Anima draws a file out of the cupboard. She had loved filing Anna's articles, neatly sticking cuttings on A4-size sheets of white paper with the name of the newspaper and date of the edition inscribed at the top. Anna had been an advocate. That is where his money and prestige came from. But what he had poured his soul into were these newspaper articles in English and Marathi. He had an unshakeable faith in the power of words. If society is to change, words are the only instrument to bring it about. Words make people introspect, think rationally. Without that, the diseases that are rotting the vitals of our country—corruption, blind faith, casteism, subjugation of women—will never be cured.

Anna's idealism always upset Bachchu Kaka. If words had that kind of power, we should have been the world's kindest-hearted, most uncorrupt and tolerant people, he said. Enlightened words had flooded our literature for centuries. Even today there was no ebb to the production of words. As for written words, how many of us were even literate, he demanded. In a country that had preserved illiteracy like a prized heirloom, it was sheer stupidity to expect society to change with the power of the written word. Anna listened to Bachchu Kaka's diatribes with a smile and continued to believe.

Anna would be busy fighting cases every waking hour of the day, but somewhere in the corner of his mind an article would be taking shape. He would soak up the sociopolitical air of every new town he visited. He would talk to the local people, ask searching questions. When he returned, his typewriter would go clickety-clack all night like the woodpecker in the bakul tree. As a child, the rhythmic sound of his typewriter was Anima's lullaby. When she was sleepy, she would creep into Anna's room, throw her arms around his neck, then lie down on the floor and fall asleep. When he finished his article, he would carry her to her bed.

Anima flips through the articles in the file. She stops at one. ‘The Ceaseless March of a Corrupt Society’ by Shankar Narayan Joshi. Anima reads.