‘Search the sky carefully and you will find the stars hiding there,’ Gorai said.

‘But where, Babu, I can’t see any, Uhunuhhn,’ his son wailed impatiently.

‘Look, there is one. Can you see that purple moving thing? Pay attention to my finger. See where it is, that is a happy star, like you, and you can call it what you wish.’

‘I can call it anything I want Babu? It is happy? Let me think… I’ll call it Hola-bola. Can I call it Hola-Bola? Can I? Ho-la-bo-la-ho-la-bo-la-ho-la…’ Getting down from his father’s lap, Kanti ran around his parents in circles, shouting his rhyming syllables, oblivious to the crowds and sounds around them.

Gorai was not listening to him. He was giving his wife Neetu blank glances.

‘Come on, let us get a photograph done. Over there, on that bench, right in front of the whole tamaasha,’ he spoke up.

Neetu wiped her eyes preemptively for the tears that did not follow.

‘I don’t want any photograph taken. And why do you make a madman of your own son? What do you think others will say about him when he tells them that his babu was showing him purple stars in the daytime clear blue sky?’

‘He has a lifetime to see things for what they are, and anyway what’s the harm…’ Gorai began a meek protest, but before he could finish, Neetu snapped at Kanti, ‘Come here, you rascal, you monster, you troublesome mischief-maker, come here, and I’ll show you stars!’

‘Ho-la-bo…’ Kanti paid no heed to his mother. Slightly expanding the circumference of his revolutions so that he was out of easy reach, he continued chanting, ‘-la-ho-la-bo.’

‘Kanti, that star is a kite in the sky, it is not a star. You see stars at night, not in the daytime, listen, Kantii,’ Gorai began to puncture his son’s fantasy, who, upon hearing this, crept between the dhoti-clad legs of his father in stunned silence.

‘Why? Tell me why? Give me one good reason, you son-of-your-mother… Why can’t we move to Dilli? Times are changing, this is 1980. Everyone moves away for a better life these days. Do you want me to die here? This baby will die, you wait and see, and I will die because of it,’ Neetu gave a vent to her frustrations as she touched her stretched and growing belly with one hand.

Gorai pretended to pull Kanti out from between his legs and straighten the dye-crinkled fabric.

‘You took the transistor, the bicycle, the clothes from them in return for marrying me. I may not be good-looking but I gave you a son. I may give you yet another son. I tried stitching, didn’t I? I made some money from that. I even saved some. I cooked you a meal whenever you were hungry. I washed your clothes. I’ve never asked for anything, not one thing have I asked for!’

‘Bai, how you talk! As if I beat you and starve you…’

‘There are worse punishments than beating and starving that a husband can mete out to his wife…’

‘Babu, will Bai give birth to another son as she says? Can we call it hola-bola instead of the star-kite?’ Kanti’s eyes were beginning to light up again, and he tried to touch his mother’s pregnant lump.

‘Shut-up! You crazy child,’ Neetu pushed his hand away. The fingers were sticky with the saliva of the sweets he had just eaten; she was wearing her best sari, there was not one mark or tear in it.

‘Bai do you think I don’t want to go to Dilli? Do you think I sit on my ass all day and relax? You know that I don’t like being a guard-man. It is an awful job. I don’t mind lifting and carrying, I have done that for years in the fields where I can at least see the results grow in the golden wheat fields and the round chapattis,’ here for a moment the hungry Gorai was distracted, ‘no, I don’t mind hard work, but I hate doing things that a good Hanuman-Bhakt should not do, should not even know… Those other guards get their extra cash by letting people sneak in at night to do illegal things on the premises, they are the ones who take their families to Dilli, and I would rather die before such cheating, deception, and… and… im-im-im-im-immorality.’

Gorai had stammered again today after a long time. He was tired and hungry, hassled by Neetu’s increasing insistence upon moving to Delhi.

‘The way you spin stories, no wonder those folks of mine washed their hands off me by marrying me to you; you must have sung your sorry tale to them too. The pious Hanuman-worshipper who gave up bachelorhood, the fiery patriot who failed to join the army!’

‘Enough!’ Gorai growled.

Kanti cowered against a wall, then ran over to a rehdi-cart displaying dried hard-boiled sweets that came in various shapes. His head reached the top of the large cycle-style wheels, and he peered above that level to savor the delightful sight of mountains of pebble-sized wonders – there were the coral-colored orange slices, deep-ochre fish, melon and lemon halves, all dusted with lickable white sugar dust. How that added to the tamarind-like flavor of fishes! If only he could one day have a mound of these sweets for himself! Kanti thought. Why, they were better than those straws filled with churan powder – which were good, but got stuck halfway through the sucking, and who wanted a straw clogged with sugary-sour mixture.

