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suffers.’
    I would dream this house into existence as I was falling asleep, in the haze before of an afternoon nap. We hadn’t met Ashish and Samuel then. I thought that it was going to be difficult, trying to live together. But then the city was getting used to difference. Heterosexual live-in relationships were permitted. And there were those who chose to live alone. Our ward’s councillor was a bigamist. There was a famous brothel behind the market. There were hijras for hire at almost every traffic signal. If people weren’t precisely proud of these things, at least they knew about them. So how was I any different?
    When I was young, as if by unspoken agreement, the entire family would descend on us for the vacations. At first, everyone came to us for ten days, then all the children would go to Nasik for a week with Aatya and then for four or five days we would go to Ram Kaka. The last one or two days of this trip were spent with Prakash Kaka.
    This was how the holidays were spent. When everyone was with us, one of the most important events was the making of ice cream by hand. Ice, milk, salt, mango pulp would all be mixed together, with everyone taking a turn at churning. You gave up only when your arms began to hurt. By four or four thirty in the afternoon, mango ice cream would be ready and we would eat until we were forced to decline any more helpings. No one was supposed to mention it again for the rest of the month.
    On one of those days, I was taking the wooden ice cream bucket out of the kitchen when Sunil, Ram Kaka’s son, hit me on the legs. I almost dropped the bucket. I sat down to rub my legs. Sunil was always exercising; he could talk about nothing other than his body and his exercises. He shouted, ‘Walk properly. Keep your legs apart and walk straight. Why do you mince along like a woman?’ Then he took me into the backyard which was set with large square tiles. He forced me to spread my legs apart—and place my feet in separate tiles. Then he made me walk with my legs apart. For about an hour, he sat on Baba’s scooter and tried to rewrite my gait.
    ‘Tannya, walk straight, don’t trip about like a girl, keep those shoulders up, push your chest out,’ he roared. Aai was in the kitchen scraping the meat out of coconuts and he told her, ‘Kaku, make him walk like this every morning and send him out to play with the boys. He just sits around reading.’
    From then on, right up to this day, I fear that I walk funny, in other words, that I walk like a woman. When I find myself walking at my own pace, I almost immediately slow down. And I learned what men do not do. They do not wet their dry lips by running their tongues over them. They don’t trot after their mothers into the kitchen. They don’t use face powder. They don’t sit on a motorbike behind a woman. They don’t need mirrors in the rooms where they might change their clothes. On trips, they can go behind a tree. They don’t even need an enclosed space to take a dump; they can do it in the open. They shouldn’t be afraid of other people seeing their bodies. If there’s only one bathroom, they can bathe in the open. When caned in class, they do not cry. They do not buy tamarind from the lady who sells it on the road and they certainly do not sit by her side and eat it.
    This dates back to the time before you came to live with us, about four or five months before your arrival. I was reading the paper when I recognized the face of a man who had killed himself. I had gone with him once to his bungalow.
    One night at the station road, there weren’t too many men on offer. There was, however, a large car standing at the edge of the road. Leaning against the bonnet was a man in his early forties, tall, slim, with a gym-built body. The station road had become part of my routine. When I arrived, he was already there. When I saw him, I slowed down and stopped right in front of him. We left together in his car. Even though it was his own