After he shifted to Colaba, Burjor's visits to the Altamount Road house decreased gradually till soon they were reduced to three visits a year—on Jamshedi Navroze and on his sister's and nephew's birthdays. He was resigned on those three days to taking on the chin Freny's battery of observations about his irresponsible obesity, while he polished off her dhanshak and kebabs. When he wasn’t eating, he’d remain standing in fear of her objets d’art. Then Freny would say in cold anger, ‘Why are you standing there like the Khada Parsi, Baji?’ So Burjor would inch sideways like a wary crab between the carved teak stools topped by china, porcelain and ceramic figurines towards Feroze's studio where he could relax. On one such day, Burjor had thrown himself into a chair where Feroze had just set down his palette. When Feroze cried out a warning, Burjor had sprung up to reveal a backside that was vividly coloured like a baboon's. With no possibility of his getting into a pair of Feroze's trousers, he had waited till dark to go home. ‘Body painting's in fashion, no, dikra? Good.’ Then he had added as an afterthought, ‘Girls don’t follow me for my mug but for my seductive backside, maybe, hunh?’

After Freny died, her home, brought up under strict rules of discipline, became suddenly orphaned and went wild. Pavaiah, who had been bound to her rules for decades, felt gloriously free and wanted to be even freer. While she was alive, Freny hadn’t given him and his scarecrow wife, Janamma, even a second's respite. At every moment of the day, her objects were to be free of dust. Even the smallest speck was not acceptable. But she had bequeathed to them in her will a pension so grand that even their most hallucinatory dreams could not have encompassed such a sum. It was enough and more to keep them in luxury back home in the village and Pavaiah was dying to be gone.

Janamma had brought up Feroze. She had been his ayah in childhood and a foster mother later, softening the harshness of his biological mother's discipline. It was a wrench for her to leave him. But Pavaiah stood in the garden, pawing the ground, afraid they’d miss the train if his wife took much longer over her tearful farewell. Finally he unlocked Janamma's skinny arms from around Feroze's neck, practically dragged her to the waiting taxi and stuffed her in. After they left, Feroze continued to hear them moving around the house all night. The next morning he had locked up the house and left for Matheran.