LETTERS TO MAMA

Of course, these will never be inserted in a mail box. I don’t like the imperial red. We haven’t been able to change the colour. That would need imagination and where are we going to get the wretched thing, imagination I mean? A bit puzzling, this. We day dream a lot—not many can beat us Indians when it comes to that—eyelids open and the future drooling away. My friends at college—Isabela Thoburn, if you please—dreamt of pimple-scars vanishing from their not exactly beautiful faces. Some girls dreamt of long tresses they were not blessed with and some dreamt of the Bombay film world, which was a snare for dreams. The soldier in his LOC dugout dreams of peace, and IIT-types dream of MIT or placements, I suppose. Judges, of course, dream of vacations, never mind the thousand-odd cases on each dusty table, paper and exhibit turning brittle, mouldering away on shelves, blood-stained knives getting rusted at the edges, under-trials gathering layers of fungus in jails. The shopkeeper dreams of money. His short-changed wife (the bahu didn’t bring enough dowry) dreams of an auspicious moment when she could set her alight. Kerosene and match are such a matchless combination, I am happy with the pun, if that’s what it is, Mama.

There are other reasons why these letters will not be posted: you don’t write to the dead.

Well, life hasn’t been a walk along the Gomati exactly since you left. But you would’ve approved of what I did. It was as ordinary a morning as any, the paper got dropped at my door, milkman on bicycle, his cans clanging away, woke me up with his cycle bell. How the hell did he know I was back? Intuition, I suppose. I would be lying if I said I heard the cucumber seller shouting away in the time-honoured Lakhnavi style: ‘Laila ki ungliyan, Majnoon ki pasliyan khaye laio, khaye laio, khaye laio.’ Cucumbers tender as Laila’s fingers and Majnoon’s ribs, eat them, eat them, eat them.

I noticed the level light of Lucknow as I stepped out. I walked out into the street, nondescript like most other bloody streets—I am using the blood word pretty freely now that you are gone and there’s no one to check me, Mama. But I will try not to use the F-word, since you hate it. Promise!And please note I think of you in the present tense. You will always be with me, and I am not being senty…I mean sentimental, if you didn’t get that. A street like any other, haberdasheries, hardware shops, betel kiosks, tea boiling away in lidless pans, blackened on the insides by tannic acid, the outer bit by coal fires; and lest I forget, cows foraging in dirty municipal garbage bins. I noticed rickshaws stood almost in the middle of the road, while a car looped its sinuous way around them. Yes, and I saw the police sealing a hardware shop.

Two constables held lac (perhaps a short form of laquer?) sticks over a burning candle, and as those sticks started dripping, an iron seal was jammed into the gluey melt and later stamped on the cloth-bound lock. It took some time, for the candle wick was snuffed out twice by the breeze, till the Sub-inspector made one of the wide-buttocked constables stand downwind and shield the flame. Never were a cop’s buttocks put to better use.

The shutters were down in any case, and the owner had placed his own lock there. They could have sealed the owner’s lock, couldn’t they? This hardware shop sold wash basins, kitchen sinks made of steel, shower stands, flush toilets. I had seen the swanky insides some years back. There was an ironmonger nearby, a small shop selling nuts (which Father Time had forgotten to screw properly, remember?), bolts, hammers, hacksaws, even utensils, degchis and scrap iron plentiful as cow dung in a cattle pen. One time, a snake was discovered in the scrap iron. This shop was untouched. How could the hardware guy have offended the law, sorry state, for there was no law. Laws and legal codes, penal and procedural, had been sucked into Mrs Gandhi’s dark pit of paranoia. And they were sealed the way the rusty shutters with the rusted Godrej lock were. The Supreme Court on Hardinge Road, recently named after Tilak, had itself sealed the Fundamental Rights in its judgement. Sometimes I become brave without being conscious of it, without any blood racing through my veins.

‘Sir, why are you sealing this shop?’

He looked me up and down from my Kolhapuri chappals, bandaged big toe and silver payal right up to the remnants of sindoor in the parting on my head.

‘Hmmm.’

‘Is that supposed to be an answer?’

‘The wise understand a word, a cough, a snort. For fools even the Ramayana won’t suffice.’

