Prompt Side

Prompt Side

For the record, I did not volunteer.

I am writing that first because I spend my working days writing down exactly who said what, and I know how a sentence can drift once three people have repeated it in a parking lot. By Thanksgiving the version going around the Edison Marathi association was that Vaijayanti Kulkarni had raised her hand at the September meeting and asked to be the prompter. That is not what happened. What happened is that Dattatray Joshi, seventy-six years old, in a gray sweater vest with a pen clipped to the neck of it, stood at the front of Meeting Room B in the public library on Plainfield Avenue, held up a book the color of weak tea, and said, "We will need someone in the wings who can follow every word without falling asleep. Vaiju types for judges. Vaiju will do it."

Then he moved on to the question of the auditorium deposit, and the room let him, because that is how it goes with Datta-kaka. He arranges your life in a subordinate clause.

It was the third Sunday of September, with the Ganpati days still on in a good many houses, and someone had brought a steel box of leftover modak, the steamed kind with pleated tops, a little hard now at the tips. They sat on the table beside the sign-up sheet for the January picnic that nobody ever signs up for in September. Forty-one people were in the room; I counted later, from the attendance sheet.

The book in his hand was a script. Not a photocopy, not a printout from somebody's nephew in Thane, but an actual printed copy of a play called Sangeet Saudamini, by a man named Balkrishna Wagle, published in Pune in 1931 by a press on Laxmi Road that no longer exists. The cover had a drawing of a lightning bolt over a river, done in two inks, the red faded to the pink of a healed scrape. The spine had been mended with brown packing tape at some point in the 1980s, and the tape had gone hard and glassy. When Datta-kaka opened it, a smell came out that I can only describe as an old school cupboard in the rains: paper, damp, a ghost of camphor.

"My father saw this play in one of the old theaters in the peths in 1946," he said. "He told me the second-act song was encored nine times. People shouted once more, once more, until the actress laughed and sat down on the stage. Nobody has staged it in America. Nobody has staged it anywhere since 1970, as far as I can find. We are going to do it in January."

There was a pause in which forty people looked at the forty-first person, who was him.

A natak with natya sangeet is not a small thing to put on. For anyone who did not grow up with it: these are the musical plays of the old Marathi stage, where the story stops so that a character can sing a pada, a stage song in a classical raga, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for twenty if the audience will not let it end. The language is not the Marathi we speak in our kitchens. It is a heightened, ornamented Marathi, full of Sanskrit words, built for a voice to lean into. My grandfather could recite whole speeches from these plays while shaving. My mother hums the songs while she cleans rice. I, who was born in Pune and lived there until I was twenty-three, cannot read a page of that script aloud without stumbling twice.

"Datta-kaka," said Prasad Pendse from the third row, raising one finger the way he does, as though the meeting were a lab and he had spotted a contamination. "With respect. Who is going to sing?"

"Gauri," said Datta-kaka.

Gauri Paranjpe, who was standing at the back with her coat still on because she had come directly from a shift drawing blood at the hospital in New Brunswick, said, "Who?"

"You sang at the Diwali program in 2019. Bhimpalas. You held the komal ga without wobbling."

"I was twenty-six. I sang four minutes. I had a lyric sheet taped to the floor."

"So we will tape a sheet to the floor," said Datta-kaka, and moved on to the costume budget.

I want to be fair to the room. People had reasons to say no. Edison in September is a town of people with two jobs and a child in travel soccer. The Marathi association had done skits before, short comedies in the spoken style, one act, forty minutes, usually about a father-in-law who cannot work the television remote. Nobody had tried a full musical play in the old literary language. Nobody had wanted to, because to try it was to find out in public how much of the language we had lost.

But there was also something in that tea-colored book that pulled at the room. I watched it happen. Rohini Sathe, who taught geography in Kolhapur for thirty years before moving here to be near her grandchildren, reached out and touched the cover with two fingers, the way you touch a sleeping baby to see if it is warm. Mukund Bhide, who plays harmonium at every function and who had been quietly eating a modak in the corner, put the rest of it in his mouth and wiped his hands on a paper napkin and said nothing, which for Mukund is a kind of yes.

The vote was not really a vote. It was Datta-kaka saying, "Good, we are agreed," into a silence, and Prasad saying, "Agreed is a strong word," and the treasurer, Mrs. Apte, writing something down.

Afterward, in the parking lot, under a sky still holding the heat of the day, Datta-kaka found me by my car. The lot behind the library smells in September of cut grass and hot asphalt and, faintly, of the fryer at the dumpling place next to it. He handed me the book.

"You will need this more than I will," he said. "I know it by heart. Mostly."

"Kaka, I am a court reporter. I take down speech as it happens. I do not feed people their lines."

"It is the same job turned around," he said. "In court, someone speaks and you catch it. In the wings, you hold it out before they fall. You already have the ears. And you have the patience. You sit for six hours listening to men argue about a fence line. You can sit for three hours listening to Ani forget his verbs."

"Ani is in this?"

"Ani will be in this," he said, with the certainty of a man who had driven school buses through sixteen New Jersey winters and then run the depot that dispatched them. That was his job here, for twenty-two years: the dispatcher at a bus yard in Woodbridge, the voice on the radio at five in the morning telling forty drivers which roads were iced. He knew everyone's route. He still talks as though he can see all of us from a high window, moving along our lines.

I took the book home. That night, after Hemant was asleep and Ketaki had gone into her room with the door shut and the light leaking under it, I sat at the kitchen table and opened it.

The paper was so soft at the edges it felt like cloth. Someone had underlined passages in pencil and then, in a different decade, in blue ballpoint. In the margin of the second act, beside a long speech by the heroine, someone had written in a small, upright Devanagari hand: breathe here, not before. On the inside of the back cover, in the same hand, a list of numbers that I eventually understood were the running times of each act at some performance: 52, 71, 48. No year. No name.

I read the first scene. It took me forty minutes. I timed it. The words were not hard the way legal Latin is hard. They were hard the way a cousin is hard to recognize after twenty years. I knew them. I had heard them. They had been in rooms with me as a girl, coming out of my grandfather's mouth and out of the brass horn of the radio in our wada in Narayan Peth. But I had not used them. A word you have only heard is like a room you have only seen through a door.

At some point Ketaki came out for water. She is seventeen and has the gift, which I never had, of moving through a house without making the floorboards say anything.

"Why are you reading a dead book?" she said, in English.

"It is a play. We are going to do it."

"Who's we?"

"The mandal. In January. At the middle school."

She leaned over my shoulder and looked at the page. Ketaki speaks Marathi the way many children of our street do: with her grandmother on Sunday calls, with her father when he is cooking, in the words for things that have no English equal, like the particular sulk of a person who wants to be begged. She cannot read Devanagari fast. She can read it the way I read Spanish on a cereal box.

"That letter looks like a person sitting down," she said, pointing.

"That is jha."

"It looks tired."

"It is ninety-five years old. Go to bed."

She did not go to bed. She stood there and read, slowly, under her breath, the first line of the play, which is a stage direction: the creek at dusk, the ferry tied up, the sound of rain coming down the ghat. She read it wrong in two places. I did not correct her. That was my first night as a prompter, and my first lesson, though I did not know it yet: you do not throw the line until the actor has truly stopped. If you throw it too soon, they never learn they could have found it.

The next morning Datta-kaka sent a message to the whole association asking for scans of any old programs from Marathi events in New Jersey going back to the 1970s. The association has a shared archive online, kept by Mrs. Apte with the stern tenderness of a woman who was a records clerk at a county office for twenty-eight years. She keeps some folders open to all members and some closed, visible only to the committee, because there was an unpleasant business years ago involving a photograph of somebody's ex-husband. Within a week people had added forty-three programs. One of them was from 1978, a natak staged in the basement of a community hall in Jersey City, the cast list typed on a manual typewriter with the e's filled in solid. Datta-kaka's name was on it, fourth from the bottom, in the role of a servant who enters to announce dinner.

He did not mention it. Mrs. Apte did, in a comment under the scan, with three exclamation marks, which for her is shouting.

I went to work that Monday at the county courthouse on Paterson Street. Nine-thirty start, a motion hearing on a landlord dispute, and then the afternoon on a deposition in a conference room that smelled of burnt coffee and the vinyl of new chairs. My stenotype sat on its tripod in front of me, the keys making their soft, padded chatter. A stenographer writes by sound, in chords, not letters, building each word out of the shapes it makes in the mouth. I have done it for twenty-six years. On the train home from New Brunswick to Metuchen, I took out Wagle's play and tried to read it the way I write: not word by word, but by the shape of the breath.

It went a little faster.

At home, Hemant had made poha with too many peanuts, the way he likes, and was standing at the stove with a dish towel over his shoulder telling Ketaki about a pool in Colonia whose owner wanted the tiles replaced with a mosaic of his own face. Hemant builds and repairs swimming pools. In winter he has little to do, and he gets restless, and when he is restless he builds things nobody asked for. I told him about the play.

"A real natak," he said. "With an organ?"

"Harmonium. Mukund."

"He'll need a platform. You can't put a harmonium on a cafeteria table in a school, it'll sound like it's in a box. I'll make him something with a riser. And you'll need a place to sit in the wings. A stool won't do for three hours."

"Datta-kaka said I would sit on a folding chair."

"Datta-kaka is seventy-six and has never sat still for three hours in his life," Hemant said, and wrote something on the back of an envelope.

So that is how it began: with a book that smelled of a monsoon cupboard, a director who decided things into being, a singer who had not agreed, a harmonium player who had said nothing, a husband sketching a chair on an envelope, and me, who had not volunteered, sitting at my kitchen table with my finger under one line at a time, reading a language I had been born into and somehow had to learn to enter, at fifty-seven, like a guest.

Heel and Key

Mukund Bhide's shop is a kiosk at the end of a strip mall on Route 27, between a nail salon and a store that sells phone cases and, for reasons nobody has explained to me, bird seed. The sign says HEEL & KEY in red letters on white plastic, and under it, in smaller letters that Mukund painted himself, SHOE REPAIR, KEYS CUT, WATCH BATTERIES, BELTS SHORTENED. Inside it is about the size of a walk-in closet. There is a grinding wheel for keys, a treadle stitcher older than me, a wall of blanks hanging on pegs like a xylophone made of brass, and a smell of leather dressing, contact cement and the lemon oil he rubs into his hands at the end of the day.

And in the corner, on a shelf he built above the polish tins, there is a harmonium.

It is a Pune harmonium, made in the 1960s by a workshop near Tulshibaug, with a teak case gone almost black and reeds that Mukund says came from Paris before the war, though I suspect every harmonium player says that about his reeds. When there are no customers he takes it down and plays. Not loudly. The bellows breathe in and out like an animal sleeping, and the notes come out under the hum of the fluorescent tube and the traffic on 27, and if you are standing outside the nail salon waiting for your daughter you can hear, very faintly, a raga leaking through the glass.

I went there the Wednesday after the meeting, with a pair of Kolhapuri chappals that needed a new toe strap, which was only half an excuse.

"Vaiju-tai," he said, not getting up. He was pressing a heel onto a woman's boot with a hand press, his reading glasses on the end of his nose. "Sit. There is no chair. Sit on the counter."

I stood. He finished the boot, wrote a ticket in a neat hand, hung the boot on a hook, and only then looked at me properly. Mukund is sixty-four, thin, with a gray moustache he keeps very short and a way of looking at you over his glasses that makes you feel you have been weighed.

"You read it?" he said.

"The first act. Slowly."

"Slowly is correct. It is not a newspaper." He reached under the counter and brought out a steel thermos with a dent in the side. "Sol kadhi. My wife made it this morning. Have some, then we will talk."

He poured it into a paper cup. It was that color I have never seen anywhere else in nature, the pink of the inside of a conch, with little green flecks of coriander floating on top. Kokum soaked and squeezed, coconut milk, a crushed clove of garlic, a slit green chili, salt. Cold, sour, faintly sweet, with a burn at the very back that arrives a second after you swallow. I had not had it in a year. It tasted the way the Konkan coast smells after rain, which is to say salt and wet laterite and coconut husk smoke, and I had to put the cup down for a moment.

"Devgad?" I asked. I knew his family was from somewhere near there.

"Near Devgad. A village you will not find unless I take you. The kokum tree is behind my uncle's house, still. My cousin dries the fruit on the roof every April. You have seen it? The rinds go from red to black in the sun. The roof looks like it is covered in burnt flowers." He took the cup from me and poured himself one. "My wife's kokum comes in a parcel from him. Customs once opened it and put a note in that said agricultural product inspected. My wife framed the note."

I laughed. He did not, but his moustache moved.

The kiosk door opened. A young man came in with a set of keys and a request for three copies, and I stood aside while Mukund clamped each blank into the cutter and ran it along the original. The grinding made a high, gritty whine and threw off a smell of hot brass. He blew the shavings off, filed the edges smooth with two quick strokes, tested each one in a lock he keeps screwed to the counter for that purpose, and charged six dollars.

"Now," he said, when the young man had gone. "The music."

He took down the harmonium and set it on the counter, on top of a folded towel, and opened the bellows. He did not play a song. He played a single note, and then the note above it, and then he looked at me.

"Do you know the problem with this play?" he said.

"Nobody can speak it?"

"That also. But that is your problem, and Datta's. My problem is that nobody has written down the music. Not properly. Wagle wrote the words of the songs. He wrote the name of the raga at the top of each one. But in those days the singer made the tune. The music lived in the singer's throat and the organ player's fingers. When they died, it went with them, unless someone in the audience remembered it and sang it to their children in the kitchen."

He opened a drawer under the counter and took out a school notebook, the kind with a picture of a cricketer on the front, and opened it. Inside, in pencil, were lines of sargam, the sa re ga ma of Indian notation, written out in Devanagari, with little dashes and loops over some of the syllables.

"My mother sang the second-act song," he said. "Not on any stage. In our house in Devgad, grinding rice for bhakri in the morning. She learned it from her mother, who saw the play in Ratnagiri in 1938 when a touring company came. That is all. One song. I have written down what I remember of how she sang it. The rest of the songs, I will have to make, the way they made them. From the raga. From the words. From what fits Gauri's throat."

"Can you do that?"

He looked at me over his glasses again.

"Vaiju-tai. I cut keys. Every key I cut is a copy of a key someone else made. Every one is a little different, if you look with a glass. Still the door opens." He closed the notebook. "Yes, I can do that. It will not be the same as 1931. Nobody alive knows what 1931 was. It will be a key that opens the door."

That evening I had my chappals back, the new strap stitched in a tan leather that did not quite match the old, and I had something else that I did not ask for: a list, in Mukund's careful hand, of the six songs in the play and the raga for each, and beside each one either the word mother, or the word remembered from a record, or the word nothing. Four of the six said nothing.

On the drive home I went the long way, down 27 past the Metuchen line and then back up, because I wanted to think. Strip malls on that road in the evening have a particular look: the lit signs in a row, a dentist, a tax preparer, a karate dojo, a pizza place, a Korean bakery with cream buns in the window, a Gujarati sweets shop with trays of barfi under glass, a donut shop, a dialysis center, all of it laid out in a straight line under a sky going violet over the parking lots. When I first came to New Jersey in 1992, I thought these places were the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I missed the crooked lanes of the peths, the wooden balconies leaning over the street, the wadas with their courtyards where the light came down like water into a well. Now I find the strip malls almost restful. Everything in them is what it says it is. HEEL & KEY. TAX & NOTARY. You know what door to go through.

