Dadiji always said that Meera was "dard deewani", pain-crazy. That was a special madness, created specially for poets and too-much love women. Not like Radha at all, who was love-crazy, satiated by kisses and caresses, fulfilled and brazenly asking for more. I knew about love-crazy women. My mother was one of them, forsaking everyone, her family, her career, her child simply to follow my father all over the world. Waiting for him to come home in the evenings, filling herself with dreams all day, and loving him all night. Everything else in the world was simply a great distraction, something that kept her away from her one sole satisfaction - loving her man. Even me.

But I never understood what pain-crazy was like. Sometimes, I thought of the elephant I had seen my grandfather bring down in the fields in our village-relative house. Its many rooms filled with so many people, all cousins, and uncles and great-uncles, aunts and great-aunts.  All relatives in that house, or at least on the ground floor.

Actually, it was our house too, at least once you climbed the narrow steps up to the upper floors. It rose like a vast pale yellow monster with its red-brown tiled head amidst the brown and ochre mud homes of the village. At the very top was Baba's room, a long hall lined with old photographs and dusty weapons, where a large desk guarded the inner doorway and the tall windows formed a semicircle of vision over the approaches from the city to the north.

You could walk out of the windows into a tiny balcony to get a clear view right up to the mango groves in the distance. The south side of the room also had a window, a tall, floor length French window with beautiful etched glass panes and a heavy mahogany pelmet. Except the south window opened into nothingness. Just a two-story fall onto the hard regular flagstones of the courtyard. "Is this a trap window? For enemies?" I had asked Baba once. He had laughed at the idea.

"I hadn't thought of it, but now that you say so, shall we try to find an enemy to push out of it," he had asked me seriously, once he had stopped laughing. For weeks afterwards, we had tried to find a suitable candidate for pushing out of the south side window. Then we decided, that all of Baba's foes were in the city. And unless one of them could be brought to the village, the window would have to remain un-inaugurated by the enemy.