to Ma, nervously scratching his man-parts when Ma’s head is turned.
Runu-Didi and I wait on our doorstep, a single blanket pulled up over our heads, prickling our skin. “Sit still,” Didi says each time I stretch my legs to stop them from falling asleep.
I wonder what the gods want from us. Maybe a bigger hafta like our basti police. Maybe a grander puja than Thumper-Baba’s. Maybe it was grand enough and the gods just don’t care about us. Maybe maybe maybe. I’m sick of maybes.
“There they are,” Didi says and stands up. Her side of the blanket falls to the ground. I try to fold the blanket so that Ma won’t be angry with us for dirtying it, but it’s heavy and spiky and it feels like I’m trying to smush a thorny kikar tree and my fingers hurt. It makes me sad that I’m too small to do even such a stupid thing. Tears burn my eyes.
“Don’t cry,” Runu-Didi says. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“I’m not crying.”
Didi takes the blanket from my hands, and her training must have made her strong because she forces it to behave and folds it neatly in seconds.
Papa picks me up. I’m not such a small child that I should be carried around, but I press my face against his neck. I can hear his breathing. It’s loud and panting, like Samosa’s. Torch beams swing around the alley, lighting one half of a satellite dish, a quarter of a washing line on which someone has hung their clothes to dry, pigeons waking up on rooftops and fluttering their wings.
“Fatima’s buffalo,” Shanti-Chachi says, her voice cracking like glass, “it’s dead. Beheaded.”
I look up. When butchers like Afsal-Chacha kill animals, it’s only to eat them. Nobody would want to eat Buffalo-Baba. Even a useless man like Drunkard Laloo considers him God.
Shanti-Chachi has slipped her hand into the crook of her husband’s elbow. Runu-Didi draws half-circles on the ground with her right foot.
“Someone left the buffalo’s head on Fatima’s doorstep,” Papa says.
“Fatima can’t stop crying,” Shanti-Chachi says. “She loved that buffalo like a child. It gave her nothing, not even enough dung for a day’s fuel. Still she spent so much money feeding it.”
Papa puts me down, and I run into our house. I slide under Ma-Papa’s bed. I’m brave in the day, but my braveness doesn’t like to come out at night. It’s sleeping, I think.
“Jai, what are you doing?” Ma asks. She has followed me into the house.
I must look ekdum-stupid. Only half of me fits under the bed because of the bags and sacks she has stored in her cave. Ma kneels down. “Come out, sona,” she says. She calls me sona only when she loves me more than anyone else in the whole world. Ma removes the Parachute tub from the pallu of her sari, and she wipes the dust from under the bed off my face with the sari’s edge. I wriggle out so that she can clean me properly. Ma returns the Parachute tub to the shelf. Papa and Didi come inside.
“Did a djinn eat Buffalo-Baba?” I ask.
“There are no djinns, Jai,” Papa says. “It’s the work of goondas. The buffalo’s head was cut neatly with a sword. There are bloody tracks going up and down Fatima-ben’s alley.”
Djinns don’t need weapons. They can behead people just by thinking about it.
“The Hindu Samaj boys must have killed Buffalo-Baba because he’s Fatima-ben’s,” Runu-Didi says. “To teach Muslims a lesson.”
“We worship cows,” Ma says. “Our people would never do such a horrible thing.”
“Everyone knows the Samaj boys have swords,” Didi says. “They bring them out during riots. We saw it on the news, haan, Papa?”
“I’m going back to Fatima’s,” Papa says. “The poor woman is so shocked.”
“Don’t do that,” Ma pleads. “Don’t go out—who knows what horrible thing will happen next?”
But Papa has already put on his outside sweater and a monkey cap. “At least take a muffler,” Ma says. “It’s very cold outside.”
“Madhu, meri jaan, will you leave the worrying to me for once?”
Runu-Didi looks embarrassed like she always does when Papa calls Ma his life or his liver or his heartbeat. But it makes me feel safe.
Ma puts a muffler around Papa’s neck as if it’s a garland and she’s marrying him again.
I can’t believe Buffalo-Baba is gone. He never hurt anybody, not even the flies that went buzzing round and round his eyes for hours until they got tired and dropped dead right between his horns.
* *