Robi got up from his chair, and I sat down next to mastermoshai. Robi, sitting on the bed, and Binoy and Mou, looking up from their books, had formed a small, expectant audience. Mastermoshai was shy; he was expected to say something about my poem. When two literary men meet in Bengal, they do not ask each other personal questions, but straightaway enter realms of the abstract and articulate. Mastermoshai’s first question to me was, in an English accent tempered by the modulations of Bengali speech: “Are you profoundly influenced by Eliot?” Though I was taken aback, I countered this with a few names I had recently discovered in the Penguin Modern European Poets series—Mandelstam, Montale, Brodsky. Mastermoshai was impressed. The next time he came to the house, he brought me a novel, a Penguin Modern Classic. It was Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett; the copy, he said, belonged to one of his “disciples.” The cover had a grim but beautiful picture, a pencil sketch, of a human skull. On the pages inside, difficult words had been occasionally underlined and their meanings noted. A strange world had been described there, one that I could not make sense of. I took the book with me back to Bombay.

It was mastermoshai who first spoke to me of Baudelaire. He knew the names of the French existentialists and the titles of their books—Sartre, Camus, Being and Nothingness, The Fall—but his highest praise was reserved for Heidegger’s Being and Time. The words “being,” “subject,” “object,” frequently entered our conversations, especially when he was discussing my poetry, of which I had begun to produce sizeable quantities. “Every writer needs his Pound,” he said to me. “Il miglior fabbro—Eliot’s better craftsman.” He was my first impresario, showing my poem in the Youth Times to his friends and “disciples.” On another occasion, he compared himself to Leopold Bloom and me to Stephen Dedalus, adding, “Every writer needs a guide, a father figure.” On one level, he was a father to me, and on another level, a friend. For, behind the big talk about literature, a fondness had grown between us, based on the ardent exchange of ideas that belonged to a foreign language and continent, ideas probably already obsolete over there, but which here, in the comforting presence of relatives and friends, took on a unique intensity, a freshness; a friendship that could have formed only in a country with a colonial past. Even more provincial, and marginal to Europe, than Dublin was in the early twentieth century, was Calcutta at the century’s close. Trams, rickshaws, markets, office buildings with wide, creaking stairs, bookshops, little magazines, literary critics, uncles, aunts, created this Dublinesque metropolis of which mastermoshai was a part.