At home I sat at the computer in the corner of the dining room and opened our family's private space online, the one Hemant's cousin set up three years ago, where relatives are added one branch at a time and everyone argues about whose photograph of the great-grandfather is the original. There is a map in it, where people have put pins on the places that matter: Hemant's grandfather's house in Satara, my mother's wada in Narayan Peth, a hospital in Mumbai where three cousins were born, a bus stop in Kothrud where Hemant proposed to me in 1991 in a downpour, which he insisted on pinning and captioning, although I have asked him twice to delete it.

I did not add anything that night. I only looked. But I thought of Mukund's cousin's roof in Devgad covered with drying kokum like burnt flowers, and his mother at the grinding stone in the morning, singing a song from a play she had never seen, and I understood that what Datta-kaka had handed us was not a script. It was a ruin, like the walls of Shaniwar Wada, where you walk through the Delhi Gate into a great empty space with only foundations and fountains left, and a guide tells you, here was a hall of mirrors, here a lotus fountain that once threw water from a great many jets, and you stand on the bare stone and try to see it.

Mukund was going to try to rebuild a hall of mirrors from one song his mother sang at the grinding stone.

The first music rehearsal was the following Sunday, in Mukund's living room in Iselin, a narrow townhouse three blocks from Oak Tree Road, so close you could smell the sweet shops frying jalebi when the wind was right. Mukund's wife, Sulabha, had cleared the coffee table and put down a white sheet on the carpet so that people could sit on the floor in the old way. Gauri came in her hospital scrubs again, purple ones with a pattern of small cartoon bandages, and apologized, and sat on the sheet with her knees up. Omkar Sawant came with his tabla in a padded case, a skinny boy of twenty-two from Malvan by way of Piscataway, a student at Rutgers studying, of all things, turfgrass science.

"Grass," said Mukund, when he heard. "You are studying grass."

"Golf courses, mostly. Athletic fields. The genetics of drought tolerance." Omkar unzipped the case and lifted out the drums, the small wooden dayan and the big copper bayan, and set them on their cloth rings. "Rutgers is very famous for it, kaka. People come from everywhere."

"I did not know grass needed a university."

"Everything needs a university now," said Sulabha from the kitchen, and brought out tea in small cups and a plate of shankarpali, little diamonds of fried sweet dough, crisp and pale gold, that left a dust of sugar on your fingers.

Mukund played the first song for Gauri. Only the harmonium, no words. Then he sang it, in a voice that was not good, cracked at the top, but true, the voice of a man who has listened more than he has performed. Then he said, "Now you."

Gauri looked at the lyric sheet in her lap. I had typed it for her, in large Devanagari, with the long vowels marked, the way I would prepare an exhibit for a jury.

She opened her mouth and sang the first line, and stopped.

"I don't know what it means," she said. "I mean, I know the words. Rain, mountain, waiting. But the third word. I've never heard it."

Everybody looked at me. I had been dreading that. In court, if I do not know a word, I do not guess. I mark it and ask afterward.

"I'll ask," I said.

"Ask who?"

"My mother."

So that night I called my mother in Pune, where it was already morning, and she answered on the second ring with the radio playing behind her, and I heard the specific echo of her voice in the front room of the wada, bouncing off the old lime plaster and the high wooden ceiling, and I asked her what the word meant. She laughed at me for ten seconds before she answered.

In our family, she said, that word had always meant the sound of rain on a tiled roof heard from inside, at night, by someone who cannot sleep. Her grandmother used it that way, and so did everyone in the wada. Whether Wagle meant the same thing, or whether any dictionary would agree, she could not say and did not care.

So it is our family's word more than the language's. There is no English for it. But Gauri sang it the next Sunday as though she had been lying awake listening to that rain all week, and Mukund, at the harmonium, did not say anything, but he closed his eyes and his moustache moved, and Omkar, who had been sitting with his hands flat on his drums waiting for the rhythm to begin, did not begin, because he did not want to cover her.

Tambda Rassa

Casting happened over misal, because everything important in the Edison Marathi world eventually happens over misal at Shankar Kamble's counter.

His place is called Tambda Rassa, which means red gravy, and it is in a strip mall on Route 1 in a unit that used to be a mattress store. The mattress store's sign is still on the back wall, painted over in white but showing through like a watermark when the afternoon sun comes in sideways: SLEEP. Shankar never bothered to paint it again. He says it is good advice after his food.

The misal is Kolhapuri style, which is to say it will hurt you. A steel bowl of matki usal, the little brown moth beans sprouted and cooked soft with onion and coconut and goda masala, and over that he ladles the kat, the thin red gravy with a slick of oil on top so dark it is almost maroon, and over that a handful of farsan, the fried crunchy mix of gram flour noodles and puffed rice, then raw chopped onion, coriander, a lemon wedge on the side. Two soft pav, buttered and toasted on the flat griddle until they have brown rings. You tear the pav, you dip it, you take the first bite, and for about four seconds you think you have made a terrible decision. Then the heat settles down into a kind of warmth, and the sourness of the lemon cuts through, and the crunch of the farsan goes soft in the gravy, and you understand why people drive from Princeton for it on Saturday mornings.

There is a squeeze bottle of extra kat on every table. Only the Kolhapur people use it.

Datta-kaka had commandeered the long table at the back on the last Saturday of September. Prasad was there, and Gauri, and Rohini Sathe, who had agreed to do the makeup and the costumes and who had brought a notebook full of measurements already, and Mukund, and Omkar, and me with the script and a pad. Ani Deshpande was late. Ani is always late, because his work is driving around three counties photographing other people's dented cars. He is an insurance adjuster for auto claims. He gets to know every fender in central New Jersey personally.

"He will be Madhav," said Datta-kaka, before Ani had even arrived.

"Has he agreed?" said Gauri.

"He has a good voice for speaking. He has a face for a clerk who falls in love. And his grandmother is from Malvan. He has the coast in his mouth whether he likes it or not."

Ani arrived twenty minutes later in a company polo shirt with a clipboard under his arm, smelling of the cold air and of the inside of a car with a pine freshener in it. He was twenty-eight, broad shouldered, a former high school wrestler who now has a slight belly he is defensive about. He sat down, ordered a misal with extra farsan, and was told he would be the male lead in a ninety-five-year-old musical play.

"I have literally never acted," he said, in English.

"Good," said Datta-kaka. "Then you have nothing to unlearn."

"Kaka, my Marathi is, like. It's kitchen Marathi. It's my aaji yelling at me to eat."

"That is the best Marathi there is," said Rohini, who has a way of settling arguments by agreeing with both sides. "We will put the stage Marathi on top of it, like a coat."

Ani looked at me. I don't know why. Perhaps because I was holding the script.

"You will have me," I said. "In the wings. If you forget, I will tell you."

"What if I forget everything?"

"Then I will tell you everything," I said. "Very quietly."

The rest of the casting went the way Datta-kaka had already decided it would. Gauri as Saudamini, the ferryman's daughter in a creek village below the ghats. Ani as Madhav, the young clerk sent from Pune to survey a new road over the mountain. Prasad as Bhau, the comic, a clerk at the ferry landing who collects tolls and gossip in equal amounts and thinks of himself as a great poet. Datta-kaka himself as Annaji, Saudamini's father, the old ferryman. A woman named Smita Ghaisas, who had acted in college in Nagpur, as Saudamini's aunt. Two teenagers from the association as villagers, if their parents could be made to drive them.

That left the boy. In Wagle's play there is a messenger, a village boy called Bal who runs between the ferry and the hill road carrying letters, who has three short scenes and one song, a little comic song about the mountain being too tall for his legs.

"Ketaki," said Datta-kaka.

I put down my pav.

"She is seventeen," I said. "She is a girl. She does not want to."

"Bal was played by girls half the time in the old companies, when they could not find a boy who could sing. And she has a clean voice. I heard her at the Gudi Padwa program in April, singing the school song. She was annoyed the whole time, but in tune." He tore his pav carefully in half. "Ask her."

"She will say no."

"Then she will say no. Ask her anyway."

While we were arguing, the door to the kitchen swung open and Shankar's mother came out.

I need to describe Sakhubai Kamble properly, because she matters more to this story than any of us knew that afternoon. She was eighty-one. She was small, perhaps four foot ten, and she wore a nauvari, the nine-yard sari draped in the old Maharashtrian way, tucked between the legs so you can work and walk and climb in it, a green cotton one with a narrow red border, faded by washing to the color of a lime leaf. Her hair was white and pulled back tight. She had a nose ring, a small one, gold, and her forearms were thin and ropy and strong, because she still rolled every pav that came out of her son's kitchen. On her feet she wore Kolhapuri chappals so old they had gone the dark of strong tea, molded exactly to her feet, the toe loops worn thin and shiny.

She came out with a tray of fresh pav and put it down on our table without being asked. Then she stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the tea-colored book lying open in front of me.

"Saudamini," she said. Not a question.

Datta-kaka looked up. "You know it, Sakhu-bai?"

She said something in a Marathi so thick with the Kolhapur countryside that even I needed a moment. It was a village Marathi, with the vowels flattened and the verbs chopped short, full of words that would make a Pune grammarian wince. What she said, more or less, was: I didn't know it. I heard it. Different thing.

Then she went back into the kitchen.

Shankar came out a minute later, wiping his hands on his apron, which said in English, HOT HOT HOT. He is fifty-five, heavy, cheerful, with forearms covered in old small burns. He sat down at the end of our table and lowered his voice.

"My mother was in tamasha," he said. "You know? When she was young. A troupe from near Kagal. She danced lavani. She traveled with them for eleven years, every season, village to village, the jatras, the fairs. Then she married my father and stopped, and she never talked about it for forty years, because, you know." He waved a hand. "People were not kind about tamasha women. Even in our own family. My father's sisters, the things they said."

Lavani, for anyone who does not know, is the great folk dance-song form of Maharashtra, quick and teasing and full of sharp wit, sung and danced by women in nauvari saris to the beat of the dholki drum, with ankle bells, ghungroo, on both feet so that the footwork is a second rhythm under the drum. Tamasha is the traveling folk theater that grew up around it: a troupe with a comic, a dancer, a singer, musicians, playing for village audiences who talked back, shouted, threw coins. It was the people's stage, while natak, the kind of play Wagle wrote, was the city stage, the respectable one, with tickets and seats. The two lived side by side for generations, looking sideways at each other.

"She says she has heard Saudamini," I said. "But the play has not been staged since 1970."

"Not the play." Shankar shook his head. "The songs. Some tamasha troupes would take songs from the famous nataks and make their own versions. Faster, funnier, with new words. The audience would know the real song and laugh at the changes. My mother says her troupe did a song from Saudamini every season. The song about the boy and the mountain."

Bal's song. Ketaki's song, if Ketaki said yes.

I looked at the kitchen door. Through the round window in it I could see Sakhubai at the steel counter, rolling pav dough into balls with the heel of her hand, fast, eight at a time, lining them up on a floured tray like soldiers.

"Would she sing it for us?" said Mukund. He had been silent through all of this. He had his cricketer notebook out and his pencil ready.

Shankar laughed, but not unkindly.

"Kaka, she will not even sing it for me. When I was a boy, I found her ghungroo in a trunk. Two strings of bells, very heavy, the leather gone stiff. I put them on and ran around the house, and she took them off me and I never saw them again. I was eight. She did not say one word." He stood up. "But she is listening. She is always listening. She heard you through the kitchen wall say Saudamini, and she came out. That is the first time in my life she has come out of the kitchen for a play."

When I got home that evening, I found Ketaki on the couch with her laptop on her knees and her feet up on the arm, doing chemistry homework with a cooking show playing on the television on mute. I sat down at the other end. I did not ask her right away. I am a stenographer. I know that most people answer better if you let them speak first.

"How was the meeting?" she said, eventually, without looking up.

"Datta-kaka wants you to play a boy."

That got her to look up.

"A boy."

"A messenger boy. Bal. He runs up and down a mountain with letters. He has three scenes and one song. The song is about the mountain being too tall."

"In the dead language."

"In Marathi."

"Aai. In the hard Marathi."

"Some of it," I said. "The song is easier. It was a tamasha song too, apparently. Shankar's mother used to sing a version of it. In a traveling show. In the 1960s. She danced lavani."

Ketaki closed the laptop halfway.

"Sakhu-aaji? From the misal place? She danced?"

Aaji means grandmother, and the children of our street fasten it to the name of any woman old enough to be one.

"For eleven years."

"She never talks."

"She talked today. Three words. Then she went back to the kitchen."

Ketaki was quiet for a while. On the television a man was folding butter into dough with a rolling pin, over and over, the layers multiplying. I watched it with her. I did not say anything else. I have learned that a pause can do most of the work, in court and at home.

"If I do it," she said at last, "I'm not wearing a moustache."

"Bal is a boy. Boys in villages do not have moustaches."

"And I'm not doing it for Datta-kaka. He just decides things."

"I know."

"I'm doing it because I want to hear what Sakhu-aaji's version sounds like."

"She will not sing it," I said. "Shankar says she will not even sing it for him."

Ketaki opened her laptop again and went back to her chemistry, and spoke the next sentence to the screen.

"She'll sing it for me," she said. "Old ladies like me. I have an honest face."

That night I sat at the dining table and typed the cast list into the association's shared archive, in the closed committee folder, under a heading Mrs. Apte had made called Saudamini 2027. I put Ketaki's name next to Bal. Then, because I am thorough, and because I could not shake it, I added a note at the bottom, in the place where Mrs. Apte had asked us to record sources and permissions. I wrote: The song of Bal may be known in a tamasha version by Smt. Sakhubai Kamble, Edison. Not to be recorded or shared without her consent.

I looked at the sentence for a long time before I saved it. It seemed like a small thing, a line in a folder that maybe four people would read. But I have spent twenty-six years writing records, and I know that what goes into the record is what people remember happened. I wanted the record to show that we had asked, before we took.

Narayan Peth

My mother lives in what is left of a wada in Narayan Peth, a ten-minute walk from the Shaniwar Wada walls, in the old heart of Pune where the lanes still bend for reasons that were decided three hundred years ago.

When I was a girl, eleven families lived in our wada. It was built around two courtyards, a front one and a back one, with a well in the back and a carved wooden doorway in the front so heavy it took two of us children to swing it closed at night. The upper floor had a long gallery running round the inner courtyard, with turned teak railings, and from it you could look down at everyone's business: who was washing clothes at the stone trough, who was drying papads on a mat in the sun, who was quarreling, who had a visitor. In the monsoon the rain came straight down into the open center of the house in a gray column and drummed on the paving and ran off through a channel to the street, and we children sat on the edge of the gallery with our feet hanging over and watched it like a performance.

Now there are three families. Half the back courtyard was sold in 2004 to a builder who put up a five-story apartment block with a gate and a guard, so that my mother's kitchen window, which used to look out at the old well, now looks at a wall of air conditioner units. The well is under a parking space. The front half, with the carved doorway and the gallery and the long front room where my grandfather used to sit with his radio, is still there, tilting slightly toward the street like an old man leaning on a stick. My mother refuses to leave it. She is eighty-two.

I called her on a Sunday morning in October, my morning, her evening, with the laptop propped against the sugar tin on my kitchen counter. Behind her on the screen I could see the front room: the lime-washed wall gone soft and patchy, the wooden pillar with the deep groove where three generations of children had run a thumbnail along it, the photograph of my grandfather in a black cap, the brass lamp in the niche. She had on a cotton sari in a color she calls onion and I call pink, and her reading glasses on a chain.