Kanti’s hand was slowly making its way to the corner of the cart where the stacks of red and white striped sweet cigarette packets lay. The small boy’s face between the squiggles traced on the cover was inviting him; he had seen a boy today whose parents had bought him a packet, and this boy had teasingly blown imaginary smoke in Kanti’s direction while biting off a piece of the slender pleasure, smirking. As he was about to snap up a packet and make a dash, the canny seller grabbed Kanti’s fingers in big brown ones of his own and crushed them. Oh, it pained. ‘Thief. Son of a thief. Go away or I’ll beat you.’ Kanti resentfully trotted back to where his parents sat on a large stone underneath the shade of a big banyan tree.

He stopped at a distance from them and blinked at the big white mass in front of his eyes. What was it anyway? Why were so many people here? He saw the purple, blue, green, red, orange, black, yellow of the clothes. He heard the tak-tak sounds of the tongawallahs who whipped the horses if they lowered their mouth into the jute bags of gram that hung from their necks. He knew that babus, cars, and mems were important. So this place must be important too. He fixed his stare upon the overwhelming mass of – what was it? – stone? But stones were gray and brown and marked. This must be special stone? It wasn’t a Hanuman shrine because there were no monkeys and his father was not devoutly muttering those words. Whatever it was, Kanti decided, it looked nice. How wonderful if it could be eaten… He imagined that big thing to be a sweet, no a sugar lump, no a sweet cigarette – the shape wasn’t right – but – oh, he could imagine it was his to eat!

He sat down cross-legged on the hot dusty ground, sucking his thumb.

‘All right, if I say one more word about it, may my tongue burn up,’ Neetu pulled herself up awkwardly. Then abruptly she changed her tone and cajoled her husband, ‘Kanti’s father, why don’t I keep quiet and maybe you will do what I want. You are a good man and you will do what is right for the future of your children. It is you who brought us here today, because of you I could have those pethas and see this grandeur’. She waved at the monument in front of them. Her honeyed tones had the desired effect on Gorai who immediately stood up and announced, ‘We will eat at that hotel you were ogling earlier, and before that, we will get that mustachioed man to give us a quick-fit picture of us, my family.’

‘O-ho Camera-bhai, we would like a picture of me, my wife – she is pregnant,’ he almost blushed as he introduced her, ‘and our son – where is he – Kanti, O Kanti, come here at once,’ he beckoned his son with one hand and with the other started fumbling in his pocket for the money.

‘Ok, mister, step here. No, you stand there, little boy. The wife can sit on…’ the cameraman cast his eyes around looking for a suitable spot.

‘Make it a good one please. I want my family, including the one not yet born, to remember this day. It is the first time we have come here you know.’

‘It is the first time we have gone anywhere,’ Neetu amended Gorai’s words as she lifted the printed end of her new sari to cover her head. Then, on second thoughts, she interrupted her gesture, let the covering drop, and retied her wavy hair into a lowered and loose bun at the back. The middle finger of her right hand found its way to the bindi on her forehead; without the need of a mirror, she exactly centered the shiny plastic disc between her eyebrows – she knew the velvet ones stuck better and stayed on longer, but they cost their worth, didn’t they? Having done that, she carefully draped the sari end over half her head, making sure that the coral red sindoor powder adorning her hair parting was clearly visible.

Gorai saw her preen and proudly inhaled. ‘We will sit there, on that bench,’ he started moving towards a stone settee with Neetu and Kanti in tow, but an officer with a wife and child coming from another direction reached at the same instant.

‘Shuhh!’ the officer’s photographer waved Gorai away dismissively.

The rebuke was unnecessary. As if struck by lightning, Gorai automatically stepped away from the officer. He waited patiently while the family photo was composed and taken. The magnificent man in a collar jacket and perfectly ironed trousers had a politician-style fashionable cap on his head. The wife sat with her legs smartly crossed, a purse under her arm, and her sandals touching the folds of her silk sari. How beautiful they seemed! How right! In between them, jumped up their splendid son, an attractive boy who was about the same age as Kanti, but he was groomed like a prince. His hair was combed and his hands were in his lap holding a chiku, he smiled as angels do.

As these regal beings departed, Gorai tried apologizing to their photographer for the initial haste. He merely said, ‘Happens,’ and rushed away after other potential customers stepping out of a honking Ambassador car. When his own turn came, Gorai wanted to sit at the exact spot where the officer had been. He made Neetu sit where the wife had been. But Neetu couldn’t cross her legs and Kanti wanted to sit on his father’s knees. It wasn’t the same.

