Left to herself, Gehna knew she would never have thought of doing that. She felt a surge of affection for her mother. It lasted about five seconds, which was the time it took for Nina Rai to lean back and ask Druhi to massage her feet.

‘I’ll do it,’ Gehna offered. She hated it when her mom asked the staff to do shit like that.

‘That’s nice of you, darling, but your hands aren’t strong enough. It’s okay. Druhi knows just how I like it done.’

Druhi patted the air with her hand in Gehna’s direction, a sign universally translatable as chill out, dude. But she couldn’t. She watched as Druhi sat on the floor and gently lifted Nina Rai’s left foot into her own lap. For Gehna, witnessing that simple act opened up a world of sadness inside her. It wasn’t right, just like it wasn’t right that people didn’t have enough to eat, or were forced to sleep on the side of roads. It wasn’t right when kids were set to work begging, or old people were forgotten, or that some people owned four cars while others couldn’t afford slippers to put on their children’s tiny feet.

Gehna got up to go hide in her room before her mom saw the tears.

‘Where are you going? I thought you wanted to talk about your birthday party,’ Nina Rai called out behind her.

She didn’t want a birthday party any more. What she wanted was for the world she lived in, the one she was going to introduce her baby to, to be fair. There would be no diseases, or at least none that couldn’t be cured. There would be no violence against women or cruelty towards animals. People would not hate other people because they looked different, or worshipped a different god, or fucked differently. Everyone would have enough to eat.

But until that happened, Gehna was stuck with her helplessness. She thought that if she didn’t do something immediately, she might end up being crushed under the weight of all that she felt. So she went to Nina Rai’s storage closet and got out the biggest suitcase she could find, a blue canvas American Tourister, and wheeled it up to her room. In it, she first threw her helplessness and anger, and then all her clothes. Every single top she’d bought just because it happened to be on sale, every single pair of jeans that had fit so well in the trial room but which she had hated as soon as it was back home. How had she let her cupboards fill up with so much stuff? There were children out there on the streets who wore the same pair of shorts, unwashed, until they literally rotted off their bodies. Gehna put it all in the suitcase. All the four-hundred-and-fifty thread count bedsheets. All the fluffy towel sets for bathing, for the face and the hands.

It wasn’t enough.

In the kitchen, Gehna found bread, eggs, milk, sugar, brown rice, frozen cuts of mutton, a bag of potatoes, tins of sweet corn and a collection of Duty Free chocolates. She gathered all the food, ignoring the cook’s protests, and packed it into the suitcase. By then, the bag was so overloaded that, even after she tried to squish the top with her butt, the zipper only went halfway. It didn’t matter. Down Gehna went in the elevator with her American Tourister, dropping from the skies on to the streets of Bandra like a one-person U.N. relief operation.