Since that first meeting, much has changed in my life. Going to England blurred certain things and clarified others. I realised that a strange connection between this small, cold island and faraway Bengal had given rise to the small-town world of Calcutta, and even to mastermoshai; from a distance, I saw it gradually in perspective—a colonial small town, with its trams and taxis, unknown to, and cut off from, the rest of the world, full of a love for the romance of literature that I have not found anywhere else, and that is somehow a vivid part of small-town life. As for Binoy, I hardly see him these days; I live, for most of the year, in another part of the world, while he has stayed on in the house in Calcutta. Not having done exceptionally well at college, he works in his father’s business and has also joined, I hear, a political-theatre troupe, and performs, occasionally, in street plays. I saw him once on the stage, dressed in silk and costume jewellery as a medieval king, a turban on his head, his dark face made pale and floury with powder. Calcutta is his universe; like a dewdrop, it holds within it the light and colours of the entire world.

Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social

Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social

IT WAS AFTER SCHOOL HOURS. Almost an hour ago, either Krishna or Jimmy had rung the bell, a continual pealing that seemed to release a spring in the backs of the boys and girls, who jumped out of their chairs and proceeded to throw, without ceremony or compassion, their books into their satchels. It was then useless for a teacher to try to be heard, or to beat the table despairingly with the back of a duster, raising dramatic puffs of chalk dust, for the boys hard-heartedly assumed deafness; one or two “good girls” who raised their arms even now, a full twenty seconds after the bell, to ask a relevant question, further irritated the teacher, who, her hands powdered with sediments of green and white chalk, wanted to be upstairs in the teachers’ common room, pouring tea from her cup into her saucer and very slowly sipping it. Preparing, like Atlas, to lift a tottering load of brown-paper-covered exercise books full of long, ingenious bluffers’ answers, she, in a moment of mischief and vindictiveness, said to a “good girl”: “Lata, will you please carry these for me upstairs?” So impenitently angelic was the girl that she agreed without a murmur of resentment; with an air of perpetual readiness, even.