This Sub-inspector had missed his vocation for sure; he should have been scribbling dialogues for Bombay films. Javed and Salim would have been out of business. Meanwhile another cop appeared on the scene, who seemed to oversee the order in the street. (You will notice Mama, that I refrained from saying ‘law and order.’ If you have a stick, there is order in the streets. Why must the state be loaded with law?) He never touched the lock or the shutters—didn’t want to soil his hands. Had to be a senior guy. I asked him the same question. He countered with another—again, a sign of seniority. Are you a journalist?

‘No Sir, just a member of the public.’ Mama, you know, one has to lie sometimes. Anyway I was a castaway journalist at the moment, writing on hills and Kangra paintings, instead of the rumbustious, roistering reality (one could die for such an alliteration, Mama) we were confronted with.

‘Han, and of course it is your right to know why a shop is being sealed, though I thought that there has been some rearrangement (rad-o-badal) in this business of rights since Madam’s Emergency announcement.’

I nodded. It was wise to nod during this emergency. ‘You must be having your reasons, Inspector Sahib.’

‘For?’

‘For sealing that shop.’

‘We have nothing to do with reason, lady. We work under orders. Some iron bars and bolts are locked up, how it matter? Tell me how it matter? We are not handcuffing someone. Orders need to be obeyed, understand, even by girls of twenty.’

‘Twenty-five.’

He wasn’t happy being corrected—another sign of seniority.

‘I asked about the sealing, Sir.’ He didn’t seem to register my polite reminder and just stared at the wall behind me, an off-white wall with a wet yellow streak—someone had obviously pissed on it minutes ago, pyjama dragged down to knee length, the cord held in one hand, a surreptitious look right and left and you let go. The bladder blesses you. That’s just imagination Mama, I didn’t see him piddling, just an encomium to the male bladder. ‘Sealing that shop with its shutters down and locked by the owner in any case, solid Godrej lock? You still needed to seal it with lac.’

‘Well said [theek boli]. You have heard of the house of lac, Bitya? Or did your parents forget to teach you the Mahabharata?’

‘They forgot, but my boyfriend did not [wanted to shock him]. He told me about the Pandavas and the House of Lac, rather Lakshagraka, erected in days by Purochana in the forest of Varnavat. The Pandavas entered the forest on the eighth day of Phalguna. But they had got a dark hint that things were dicey here, and when the palace was set ablaze they were not there. Absence of body—key safety measure in a fire—ask any fireman. You can’t burn absence, Inspector Sahib. It is all there in the Adi Parva 114 of Mahabharata, Sir.’

He nodded approvingly, but his look disapproved. Senior people don’t like upstarts to know more than them, and be bold enough to spit it out.

‘But there is this iron monger right here, dirty little shop stuffed with scrap iron, some of it rusted. How come you are not sealing it? No orders,I suppose.’

He didn’t nod or bother to reply. People had gathered around this chit of a girl asking the police questions. My trouble is I look far younger than I am. Must be related to someone big, they may have thought. And these coincidences zap me, for just as I thought this up, the senior cop turned to the junior and said,‘Bade baap ki beti hogi’.

A police truck rolled in and men clambered down. Policemen create a lot of noise coming down a truck, right till the moment their hob-nailed boots thud against the tarmac. I could now feel the fear in the air. Fear communicates without sound, smell or any of the things we associate with the senses. The seventh sense, what? And fear is a communicable disease. But it turned to panic the moment they saw two hospital vans screaming to a halt. Police was tamasha—you watched them as you’d pause to watch bears dancing to a damru. But the hospital vans they knew would go for their privates—sorry Mama, but those are the facts.

These days, our days, one apologizes for facts. If facts had faces they would be embarrassed.

Pandemonium, Mama. The Pandies (alliteration led me on to that word) never ran from the avenging Brits as the rickshaw crowd ran. Remember the forced march of the Brits from Allahabad to Kanpur, as they went about stringing up mutineers on roadside trees. 1857 Mama, you knew the subject. (You were an expert on the Kakori conspiracy too, Mama. Your daughter is only an expert on kakori kababs.) To continue the narrative, as academics would put it, I have only read about grapeshot, but the humans flying away on all sides were as close to that as possible. How they scampered, leaving rickshaw, pushcart and tonga behind.

(You weren’t offended by the term Pandies, were you Mama? I am irritated with all this drummed up rhetoric about freedom-fighters. The term has lost its sheen after all the money some of them made. And some of them are siding with Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency. Hence ‘Pandies’ out of cussedness.)

