After a couple of years, I was back in Washington, this time to work for the World Bank. My home was in the suburb, and I decided to buy a new house downtown to reduce my commute. Buying takes exploring and checking. I rented an apartment meanwhile, a short walk from the office, near the Dupont Circle.
 
I loved the location. It was always buzzing. Lots of people, old and young, men and women. Some worked in the offices nearby, some were there to buy medicines, stationery and clothes, and others were there simply to enjoy the area. There was a great variety of restaurants, Greek, Chinese and American, a bunch of bistros and coffee houses, even a steak house. There was a small store that sold magazines and newspapers from many countries in different languages and a large book store, with a charming café at the back.
 
I had ordered a car, but I did not feel deprived waiting for it to arrive. There was a metro station, good enough to take me to most of the places I cared for, the Library of Congress or the many Smithsonian museums. But most of the time I walked and enjoyed the sights and sounds of a new old city. Washington was fun and walking around seemed the best way to get the most of it.
 
The weekends were the best, for I had few responsibilities. Housekeeping was zero and I rarely cooked as I ate out most of the time. Sunday morning, I woke unexpectedly early, picked up a croissant and magnum-sized coffee at the corner store, picked up the sixty-page New York Times and forty-page Washington Post and walked over to the Dupont Circle.
 
The Circle is a hub of ten streets and at the center is a small park with benches. I loved its smallness. It seemed familiar in less than an hour. Sometimes a small band played there, sometimes a lone guitar player sang out his heart. I loved those little shows too. It seemed they cared for the place and the park. Today there was no performer, not yet. I liked the Sabbath silence.
 
I put down the heavy papers, slowly ate the croissant with relish and took a first sip of the fragrant coffee. I was just considering starting with the papers, when a man came and sat down at the other end of my bench.

​“May I?” he said and cast a glance at my pile of newspapers.
 
I let him have the Washington Post to read and picked up the front section of the New York Times. A bird came and perched itself on another bench and gave out what seemed like the first bar of the shortest song. What better accompaniment could there be for all the news of murderous wars and economic collapse?

r​Then the man next to me lowered the paper and seemed to be taking a measure of me. He was a large white man in his fifties, with a reddish face, indifferently shaved and coiffed, in clothes that had seen better days. I was in mufti, but, in clean and freshly pressed clothes, and must have seemed quite a contrast to him. He took me in, brazenly, head to toe.
 
Then he said, “Look at you! You must have come from another country. Yet you are so clearly well off. You wear good clothes, even good shoes. I can smell your cologne. The American government looks after you and pays you a lot of money, I am sure.
 
“And here I am, sitting on a park bench next to you, in dirty clothes. With little to call my own. Yet I am the native son. I was born here. The government pays me nothing. What a shame.”
 
I was taken aback. Yes, I was probably well off compared to him, but, in his view, all because of some discrimination by the US Government!
 
I pointed to my coffee and said, “I paid the man who made that coffee because he gave me something for my money. Usually people pay for some goods or services they have received. Are you doing something for the government? Then they are likely to pay you for it.”
 
“But I am an American. The government should pay me.”
 
“There are 350 million Americans like you. If they did nothing and wanted the government to pay them, the government would go bankrupt quickly. The government has money only because people who work pay taxes and people who do business pay taxes too.”
 
“But the government pays you money!”
 
“No, I pay them money, out of what I earn. And I earn because I work every day. There are hundreds of people like me, who don’t look like you, but they work hard, earn money and pay the government. They help keep the government running and the country running.”
 
As he talked, there was the clear whiff of alcohol from his mouth.
 
“You think so?” he asked.
 
“I know so. This is an immigrant country. It does not matter how people look. It matters what they do. Whether they work and contribute, or they don’t do a thing. It will be a very foolish country that treats badly the people who give it the most and hold to its heart people who don’t contribute. Don’t you think so?”
 
The man seemed surprised to hear what I had said. He was thinking. I thought that was good.
 
“You can keep the newspaper,” I said quietly, bid him goodbye and left the park for home.

When I bought a house and moved into a community of fifty families in a Washington suburb, the first person I met was Melinda.
 
I was moving in at an early hour of the day, when Melinda appeared on my doorstep to welcome me. She was the president of the home owners’ association and would not fail in her role as a welcoming host. She gave me her card and told me I could call her if I needed any help. She also gave me the particulars of my two nearest neighbors and suggested that I get to know them.

