Say One.

Compounds, the kind of open space behind a one-storey house, I learnt later you could call it a backyard. I hate all compounds. It was in the compound of my grandmother's house that I hid behind a plaintain tree as she ran out of the kitchen, fist clenched around red chillies and what I now know to be spluttering sesame, and once she found me she started at the head, circling it thrice. Pungent smelling fist rubbing right through to the scalp, then dragged down unwavering to my ear, then down my neck, I can feel a stray fingernail scrape it. From the nape it travels along collarbone to ball of shoulder then down my hand, sticking to the skin, never leaving, words being muttered all along in with purring sounds in between, and then it's down to the wrist, reached the fingertips, then taken off me and flung away. One jerk and a handful of spices lies at the bottom of the tree, mingling with rotten banana skin, being ignored by an army of plump black ants.

This happened a lot for mostly two reasons. My grandmother believed in the evil eye, and I kept getting sick for no reason. The sicker I got the more often she hunted me down, the better I got the more she let me alone, it used to be simple enough for me to understand so you'd expect the world to work in my favour sometimes, especially since I couldn't stand the smell of heated chillies or the feel of her skin against mine. Things rarely work out that way, a new vendor arrives outside school and he has things we haven't seen before, things he calls A-Class Jelly in long thing plastic tubes, and before you know it I'm letting my pants run yellow. But here is a lesson, the avoidance of an exorcism goes thus: steal keys at noon when everyone's asleep, increase TV volume, open back door to compound. Run past papaya trees, leap across ditch and speed it till Lajpat Rai colony, turn left to the market, walk four streets past, stop at milk booth, turn, stare, be reborn.

When I was reborn I had a bottled thandai in my hand and a discarded nine-piece puzzle at my feet, and the biggest compound I'd ever seen spread out in front of me like a stage scene. No fences no gates no postbox, just a compound.