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.

Tripathi and Jyoti barely made it in time for her examination. Tripathi walked down the corridor towards the staffroom. The plaster had come off in various places giving the place the look of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, half the pieces having fallen off at some point. Most of the furniture in the classrooms was broken. Disgruntled men had been letting off steam in these high-ceilinged rooms for decades. The windowpanes were all shattered; jagged pieces of glass remained stuck in the frames like stubborn natives broken and dispossessed by foreign invaders, yet refusing to leave.