more than a decade ago with other Pelican books to India.

Looking into it when I was twelve or thirteen,

I remember the bemusement and distaste

I felt, more than if I’d come upon an obscenity,

on reading the lines “I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…”

and experiencing a great, if temporary, disillusionment,

as if some taboo had been breached. Thus, my childhood.

Never quite happy at school, never

doing as well as expected, but not

too badly either, frequently visiting

my father’s office at Nariman Point, where the blinds

kept the sun out of his room. Nariman Point

didn’t exist when I was very small, except as a strip

of land darkly petering out from Marine Drive

into the sea. The sea—the prisoner and attendant

god of this city, one of the points where its secular

locutions, its advertisement hoardings, its hotels,

are linked to the horizon; emptiness. Each year

we’d watch as the road congealed with people and cars,

and Ganesh was carried out to sea, the giant god

sinking, his trunk tranquil, with the Queen’s Necklace

behind him, and the Cream Centre; Malabar Hill

and Walkeshwar on one side as he drowned.

The promise that he’d return next year was made good

in the same emphatic way. These days, the traffic

from Haji Ali to Peddar Road to Marine Drive to Cuffe

Parade is so bad, with massed, uncertain files

of slowly moving cars, that it seems the Ganesh festival

is perpetually in progress. Sometimes it takes an hour

to get from Haji Ali to Nariman Point. When I was

a child, it took fifteen or twenty minutes from home

in Malabar Hill, past Churchgate, to school, which began

at half past eight sharp. There were four branches: infant,

junior, middle, senior. The day began with

“Almighty Father, who art in heaven” and hymns

like “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

And though things were largely beautiful and bright

for us, the pupils, perhaps they weren’t for the teachers,

who couldn’t be too well paid. As for us, we were princelings

or delinquents; however poor our report cards, whatever

the black marks against our names, the blot on the pages

of our exercise books, our almighty fathers, in the end,

would save us. I had my own school diary

with the school logo on the cover; its last pages

came to be thick with the teachers’ messages in the red

ink of their ballpoint pens. These admonitions

I needed to get initialled in my mother’s impatient hand.

Some of the teachers vacillated between resentment

and a cold, tranquil estimate of our fathers’ wealth.

Some of the very teachers who pulled us up in class

gave us private tuition for extra money.

They seemed transformed, smaller, entering our homes,

as we must have been transformed in their eyes

when they discovered our houses firsthand. A few