There were shouts of vasectomywalahs, nasbandiwaleh! That was it! Stupid me, I realized now why there were no porters and rickshaw-pullers at the station. They had bolted. The street was now seething with policemen, they were all over, not really brandishing their staves for once. They were hollering all right, though. They had been tutored to placate the guys if you please. ‘Nothing is gonna happen to you son. Just relax and come with us into those mobile vans. You’ll get jalebis for free.’ Doctors were also soliciting…will you lie down on my table/ said the doctor to the guy/ I’ll use the most harmless scalpel/ your tool did ever spy. They made kissing sounds, puchkarna as we say in Hindi. Onomatopoeic. Sad isn’t it, that language should have evolved from sounds emanating from kissing and necking, or hitting a fellow—or how else could a word like ‘thud’ have come into being? (Am not talking of Thadanis, Mama). Suddenly, I heard a man saying, ‘like any other’. Where had he sprung from? How did I not notice him earlier? Did he sidle up to me? He saw the question in my eyes as I turned my head, and nodded. ‘Like any other’, he repeated.

‘You seen many of these?’ It was more a statement than a question. He just nodded. He sported a two-day stubble, wore the regulation jeans—you can’t be a reporter if you’re not in jeans. Five feet ten, I surmised, face burnt by the sun. Had to be a reporter.

‘And you?’

‘My first one.’

‘Where the hell have you been? Timbuctoo?’

Rude bastard. ‘Kangra.’

‘Got a pad up there?’

Why was he asking? Wanted to shack up with me or what?

‘Sort of.’

He nodded again; nodding seemed to come naturally to him. ‘Bade baap ki beti.’ He was still nodding to himself, as he said that aloud, more to himself than me. When a foreigner breaks into Hindustani, it rattles me, Mama. I don’t know why. Just the surprise sprung on unsuspecting me, verbal bloody ambush. And I had heard the wretched words for the second time within minutes.

‘Not really. Communist ma ki ladki.’

His incessant nodding was getting on my nerves. ‘Communist ma ki bourgeois beti,’ he said, as if confirming a report he had already got from one of his sources.

‘Wish I had a camera.’

‘Lucky you. If you had one they’d have smashed it, and taken you in.’ Then he looked me over, head to bruised toe. ‘I saw you asking questions off the inspector, and surmised you were a journalist. But you seem to be an utter novice. Chummy with your editor or what? How come he hasn’t fired you?’

‘I thought you had brains. We are not allowed to write— unlike you guys who still manage to worm your way into your native press.’ I was happy with that native bit. He laughed and extended his hand. ‘Hemming.’

He doesn’t hem and haw, I thought; didn’t hide his identity. Thought he’d say I am John or Smith or something. ‘They must have given you a first name, or did your parents forget?’

‘They didn’t,’ he answered. ‘Alfred.’ He again extended his hand and this time I shook it vigorously. ‘Welcome to Lucknow, Alfie.’

‘You know why they have sealed that shop? He is a Jana Sangh guy. Very staunch. When young, he used to go to the shakhas.’

‘You mean the khaki knickers and the solar- plexus-salute types?’

‘You never been to a shakha, have you? I can see it in your eyes. Amazed how your editor hasn’t booted you out!’

For a foreign correspondent he seemed to know quite a bit. They don’t get their pounds for nothing. The more Alfie seemed to know, the more I hated him, and so my rudeness matched his. ‘Which rag do you work for?’ Before he could answer the older cop summoned me with his forefinger, the way you summon a hotel waiter. ‘Dangerous man,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Keep away from him.’ For a moment I was too angry to even speak. What does one say at such a moment?

By now the acting rights had passed on to the victims. They too had a part in the play—they always have, there would be no play if there weren’t victims, no scandals or enquiry commissions if there weren’t any fall guys. The street detritus and the cops were at it, not just the cops but also the hospital staff. No vasectomy, no pay, that was the rule, a fiat handed down by the health minister. (I’ll write a novel one day Mama, showing the minister of health down with syphilis and the finance minister fighting bankruptcy proceedings. Personal bankruptcy Mama, wouldn’t want the country to go bankrupt.)

The street turned into a battle scene, more an end-ofbattle scene, with street vendor and rickshaw-puller suddenly trying to break loose. Two of them had darted from a mobile van, one of them naked—I mean sans pyjamas or undies. That’s how we define nudity, don’t we? You can cover your torso with a trench coat, but the privates are the things wherein you’ll catch the conscience of the king. But then there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark at the moment, isn’t it? Sorry I keep getting off the track, but as I said it was an end-of-the-battle scene, with cops in khaki and compounder and ward boy in white overalls, even a doctor with his gloves on, giving frantic chase. I can’t say who was more frantic, the emasculators or the about-to-be emasculated?

