear and listened: an urgent trill of three rising notes. It must have been Madhavi, the plump girl: she was of the right age to have exams. Setting an alarm for revision, or to signal the end of a timed question, was the kind of thing serious students did. But no one came to switch off the alarm; it shrieked itself into catalepsy and, with a squeak, died out.

Ashish sat at the desk and thought he would read a little more. He was thinking about Sunder, about his lazy, deep voice, and his inarticulateness, and about how they were to meet the next day; at the same time, he was reading, but too fast to notice any of the words that passed his eyes like long distance trains at night, noisy but unmemorable. At once he felt eyes fixed on him, and heard a gobbling sound. Very slowly, hairs rising on his neck, he looked up. Two round white faces, enormous, dark, knowing eyes, and a look of surprise modulated by the polite pretence of disinterest. In the open window of the empty flat opposite sat two white owls. They rocked slightly, their eyes scanning the darkness. As his eyes met theirs, one of the birds unfolded like a threat suddenly swept aside and Ashish’s heart contracted; the whiteness of its wings flashed into a V, then a line; it swooped through the glow of the street lamp and was gone.

His aunt, who couldn’t remember whether the apartment door had been double-locked, came out of her room after midnight to check. On her way back she saw the line of light under Ashish’s door and was surprised; none of their children had studied this late, especially so far before the exams. He must really be serious, she thought. She went back to her room and quietly closed the door.

Chapter Five

Her day held its breath until Mohan and Ashish had been safely eased into the world. When the morning’s whirlwind was over – tea cups and clattering arrivals in the kitchen, departures for the bathroom, reappearances in different stages of readiness, last-minute forgetting of things – she felt like a sports coach who retreats into his private life between moments of crisis.

The cleaning over, she went to the bathroom, stripped off the old salwar kameez in which she slept, and watched the red light of the water heater come on. A good stream of hot water came out of the tap and filled up the bucket. She threw half a mugful over herself, flinched, and added more cold water. Her skin was still soft and pale below the neckline. She picked up the cake of citrus soap, streaked in yellow and green; its slight tackiness and the hint of steam, the scent of lemon and clean skin that lingered in the bathroom, were all signs that her husband and Ashish had been there before her.

She came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and considered what to wear. Her cupboard was full of saris, ironed, folded and stacked like important documents, but these days she mostly wore ‘suits’: long, fitted kurta, baggy salwar, and a matching dupatta. The suits were easier to look after. Unlike cotton saris, they didn’t need to be starched, and they went uncomplaining into the laundry and then to the ironing boys’ blue hut from where they were collected, pressed and submissive, by Mohan in the morning when he was on his way back with the bread and milk.

Still, the sari, and the ceremony of putting it on, retained some glamour. Today she stood in front of the open cupboard and thought she’d wear one. She scanned the shelves: her eye passed appreciatively but without great interest over the heavy silks, the practical synthetics, which in their way had been exotic years earlier, and the few chiffon saris that her daughters had given her, and which she rarely wore. It was hot today: she wanted a cotton sari. She put her hands in and pulled out a slim, pale blue spine. It was a simple one, with large grey dots and discreet embroidery on the border. The matching short-sleeved blouse looked saggy and depressing until worn, when it filled with the authoritative curves of upper arms, shoulders, and breasts. The petticoat too became more graceful, a vestige of a milkmaid’s outfit in a painting, like the one they had hung in the bathroom, a fabric calendar picture of Krishna teasing the gopis. This was an unlikely gopi, of course – she regarded herself, in the latest instalment of the daily conversation with her own image, and checked the lines between her nose and mouth, and the grey hairs at the side of her head. She’d put on a little weight in recent years, and probably looked better for it. But the eyes gazed back, doubtful.

She unfolded the sari, shook it out and examined it for any rents or stains; then, with absent-minded grace, tucked it in so that it made half a round of her petticoated lower body. Her arms danced as cheerfully as the limbs of an automaton to pay out the fabric, pleat it, and secure it at the front. The neatly gathered folds made her think of the last letter they’d had from their youngest daughter, who was working for a computer company in America. Her life was unimaginable; she had no family of her own yet but no help either, and had to work long hours as well as manage her own food, laundry and cleaning, though she said that these were simpler affairs than at home. Lakshmi glanced in the mirror to check the pleats fell straight and her mouth curled; she liked this impudent daughter’s freedom. Megha would find it difficult, though, when she married; there were so many things – but all that was a later worry, and marriages, also, were different these days.

She wrapped a further length of the fine cotton about her body, stretched the remaining cloth along her left arm, scrutinized it for holes, and threw it over her left shoulder. Then she went to the small idol of Ganesh near the window, lit a stick of incense in front of the god, and said a prayer. It was a ritual she performed every day, though not because it was supposed to achieve anything; it was a counterpart of her bath, and created a quiet corner in her mind that might, with luck, survive the rest of the day.

The building was quieter; earlier there had been the sounds of office workers opening and shutting their front doors. Now it was the domestic traffic. Cleaning women were arriving at some houses. Here, too, the doorbell rang loudly; it must be the rubbish collector, a leering, dark, and cheerful youth who wore brightly patterned shirts. He came whenever he pleased between the morning and lunch time, except on Sundays, when he arrived promptly at eight; later, she or Mohan would see him out and about, nattily dressed and with brilliantine in his hair, so that he looked as if he were on his way to meet a girl.

She put her head into the passage. ‘Yes?’

‘Kachra!’

‘Yes yes,’ she replied, ‘wait a minute.’

The kitchen basket already smelled ripe. She picked it up and went forward, her nose wrinkling; she was opening the outer door when something dark and solid, sensing its imminent danger, shot out of the basket, along her arm and off her shoulder.

