Harbart looks at him by the dying afternoon light and thinks that Khororobi is coming back as an obedient school of fish.

That scene, it could have been a photograph.

Although by now it would have become yellowed, corner-nibbled and slurred with time. Yet, for a hundred years hence, and a hundred years more, by the light of the moon, in the mists of a winter morning, Khororobi and his love will remain afloat on those still waters of death. Around him will twist and tumble mermaids, the ones who cry but whose tears you cannot see.

*

“My name is Harbart! I’m a tit. You’ve seen a tit. Now see a tat.”

“On the velvet greens of grass and flower, houri-fairies prance and play.”

“Kite, airplane, balloon, broom, man, parachute, bird—they all fall down. Yet first they rise. This also rises. This also falls.”

“If man is 1, then 0 is dead man. Man + dead man = 1 + 0 = 1 = Khororobi.”

Water’s riddle in cranny and crack

Fate’s flight of fancy in saree edged wit black.

—Harbart

Three

Life, dear god, is hell!

—Maankumari Basu

Rabba! Rabba!

That kite, that one, with its sun-smeared belly, rising high, fly-high-ing higher, if you turned away for a moment as it began to fall, there, th–e–e–e–r–e, on the other side of the thirteen-story building until just the other day you could see the Howrah Bridge … the top of the Victoria Memorial … there, shaheb-para, the posh neighborhood … there, cinema-para, where all the movie theaters were … there, the telephone office at New Market … closer home, the Seal terrace … then the rowdy Pals’s terrace … the clothes of the Christian landlord’s Punjabi tenants drying in the sun … then the sigh-soaked Haldar terrace where Buki, beautiful, dust-skinned, soft, slightly saucy-breasted Buki would come no more in the evenings, home from school, walking from one side of the terrace to the other and back again, an open book in her hands, the potted plants in the terrace garden swooning in the breeze, the strands of Buki’s hair lifting, the pages of her book uncurling …

The top-terrace was Harbart’s true place. That was where he had perceived everything. The extraordinary dream that had granted him social status and standing, that had granted him fame—but that had also, in the end, been his end—that dream too had come to him there.

The Ganga-water tank used to be on the top-terrace. Once upon a time, Harbart would climb in and, scrabbling in the fine mud at its bottom, catch little white shrimps, their legs whirring in the water as they tried to flee.

Round snails clung to its sides.

Later, the water stopped. The mud dried. The pipe broke.

Later, rainwater collected in it. Then, inside it, at most a little moss or scum or a clutch of bubbles bursting into somersaulting water mites or mosquito spawn. Without the flow of Ganga water, the tank was dead. But to Harbart even the dead tank had its uses. In the hot summer months, he would crawl under it and sleep in its shade. Take his pickles or lozenges there. Suck on a lozenge a few times, then put it on a scrap of paper, and read Accounts of the Afterlife. Read and read and then fall asleep. Waking up, if he found that three or four—no more would venture up to the top—ants had begun to nibble at the lozenge, he would flick them off, one by one, and then suck on the lozenge again.