By the time I visited Calcutta again, another one of my poems had appeared in the large, loose-leaf pages of The Illustrated Weekly of India. This magazine, easy to roll, generous to the touch, had circulated among members of my mother’s family and even reached mastermoshai. He had tucked it under his arm, emerged from my uncle’s house, and walked off to show it to his friends—for, in South Calcutta, many literary critics and poets lived within walking distance of one another. “Extraordinarily mature for seventeen years old,” Binoy reported him to have said. He was now ready to introduce me to his “contacts,” clerks and accountants who led a shadow life as editors, poets, and intellectuals. They were a small, stubborn band of people struggling to keep alive a sense of the urgency of modern poetry and its many movements in the midst of an enervating climate and a society with other preoccupations.

One morning, mastermoshai arrived at my uncle’s house. He seemed to be in possession of a secret. He told me to hurry up, for he was taking me to meet the editor of Living City. It was a magazine locally published in Calcutta, and I recalled that I had once picked up a copy from a pavement stall in Park Street. I had found it interesting in a strange way, because its contributors were Bengalis I had never heard of, with the kind of common reassuring name you think must belong to learned people—Sukumar Mukherjee, Shibnarain Sen—all writing articles in quaint, textbookish English about Bengali literature and culture. It confirmed my suspicions that the most important work in literature was being done in the regional languages. In Bombay, for instance, I had sensed with some awe that Marathi poets had a highly developed network of meeting places and discussion groups organised around a series of roadside cafés and Irani restaurants. Here, in Calcutta, the contributors to Living City seemed more middle class and academic, and yet oddly impressive, inhabitants of a world apart. The editor himself, R. D. Banerjee, had written an article on the Baishnab Padabali, the poets Chandidas and Bidyapati and their influence on Tagore, and the emotions associated with biraha, or separation from the loved one or God. In neat boxes by the side of certain pages, there were small poems written in a language that somehow seemed to fit in naturally with the style in which the essays had been written. It was a language that all the contributors to Living City had in common, so that one man, almost, might have composed the contents of the entire magazine. There were some pages that had the simplest form of advertisement—a message, or the name of a firm that could not possibly have any interest in literature—personal gestures of goodwill, old friendships, that sustained such a project.