‘You are the only one looking good,’ Neetu teased him. ‘You always were clean-colored, Kanti and I belong somewhere else, isn’t it Kanti?’

‘Don’t speak. Smile when I say one-two-aaand-three,’ at three the cameraman’s finger fell like a guillotine in the air to indicate that the moment and the scene had been captured.

‘How expensive they are!’ Neetu complained as Gorai finished haggling on the price. ‘Now that we are in his grip, he will extract the most from us. You should have negotiated in advance. We could have gone to another cameraman. There are so many roaming around.’

‘He said no one will go any lower. If we find a better rate, he won’t charge us anything, and we pay him when we pick the picture, so relax.’

‘Babu I am hungry. Bai I am hungry. Uhun-uhhn,’ Kanti piped up.

‘This child’s stomach is a bottomless well,’ Neetu stated, together with, ‘Your Babu will soon take us to eat Kanti. Don’t you want to see the Taj Mahal first?’

‘See what?’ Kanti forgot his crying.

‘This thing so white like Dhobi’s sheets. That building in front of us,’ said Neetu.

Kanti recalled his curiosity about the structure – ‘What is it?’

‘Taj Mahal.’

‘What is that?’

‘It is a palace of Kings and Queens.’

‘Why is it white?’

‘Because the palaces of Kings and Queens are white.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it eatable?’

‘Crazy child! Does one eat palaces? One lives in them.’

‘Can I live in them?’

Neetu laughed at her son, ‘It is not your fate in this birth.’

Kanti felt encouraged by his mother’s mirth to probe further, ‘Is it made of stone?’

‘Yes, what else, will it be made of? Mud?’

A peeved Kanti responded, ‘Why? I can make palaces from mud. I have seen ants make palaces from mud. And stone isn’t white.’

‘Sometimes stone is white. White stone is called Marvel. This palace is made from Marvel.’

‘How do you know? I will ask Babu when he comes back.’ Gorai had gone to empty his bladder.

‘Bai also knows. Bai knows better than Babu. I have studied until 8^th standard. Your Babu is 6^th fail.’

‘How much have I studied then?’

‘You haven’t started going to school my son. If you don’t go to school, you will never become anyone. Your life will be like your Babu’s and mine. When we move to Dilli, I’ll get you admitted into a school and you will study and become a Very Big Man’.

‘Dilli, I like that,’ Kanti declared, ‘Dilli-Billi-Dil-li-Bil-li-Dil-li-’

Neetu struck her forehead in desperation. ‘Crazy, forever crazy. I will beat you if you whisper a word about Dilli to your Babu. You understand?’

‘Bil-li-Dil… Ok, if I don’t say a word about Dilli to Babu, will I become a Very Big Man?’

Neetu nodded.

Kanti shrieked excitedly. ‘Hah ha. What a fool I made of you! Hah ha. I don’t want to be a Very Big Man.’ He capered with his torso protruding and his arms aloft, parodying a paunchy man, ‘Being a Ve-ry-Bi-ig-Ma-an isn’t fun, I can’t sing it like Dil-li-Bil-li-Dil-’

‘Li-Bil-li,’ Gorai surprised him from behind. ‘Billi? Where’s the cat? Cats are small. We’ll make an elephant. Come my son, you want to make an elephant? Here – yes, put your arms around my neck, hold firm, and hang limp as I move.’

Gorai walked slowly and swayed with his head bent forward. A giggling Kanti hung limp from his neck and wiggled like an elephant’s trunk.

‘My belly hurts. Where are we going now? Won’t we go inside this palace?’ Neetu asked.

Gorai put Kanti down even as he begged for more elephant fun. ‘What’s the rush? The cameraman said to come after an hour for the photo. When we return we’ll go inside. This building isn’t going anywhere. It will stay rooted to the ground. But our hunger will kill us if we don’t act on it!’ Gorai joked, winking at Kanti.

‘Yes Babu. Food first,’ he chimed in.

‘Fine. Let us eat. You promised to take me to that hotel,’ Neetu reminded her husband.

‘I don’t forget my promises wife,’ he was not addressing her as Kanti’s mother. Neetu grasped this display of affection and returned a coy smile.

The peddler blew into the small whistle and a long paper snake intermittently shot out. The disinterested hired-car drivers sipped strong tea from glasses. Foreigners in tongas went clapping past, tak-tak-tak. Urchins ran after them and squabbled when the coins fell. Cartmen pulled bales of clothes and boxed cartons fast through the crowded maze of narrow streets. Stepping clear of a basket of lemons in the nick of time, Gorai, Neetu and Kanti entered the Dhaba Hotel and sat on the chairs right under the ceiling fan. A young boy wiped their table with a rag kept on his shoulder, as he rattled off the menu items in a gravelly voice.

