Dibu Banerjee’s family had long organized their lives around passive rental income. Their physical, mental and metaphysical construction had come together for decades in the rationalization of their economic spirit. The family took great pride in the fact that they had never lifted a finger in their lives. Receiving money from tenants too was categorized as an activity that required inordinate effort. It could not be possibly done without the help of heavily sugared milk tea ordered at intervals of approximately two hours, during which friends and neighbours would visit. The more enterprising among them would organize chess competitions in the neighbourhood. At times, chess would be substituted by another game; the only unwritten rule was that the game had to be sedentary. There was a year when Chinese checkers received furious enthusiasm. Another year it was the tiger and the goat from Nepal. The neighbourhood had become a hotbed of table games although it would be a stretch to say travellers from all over the world would bring their discoveries here and reap rich rewards. This phenomenon wasn’t lucrative enough to create that kind of a gold rush. The underlying ethic was entertainment not enterprise, no well-to-do family would be caught dead mixing these two goals in public. Nevertheless, betting on players was permitted and covertly encouraged. Exorbitant bets would never be settled. It was understood that they were merely symbols of conviction. The emotional shock from the loss was seen as a good substitute for the amount forgone. Diabetes had settled in the family. It was a lifestyle disease, transmitted by nurture, not nature. The house retained three daily suppliers of Bengali sweets, one for roshogula, another for mishti doi (sweetened curd) and the third for everything else. The presence of visible muscle on the body was considered lack of both class and caste, and pronounced muscles were strictly abhorred for they indicated physical labour. If the younger members of the family spent too much time outside or ran about for more than ten minutes a day, it was customary to increase their dosage of butter. The ability to see one’s own feet, for male and female members of the family alike, was not seen in good light. Here gender equality was generally maintained.

‘Don’t go about displaying our poverty to the world’ was a programmatic comment used by the elders at the dining table. It was a preventive measure, not a curative one.