Tomorrow I will cast my vote in India’s elections. Democracy itself is at stake | Amit Chaudhuri

There have been highs and lows during the country's long voting period. Now pessimism is setting in

Tomorrow I will vote. I'll probably walk to the same mid-20th century bungalow that I walked to five years ago - it was once a primary school my daughter went to - where you vote in a room on the margins of the open space that was a playground. It is a site in which the ballot is cast (or the button pressed) in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Ballygunge in Kolkata. It has a historic serenity - even an optimism, given its immediate pedagogical past - that may not be typical at all of the circumstances of voting in India.

The general elections are, however, always largely orderly (largely" being a crucial qualifier). This one hasn't been very different in that regard. After I vote, I expect to receive an indelible ink mark that will stretch vertically on my forefinger from the cuticle to the skin below it; somehow, like a memory that was once all-important, it will fade after a few days. There have been stories about people who have managed to get the mark off; one of them, who voted eight times for the Bharatiya Janata party, was arrested.