CROWDS MILL ON the pavements. They brush past you, knock into you, jolt you, poke their umbrellas into your eyes, prod you in the ribs; your hair gets caught in their umbrellas. They walk in family groups, the grandmother carrying the baby in her arms, the mother following behind, the husband leading the elder child by the hand. They are bodies, just bodies, brushing past impersonally. Sometimes faces, the eyes directed only at what they want to see. Among them mingle the foreigners in their kurtas and swinging skirts importuned by the sellers of coloured seed chains and spice packets. The woman who sells betel on the pavement outside the Baptist Church has had a new baby this year. The child plays beside her, unaffected by the street full of people.

Eyes survey you coolly from the seat of a car. Sitting there, leaning against the leather seats, those people can watch you as they drive past, and in that split second see the lives of strangers, open and revealed before them. Beggars stand beside the windows of the cars for alms. The back seats are usually stacked with boxes and bags. The parking girls in their yellow uniforms and black belts stand beside the vehicles with their notebooks and pencils. In a corner of the street an old man, hunched after years of bending over bits of leather, sits with his legs drawn up, painstakingly putting white stitches on a pair of old leather shoes. It is old leather, but good. How absorbed the old man is, his white head, his white beard and the white stitches creating their own pattern on the grey pavement, the sunlight slanting on the man’s worn-out clothes. How precise each stitch is, how neatly placed on the leather. People no longer throw away their old shoes but have them mended, re-soled, or stitched together.

I forget to stop and ask him to mend my shoes. The soles are thin, worn out, the stitches have come undone near the toes. I have worn them for a long time, so long that I feel my feet are part of the road, as I walk and walk.

The shop windows filled with sarees, lengths of dress material, imported goods—crystalware, cut-glass, stainless steel and electrical goods—tantalize window-shoppers. They can only afford to stand and gaze longingly at the things displayed, overcome by a powerful urge to possess at least a few of them. But what can they do if their pockets are empty—only grab at fistfuls of wind. Outside one of the big shops stands a larger-than-life Santa Claus. The cloth that covers his body is thick, red and warm. He is shod in strong, heavy leather boots. Is it real leather? I don’t stop long enough to see. The giant Santa Claus holds a brown paper parcel in his hands. I turn to my daughter.

‘Shall I take the gift?’