Gorai asked for water and ordered a feast of rice, dal, and that day’s special item: aloo-matar. He was being extravagant, and relishing the feeling. When the food arrived, Neetu asked for pickles and raw onions, extra salt, and green chilies. Kanti even got a laddoo at the end and confirmed that it was the best meal of his life.

Neetu burped as they washed their hands over a drain, ‘I have eaten too much.’

‘Never mind. You are eating for two. Kanti’s unborn brother is as greedy as Kanti.’

‘I am not greedy. I am a Very Big Man. And I have no brother. I’ll have an elephant.’

‘This child is mad,’ Neetu commented as they walked back to the Taj Mahal.

‘Babu is the TajMaj-uh-, that white thing we are going to see, made of Marvel?’

‘Not Marvel, Marble,’ Gorai corrected him.

‘See, I knew Bai was lying. She said it was made of Marvel,’ he was triumphant.

‘I heard a Tourist Guide. He was saying Marvel. Anyhow, Marvel-Marble, it’s the same thing,’ said Neetu as they neared the steps of the Mahal.

But by now Kanti’s attention was drawn to the small boy who was eating yet another one of his cigarettes and his sister was eating one too. How many there must be in a packet!

‘We meet again! Have you seen the inside?’ Gorai greeted the cigarette-muncher’s father as he came down the steps with his wife, mother, sister and brother-in-law, and four children, two of them infants.

Kanti inched nearer Gorai’s leg, trying to hide, while slyly keeping his eyes on the other boy, and plotting how to ask for one of the cigarettes. He had nothing to offer in return.

The other boy divined Kanti’s intention and promptly stuffed his packet deep into the pocket of his shorts. Taking his sister’s hand he led her to their mother and they busied themselves playing with their infant siblings.

A crestfallen Kanti turned to Neetu but she was bargaining with a seller of kohl pots, so he studied the big Marble giant in front of him. It was bigger than elephants. But what was the use? Only Kings and Queens could live in it, if what Bai had told him was correct, and it made no sound unlike elephants, and it didn’t move, and it was not eatable. It was important, or the cars, mems, and babus wouldn’t be here, yet if it did not move or entertain or feed, why was it important? Who could he ask why it was important? The babus and mems in cars would know. The Very Big Men from Dilli would surely know. They must have an endless supply of sweet cigarettes to eat…

When Gorai had finished talking to the sign-board painter from Lucknow, he called for Neetu.

‘I thought you would spend the whole day talking to that man. Isn’t he the one we saw at the petha shop in the morning?’

‘Yes, what do you know woman, he’s a signboard painter in Lucknow!’

‘So?’ asked Neetu.

‘So?’ Kanti mimicked his mother.

‘Shut up you mischief-maker,’ Neetu snapped. Kanti went bounding after a stray goat.

‘He paints cinema hoardings. He can paint Dharmendra, Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Hema Malini, Vyjayantimala, Dilip Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, K.N. Singh, you name it… He is a master at it. He makes his living by painting the faces of those famous people. He once made army posters also.’

‘Oh-oh, you. How much money you have wasted on nautanki and cinema in your life. Because of that you failed school and the army didn’t take you. I could have been a soldier’s wife!’

Smarting from this cruel insult, Gorai emphasized, ‘If I was a soldier, I wouldn’t have married you.’

‘Why indeed! You would have been loaded with money and guns. And your wife would have been able to buy kohl pots instead of blackening her eyes with flame soot.’

‘Black skin, black soot,’ Gorai shot back.

‘I may be an orphan, but you got me with a dowry and I gave you a son. It was because of me you got the guard-man’s job. Your fair color has given you nothing but a name. And your mother…’

Seeing the look on Gorai’s face, Neetu’s fell silent. She brought to mind that she had his child and his food in her belly.

‘Signboard painting must pay well if he can support so many people,’ she ventured in a quieter tone.

‘Of course, it is an art, a skill. Something blessed in a person’s hand. He can go anywhere and make a living because he can paint anyone, anything. He never need grovel for work,’ Gorai’s anger was of the flash-in-a-pan nature.

‘You also have skills, you can lift heavy loads, you are strong, you have worked for years on a farm, you guard property,’ Neetu bolstered him.

‘Even oxen work for years on a farm and dogs can defend better than men, Kanti’s mother. Working on farms teaches you nothing except how difficult it is to grow food and satisfy human hunger. You are right. If the army had taken me, I could have learned to defend my country and then I would have that skill.’