​She was a woman in her early sixties, trim and fit. Even at that early hour, she was perfectly coiffed, every hair in its place. She wore a pearl necklace and a silver bracelet. She was superbly cordial and yet quite firm when she explained that as a householder she expected me to follow the association rules. I got the impression that she would be a good ally, but not a person to trifle with.
 
Three days later, she again called to say that the annual meeting of the association would be the following week, and, as a new resident, it would be advantageous for me to come and meet all my neighbors. Toward the end of the meeting, Melinda, presiding over the proceedings, surprised me by introducing me and then asking me to say a few words about myself. I gave a short, facetious description of my current life and work and people laughed.
 
It must have gone down well, for the very next agenda item was the election of a new member of the association board and, before I could take another breath, my name was proposed and accepted. That is how I got to know Melinda well.
 
In the very first meeting I proposed modestly that it might be a good idea to computerize the association records. Melinda said that it was “the most hare-brained idea” she had heard. She had managed everything well with a typewriter and pen-and-paper, and saw no need for a change. In the next two meetings I suggested a few more things, each time evoking the ‘hair-brained’ appellation.
 
I realized, with clarity and without rancor, that my views were rather different from Melinda’s and the other board members dared not differ from her firm views. I pondered leaving the board, for I could contribute little that would not be discarded forthwith.
 
Then something curious occurred. I met Melinda on a trail one Saturday, while she was walking her dachshund, and I mentioned that I was recovering from the morning’s news that Richard Burton had died. I had loved his love of poetry and his recorded recitals, and owed him my understanding of John Donne. She responded warmly and our discussion stayed into histrionics. She discovered that I loved the theater and had read plays from Euripedes and Sophocles to Richard Albee and Arthur Miller. I found that she had been a Broadway star as a young woman and later an important entertainment manager in the US Army and a key figure in the Washington theater world. She knew most of the principal directors and producers of plays in the country.
 
After that there was no end to our discussions. I would come up to her home after dinner and split a bottle of Chivas Regal for hours while we talked. I would get complimentary box tickets for me and a friend for any local play I wanted to see. After we had talked about drama for hours, I might mention a proposal for the association. She would listen quietly and at the next board meeting suddenly say, “Nandy has come up with the curious idea…” Seldom anybody demurred.
 
Extremely fit and unusually active, Melinda was suddenly stricken with a breathing problem six years later. I took her to the nearest hospital for an examination. The doctor frowned when he saw the test reports and insisted that she be admitted immediately. Melinda was equally insistent that she was fine and would come back. I persuaded her to get admitted and promised to get her files, clothes and jewelry from home. I did, but she was too ill by then to use any of them.
 
Without her hair styled and the pearl necklace in place, she refused to meet any visitors. But she would see me every day. That is the first time I unearthed her real name; Melinda apparently was just a stage name. I also found she was fifteen years older than she looked. She was in agony and it was painful for me to see her daily decline. It was a relief when Melinda gave up her struggle and breathed her last. To the end, we talked about plays and the extraordinary things they had meant in our lives.
 
Her many admirers organized a memorial meeting. It was, as Melinda wanted, more a celebration: a star sang songs from Melinda’s favorite musicals accompanied by a famous pianist. I was asked to speak and there was room-wide uproarious laughter when I quoted Melinda’s oft-repeated phrase, “the most hare-brained idea.” Clearly a large majority of them had had to hear at some point that phrase from our common feisty friend.

A bright yellow cap suddenly blew by in the air and I instinctively put out a hand to catch it. It twirled around my index finger in the strong breeze, before I firmly grasped it and brought it in.
 
“Thank you so much,” said a grateful young woman, who had given up on her cap, until a complete stranger, me, retrieved it from the gust of wind.
 
The phenomenon of a wayward cap is perfectly intelligible when you realize it occurred on the sunny, windy top deck of a large sea liner. I am in a ship, a massive ship with twenty decks, holding nine thousand people. It is virtually a city on the water.

​I am more used to a plane than a ship, especially a ship dedicated to entertainment. I have scant use for the huge casino or the ostensibly bargain sale of jewelry and clothes. Not being James Bond, I don’t want to make – more likely, lose – a pile of money, nor being one of his many paramours, I don’t have a lust for gems or garbs. There are a bunch of shows, some musical and some athletic, and I attend a few as my mood dictates. I rather like the abundance of bistros and restaurants sprinkled at different levels, where I can eat or drink any time I want, just as I do at home. Not yoked to office hours any longer, I consume the way a free man should: when I feel the need to do so.
 
