‘Now you lie down here for some time while I see to the other children.’

Siddharth does not remember anything after that, why he came home early, when he slipped off the table, quietly put on his clothes, how he got home. His memory is one of feeling more secure, curled up on his grandfather’s knee and putting his nose right into his grandfather’s kurta so that he could feel comforted by the familiar, warm, loving smell.

Then everybody took him to his grandfather’s doctor-friend’s hospital where they put medicine in his bum because it was burning very badly.

Now it is not burning so much.

But everyone is still coming home to talk in whispers and grandfather and father are whispering back. Mummy is suddenly crying and suddenly hugging Siddharth and on the phone when she is talking to her friends, she is cursing Otto Sir and saying, ‘Why my son? Were there no other children to pick on?’

One lady has come, with a video cameraman. Grandfather’s tone has become loud, Siddharth has been sent away into the bedroom and he can hear him from there.

‘No I do not wish to say anything and you cannot take pictures of a minor . . . Please ask your cameraman to leave my house . . . We are deeply disturbed by what has happened, we want to be left alone . . . No we will not be filing a police complaint because our child will be harassed in court and he will be doubly wounded . . . Why should you insist on only speaking to me, go and talk to the parents of the fifty other boys he has been doing this to since the last six years, they are all in Bandra and Khar schools, why have those parents not complained, it is not possible that they do not know . . . Why should I mind if the parents beat him up black and blue . . . Do you know that the principals of the schools are saying since we are not filing a police complaint, they cannot stop him from coming to the schools . . . Why don’t you ask the principals of these schools why they have not done anything till now? No, you cannot meet my grandchild, please leave my house right now.’

Siddharth’s summer vacation is over, he has come back to Pune, school has long since begun. His best friends in Pune are asking him all the time what happened to him in Mumbaii, but Siddharth is not telling them because his grandfather and mother have made him promise that he will not say anything.

When he comes to Mumbaii for a weekend for a religious function in the family, his best friend in Mumbaii tells him, ‘My daddy was telling my mummy that they went again and beat up Otto Sir in his house. His daughter was crying like anything and Otto Sir’s wife was also crying because she had many marks on her face and hands.’