Jyathamoshai Girishkumar, Lalitkumar’s older brother, had a whore habit. Which resulted in him contracting the inevitable disease, whose inevitable consequence was a general paralytic insanity. He would, as witnessed by Harbart throughout his childhood, live on the second floor, flit room-to-veranda and then back again, and on the hour, every hour, with remarkable rooster-regularity, let out a scream of “Peeyu kahaan, peeyu kahaan!”

In the early days of this habit, if Jyathaima was in the kitchen or, next to the first-floor courtyard, in the front-of-the-house bathroom, she would cry out a “Here, just coming dear” in response.

Girishkumar had two sons—Dharmalal, Harbart’s Dhanna-dada, and Krishnalal. Krishnalal was a professor of English, extremely close to the progressive and undivided Communist Party and still a believer. He taught at the K. M. College in Baharampur and had managed to build a small house for himself there. His share of the Beadon Street paternal property, he had, after his son Binu’s death, written off to his brother Dhanna.

Dhanna, since his childhood, was a bundle of bastardy, greedy as hell. Somehow, he’d managed to get a job at the Mint. In those days, they were not so strict, and maybe he’d indulged in some bribery too. Because every day he’d come home with his tiffin box full of stolen quarter-rupee shikis and half-rupee adhulis. By the time he got caught, there was no way of telling how long he’d been stealing. Got fired, got jail time—although his sentence was cut short quite a bit. Set free, Dhanna set up a large lock-and-key shop in Naadu-babu’s Bazar, got married and fathered three sons. The eldest lived in Gauhati. Fat and foolish, and a slave to his wife. But that one was still alright. The other two were loafers—fatter and fattest, scoundrels to the core. One installed a satellite dish on the terrace and supplied the neighborhood with cable-TV connections—Star TV, MTV, BBC, the people were gorging on that stuff these days. The other had conned a black belt into being his business partner and ran a kung-fu/karate school, although he knew fuck all about any of it.

Dhanna-dada’s wife was a clever woman, an English-medium girl. She ran a cookery class at home—a three-month snacks course that went from Party Loaf to Ribbon Sandwich as well as another three-month Mughlai course that included Rainbow Polao, Murgh Irani. She also baked birthday cakes to order.

Many wives came to Dhanna-dada’s wife’s classes.

From Harbart’s room at the mouth of the lane, a room out and away from the house, he could, alas, not watch the women come and go.

But two lines in his notebook are dedicated to this affair:

In Dhanna-dada’s hall

Mrs. Centipedes coo and crawl

Harbart Sarkar. Admitted to Nandakumar Institution in Class Three and then, after his promotion from Class Five to Class Six, dropping out. Preferring to stay at home and read whatever he could. That Harbart was no longer attending school escaped everyone’s notice for quite a few months. By the time his Jyathaima did notice, she had already gotten used to sending him to the grocer, to the market. Of course, even when he had been going to school, it had been with Dhanna-dada’s tiffin, his cheat sheets, and his books. Since Dhanna-dada cheated in all his subjects, he needed more books than usual. This neighborhood had a long tradition of sneaking answers in to the students through the window. All the boys were local boys, so the teachers didn’t mind. Over the last thirty-one years, only three students at Nandakumar Institution had slid as low as a Second Division.