figure from fable. I looked closer. His skin was soft, with bronze lustre, his face, finely made and feminine, and his prominent lips curled into a smile as mean as an incision. There was something victorious about him. Even as Jhaatkebaal policemen manhandled him, his laughter seemed to ring out. Under his tattered denim jacket, he wore a purple shirt on which, like patriotic explosions on a night sky, were daubs of pink.
And seeing that face smile out at me from its rectangle of newsprint, I yelled once again to Shakti, this time to bring me some milky coffee, and after a year of paralysis and stagnation, of not knowing how I would digest India, I sat down to write of my arrival in Delhi, in those months before summer, the months of flowering trees, when in the icy-white cabin of a Jet Airways flight I had wept tears of fear and joy.
Aatish Taseer
Aatish Taseer was born in Delhi in 1980. He has worked as a reporter for