She screamed.

‘Oh, a lizard! Ugh!’ She found herself trembling with disgust. It wasn’t a pale green house gecko but one of the dark, shameless outdoor lizards that wouldn’t take fright decently even at loud noises.

The kachrawala grinned; wretched fellow, he’d enjoyed the show. ‘It’s good luck,’ he said. ‘You’ll come into some money.’

‘Ugh!’ She opened the door, and handed him the bin, which he emptied into his bag, knocking it so that the last vegetable peelings fell out. He pointed just outside the outer door. ‘There he is,’ he said. ‘Looks like he’s waiting to come back in.’ The lizard skulked next to the jamb.

Lakshmi’s neighbour opened her door and began to berate the kachrawala. ‘It’s after eleven. When are you going to start coming on time?’

He smiled and nodded, and gave Lakshmi back her bin.

Ashish had gone out; he said he had to go to college for something. Outside, it was hot and still: the last days of summer before the rains came. The empty hours stretched ahead. She thought of various things she had to do: change the sheets, put more camphor pellets in the cupboards before the monsoon started and insects multiplied; perhaps, in the evening, go and collect a new suit that she’d ordered two weeks earlier from a tailor in the market.

Instead, she sat near the window, looking out at the lane, which had come to a midday lull. The watchman had disappeared, probably for his lunch; the ironing boys were inside their hut; she heard their radio. She could do one of the more infrequent cleaning jobs – the shelf next to the stove, for example, where salt and other condiments were kept. But the idea had neither reality nor urgency. The crows on the electricity wires were quiet after their early morning exuberance; soon they’d find some shade to sit in until it was cooler again.

A single bird sang out: a falling sequence of four notes, with a cheep at the end. It sounded oddly familiar, yet she hadn’t, she thought, heard it before. Maybe it was a bird that used to come near their childhood home, in Tardeo? Its song – she hummed it to herself – brought no specific recollection, only a vaguely poignant feeling.

It was hard to work out, sometimes, how she had come from that house, with a family full of loudly talking, cheerful people, into this one, where, often, each person withdrew into silence, nursing his or her own dreams, oblivious to everyone else. Only her elder son, Gautam, resembled her family; he’d also spent most time with his cousins from that side. He talked and laughed more loudly, didn’t think deeply about every single thing, and, like her, seemed to exist most clearly when he was speaking. Like her, he narrated aloud to himself whichever action he was about to take (‘Hm, I mustn’t forget to get that CD for Alka’), a habit that bemused and irritated his father, who would wonderingly ask, ‘How does saying it aloud help?’ and privately, no doubt, add: ‘And why are you intruding such banal reflections into my world?’

She ran through the rest of the day’s tasks, murmuring some of the words aloud. ‘Vegetables…’ No, she’d looked, there were enough for dinner. ‘Newspapers.’ Yes. She made herself a cup of coffee, and sat near the window where the light was good, the pile of last week’s papers and the scissors next to her. She clipped out a picture of a polar bear, and a recipe for macaroni cheese with baked vegetables, the sort of thing that Ashish might like. It was nice, this process of revisiting the novelties of a few days earlier, which now seemed agreeably tired – it was a habit from childhood, though then the paper had been Navshakti, or old issues of Stree or Kirloskar that a neighbour provided for her scrapbook. There was something she had been meaning to clip, but she couldn’t remember what – it bothered her for a few minutes, and she turned over the pages. Then she found it: a column on the edit page about Seema Kulkarni, a classical singer whom she’d admired very much when she was younger. The article was about the tradition of singers as divas, and the often extravagant caprices they displayed. Lakshmi had gone, more than once, to hear Seemabai sing; she always turned up a couple of hours late, while the audience sat patiently waiting. Finally the singer, richly dressed and made up, with kaajal, lipstick, and an enormous bindi on her forehead, appeared on stage; she smiled, did namaskaar to the audience, sat down, then snapped at the tabla player before closing her eyes and beginning to sing. Here an odd thing happened, each time: the woman of so much personality completely disappeared, and only the music was there till the raga ended.

The newspapers now addressed, Lakshmi piled them near the door, ready for the wastepaper man.

After lunch she found herself drawn to the television, though at this time of day there was nothing she wanted to watch; her favourite serials were aired much later, in the evening. There were two: one ran on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Both were about the travails of young women newly married into traditional families, and how they dealt with the women around them: their sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law. She preferred the first one, Daughters of the House. On Wednesday, when for fifteen minutes they overlapped on rival channels, she was distracted, flicking between advertisement breaks and trying to keep up with the stories.

She put on the television and waited with the usual tense expectation of pleasure as the screen flickered into a point of light, then animated. There really was nothing to watch – some terribly dry cultural programme on a Marathi channel, endless cooking shows in English – and she turned the television off again and resealed its clumsy plastic wrapper; it was supposed to protect the set from the corrosive sea air, but made it appear to be a sort of cranky deity that had to be kept in check.

‘Sheets…’

She went to get the clean ones from Ashish’s room and became diverted while searching for a packet of camphor pellets that she was sure was in a bottom drawer of one of the big cupboards. Instead, among candles, ballpoint pen refills and curtain hooks, she found a thin envelope with four small pieces of paper inside: ‘Baby boy, 8.34 a.m.’, ‘Baby girl, 5.21 a.m.’ and so on. They were from the nursing home where her children had been born; though they were years apart, the writing was the same politely curling convent-school hand. They had carefully preserved each record relating to the children, in case the government, which might be omniscient in such matters, spotted and rebuked neglect; there was a vague feeling of contributing, by this scrupulousness, towards national housekeeping.

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