The Brahmin Tutor

As a child growing up in Bombay, my grandmother wasn’t good at Sanskrit. She went to the house of an older Brahmin student who would tutor her. At the Brahmin house, they covered all their furniture and made my grandmother sit in the balcony so she wouldn’t touch anything. After partition, when my grandmother moved to Karachi and enrolled in a college, she was shocked to see her former tutor there. The tutor made a pleading gesture, putting her finger to her lips; she had married a Muslim and migrated with him.
“Please don’t tell on me,” she begged.

[Edited on 14-12-2022, three years after her passing. Now on Instagram.]