When I met mastermoshai I was sixteen years old, and had had a poem published in the Youth Times, a magazine now defunct. Prior to the meeting, while I was still in Bombay, my cousins had shown it to him, so that when I arrived, Binoy smiled and said to me, “Mastermoshai was very impressed by your poem.” On Saturday morning, I saw a bespectacled man in his early fifties, dressed in a shirt and lungi, enter the small room where Binoy and Robi studied. Approaching the room later, I saw an unlikely lesson in progress, for Binoy and Robi, and even little Mou, were sitting, heads bent, each staring at a book, while the bespectacled man seemed to be reading the exercise books in which they had written their answers. It was a time of particular significance, for Binoy, at fifteen, would be writing his matriculation finals at the end of the year, as would Robi two years later. After the finals, Binoy would have to decide whether he would take Science or Commerce; he would have to be readmitted to his school, or to another school, depending on how well he did, for his upper matriculation exams; and his life would receive an abrupt push towards a certain direction. Even so, he would not be free of the English language and its literature for at least the next two years, although it would be increasingly marginalised from his life.