in the papers.” She’s nicer than I can ever remember.

After this, we ignore each other, no longer

burdened with having to fulfil the jejune

prophecy of that popular song. Suresh

comes regularly if reluctantly

(apprehensive of whom he’ll run into),

and shares chicken Manchurian and

fried rice. Each day we study the menu.

This is the last stop on my book tour.

Suresh has been seven years “clean,” ever since

his mother, whom he loved more than anyone else

(and whom he also blames for loving him—

“She made me weak”), this short, round-bellied

Mangalorean woman, for whom a picture

of the Madonna is illuminated

in their drawing room, died; she had a congenital

heart murmur not unlike the one I was born with,

which tired her at times and made her look absent;

she was too old to operate on. This—her life’s soft

companion—didn’t kill her; one day

her synthetic negligee caught fire

as she was heating milk on the stove. Suresh,

who was still flirting with smack, spending more time

at home than at work, overheard her screams

and saw her from the ventilator windows

above the doors to the other room, which

were locked. Since then, he’s stopped “taking,” and

they commemorate her death once a year, the father,

the son, and the still single sister, whom he

still resents but accepts now, philosophically;

though in what way the sight of a mother burning

should be a reprimand to an old habit,

I don’t know. Anyway, he has not the means

to compose her a more fit epitaph than this,

this second attempt to return, like a prodigal

son, to “normal life,” for her sake

and his, though “normal life,” rediscovered,

is an empty promise filled with cars and people

and noises that frighten him slightly. He tells me

how fourteen years of semi-oblivion and a sort

of absence have left him maladjusted

and inept and unsure of himself. The book tour

goes on even after it’s supposed to be over; reporters

who haven’t read my book come and ask me questions.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Elsewhere in the city,

the Shiv Sena is burning Valentine cards.

Here, in the Gymkhana, young couples hold hands

and look wide-eyed and unnaturally devout and composed.

Evening brings the dark to the maidan, and, with it,

mosquitoes. This morning, we mentioned Sujata

Birla, rhetorically. “Hey, d’you remember

Sujata?” “Yeah,” in a tone of disbelief,

“she died in a plane crash, yaar.” We already

know this, how she married after college, was divorced,

then married again—a happy flowering; on that plane

were her mother and her father, Ashok Birla. The husband

wasn’t with them that day. I pick up my daughter

and we head for Pipewalla Building in a taxi,

my wife carrying the feeding beaker and the packet

with the sari she bought from Cottage Industries

earlier today. For her, this city