In Behrote the morning tea is made at six. The midday tea is made if there is someone.

Today the mother made it at eleven.

She put three glasses on the tray and used one. The other two stayed full until they went cold, and now they have a skin on top.

The shawl is the good one, grey wool, with the fringe redone twice.

On the wall, beside the window, there is the paper of the report. It is from two thousand. It is folded in four and the fold has torn along the short way, and whoever opens it opens it slowly.

Inside there is the description. The mother says it the way it is written, always the same, and she has been saying it for twenty-six years.

"A mark above the right eye, as long as a fingernail."

She does not say scar. On the paper it is written mark, and she says mark.

He got the mark at nine years old, at the canal, when he went for water with his big brother and slipped on the concrete edge. He bled a great deal. The father took him to Thanamandi on the scooter, and at the clinic they put in two stitches and said that two stitches were enough.

The big brother is Bashir.

In two thousand Bashir was twenty-two and had a job promised in a warehouse in Andheri.

The two of them left at night, on the truck of a man from Kotranka who carried apples. Rafiq was fourteen and was in the ninth standard. He was to stay in Mumbai two months and come back for school.

They arrived on the fourth day.

In the third month Bashir came back. He came back alone and said what there was to say, that the boy had taken up with others from the valley, in another neighbourhood, and that he was coming home in October.

Then October.

Then he looked in Andheri. He looked in Kurla. He went twice to Dharavi with the address of a cousin of a neighbour. He went to the police post in Rajouri with the paper. He went to the police posts in Mumbai, three of them, and the third time one of them told him to leave the photograph and not come back.

The photograph was the only one. The mother gave it and never had it back.

The video came last night to the phone of Bashir's wife, from a cousin who lives in Jammu, who saw it go past and wrote only look.

It was made by a young man who goes around the markets and interviews people. Four minutes and eleven seconds, in front of a roller shutter, a man of about forty who says he worked for years at loading and unloading and that now he is at the shutter, that he sells belts and wallets, and that he has never gone back to the village.

He says the name of the district. He says it right.

At twenty past eleven the mother watched it once only, all of it, without ever stopping it, and then she got up to fetch the shawl.

Bashir has the phone in his hand. The video is stopped. His thumb is over the glass and does not press.

One word is enough. Wait. One word and the mother sits down.

The mother is in the doorway. She has the shawl in her right hand, rolled up, the way she holds it when she goes to the well. With the left she holds the doorjamb.

"I am going to tell them."

Bashir looks at the frame. The man's forehead is covered. The hair comes down at the side and covers the right brow as far as the temple.

He spreads it with two fingers. The frame goes big and dirty. Under the hair there is nothing to see. He spreads it more. Worse.

He closes the video.

He stands. He crosses the room. The mat folds under his foot, the way it has always folded in the same place, where the step of the old floor is.

He reaches the doorway. He takes the shawl from his mother's hand. She lets it go.

He opens it. He shakes it once, along the long way, so the dust goes. He puts it on her shoulders. Then he settles the edge behind her neck, under the braid, the way his father did and the way she lets no one else do for her.

He draws the bolt.

He opens the door.

Outside it is past noon. The wall opposite gives off heat. A goat lifts its head and lowers it again.

"Go."

The mother goes out. She does not run. At the end of the courtyard she stops and covers her head with the shawl, because that is how one goes out.

Then the voice.

First in the courtyard. Then in the street. Then further off, where the street turns behind the Mirs' house, and the words can no longer be made out but which voice it is can be made out.

Then other voices answer. First two. Then many.

Bashir stays inside. He shuts the door and leaves it ajar, by a hand's breadth, which is how the door stays when there is someone in the house who is waiting.

He sits where he had been sitting.

He starts the video again from the beginning. This time he spreads nothing. He watches all of it, from the first second, with the volume low the way he always keeps it.

It is four minutes and eleven seconds. The man is sitting on an upturned crate, in front of a roller shutter. He speaks little. He laughs once, at the question about food.

In the third minute wind comes and the man puts his hand to his forehead, to hold the hair still, and the hair moves.