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instead I am showing blouse pieces and saris to wretched housewives. I hate you! Why don't you
die?' he would holler, and throw a peppershaker, a glass, a plate. At his wife, his daughter, her
cat.
One night he exceeds all limits and throws a piping-hot cup of tea at his wife. Gudiya tries to
shield her mother and the burning liquid falls on her instead, scalding her face. She shrieks in
agony. Shantaram is so drunk he doesn't even realize what he has done. I rush out to get a taxi
for Mrs Shantaram to take her daughter to hospital. Two days later, she comes to me and asks
whether I will go with her to visit Gudiya. 'She gets very lonely. Perhaps you can talk to her.'
So I accompany Mrs Shantaram on my first-ever visit to a hospital.
* * *
The first thing that assails your senses when you enter a hospital is the smell. I feel nauseated by
the cloying, antiseptic smell of disinfectant, which permeates every corner of the dirty wards.
The second thing that strikes you is that you don't see any happy people. The patients lying on
their green beds are moaning and groaning and even the nurses and doctors seem grim. But the
worst thing is the indifference. No one is really bothered about you. I had imagined there would
be doctors and nurses swarming all over Gudiya, but I find her lying all alone on a bed inside the
Burns Unit with not a single nurse on duty. Her face is completely bandaged; only her black eyes
can be seen.
'Gudiya, look who has come to see you,' Mrs Shantaram says, beaming at me.
I feel diffident approaching the girl. She is obviously much older than me. I am just a voyeur
who has heard some snippets from her life; I hardly know her. I don't see her lips, but I can see
from her eyes that she is smiling at me and that breaks the ice between us.
I sit with her for three hours, talking about this and that. Gudiya asks me, 'How did you get such
an unusual name Ram Mohammad Thomas?'
'It is a very long story. I will tell you when you are well.'
She tells me about herself. I learn that she is about to finish her Intermediate and start University.
Her ambition is to become a doctor. She asks me about myself. I don't tell her anything about
Father Timothy or what happened to me later, but I recount my experiences in the chawl. I tell
her about life as a foundry worker. She listens to me with rapt attention and makes me feel very
important and wanted.
A doctor comes and tells Mrs Shantaram that her daughter is lucky. She has received only first-
degree burns and will not have any permanent scars. She will be discharged within a week.
The three hours that I spend with Gudiya enable me to learn a lot about her father. Mrs
Shantaram tells me, 'My husband is a famous space scientist. Rather, he was a scientist. He used
to work in the Aryabhatta Space Research Institute, where he investigated stars with the help of
huge telescopes. We used to live in a big bungalow on the Institute's campus. Three years ago he
discovered a new star. It was a very important scientific discovery but one of his fellow
astronomers took credit for it. This shattered my husband completely. He started drinking. He
started having fights with his colleagues and one day he got so angry with the director of the
Institute he almost beat him to death. He was thrown out of the Institute immediately and I had to
beg the director not to have him arrested by the police. After leaving the Institute, my husband
got a job as a physics teacher in a good school, but he could not keep his drinking and his violent
temper in check. He would thrash boys for minor lapses and was kicked out in just six months.
Since then he has been doing odd jobs, working as a canteen manager in an office, as an
accountant in a factory, and now as a sales assistant in a clothes showroom. And because we
have exhausted all our savings, we are forced to live in a chawl.'
'Can't Mr Shantaram stop drinking?' I ask her.
'My husband swore to me he would not touch alcohol again and I had begun to hope that the
worst was over. But he couldn't stick to his promise, and look what has happened.'
'Do me a favour, Ram Mohammad Thomas,' Gudiya says. 'Please look after Pluto till I return
home.'
'Definitely,' I promise.
Suddenly she stretches out her arm and takes my hand in hers. 'You are the brother I never had.
Isn't he, Mummy?' she says. Mrs Shantaram nods her head.
I do not know what to say. This is a new relationship for me. In the past, I have imagined myself
as someone's son, but never as someone's brother. So I just hold Gudiya's hand and sense an
unspoken bond pass between us.
That night I dream of a woman in a white sari holding a baby in her arms. The wind howls
behind her, making her hair fly across her face, obscuring it. She places the baby in a laundry bin
and leaves. Just then, another woman arrives. She is also tall and graceful, but her face is
swathed in bandages. She plucks the baby from the bin and smothers him with kisses. 'My little
brother,' she says. 'S-i-s-t-e-r,' the baby gurgles back. 'Meeeow!' A strangled cry from a cat
suddenly pierces the night. I wake up and try to figure whether the cry I heard came from the
dream or the adjacent room.
I discover Pluto's limp and mangled body the next morning, lying in the same dustbin in which
Mr Barve disposes of his copy of the Maharashtra Times. The cat's neck has been broken and I
can smell whisky on his furry body. Shantaram tells his wife that Pluto has run away. I know the
truth, but it is pointless mentioning it. Pluto has indeed run away. To another, better world, I
think.
'I like Gudiya very much,' I tell Salim. 'I have to ensure that Shantaram does not repeat what he
did to her.'
'But what can you do? It is his family.' 'It is our business as well. After all, we are neighbours.'
'Don't you remember what you told me once? That it's not a good idea to poke your nose into
other people's affairs, or make other people's troubles your own, Mohammad?'
I have no response to this.
* * *
Gudiya comes home, but I don't get to see her because Shantaram will not permit a boy to enter
his house. Mrs Shantaram tells me that her husband has realized what he has done and will now
reform, even though in her heart of hearts she knows that Shantaram is beyond redemption. But
even she did not know the depths to which her husband could descend.
Barely a week after Gudiya returns from the hospital, he does something to her again. He tries to
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