Tuesday, November 8

On Tuesdays, Simi, Lekshmi and I run two DGD Junior sessions for children at a local school and then a local nursery. We have a routine. Rajeev collects me with my rucksack full of tricks and drops me at a bus shelter twenty metres from Bethel School. He then drives off to collect Simi and then Lekshmi from their homes and brings them to the bus shelter, and disappears. He returns in an hour and takes the three of us to the anganwadi. He comes back there in another hour and takes Lekshmi and Simi home while I walk one hundred metres uphill to Sarovaram.

I sit in the bus shelter waiting and watch a cat sitting in front of a rickshaw.

Until recently rickshaws had no doors, and most of them still don’t. Rajeev’s doesn’t. In the last couple of years a new, slightly larger model called Maxima has appeared, and it does have doors on both sides, although only the one on the left hand side actually works.

I watch the Maxima while the cat watches me.