Ganesha on a lotus across a woman's back

The generator packed in again on the Saturday, so the big wheel sat dark over the Saltley fields with forty children stamping their feet below. I went round the back of the dodgem cabin where Rajan keeps his paints and found him on an upturned crate, a brush between his teeth, touching up the old elephant-headed god painted on the tin door. He put it there the summer his mother died, he says, because somebody had to clear the path for the rest of them. Ganesha, he calls him. The one who lifts obstacles out of the road.

He had the lotus done in rose and a bit of violet, the petals gone pale at the edges where the paint ran thin. He was working the blue of the god's cloth in with his little finger because he said a brush made it look like a postcard. I held the torch while he fixed the generator with a spanner and a good deal of swearing, and the wheel came round at quarter past nine to a cheer I could hear from the tea tent.

Afterwards he asked whether I thought the god minded being stuck on a fairground door, seeing the same faces every night and being splashed with cider and chip fat. I said I doubted he'd minded much worse at his own festivals. Rajan laughed and said it was the most useful thing anyone had told him all season.

I left him with the tin door still tacky and the small lotus in the god's hand catching the bulb, the wheel turning slow over the caravans like a clock that had finally been wound.

Love, Agnes