In fact, so moved were Singh's brethren after seeing newspaper pictures of him in a DTC bus, this morning they gifted him a white Maruti Gypsy King. Not to be left behind, supporters from his own Shalimar Bagh constituency presented him a brand-new Ambassador, complete with a flag staff and a red light. Lunch was on-the-house for all the supporters.

They slipped on his ceramic green and white-coloured tiled floor and held on to the walls with daal, cottage cheese and spinach-stained hands. And a domestic help presented herself on cue to clean the tiled walls with a wet sponge.

The house itself does not look plush from the outside -- in fact a window-pane is missing from the living room window. But the difference is obvious inside. The ceramic tiles in the dining room are the same colour and size as the ones in the living room. The two rooms had been stripped bare for the stream of supporters pouring in since yesterday.

But with the house itself proving to be too small for all the supporters, Singh promised that the shamiana erected in the park outside would remain for them to sit and wait for him. A Jat leader from Singh's Mundka village, however, said that the problem would not recur at Singh's double-storeyed Mundka house.

Number 555, the Mundka house, however, is not half as well kept as the one in Shalimar Bagh. The marble on the walls leading to the backyard is chipped.The patch of green at the rear end of the house is where Jat leaders hold discussions and seek advice.Singh's brother and family live in the Mundka house where the window-panes have been tinted to keep the sun out. Though larger in size, the house was empty this morning in stark contrast to the smaller Shalimar Bagh house teeming with people. ``Everybody has gone for the maha-panchayat in Bawana,'' a neighbour at Mundka village said.

But Singh himself has no plans of living in either of the houses. Speaking to Express Newsline this morning, he said: ``The government will provide a house for me when I am inducted into the Union Cabinet. But I have had enough of government houses. I will make a small cottage in the centre of a field with greenery all around and I will live there''.