While Feroze's mother, Freny, was alive, the house, its residents and its visitors were strictly regimented. Her stern eye controlled not only Burjor, Feroze, Pavaiah and Janamma, but also every object and fixture in the house. How she did it without ever raising her voice was her secret. As a child, Feroze had imagined her standing in the middle of the house, even before she had had her first cup of tea, and looking at everything animate and inanimate with warning eyes. After that, for the rest of the day, nobody dared loiter, shirk work, sit on their fat arses or jabber. The art teacher at school had once asked Feroze's class to draw a picture of their mother. Feroze's mother stood with clenched fists on her hips and big, angry eyes. Her eyes were so big they swallowed up her face. The art teacher had told him in a sweet voice that a mother is the fount of all love and the child who doesn’t see that gets only two out of ten. No matter. Feroze had been used to getting even zeroes for his work because, while the rest of the children painted bananas green or yellow, he would paint his in other colours, including purple.

Burjor is Freny's only brother and a bachelor. He had lived in this home for many years. At the age of thirty-five he declared, ‘I’m old enough now to live on my own.’ It wasn’t that he had been eager to move away. He had desperately wanted to escape the innumerable objets d’art that dotted Freny's home. For, as his girth increased, a battle for space had ensued. Burjor had once confided to Feroze, ‘What do you think she’ll say if I sit on one of her precious objects one day? By mistake?’ Finally he had bought himself a tiny flat in Colaba—furnished with one bed, one table and one chair—and found supreme happiness.

Freny had straddled two worlds. One was her balwadi in Ganesh Nagar, which contained no furniture at all, and the other was her six-bedroom bungalow on Altamount Road where furniture and objects collected by her parents from Europe, China and Africa crowded every available bit of space.