in Khar, then in Cumballa Hill, and,

in 1971, in a flat—three bedrooms—

on the twelfth floor of a new building called

Il Palazzo (“the palace”) on Malabar Hill.

This building transcended the others, so that our flat

hung midway over the Arabian Sea

and watched the Queen’s Necklace from a vantage point

it would not have been possible to cheaply occupy.

For many days, the smell of new paint

hung like a benison on the flat, while shelves

and tables still not arrived at their final shape

had their naked wood whittled away by workmen.

That first night we came to the flat, those unfinished

chairs and tables and that first coat of paint

on the walls greeted us. To write about it in verse

is to make palpable to myself the experience

of living in that apartment, the pauses

and caesuras between the furniture, the dining

room, the overhanging balcony, the sea outside;

my father, recently made Finance Director, my mother,

like children gazing into a doll’s house. Sylhet,

no longer memory, nor country, but just themselves.

(Sylhet, from where it’s claimed, Sri Chaitanya’s

parents came to Nabadweep. There, the holy child

played in the dust on all fours in the courtyard

of their home, watched by his mother. Old songs

call him the “fair moon”; this was before he grew up

and became a wanderer.) Outside our balcony,

too, a fair moon hovered that night. Sylhet—

aeons of migration; even now, most of the

Indian restaurants in England are run by Sylheti

Muslims: the menu’s a delirious poem

on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi

dishes—chicken korma, bhuna meat, dhansak—

are placed in a proximity they’ll never be in elsewhere.

Relocated twice; the first time, when Bengal

was broken up in 1905, and Sylhet annexed

to Assam. When my father was a student in Calcutta,

a man from Chittagong said to him in his hostel:

“Sylhet? So you’re from Assam! Don’t you eat humans there?”

My father said: “Yes, we do. Do drop in for lunch.”

In Il Palazzo, the transition was made

from humans to biscuits. There were cut-glass ashtrays

collected from Denmark, placed strategically

in a non-smoking house (my father’s one or two

attempts at a social cigar have left him ill),

guarded on all sides by a regiment of curios.

Those ashtrays populated my childhood like unusable toys.

Of course, we knew this life, refracted

through cut glass, reflected on brass, was, in part,

make-believe—even I, as a child, knew it—that

the furniture, the flat, weren’t ours. Yet that view,

morning and evening, of the Arabian Sea

and the Queen’s Necklace, and the dome of the Taj,

was all mine. At that time, I was more

interested in prying into windows of the buildings

not too far away—I had a pair of binoculars

given me by a friend of my father’s from England