Jijabhau had never done housework before. He was acutely nervous when he rang Feroze's doorbell. Between ringing and the door being opened he had thought a dozen times of disappearing. Such a big house. How would he manage? But the minute Feroze opened the door and said, ‘Come, Jijabhau, come’, he felt he had come home. Even after Jijabhau arrived, Feroze continued to get his food from Goolmai in Tardeo. But soon Heerabai came. She swept, cleaned, washed and cooked. Jijabhau had proved naive in his own transactions, but was very particular with Feroze's.

Feroze's life has again acquired form. Among Hoshi Uncle's books in Matheran he had found an excellent, abridged translation of the Mahabharata. The night he finished reading it, he saw Krishna in a completely new way. The following morning he had made a rough sketch of this Krishna. He was going to be the central figure in a large painting, crowded with detail. Feroze was brimming with ideas by the time he got back to Mumbai.

He is working feverishly, making cartoons of different sections of the painting. It's going to be a large one. During the day Jijabhau watches him from a distance. In the evenings, he retires to his room to sing bhajans with his Warkari friends.

7

Anima is angry with Ashesh. It's become a habit now—using work as an excuse to avoid Surgaon. After Anna went away, they had decided they would take turns on Saturdays. He kept to the schedule for a while, though not without a fuss. But after she was sacked from the school, he took to shoving the entire responsibility on to her. Anima is ‘free’ now. She has no ‘work’. He's the one who has all the work.

She could have read Amitav Ghosh today after running through her chores. She’d started on the fifth essay last night, but snapped the book shut after the first paragraph. This wasn’t the best bedtime reading for her. This was Ghosh coming to terms with the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi. Why wake up her ghosts reading an essay that had helped him settle his?

Anima had put the book aside but hadn’t been able to put aside the turmoil that even those first few lines had created in her. It had been thirty years since that event and the butchers who had turned thousands of women into widows overnight were still free men. No justice yet for the fatherless children who must now be her students’ age. Had they been able to regain their faith in this country and its people?