‘Here you are! Did you want to slip away without paying me?’ the cameraman had sidled up.

Gorai paid him and took the picture.

‘Like it?’

‘It is very good. You are a talented man.’

The mustachioed photographer beamed and spat red betel juice. ‘Do you want another? I can do the same thing with color, latest style,’ he offered.

‘No, next time.’

‘Your promise then, next time a colored one, at a special rate,’ saying this he made haste towards the Bengali newlyweds.

Neetu called Kanti and they saw the photograph together with Gorai who couldn’t take his eyes off it. His family may not look as nice as the officer’s, nonetheless… it made him happy.

‘Why is the Taj Marble important?’ Kanti asked, breaking into his father’s reverie.

‘Taj Mahal, son. When we are inside, you can see for yourself. Let us go,’ Gorai answered.

They took their slippers in their hands and went up the steps. Kanti was taken by the wide open space around the mausoleum. He raced from one minaret to the next. Neetu kept an ear peeled for any Guide explaining things in Hindi. She could even understand a bit of broken-English, ‘Man made – hundred – beautiful – hello? hollo? – Muslim – dead body.’ Before she could boast to Gorai, he came back from a brief chat with a puny priest and he had gathered more information than her.

‘That fellow is a Hanuman Bhakt. I saw the locket and I wasn’t mistaken. He told me everything about this Taj Mahal. A King got it constructed. Mohammedan King. Mughal. Long time ago. To bury the dead. Like they do in Shamshan Ghats. It has his dead body and that of his wife.’

‘No one lived in it?’ Neetu asked.

‘I don’t think so. Maybe they prayed here. There was another Taj Mahal, an unfinished black one, he told me, on the other side of the river, behind this one, and that was a prison. And the King cut the thumbs of every artisan who worked here.’

‘How terrible! Why?’

‘So they could never make another like it.’

‘That figures. If you spend so much money making it, you have to be careful.’

‘He said, on certain moonlit nights, there are ghosts here.’

‘Kanti’s father, you are mad like your child. Kantiii, O Kantiii…’ Neetu didn’t want to hear the rest of what Gorai had to say.

‘What is it?’ Kanti eventually heeded his mother’s calls.

‘Let us go inside the white building.’

They queued at the entrance to the crypt and shuffled forward with the rest. People were touching the walls and admiring the patterns of curving stems inlaid with flowers and fruits. A man was shining the bulb of an Eveready battery pencil torch on the marble walls to show the flawlessness of the stone quality which allowed light to pass through unobstructed.

‘Hear Bai, they are saying it was encrusted with jewels at one time, then the Angrez came and looted Hindustan and stripped this building too,’ Gorai eavesdropped on strangers and enlightened his wife. ‘Those graves up there are false, these down here are real. Bai, why have false graves?’

But by now Neetu was feeling dizzy. They had entered the basement where a swarm of people encircled two graves. The air was stale with the stench of sweat. Smoke and smell from the incense was overpowering the senses. People jostled.

‘Bai? What happened?’ Gorai noticed Neetu’s eyes glazing and her hand clutched at the greasy walls.

Kanti tugged at her saree, ‘Bai? Bai? Babu see what happened?’

Others around them saw her condition and made way as Gorai led her up the stairs and out, slowly, and with the aid of strangers.

‘Poor woman, she was pregnant,’ someone empathized.

‘They always are,’ came a tart reply.

Neetu took in gulps of fresh air and drank some water. When she came to, she instantly

requested, ‘Kanti’s father, take me away from this place. It is devilish. I don’t feel good here. Dead bodies, prison, false graves, ghosts, Angrez loot – it may be white as Marvel but it is evil.’

‘Ok. We will leave. But who asked you to overeat?’ he replied good-humoredly.

Kanti was standing stock-still, unblinkingly spying on a spider in the wall crack. When Gorai pulled him away by the hand, he lost his concentration and the spider scurried away. ‘Uhunuhhn,’ he expressed his displeasure, and scarcely had they reached the stone steps of the outer perimeter exit, when, taking the first opportunity, he ran back to the wall. Gorai chased after him.

‘Come here, you little rascal! I’ll give you a…’

‘Hah-ha-ha…’

‘Thrashing…’

‘Ha-hah-ha…’

‘Sweet laddoo…’

‘Ha-ha-hah-h – aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHH!’

In a split-second swift relay of reactions, Gorai and Kanti turned around, then those around them. Kanti’s mouth was agape. Gorai sprinted to where the raised platform was and Neetu was not. She had slipped and fallen.

