After her chores, she liked to sit on the edge of the property facing the orchards to watch the sun go down, while the others offered evening prayers from the holy book.

Rahat often joined her as he rolled up a beedi to smoke and watched the sunset. He empathized with Rajjo, perhaps because she was brought in half dead, with a busted ear and she spoke very little. Yesterday he had boasted about his hero Mehtaab Sarkari, a revered Godman who ran the entire place. It was the first of him Rajjo had heard and she was sure she was going to hear much more of him. She was surprised to learn from Rahat’s not so subtle insinuations that Mehtaab had close links with important leaders of the extremist Sikh outfits that had the state terrorized since the mid-eighties. Apparently, Mehtaab had flourished through this period of turmoil and now he was the policy man in the ashram.

Rajjo wondered if Rahat knew the amount of trouble he could get into if he was caught saying all this to other people. Despite herself she advised him sharply, ‘You should watch your words, be careful with them.’ Rajjo cut short his accounts of Mehtaab and his association with the Khalsa movement.

Rahat shrugged.

‘I think it’s good, what they are doing, the extremists. I want to be with them…fighting for our rights and religion.’

‘Then why are you not with them? Fighting? What are you doing here?’

‘I am a bastard. I am scared, I am lazy, I am a cunt…one day I want to fight with them and the other days I just want to tell them to go to hell.’

And then he went back to smoking his joint.

Rajjo looked at the strange boy. He had complete clarity of his own character that was rare to find. But she knew the chinks in this God haven were beginning to show.

The next morning, in the kitchen, Rajjo shoved the conversations with Rahat aside as she worked the rolling pin, flattening the little balls of dough before they were put on a black pan to bake. The lady passing her the round balls of dough spoke to Rajjo in a friendly voice, ‘Heard there is a visitor from a newspaper. Kuljeet will be bringing the visitor in here…’

Rajjo worked on the rolling pin non-stop, flattening the dough balls to a perfectly round shape and placing them on the hot griddle. Sweat rose and engulfed her. She could feel it running over her body as the heat from the hot griddle seeped into her clothes and pores. There was a slight flutter in the kitchen as the visitor finally arrived with Kuljeet, wearing pants and holding a notepad. He seemed to be some sort of journalist. Kuljeet was giving him a tour as he stopped by to peep in the kitchen. Kuljeet informed him how food was cooked for hundreds here to feed the villagers and other devotees.