In summers, Mahesh would wear a loose kameez (shirt) and a dhoti. In winters, to this he would add a sweater and a woollen scarf or a woollen galabandh to keep out the fierce hill chill of Shillong, which sat snugly among pine trees, rolling hills and swift streams at nearly 5,000 feet above sea level. Frost would form on winter nights, the taps would freeze and the coldest place would be bed—at least for those freezing first few moments when you jumped in, before your body heat, the thick razai and the hot water bottle at your feet restored some sense of normalcy.

Mahesh had a wife and several children. And every year, he would disappear for a couple of weeks—he was going home, he would say. My parents, of course, knew where ‘home’ was. But it was not until I was about twelve or thirteen that I understood.

I forget whether it was my father or mother who mentioned to me that he went to East Pakistan. ‘This is wonderful,’ I thought. It was the very stuff of adventure—our bandy-legged cook, slipping across treacherous terrain, deep into enemy territory, meeting secretly with relatives and then slipping back. Better still, what if he were a spy out on a special mission. One had read about such innocuous or ordinary-looking people being recruited as secret agents in World War II comics. For an imaginative mind, the possibilities were endless.

Mahesh went up a few notches in my esteem, despite his biris.

So when he came back, I asked him about the trip.

‘I went to Sylhet,’ he said. ‘Yes, but how did you go?’ I asked. I recall that he misunderstood the question. ‘I have many relatives there still.’ I repeated the question. The answer was short and bland: ‘I went to the border and paid ten rupees to the Pakistani police and then walked across.’ He then caught a bus and went to Sylhet, which is about 100 kilometres from Shillong. On the way back, he would invest another ten rupees in the Indian police officer on duty (few people even today make the fine distinction between a policeman on duty or a border security guard but they do differentiate between a policeman and an army soldier) and slip across. No papers, no hassles. A nice balance it seemed: pay the Pakistani on the way out and the Indian on the way in. Keep parity.

In similar fashion, Mahesh added, his numerous relatives would come to savour the fresh air of a hill station at Shillong (this was the nearest hill station for East Pakistan and remains so for its successor state, Bangladesh). Everyone eventually got what they wanted—the policeman got his money and the relatives their trip to India without going through the bureaucratic labyrinth of first seeking passports, then visas and then dealing with the travel sharks and touts. It seemed, to my young mind, a very easy and sensible thing to do.