Jyoti joined the BA course following her parents’ wishes. Her heart wasn’t in it though. Her father had been teaching the same English course for the last thirty years but was as clueless as her about Byron, Shelley and Keats. Still, they both soldiered on.

Today was the day of the re-examination. When Jyoti sat for her prose paper earlier in the year, there had been complaints of irregularities. A section of the students insisted that the paper had been leaked before the examination actually took place. They organized a protest outside the vice chancellor’s office and chanted slogans. The VC, wanting to avoid an unpleasant scene, ordered a fresh examination scheduled for the next term.

Tripathi and his daughter set out from home at the stroke of eight. She wore a blue salwar kameez, her long thick hair was held in place by two shiny black pins. She sat sideways on her father’s scooter, her cracked heels planted firmly on the aluminium footrest.

When Jyoti was five years old, she used to stand in front, her tiny palms gripping the handle. As she grew older and taller, she began obstructing her father’s line of sight. He would slide back a bit, thus freeing a tiny amount of space on which Jyoti would perch precariously. Then, one day, the front of the scooter became too cramped to contain both father and daughter. Jyoti found herself banished to the middle of the vehicle. Right through middle school she sat in that position, a tender slice of ham sandwiched between two crusty slices of bread.

By the time she entered 12th standard, the LML Vespa could only fit two. If the family was calling on friends, Tripathi would put wife and daughter in a cycle rickshaw and follow on his scooter.

Tripathi was a short, squat man. He liked wearing dull colours. His preferred fabric was terry cotton because it was easy to wash and required no ironing. He liked wearing his shirts outside his trousers. He found shoes constricting, generally preferring to move about in Sandtek flip-flops.

During the years Jyoti sat between her parents on the Vespa, Tripathi noticed something unusual. Jyoti seemed to add inches to her height almost everyday.

At the beginning of one year, he felt her nose bumping halfway up his spine. By the end of that year, the nose had reached up to his shoulders, another few months and she was literally breathing down his neck. By the time she finished school she had shot past his scratched and faded yellow helmet—a good head taller than him. Nowadays, on certain winter evenings, coming back with her father on the scooter after doing some shopping, Jyoti would feel the cold wind on her face and wish for the days of her childhood to return. Back then, she was the warmest, happiest child on any road, anywhere in the world. Her wobbly back propped up by her mother’s comfortable arm, her face squashed sideways on her father’s back, her hands clasped around his substantial paunch, Jyoti would feel so safe and contented that she would sometimes even fall asleep. She would open her eyes ever so slightly at a noisy traffic intersection, then slip back into her reverie.