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slit-open belly of a fish. Every few weeks, Mr Puri would scatter magazines while searching for a bank cheque or letter and shout: ‘Why don’t we clean this house up!’ But the mess grew. The enveloping junk only enhanced the domestic glow from the neat beds and the well-stocked fridge, for (as outsiders instinctively understood) this dingy, dirty flat was an Aladdin’s cave of private riches. The Puris owned no property and little gold. What they had to show for their life was in the form of paper, and how comforting that all of it was within arm’s reach, even Mr Puri’s old, old Shankar’s Weekly magazines, full of cartoons mocking Prime Minister Nehru, borrowed from a friend when he dreamed of becoming a professional caricaturist.
    As his mother put Ramu’s shiny black shoes on her knees, one after the other, to tie his laces, he sneezed. Down below in 2C, Mrs Ajwani, the broker’s wife, was spraying herself generously with synthetic deodorant. Done with the laces, Mrs Puri spat on the shoes and gave them a final polish with a thick index finger, before she took Ramu to the toilet, so he could admire his good looks. The moment the boy stood before the mirror, the toilet filled with gurgling noise, as if a jealous devil were cursing. Directly overhead in 4C, Ibrahim Kudwa was performing extraordinary exercises with salt water, designed to strengthen his weak stomach. Mrs Puri countered with some gargling of her own; Ramu pressed his head into her tummy and chuckled into his mother’s fatty folds.
    ‘Bye, watchman!’ Mrs Puri shouted, on Ramu’s behalf, as they left the Society. Ram Khare, reading his digest of the Bhagavad Gita, waved without looking up.
    Ramu disliked heat, so Mrs Puri made him walk along the edge of the alley, where king coconut palms shaded them. The palms were an oddity, a botanical experiment conducted by the late Mr Alvares, whose mansion, full of unusual trees and plants, had been sold by his heirs to make room for the three florally named concrete blocks, ‘Hibiscus’, ‘Marigold’, and ‘White Rose’.
    Mrs Puri tickled her son’s ear.
    ‘Say “Mar-i-gold”, Ramu. You could say lots of things in English, don’t you remember? Mar-i…?’
    ‘Rum-pum-pum.’
    ‘Where did you learn this thing, Ramu, this “Rum-pum-pum”?’
    She looked at her boy. Eighteen years old. Never growing, yet somehow picking up new things all the time – just like the city he lived in.
    As they neared the church, Ramu began to play with the gold bangles on his mother’s hand.
    The school bus was waiting for them in front of the church. Before helping Ramu board its steps, Mrs Puri loaded him with a home-made sign: it showed a big green horn with a red diagonal going through it and the legend ‘NO NOISE’. Once again, Mrs Puri made his classmates promise, as she did every morning, to be quiet; and then she waved, as the bus departed, at Ramu, who could not wave back (since he was pressing the NO NOISE sign to his chest), but said what he had to say to his mother with his eyes.
    Mrs Puri hobbled back to Vishram. Walking around the big construction hole in front of the gate, which the workers were now filling up with shovels, she noticed that the sign:
    W ORK IN P ROGRESS I NCONVENIENCE IS R EGRETTED BMC
    had been crossed out and rewritten:
    I NCONVENIENCE IN P ROGRESS W ORK IS R EGRETTED BMC
    Age had accumulated in fatty rings around Mrs Puri, but her laughter came from a slim girl within: a joyous, high-pitched, ascending ivory staircase of mirth. The shovels stopped moving; the men looked at her.
    ‘Who wrote this joke on the sign?’ she asked. They went back to filling the hole.
    ‘Ram Khare! Look up from your book. Who did that to the municipal sign?’
    ‘Mr Ibrahim Kudwa,’ the guard said, without looking up. ‘He asked me what I thought of the joke and I said, I can’t read English, sir. Is it a good joke?’
    ‘We are impotent people in an impotent city, Ram Khare, as Ibby often