The doorbell rang. Sharada opened the door. It was Shekhar's driver, Kripashankar. Father of four children, he lived in the shanty colony abutting the railway line. ‘Did you hear the crows?’ he asked excitedly. Sharada nodded. Shantanu's arms were still wound tightly around her neck. Kripashankar laughed. ‘What? You were scared? It was Nakhatesahib's grandson,’ he said to Shekhar who had come up behind her. ‘The boy has a gun. Not real bullets. Bird killer. Doesn’t make a sound. Just “thuk”. Clever fellow. He told the watchman to put grain under the rain tree and killed the crows as they flew down to eat it. He killed many. He can now be his grandfather's bodyguard. For free.’

Later, when Sharada was making Shekhar's tea, a line had flashed into her head, complete with melody and beat.

I have seen black Time, my friend, I have seen black Time today

The melody was in Shuddh Sarang, sixteen beats, medium tempo.

4

To: Ashesh Joshi, Anima Joshi, Feroze Banatwala, Shekhar Sakhardande, Atul–Anju Dodiya, Sudhir–Shanta Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Sakina Mehta, Sara Epstein, Maria Carlotti, Shankar Hariharan

Subject: Sema Al-Radi

I’ve just read on the net that our friend Sema is fighting leukaemia in Beirut. It's been two years since she mailed any of us. We were worried about her during the American assault, wondering what a quiet, peaceful artist like her does in times of such violence. I know now. There's a link with the news story about her leukaemia to an essay she wrote two years ago. You can see the link below later, but here's a short extract of the essay. Some of us talk a lot about the violence that's going on here, and how our work should reflect it. But what is our violence against what's happened in Afghanistan and Iraq?

I’m a potter, sculptor, painter. In my work I have tried to touch upon the lives of people, their relationships with each other, with nature. But doing my work has become increasingly difficult during the events my country has passed through in the last twelve years. To sing of dark times in dark times, as Brecht proposed, is not as easy as it sounds. At the moment I am in Pakistan, preparing for my show. A journalist here asked me, ‘Why is it that your paintings don’t have anything to say about the thousands of children who have died in Iraq, about the destruction of centuries of cultural treasures that filled the museum that was bombed, about the sanctions that were inflicted on Iraq for twelve years before that?’

My answer to his question was this: ‘I was in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. I started writing a diary. I made notes about how we were living our daily lives with bombs exploding over our heads. We were living as best we could, working as much and as well as we could, keeping our heads down.