Back in Okhla Basti, it was seven in the morning. People were spitting, shitting, having sweet, milky tea, getting ready for a new day. Ilyas was smoking his first chillum. ‘Jai, jai, Shiv Shankar, na kaanta lage na kankar,’ he chanted, before taking the mother of all pulls. A sadhu—Tiger Baba—sat next to him, sharing the chillum and coughing his tubercular cough. The morning lot had begun to arrive for their fix. Opposite Nasir bhai’s parlour, the old man who bred racing pigeons pottered about outside his shack, cleaning his teeth with a neem twig. At night he covered the cages with gunnysack in order to keep the pigeons warm. He walked up and down, neem twig in mouth, single-handedly removing the sacks. The pigeons hopped about randomly, setting up a huge racket as soon as they felt the first rays of the sun on their backs. The old man’s wife stood framed in the kitchen window. A pressure cooker blew steam in her face.

By now Dheeraj had joined Ilyas and Tiger Baba. They watched the old man at work with his pigeons. Soon he would open the doors to the cages and the birds would be all over him. ‘Where’s Angad?’ asked Dheeraj, ‘I woke up at six and he wasn’t there.’ ‘Must have gone home at some point,’ said Ilyas. ‘Must have taken a cab. One night in the slum probably proved too much for babyface. Left behind his jacket and cap though.’

The Teacher’s Daughter

On 2 November 1984, Keshav Tripathi woke up with a terrible sinus headache. He lay in bed waiting for the pain to subside. When it didn’t, he called out to his wife and asked for a glass of hot water. She was in the balcony at the back of the flat, putting clothes out to dry. Not getting a reply, Tripathi roared in irritation, ‘Sudha, can you get me a glass of hot water. My head’s hurting again.’ Sudha rushed into the room a couple of minutes later and in a weary voice asked her husband why he was raising a racket this early in the morning. ‘My sinus,’ said Tripathi, pointing to his forehead. ‘It’s acting up again. Can you get me a glass of hot water . . . please?’ Sudha turned around without replying and walked in the direction of the kitchen, muttering something.

Tripathi and Sudha had been married for twenty-five years now but her barbs still retained the power to incense him. He would get so worked up, he would begin muttering to himself. What really got his goat was the lack of clarity: why was she upset with him? What had he done? What was she saying?