She lay at the foot of the perimeter stairs with blood oozing from her forehead and spilling from between her legs. Her saree was above her knees and she screamed nonsense in agony.

Quickly there was a throng around her. Someone suggested carrying her to a rickshaw or a motor vehicle on the main road. She was shouting in torment. A guard came rushing to Gorai and asked that she be removed without delay. The monument received important visitors and he might be fired if an official witnessed the commotion. Brandishing his lathi in the air, he dispersed the rubberneckers, ‘What is this? A paid show? On your way, go, move it. Haven’t you seen an accident before?’

A few kind souls stayed on. A benevolent clerk called a rehdi-cartwallah who was returning empty after making goods delivery to a storeroom on the precincts. ‘Take this woman to the Civil Hospital, and go fast,’ he instructed, shoving some cash into the cartman’s palm.

‘I will do my best, Sir.’

A couple of women were consoling Neetu who couldn’t bear the excruciating pain.

‘Keep faith Kanti’s mother, don’t scream. Everyone is watching. Nothing will happen. Keep faith. Hanuman will save you,’ Gorai spoke continuously to her. He remembered lifting her onto the cart and taking Kanti into his arms as they followed the rehdi-wallah navigating expertly through the streets.

‘Hark! Hark! Hut! Hut! Make way,’ urged the barefoot cartman as he hurried past onlookers in the shops, groups of children, women who stepped aside, and cows that grudgingly made way. Taking shortcuts, he pulled the handcart behind him through darkening lanes where ramshackle buildings on both sides almost merged balconies a few dozen feet above the ground. Kanti sucked on his thumb and Gorai held the cart with one hand as he kept pace.

Neetu was writhing in anguish, blabbering, ‘I won’t survive. I will die. It’s because of that cursed building that my womb tore! Aieeeemaaaa.’

‘We are getting there. We are almost there. Keep faith. Keep courage,’ Gorai repeated over and over again. They got to the government hospital in the end.

Wiping the sweat off his brow, the cartman said, ‘I did what I could. The rest is God’s will.’

Gorai set Kanti down and darted around for a spare stretcher. He was told to take Neetu to the Emergency entrance at the side. He went ahead to find assistance and seated Kanti in a corner.

When the rehdi-wallah began acting on his mandate, a constable appeared, ‘What’s this? Where are you taking this rehdi? Do you think you can walk into a hospital with a cart?’

Neetu was in a wretched state, cursing and convulsing.

‘Sahib – this woman is bleeding, and –’

‘I can see that she’s bleeding. Everyone can see that. Don’t tell me what to see. Hear what I say. Get her onto a stretcher and take the cart outside. Unauthorized vehicles cannot be permitted inside the hospital compounds. Understood, or shall I explain?’

The menace in his voice shut the cartman up for good and he bowed his head waiting for Gorai who soon came panting from the Emergency building.

‘Why are you still here?’

The constable was sharp on the lookout. ‘So it’s your woman. You fellows get them pregnant, then beat them into this condition.’

Furious and frantic, Gorai lurched for the policeman and missed, ‘I didn’t beat her. She f-f-f-fe-fe-fell. She fell.’ Tears swelled in his eyes and he was nauseous.

‘Ok. Whatever. This rehdi can’t go inside the building. Go request the wardboy there for a stretcher and say the constable asked to send one. And if you ever threaten me again, I’ll put you behind bars till you cry tears of blood. I am a charitable man. I have pity for miserables like you. Understood, or shall I explain?’ he vigorously crushed and rubbed tobacco strands in his palm.

Gorai had already left before the end of the sentence and, sure enough, the wardboy found a stretcher at the mention of the constable. He even came to help lift Neetu on to it.

When they had all gone, the rehdi-wallah slowly made a semicircle with his handcart and trudged out the way he came. Crossing the road, he stopped at a communal tap and used the battered aluminum mug chained to the trough to throw water on his wooden cart. It was getting dark by now and in the faint streetlight he couldn’t be sure if he had washed away the blood stains entirely. Well, he would know at dawn tomorrow. Thinking this, he stepped away onto the road, then paused, as at an afterthought, took the mug in his hands again and splashed the liquid on his face and at his feet. ‘May God bless all of us.’

Meanwhile, Neetu lay propped up against a wall in the Emergency Ward. Her head flapped back and forth as she suffered her searing pain. It was hell. Her cries were drowned out by the violent screams of patients with fractured skulls, third degree burns, mangled limbs. She barely realized that Kanti was the touch she felt on her left side.

‘Kanti,’ she rasped.

‘Bai,’ he slid onto the granite floor in front of her.

He was sniffling and watery snot leaked into his lips. There were flecks of blood on his shirt.

