From that same top-terrace, for so many years, Harbart had watched in the evenings the cranes fly back home in long lines across the sky. Small bats swooping at twilight. And the large bats as the darkness thickened into night. Airplane lights flickering. In the blink of an eye, from the countless constellations, one star slips and falls. A kite-balloon bobs past. Harbart had even seen a kite-lantern once—a paper packet made stiff with a frame, a candle placed inside, and all of it then tied to a kite and flown in the air. Once he’d held on to a kite-balloon until the string went taut in his hands.

*

As a boy, Harbart had gone with his Krishna-dada to a screening of The Fall of Berlin, organized by the Communist Party. Then to many other screenings, mostly war documentaries. Once he’d seen a block of ice upturning, and the soldiers on it swirling their way to the bottom of the bottomless sea. No one bothered to tell him he was watching Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Long before that, once, at Indira, he’d watched a Bengali movie in which Sabitri Chatterjee stood in the courtyard of her husband’s home, balancing her slippers upon her head. And during the Durga Puja in the neighborhood, he’d watched, among others, Morning Will Come Again.

Later, when he began to earn a little, he’d been begged to rent videos by the neighborhood nut jobs, and ended up watching even more, many more movies.

But of all the things he had learned, if half had come from those two most important aforementioned books, then the rest had surely come from the top-terrace.

It was from that top-terrace that Buki and Harbart had been drawn to each other. Every evening, Buki would come up to her terrace. Harbart would, of course, be on his terrace already. Then, a few moments of deep closeness, despite the two-house gap between them. Until Buki arrived, until then, her frocks drying in the sun would keep Harbart company.

Buki went to and from school in a rickshaw. Buki and her family were tenants at the Haldar house. For about two years. Then they left. Harbart was sixteen, Buki eleven. The Saraswati Puja not long before they left, that afternoon, by the side of the local library room, that was when they first spoke to each other. Almost invisible Harbart, hiding behind the pillar of the Banerjee-house gate, had whispered, “If I write you, will you read my letter?”

Buki had nodded, yes.

“Which class are you in?”

“Six. You?”

“I study. But not at school.”

“You have a tutor?”

Harbart had nodded, yes, hating himself for nodding, yes.

After Buki went away, Harbart spent quite a few months away from the top-terrace. Although later he went back—went again. Saw how the shadows thickened at evening’s end, how a light or two came on before all the rest, how the smoke from the clay ovens flowed away like rivers, and saw how, a little after that, the terrace didn’t feel so empty anymore. Perhaps at the heart of that indistinct impossible stood Buki, waving, smiling. It seemed that way even when he rubbed his eyes for a second look. Although eyes are known to be blurred over at times like that.