Night after night into July to the accompaniment of the drumroll of thunder and the beating of the rain, I sat there nodding in silence as you played variations on this theme, starting always from the rogue cell of slumdom and ending always in the scapegoating of Islam. I am your mother. Whatever you hand out, I take. I was simply grateful that at least you were talking to me. I no longer expected any classified personal information. Often I admit my brain would zone out, confident I could deliver an appropriate grunt if you ever addressed me directly. But then late into the month, you surprised me; you snuck in something almost personal, as if to catch me off guard, like some of my teachers would do when I was still in school to see if we were awake, if we were paying attention. As if in passing, as a sidebar, you let drop that Geeta had come to Dharavi that day, on a VIP tour.

“Geeta? How did she look?”—the first question that popped into my head, then right out of my mouth.

“Filmi. Like a movie star. She looked straight at me, but didn’t recognize me.”

I was stunned that you had volunteered this morsel—eye contact between you and Geeta, such an intimate detail. I had no idea when this window of opportunity would slam shut on me; I felt intense pressure to find out as much as possible while you were still ready to talk. “She was leading a delegation from the orphanage ministry or whatever,” you said in response to my next question. “They’re giving full scholarships to fifty slum girls under ten to come to Delhi to be educated. Their families will also get a lot of money. She was there to pick out the girls. She gave a little speech and promised to be like a mother to them.”

“I hope you talked to someone high up,” I said. “She would be a terrible mother.”

But by then the well had dried up, you no longer were talking. You lowered your head. I was afraid you might start to cry. I understood what you were feeling. Quite apart from your own personal loss—a mother is a terrible thing to lose, even a terrible mother, and yes, let’s face it, for better or worse, Geeta was also a mother to you. What would have happened had you gone up to the slum bosses with your pals trailing behind you, Sita, Samir, the whole gang, to warn against letting the girls go off with such a travesty of a mother as Geeta? They would invariably have inquired how you knew her, and at that point you would have been obliged to tell them that she had been married to your mother, that she had been your mother’s wife. It was an impossible situation. They would not have believed you, they would not have understood it, such things do not happen in the world, they would have thought you were joking, they would have thought you were mocking them, they would have thought you were mad.