‘Be careful,’ he pleads, looking at me, ‘be careful of your bag.’

My bag. Does he know how much my purse contains? Its contents are meagre. It could just as well belong to any of the poor people who stand around me. Only I don’t tuck my purse into my blouse like some of them, or, like the old village women, tie the money into a knot at the edge of my saree pota. If I take out the paper notes they might just drift away, vanish like scraps of soiled paper on the pavement. Does my whole life, my whole career amount to just this minuscule amount? Do I have to sweat year after year to buy just two cut-pieces of cloth and join them together to lend an air of respectability to my occupation? What if I leave my bag behind? I have discarded many things that do not matter any more. Shoes that have to be repaired, for instance. I never collect them from the cobbler’s. I suppose I have walked long enough in them. They have served their purpose.

Cut-pieces …. And second-hand clothes … the shops by the station are full of second hand clothes—soiled, faded, frayed. Who buys them? There are people who do. I am fascinated by the thought of the bodies, the lives they must have once wrapped. I sometimes stop and look hard to see if I can find all those garments that have been stolen from me through the years. I have often been betrayed by those whom I have shown kindness to. This does not make me bitter; I have accepted it. They were poorer than myself.

I remember the wild-looking man with his light grey eyes on fire, a flame of madness flickering in them, who sits in one of the shops near the station, sewing away at his machine, converting old silk sarees with their dull gold thread into pants, skirts, salwar kameezes. Among the sarees heaped on the floor and hanging on a rope stretched across the front entrance I had once spotted a faded turquoise-blue Kashmir silk with block printed designs—stylized figures of women, peacocks, flowers. It was genuine silk, the kind, one has heard, that will pass through a ring.

‘Where did you get that Kashmir saree from?’ I had asked. The saree was quite obviously old, tatty.

‘I went to Kashmir. I brought it from Kashmir.’

‘It’s not new,’ I said.

‘Yes, new.’ His face shone with a crazy light, all on fire.

The old silks swung like curtains before his face. The shop looked ghostly, the machine went on whirring. He kept hoping that I would be taken in by his deception which was so innocently transparent.

‘Tell me the truth. It’s old silk. I like old things.’

‘New,’ he insisted.