“Of course I’m ready! Should we say ten minutes?” As an afterthought, a change of register: “Sorry I didn’t call earlier.” You can’t choose your colleagues in the office; he hadn’t grasped the significance of this until a few months ago. And to pretend you were friends—that, too, was a fiction you couldn’t bring yourself to wholly believe in, but couldn’t entirely dispense with either; you did “things” together, sometimes outside office hours, you visited each other’s houses—he’d been to Ranjit’s place in New Alipore only day before yesterday—got to know each other’s wives and children, the kind of food the wife, affectionately referred to as the “grihini,” cooked, and, yet, you made a pact to keep all that was true and most important about yourself from the colleague; in case the desirable boundary between private life and secret nightmare and employment ceased to exist. Meanwhile, your real friends, those mythological beings, who by now had embarked on lives and careers of their own, fell obligingly by the wayside; they became things you put inside a closet and meant to recover, someday, in the future. In other words, you were alone, with your family, and your destiny.

Pramathesh Majumdar had joined the company three years ago, soon after coming back from England in 1964 as a chartered accountant. A brief honeymoon period with office life and work in Calcutta ensued, which also saw this makeshift arrangement, this friendship, with Ranjit Biswas come into being. Ranjit had never been abroad; he’d been born and brought up in Calcutta. He had the ease and the unquestioning expectancy of routine repeating itself, and of things continuing to fit, that belong to one who has never been removed from his original habitat. Pramathesh belonged nowhere; he came, originally, from East Bengal; his sights were probably set somewhere higher. Although Ranjit Biswas was still, strictly speaking, a colleague, both knew, though this wasn’t articulated, that Pramathesh, in his unassuming way, was preparing himself for the race people called “professional life,” while Ranjit, with his impatience at keeping appointments, was perhaps going to stay in the same place for some time, feeling, now and then, bitter, without being unduly bothered to do anything about it. It was the strength of Pramathesh’s British degree that gave him a head start, of course, but it was also something else, a meticulousness that might be called foresight. In fact, Pramathesh had been transferred to the Delhi office in June this year, and since the Delhi office was now the head office, this move had been interpreted as a promotion.