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There was something wrong with Nithin, Vrinda’s boy. A hormonal imbalance of some sort that could not be corrected. He was overweight and hoarse and constantly lunging at things. They had moved in two years ago-mother, nine-year-old son and a huge, ferocious Alsatian, his collar buried in his bristling coat. The father was dead, in a car accident whose details could not be properly imagined because it had happened halfway around the world, in Canada, and had involved fog and ice.

Hema, my beautiful Hema, is determined tonight. I know it the minute I crawled into our home. I don’t mean “crawled” in a figurative sense. It accurately describes what I did. Our house, you see, is a little on the cozy side; six by six feet to be exact. A perfect little cube it is, made of tin cans that my Hema’s late hubbie took apart and flattened into sheets. The result has been quite colorful–white Amul milk powder sheets next to yellow Dalda tin sheets, next to rose-red and aquamarine-blue Asian Paints sheets. Of course, rust, like a leprosy of tin, has eaten away most of the color, and the Jai Sena have scrawled their fascist slogans in black paint all across our walls.