‘Kantiii my crazy child. I am dying Kanti. Call someone,’ dark stars floated before her eyes.

At length, a hurrying nurse paused and said, ‘See Rani, everyone is on the verge of death here. We are doing what we can. Have patience, the doctor is coming.’

Gorai was persuading the Resident Doctor’s assistant to get someone to attend to Neetu.

‘He’s busy with a patient.’

‘Isn’t there another doctor?’

‘Of course there is, but there are many more patients. They’re all busy.’

‘Please, my wife is hurt. Our child may die in her belly. What should I do?’

‘How do I know? Wait your turn, what else?’

‘Please let me in there for a second.’

‘No second. No first. Step aside or the doctor will bark at me.’

‘Doctor sahib…’

‘Hush! He’s got someone with multiple stab wounds. I’m telling you, it won’t take much time. The guy has had it. He won’t survive. It’s the form they have to fill which is delaying him. Dr. Gupta is a very good doctor, you know.’

Soon the doctor came out and had Neetu laid up for examination. She was ululating. He checked attentively between her legs, pressed her abdomen and asked her questions: ‘Where did you fall?’ – ‘Where’s the pain worst?’ – ‘Does it pain here?’ – Neetu yelled – ‘Don’t cry. Wait. I’m helping. I’ll give some medicines.’ He said to Gorai, ‘You should take care of your wife in this state. Why did she fall? Anyway, she has miscarried and it is incomplete. Your child has died. We need to clean her inside. She will be ok. You get this injection and tablet,’ he scribbled some words on a hospital notepad, ‘we’ll keep her in overnight.’ Briskly moving to another patient, he told the attendant, ‘Dam the blood. Tell the nurse to give her a glucose drip. Get her admitted into Ob-Gyne. Check for internal injury. Say I referred. If there’s a delay in cleaning her there and she frets before D&C, give her the tablet and the injection.’

Kanti clung to Gorai’s dhoti. Bai’s stretcher was much above his eye level, but he was uneasy. The continuous crying around him mixed with the smell that was sweet but revolting, the sight of blood; it was making him sleepy.

‘You wait here son, I have to go get the medicine,’ Gorai hastily asked a Nurse for the way to the medical store.

‘Any female relatives?’ Nurse asked Neetu as she wiped her forehead and thighs.

‘No, husband and son,’ Neetu’s face was covered in tears and she howled at every movement.

‘Well, they can’t go in Gyne.’

‘Your mother?’ the Nurse asked Kanti.

‘Yes,’ said Kanti, adding, ‘What happened to that?’ He had seen a new burn victim coming through the doors of Emergency. She was unrecognizably charred. A horrific brown mass.

‘She is burnt.’

‘Why?’

‘Probably set afire by her mother-in-law. Now you stay silent and let me work.’

She called a wardboy and asked him to fix the glucose drip.

Gorai returned. The Nurse said, ‘Ok. Once they take her to the Ward, you go outside with the child. Stay around Gyne in case they want you to get anything else, we are often out of stock.’

‘When will she be released?’

‘Discharged. You heard the doctor say she’s going to be here overnight. Take her tomorrow. Don’t worry.’

Gorai gave the details they asked for, then went outside where Kanti had drowsed on a bed sheet spread on the lawns. Many families were camping there and one had lent their sheet to the boy.

‘We offered food but he was too sleepy to care, will you have some?’ they spoke to Gorai.

‘You are kind people. But I am not hungry at the moment,’ Neetu’s face was swimming before him.

‘What is your case?’

‘His mother fell from the steps. She was pregnant. The baby died.’

‘Ohhhh! Is she going to live?’

‘They will discharge her in the morning.’

‘At least it is quick and easy. You can have another child. We have to be here much longer. A machine at the factory where he worked nearly killed our son. We don’t yet know if he will survive. He’s in ICU.’

‘Will they give him any compensation? Was it a government job?’

‘No. Private contractor related to our MLA. We will go to him and beg.’

‘God must know why, we can merely hope,’ Gorai sighed.

‘Be it the rule of God or Man. It can’t be any different. Our son doesn’t have even any children, his wife here bore him four offspring; all daughters and not one son. What was our fault? That we let the daughters live? They fitted his wife with Copper T and then they tied up his tubes perforce, lured him into it. Threatened him till he signed up to being made infertile. At the time, people said – the trains run on time, the offices work. Let the godforsaken trains run late, I say, and the offices never work for people like us anyway. But don’t make animals out of men. Emergency Period, Emergency Ward, if it isn’t this, it’s that. Best keep our hopes low,’ the elderly woman sobbed and her daughter-in-law silently patted her back.