I used to know a ship’s captain who joked, “A cruise is a cross I bear when I have to.” His point was that all kinds of people save up money for a cruise and enter on it with extravagant expectations; as a captain, he had to struggle to meet their unrealistic dreams and flimsy complaints. He cited an elderly teacher with false teeth who grumbled about overdone steak to a lusty youngster who entertained too many beaus at a time, who in turn started a noisy fight. Remembering him I am grateful enough for a beautiful, quiet room with peaceable neighbors.
 
When I wake up, I pull the curtains and see the reassuring sight of the blue Caribbean Sea, glistening in the morning light. I open the glass door and step on to a small terrace, where they have thoughtfully placed a table and two chairs. It is a great place to sit and write. Or just to dream and dawdle, and watch the modest waves created by the boat I am riding. Amazingly, the behemoth creates very little noise – I haven’t even heard a roar or a whistle that I associate with steamers – and I hear only a mild hum. The water is a beautiful cobalt blue, with a white foam and occasionally some yellow algae.
 
There is a great variety of entertainment shows, but for the vast majority of people the greatest entertainment seems to be the plentiful free food. Young and old, I found everybody eating all the time, exactly the opposite of what doctors would recommend for a visibly obesity-tilted crowd. The open decks were crowded with distinctly underdressed men and women, the latter clearly in bigger numbers, soaking in the immoderate sun, again in utter defiance of doctors recommend. I have no such love of the midday sun and feel content to get some exposure only when I walk at home in the morning and at dusk.
 
If not the food or the sun, or even the plebeian entertainment, what then did help me pass the time? I only have to pose that question to feel embarrassed by it. Why should I need, like a child, to be fed entertainment by the spoonful? A child, in fact, if left by herself, finds a thousand ways to amuse herself. An adult, with a modicum of education and experience, has an enormous fund of resources to find diversion. The whole world around him is waiting to flood him with engrossing material. Some pre-packaged entertainment material, like a film or a play, may be wonderfully engaging, but it is pathetic being who must be constantly supplied by such material to be amused or feel engaged with the universe.
 
Severed from my familiar world of friends, neighbors, acquaintances and even my home or familiar surroundings, I seem to have developed a closer relationship with my very temporary cabin in the ship. Because of my nomadic life, I have stayed in hundreds of hotels, but never have I struck such a close rapport with my tiny desk, my minuscule shower or my pint-sized terrace. I lie on a deck chair and watch the wide blue sky and rediscover the reconfiguring clouds that I don’t remember having noticed since I was in school. Given a few more days, I might find mysteries in the carpet on my floor that nobody has noticed. There is something to be said for presence of leisure and the total absence of distractions like a phone and an internet.
 
At the end of a week, an unbelievably uneventful serene seven-day stretch, I am walking down the gang plank and emerging from the large ship, when I notice again the bright yellow cap and underneath a bright, wide smile. She recognizes me. What better reward than that silent recognition of my brief legerdemain!

You can’t love Venice without loving its canals and bridges; you can’t love Italy without loving gelato and Sophia Loren; you can’t love Europe without loving its small bistros and narrow streets. And you can’t love Kolkata without loving its second-hand booksellers on College Street.
 
I was an impecunious student living at the busy, bustling, blaring corner of College Street and Harrison Road. We lived on the third floor, but even there we often shut the large French windows to mute the din. The trams created a metallic racket, the honking of the buses and the hollering of their conductors rose to the heavens, and there was the steady hum of vendors and traders offering their wares.
 
Young, heedless, I became inured to this unwelcome orchestra in three weeks. I slept well, punctuated only by erotic dreams. I was excited instead by the vibrancy of the place. In two opposite corners stood two fragrant restaurants, one famous for its confectionery and the other for its mutton delicacies. Next to one was a shop whose windows displayed the most spectacular saris, of colorful silk and exquisitely designed cotton. Ample middle-aged women came to shop, but occasionally they were accompanied by a slender young beauty that left me enthralled. Set back from the corner was a large, messy market that repelled me, but next to that was a dream house, a movie theater. On its upper-floor deck were huge cutouts of beautiful stars, facing the window of my room, and a well-endowed Madhubala was enough to populate my erogenous dreams for a month.
 
But the most exciting thing in that buoyant, boisterous corner was the long series of second-hand books for sale. There were seven to nine vendors who ran well-stocked consignment stores, selling all manner of books. One or two specialized in science tomes or college texts, but most sold all manner of books, ranging from literature to how-to books to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Some were soiled or had a missing cover, but many were in great shape and could be had for virtually a song. If you bought more than one volume, the shopkeeper would readily offer a discount. When clients were few, they even allowed you indulgently to stand and read a passage or two.
 
