Ashesh walks round August Kranti Maidan to get to the main road, then turns left and walks briskly towards the bus stop. The sweat, dripping out of his hair on to his neck, trickles down under his shirt collar, tickling his back. Ashesh resists the impulse to wipe it. You start wiping sweat, you can’t stop because there's more coming. Everybody has their own technique for dealing with summer heat. Haresh had perfected his, while still at school. He would wear two shirts one over the other when he left home in the morning. When the heat became absolutely unbearable, he would peel the top one off. ‘Try it,’ he would say. ‘It's like switching on the air conditioner.’ He would do the same at night. Cover himself with a thick quilt then kick it off. It was all cool inside. ‘It's the same theory that keeps water in a clay pot cool.’ Not true. But who was going to argue with him?

Waiting at the bus stop, Ashesh fixes his eyes on the sky for somewhere to look. Not a speck of rain cloud. The sky is like a vast tin cauldron inverted overhead while the world below bubbles like a stewpot on the boil. Human bodies, suffocating in its steam, stare open-mouthed at the cruel sky, like a many-headed chatak bird, breathless for rain.

The old man standing beside Ashesh under a large umbrella says aloud, ‘In the old days pre-monsoon showers would have fallen by now.’ Ashesh glances at him. All shrivelled up, he looks particularly lonely under his large umbrella. If you blew on him, he would waft away. The old man looks Ashesh up and down through the thick lenses of his glasses. ‘Are you Marathi or something else?’ There's suspicion in his voice.

Ashesh mumbles, ‘Marathi,’ but warily.

‘That's lucky. Mumbai's no longer ours. Everything has changed.’ The old man sighs dramatically. He is lonely in many ways. The time is not his, and no longer is the place.

‘Brahmin?’ the old man asks, once again looking Ashesh up and down. Ashesh is confused. Can he answer this grandfather's question with Anna's ‘if we want to break the caste system, we must first forget our caste’? Haridas would have said (who knows whether truthfully or not), ‘My mother was from the barber caste, my father was born a Mahar but converted to Christianity.’ If Anima had been in Ashesh's place she would have deftly sidestepped the question altogether and asked the old man a series of solicitous questions about where he lived and which bus he wanted to catch. But Ashesh, being Ashesh, is tongue-tied and pretends he has not heard. As proof, he fixes his eyes in the far distance.

A little time passes. Then the old man taps him on the shoulder. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Close by.’

‘Meaning exactly . . . ?’

‘Behind Mani Bhavan.’