Ah, the bus stand outside Rankala—yesterday I saw a young father, his bachcha on his hip, drop his coin pouch into the drain trying to fish out the exact fare. A chai-wala just handed him the change, no words exchanged. You see, in this city of milky mornings, the meter of a rickshaw still reads honest, and the postman still knows your name by heart. But the school fees for the NGO children in Kolhapur have jumped again; the government says it will look into it—as it has for three years. My granddaughter’s new Marathi poem is about a steam engine that never stops; I think she’s writing about us here, waiting for the train that should have left yesterday.

Yesterday at the Rankala Lake, I saw a young boy—maybe twelve—practicing his aim with a borrowed air pistol at the reeds. His father stood behind him, not saying a word, just holding a tiffin of pohe. That boy will need a dozen permissions, forms, and gun licenses before he can even hope to touch a national camp. And we wonder why our shooters lose their spark in the gap between the village ground and the committee room. Achha, we ask for shanti, but the true shanti comes when the paperwork doesn't kill the dream before the trigger is pulled.