‘If you’re looking for Sindhutai, you’ll have to wait. She's just gone for her bath,’ Bhaskar says as he walks out of the gate. Bachchu Kaka wonders at the intimacy of the tone as he watches the doctor's straight, slim back disappear down the dusty road. Frowning slightly, he walks slowly into the compound and settles down on the bench in the krishnakamal arbour. A memory has begun to stir at the back of his mind which embarrasses him.

Shankar and Sindhutai had just shifted into Home. Sindhutai had been deeply upset about entering the new house without performing the griha puja and Shankar going away on work soon after. When Bachchu Kaka dropped in on a routine visit, she had burst into tears. ‘He goes away for days at a time. It's just me and these two little ones. What use are the Warli servants? And the townspeople won’t look our way. If something evil happens who will . . .’

‘What evil do you think is going to happen?’

‘Anything can. We didn’t appease the land before building on it, and we haven’t appeased the spirits of the house before entering it.’

At that very moment, something had crashed in the kitchen with a loud clatter. Startled, Sindhutai had gripped his arm. At first it was the grip of a frightened woman. But as the echoes of the crash faded, his body was responding to it very differently. For a split second, she was female and he male. But before Sindhutai sensed the change, he had freed his arm and was hurrying away, only saying as he left, ‘There's no need to feel scared. We’re all here for you.’

This was the first time Bachchu Kaka had realized that even his body, controlled as it was by his mind, could unexpectedly do something independent of it. Or perhaps the first time he admitted to himself that it did and that it had its own needs. That might have been why he allowed his friendship with the land-reform activist Saguna Rao to go its natural way. Their enormous respect for each other's work, commitment and integrity had prompted them to confine their relationship to friendly meetings whenever they could spare the time from work. Then they were taking time off to travel together. Soon they were eating and sleeping together.

One such night was to be the last time Bachchu Kaka saw Saguna Rao alive. She was murdered the day after. The builder-developer who had been grabbing adivasi land for years had begun to find the court case she had filed against him too bothersome. He had enough clout in that part of Thane district to have her killed and to ensure that the land-grab case against him lingered in police files till it died a natural death. Saguna Rao's murderers were never traced.