“What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?” The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. “You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?” she asked. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, he said, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. Long ago a man who knew English told her that her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. It was only after Ziauddin, the blind imam who had once led the prayers in the Fatehpuri Masjid, befriended her and began to visit her that the neighbourhood decided it was time to leave her in peace. When people called her names – clown without a circus, queen without a palace – she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain. She didn’t turn to see which small boy had thrown a stone at her, didn’t crane her neck to read the insults scratched into her bark. When she first moved in, she endured months of casual cruelty like a tree would – without flinching. She gathered they weren’t altogether unhappy at having excused themselves and exited from the story. She felt the gentle grip of their talons like an ache in an amputated limb.

Between shifts she conferred with the ghosts of vultures that loomed in her high branches. At dawn she saw the crows off and welcomed the bats home.

Chapter one: Where do old birds go to die?

The ministry of utmost happiness book