The plans of the evening came, unsurprisingly, to nothing the next day. The police wanted to question the servants again, and Bishu and Uma took Priti and their few possessions and walked towards the main road, with its smoke and noise, to catch a bus to Manecktala. Priti looked curiously around her; she thought it was merely an outing. At the bus stop, Bishu said: “After I leaves you at Manecktala, I goes to see Mejda”; Uma seemed not to have heard. Today, before leaving, no goodbyes had been said to the other servants; only the money was collected from Mr. Banerjee and a signature written inside a notebook. “We’re going, dadababu,” said Bishu, and Mr. Banerjee said: “Keep well.” It was a journey from the centre of the city, Ballygunge, with its tall buildings and shops, to what was much farther away and older. The room in the outhouse had not been much, but it had been something in an area where even the rich cannot afford houses; it had given Bishu and Uma a place to stay in proximity to the lives of the well-off, to employment, and yet given them the independence for the life of their small and new family. Now that phase of their lives, which, after all, was so relatively brief that they had hardly become used to it, was ending, and another was about to begin.

Beyond Translation

Beyond Translation

THE DAKKHINEE BOOKSHOP, at the turning of Lansdowne Road and Rashbehari Avenue—it was really no more than a pavement bookstall. It stands even now, though with more than half its books gone, still doing business, but a shadow of its former self. Yet if you go down Rashbehari Avenue towards Lake Market in the evening, you can still see it, a series of cupboards against a wall, lit by an electric light, and books leaning against one another upon bookshelves behind their glass-paned doors; a wonderful bookshelf, exposed to the surrounding pavement and the traffic, as if the house around it had uncannily disappeared.

When I was a boy, and a visitor to Calcutta and my cousins’ house, this was the main bookshop in the area; although it was a good half hour away from where my cousins lived, we would trek to it on foot, either with one another, or with our parents and aunts, on certain days. Any passing car at that time and that year would have seen three boys there, their backs to the road, their heads bent.