Harbart heard those words and moved closer to Krishna-dada. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

Krishna-dada was reciting:

Stormraisers every one, storm-hearted they,

Writ in the blood of our foreign foes,

In bullets and guns and bombs and blows

Their lives and stories thrill us even today.

Then, Binu was burning then.

*

Since then, the stinking and stagnant and wholly insignificant period that came to pass was so wearisome that we would be hard put to find its parallel in the annals of history. The sliver of the city in which Harbart lived had remained untouched by time from time immemorial but then the old houses were riven apart by shouting and screaming, and then shackled back together by walls and doors built up in the unlikeliest of places. And, yes, a change of taste had most certainly been provided by the developers who tore down some of those ancient homes and replaced them with the newfangled multi-storied. Then, by the video shop—Gyanobaan and Buddhimaan had been the first to take the revolutionary step of setting it up. There was a roll shop too, at the mouth of the lane. The main road had once been lined with tall trees whose soft shadows would fall upon the double-decker buses like a cool caress. Now the trees were gone. Now, only the frantic frenzy of traffic. The pushcart men had a favorite resting spot in the neighborhood—that was gone. Harbart remembered, one night there’d been an earthquake. The bundle of bed linen hanging from the roof of the second-floor veranda—swinging like a pendulum. One of the old pushcart men started shouting “Bhuidola, bhuidola!” in terror, trying to warn his sleeping friends. Yet, the next morning, on that decadent street, yesterday’s gamblers and yesternight’s drunks walking bleary-eyed to the market, the clumps of hair on the floor of the saloon, the rattle of the rickshaws—which man was man enough to tell from all this that just the night before this place had been rocked by an earthquake, a small one but still?

There had been a few elections, in those in-between years. Not that Harbart gave a damn. He never voted. Every election day, he refused to step out of the house and spent all day perched high on the top-terrace. In tribute to Binu.

Even though he could no longer remember much about him.

*

One afternoon, after the gift of the Ulster overcoat and the ugly thrashing from his nephews that followed, Harbart was up on the top-terrace, fast asleep. Krishna-dada was visiting Calcutta, then. After Binu died, he’d written off his share of the house to Dhanna-dada and gone away. Binu’s mother had died about five years after her son. So Krishna-dada was back after almost thirteen–fourteen years. Just as all the other times before, this time too Krishna-dada took Harbart to the Hawker’s Corner and bought him two dhutis and two full shirts.

New dhuti and new shirt-clad Harbart was asleep. Streaks of sunlight shone through strands of feathery white clouds. A gentle breeze blew, like a moist breath upon the skin.