"So," she said. "You are making puran poli for the actors."

"For the second rehearsal. Datta-kaka says Saudamini serves it to Madhav in the first act, so the cast should know what they are pretending to eat."

"Datta Joshi," she said. "From Sadashiv Peth. His father had the printing press near the Vishrambag side. Did you know? They printed wedding cards. I think your own wedding card came from that press, actually, from the son who stayed."

I did not know. I wrote it down on the pad by the stove, because things like that are always lost if you do not catch them the moment they fall.

"Aai, the recipe."

"You have the recipe."

"I have your recipe from 1992, on a piece of paper that has been through two moves and a flood in the basement. Half of it is a brown stain."

"Then you have half the recipe," she said. "The important half is in your hands, not on the paper. Get the dal."

So we made it together, across ten thousand miles, her in her kitchen at the back of the wada with the air conditioners humming outside her window, me in mine in Edison with the October sun slanting across the counter and the maple in the yard gone the color of turmeric.

Chana dal, soaked and boiled until it collapses when you press it with your thumb. The water drained off and saved, because the water becomes the katachi amti, the thin, sour, spiced soup you eat alongside, and to throw it away is, according to my mother, a moral failing. Then the dal goes back in the pan with jaggery, an equal weight, the dark crumbly kind from Kolhapur, and you stir it over low heat while the jaggery melts and the whole thing goes from yellow to a deep, glossy amber and begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cardamom, ground fresh. A grating of nutmeg. My mother adds a pinch of dry ginger. Nobody else I know does that.

"You are stirring too fast," she said, from the screen.

"You can't see how fast I am stirring."

"I can hear it."

The filling must be stirred until a spoon stands up in it by itself. Then it is cooled and pushed through the puran yantra, the old hand-cranked sieve, to make it smooth. I do not have a puran yantra. I have a potato ricer from a store in Menlo Park. My mother pretended not to see it.

The dough is the second art: wheat flour and a little maida, a lot of oil, a pinch of turmeric, kneaded soft and loose, softer than for any other bread, so soft it nearly runs, then left to rest under a wet cloth for an hour while you sit with your mother on a screen and talk about other things.

We talked about the play. I told her about the word she had laughed at me for not knowing, the rain on a tiled roof heard by a person who cannot sleep. She told me she had seen a revival of Saudamini once, she thought, in 1967 or so, at one of the big theaters near the river, when she was a newly married woman. She remembered nothing about it except that it was very long, and the actress who played the aunt had a cold, and her own mother-in-law had brought a tiffin of chivda and eaten the whole thing during the third act, very loudly.

"That is all?"

"That is all I remember of the play. I remember the evening. Your father in a white shirt. The river smelling of mud. A man selling roasted peanuts in paper cones on the steps outside. A cool wind after the rain. You don't go to a natak to remember a natak, baby. You go to remember the night."

Then we rolled. A ball of dough flattened in the palm, a ball of filling the same size placed in the center, the edges of the dough pulled up and around and pinched shut, then pressed flat again and rolled out on a floured board, very gently, so that the filling spreads to the edges without tearing through. This is where I always fail. My first one tore in three places and the amber filling burst through like lava. My mother made a sound I have not heard since I was nine and broke her good glass bangles.

"Again," she said.

The second one held. I put it on the hot iron tava and it puffed slightly and freckled brown, and I brushed it with ghee, and the smell came up out of the pan, browned wheat and caramel and cardamom and hot butter, and for one moment I was standing in the wada kitchen on a festival morning in 1978 with my braids tied in red ribbon and my grandmother slapping my hand away from the stack.

I made twenty-four. Seven tore. My mother said seventeen out of twenty-four was not bad for a woman who had used a potato ricer.

When we were done, she held up a piece of paper to the screen. It was the original. The one she had copied out for me in 1992, before I left, except this was her own copy, older, in her mother's handwriting, on a sheet of ruled paper gone the brown of a dry leaf, with a splash mark in the corner that had dried into a ring.

"Take a picture of the screen," she said.

"Aai, I can't take a picture of a screen, it will look terrible."

"Then I'll send it." She put it down, and I heard her shout to the neighbor's grandson, who lives across the gallery and fixes her phone for her, and a minute later a photograph arrived of my grandmother's recipe, flat on the kitchen table in Narayan Peth, every letter clear, the ring stain in the corner like a moon.

That evening I put it on the family's shared recipe shelf, the page where Hemant's aunts and my cousins have been posting their dishes for three years, each one with a photograph of the handwritten original if there is one. Hemant's aunt in Satara had put up her thalipeeth last spring, and my cousin in Dombivli her kothimbir vadi, and someone, I suspect Hemant, had put up a recipe for a mango milkshake with the instruction add mangoes until happy. I typed out my grandmother's puran poli underneath her photograph, word for word, including the line at the bottom that says in her small tidy Devanagari: if it tears, it is because you are in a hurry.

The next day was a court day, a long one, a medical malpractice deposition in a conference room on the twelfth floor of an office building on George Street, with a view of the Raritan going gray under a flat October sky. The witness was a surgeon who spoke very fast and used a great many Latin terms, and opposing counsel kept interrupting, and twice I had to ask them to speak one at a time. By four o'clock my wrists ached. On the train home I did not read the script. I sat with my eyes closed and thought about the dough, how soft it had to be, how it held the filling only if you did not force it.

I brought the puran poli to rehearsal that Thursday in two stacked steel tins, layered between sheets of parchment, with a jar of ghee and a big thermos of the amti, sour and hot, smelling of tamarind and goda masala and curry leaves. The rehearsal was in Datta-kaka's basement in Edison, because we did not have the school auditorium until November. He has a finished basement with wood paneling, a dartboard nobody uses, and a framed map of the Indian railway network from 1961.

Ani took a bite of puran poli and stopped chewing.

"My aaji makes this," he said, with his mouth full. "In Malvan. But hers is different. She puts coconut in. Is that wrong?"

"Nothing is wrong," said Rohini Sathe. "There are as many puran polis as there are grandmothers."

"Mine are better," said Datta-kaka, who does not cook.

We ran the first-act scene in which Saudamini serves the clerk Madhav a meal at the ferry landing in the rain. Gauri held out the steel plate with a real puran poli on it, glistening with ghee, and said her line, which is long and courtly and full of words about hospitality and monsoon and the honor of the house. Ani took the plate. He was supposed to say a line about the sweetness of the food being nothing beside the sweetness of the hand that offered it, a line that would make any modern person groan, and that was, I suppose, the point.

He opened his mouth. He looked at the puran poli.

What came out was, in perfect kitchen Marathi, in the exact singsong of a Malvan grandmother, "Arre, you have not put enough ghee."

The basement fell apart. Prasad laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairs. Gauri put the plate down and covered her face. Omkar, at the back, hit his tabla with the flat of his hand by accident and made a sound like a door slamming. Even Datta-kaka laughed, a short barking laugh I had never heard from him, and then wiped his eyes and said, "No. Again. From the line."

I sat on my folding chair with the script open on my knees, my pencil ready, and threw Ani his line. Quietly. The sweetness of the food is nothing.

He said it. He said it badly, stiffly, the words sitting on top of his voice like a hat that did not fit. But he said it.

And I wrote in the margin, in pencil, beside the line, the thing he had actually said first, the kitchen line, the true one. I did not know why. In court, you take down what is said, not what is supposed to be said. I suppose I could not help myself.

Earl's Keys

The auditorium belonged to Larchmere Middle School, a long, low brick building off Grove Avenue with a flagpole, a bus loop, and a marquee sign out front where the custodian changes the plastic letters by hand. The first week of November it said PARENT CONFERENCES NOV 12 and under that, in letters slightly smaller because he had run out of the big ones, GO WOLVERINES.

The custodian was Earl Pinkney. He had worked at Larchmere for thirty-one years. He was sixty-three, tall and a little stooped, with a gray beard trimmed close and a ring of keys on his belt so large it looked like a piece of armor. He met us at the side door at six-thirty on a Tuesday evening in a navy work jacket with his name stitched on it in red, and he looked at the twelve of us standing there in the dark, with a harmonium in a padded case and a tabla bag and two steel tins and a rolled-up painted backdrop of a mountain, and he said, "Y'all are the opera."

"Natak," said Datta-kaka.

"Sure," said Earl, and let us in.

A middle school auditorium in New Jersey is not a theater. It is a big rectangular room with a sloped floor, four hundred folding seats in red plastic gone pink with age, a wooden stage at one end with a scuffed apron and a heavy maroon curtain that smells of dust and the radiators, and a cinder-block wall at the back painted the yellow of an old tooth. Over the stage arch someone in the 1970s had painted the school crest, a snarling wolverine holding a book, and the wolverine had faded until it looked more puzzled than fierce. The lights were a row of fixed spots on a pipe and a lighting board in a booth at the back that Earl said only he and one eighth-grader named Tamia knew how to run, and Tamia had been grounded.

Stage left, behind the curtain, there was a narrow space between the edge of the stage and the cinder-block wall where the ropes for the curtain were tied off on iron cleats. That was where I would sit. Hemant had already been in on Sunday, with Earl's permission and a power drill, and built me a platform there: a little raised box of plywood painted black, with a cushioned seat and a slanted shelf in front for the script and a clip-on lamp with a blue bulb so that the light would not spill onto the stage. He had even put a cup holder on the side.

"Your husband built that in two hours," Earl told me. "I have been asking the district for a stool back there for nine years."

I sat down on it. From there I could see a slice of the stage through the gap between the curtain and the proscenium, about the width of a door, and beyond it the dark rows of red seats going up and away. I could hear everything. The radiators along the side walls ticked and knocked, a slow irregular rhythm like a drunk man trying to find a door in the dark. Somewhere in the building a floor buffer was humming. The air was dry and warm and smelled of floor wax and pencil shavings and the faint sour ghost of a thousand cafeteria lunches.

That first night we did what Datta-kaka called a reading on its feet, which means you walk through the scenes holding the script and the director stops you every few seconds.

I will try to describe what happened to the language once it was out loud in that room.

In Datta-kaka's basement, among the paneling and the railway map, the play had been a family argument. Here, on a real stage, with the curtain and the lights and the four hundred empty seats looking at us, everybody started to sound like where they came from.

Datta-kaka, as the old ferryman Annaji, spoke the stage Marathi like the old Sadashiv Peth Punekar that he is: every consonant pressed flat and exact, the vowels long and correct, the nasals ringing, the grammar so polished you could see your face in it. It was, I have to say, beautiful. It was also so correct that it was funny, because Annaji is supposed to be a poor ferryman on a Konkan creek, and he sounded like a professor at the Deccan College giving a lecture on ancient copper plates.

Rohini Sathe, who had agreed in the end to play a small part as a village woman as well as doing the makeup, spoke in her Kolhapuri way, which is warm and loud and sing-song, full of short sharp syllables and a habit of turning statements into questions at the end. When she said her line to Saudamini, "Child, the ferry will not cross tonight," it came out with such a Kolhapuri lilt that it sounded less like a warning and more like an invitation to a wedding.

Prasad, as the comic clerk Bhau, had the opposite problem. Prasad was born in Thane and raised in Mumbai and came to America at nineteen, and his Marathi is the brisk, flattened, half-Hindi Marathi of the Mumbai suburbs, the Marathi of crowded trains and office canteens. He kept turning Wagle's long sentences into short ones. He did it without noticing. He would read a line of twenty words and say it in twelve, and the twelve would be funnier than the twenty, and Datta-kaka would stop him and make him do it again with all twenty, and then it would be less funny, and everyone could see it, and nobody said anything.

Gauri, the lead, born in Edison, had the most careful Marathi of anyone, because she had learned it from her parents as a deliberate thing, the way you learn to swim, with her mother speaking only Marathi to her until she was five. But careful is not the same as easy. She spoke the lines like a person walking across a frozen pond, testing each step. You could hear the testing.

And Ani. Ani, as Madhav, a Pune clerk, was supposed to sound like Datta-kaka. Ani sounded like his grandmother in Malvan. Every time he relaxed, the coast came back into his mouth: the soft rolled consonants of the Konkan, the habit of tacking a little ga or re onto the end of a sentence, a cheerful sloppiness with verb endings. When he concentrated on being correct, he went stiff and quiet and you could not hear him past the third row.

So there we were. Five people on a stage in Edison, New Jersey, speaking five Marathis, in a play written in a sixth Marathi that none of them spoke at all.

Datta-kaka stopped the rehearsal at a quarter to nine.

"This," he said, standing at the edge of the stage looking down at the rows of empty seats, "is a disaster."

"It's the first night," said Gauri.

"It is a disaster. Annaji sounds like my father. Bhau sounds like a man selling train tickets. Madhav sounds like a fish seller. Saudamini sounds like she is afraid of the floor." He turned around. "And the aunt sounds like she is about to offer everyone a second helping."

"I am always about to offer everyone a second helping," said Rohini.

"Kaka," I said, from my box in the wings. I had not meant to say anything. "In court, when we have a witness who speaks a dialect, the interpreter does not change the dialect. The interpreter gives the meaning. If the witness is from a village, the record shows a village man speaking. It would be a lie to make him sound like a lawyer."

He looked over at the gap in the curtain, where only my blue lamp would have been visible.

"This is not court," he said.

"No," I said. "But Annaji is a ferryman."

He did not answer. He stood there for a long time, in the light from the single spot on the pipe, a thin old man in a gray sweater vest on a middle school stage, and the radiators knocked, and I thought he was angry with me. Then he said, to nobody in particular, "Wagle was from Ratnagiri. Did you know? He was a Konkan man. He moved to Pune at eighteen and taught himself to write like this, so that people would take him seriously." He tapped the script against his leg. "Everyone forgets that."

Earl came down the aisle then, jingling, to tell us he needed to lock up at nine. He had been sitting in the back row for the last half hour with a mop leaning beside him, watching.

"I don't understand a word," he said cheerfully. "But that big guy," and he pointed at Ani, "sounds like he's having more fun when he isn't trying. Is that a thing?"

"It is a thing," said Prasad.

"In high school I did stage crew for The Music Man," Earl said. "Weequahic High, Newark, 1979. We had a kid playing Harold Hill who could not sing, could not dance, could barely walk. Opening night he forgot all his words and just started talking to the audience like he was selling them something on the street. Best show we ever did." He rattled the keys. "Nine o'clock, opera."

On the drive home I was quiet, and Ketaki, who had come to watch, was quiet, and Hemant, driving, hummed under his breath something that was either a natya sangeet tune or a jingle for a furniture store.

That week Datta-kaka did something I did not expect. He started a word list.

It began as a page in the association's archive, in the committee folder: a list of every hard word in the play, the old literary words, with their meaning in plain Marathi and in English beside them. Then, because he is who he is, he added a little sound clip to each word: him saying it, once, slowly, the way it should be said, in his Sadashiv Peth voice, recorded on his phone at his kitchen table. You click the small speaker beside the word and there he is, clearing his throat first, then the word, exact and polished as a brass pot.

By the second week there were a hundred and twelve words. By the third, two hundred and six. Gauri listened to them on the way to work. Ani listened to them on his rounds between dented cars, and told me he had started saying them to the cars, under his breath, as a kind of practice, so that a crumpled sedan in a body shop lot in Sayreville had been addressed as O moonlight of my heart.

