Leave me now

Sanjeevani sits there, singing song after Hindi film song. "Gore gore", "Mohabbat aisi dhadkan hai", "Dil cheez kya hai" and more. It's a breezy, dramatic setting with palms and the ruined ramparts of the Fort rising up on the hill, people seated all the way up. Everyone's in a fine mood, shouting requests or handing them over on scraps of paper, foot-tapping in time. People stroll in all through the performance: a young couple with their two children; a girl by herself; a thin man holding a plastic container filled with rice; another couple, their kids and a friend. All find places, sit down to listen and clap along.

Another man walks in. He's in a uniform and carries a long stick: a security guard. He climbs the stairs to the thin man. Yanks him to his feet and shoves him down the stairs. Whacks him a couple of times on his back and neck, mouths some abuse, pushes him along and out of the arena.

Nobody reacts. Sanjeevani sings on.

Bewildered by what I've just seen, I get up from my seat across the arena and run after the two men. I catch up with them near the exit, towards which the guard is shoving the thin man, who is holding the back of his neck as if it hurts.

Perhaps this is the right moment to mention that the thin man is also somewhat shabbily and grubbily dressed, and is wearing worn out slippers.

"What are you doing?" I ask the guard. He replies, "Can't have him in here!"

"Why? What's wrong with him?" I ask, and then call to the thin man not to go. The guard replies, "We got a complaint from someone in the audience that he was sitting there, so we have to throw him out!"

I'm suddenly angrier than I've been in a long time. "You throw him out for that?" I am nearly shouting. "And why were you hitting him anyway? What did he do?"

The exact sequence of this swift exchange is now hazy in my mind, but it's about now that one of the young volunteers for this festival comes over and says, "We don't allow food in." To my continuing regret as I write this a day later, I accept this explanation. I keep asking why the thin man was hit, but I don't immediately question this food policy.

And also to my continuing regret, I take my eyes off the thin man. In a few seconds, he has vanished.

Several minutes later, my whole mood irretrievably destroyed, I remember: two days earlier, I came to a performance in this very place with my kids and a load of sandwiches for them. Nobody stopped me because I had food along. I find the volunteer and tell him that. "The guards must not have noticed," he says, "or they'd have stopped you."

But I also remember that I sat listening for 45 minutes that evening, surrounded by hundreds of people, openly feeding my kids and eating the bits of the sandwiches they did not finish. Plenty of people saw us, some even reached out and mussed my kids' hair. Not only did nobody stop me, nobody complained about me as somebody has complained this evening about a thin grubby man and his plastic container of food.

It tears me up, but I have no choice but to believe that somebody complained about this man purely because he looks like he lives on the street. Can't have that kind listening to Sanjeevani.

Famously, we're celebrating the Queen of Bombay's suburbs over two crisp November weeks. But someone who has come here believes such celebration must also exclude.

I am still angry, but most of all at myself. Because I didn't have the presence of mind to call the thin man back, saying: "Come sit beside me and listen to the lady. If they complain about you, they'll have to complain about me."

And now he's gone. With no hint of irony, Sanjeevani breaks into a song several people have requested: Sahir's "Abhi na jao chhod kar." ("Don't leave me now").

Later, on my way out after the concert, I run into the same guard. I tell him: "Next time you feel like hitting someone, come and hit me, OK?" He says: "Look sir, we have no interest in hitting people. After all, all of us like to listen to music too."

Then he says: "The fault is really with people like you. You people make these complaints and ask us to do these things."