Fiction: Bubbly is dead, but from somewhere above Chandigarh, she continues to look down at her city

It was the thumb of my left hand that had shot to my mouth soon after I was born, maybe a prescient thumb, the one that indicated a growing thirst. The pink soles of my feet had kicked up a frenzy. Initially, I hadn’t really cried, a failing that pursued me through my life. “Pushpa, I hate tears,” a deified matinee idol had said in a film – a line that became famous in the seventies as an expression of understated emotion quivering in the subconscious but fighting shy of an overt appearance. However, my tear drought had preceded all such popular antagonisms with emotion.

In school, quite inadvertently, they had cast me in the role of the princess who would not cry. The king had sent far and wide for physicians. And needless to say, no one could unplug her tear glands. Finally, a dhaba owner, or an equivalent thereof, set her to chop onions and presto, she was crying. The palace cook was dejected. “Onions, onions, why didn’t I think of onions,” he said, shaking his head sadly, pronouncing the “o” with an “oh” and sculpting onions in the air.

When they tried to dislodge the thumb, I fought valiantly....

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