But the strangest thing was that people kept adding to the list who had nothing to do with the play. Mrs. Apte added nine words her mother used to say in Nashik that no longer appear in any dictionary she owns. A man from the association named Kelkar, whom I had never heard speak at a meeting, added six words for different kinds of rain, from his childhood in a village near Mahabaleshwar, each with his own voice clip, a slow gravelly voice, embarrassed. Rohini added the Kolhapuri word for the crust at the bottom of the pan. Ani added, after some hesitation, two Malvani words his grandmother used, one for a lazy person and one for a crab that hides under a rock, and recorded them in her voice, from an old phone video he had of her scolding him in the kitchen in Piscataway before she moved back to Malvan.

Datta-kaka saw them and said nothing. He did not delete them. He did not move them to a different page. He left them there in the list, the village words and the kitchen words sitting next to Wagle's words, all with their little speaker buttons, all of them saying themselves in somebody's real voice when you clicked.

I listened to them on the train to New Brunswick one gray morning, the whole list in order, with my earphones in, as the backyards and bare wet woods went by outside the window under a low sky, the cattails gone brown in the drainage ditches. Datta-kaka saying a word for a lotus. Mr. Kelkar saying a word for the fine rain that hangs in the air on a ghat road in August and soaks you without seeming to fall. Ani's grandmother calling somebody lazy.

I thought: this is what a language sounds like when it is alive. Not one voice saying it correctly. Many voices, saying it in the places they learned it.

The Ghat Song

The second-act song is the reason the play exists. Everything before it is a slow climb, and everything after it is the walk down.

In Wagle's story, Madhav the clerk has been sent from Pune to survey a road over the Sahyadri, the great wall of mountains that runs down the western edge of Maharashtra and drops sheer to the Konkan coast. He is stuck at Saudamini's father's ferry at the bottom of the ghat because the monsoon has come early and the creek is in flood. For a week he cannot cross and cannot climb. He and Saudamini fall in love in the slow, sideways manner of 1931, mostly by exchanging remarks about the weather. Then a letter comes down the mountain, carried by the boy Bal, telling Madhav he must return to Pune at once, the road survey has been canceled, and he will never be sent back. In the second act, on the last night before he leaves, Saudamini sits alone on the ferry landing in the rain and sings.

The song is in raga Megh, the raga of clouds. Mukund's mother had sung it at the grinding stone in Devgad. It was the one song in his cricketer notebook marked mother.

And Gauri could not sing it.

That is not quite fair. She could sing the notes. She had practiced with Mukund every Sunday in his living room and every weeknight in her car in the hospital parking garage between shifts, with the windows rolled up and the recording of his harmonium playing from her phone on the dashboard. She knew every turn of the melody. She could hit the high sa. She did not wobble. But when she sang it on the stage at Larchmere, it was like watching someone carry a very full bowl across a room. All of her attention went into not spilling.

"Again," said Datta-kaka, on the third Thursday of November.

She sang it again. The radiators knocked. Earl, in the back row, stopped mopping.

"Again."

"Kaka," said Mukund, from behind the harmonium on the riser Hemant had built him, stage right. He did not raise his voice. "Enough for tonight."

Datta-kaka turned to look at him, and for a second I thought there would be a fight, the two old men, the director and the musician, one on each side of the stage like the two pillars of a gate. But Datta-kaka only took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and said, "Yes. All right. Enough."

Gauri walked off stage left, toward me, and sat down on the edge of my black box with her back against the cinder-block wall. Her face was wet. Not with crying exactly. With effort.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," she said.

"Nothing is wrong with you."

"Vaiju-mavshi, I draw blood from people all day. I put needles into crying children. My hands don't shake. And I can't sing one song without feeling like I'm going to throw up."

I gave her the bottle of water from Hemant's cup holder. In my work I see people at the worst moment of their lives, testifying about car crashes and dead husbands and the end of a marriage, and I have learned that the person who says I don't know what's wrong with me usually knows exactly.

"What do you think about," I said, "when you sing it?"

She took a long drink.

"The words," she said. "Whether I'm saying them right. Whether Datta-kaka is going to stop me. Whether people in the audience who grew up in Pune are going to laugh at my accent. Whether my mom is going to cry because I said a vowel the American way." She laughed, without much in it. "So basically everything except the song."

Datta-kaka had come up behind the curtain. I did not see him until he spoke. He was holding his coat.

"Have you been to the ghats?" he asked her. "In the rain?"

"Once. When I was eleven. My parents took us to Lonavala in August. I threw up in the car."

"Everyone throws up on the ghat road," he said. "That is not the point."

He sat down on an overturned milk crate by the curtain ropes. I had never seen him sit on anything that was not a proper chair.

"In 1966," he said, "I was fifteen. I went with my uncle on the state bus from Pune down the Varandha ghat to Mahad, to see a relative who was sick. July. The worst month. The road goes down that mountain like a dropped rope, turn after turn after turn, with the cliff on one side and nothing on the other. The clouds come right through the windows of the bus. You cannot see the front of the bus from the back. Everything is white and wet, and you can smell the forest, the wet leaves, the red earth, and something like pepper. And everywhere, everywhere, water. Water coming down the rock in long white ropes, hundreds of them, waterfalls with no names because there are too many to name, falling straight onto the road."

Gauri was looking at him. So was I. Behind us, on the stage, Mukund had stopped putting the harmonium into its case and was standing still, listening.

"Halfway down," Datta-kaka said, "the bus stopped. A waterfall was coming down right across the road, onto the bus, like a tap. The driver would not go through. We waited forty minutes. Nobody could get out. Fifty people in a tin box in a cloud with a waterfall drumming on the roof. Women with chickens. A man with a goat. Children crying. And the conductor, a thin fellow with a wooden rack of paper tickets and a leather cash bag, stood up at the front and started to sing. Not well. He was not a singer. He sang a natak song. From Saudamini. This one."

"This one?"

"The ghat song. The rain song. I did not know it then. I learned what it was years later, when I found my father's copy of the play. But that day, I only knew a thin man with a cash bag was singing about rain while the rain came down on us, and the bus went quiet. The children stopped. The goat stopped. The whole bus listened. He did not get the words right. I know that now. He mixed up two lines and made up a third. It did not matter. When he finished, a woman at the back said once more, and he sang it again, and then the waterfall slackened, and the driver started the engine, and we went on down the mountain."

He stood up and put on his coat.

"I have been making you sing it like it is an exam," he said to Gauri. "That was my mistake. My father's mistake too. He made me recite for guests when I was a boy. Every word correct." He buttoned the coat to the neck. "Sing it like you are stuck on a bus in a cloud. Get the words wrong if you must."

He went out through the side door into the cold. We heard his car start in the lot.

Gauri sat on the edge of my box for a long time. Then she said, to me, "Did that really happen? Or did he just make that up to make me feel better?"

"In court," I said, "we would say that is a question for the finder of fact."

"What does that mean?"

"It means it doesn't matter. It is in the record now."

The next Sunday, at Mukund's house in Iselin, something changed, and it was Mukund who changed it.

He sat Gauri on the white sheet on the carpet, with the harmonium in front of him and Omkar beside him with the tabla, and Sulabha in the doorway to the kitchen, and me on the couch with the script. He did not play the song.

"Tell me the song," he said to her. "In your words. Not Wagle's. Your words. How you would say it to your mother on the phone."

"In Marathi?"

"In whatever comes out."

Gauri looked down at her hands. Then she began, slowly, in her own Marathi, the careful Edison Marathi her mother had taught her, with English words dropping in where she did not have the Marathi ones, the way they drop in for all of us.

"So it's raining," she said. "It's been raining for a week. And he's leaving tomorrow. And I'm sitting by the water and I can hear the rain on the roof, the sound you hear at night when you can't sleep, that word Vaiju-mavshi's mother told us. And I'm thinking, the mountain is so big, and he came down it, and now he's going back up it, and the road isn't going to get built, so he's never coming back down. And I'm angry at the mountain. I'm angry at the rain. I want the rain to keep going forever so the creek never goes down and he can never leave." She stopped. "That's dumb."

"That is the song," said Mukund. "Exactly. Now sing it."

He played the opening, the slow climb of Megh, and Omkar came in under it with a soft rolling rhythm on the bayan like distant thunder, and Gauri closed her eyes and sang.

I will not pretend it was perfect. She mispronounced a word in the second line. She came in late on the third verse. But it was not a bowl being carried across a room anymore. It was a woman sitting on a ferry landing in the rain, furious at a mountain.

Sulabha, in the kitchen doorway, put her hand over her mouth.

Afterward, Ani, who had come late as usual, still in his adjuster's polo shirt, was standing in the hall taking off his shoes, and he had heard the end. He came in and sat on the carpet and did not make a joke, which for Ani is a declaration.

"My aaji's house in Malvan," he said, after a while, to nobody, "has a roof like that. Clay tiles. Mangalore tiles, they're called. When it rains, it sounds exactly like that song."

He took out his phone and showed us. His cousin in Malvan posts photographs of the house every few weeks to the family's shared space so that Ani's father, who grew up there, can see it: the red tiled roof furred green with moss after the monsoon, the coconut palms leaning over it, the laterite wall around the compound, the deep well with a pulley. Ani's grandmother on the front step in a cotton sari, waving, squinting into the sun. A photograph from October showed the tiles being replaced on one corner where a branch had come down, two men on the roof in vests and lungis passing tiles up a bamboo ladder.

"Every time it rains here," said Ani, "I check if he's posted. I don't know why. I can't do anything about it from Edison. I just want to see the roof is still there."

Mukund nodded slowly and did not say anything. Then he turned back to the harmonium and played the opening of the ghat song once more, very softly, just the first phrase, the climb of the cloud raga, and stopped, and closed the case.

On the way home, I sat in the passenger seat while Hemant drove down Oak Tree Road, crowded on a Sunday evening, with the smell of frying samosas coming in through the vents. I was thinking about Datta-kaka's thin conductor singing in a bus in a cloud and getting the words wrong. I was thinking about my job, in the wings, which was to make sure the words were right.

For the first time, I wondered if that was what the play needed from me.

Ada

Ketaki started going to Tambda Rassa on Saturday mornings at six-thirty, before it opened, to roll pav.

I did not arrange this. I found out because Hemant noticed his car had been moved two Saturdays in a row and had a smell of yeast and toasted butter in it. When I asked her, she said, in English, with the air of someone explaining a thing that should have been obvious, "You can't just ask an old lady to sing for you, Aai. You have to be useful first."

So for three Saturdays she stood at the steel counter in Shankar's kitchen next to Sakhubai in a borrowed apron that said HOT HOT HOT and learned to roll pav dough into balls with the heel of her hand. She was terrible at it. Shankar told me later that the first Saturday, Sakhubai threw away every ball Ketaki made and rolled them again without a word. The second Saturday, she threw away half. The third Saturday, she kept them all and showed Ketaki how to tuck the edges under with two fingers so the tops came out smooth and round as river stones.

They did not talk. Sakhubai speaks almost no English, and Ketaki's Marathi had no words for most of what happens in a kitchen at dawn. Shankar said they communicated mainly by Sakhubai slapping the counter beside a bad ball and Ketaki saying sorry in both languages.

On the fourth Saturday, Ketaki came home at nine with flour on her eyebrows and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and did not take off her shoes.

"She sang," she said.

I put down my coffee.

"Not the whole thing. Just, like, the first part. Under her breath. She was rolling and she just started. I didn't do anything. I didn't ask. I swear I didn't ask." Ketaki looked at her hands, which were still white at the knuckles. "Aai, it's not the same song. It's the same tune, kind of. But it's faster. And the words are different. In the play, the boy is complaining the mountain is too tall. In her version, he's complaining that the clerk is too slow. That the clerk is so slow and stupid that the boy could have run up and down the mountain ten times while the clerk was still tying his shoes. And there's a part where he says the clerk's moustache looks like a dead caterpillar."

I laughed. I could not help it. Ketaki did not laugh.

"She stopped in the middle," she said. "She looked at me like I'd caught her doing something. And then she said, in Marathi, slowly, so I'd understand: Don't tell anyone. And then she said, Tell your mother."

"Those are opposites."

"I know. I think it meant tell you and nobody else. So I'm telling you."

That evening, at rehearsal, Ketaki ran her Bal scenes for the first time with the song. She sang Wagle's version, the official one, the one about the mountain being too tall for a boy's legs. She sang it well. She has a clear, unforced voice that comes from somewhere high in her head. But I sat on my box in the wings and heard, under it, the other version she had just told me about, the one about the slow clerk and the caterpillar moustache, and I thought: which one is the real song?

Datta-kaka, if he had been asked, would have said Wagle's, because Wagle wrote it down. Sakhubai, if she had been asked, would have said nothing, and gone back to the kitchen.

But the next Thursday Sakhubai came to rehearsal.

She came with Shankar, who brought her in through the side door at a quarter to seven and settled her in the middle of the third row, in a red plastic seat that was far too big for her, with her feet not quite reaching the floor and her old Kolhapuri chappals dangling. She wore the lime-green nauvari, and a thick brown cardigan over it against the November cold, and a wool scarf over her head. She held her handbag on her lap with both hands.

Nobody said anything about it. Datta-kaka glanced at her once from the stage and gave a small nod, the nod of one old person to another, and went on blocking the first scene of Act Three.

For an hour she did not move. She watched. Earl, who had been sitting in the back row as he did most nights now, came down the aisle at one point and offered her a cup of water from the cooler in the hall, and she took it, and said "thank you" in an English so heavily accented it came out as one word, and he said "you're welcome, ma'am," and they nodded at each other with great formality, two people who would never share a sentence.

Then came Bal's second scene. Ketaki, in jeans and an oversized Rutgers sweatshirt she had borrowed from Omkar, with her hair stuffed into a knitted cap because Rohini wanted her to get used to the feel of a pheta, ran onto the stage, delivered a letter to Prasad as Bhau, and began her comic exchange with him. It is a scene with a lot of back and forth: Bhau tries to get the boy to tell him what is in the letter, and the boy refuses, and they bargain, and it ends with the boy selling the information for a guava.

It was not working. It had not been working for two weeks. Prasad was funny in his brisk Mumbai way, but Ketaki, who is a polite girl underneath all her eye-rolling, kept looking at him when she spoke, as you would in a real conversation. She played it to Prasad. And so the audience, which tonight was Earl and Sakhubai and a few parents waiting to drive children home, sat outside it, watching two people talk.

From the third row came a sound.

It was not loud. It was a click of the tongue, a sharp tch, the sound an old woman makes in a vegetable market when a vendor names a ridiculous price.

Everyone stopped.

Sakhubai stood up. It took her some time. She put her handbag down on the seat beside her and went along the row, holding the backs of the seats, and down to the front, and stood below the edge of the stage looking up at Ketaki. She was so small that the stage came almost to her shoulders.

She said something in her thick village Marathi that I will translate as best I can.

"Who are you talking to?"

Ketaki, startled, pointed at Prasad.

"Him? He knows what's in the letter. He's in the play. Why are you telling him?" Sakhubai turned and swept her thin arm out at the four hundred red seats behind her, most of them empty. "Tell them. They paid. They want to know."

Then, to my astonishment, she put both hands flat on the edge of the stage, and Earl, who had come down the aisle quickly, and Shankar, from the other side, helped her up the four wooden steps at the side of the apron, and she walked to the center of the stage in her old chappals that squeaked faintly on the boards. She stood beside Ketaki.