So far the cops were only brandishing their sticks, herding the runaways, as goatherds nudge their flock back into the sheepfolds at dusk. But when a guy hit one of the victims, I couldn’t restrain myself. I ran towards the fellow, never mind my hurt toe and slapped him full on the face. Can you imagine the humiliation for a Kanaujia constable, why he could even be from Bihar, getting slapped by a pheemale! Can one even contemplate the indignity of it? Mama, I leave the rest to your imaginasun. After all you have Bihari blood in you, what if you studied in the Loreto convent in Lucknow. Your mother was from Bihar. But to continue with the narrative from which I continually get derailed, the young sub-inspector, the dialoguewalah, the one who should have been writing speeches for Pran or some other villain, pounced on me and tried to pin my arms down, but I freed my right hand and threatened to slap him. The dialogue was fit for a film, he didn’t have to invent it:

Sub-inspector (pouncing):‘How dare you slap a Policeman!’

Me:‘How dare you cut off their lulus!’

Doctor (bouncing in):‘We’re not cutting them off. This is false propaganda.’

Me:‘Three cheers for the Emergency. Indira Gandhi ki jai!’

The sarcasm should have been evident, but they were taken aback. That cheer from me fell like a grenade. Guys didn’t know what to do. What do you do to a mad girl who first slaps you and then raises a cheer for Mrs Gandhi! But khaki can’t freeze for ever. The senior man, the inspector, sauntered towards where I stood and I saw him nod his head and say something—all I caught was the tail end of a short sentence… ‘no handcuffs’. Two policemen stood on each side, holding me firmly by the wrists. When I struggled, the inspector gave me a kind look but shook his head from side to side. My resistance subsided momentarily. I reckoned it would be the cooler.

The police call it embussing, Mama. So does the army. Ever heard the term? So we were put in a bus, taken to a police station and sent off to jail, where we de-bussed! I had heard the senior cop telling the SI to take me to the police station and not the control room. It was in jail I learnt that the control room had got very fierce pro-Emergency officers, loyalists of whom Sanjay Gandhi would have been proud, had he heard of them. But news of loyal riff raff never reaches royal riff raff. I was told the old man had done me a good turn. The control room would have booked me under Section 216, coming in the way of a public servant and his duty. Why don’t we do away with this sham and start calling the police and the IAS types ‘public overlords’ and not servants?

Not that I didn’t create a ruckus even in jail. A warder had to fill in the particulars of the new arrivals. ‘Father’s name?’ he asked in a slow drawl—the man was unshaven and pot-bellied. ‘Dead,’ I answered. He did not lose his composure. Equanimity and fat bellies, I was to discover, are at peace with each other. ‘Mother’s name?’ He asked. ‘Dead,’ I answered again.

‘We are looking for names, not whether they are alive or dead.’ The fellow missed his chance of a good riposte. I reflected later that had I been him (God forbid) I’d have said, ‘This ain’t a headcount in a graveyard, Lady.’

Then the jailor appeared, looked at me carefully and said ‘keep her in solitary.’ I protested.

‘It will be better for you if you stay there,’ he said softly. And when I protested further he made me walk past the women cells. They stared at me wide-eyed in almost shocked silence. What could they be thinking of? Has the girl murdered someone, her boyfriend perhaps? The next cell contained prostitutes—victims of a massive raid. After all, sexual liberty also had to be contained, isn’t it? Or what would Delhi say? The wireless message from the IG police to the home minister must have read ‘so many prostitutes arrested’. The home minister must have banged his head on the table and screamed ‘we want politicians arrested!!!’ To get back, the women yelled at me and some of them stretched out their arms through the bars to get at me. I agreed with the jailor. It was solitary for me for two nights.

I was let off by evening after signing a bond which said I would keep the peace. My day for moving out of stereotypes. Compassionate jailor! What did he see in me to be kind?

Dr Bajpai came over to look at my big toe, if you please. She must be in her mid-sixties, Mama. Her glasses have become thicker since I last saw her. It felt as if I was looking at someone on the other side of a window. Shut window obviously, disapproval seemed to have been shut or shuttered there. For good. Shilpa had told her about it, my toe. Shilpa must have also tattled or how did she know I had been in jail. It wasn’t in the papers. It was the two nights there that worried her. Wonder what she must have imagined—some fat scruffy looking jailor making advances? Who can tell? I was, of course, worried about what my husband in Delhi would do once he came to know.

