“If he asks, what’ll you say?”

“What say? I’ll thrash him black and blue and throw him out. All these years of feeding and clothing—let’s add that up first. I’ll carve a canal through the motherfucker.”

The minds of those persons who are sensual materialists are incapable of understanding the afterlife. Why only the afterlife—they are incapable of understanding so many subtle sensations of this life too. Those minds revolve around thoughts of the body, its sensual pleasures, and its desires, nay, are obsessed with such thoughts and thus dwell in a state of perpetual restlessness. Hence, the highest realization, the purest truth about the afterlife cannot manifest itself in those minds. Those things that the mind can concentrate upon, from those it can extract joy. Those things upon which it cannot so concentrate, from those it can extract nothing. This inherent property, this innate characteristic of the human mind is known to man and boy alike.

—Mysteries of the Afterlife

*

After the Ulster episode, Harbart’s two younger nephews, Prasenjit (Phuchka) and Indrajit (Bulan) suddenly attacked him one day in the first-floor dining room. Their excuse was that while they had been studying, Harbart had been chopping up old coconut shells for kindling, deliberately making a racket to disturb them. Jyathaima was then upstairs, in her prayer room. She could hear nothing. Dhanna was out, in his shop. Boudi was not home either. The eldest son, Priyajit, was in the bath. Hearing Harbart’s screams of pain, he’d rushed out with only a towel round his waist and shouted at his brothers to stop. By then Harbart’s lip was split wide open. And bleeding. The skin beneath his eyes was puffy and swollen. His teeth were throbbing.

There was one other witness to this event—Dhanna-dada’s maid, Nirmala.

When Harbart was out in the courtyard, washing the blood from his mouth, as Priyajit was pouring him water, as his head was spinning, then, he remembers, up above him, his Jyathamoshai roaring. “Peeyu kahaan! Peeyu kahaan!”

Thanks to this incident, the deeply despairing Harbart succeeded in securing the key to the gates of heaven. At the tailor’s, he’d told Dulal and Rakhal-babu that he’d slipped and fallen in the courtyard. But via Nirmala, the truth soon seeped out into the neighborhood ears. At the hand pump where she went to fetch water, at the grocer’s, at the sweet shop—everywhere and to everyone, Nirmala said, “Those heartless boys, oh! That good-man uncle of theirs, how could they thrash him like that?” Word spread so far so fast that one day, in front of so many people, Barilal, the eldest of the Ganguly brothers, actually spoke to Dhanna about it: “Dhanna! What’s going on in that house of yours? Never heard such things in this neighborhood before. Nephews beating up their uncles?”

The local boys—even the junior gang who greeted Harbart with cries of “Titbird”—they stopped their teasing and drew closer to him to express their sympathy. And because they drew closer, stood nearer, the nephews realized they were cornered.