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house.
    They arrived to find that a large blue and white board had gone up on its boundary wall. It read: Kailash Nath Sons and Associates. And just behind it, in the garden, a great commotion was
underway. A gang of barefoot men in checked lungis and fraying vests tore up the lawn. The grass was gone; so were the flower beds and dahlias; all that remained standing, like a single tree over a
fallow field, was the gardenia. Udaya and Rehan watched from inside the car as two men caught hold of its branches with a rope, pulling the canopy to the ground, while two others hacked away at the
trunk, making white gashes. The tree seemed startled by the violence applied to it. The gashes multiplied and it fell within minutes, not with a crash but a swoon, still holding aloft its many
flowers. And there it lay, on the garden’s muddy floor, the curve of its trunk just a hump now; its destroyed beauty produced, even in the faces of its hired executioners, a kind of
wonder.
    Only Rehan’s grandmother, looking, not at the tree, but at the light striking its fleshy stump, was triumphant.
    ‘No rakshasa there, Nani!’ Rehan cried out.
    She gave him a bitter look. His mother pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, seeming to suppress tears.
    Rehan glanced over at her and breathed out. ‘OK, let’s do it.’
    ‘The flat? Really?’ she asked, wiping her eyes, surprised at his adult timing.
    He looked sadly at her, compacted his lips, and nodded.
    *   *   *
    Some days later, at the maidan, the effigies awaited their end. Udaya and Rehan, late in arriving, had to watch from the flyover. Here, too, the crowd grew large. Policemen in
olive-green uniforms prodded them with canes but when they became too many, they gave up. Rehan, on one rung of the flyover’s parapet where a sheet of hoarding, rusted and threatening, had
been bent away, felt them press against his legs. He looked urgently down at his mother, already anxious.
    ‘Come down, baba. It’s not safe,’ she said, feeling his dismay.
    ‘I can’t see anything.’
    ‘Nothing has begun yet.’
    But it was in snatches that Rehan saw white explosions riddle the first effigy – Ravana’s son – and flames climb wildly up the hollow of his body. Then the gaps in the crowd
closed. He knew from the roar that rose off the maidan that the burning was over. When he next glimpsed the skeletal frame alight and collapsing, limb by limb, he had to hide his great
disappointment. Udaya saw this and felt terrible. It was their first Dussehra and Diwali alone, in the new flat, and everything was significant.
    For the second burning she tried carrying him piggy-back but couldn’t keep him up. His weight slid down her back, his arms pulled against her neck and hair. At last it was Rehan who said,
‘Don’t worry, Ma, I can see.’ And when the second roar came, he roared louder than the rest.
    It was now Ravana’s turn. Rehan was preparing to go through the motions again, when from nowhere two powerful arms gripped him by the legs and lifted him out of the crowd. His
mother’s hand steadied him, and when he looked down, he found himself sitting on the shoulders of a man he had never met before. Ahead, he had a clear view of the demon-king.
    His mother’s voice, carrying up from the thick crowd below, said: ‘Baba, say thank you . . . Amit Uncle.’
    ‘Just Amit is fine,’ the man said.
    Rehan, though he said a loud thank you, could not make out his face; just the greying hair and spectacles.
    Night fell over the maidan. Moths and insects swarmed in the light of naked bulbs and flares. And over the tense and seething mass, bunches of pink balloons and candy-floss bobbed lightly by.
Rehan Tabassum’s face burned brightly with the fire of the dying Ravana.

 
2
Dinner for Ten
    (1985–2002)
    ‘To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a
kind of