Sankar asked me, what have you recently written? I couldn’t report like he does—I have written nine new things, so much indulgence in writing. Sometimes it all becomes empty, and then I am wary, I worry—oh yes, right there is the mirror of allure, about which the professor has repeatedly warned me, it shows the same image with different frills and incrementally increasing glamor each day.

How have I ever written anything new, it’s a real surprise! My brain is brimming with letters: what is the most recent crisis in the Middle-East, how legal might a gherao be, which fancy shops showcase those terylene shirts collected during the famine, the name of that robust girl, love, the many waves in a string of pearls. Where is poetry, inside, outside, where! So many obscene words all around, such restlessness in lowly homes, so much coffee and cacophony in my head—drowning the bite of trusted teeth.

I haven’t written anything new. Having made many fingerprints through the dust on that car at the mouth of the alley, Sankar eventually left.