She doesn’t ask who ‘they’ are. She wants to escape as fast as she can. She gropes in her handbag, pulls out a couple of coins, pushes them into the younger child's hand and says, ‘Tell them he sang.’

The older child says, ‘They are watching.’

Sharada hurries away. Behind her the younger child howls again. She keeps walking. Her mind is in turmoil. Why did she give him money? She should have bought him pao. The beating might have hurt less on a full stomach. Soon she hears two voices, raised in song—one strong, the other tearful.

Tumhare hain tumse daya maangate hain

Tere laadlon ki dua maangate hain

(We are your own, we beg you, have pity

We pray for blessings for your loved ones)

The song takes Sharada back some thirty years to her aunt's house in Pune. It was the summer vacation. Aunts and cousins were playing antakshari on the terrace, under a bright starlit sky. The last letter from the previous song was ‘t’. Shalinitai began to sing, ‘Tumhare hain tumse . . .’ The refrain was sung, the first stanza was sung. According to rules, she might have stopped then. But Tai continued. Sharada's eyes streamed with tears. The song rose to a final crescendo. Tai sang the last two lines.

Bacha ho jo roti ka tukada dila do

Jo utara ho tan se woh kapada dila do

(Give us leftover food

Give us discarded clothes)

Sharada had burst into uncontrollable sobs. Her aunt slapped her back lightly and said, ‘Really, Leela's daughter is too sensitive.’ Sharada did not understand what the English word ‘sensitive’ meant. But she gathered it was not a good thing to be and quickly rubbed her eyes dry.

Sharada climbs up the ramshackle stairs to Pandit Keshavrao Kinikar's rooms. There is an iron ball in her stomach. Pandit Kinikar lives in a two-room unit of the Umrao Chawl in a lane behind Kohinoor Mill No. 2. The door is open. Guruji stands at the window. He remains standing with his back to her even after she has entered. The expanse of the mill land spreads before him. Mill workers once laboured here in three shifts, spinning and weaving twenty-four hours of the day. The mill is now razed, the teeming workers rendered jobless. Guruji has seen those days from this window. Now he sees these. His seventyyear-old back—straight as a toddy palm—is rigid, as though prepared to receive a sudden blow.