Then we would return home with the books in our hands, adventure annuals and mystery stories, my book an English one, and my cousins’ books in Bengali. Childhood was a time when I read nothing in Bengali, and my cousins nothing in English; yet none of us really needed to encroach on the others’ territory, so rich was the store of children’s literature in both languages. Sitting side by side, we would begin to read almost immediately, enveloped in the same contentment as we read our books in different languages, inhabiting different imaginary worlds.

As we read, the routines of the house continued around us. For instance, the maid might be swabbing the floor and the stairs, leaving dark arcs on the red stone. How swift and anonymous and habitual was her task, almost as if a ghost had done it, leaving those dark, moist marks on the floor, which dried and disappeared soon after! Downstairs, my aunt—my cousins’ mother—might be overseeing something in the kitchen, while my uncle might be preparing to have an early lunch before going out to work at his small business.

We sat just anywhere while reading, suspending activity, waiting for the story or the book to finish—on the stairs, against the side of a bed, on the floor. It might be the years of the Naxal uprising outside, with young men drawn into the movement, into the spilling of blood, blood that could not be recovered, and the lane, in which both Naxal and Congress supporters lived in some of the houses, was traumatised by those years. Cries would be heard; bottles broken; far away, the explosion of a homemade device. My uncle did not know what to make of this; with his shawl wrapped around his kurta, he was both voluble and innocent; he had always supported the Marxists, but now this was destroying his business, and would drive him to the verge of bankruptcy. Then the years passed. And we still sat reading side by side, of worlds that could not be translated into each other; the changes around us came to us as sounds in the street and from downstairs, that were adornments to our consciousness.

My uncle’s business never took off; it was a failure from the start. But optimism never flagged, either. Sometimes, my aunt would come upstairs while we read, perhaps to rearrange something—a pillow on the bed—or to have her bath and do her puja, or to call us downstairs for food. I would be reading about lighthouses, boating adventures, mountain expeditions, while my cousins read about mad scientists and mysteries that Hemendra Kumar Ray had created, about holy men and the seven seas and bloodthirsty kings. Every paisa my aunt spent had to be counted; but they—my uncle and aunt—had great reserves of hospitality and tolerance, so that their worries and struggles never marked their behaviour.