Translation Dwarkabai and Dhundi

Two hands kneaded the dough, broke off a piece, rolled it into a ball and ran the pin over it. She picked up the rolled out circle of dough and threw it into the air, her nimble fingers making a game of the catching and the throwing. She landed her little continent of dough onto the griddle. The flame shuddered in the earthen fireplace, throwing a light on Ma's face. Drops of sweat shone on her skin like early morning dew reluctant to be woken by the day. Ma turned and looked and found that Dhundiraj had crawled on all fours to the door where he was digging the earth, readying to eat the mud.

She leaped up and picked him onto her lap. She pushed a finger into his mouth and picked out the mud. Slapped him across his face, twice over, and dumped him on the ground.

Dhundiraj howled.

Dwarkabai: Cry all you want.

A thought struck her and she got up and found a torn bit of saree. She tore it further, and tied the two pieces onto her child's hands, making horses' hooves of them.

"Go on, eat more mud, your hands are going to stay like this"

Lying in his cradle, the child looked one glance at Dwarkabai, and one at the sky. There was a single cloud in the blue expanse... After a few seconds, as the cradle stopped rocking, the cloud started moving, and came up, right over Dhundiraj. His crying suddenly stopped. He lay quietly in his rocking bed, a mute witness to an event that thinned the boundaries dividing the worlds.

His pupils dilated and floated like boats towards his nose. A strange bird on long grey legs settled near the cradle. He was composed of a porous grey material. Ma had covered the embers of the fireplace and was sitting, lost in thought, when the silence woke her up. Why had Dhundiraj's crying stopped so suddenly? She ran to the cradle with her heart in her mouth. Dhundiraj looked like he was in a samadhi. His palm was half open like it was Tukaram's palm holding the kartal. His face had a unsettling smile, but he made no sound and the cradle was still. As though that small piece of cloud in the sky had hypnotised him.

And then, the sudden excitement in the atmosphere subsided, restoring movement to the air once more, and bore that cloud away. The cloud had barely moved when the cradle began to rock again, and Dhundiraj came out of his trance and cried out noisily.

Dwarkabai was relieved by the sound " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".