Neetu was splayed on a stretcher in the Gyne Ward. A woman was pushing through with a delivery, another screamed as her contractions became intense. One of the nurses was arguing with a bewildered woman whose baby had gone missing – ‘We don’t know where it went. Maybe one of your relatives took it. It isn’t written on anyone’s face that they are a babysnatcher!’ Some beds had two women patients on them, facing away from each other, and, in spite of this, a few women were lying on mattresses placed on the floor between the beds. The ward ayah went up and down the length of the passage, cursing everyone. Rolls of blood soaked cotton lay in the corners. Phlegm, flies, paan-stains, clothes-piles.

‘Who referred?’ a nurse enquired of the stretcher trolley wheeling boy.

‘Gupta.’

‘Ok, where’s the slip? Be quick. I can’t wait all night,’ she chastised.

The boy handed her a slip, saying, ‘I need the trolley back now.’ The ayah pulled Neetu onto a bench and the Nurse instructed a junior, ‘Tell the doctor it’s a D&C from Gupta.’

‘Here, you take this medicine, it’ll help the pain ease,’ she handed Neetu a pill from her pocket.

Neetu faded in and out of the screaming chaos, until the anesthetic swab was resolutely pressed to her nose.

‘Rani, we have cleaned your womb. The fetus was incompletely aborted. But you are fine now. Take care with your area or there’ll be infections and complications. And I’d say don’t let him near you in that way for a while. Refrain,’ the lady doctor advised Neetu.

‘You heard Dr. Sharma. She gave you priority last night,’ the ayah confided afterwards. ‘If you have any money, I can get something for you from outside.’

‘I have no money. My son is outside with his father.’

‘Fine then. Wear your clothes. Do mention this to your husband – I got you this perch on the bed. He can thank me for seeing your face again. The Nurse would have left you rotting.’

The discharged Neetu ambled over outside and saw Gorai still asleep with Kanti nestling on his body. ‘I lost a son. Who knows when I’ll have the chance again with this devout Hanuman-Bhakt?’ she spoke aloud.

Gorai was inside the crypt of the Taj Mahal again. This time he was alone. On the two graves lay the flesh of animals which had been slaughtered. The white marble was stained with warm blood everywhere. It was like being in a butcher’s shop. Suddenly, Gorai himself became the signboard painter and Kanti appeared to ask him, ‘Where’s the hospital?’ He awoke with a jerk, baffled and dazed as he recognized Neetu’s face in the sky above his head.

‘Bai? They discharged you? Are you ok? Get up Kanti,’ he shook the child who responded with his, ‘Uhunuhhn,’ and roused with difficulty.

‘Yes Kanti’s father. Did you think they would keep me there forever? Government hospitals are free, so the stays don’t last much’ She was feeble, but herself alright.

‘Kanti’s mother, your tongue is fit as a fiddle.’

‘My tongue is made of leather. But so is my stomach. Won’t you feed it, now that I will only eat for one?’

‘How you talk! Come Kanti, we are going to eat.’

The boy jumped up.

Gorai gave the bedsheet back. He was damp and stiff in his limbs. The trousers he normally wore would have served him better on this trip than the flimsy dhoti which he had taken out for a special day. Special indeed! It had turned out to be a most unfortunate day instead. He had lost a child. Maybe it was God’s sign to him that another offspring was not meant to be. He had been wrong in giving up his Hanuman-devoted bachelorhood. Marriage itself had been the first mistake. Kanti was the second. And though he slipped up sporadically and Neetu didn’t make enforcing his restraint easy, he must forbear.

‘Chai Garam! Chai-Chai, Biscuit,’ the tea-seller threaded his way through the clusters of patients’ relatives with a kettle in his hand and a bag on his shoulder.

Gorai bought tea and rusk for his family. When he dived into his pocket for the money, he realized that’s where he’d kept the photograph taken yesterday. He pulled it out along with the coins for the tea-seller.

Kanti nibbled the crusty bread biscuit given to him; it was hard and he dipped it in Gorai’s tea, then chewed the softened lump contentedly. After a time, he followed his parents’ gaze to the photograph on Gorai’s lap. Leaning on his father’s knee, he voiced his unsolved riddle from the day before, ‘That big white Taj building we saw yesterday, why is it important Babu?’

‘The Taj Mahal son, it isn’t important, not to us anyway,’ Gorai gave him a simple answer he hadn’t expected, then added, ‘Let us go home now, my duty begins in a few hours.’

‘Yes, let us leave,’ Neetu quietly repeated, fixing her eyes on a bus passing in the distance.