Mad Man in the Street Some thought he said, ‘hut!’ to shoo off pesky children who giggled endlessly as they passed him on their walks to school. Some thought he said, ‘phut!’ to reproach any passerby, who, in an act of spontaneous generosity, handed him anything less than a rupee. And most of the time, when he seemed to confer with the air around him, the only word they could catch from him was ‘dhut’, as if he were dismissing an inane idea. But no one could say for certain what the mad man in the street – for that is what they called him – actually said, as his utterances seemed to sound all the same. He lived between a lamppost and large bin, on a jute mat nailed to the pavement by the weight of a dented aluminum canister that clanked every time a coin was dropped in it; a plastic tumbler, pair of worn out hawai chappals, bedroll of discarded clothes, broken umbrella and a few roadside rocks. No one knew where he came from and when and how he got there. One day the...