For a month after her murder, Bachchu Kaka had locked himself away in his room. Only Anna was allowed in. When he emerged from this period of intense mourning, he had put behind him the most joyous time of his life.

Sitting under the krishnakamal creeper now, Bachchu Kaka recalls the mornings when he and Shankar would sit together on this bench having a late-morning cup of tea. Before him is the Gandhi mandir that Shankar had so lovingly built. It is a small, shoulder-high cube topped by a chhatri, with four niches in each side containing the Bhagwad Gita, the Quran, the Bible and the Granth Sahib. When Ashesh's friend Feroze had visited Surgaon he had asked in mock anger, ‘And where is our Avestha, hunh? Our Dadabhai Naoroji worked with Gandhi, and no Avestha in Gandhi mandir?’

Where's Gandhi now, Bachchu Kaka thinks. Great men are great in their times, made great by their times. The poet Mardhekar hoped: ‘Let another age pass and another Mahatma be born.’ But such a hope is futile, a sign of weak minds. Gandhi gave the nation a dream that was born of his times. He gave them the weapon of peaceful resistance which he was shrewd enough to see would work with the British at that moment of time. There was only one dream that the nation could have at the time, the overthrow of one single enemy. No man, however great, can give this country of disparities a single dream today, not even a Gandhi reborn. And yet, for forty years after his going, his followers had lived with the idiotic conviction that he had bequeathed us a nation founded on peace, equality and communal tolerance. They did not possess the eyes to see what actually lay underfoot, nor the ears to hear the furious bubbling of hatred, envy and lust for power that lay just below the surface. When the volcano erupted, snapping them out of their rosy dream, all they could say was: ‘This is not the land of Gandhi.’ These people should have taken the other line of Mardhekar's more seriously.

We must see ourselves once more

With our glasses off our noses.

It was too late for some to take off their glasses then. So they kept them on and continued to walk the mouldy rut they had made for themselves. Some dusted the mould off and stood up to confront the newly revealed forces. Some went with the wind. A few true idealists like Shankar were shattered. The last dyke in his mind to spring a hole must have been Siddharth's murder. It was surely not a coincidence that he disappeared within two months of that tragedy. A lump rises to Bachchu Kaka's throat.