‘If you don’t sleep for two days, you’ll go mad,’ Ragesh, the most badly behaved of the youngsters, said, imitating the way Soordas walked with his white cane. ‘Let’s teach him to play cards. He won’t see if we look at his cards, so we can beat him all the time.’

‘We’ll need playing cards in braille . . .’

‘Braille lost his sight because of an accident with a shoe-making awl,’ Soordas said. ‘And when he was older, he created the braille system with the same awl.’

The youngsters looked at each other as though they were fed up with this bore. One of them sent a paper rocket flying towards his eyes. Everyone laughed, and Soordas laughed with them. I began to suspect that he had seen the rocket coming at him.

When, along with the youngsters, Soordas, too, became a regular at the shop, Selvi became angrier than usual. As it is, she was suspicious of me, her husband who, on the rare occasions when he went home to Kerala, came back a couple of weeks later than promised. She was concerned that more and more Malayalees coming into the shop might entice me back to Kerala for good.

‘He doesn’t even buy a biriyani,’ she said, angrily squeezing tamarind into the ennai kathirikai to be served with the biriyani.

‘He’s not a Malayali. He’s a Pattan, Tamil Brahmin. His mother is from Madras.’

‘Then why do you always turn the radio to a Malayalam station as soon as he comes?’

Like most blind people, Soordas was mad about music. ‘Blind people can’t see anything. Pattans can’t see anything beyond their own caste. So we prefer music,’ Soordas explained.

‘But people from your caste never made it in the movies. Yesudas is a Christian, and Brahmanandan and Kamukara are from some other castes . . .’

‘Too much training is detrimental to practice, that’s why. We only perform kacheri, formal concerts, and in the film world we are music directors.’

Soordas laughed loudly as though he had lost his hearing too. I smiled quietly.

‘If you are laughing at my jokes, you must laugh out loud,’ he said. ‘Like when you’re on the phone. Otherwise how will I know?’

‘None of the rooms in the hostel has locks, but no one steals anything from their room,’ Ragesh said, taking off his mundu and doing a dirty dance in front of Soordas. ‘They don’t change the fused bulbs and have set all kinds of booby traps in there for the sighted.’

‘Half the time they are pretending. They can see even things that we can’t see, like a woman far away.’

‘The only thing worse than not being able to see is seeing what’s not there,’ Soordas countered.

‘Slimy, these people are,’ said a young man from Mannarkkad whose name I could never remember. ‘Have you noticed how their wives become pregnant within the first month of their marriage?’

Everyone, including Soordas, roared with laughter.

One evening, the youngsters did not turn up, and fed up with Selvi’s face and the irritating silence, Soordas and I took an autorickshaw into town. The sun had begun to set. There were only a few people at the old fort, and they looked with interest at Soordas who walked with a radio set to a high volume. Seventy years ago, such a sight would have garnered respect, and we would have been followed by a gaggle of children listening to the music. I looked at him and thought about bats who found their way by echolocation.