‘A Love Song for Jude’: Flash fiction by writer Iffat Nawaz

The day 60-some-year-old Baby left Jude’s home, he had marked it as another reason to leave Bombay. Bombay his city of birth, his parents’ too.

“Bombay doesn’t love you easily. Bombay demands your energy, focus. The only way to be with this city is to fall in love with it.” Jude had started believing this, he found ample evidence to strengthen the theory.

Was he no more in love with Bombay then? It’s hard to tell these things when one has been in love since the very beginning of life, when love for a place and its curated virtues and assets have been passed down as inheritance.

Baby had started working at Jude’s home when he was 12 years old, he is on the younger side of his fifties now. And because he has a knack for knowing a lot about things one would imagine otherwise irrelevant to him, also because he had seen his mother age with ailments and knows how a woman’s body is capable of betraying her, Jude knew Baby had either caught an early onset of dementia, or a vitamin B and calcium deficiency. Baby’s bent back was a cliched signature for many women of her age and making, housemaids working for...

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