‘I don’t know what your mother would have said, if she had learnt about it, slapping a policeman and a night in jail!’

‘I wrote to her about it.’

You should have seen her face Mama,your doctor friend’s. Shock sat on those ever pale cheeks as if it had a long lease there. She didn’t pursue the matter, may have noticed my one millimetre smile. She couldn’t have read anything in my eyes, for I determinedly looked serious. She felt unsure though, has this girl gone bonkers? She handed over antibiotic pills, and said she’d send over her compounder to bandage my toe.

‘Seema, your big toe is infected, don’t wear chappals for the next few days, or it could get worse, with the dirt. Put on shoes. You might as well stay home. You could keep out of trouble that way.’

Nice parting shot and a cold stare to go with it. On her way out she repeated, ‘I’ll send the compounder to bandage your toe.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Aunty. I will manage that.’ It was Shilpa. If Dr Bajpai was here, could Shilpa be far behind? Not after she had tattled. Who else could have told Bajpai? She hugged me for a very long minute, Shilpa.

‘When did you get out and when did you get in?’

Now how was I going to answer that one? I told her so. ‘How did you leave jail and when?’

‘Took a tonga, what else? Rickshaw-pullers have run away, not tongawalahs. How could they leave their horses to die? They gave me back my purse with the house keys intact.’

‘Experience.’ I noticed that she too was nodding.

I couldn’t agree more. You go through life experiencing experience. She walked across and drew the curtains shut. ‘Why?’ I asked. She couldn’t believe my question and carried her forefinger to her temples. Hmmm. More people could be thinking the same, wondering about my frame of mind, when I let go at the constable. Why do we say ‘frame’ of mind Mama. It should be state of mind, isn’t it?

‘What’s gone wrong with you, Seema? Are you totally out of your mind?’

‘Out of my mind, that’s it. A much better phrase.’

She passed or rather waved her hand across my eyes. ‘Where do you get lost, Seema? Which world are you in?’

She couldn’t have noticed that I was also talking to my mother. I saw alarm on her face. When people get alarmed about you, it’s time to get a hold of yourself. ‘I will get a hold on myself, Shilpa, don’t worry.’

‘And what do you mean by that?’

‘Getting a hold on myself?’

‘What else?’

‘Shilpa, it’s like clutching the gathers of an ankle-length skirt, or shall we say a lehnga, its hem trailing on the floor. Getting a hold on yourself is something akin to that, isn’t it?’

I noticed the incredulous look had not left her face, nor the dregs of disgust. ‘Get me some chai, will you.’ We sat down and had chai. I told her about meeting Alfie, the foreign correspondent. ‘Christian Science Monitor, you mean.’ How does she know everything? ‘He’s writing very acerbically, you know,’ and she added, after sipping her tea, ‘will come to grief. Keep away from him.’

‘What can they do to a firang? White skin, British passport, even if you throw him out, the police will need a good car to escort him to the airport.’

‘Yes Seema, but they can keep him in the cooler for some days till the immigration or the emigration babus get their act together. Do you know, the babus are keener to get into emigration than immigration these days? More money in it.’

I keep quiet, no point in getting into an argument with her, she’s bound to win, bloody know-all. ‘How do you know all this, Shilpa?’

‘I keep my ears open, absorb what is buzzing around me. You seem to be in a trance these days. Are you in love, or if I may say so, out of it?’I told her not to be stupid. We got down to discussing politics, Shilpa started it. ‘There’s no hope now, for the moment I mean. We don’t have a party, what is worse, we don’t even have an ideology to match this female. She is for the poor, she says, and the poor believe her. We have the Swatantra types, whom you will not approve of—starched kurta, starched leggings, hush puppies, tea served by bearers in china, serviettes in silver rings, and contempt for the government dripping from their thin lips in accented English. How can these blokes ever have a mass following? Or, and what a choice, you have the shakhawalahs.’

I know of her dislike for the Jana Sangh. ‘You have the communists,’ I said quietly. ‘I knew you’d say that. They are with Mrs G, don’t you see. And God save us from their ideology—demagoguery, revolution, class collaboration, trade unions, strikes, gheraos, encircle the top man, factory manager (in case you want more pay for no work) or the vice chancellor (if you want no exams or no invigilation so that you can copy). Surround him and don’t let the bugger sneak off to the loo. Once he can’t retain his piddle anymore, he will succumb.’

