They kept the girl. The children took to scrubbing, cleaning, washing and feeding their new mothers with new devotion. The cows could have truly become mothers, although most of them were abandoned on the street as soon as they stopped lactating. They demanded nothing from the children, and didn’t ask them to play, or draw, or read, or write, or learn. One infant had clung to a cow’s udders. The real mother was emaciated and transferred her duties to the cow-mother. The cow’s udders were dry and shrivelled as if all humanity had drunk off it. She merely kicked the baby away.

~

‘Do you have the plague?’ the cleaner asked.

‘No,’ the worker responded.

‘Why are you coughing?’

‘Cotton fever.’

‘Are you a mill worker?’

‘I was. I broke a lightbulb.’

‘Vandalism! Are you a felon then?’

‘We complained that there were mice and we couldn’t see them. When the lights were installed the supervisor said, “Work for fourteen hours now, not twelve.” Then some of us broke the lightbulbs.’

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Didn’t you think about your family, kicking the food off your children’s plate like that?’ the cleaner responded.

‘Don’t worry about that. My daughter is already dead.’

The strikers had learned three lessons. Public enemy number one was the mill owners. Public enemy number two was the Bombay Improvement Trust. Public enemy number three was the Bombay Municipal Corporation. The mill owners kept the wages low, the hours long and the tenements ghastly. The Bombay Improvement Trust demolished these tenements, raised the rents for the new ones and reclaimed land that was in turn usurped by the real-estate companies. The Bombay Municipal Corporation decided the rules and allowed the system to run like a whistle. The plague shocked the system. The result: more segregation, more demolitions, more families in sordid huts on the outskirts of the city—some not even that, they lived on the pavements. Enemy number one. Enemy number two. Enemy number three. Who are our three enemies? He was told they are all the same men and they met regularly on the topmost floor of the red Bombay Municipal Corporation building in Wellington Circle to develop their blood-sucking schemes.

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