Mahesh had moved to Shillong, the capital of Assam province to find work. He ended up as a cook at the Reid Chest Hospital, the main tuberculosis treatment centre of the North East. My father was the superintendent or chief administrator at the time. But how Mahesh got in is a story I don’t know.

Mahesh is central to this book not because he has a great story, but because he doesn’t. He was illiterate, yet, could sign his name with a flourish. Many of the people who move from nation to nation, village to city, often illegally and silently, are simple folk with simple tales, often faceless and voiceless. Often, they do not even exist as statistics because they are not enumerated. Until perhaps much later. By then they have developed a fiction of their lives: one identity in this land, another in the nation of their birth and growth. You won’t know who they are until you engage them in a conversation and that too after winning their confidence, a process that could take weeks, if not months. Because they’re always afraid that the sarkar would be watching their every step, waiting to harass, extort, pressure and oust them through its many agencies. Or worse, the sarkar would turn its back on harassment, extortion, pressure and ousters by local thugs and dalals.

Which of the two is preferable? Which is worse?

Mahesh was a Bengali-speaking Hindu, which did not really matter to us. Growing up and studying in an Irish missionary (Roman Catholic to boot) school, with a classful of other boys from all communities, labels of caste, religion and language did not really matter. I think I learned more about secularism just by being at St Edmunds’ all my school life than by reading about it, or later, through observing majoritarian or minority chauvinists at work in India and abroad.

Mahesh was a great cook; everyone used to rave about his ilish (hilsa) curry. I preferred his chicken and mutton, not being much of a fish-eater those days. It’s only now that I realize how much I missed.

If there was one thing I found obnoxious about Mahesh, it was the horrible-smelling biris which he smoked. He had this rather unsettling habit of sucking in the smoke with a long hissing sound. His cheeks would cave in, his lips would disappear and he would, ostensibly, savour the moment. Then, at the right time, with a sibilant hiss, the smoke would flow out of his nostrils and mouth. Life would be normal again, except that his lips remained stained from the last paan.