The tell tale signs are all present,
the stubborn frown, the suppression
of superficiality and the puckered palms
clenched into fists.

He squints and reads the new notice,
the glare of the sun glancing off his
brow, marked by the eddies and rifts
of tenacious time. The language is the
same. It never changes. Frowning
legalese that tries terrible threats.

He tears it off the door in one quick motion,
an economy of movement in everything. He
looks around. Blank windows stare back at him.
But he knows. He can already hear the whispers
begin their weekly workout. The circuit they made

he knew by heart. Mrs. Ranade would flag off the
rally first. The whispers would then pass to her follower
in flattery, Mrs. Khulchatri. Then they would jump across
the street to the blue windows of Mrs. Patel. There the
whispers would rest and strengthen until afternoon
lengthened her shadow. They would then pass next door
to the Telugu teacher, Mrs. Reddy, an anomaly of the
neighborhood but never slacking in her weekly devotion.
Finally, they would cross the finish line and fall into the
enormous lap of Mrs. Sen. The collector of the cohort.
The dispenser of decrees that began or ended a rumor.
The final authority on all that passed behind every door.
She would collate and process, dot the i’, cross out the t’s
and erase the e’s.

In her domain his case would rest. His eligibility to continue
in a neighborhood where respectability must be as red as the
sindhoor on Mrs. Khulchatri’s forehead. A neighborhood that
restricted the right of single men to private conversations.

He shrugs his mulish shoulders and passes into the house.
His action would gain momentum, gather grist along the way
and increase its aura of defiance. Tongues would wag in the
wake of whispers determined to have the upper hand.

He does not care. He washes his face and drinks a glass of nimbu
pani. He changes into comfortable clothes, goes out on to the
cooling terrace partly covered by a fresh evening shadow and
in full view of the locality matrons unzips his pants and to the
sound of Madonna moaning begins to masturbate.