‘You are quick to hate, to dismiss. And I don’t mind the shakhas at all. They are cadre-based, disciplined youth, don’t scoff at them. They can resist the lady. I appreciate cadres, there’s a collective will about them and they can stand their ground.’

‘Knew you’d say that, the communists too have cadres.’

‘All the same I respect the shakhawalahs. We need all types.’

‘Yes, but what about their brahmastras? The parmanu bumb as they call it, the science behind it came from Vedic lore, they copied the brahmastra, Oppie and co. Enola Gay was obviously the udan khatola of yore. And if Hanuman could burn Colombo and Galle with the flaming end of his tail, what are these Brits and Americans crowing about incendiary bombs?’ I was about to enter into a boxing match with her, when the phone rang mercifully. It was Nishant. ‘You are back, wish I had been told.’ His tone was soft, not accusatory.

‘Yes. Thought I’d let you know once I arrived here. The rains were getting a bit much too much for me in Kangra and the bed room had started leaking—all sorts of troubles.’

‘I can’t believe it, you travel and I don’t know where you are or where you’re off to. Someone asks me where you are, I say Kangra, and you could be in Dharamsala or Dalhousie or bloody Bakhloh!’

‘Don’t shout.’ He immediately started pleading. ‘Come to Delhi. Just leave Lucknow for God’s sake. Don’t enter the bloody place. It is crawling with these sleuths, CID, Special Branch…’

I butted in. ‘What is so special about this branch?’

‘They are the dedicated political intelligence types, you should know, you are a journalist. Who made you a journalist?’ He was beside himself with fury. This, too, I had been hearing since that encounter with bloody, sneering Alfie.

‘And you’ve been in the cooler. Two days there. If word gets around I’ll be booted out of my job. I am in the PMS— deputy secretary, bit of an underling, kicked around but so what, it happens to be the Prime Minister’s Sectariat!’

‘Secretariat.’

‘Thanks for correcting me, Seema. But just vanish from Lucknow, please. Kangra must have bored you, should have bored you by now. Don’t go back. Come to Delhi. A new house is being readied for us. Or how about a few days with your uncle?’

He meant my maternal uncle, Balbir chacha—the one who could put me wise to a lot of goings on concerning my parents. I nodded, Shilpa laughed. ‘Well what do you have to say about it?’ he screamed.

‘Can’t you see I agree?’ Shilpa shouted loud at that and cried out, ‘she was nodding’. ‘Who was that, Shilpa?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. He laughed. ‘Who told you I was in the cooler?’ I was serious and my tone cold. He sensed it. Was he snooping?

Work; the very thought of it weighs you down. Adjacent to the Residency we have a mango orchard—trees mostly of the Langra variety. The caretaker, Mushtaq Mian, what has he been doing? He hasn’t even come to offer his salaams, meaning to meet me. We belong to old Lucknow—we don’t meet people, we offer salaams, or regard, and to the much older, respect; our tawaifs were more cultured than the middle class housewives you find today, hunting on tired legs for a bargain deal, a machine embroidered kurta, we wouldn’t look at. Anything which looks like the real thing and is not the real thing, but can pass off as the real thing, they will go in for, as long as it is cheap! I thought of the mangoes for the first time this evening, in months. Were there dry winds in early March, was the mango blossom blown away, I hadn’t even cared to find out. June is the peak season for the Langra. Mama, I remember once father asked you, ‘What kind of a girl have we brought up?’ I am asking myself something similar today. Fortunately we have a few Fazri trees, the ones with the huge fruit, very sweet and sticky, but with no particular taste of its own.

Suddenly I hear the light splash of water. Bless him, the Bhishti is here with his mashq, water skin, and the smell of wet earth rises, its fragrance better than all the perfumeries of Kanauj. He is bent low as always, the leather mashq almost tied to his back. I have always called him Mashq Mian, no matter how you scolded me, Mama. I call him the same now and we laugh, both of us. ‘How are you, Najeeb Mian?’ I ask. He shakes his head, ‘No, Mashq Mian.’ And we laugh again. I ask him if he has been paid. Not for a year, he replies. I left some money with Mushtaq, I tell him. He simply shakes his head. I go in, dig into my purse and hand over what is due to him. I sleep well at night. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the orchard.