"Watch," she said.

She did not sing. She did not dance. I want to be clear about that, because later people told the story as though Sakhubai Kamble had performed a lavani on the stage of Larchmere Middle School, and she did not. What she did was smaller and stranger. She said Bal's first line in the scene, the line where he tells Bhau he will never reveal what is in the letter. But she did not say it to Prasad. She said it out, over the edge of the stage, to the empty seats. She turned her head over her shoulder toward Prasad on the word never, very quick, a flick of the eyes, and then back out to the house, and lifted one eyebrow, and paused, with her chin up, for just the length of a breath, as if waiting for someone in the back row to shout something.

That was all. A line, a look, a pause.

And it was funny. It was so funny that Earl, in the aisle, laughed out loud, a big surprised laugh that went up into the dark of the ceiling, and Prasad laughed, and Omkar, at the tabla, slapped his knee. It was funny because she had let the audience in on it. She had made us all accomplices.

"Ada," said Rohini Sathe, softly, beside me in the wings. She had come over to stand by my box. "That is ada. The look. The way a lavani dancer looks at the crowd. My grandmother used to say you could pay for the dance, but the ada was free."

Ada is one of those words that I cannot translate. It means a gesture, an attitude, a way of turning the head or holding the hand, the particular grace or sauciness or wit with which something is done. A dancer has ada. A good comic has it. Some people have it just walking into a room.

Sakhubai made Ketaki do the line six times. Every time, she corrected her, with small sharp movements of her own hands: the chin higher, the eyes quicker, the pause longer, no, shorter, the shoulders turned out, never in. She did not explain. She showed. By the sixth time, Ketaki said the line to the empty seats and flicked her eyes at Prasad and paused, and Earl laughed again, and Sakhubai said, "Ha," which means yes, and turned and walked off the stage the way she had come, holding on to Earl's arm and Shankar's arm, and went back to her seat in the third row and picked up her handbag and put it on her lap again and folded her hands on it.

Datta-kaka had been standing stage right the whole time with his script in his hand. He had not said a word.

When she was seated, he walked to the edge of the stage and looked down at her.

"Sakhu-bai," he said. "Will you come every Thursday?"

She said something short. Shankar, beside her, translated without being asked: "She says only if somebody brings her tea. The water here tastes like the pipe."

"Done," said Datta-kaka.

That week, Shankar did something he told me later he had been meaning to do for years. In the Kambles' family space online, which his daughter in Hoboken had set up during the pandemic, there was a map with pins on it: Shankar's father's village near Kagal, the house in Kolhapur city where Shankar grew up, the shop in Mumbai where he first worked as a cook at sixteen, the apartment in Jersey City, the Route 1 strip mall. Sakhubai had never asked for anything to be put on it. But that Sunday, after lunch, she sat with Ketaki at Shankar's kitchen table, and Shankar held the laptop, and Sakhubai named towns.

Ketaki told me about it that night, sitting on the end of my bed in her pajamas with her knees under her chin.

"Nipani," she said. "Gadhinglaj. Chikodi. Ichalkaranji. Some villages I'd never heard of. A whole bunch of places where they used to go for the fairs. She'd say the name, and Shankar-kaka would find it on the map and drop a pin, and she'd tell me something about it. Like, in one town the stage was built on top of four bullock carts pushed together. In one town it rained so hard the tent fell down on the drummer. In one town a man in the front row kept trying to throw his turban on the stage, and the comic in their troupe caught it and wore it for the rest of the show and wouldn't give it back."

"Did she let you write it down?"

"She said I could write. She said not to record." Ketaki held up her phone, showing me a note full of typed lines in a mix of English and Romanized Marathi, the way young people type our language when they have no keyboard for it. "I asked her, like, can I put your stories on the map pins, as notes? And she thought about it for a long time. And she said yes, but only for the family. Not for strangers. And only the funny ones."

"Only the funny ones?"

"She said the other ones are hers."

I thought about that after Ketaki went to bed. I lay awake in the dark, with Hemant breathing beside me and the furnace ticking on and off in the basement, and I thought about the stories that were Sakhubai's, the ones she would not give us, the eleven years she had danced in tents lit by hissing kerosene pressure lanterns in villages whose names were now pins on a map in a laptop in Edison, the forty years she had not spoken of it at all. I thought about the ghungroo that she took off her eight-year-old son and that he never saw again.

In court, a witness can decline to answer. It goes in the record as a refusal. The record shows the question and then the silence. I have always thought that was one of the more honest things the law does. It does not pretend the silence is not there.

Oak Tree Road

On the first Saturday of December, Rohini Sathe took four of us shopping for costumes on Oak Tree Road, and I learned that a retired geography teacher from Kolhapur is the most dangerous person you can bring into a sari store.

Oak Tree Road runs from Edison into Iselin, and on a Saturday in December a mile of it is as crowded as a Pune market. The Diwali lights were still up, strings of small gold bulbs looped along the storefronts and across the upper windows, and the jewelers had their windows lit so bright that the gold necklaces on their velvet busts seemed to hum. There were sweet shops with trays of kaju katli and motichoor laddoo under glass, and a paan shop with a man folding betel leaves at a tiny counter, and a store that sold only pressure cookers and steel tiffins, stacked to the ceiling, and three sari shops in a row with mannequins in the windows wearing Kanjeevaram silks in peacock and mango and deep wine. The sidewalks were full of families: grandmothers in cardigans over saris, teenagers in puffer jackets, fathers carrying bags, small children holding paper cones of bhel. The air smelled of frying, of cardamom from the sweet shops, of exhaust, and of the cold.

There were five of us: Rohini, Gauri, Ketaki, me, and Sakhubai, whom Ketaki had brought without telling anyone, on the grounds that Sakhubai had said yes when asked. Sakhubai walked slowly, holding Ketaki's arm, wearing her brown cardigan and a knitted hat in purple that Ketaki had bought her at a pharmacy on Route 1, and she looked at everything on that street with an expression of mild, unsurprised judgment, like a cat brought into a new house.

The first stop was Trivedi Silks, run by a Gujarati woman named Mrs. Trivedi who has been on Oak Tree Road since 1989 and who greeted Rohini by name, which tells you everything about how often Rohini goes there.

"Nauvari," said Rohini. "Three. Cotton for the village women. One silk, for Saudamini in the last act. Paithani if you have it. Not a real Paithani, we are not millionaires. Something with a Paithani border."

Mrs. Trivedi raised her eyebrows and went into the back.

A nauvari is not a sari you can buy off the shelf the way you can a regular six-yard one, because it is nine yards long and draped in a way that most shops in America do not carry. But Mrs. Trivedi had some, in a cupboard at the back, wrapped in plastic. She brought out a stack and unfolded them across the counter, one over another, in colors that made Gauri catch her breath: a parrot green with a mustard border, a turmeric yellow with a maroon border, a deep indigo with tiny white checks, and a silk in a shade of pink that Rohini called rani and I would call the inside of a guava, with a border of peacocks and lotus vines woven in gold thread.

Rohini picked up each one and rubbed the cloth between her thumb and fingers, held it to the light, smelled it, actually smelled it, and put it down. She did this to all of them.

"This one," said Rohini, about the indigo check. "This one," the green. "Not this one. The yellow is wrong, it will look like a highlighter under the lights. Do you have a yellow that is more like turmeric and less like a school bus?"

They went on like that for forty minutes, the Kolhapur geography teacher and the Gujarati sari merchant, in a mix of Hindi and English and occasional Marathi and Gujarati, negotiating colors and prices with great courtesy and no mercy. Ketaki sat Sakhubai on a padded stool in the corner, where she watched the whole thing with her handbag on her knees.

At the end, when Rohini had chosen the four, and Mrs. Trivedi had named a price, and Rohini had named a lower one, and Mrs. Trivedi had named one in the middle, and they had both pretended to be insulted, Sakhubai stood up from her stool and came to the counter.

She reached out and took a corner of the pink silk, the one for Saudamini's last act, and pulled it toward her, and turned the border over, and looked at the back of the weaving.

Then she said, in her village Marathi, to Rohini, something Ketaki and Gauri did not catch.

Rohini burst out laughing.

"What?" said Gauri. "What did she say?"

"She said," said Rohini, wiping her eyes, "that it is a good silk, but whoever drapes it on you will do it wrong, because nobody in America knows how to tie a nauvari tight enough to dance in. She says she will drape it herself."

Mrs. Trivedi, who had understood the gist, said to Sakhubai in Hindi, very respectfully, "Aunty, you have danced?"

Sakhubai looked at her. Then she let go of the silk and went back to her stool and sat down, and did not answer, and Mrs. Trivedi, who had been in business thirty-seven years and knew when not to push, wrapped the four saris in brown paper without another word and knocked twenty dollars off the price.

The second stop was for the men. Madhav, the clerk from Pune, needed a dhoti, a long coat buttoned to the neck, and the round black cap that clerks and teachers wore in the Pune of 1931, the kind you see in the old photographs of every great-grandfather in every Maharashtrian family. Annaji, the ferryman, needed a simpler dhoti and a short vest and a pheta, the turban, in a color that Rohini said had to be a faded saffron. Bhau the comic needed something ridiculous, which Prasad had volunteered to choose himself, and which none of us were looking forward to.

We found the black caps on a high shelf in a store that sold mostly wedding kurtas, three dusty ones of felt over a stiff frame that a customer had ordered for a play in 2011 and never collected. They smelled of mothballs.

The pheta we did not find at all. Rohini said she would tie one herself from a length of cotton, as her father did every morning of his life.

By one o'clock we were hungry. There is a place halfway along the road called Dadar Corner, a narrow storefront with a counter, four stools and a cardboard sign in the window shaped like a Mumbai local train. They make vada pav.

For anyone who has not had one: a vada pav is a potato fritter in a bun, which is like saying a sonnet is some lines. The potato is boiled and mashed with mustard seed and curry leaves and green chili and garlic and ginger and turmeric, rolled into a ball, dipped in a gram-flour batter, and fried until the outside is golden and crackled and the inside is soft and yellow and steaming. The pav is a soft square bun, split open but not all the way. Inside it goes a smear of green chutney, coriander and mint and chili, and then a heavy sprinkling of dry red garlic chutney, a coarse crumbly powder of dried coconut and garlic and red chili that is the soul of the thing. Then the vada goes in and you press the bun shut around it. On the side, a fried green chili, salted, blistered, which you bite between mouthfuls like a dare. It is the food of every railway platform in Mumbai and every school canteen in Pune. It costs, at Dadar Corner, three dollars and fifty cents.

We stood outside on the sidewalk in the cold eating them out of paper, with the steam coming up off the vadas into the December air. Ketaki ate hers in four bites and bought another one. Gauri burned her mouth. Sakhubai ate hers slowly, in small bites, with great concentration, and when she finished she folded the paper into a neat square and handed it to Ketaki to throw away, and said, in Marathi, "Not enough garlic."

"That," said Rohini, "is what we will sell at the intermission."

"Vada pav?"

"Vada pav. The association needs money. The auditorium was eight hundred dollars. The saris were three hundred and forty. Everybody in New Jersey with a Marathi grandmother will pay five dollars for a vada pav at the interval of a natak. My grandson's school does bake sales. We will do a vada sale." She looked at Sakhubai. "And Sakhu-bai will tell us how much garlic."

That was how the vada pav committee came into being, on a sidewalk on Oak Tree Road. Ketaki became, by the end of the afternoon, its co-chair, along with two of her school friends whom she had not yet asked. She seemed pleased.

On the drive home, in the back seat, Sakhubai fell asleep against Ketaki's shoulder with her purple hat over one eye.

The rest of the week was court and rehearsal, rehearsal and court. On Thursday at Larchmere, Rohini tried the costumes on the cast for the first time, and Datta-kaka in his faded saffron pheta and short vest looked so exactly like a photograph of my great-grandfather that I had to look away for a moment. Ani in his dhoti and long coat and black cap looked like a nervous young clerk from 1931 and also, somehow, like a wrestler dressed up for a wedding. Prasad came out as Bhau in a costume he had put together himself: a dhoti, a bright green vest, a pair of round wire spectacles with no glass in them, and a pencil behind each ear. Everyone laughed for a full minute.

And the Kolhapuri chappals arrived.

Rohini had insisted. Real ones, she said, made by hand in Kolhapur, not the factory ones from the stores in Edison that look right and feel like cardboard. She had ordered them in October from a family of chappal makers in Kolhapur whom her cousin there has bought from for years, and they came in a big brown box tied with string and covered in Indian stamps, eight pairs, each pair wrapped in newspaper in Marathi. When she cut the string and opened the box, the smell that came out filled the side hall: raw vegetable-tanned leather, earthy and sharp, a little like tobacco and a little like a barn.

They were beautiful. Flat soles, stacked and stitched, the leather a pale honey color, the straps braided and the toe loops tied with a little knot. Each one had a slightly different pattern punched into the straps by hand.

They were also, as new Kolhapuris always are, as stiff as wood and as loud as a creaking door.

When the cast put them on and walked across the stage, every step made a squeak, a high, rubbery, comic squeak, like a small animal being stepped on. Eight pairs of chappals squeaking at once. Datta-kaka, as the stately old ferryman, walked from upstage to downstage to deliver his opening speech, and squeaked with every step, eight squeaks, and then turned to face the audience and squeaked once more, a small afterthought.

Earl, in the back row, put his head down on the seat in front of him and laughed until he coughed.

"You have to soak them," said Sakhubai from the third row, without being asked. "In water. One night. Then oil. Then walk. One week. Then they're quiet."

Rohini translated. Everyone looked at Datta-kaka.

"We will soak them," he said, with dignity, and squeaked off stage.

That night I got an email from Shankar's daughter in Hoboken, sent to the whole cast. Sakhubai's eighty-second birthday was the following Sunday. The family had made a page for it, in their private space, and they were inviting the cast to leave wishes there, because, she wrote, my aaji does not use a phone, but I will print them all and tape them to the wall above the pav counter, where she will pretend not to look at them.

I went to the page. There was a photograph of Sakhubai at the top, taken that very week at the steel counter in Shankar's kitchen, rolling pav, looking up at the camera with an expression of extreme irritation. Under it there were already wishes from her grandchildren and from people at the restaurant and from a cousin in Kolhapur.

Ketaki had left one. It was in Marathi. She had typed it, slowly, in Devanagari, which I knew because she had been in her room for an hour with the door open and her tongue between her teeth. It had three spelling mistakes in it. It said: Happy birthday Sakhu-aaji. Thank you for teaching me how to look at people. I still cannot roll pav. I am going to keep trying. I read it twice and left all three mistakes exactly where she had put them, the way I would leave a witness's grammar alone, and went to bed with the sound of her typing still in my ears, one slow key at a time.

After Wagle

The second week of December I was assigned to a civil trial in Courtroom 403, a slip-and-fall case against a supermarket chain, and on the third morning the plaintiff's side called a witness who needed a Marathi interpreter.

I did not know this until he was sworn. He was a man of about seventy, from a village near Jalgaon in the north of Maharashtra, who had been visiting his son in South Plainfield and had been standing near the produce section when the plaintiff fell. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the collar, a gray wool vest that was too big for him, and polished black shoes that looked new. He held a folded handkerchief in one hand the whole time. His son sat in the second row of the gallery.

