Powai is fifteen minutes away from Chandivali. Travelling by an autorickshaw, sitting at the edge of the long seat, the left knee almost out of the rickshaw and exposed to the hot exhaust of large, dilapidated, trucks, I can see the city glide, trudge, and slog by me. After taking a winded road embedded with yellow-and-black speedbreakers which trigger irrational anger in me sitting on the top of rusty shock absorbers, the road straightens out and the auto takes me through a rather long stretch of road lined with houses.

The chawl (~slum) is named Munnu Chawl. There are butchers exhibiting their chickens, white and red and covered with what looks like soot from the passing vehicles; their billboards shouting at the world that “party orders” and “hotel orders” will be accepted. The road ends not at sidewalks but at the edge of houses that are like boxes with width, height, and breadth like they have been lifted off a mathematics lesson on volumetry. In some cases they are also badly rendered blender shapes, their walls defying parallels and departing and arriving at the road’s edges as the rickshaw goes by. There is a temple that shares a building with a shop that sells spare parts of what appears to be a strange vehicle, for there are visors of motorcycles and an assorted collection of objects that belongs to not one but many kinds of machines.

Halfway down the road, there is a small alley that leads to another building, green and blue, blocked from my view by other houses. The alley is rather narrow, but spotless and covered by an awning of rows of green cellophane streamers that flutter in the wind. There are also attractive young men wearing caps and well trimmed beards sitting on motorbikes parked nearby. There is one among them whose eyes, even when focused on his smartphone, reminds me of a meend from Tilak Kamod.

It is fifteen to three in the afternoon and there are women sitting on the doorsteps of the houses, their nighties hitched up to the knees, aluminium and steel dishes in front of them on the ground, lathered up and shiny. The younger women’s faces tells me they are in-the-act, their eyes seeing the dishes, the lather, the scrubber. The older ones have eyes that are clouded over by the experience called life which remains largely lived in close proximity to vehicles pumping houses full of the rumbling of engines and suffocating exhaust. There is a woman who must be around seventy-five or more. She is engrossed in the dishes, not far from them, not very close to them either.

The nightie is a dress that is closely attached to the idea of home and erasure of sensuality. It is exchanged for a saree or a churidar when one leaves the home and venture into the world of other men. Seeing the women here on the doorstep, their nighties hitched up, I cannot but think of Those Pricey Thakoor Girls swooning over the abdominal muscles of young rickshaw pullers, glazed by sweat and turgid from exertion.

(Fair warning: if you contact me—not realistic, really—to tell me how ‘male gazy’ this is, I will fantasize about breaking your face and embedding your teeth on your palate, with all due respect. No, I will not discuss this with you.)