When Harbart was eighteen, Jyathaima took him to Puri for a fortnight. Harbart brought along a notebook and a pen. They had put up at the ashram run by Bharat Sevashram Sangha. There, Harbart’s poetic genius had blossomed in leaps and bounds. The Harbart who wrote upon his arrival in Puri—

Beside Bengal is where the Oriyas stay

The Puri Express goes there every day

that same Harbart wrote, four days later,

A wave comes in

And out it goes

Here by the sea

Life ebbs and flows

And then, three days later, the more complex:

Mighty the wind when it blows on land

But evil when it blows on sea

Scaring even the octopus, who thinks,

“Oh, what will become of me?”

Harbart paid regular visits to the neighborhood tailor to read the Bengali newspaper. To the saloon, to read Morning Star and New Wave.

His sense of rhythm and depth of perception had hinted at a luminous future although, in the end, that had all come to naught.

Back home from Puri, Harbart had written:

The hat-headed nuliya has a good life

No need to dress up and cut a dash

Splash in the ocean all day long,

Simply splash in the water and pocket the cash.

The diminution of poetic sense and poetic skill—Harbart was a spot-on example of that too. Who would not be mortified by the thought that the hand that had penned these earlier gems had also written this?

Footpath, foot-fart

Toots–plat–toots

Dhanna goes to work

In his gumboots.

Or this?

How hot it is, oo

Roach in my ear goes coo

After this stupendous stupidity, although it was vulgar, in this next ode to a motley of maids getting wet in the rain, one’s finds one’s faith restored, albeit slightly:

Ladies, why do you wet, oh?

Wet so

Girls, why grow wet, low?

Come, lo.

In the end, what arouses not only despair but also pity is the passing off—in a fit of desperation, clearly—of Amrik Singh Arora’s lyrics as his own (these are the last lines in his notebook):

Let me be

The kohl so black in your silver kohl container.

*

Dhanna-dada’s house was not too large, not too small. A two-story house, a terrace. On the terrace, a room used for prayers, and a smaller terrace atop that. On it, a tank that once had water pumped straight from the Ganga. Now, it had a Star-TV satellite dish. A small room on the ground floor—not toward the main door but to the back. Used to store old books, 78 RPM records, documents, and the electricity meter. When in 1969 Binu came to Calcutta to study, a small bed and a table fan had been put in for him. After his death, the room lay locked up for a few years. Then one day it became Harbart’s office and, until his last moment, his room.

Before that, Harbart had slept on the second-floor veranda, the one that ran inside the house. And that stayed dry even in the monsoons. His clothes hung on a line along the stairs that led up to the terrace. Once there’d been a rotten wooden staircase leading up from the second floor to the top-terrace. But as you climbed up it, you could peek into the neighbors’ bedrooms. Their loud protests had rendered that staircase practically defunct. A few days after Binu died, there was a huge storm. In the middle of that rainy night, the bottom half of the staircase collapsed. In the morning they found the top half hanging from the terrace-top, refusing to let go. Only after much prodding and pulling, yanking and yelling, did it finally fall to the ground.