The court interpreter was a woman I had not seen before, sent by an agency. She was very good. I want to say that first. She was precise and calm and her English was perfect. Her Marathi was perfect too. It was the Marathi of a textbook, of a news broadcast from Mumbai, of an official letter from a government office. It was correct in every particular.

And the man from Jalgaon did not understand her.

Not completely. He understood the gist. But he would pause after each question, with his eyes moving, the way you pause when you are hearing a language that is almost yours. Twice he asked her to repeat. Once he answered a different question from the one that had been asked, and the attorney had to rephrase, and the interpreter rephrased in the same formal register, and he paused again. His own answers, when they came, were in the Marathi of Khandesh, the region he came from, a Marathi full of words I knew only faintly, with a rhythm that went up and down like a cart on a rutted road. The interpreter caught most of it. She had to ask him to clarify once. I watched her face while she did. It was perfectly polite and it was, for one second, the face of a city person hearing a village.

My job is to write down the English. Only the English. What the interpreter says the witness said. The Marathi goes into the air and is lost.

I sat at my stenotype with my fingers moving and I heard every Marathi word. I heard where the interpreter's version of the question lost something. I heard where the man's answer had a shade in it that the English did not carry. At one point he said a word that means, roughly, a slick place on a floor, but specifically the kind of slick that is made by water from vegetables, by wet leaves, by the rinsing of greens, a word that a farmer would know and a city person would not. The interpreter translated it as wet floor. Which was true. And which was not what he had said.

I did not say anything. I am not allowed to. The record keeper does not speak. I wrote wet floor.

At the lunch recess, I passed the man and his son in the corridor outside the courtroom, standing by the tall window that looks out over the parking deck on Paterson Street. The son was talking to him quietly. The old man was looking out the window with his handkerchief in his hand.

I stopped. I am not sure I should have.

"Kaka," I said, in Marathi. "You spoke very clearly."

He turned and looked at me, and his face changed all at once, the way a face changes when you hear your language on the street in a strange city.

"You understood me?" he said.

"Every word."

"That lady," he said, lowering his voice and nodding toward the courtroom door, "speaks like the radio. I kept thinking, she is going to give me the weather."

His son laughed. I laughed. Then the bailiff called the case and we went back in, and I sat down at my stenotype, and he sat down in the witness box, and the interpreter asked him in her radio Marathi how far he had been standing from the plaintiff, and he answered in his Khandesh Marathi that he had been as far as a man can throw a mango, and she said in English, approximately fifteen feet.

I wrote approximately fifteen feet.

That evening, at Larchmere, I could not concentrate. I sat on my box in the wings with the clip-on lamp throwing its blue circle on the script, and I followed every line, and I prompted when I had to, which was often, because Ani was two scenes behind on his memorizing, but I kept hearing that man say as far as a man can throw a mango. I kept thinking about how a word can be correct and wrong at the same time.

It was also the night of the fight.

It had been building for a week. Datta-kaka wanted the ghat song slower. Much slower. He said that in the old days a song like that would take fifteen minutes, with the singer stretching every phrase, and the audience would shout once more, and the singer would do it again. Mukund said the song was eight minutes because Gauri could sing it for eight minutes and sound like a woman on a ferry landing, and if she sang it for fifteen she would sound like a woman waiting for a bus. Datta-kaka said that Mukund was making the music to suit an amateur instead of making the amateur rise to the music. Mukund said that Datta-kaka had never sung a note in public in his life.

They said all this in front of everyone, on the stage, at a volume that brought Earl out of the boiler room.

"It is not your play," said Datta-kaka, finally.

"It is not your play either," said Mukund. "It is Wagle's play. And Wagle is dead. And nobody alive knows how fast he wanted it, including you."

There was a terrible silence. Gauri was standing in the middle of the stage in her rehearsal skirt with her lyric sheet in her hand, looking at the floor. Ani was standing next to her, looking at the ceiling. I was sitting in the wings, holding my pencil, with my heart going as it does in court when a witness suddenly starts to shout.

Mukund closed the lid of the harmonium, with a soft wooden clap that sounded much louder in that silence than it was, and went out the side door into the parking lot without his coat.

Datta-kaka stood on the stage for a moment. Then he said, "We will do the third act," in a perfectly level voice, and we did the third act, badly, without music.

The next morning, a Wednesday, Mrs. Apte called me at seven-fifteen, while I was standing at the kitchen counter eating toast.

"Vaiju," she said. "Datta Joshi has written to me about the music."

At some hour of the night after the rehearsal, unable to sleep, Datta-kaka had sent her a long message. In the play's folder in the association's archive were Mukund's recordings: every rehearsal track he had made at his harmonium in the kiosk and in his living room, played slowly for the singers to learn from, with his own voice humming the melody over the top. Fifty-three files. Gauri had been listening to them in her car for two months. Ketaki had been listening to Bal's song every night before bed. Datta-kaka wanted them taken out of the members' folder and shut away where only the committee could see them, because, he wrote, people would hear them and believe this was how Wagle's songs had gone in 1931, and it was not, and nobody could know.

"He is not entirely wrong," said Mrs. Apte, in the voice of a woman who spent twenty-eight years in a county records office deciding which drawer a paper belongs in. "But I am not hiding them. The singers need them. So I have put a line under every file." She read it to me: Music by Mukund Bhide, 2026, after Wagle; one song remembered from his mother, Devgad. "Now nobody will mistake it, and nobody has to go without it. I am telling you because he will be angry and you are the one he will complain to."

He was angry. He called me at nine-thirty, while I was waiting to start in Courtroom 403, and I took the call in the corridor by the window over the parking deck.

"After Wagle," he said. "Like a card in a museum. I asked her to protect the play, and now everyone will hear Mukund's tunes with Wagle's name hanging underneath them."

"Kaka, that is what they are."

There was a silence on the line. I could hear his kitchen behind him, a kettle going, the radio on to the AM news station that he listens to for the traffic reports, out of long habit, though he has not dispatched a bus since 2016.

"That is what they are," he said at last. Another silence. "When I was a boy I asked my father how the second-act song went in 1946. He said, the way it went that night. Then he hummed it, and it came out different every time. I used to think he had forgotten. Now I think he was being exact." He let out a breath. "Bharati is not wrong. She is never wrong. It is very tiring."

"You should call Mukund," I said.

"Mukund does not answer his phone at the shop. He says it frightens the customers."

"Then go to the shop."

He did go. I know because Mukund told me. Datta-kaka drove to the Route 27 strip mall that afternoon in the cold, parked in front of the bird seed store, and walked into HEEL & KEY carrying, of all things, a pair of black dress shoes with worn heels, which he put on the counter. Mukund looked at the shoes and looked at him. Then he picked up the shoes and turned them over and examined the heels and said they would be ready Friday, eleven dollars, and wrote a ticket. Datta-kaka paid. Then he stood in that tiny kiosk with its wall of brass blanks and its smell of leather and lemon oil and said that he had been wrong about the tempo, and wrong about the folder, and wrong, perhaps, about a number of other things over the years, and that he would like Mukund to come back to rehearsal on Thursday.

Mukund said that he had never left. He had only gone to the parking lot without his coat because he was too angry to remember it, and had sat in his car for twenty minutes with the heater on, and then driven home, and Sulabha had told him he was a fool.

Then he took down the harmonium and played the opening of the ghat song, and Datta-kaka stood at the counter and listened to it all the way through, at eight minutes.

"Too fast," he said, when it was over.

"Yes," said Mukund. "Thursday."

On Thursday the two of them did not speak to each other directly for the whole rehearsal, but at the end of the night Mukund played the ghat song at what he announced was a compromise tempo, eight and a half minutes, and Datta-kaka nodded once from stage right, and that was the end of it.

Except for one thing. That night, on the drive home, I asked Ketaki, who had been in the house when Mrs. Apte called and had heard everything, whether she had been worried when she heard the songs might be shut away.

"Not really," she said, looking out the window at the dark houses going by with their Christmas lights on, blue and white and red, a plastic snowman glowing on a lawn. "I'd already saved them all to my laptop. In September. And I made copies of the word list too. With all the voices." She shrugged. "Things disappear. You have to keep a copy."

"Did someone teach you that?"

"Sakhu-aaji," said Ketaki. "Kind of. She said the reason nobody knows the tamasha songs anymore is that nobody wrote them down. She said their singer had pasted the words of every song inside the lid of the troupe's harmonium case. The case fell off the back of a truck outside Nipani in 1969, and nobody ever found it. She said she thinks about it every day."

We drove for a while without saying anything. The heater fan hummed. Outside, an inflatable reindeer lay collapsed in a heap on somebody's lawn because its fan had stopped.

"I'm going to make a book," Ketaki said. "After the play. Of everything. The songs and the word list and Sakhu-aaji's town stories and the photos of the rehearsals. A real one, printed. Like, with a cover. So it can't fall off a truck."

I did not say anything for a moment, because I did not trust my voice. Then I said that her father would want to build a box for it, and she laughed, and said he probably would, and we pulled into the driveway, and Hemant had left the porch light on.

Spirit Gum

There is an old belief in theater, Earl told us, that a bad dress rehearsal means a good opening. He said it at ten-forty on the night of Wednesday, January twentieth, standing in the aisle with his ring of keys in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other, and I want to state for the record that none of us found it comforting.

Here is what went wrong, in order.

At six-fifteen, the painted backdrop fell down.

Hemant had made it in November in our garage, from two queen-size bedsheets stitched together and stretched on a frame of furring strips, and Rohini and Ketaki and two of Ketaki's friends had painted it over three weekends: the Sahyadri rising behind the creek, a great dark green wall going up into clouds, with white streaks of waterfalls coming down the rock, and at the bottom the brown water of the creek and the ferry landing with a little thatched shed. It was, honestly, beautiful. Rohini had made the greens out of six different paints mixed in yogurt containers, and she had made the clouds by dabbing on white with a kitchen sponge. In the garage, under the single bulb, it had looked like a real mountain seen through rain.

Hung from the pipe at the back of the Larchmere stage with zip ties, under the lights, it looked like a real mountain for about forty minutes. Then one of the zip ties at the top left corner let go with a small sharp crack, and the corner of the Sahyadri folded down over the ferry shed like a dog's ear, and then the next tie went, and the whole western ghats came down slowly in a long sigh of cotton and landed on Prasad.

Prasad, in his green vest and his empty spectacles, stood very still underneath it. Then a muffled voice said, in Marathi, "I believe the mountain has come to Bhau."

Hemant, who was in the audience, was up on the stage with a ladder and a bag of new zip ties before anyone else had moved. He rehung it in a quarter of an hour, doubling every tie. It stayed up for the rest of the night. Prasad said the experience had given him new insight into his character.

At seven-oh-five, the harmonium bellows tore.

Mukund was playing the overture, the long instrumental opening before the first scene, and in the middle of a fast run there was a sound like somebody letting the air out of a bicycle tire very rudely, and the harmonium sagged on one note and wheezed. Mukund stopped. He bent over the instrument and looked at the bellows, the folded cloth-and-cardboard lungs at the back, and put his finger through a hole the size of a coin.

He did not swear. I have never heard Mukund swear. He said, very quietly, "Sixty years," and closed the case.

We did the rest of the dress rehearsal with Mukund humming the music and Omkar keeping time on the tabla. It sounded like a play being performed in a kitchen.

At seven-forty, Prasad's moustache fell off.

Bhau, in Wagle's play, has a tremendous moustache, the kind that curls up at both ends, which he strokes while composing terrible poetry. Prasad does not have a moustache. Rohini had made him one out of crepe hair, black, very thick, curled with a hot hairpin, and fixed it to his upper lip with spirit gum, the old theatrical glue that comes in a little brown bottle with a brush in the cap and smells like a mixture of nail polish and pine resin. Rohini said it would hold through a monsoon. It did not hold through Prasad's first comic speech, in which he declaims a poem about the ferry tolls and gets so carried away he sneezes. The left half of the moustache let go and hung from his lip like a broken shutter. He pressed it back. It hung again. He finished the speech holding it on with one finger, and the result was so funny that Datta-kaka, who had been very tense all night, laughed until he had to hold onto the curtain rope.

"Keep it," said Datta-kaka, when he could speak. "Keep the finger."

"It's not supposed to fall off, kaka."

"Bhau is a man whose dignity is always falling off. Keep the finger."

At eight-fifteen, the lights went blue.

The lighting board was being run that night by Tamia, the eighth-grader, who was no longer grounded and who had been given, by Earl, permission to run the lights for the play in exchange for community service hours. Tamia is thirteen, very serious, wears enormous headphones around her neck at all times, and had studied the lighting cue sheet I had typed for her with the gravity of a surgeon. At the beginning of Act Two, the cue said: evening, rain, low warm light on the ferry landing. Tamia pushed a slider. The whole stage went the deep electric blue of a swimming pool at night. Gauri, sitting on the ferry landing about to begin the ghat song, looked down at her own arms and said in English, "Oh no, I'm a blueberry."

The blue stayed for ninety seconds while Tamia, in the booth at the back, hunted for the right slider. We could see the light from her screen on her face up there, and her lips moving. Then the stage went warm amber all at once, like a lamp being lit in a house, and everyone, even Gauri, clapped.

At nine-thirty, the vada pav committee was told by Earl that under no circumstances would they be deep frying in the school cafeteria.

Ketaki and her two friends, a tall girl named Rucha and a boy named Varad who had joined the committee mainly to be near Rucha, had set up in the cafeteria kitchen off the side hall with a big electric fryer borrowed from Shankar, and a steel bowl of batter, and a tray of potato balls that Sakhubai had mixed that afternoon, with her own garlic chutney in a tub, and they were about to do a trial batch.

Earl walked in and saw the fryer and stopped.

"No," he said. "No, no, no. Hot oil in my cafeteria with the fire marshal coming Friday? No. I love you kids. No."

So the plan changed. The vadas would be fried at Tambda Rassa on Route 1, an hour before the show, and driven to the school in insulated bags, and assembled at a folding table in the lobby. Sakhubai, when this was explained to her in the third row, said only that a vada that has traveled is a sad vada. Ketaki said they would drive fast.

At ten-twenty, Ani forgot the whole second-act speech.

This is the speech that comes after the ghat song, when Madhav, who has been listening hidden behind the ferry shed, comes out and tells Saudamini that he will not leave, that he will tear up the letter and stay at the bottom of the ghat and become a ferryman. It is the longest speech in the play, two pages, in Wagle's most elaborate Marathi, full of mountains and clouds and lightning and the honor of the clerk's family and his duty to his mother in Pune and why he will betray it. It is very old-fashioned. It is also, when it is done well, the moment the whole play turns.

Ani came out from behind the ferry shed, in his long coat and black cap. He looked at Gauri. He opened his mouth. Nothing came.

I was ready. I had been ready for this all night. I leaned forward on my box with my finger on the line and said, in the low carrying whisper I had been practicing for three months, the first four words.

He said them. Then he stopped again.

I gave him the next four. He said them. He stopped.

We went on like that, four words at a time, through the whole first page, him on the stage and me behind the curtain, like a man being pulled up a cliff on a rope a few feet at a time. It was painful. Everybody could hear me. In that empty auditorium, on a dress rehearsal night, there was nothing to cover my voice, and my whisper went out across the stage and into the red seats, and every line came twice: once from me, flat and quiet, and once from him, a second later, a little louder, a little lost.

