MARUTI

Chest exposed, gold chain nestling among manly hairs, at the neighbours—until he met his match in Nani

- 

Three days before Diwali, I saw Lucky's car keys on the dashboard.

in the fog should pass by. Armed with our list, we would scour the neighborhood on a recovery mission. It became so that neighbours, on seeing us outside their homes, asked, “What did Nani give us today?”

When we returned from our salvage missions, Nani would look askance at the objects we had brought, as if accusing us of theft. And if Lucky should happen to honk the horn, she would say, “That car needs to prepare for death!”

Our biggest fear was that she would hand something very precious to Cycle Baba who, unlike our neighbours, would neither reveal the gift nor return it. Didi claimed to tell a man’s character by a mere look at his face, and in Cycle Baba’s she saw dishonesty because, she said, he did not believe in the lines he recited from Bhagwat Puraan. Besides, which sadhu in all of Delhi rode a bicycle and claimed to be able to drive a car? So, when the baba visited us, we were on high alert, using every conceivable pretext to walk past the shrine and eavesdrop on their conversation.