“It’s okay, Maya,” I sought to comfort you. “I understand. It’s not your fault, whatever happens to those girls.”

At the same time, though, I privately resolved to go on the slum tour as soon as possible. If Geeta your cold-hearted absentee parent could gaze upon you on planet slum where you passed your days, I certainly had earned the right to see you there too, I who had stuck it out.

I decided not to let you know when I would be coming. I wanted to spare you the state of living dread, or the obligation in such a traditional society to drop whatever you were doing and come forward to greet me, your honored mother. In any event, there were over a million people living in Dharavi. Chances were very small that we would run into each other. I could come and go, and you would never even know I had passed through, but anything I might learn would give me some insight into where your head was at now, and I could help you—helping you was my reason for staying alive. I was doing it for you, Maya, but it would not be an invasion of your privacy, like opening your mail or reading your journal. I had been invited, publicly and in your presence, fair and square, and now I was accepting the invitation as discreetly as I could to spare you. I would leave no footprint.

But who leaves a footprint on this earth anyway, and especially in a slum where life is so cheap, and most especially in a slum during the monsoons when every sign is washed away and erased? Trailing through the thickets of narrow congested lanes behind the backpackers, tuning in and out to the upbeat patter of our guide Sunil/Sunny, the first thought that hit me as we waded up to our knees in brown sludgy fluid floating with dead vermin and turds with personality, decomposing flesh and rotting garbage, was, did the Hindu princess Geeta really trek through this? The second thought was, maybe you had made up the story of Geeta’s visit in order to finally get me up off my tukhes to go on this damn tour—a sweet thought only in that, contrary to every indication, its implication was that you might actually have wanted me to come, you were not ashamed of me after all as I had so foolishly imagined—but it was also a thought that I quickly scratched as fantasy since I knew that the memory of losing Geeta was still too fresh and painful for you to evoke, even for my sake.