Halfway down the second page, Ani stopped and turned to the gap in the curtain where my blue lamp was, and said, in English, not angrily, just tired, "Vaiju-mavshi, I'm sorry. I don't have it. I just don't have it."

From the third row, Sakhubai said something.

I did not catch it. Rohini, beside me, did. She drew in a breath.

"What did she say?" I asked.

Rohini did not answer right away. Then she said, "She said: then say what you have."

Datta-kaka called a break. It was ten-thirty. Earl had come in with the fire extinguisher by then, not because of a fire, but because he had been checking all of them before the fire marshal's visit and had simply walked in carrying one, which added an air of emergency to everything. That was when he told us about bad dress rehearsals.

We went home at eleven. Ani sat in his car in the parking lot for a long time with the engine off. I saw him as Hemant pulled out, sitting in the dark with his black cap still on, his hands on the wheel, his breath fogging the windshield.

At home, Hemant and I did not go to bed. We sat at the kitchen table, and he made chaha the way his mother does, with ginger crushed in a mortar and too much sugar and the milk boiled up three times until it nearly comes over the top, and we drank it out of the steel tumblers we brought from Pune in 1992, and I told him I was afraid.

"Of Ani?"

"Of all of it. Of the speech. Of Gauri's song. Of the harmonium. Of four hundred people from the association sitting in those red seats waiting to see if we can still do it, if we still have the language. And of Datta-kaka's face if we can't."

Hemant turned his tumbler around in his fingers.

"Mukund called me," he said. "While you were in the shower. He's at the kiosk now. He's taking the bellows apart."

"Tonight?"

"He says he has leather. He says he has contact cement. He says a bellows is just a shoe that breathes." Hemant smiled. "I'm going to go over there in the morning and see if he needs a clamp."

I went to bed and did not sleep. At some point around two I heard the furnace go on and off, and the refrigerator hum, and a car go by on our street very slowly, with its tires hissing. I thought: it is cold out. It is getting colder.

In the morning, before I left for the train, I looked at my phone, and there was a message to the whole cast from Datta-kaka, sent at five-eleven in the morning, the hour at which, for twenty-two years, he used to sit at the radio in the bus depot in Woodbridge and tell forty drivers which roads to take.

It said, in English, because he was being a dispatcher, not a director: Models are converging. Low forming off the Carolinas Friday. Nor'easter track. Possible 12 to 18 inches central NJ Saturday afternoon into night. Opening is Saturday 6 pm. I am watching it. Do not panic. Soak your chappals.

Dispatch

By Thursday night the forecast had gone from possible to likely, and Datta-kaka had become, for the first time since I had known him, completely calm.

I understood why later. For twenty-two winters, his job had been exactly this. At four in the morning on a snow day he would be at the radio in the bus depot in Woodbridge with three screens of weather in front of him and a map of every route in the district on the wall, with colored pins, and he would decide which roads were safe, which buses would run late, which drivers would go where, and which children would be standing at the end of which driveway in the dark. Every winter there were superintendents who panicked and principals who called him at home. He never panicked. He told me once that panic is what happens when you have not made a plan, and he had always made a plan.

So on Thursday, while the rest of us were refreshing the forecast every few minutes and texting each other photographs of the grocery store on Route 1 with its shelves of bread and milk stripped bare, Datta-kaka sat at his kitchen table in his gray sweater vest with a legal pad and drew a map.

He sent it to the cast at nine that night. It was a photograph of the legal pad. On it, in his neat, upright handwriting, he had drawn Edison and Metuchen and Iselin and Piscataway and South Plainfield, with the main roads in heavy lines, Route 1 and Route 27 and Oak Tree Road and Grove Avenue, and the school marked with a star. Then he had drawn every cast member's house as a little square, with their initials, and arrows from house to house in different colored inks. These were the routes. Hemant's truck, which has four-wheel drive and a plow mount he uses for pool-company customers' driveways in winter, would go first to Rohini's in Edison, then to the Kambles' in Edison, then to the school. Ani's car, a small sedan, would not be used; Ani would be collected at his apartment in Piscataway by Omkar's father, who drives a delivery van. Gauri, who lives in Metuchen, would walk to our house, a ten-minute walk, and come with us. Smita Ghaisas, who lives in Princeton Junction and was playing the aunt, was circled in red with a question mark.

At the bottom of the page he had written: Departure times Saturday to be confirmed 10 am Saturday based on accumulation. Everyone in costume by 4:30. Bring a shovel if you have one.

"He's gone full dispatcher," said Ketaki, looking at it on my phone over my shoulder.

"He has always been full dispatcher," said Hemant. "He only lets it show when it snows."

On Friday the courthouse closed at noon. I was in the middle of a deposition in a conference room on the fourth floor, a dull insurance matter, and at eleven-forty a clerk knocked on the door and said the county was sending everyone home ahead of the storm. The attorneys shook hands and packed their briefcases with the relief of children let out of school, and I folded the legs of my stenotype tripod, and went down in the elevator and out onto the street.

It was not snowing yet. The sky over New Brunswick had gone a strange low yellowish gray, flat and heavy as a lid, and the air had that smell that comes before snow in New Jersey, a metallic, clean, cold smell, like a knife just washed. People were walking fast with their collars up. The Raritan, when I glimpsed it at the bottom of the street, was a dull pewter color, very still, with thin plates of ice along the edges where the reeds were.

I did not go home. I got off the train one stop early, at Edison, and walked fifteen minutes to the strip mall on Route 27, to HEEL & KEY.

Mukund was there. The kiosk was shut, with a sign on the door in his handwriting that said CLOSED FOR WEATHER, but the light was on, and he let me in when I knocked. The harmonium was on the counter on a towel, open, with the bellows out of it.

He had replaced the torn panel with a piece of soft black leather. I asked him where it came from.

"A boot," he said. "A lady brought in a pair of boots two years ago to be resoled and never came back. I keep everything for one year. After that, it is mine." He held up the bellows, opened and closed it gently, and it breathed, a long, soft, even sigh. "Calfskin. Very fine. Better than the original, actually. The original was cardboard and cotton. Sixty years it lasted. This will last sixty more."

Hemant had been there that morning with two clamps and had held the panel in place for twenty minutes while the contact cement set. Then, Mukund said, Hemant had gone home to put the plow on his truck.

Mukund fitted the bellows back into the harmonium and screwed the back panel on with a small screwdriver and set the whole thing upright. Then he sat down on his stool behind the counter, and pulled out the stops, and played.

The sound filled that tiny kiosk like water filling a cup. It was richer than before, I thought, or maybe that was only the room, the closeness of the walls with their brass keys on pegs, the leather smell. He played the ghat song. Not all of it. The first two phrases. The slow climb of Megh, a cloud going up a mountain.

"I tested it on Wednesday night," he said, when he stopped. "Late, after I glued the first piece. There was a man waiting for the bus outside, on 27, at midnight. A young fellow in a hospital uniform, from the nursing home down the road, going home from a shift. He heard it through the glass. He knocked. I thought, he wants a key cut at midnight. But he said, what is that? I said, an old song from a play about rain. He said, play it again. I played it again. He listened to the whole thing, standing outside the glass. Then his bus came and he left." He closed the stops. "I don't know who he was. He was from Haiti, I think, from his accent. He didn't understand one word. He stood there anyway."

He sent me home with a thermos of sol kadhi. "For tomorrow," he said. "For the singers. The kokum is good for the throat in the cold. My mother said so. Maybe it is not true. It does not matter. Gauri should drink it."

The snow began at four on Friday afternoon, while I was walking home from the train, very fine at first, like sugar shaken through a sieve, so fine you could not see it falling, only feel it on your face.

On Saturday morning there were six inches on the ground and it was still coming down, heavier now, big wet flakes that stuck to everything, to the branches of the maple in our yard and to the telephone wires and to the top of the mailbox, so that by ten o'clock the whole street looked like it had been packed in cotton wool. The sky was white. The ground was white. The air between them was white and moving. There were no cars. The only sound was the scrape of a neighbor's shovel and, very far away, the rumble of a town plow on Main Street.

At ten exactly, Datta-kaka sent the message.

The district had called him at nine. They had not canceled. A Saturday rental is not a school day; the district does not close buildings for snow on weekends unless the roads are closed by the state, and the roads were not closed, only, in the words of the man from the district, highly discouraged. Earl had confirmed he would be there; he lives a mile and a half from the school in a house on a side street off Grove Avenue, and he had said he would walk if he had to. But the district had also said that the building would be closed all day Sunday for snow removal and parking lot clearing, and there would be no second performance. The Sunday matinee, the one most of the association's older members had bought tickets for because they do not like to drive at night, was gone.

There would be one show. Saturday at six. In a storm.

Datta-kaka's message laid this out in four short lines. Then he wrote: The association has 312 tickets sold for tonight and 170 for tomorrow. I have spoken to Bharati Apte. She is calling every ticket holder for both shows. Anyone who can come tonight is welcome tonight. We will see who comes. We go at six. Departures as planned. Hemant leaves at 2:45.

I read it twice, standing in the kitchen in my socks. Then I went upstairs to find Ketaki, who was sitting on her bed with Bal's pheta in her lap, practicing tying it, over and over, the way Rohini had taught her, the long strip of faded orange cotton wound round and round her head and tucked at the back with the tail hanging down.

"One show," I said.

"I heard." She pulled the pheta off and started again. "Sakhu-aaji's coming."

"In this?"

"Shankar-kaka said she said, I danced in worse." Ketaki tucked the end. "Then she told me a story. On the phone this morning. She made Shankar-kaka put me on speaker. She never does that."

"What story?"

Ketaki took the pheta off again and held it in her hands.

"About a night in, like, 1964," she said. "At a fair in some village. It rained so hard the tent came down, the big one, the one the audience sat in. Everyone ran. The whole village. And the owner of the troupe said, that's it, we're done, pack up. And then they saw there were six farmers who hadn't left. Six old men sitting on the ground in the mud with gunny sacks over their heads. Just waiting. And the troupe looked at each other. And they got up on a bullock cart, the whole troupe, the dholki player and the comic and the singer and her, under a tarp, with one kerosene lantern hanging from a stick, and they did the whole show. For six old men. In the rain. Three hours."

"Did she dance?"

"She said she danced so hard her ghungroo broke and the bells went all over the mud and the next morning the farmers' grandchildren came and found them and brought them back. All but four." Ketaki started winding the pheta again. "She said she sewed new bells on, but they never sounded the same as the old ones. She said she could always hear the four that were missing."

The snow kept falling outside the window, past the maple, past the roof of the house across the street, past the streetlight that had come on at noon because the sky was so dark. Ketaki finished winding and tucked the tail and held still, looking at herself in the mirror on her closet door, a girl of seventeen in pajama pants and a Rutgers sweatshirt with a faded orange turban on her head. I stood in the doorway and watched her. I thought about six old men in the mud with sacks over their heads. I thought about four missing bells. I thought about 312 tickets, and how many people were going to dig out their cars and drive through a nor'easter to a middle school on Grove Avenue to hear a play in a language most of them only spoke at their own kitchen tables, and the answer, I was quite sure, was not very many. At two-forty-five Hemant started the truck in the driveway and let it run, the plow blade up and dripping, the headlights on in the middle of the afternoon, two yellow cones full of falling snow.

Sixty-One

I counted the audience from the gap in the curtain at five fifty-eight. Sixty-one people. For the record, that is sixty-one out of three hundred and twelve, in a room with four hundred red seats, which meant that from where I sat they looked like a few handfuls of seeds thrown across a field.

They had come in boots. Snow boots, rubber boots, one pair of ski boots, the clomping kind, worn by a man from the association named Gadre who had apparently skied from his house on Library Place, a mile away, and had his skis leaning in the lobby by the vada table. Many had brought their good shoes in plastic grocery bags and were changing into them in their seats. The women had saris on under their parkas. One family had brought a thermos and a stack of paper cups and was passing chaha along their row. The room smelled of wet wool and snowmelt and the hot dust of radiators that Earl had turned all the way up at four o'clock, so that the old iron along the side walls was banging and clanking like a ship's engine room.

Mr. Kelkar was there, the man who had added six words for rain. Mrs. Apte was there, in the front row, with a clipboard, checking names. Gauri's parents were there, and Ani's father, and Omkar's whole family, who had come in the delivery van. Bharati Apte's husband had brought her mother, ninety-one, in a wheelchair, through the snow, and parked her at the end of the second row with a blanket over her knees. And in the third row, in the center seat that was too big for her, in the lime-green nauvari and the brown cardigan and the purple pharmacy hat, sat Sakhubai Kamble, with her handbag on her lap.

Smita Ghaisas was not there; her street in Princeton Junction had not been plowed. So Rohini Sathe, who had sat in on every rehearsal and done every costume and knew the aunt's lines, she said, as well as she knew the capitals of the states of India, was playing the aunt. She had put on the indigo nauvari over her own clothes in the girls' bathroom at four-thirty, and painted her own face, and stood in the wings beside my box saying, under her breath, the capitals of the states of India.

Shankar's van with the vada pav was not there either. It had slid into a snowbank at the corner of Grove Avenue and Route 27 at five-fifteen. Nobody was hurt, and the vadas were fine, but the van was stuck. Ketaki's friends Rucha and Varad had walked down the road with a sled from Varad's garage to get them.

At six-oh-four, Earl turned down the house lights from the booth, and Tamia, in her huge headphones, brought up the warm amber, and Mukund, on his riser stage right, pulled out the stops of his harmonium with its new calfskin lung and began the overture.

I will not describe the whole play. What matters for the record is what went wrong, and what went right, and the place where those two things turned out to be the same.

The first act went well. I want to say that, because nobody remembers it. Gauri as Saudamini was clear and strong, and the audience, hearing that old Marathi out loud in a room in Edison, made small sounds of recognition, a murmur, a laugh at a joke that had not been funny since 1931 and suddenly was. Datta-kaka as the old ferryman squeaked across the stage in the one pair of chappals that had never been soaked, his, and the squeak got a laugh, and he waited for it with perfect timing, and I realized he had kept them dry on purpose. Prasad's moustache came loose in his first scene exactly as it had in the dress rehearsal, and he held it on with one finger as Datta-kaka had told him, and the audience roared. Rohini, as the aunt, did not miss a single word.

I prompted seven times in the first act. All small.

At the interval, the vadas arrived on a red plastic sled, pulled through the lobby doors by Varad with snow up to his knees and Rucha pushing from behind. They were cold. A vada that has traveled is a sad vada. Ketaki warmed them in the cafeteria microwave, and Sakhubai, who had come out to the lobby on Shankar's arm, stood over the folding table and personally added extra garlic chutney to each one with a spoon. They sold all one hundred and twenty. Some people bought three. A man I did not know stood by the trophy case with his wet boots and his good shoes and a vada pav in each hand and said to nobody, "This is the best one I have had since Dadar station in 1988," and nobody contradicted him.

Then the second act.

The ghat song.

Gauri sat on the ferry landing under the warm light, which Tamia got right the first time, and Mukund let the first notes of Megh rise out of the calfskin bellows, and Omkar answered low on the bayan, and outside, through the walls, you could hear the wind pushing the snow against the windows of the cafeteria. Gauri closed her eyes. She sang.

She was not perfect. Her voice caught in the second verse, a small break on the high note, and she went on. But it was the song, the real one, the woman on the landing furious at the mountain. I sat on my box with the script on my knees and did not look at it.

When it ended, there was a silence. Then a man's voice from the fifth row, old and cracked, Mr. Kelkar's voice, said, in Marathi, "Once more."

