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harangued the milk-woman into bringing her cow to the back yard so that she could watch her draw milk. “My babies get milk without water mixup,” she told the milk-woman, who spat a stream of betel juice into the bushes to show Linda Ayah what she thought of her.
    I remember the woman, with her fat breasts swinging naked beneath the faded sari, standing astride a drain in full view of the road, her sari hitched up to her thighs, pissing a fierce stream. I had only ever seen men doing this and wondered if she was actually one of the eunuchs who dressed up in women’s clothes and roamed the streets during festivals, clapping their hands and singing obscene songs. I was scared to ask the milk-woman, and got a slap on my bottom from Linda Ayah for my curiosity. “What for you want to watch mannerless people making dirty water on the main road? Stupid child!”
    Linda Ayah had coarse, bony hands with knuckles large as tree-knots and palms criss-crossed so deeply with lines that they looked like the railway shunting yard. Her fingertips were stained yellow with
khaini
that she rolled out of a little tin tucked into the waistline of her sari.
    “What is that?” I asked, watching Linda Ayah pinch a ball of
khaini
delicately between finger and thumb and rub it against her leathered palms till it powdered. Thenshe slapped at it briskly before tossing it into her mouth. A deep sigh of contentment, her eyes gleaming pleasure behind her glasses.
    “A magic powder,” said Linda. “Something to make an old woman happy.” The
khaini
box went back into the folds of sari and petticoat to be taken out the next time the household became too heavy for her.
    “But you are not old,” I said.
    “I feel very old sometimes, Baby-missy,” said Linda, still absorbed in the pleasure of the
khaini
as it mingled with saliva in her mouth, its vapours reaching her heart and brain, a langorous stretching of her creaky muscles.
    “Ma says she feels old too,” I said. “Can’t you give her some
khaini?”
    It was true that Ma said she felt as if she had aged twenty years since her marriage. “Look at this grey,” she grumbled to Dadda during one of her arguments, jabbing at her head. “You are responsible for this. Already I look like my Ajji!”
    I never thought of the arguments as anything other than my mother’s, for Ma did all the talking and Dadda locked himself into a tight box of silence. A deep silence, only the soft
phhp-phhp
suck of his lips on the pipe stem. Smoke wreathed his head and his face was an indistinct blur.
    “Can’t you say something?” cried Ma, enraged by his relentless quiet, which was more deadly than angry words could ever be. “Say something, say something, say something!” she screamed once, flinging all the bone china cups and saucers Dadda had bought from England many years ago into the kitchen sink. My father sat in his armchair, a ballooning grey shadow, and said not a word,staring into the mist of smoke, refusing to listen to Ma’s hysterical sobbing. I shook Roopa awake, forcing her into her slippers and a sweater, for if Ma was going to leave the house after smashing all the china, I wanted us to be dressed and ready to follow her.

 
    T
he nicest thing about Ma’s flat was the gulmohur tree that scattered its flaming red flowers all over her balcony. Here, in Calgary, I had no gulmohur outside my window, but a lilac bloomed in summer and filled my home with its delicate fragrance. Sometimes I wished that I could trap the beauty of those flowers to last me through the winter, as well. But as Dadda told me once, there are some things you cannot keep forever—youth and beauty and the breath in your mortal body.
    Of Dadda himself, there remained so little to hold on to. Roopa said that she remembered him as an absence. His chair at the dining table sat empty flor at least fifteen days of the month. And when he was at home, she couldn’t see his face, only the sheets of newspaper rustling before