Ashesh looks at the tubes of paint on the stool next to the easel. His mind prompts his hand to act. His hand picks up a tube of black. He squeezes it on to the palette and dips his brush into the ooze. With the loaded brush he lightly paints in the shadows of the window bars. Now he grows calm. The first marks have been made on the canvas to guide and restrict him. Anything that goes on to the canvas now will have to relate to them, to the way they are deployed, to their colour, their form, their texture. He sighs, satisfied. He cleans his brush carefully, returns it to its place. Tired, he lays his body down on the bed and falls into a deep sleep.

Ashesh stands on the veranda sipping his morning cup of tea, looking at the half-broken body of the building across the street. In an hour or so, the hammer-men will emerge from their cane shelters in the building compound, scrub their bodies under the outdoor tap, drink the tea brewed by their women on improvised three-stone fires and climb the building to hammer it down. The massive walls of the building will shake under the impact but they will not give way immediately. The workers will fall into a rhythm. Lift hammer up, swing it back over the head, bend knees to balance the load on the arms, jerk the body up, bring the hammer forward to crash against the concrete slab. Again the knees will bend, again the hammer will swing back over the head, again it will come down on the slab in an arc. A few bits of masonry will fly up. This through the whole day and the next and the day after and who knows for how long before the building is rubble.

The building was built by an ancestor of the present owner to last seven generations. It would have had at least another fifty years of life had the present owner not sold it to the developer. The owner had only been waiting for Mr Dholakia on the first floor to die. Mr Dholakia, the Gandhi hater, had been Anna's regular sparring partner. Whenever Anna visited Mumbai, the two would fire up at least one evening in political debate.

It's been a fortnight since Dholakia died and the developer's hammer-men moved in. For two weeks, the neighbourhood has found it impossible to work with those remorseless hammer blows. Even with doors and windows tightly shut—and no way to breathe—the noise has been percolating into every home. There's only one way you can deal with it. Accept it. Absorb it into the rhythm of your life.