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care for him, though I am not able to express this to his satisfaction.
    A dusty, broken slip road joining two busy highways serviced our village of Haripir, bisecting it. The shrine stood on this road, at the end of the village closer to the Ahmedabad junction. At the entrance, next to the gateless posts, a wooden signboard fixed on two legs carried a faded legend in roman script: Mussafar Shah Dargah—Pir no baag. The Shrine of the Wanderer—the Garden of the Pir. It was called Pirbaag for short, and also, affectionately, the Baag.
    Straight ahead from the gateposts, at the top of a rise, stood our faded old house, attached to the shrine at its farther end, and built around a square courtyard that was mostly open to the sky. The front steps led into a short dim passageway that stepped down into the open square. A side gate here opened directly into the sacred space and was our private entrance into it. A high wall ran from the house to the road, the shrine to one side of it and our front yard to the other, empty except for a swing hanging from a tree. Early in the morning crows would congregate on the tree and create a racket; it was believed that they had been here as long as the shrine. Halfway down the wall was the arched doorway that was the public access to the shrine. Often we used this entrance to go to our house through the shrine and to the back.
    Outside the gateposts at the road where I would emerge after my snack, trailed by little Mansoor, the village would be coming to life as the shopping hour approached. Next to Ramdas's flower and chaddar store, on the right, a peanut seller would have set up; and beside him a row of vegetable vendors; and so on up the hill. Across the street, next to the tire-repair shop, was a bus stand, where a torn Congress party poster staked claim to the area, beside a film poster depicting Raj Kapoor and Nargis in the film
Shri 420
. Chacha Nehru was at the helm of the nation; the country was poor but proudly looking ahead.
    The two of us turned left at the entrance into the playground, where Harish, Utu, and others had gathered to play the daily cricket. “Eh Kaniyaa!”—that was my nickname—would come a cry. “Harry! Utuputu!” I would answer. “I am bowling from yesterday's game, don't you forget! Trueman has arrived!” As I threw off my slippers, to play barefoot, a high ball would come my way, which, laying down my bat, I caught expertly, with precisely the composure required. Losing this challenge would be to court laughter and lose face.
    In the farther distance in the cultivated hinterland, a line of camels would stand up and slowly wend its way to wherever it was they retired for the night.
    Two crates, stood one atop the other against the low wall that bounded our property on this side, substituted as the stumps for our games; an old monster of a banyan tree, known affectionately as Mister Six, and the radius it described formed the boundary to which a ball had to reach for a score of a four or a six. Some twenty yards beyond the banyan was a small, old, and usually deserted temple dedicated to Rupa Devi, wife of Pir Bawa and beloved to young, unmarried women and transvestites.
    Why Rupa Devi's temple was not part of the Baag, no one could quite explain. But it was the women of the Baag who looked after it, and the girls of the town came here to tell the goddess their secrets. Bands of transvestites, the eunuch pavayas who were more alluring than the local women, would stop here periodically on their way to their own Kali shrine of Becharaji up north; and any boy who crossed their path would get teased no end.
    The thin but persistent tinkle of a bell was the prelude to dawn in our garden of the saints. It echoed around the shrine as though intending to wake up not only the living but also the dead lying buried under their burdens of draped stone. I would open my eyes in the dark, follow the sound in my mind, as it moved in the aisles between graves, accompanied