That morning, Binoy and I were relaxing in the house, Binoy in kurta and pyjamas, and I in pyjamas and full-sleeved shirt. Dressed like this, both of us accompanied mastermoshai, in a taxi, to a house in one of the lanes near Southern Avenue, Binoy sitting in the back with mastermoshai, who was singing a Rabindrasangeet, and I, in the front, next to the taxi driver, with one elbow in the open window. In those days, when I came to Calcutta, Binoy took a personal interest in my literary career, and visited, with mastermoshai and me, the houses of several editors, a spectator who silently listened to our discussions and reported them later to my mother and his parents. He had been my closest companion in childhood; we had played and fought with each other. Now, at sixteen and seventeen, he and I were as tall as each other; we had reached our full adult height, though we were still boys. The taxi entered a lane with two- and three-storeyed houses, trees and flowers in their tiny courtyards, their façades in stages of disrepair. It was the time of day when children go to school, and men to their offices, and a domestic calm in which these houses belonged entirely to women and servants was evident as we passed through the lane. To be part of this pre-midday hour was rare for a man. The taxi driver, on mastermoshai’s command, stopped at a small yellow building. Stone stairs of no particular colour, which we climbed up slowly because of the darkness, mastermoshai our leader, took us past the identical bottle-green doors of the two flats on every floor, till we reached the door which had R. D. BANERJEE in white letters upon a black plastic nameplate. Mastermoshai pressed a buzzer. The three of us stood in the small space that formed the landing at each flight of stairs and the common area outside the flats, a dark square box from which stairs radiated upward and downward. A balding man in spectacles, dressed in a cotton shirt, black trousers, and sandals, opened the door for us. It was Mr. Banerjee himself; politely but tacitly he led us inside. The door, once opened, led to a long corridor that was also a verandah which formed a border to the flat; to its right, there were three rooms with their doors open, and a curtain hanging from each doorway. The verandah ended in a wall, and to its left, there was a rectangular space, and then, the verandah of the opposite flat, with the same three doors. The building thus seemed to enclose an empty rectangle, with the flats on its margins.