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row. And Damoo had been drinking relentlessly, day and night, all through those five days, competing with the downpour. Neither would the rain let up nor would Damoo let go. The steadfast rain and stubborn Damoo. Drunk, both.
    Damoo had always been like this. When he picked up the bottle he had to completely take to it. His drinking bouts stretched into days, going on for twenty days, sometimes thirty. He would drink all through the day and right through the night. When his wife stopped Laksha from supplying him more, Damoo would conjure up a bottle from anywhere—from under the mattress, from inside the containers in the kitchen, even from the rafters on the roof. He had an insatiable capacity to drink. And he was happy when he was drinking. He was never the man you would find in a drunken brawl;in this Damoo was quite unlike others. And when he gave up the hooch, he really gave it up—he wouldn’t touch the devil for three or four months at a stretch, sometimes even for a full six months. When he was on the wagon, there wasn’t another man like him in the basti—there was no better father than him, no better husband, no better worker.
    But all that was in another season. Seasons change. This monsoon he had started drinking with the very first showers. And this year it wasn’t raining, it was pouring. Such a downpour had not been seen in the last hundred years.
    The city braved the first day of the onslaught. Local train services were suspended, then resumed, and then suspended again. The second day took its toll—trucks were unable to enter the city. They started grinding to a halt on the highways. The city was flooding. The supply of fresh vegetables dried up. Prices shot up like the ears of a rabbit. The rain kept falling—in sheets. Steadily, unfalteringly. And Damoo kept drinking, matching the intensity of the rain.
    By the third day the signs of danger were loud and clear. Rain and more rain accompanied by strong winds. The wind drove the sheets of rain into the lane, and it quickly started filling up. Half the household lay strewn outside Damoo’s house in the lane—his wife started dragging it all into the kholi, their one-room tenement. The kholi had the wingspan of a sparrow. It could hardly accommodate Damoo, his wife Shobha, and their daughter Kishni who was to be married off the next month. Whenthe wife pulled in the family goat as well, Damoo lost it: ‘Abey, what’s the need to get this behen inside?’
    ‘What am I to do—let it soak in the rain? Till when?’
    ‘Look at the bloody thick coat she has! She’s not going to wilt in two hours.’
    ‘You say two hours, but it’s been two days. Today the lane’s flooded. Even the drain’s spilling over. I think this accursed rain is going to sweep Punya’s shanty away.’
    Damoo fell silent. He smacked a little salt off his right hand, picked up the glass and guzzled half a glass of hooch. The booze scorched his innards and he belched out a thick, filthy curse—directed this time at the maker of the hooch.
    ‘The bastard. Saala has poured so much naushader * into the booze it tastes more like battery acid.’
    Shobha did not respond. She tied the goat in the corner and spoke to Kishni instead. ‘Get up beti. Pick up all the things from the floor and put them on the shelf. I’m afraid some water will seep in. This rain is not going to let up. It has started raining harder instead …’
    She hadn’t even finished speaking when a clamour rose in the streets, ‘Look at that, that’s Punya’s shanty—it … it’s gone.’
    Shobha looked out of her door: Muqadam’s roof had collapsed and slid onto the lane. People ran across to hoist it up again, but there was no point. Instead of flowing in from the lane, the water was now filling in from the top. The sky was stubborn in its intent.
    Kishni wanted to run out, to help, but Shobha stopped her: ‘You stay put. You’re going to get married next month. I don’t want you to break a limb.’