A DEMON WITH RUBY EYESGrave of Rai Tulsi Das. (Photo © Manan Ahmed Asif.)present.^3 These were material homes for bodies belonging to Hindus
of the present Uch and surrounding villages. There are other such ma-
terial echoes of Hindu past and-present in Uch. At the arch above the
old market, I saw the inscription "Koncha Temple Doorway" (Koncha
Mandar Darwaza). Walking under the arch and down the pathway, I
asked a number of shopkeepers if they knew about the temple. Everyone
claimed they had never heard of a temple-many were even incredu-
lous that I was asking about a temple'. Yet as I kept walking into the
old neighborhood, I spotted in the fading light the telltale spire of a
temple rising above the walled gate.
Arriving at the temple structure, I knocked on the door. A twelve-
year-old boy answered and explained that this house belonged to his
father, who also had a home in Karachi. The father was at home, so I
was able to ask him about the arch. He said that yes, his home had been
the temple. In the years since the Partition of 1947, scores of Hindu
families had left Uch, driven out by fear or by fiat. The family who had
lived in the temple had been there since the early 1980s, when the father