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from the evening traffic. I wondered if Kusum's capacity to expect things from people was due to her not being raised at home. I said, "We have to live with him. Why be angry?"
    "That's what he's relying on. Be angry. It's a big world. There are a lot of people worth loving. Why waste time on somebody mediocre?"
    In the hospital there was broken glass in the hallways. Someone had urinated in the lift. When we came into the yellow room that

    Pitaji shared with five other men, he was asleep. His face looked like a shiny brown stone. He was on the bed nearest the window. Rajesh stood at the head of the bed. Ma sat at its foot, her back to us, looking out at the bleaching night.
    "He will be all right," I said.
    Turning toward us. Ma said, "When he goes, he wants to make sure we all hurt." She was crying. "I thought I didn't love him, but you can't live this long with a person and not love just a bit. He knew that. When they were bringing him here, he said, 'See what you've done, demoness.' "
    The world slipped from under me. Ma had often said she hated Pitaji. I became dizzy. One second Ma was herself and then, the next second, there was no one in the world who loved me.
    Rajesh took her away. Kusum also left, so that she would not be tired for her laboratory in the morning. I spent the rest of the night awake in a chair next to Pitaji's bed.
    Around eight. Ma returned. While we were there, I kept looking away from her, because it made me too sad to see her face. I went to the flat. In the days that followed, it was I who replaced Ma in the morning. Kusum lived at home while Pitaji was sick, but she came to the hospital only once.
    At night, Kusum, Rajesh, and I slept on adjacent cots on the flat's roof I sometimes played cards with Rajesh before going to bed. Kusum did not join us. Instead, every night, in preparation for going abroad, she read five pages of an English dictionary. She would write down the words she did not know. Kusum did not brag about her work as I might have.
    I had thought I would be anxious alone with Pitaji. After Ma caught Pitaji and me, he and I were rarely together. When we were, it was either in public or with Ma in a nearby room from which she would periodically appear. Her surveillance made me feel that she had no faith in me. Now, despite the other patients in the room with Pitaji, I worried that since only Ma knew how dangerous he was, he might be able to hurt me. Even asleep, Pitaji looked threatening. But the medicines kept him unconscious. When he woke, it was only to ask for water or food, then he fell asleep again. If I did not respond quickly enough to his demands, Pitaji screamed and I cringed.
    Two or three days after I began staying with Pitaji, I was looking out the window at the autorickshaws lined up across the street when Pitaji shouted something at me. I turned to him, saw his mouth opening and closing like a digging machine or a dog, and I thought, I can leave right now. I can be home in twenty minutes in one of the autorickshaws. Suddenly I could see only Pitaji. Everything else vanished in a white rage. I felt as if I were tipping forward.
    In a few hours the anger was gone. Once it stopped, I doubted its intensity.
    When I replaced Ma the next morning, she greeted me by nodding toward Pitaji. "He won't die a natural death," she said with a strange pride.
    The anger came back momentarily. I nearly said, "Let's kill him, then."
    That afternoon Pitaji wasn't able to sleep. He told me again the story of how an exorcist had been called to beat his mother sane. Pitaji had been unable to watch. But he could not leave, for he felt he would be abandoning her. He stood in the doorway of their one-room mud house, looking out as she was beaten behind him. A crowd of children had gathered beyond the front yard. Whenever his mother screamed, the crowd whispered. Pitaji told the story calmly, as if it were someone else he was talking about. When he finished, he changed the topic. But Pitaji had