And then someone else said it. And then four or five people. Once more. Once more.

Gauri opened her eyes and laughed, a startled laugh, and looked over at Mukund. Mukund, at the harmonium, raised his eyebrows a quarter of an inch. Then he played the opening again.

She sang it twice. The second time was better.

Then came Madhav's speech.

Ani came out from behind the ferry shed in his long coat and his black cap. He looked at Gauri. He opened his mouth, and said the first line, and the second line. He had it. I could see that he had it. Then, at the place where he had dropped it at the dress rehearsal, the place halfway down the first page, where the speech turns from the mountain to his mother in Pune, he stopped.

I threw him the line. Four words, in my carrying whisper.

At that exact moment, the radiator along the stage-left wall, three feet from my box, let out a bang like someone hitting a steel drum with a hammer, and then a long, hissing, rattling groan, and my four words disappeared into it.

Ani did not hear. He turned his head a little toward the wings.

I said it again, louder.

The radiator banged again.

I said it a third time, and this time I did not whisper. I said it out loud, in my court voice, the voice I use to ask an attorney to repeat a question, and it went out across the stage and over the footlights and into the room. The whole audience heard it. They heard the prompter.

There was a pause. Then laughter, not unkind, rolling up from the red seats. Someone said, "Thank you, prompter." Ani stood there in the middle of the stage in a pool of warm light with his face going dark red under Rohini's makeup, and I could see that he had heard the line now, and could not say it, because now it was not his.

And from the third row, in a voice I had heard speak perhaps forty words in four months, Sakhubai Kamble called out.

It was not the line. It was not Wagle at all. It was the meaning of the next line, in her village Marathi, loud and flat and cheeky, in exactly the tone a tamasha audience uses to tell a performer to get on with it. What she said, more or less, was: "Say it, clerk. You're not going. We all know you're not going."

The room exploded. People turned around in their seats to look at her. Mrs. Apte's mother, ninety-one, clapped. Sakhubai sat with her hands folded on her handbag and her chin up and her eyes on the stage, exactly as she had sat in rehearsal, and did not look at anyone.

Ani turned. He turned the way she had taught Ketaki, the way she had shown all of them, out, to the house, not to Gauri. He looked at the third row. He lifted one eyebrow. He paused, the length of a breath. Then he said, not in Wagle's Marathi, not in Datta-kaka's Marathi, but in the Malvani-tinged kitchen Marathi he had grown up speaking with his grandmother in a house in Piscataway, the coast in his mouth:

"You're right, aaji. I'm not going."

And then he turned to Gauri and said the rest of the speech. Not the speech. His speech. What it meant. That he had come down the mountain for a road that would never be built. That he did not care about the road. That his mother in Pune would be angry and then she would come to visit and eat fish and forget she was angry. That there was a house he knew with a clay tile roof that sounded like her song in the rain, and he wanted to hear that sound every night for the rest of his life, and he did not care if he never slept again.

It was not literature. It was not 1931. It was a twenty-eight-year-old insurance adjuster from Piscataway saying what he would say if he had to say it, in the words he had. It took less than two minutes. Wagle's version takes six.

When he finished, Gauri, who was supposed to answer with a long, ornate reply about the honor of her father's house, looked at him for a long moment, and then said, in her careful Edison Marathi, very simply, "Good. Then stay."

I closed the script on my knees. I did not open it again for the rest of the second act. I took a pencil from behind my ear and turned to the blank pages at the back, after the running times somebody had written there decades ago, 52, 71, 48, and I began to write down what they were actually saying. Not in Devanagari. In stenographic shorthand, by sound, the way I do in court, as fast as it came.

Datta-kaka came on as the old ferryman for the end of the act. I watched him from the wings. He had to answer what Ani had said, and what Ani had said was not in the script. For a moment he stood there in his faded saffron pheta, squeaking very slightly in his dry chappals. Then he spoke. He began in the polished Sadashiv Peth Marathi of Wagle's Annaji, and then, halfway through the first sentence, he stopped, and said in the plain Marathi of an old man at his own kitchen table, the Marathi he speaks to his son on the phone, "Well. Then you will have to learn to row." And the audience laughed and clapped, and the act ended, and Tamia brought the lights down a little too fast, and in the dark I could hear Datta-kaka laughing to himself on the stage, very quietly, a short barking laugh.

The third act went back to Wagle, mostly. Ketaki sang Bal's song, the mountain too tall for a boy's legs, clearly, well, the faded orange pheta on her head. At the end of it she stopped, and looked at the third row, and asked a question with her eyebrows. I saw Sakhubai, very slightly, nod. Ketaki sang one more verse. Sakhubai's verse. The clerk is so slow and so stupid the boy could run up and down the mountain ten times while the clerk tied his shoes, and his moustache looks like a dead caterpillar. It was not in the script and it was in the village Marathi of a tamasha troupe from near Kagal in 1964 and it got the biggest laugh of the night, and Prasad, as Bhau, put his hand over his own crepe moustache and fled the stage.

At ten-fourteen, in the middle of the last scene, the side door opened and Earl came in, with snow on his shoulders, and walked down the aisle to the edge of the stage, and said, apologetically, to Datta-kaka, "The district's sending the plows into the lot at ten-thirty. They want the building empty. I'm real sorry."

There were eleven minutes of the play left. The farewell scene, the final song, the reconciliation with the mother who comes down from Pune. We did not do them.

Datta-kaka stepped forward to the edge of the stage, in his pheta and vest, and looked out at sixty-one people in their wet boots, and said, in his ordinary voice, "In the end, the mother comes down the ghat, and she is angry, and then she eats the fish, and then she stays a week, and then everyone sings. You will have to imagine it. Please drive carefully."

And that was opening night.

The Eleven Minutes

The plows came into the Larchmere lot at ten thirty-one, as promised, two big orange trucks with their blades down and their yellow lights turning, pushing the snow into mountains at the edges of the asphalt taller than Hemant. We loaded the harmonium into the truck in a snowstorm, wrapped in two moving blankets and a garbage bag. We loaded Sakhubai, who had to be lifted into the cab of Hemant's truck by Shankar and Earl together, and who said, as they set her down on the seat, that she had been lifted onto bullock carts with more dignity. Ketaki fell asleep in the back seat with her pheta still on.

The next morning was the Sunday matinee that did not happen. It was bright and blue and absolutely still, eighteen inches of snow on everything, the sun so hard on it that you could not look out the window without squinting. Every branch of the maple had a white line along its top. The street was silent except for the sound of shovels, dozens of them, scraping in every driveway, like a whole town scratching itself.

By noon, the association's archive had a hundred and four comments on the post Mrs. Apte had made at six that morning, which said only: Saudamini, 23 January 2027, performed. Photographs to follow.

I read them all at the kitchen table, with my back to the snow light.

They were not all kind. A man named Dandekar, who had not come, wrote three long paragraphs saying he had heard that the second act had been, in his word, improvised, that Wagle's language had been replaced with kitchen talk, and that if the association would not respect the text it should not stage the text. Two people agreed with him. One of them was Smita Ghaisas, who had not been there either, and who wrote that it was a pity because she had worked very hard on the aunt.

But most of the comments were from the sixty-one. Mr. Kelkar wrote that he had not shouted once more in a theater since 1971, on a cheap seat near the back in Pune, and that he had forgotten how it felt in the chest. Gauri's mother wrote only that she had cried twice, the first time from the song, the second time when Gauri said then stay. A woman I did not know wrote that her children, eleven and fourteen, had asked her on the drive home through the snow what the old woman in the third row had said, and when she explained it, the fourteen-year-old had said, oh, so it's like you're allowed to talk back, and asked if there would be another one.

And Mrs. Apte's mother, aged ninety-one, dictated a comment to her daughter, which Mrs. Apte typed in exactly, with no corrections. It said: Too long, too cold, best night in years, the vada was not hot.

Datta-kaka did not comment. He did not call. He did not send any messages for four days, which for Datta-kaka is a kind of disappearance.

On Thursday he came to the courthouse.

I was in Courtroom 403 for a pretrial conference, and at the recess I came out into the corridor and found him sitting on the wooden bench by the tall window over the parking deck, in his overcoat and a wool cap, with his hands folded on top of a cane I had never seen him use before. Below, the snow in the corners of the deck had gone gray.

"I wanted to see where you work," he said.

I sat down beside him.

"Dandekar," he said, eventually.

"I read it."

"He is not wrong." He turned the cane a little in his hands. "Wagle's second act was not performed. A man came and paid and was promised a play, and did not get it. In my old job, if a bus did not run its route, I wrote it up. That is what happened on Saturday. The route was not run."

"Kaka."

"Let me finish." He did not look at me. "And still. When that boy turned to the old woman in the third row and said you're right, aaji, I have been on that stage in my head since I was fifteen years old, and I have never felt the floor move like that. Never. Not in Jersey City in 1978. Not anywhere." He was quiet. "My father would have walked out. I think. I am not sure. He also shouted once more nine times in 1946 at a song that was, I suspect, sung slightly wrong."

He reached into his overcoat and took out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a printout of a page from the association archive. The play folder. Mukund's fifty-three files, each with its line underneath: after Wagle.

"I was angry about those little lines," he said. "Now look what she has done to us." He tapped the paper.

At the bottom of the list, Mrs. Apte had added a new file that morning. It was titled: Act Two as performed, 23 January 2027, transcribed by V. Kulkarni from shorthand. And beside it, a note: To be kept with Wagle's text, not instead of it. Both are the play.

"You have not transcribed it yet," Datta-kaka said.

"No."

"Bharati has made a file with nothing in it. She is a very hopeful woman." He stood, slowly, on the cane. "Transcribe it. Then we will talk about January."

"January?"

"Next January," he said. "We are doing it again. All of it. Wagle's first act. Wagle's third act. And the second act will be two acts, the one he wrote and the one we said, one after the other, so Dandekar can have his and the rest of us can have ours. And this time we will do the last eleven minutes." He put on his wool cap. "Wagle's last scene is in his Marathi, and the second act is now in ours, and the two will not fit. Somebody who knows how all of us talk will have to write the ending."

He looked at me.

"No," I said.

"You did not volunteer," he said. "I know. I will tell everyone you did not volunteer." And he walked away down the corridor toward the elevators, tapping, a thin old man in an overcoat among the lawyers in their dark suits, and did not look back.

I transcribed the shorthand over the next three weeks, in the evenings, at the kitchen table. It was harder than any court transcript I have ever done. Stenographic shorthand is built for English. I had written the Marathi by sound, in improvised chords, at speed, in the dark, and much of it, reading it back, was like reading the tracks of a bird in snow: you know something was there, you can see which way it went, but the shape of the creature you have to guess. I would sit with a page and say the chords out loud, quietly, and slowly the sentences would come back in Ani's voice, Gauri's, Datta-kaka's, and I would type them in Devanagari.

Some of it I could not recover. Where I could not, I marked it, the way I would in court. [Inaudible: radiator.] There are four of those.

Ketaki sat at the other end of the table most of those nights, working on her book. She had all of it on her laptop: Mukund's fifty-three recordings, the word list with all its voices, the photographs of rehearsals and of the backdrop falling on Prasad, Sakhubai's town stories, only the funny ones, and the birthday page. She was laying it all out for printing, page by page, with a cover she had designed herself: a photograph taken by Varad at ten-forty on opening night of the Larchmere parking lot in the storm, with the orange plows and the yellow lights turning and the snow coming down slant across the frame, and in the lower corner, small, the lit side door of the school with a figure in it that was, if you looked very closely, Earl, with his keys.

In the middle of February, Sakhubai asked to see me.

Shankar brought her to our house on a Sunday afternoon. She had never been inside it. She stood in the front hall for a long time in her brown cardigan, looking at everything with the same mild judgment she had given to Oak Tree Road. Then she sat at the kitchen table in the place where I had been transcribing, and Ketaki made her chaha, with too much ginger, the way Hemant does, and Sakhubai drank it and did not complain, which Ketaki said afterward was the greatest compliment of her life.

"Ketaki says you write everything down," Sakhubai said to me, in her village Marathi.

"Yes, aaji. It is my work."

"The play. You wrote what they said, not what the paper said."

"Yes."

She nodded. She put the cup down. Then she said that she had decided there was one story, out of the ones that were hers, that she would like written down. Not recorded. She did not want her voice in a box. Written, by me, by hand, on paper, and then typed, and put in Ketaki's book, with her name on it.

I got a pad. I uncapped a pen.

She told me about the four bells.

Not the story Ketaki had told me, the one about the six farmers and the bullock cart and the rain, though that was in it. The rest of it. What came after the bells were lost. What it was to dance for eleven years and then marry into a family that would not say the word tamasha at the dinner table. What it was to put the ghungroo in a trunk and not take them out for forty years, and then to take them off her own son when he put them on, because she could not bear to hear them on someone who did not know what they cost. What she had done with them after. Where they were now.

I will not write it here. It is in Ketaki's book, on one page, under Sakhubai's name, and it belongs there and not in this account. I will only say that it took her twenty minutes to tell, and that I wrote every word in longhand, in Devanagari, in her Marathi, the village Marathi of near Kagal, exactly as she spoke it, and that I did not correct a single word into the Marathi of Narayan Peth.

When she was done she asked me to read it back. I did. She listened with her eyes closed, nodding sometimes. At one place she stopped me and said a word was wrong, I had written it the Pune way, and she said it again, her way, and I crossed mine out and wrote hers above it.

Then she said, "Ha," and finished her chaha, and Shankar took her home.

In March the snow was gone except for a few black heaps at the backs of the strip mall lots, and the first crocuses were up in a strip of dirt beside the HEEL & KEY sign on Route 27, purple and white, between the cigarette butts. We met there on a Wednesday evening, the core of us, in the kiosk and spilling out onto the sidewalk: Datta-kaka, Mukund, Gauri, Rohini, Omkar, Prasad, Ketaki and me. Ani drove in from Allentown, where his company had moved him in February, and said he would come every Thursday next winter through any nor'easter. Mukund poured sol kadhi from the dented thermos into paper cups, and we stood in the cold under the strip mall lights drinking the pink of it, sour and cold and burning at the back, and talked about next January.

Gauri would sing again. Ketaki would play Bal again, though she would be at Rutgers by then and would have to come home on Thursdays too. Smita Ghaisas had written to Datta-kaka to say she would like to play the aunt next year, if Rohini did not mind. Rohini said she did not mind at all, and that she would play the mother from Pune instead, the one who comes down the ghat in the last eleven minutes and eats the fish.

"But the mother has no lines yet," said Prasad. "Not in our Marathi."

They all looked at me.

So now it is a Tuesday night in late March and I am sitting at the kitchen table in Edison with the window open an inch for the first time since October, letting in the smell of wet earth, and I have a blank pad in front of me, and Wagle's tea-colored book open beside it to the last scene, and my mother on the laptop propped against the sugar tin, in Pune, where it is already tomorrow morning and the radio is playing in the front room of what is left of the wada, and I have just read her the first line I have written for the mother who comes down the mountain, a line in the Marathi of our kitchen, not of Wagle's stage, a line I have heard her say to me on the telephone perhaps a thousand times since 1992, and she has laughed for ten seconds, and said that it is wrong, that she would never say it like that, that I have made her sound like a Kolhapur woman, and then said it back to me herself, her way, slowly, the Narayan Peth way, so I could take it down.