*

In the wall, a rusty iron hook. From it, hanging, on the inside, Harbart’s curl-handled umbrella. Invisible to the naked eye for over it, like Dracula’s cape, hung Harbart’s Ulster overcoat. Near his head, in a shelf cut in the wall, lay his two most important books:

(1) Mrinal Kanti Ghosh Bhaktibhushan’s Accounts of the Afterlife. (Revised and Enlarged, Second Edition. Price: 2 Rupees only.) Upon closer examination, the book appears to begin at page 171. So the first thing you see is a photograph of Maharaj Bahadur Sir Jatindramohan Tagore KCSI. And beneath it, the information that on January 14, 1908, aged 77, he left this world for the great hereafter, and then the book began, thus—“[W]rote, ‘Mother, I have troubled you a lot, forgive me. I too have suffered but now I am finally resting in peace.’ Then, after writing many more such things, Shibchandra’s wife burst out of her trance. She began to weep for her daughter …” Etc.

(2) Kalibar Bedantabagish’s Mysteries of the Afterlife.

Harbart had found both these books in his grandfather Biharilal Sarkar’s collection. Apart from Mysteries of the Afterlife, no book had been intact. No, one other book had been—Srigurupada Haldar’s A History of the Philosophy of Grammar, Volume One. For obvious reasons, Harbart had never read that one. But he had read The Horribly Haunted Circus in a bound but crumbling volume of The Dance Hall magazine. From that he had gathered the out-knowledge that the nicknames of the two actress sisters Suchinta and Sukumari had been Suchi and Bhudi, respectively; that Srimati Sushilasundari would play at Professor Bose’s Grand Circus; and that two other actresses, Hironmoyee and Mrinmoyee, alias Bhuti and Bhoma, resided on Beadon Street.

One could say that Harbart was attracted to them, by them, that he thought them familiars in a way that went beyond their ever meeting or living in the same time.

It was the dead of night. When, suddenly, the palace of Pithapur was set atremble by the frightened screams of the ladies and the confused shouting of the gentlemen. Who knows what ghastly ghostly creature had struck again—thinking thus, Gopal Duria and the rest of the stable hands ran toward the palace doors!

It would be no exaggeration to say that Harbart felt as though he had seen it all with his very own eyes.

Tired of flapping her wings against the windowpane, and afraid of the brightening sky, the fairy fled back to the shop.

The lizard and the cockroaches had, in any case, forgotten all about her.

Around midnight, when Harbart slashed the vein in his left hand, a fly trapped in his room, like a shark in the ocean, had smelled the blood. But it could not see, so it could do nothing. When drops of morning light began to seep into the room, it buzzed over to the blade fallen to the floor.

But the blood on it had dried black, long black, long ago.

Harbart’s hand, its vein slashed, still hung still in the bucket of ice-cold water. His eyes, almost closed. His face, however, no longer as fair or as sharp as usual, but black. His mouth, a little open. His right hand, folded across his chest.