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would drift out from Santosh’s house. There was no need for the aroma to be stifled with red chillies any more. Oh yes, if you asked her for some bitter gourds she would give you a few sometimes. Even she took unripe tomatoes from my flower pots. Everyone had grown something or the other in front of their shanties. Tulsi plants were there, of course—watered every morning and evening. No one knew why the tulsi was planted, why an earthen lamp was lit under it. Everyone—Amina, Karima, Shanti and Puro—would say, ‘Whenever the old man coughs I give him tulsi extract.’ Some people’s vines had crept up the huts and spread over the roofs.
    But Aunty, being Aunty, had constructed a still—right behind her shack, not like Bakshi who had his distilling apparatus in the corner of the maidan. Bakshi would brew liquor only once in ten–fifteen days and distil justenough to fill his drums. The days Bakshi would fire his still you could see the havildar making rounds of his hut right from the morning. Bakshi owned another two huts—the men of honour would sit inside one of these and drink. And the men of normal stature, whose honour would neither increase nor decrease if they were seen drinking, would squat outside the huts and drink the country liquor. For snacks they would lick the salt kept on the plate in front of them. But Aunty was Aunty—she would distil her alcohol with great love and tenderness. She would put some rotting fruits in her brew and very little sal ammoniac. Her alcohol was the colour of gold. And if you brought in your own empty bottle she would give a discount of one rupee on the price. Her customers were mostly regulars. They were the only ones who came to her and never after 10 p.m. After that it was her time to drink. She would drink herself senseless, feast on beef and then go off to sleep. If somebody were to wake her up, she would hurl such choice abuses at them that the entire basti would become redolent with the language.
    But now even Aunty was imprisoned behind walls. You no longer got to hear her—as if her voice has been choked. She did not seem this lonely earlier.
    And Jaani … these days he says that the money from his hotel job is not enough, not any more. He sold off some of his chickens, ate some and some died. What could he do? You couldn’t raise chickens on the second or third floor!
    This year, Gaffar did not buy a billy goat either. On Bakr-i-Id, he sacrificed his own she-goat. What elsecould he do? Earlier he would let his goat loose and the goat would look after herself—she would graze for food somewhere in the rubbish heaps of the basti. Now she was eating away the clothes in the house—the cost of two lungis had got added to Gaffar’s monthly budget. Poor Gaffar. When he did not have his pukka house, he was so much better off.
    My husband too used to often bring his friends home. He would set the charpoy outside our shack and drink and argue most of the night away; and then they would roll over there itself and sleep through the rest of the night. In the morning they would all get up and go about their duties. Now my husband had stopped bringing his friends over. In these one-room homes, what would all the men and women do now? Earlier the children would lie on the floor inside and the men would sleep outside. The women, after filling their buckets with water from the tap, would come and pick up their bleating kids and wrap them around their bosoms and go off to sleep. What were they to do now? The grown-up kids … they all kept staring wide-eyed.
    I have told my husband a number of times, ’Damn it, is this any life? The government had locked us up in boxes and you know why … so that the stench of poverty stays contained, stays inside. Come, let’s sell this pukka house and go somewhere else … to some other slum. Surely we can find some place that we like.’

The Rain
    The rain was unrelenting. It had poured night and day, continuously, for five days in a