Two years later, Harbart put the skull and bones into a little cloth bag, and then went to the Old Ganga behind Keoratala Crematorium and threw them into the water.

He used to store his own things in the trunk, later. Later, his money too.

After immersing the remains of that unfortunate unknown, Harbart was filled with an intoxicating attraction for death. He would feel that he was drowning in the darkness of those empty eye sockets—that all around him spun a Ferris wheel of stars or a furious flutterment of fireflies.

Soon after, he began to read and reread those aforementioned two most important books.

Soon after, his friend Khororobi committed suicide. Harbart was nineteen. The boy had a khor-kutter, a straw-cutting machine, at home, so his friends had stuck the word before his name, the name his parents had chosen for their son, Sun. Robi. So he became Khororobi. Straw Sun. Khororobi was a good boy who had fallen deeply in love with the short Jaya from the neighborhood behind theirs. Every evening, Jaya and a gaggle of girlfriends would step out for a walk, come over and chat with the girls on this side. That Khororobi would begin to act honey-funny whenever he saw Jaya, everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he didn’t have the balls—he’d never dare to venture out of their gang. But that fateful Ashtami day, what madness filled his head, only he knew. Elbowing his way through the crazy crowds, he strode into the Durga Puja in Jaya’s neighborhood and handed her a slip of paper and one of those tiny fountain pens that had then flooded the market. On the paper was scrawled in a crow-leg-and-stork-leg script: “Jaya, an offering at your divine feet from a humble devotee. Yours, Robi.”

The local boys grabbed him. Jaya sped back home. Robi somehow scrabbled free. The scuffle had ripped apart his new shirt. That night, Jaya’s uncle came to have a word at Khororobi’s house. The two neighborhoods grew dense with hostility. Nabami, Dashami—Khororobi was AWOL. Then, the strains of the idol immersions were not yet past when, in the late afternoon of the day after, a hue and cry—Khororobi had been found. Floating in the wall-encircled Corporation pond. Dead.

Khororobi’s corpse floated facedown near the water’s western edge, floated in water two men deep, floated and bobbed and swayed and rocked. On the shore stood all the neighborhood boys, stood Harbart. The sunlight shone on the water, made it a little transparent, one could see beneath the surface a waggle of waterweeds, and then the deep green of the moss thickening into darkness. On the shore, a bicycle. Someone holds out a shaft of bamboo. Two boys from the swimming club get into the water. A prod from the bamboo upturns Khororobi and sets him floating away from the diving board and into murky waters. The sun is swiftly sliding. The police have arrived. Striding to the pond, the sergeant asks, “Corpse come up?” No one answers. The swimmers have reached Khororobi. But as soon as they touch him, he bobs away on the backs of many little waves. Then each boy swims to one side and grabs a fistful of shirt. Khororobi is finally caught. Then they kick and kick their way to shore, and the water stretches out taut and tight Khororobi’s full head of hair.