The display was modest but ingenious. None of the vendors had a bookshop or a stall worth talking about. They displayed their books on small planks hung from the railings that bordered the campus of a college, just outside of which they plied their trade. What could not be displayed they kept in cheap metal boxes on the ground. It was astonishing how well they remembered the titles and authors of the books they displayed or kept in storage. All you had to do was say half of an author’s name or a fraction of a title, and the vendors would produce the book in an instant. Their metal boxes also contained a plastic cover. That was their tenuous protection from a sudden downpour that could destroy their painstakingly collected books and decimate their inventory. 

​Rain, in fact, was what caused my first acquaintance with Bidhu Babu. He was a sixtyish man, with thinning white hair and old-fashioned metal glasses. I lived next door and passed the booksellers morning and evening. I could not help but notice his august bearing and quiet way of talking with customers. Returning home one afternoon, I was suddenly caught in a heavy downpour and started sprinting for the front door. Passing Bidhu Babu, I found him fully drenched, still trying to put the last book in a box.
 
I stopped and said, “That’s my home. Let me take that box. You collect the other books and follow me before all those get soaked.” When we got indoors, I saw him shivering and went to get a towel.
 
I hadn’t done much, but Bidhu Babu seemed touched. He told me his name and added that he had seen me often looking at old books on the street. I explained that I was a student and I liked reading literature, but I had very little money to buy new books.
 
Bidhu Babu had worked in a small printing shop, but when business shrunk he was let go. Since he was a widower and his son lived and worked in Pune, he decided he would start a business that required little or no capital. I liked both his enterprise and his personality. I felt we had connected at some level.
 
From then on, whatever money I had from my parents or earned by tutoring students, I used to buy novels from Bidhu Babu. He found the latest authors for me and gave me attractive prices, and I tried to reciprocate by bringing my friends as new clients.
 
Four years later, when I was leaving for the university, Bidhu Babu said he was leaving his business, for his son had invited him to live with him in Pune.
 
“I am not as young and strong as I was. Still, I am considering whether I should again start a book selling shop in Pune. My son says he can rent a stall near his home.”
 
He looked happy, and I felt happy for him. But I was losing the best book seller in town. And a friend.

It is a picture of a little girl. It is a black-and-white photo of a girl striking a dance pose.
 
She is a girl of about nine. She has luxuriant hair, cut to shorter than shoulder length. She wears a lovely long dress with an attractive floral print. She in fact looks pretty, almost festive. But she wears a decidedly melancholy look. It is a picture I can’t get out of my mind. Why does a little girl look so sad?

​I asked the person who showed me the photo. Yes, she was nine when the picture was taken. She had just taken part in a dance drama in her school, where she played the role of a street vendor who carried her ware in a basket on her head. She received applause from the audience and that pleased her.
 
But, when the play ended and her mother came to collect her, she was accompanied by the man she had seen many times with her mother before. He always came when her father was not there. He was an engineer and he brought gifts for her mother. She knew he was the cause of innumerable fights between her parents. She also knew that her mother was greatly enamored of him and had no intention of abandoning him. She did not dislike him, but she knew well her parents’ relationship would remain highly toxic as long the man would be on the scene.
 
The man said to her, “You did a good job in that play. Let me take a photo.”
 
Her mother made a sign of approval and the man directed her to pose like a vendor and pretend she had a basket on her head. She did not want to do it. She did not want to please the man. But she knew her mother would be annoyed if she did not comply. She complied. The photo was the result. She posed but she wasn’t happy.
 
“That is clear from the photo,” I said. What happened to the man, I wanted to know.
 
“He had advanced colon cancer,” she replied, “my mother visited him every day. She told me she prayed morning and evening for his recovery. The prayer wasn’t answered. He died very young, in his early forties.”
 
“And your mother?”
 
“She didn’t last long either. She had an unusual heart condition. She passed away five years later.”
 
She paused and added, “My parents never reconciled. They lived under the same roof, but they barely talked. The air in my home was fraught with hostility. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t breathe. The last few days of her life, mother didn’t even want to see father. I sat alone next to her bed and gave her the medicines.”
 
She resumed, “Father loved me. But what had happened, not just a day or two but for years, had poisoned our family life. Father was not at home very much. He seemed to avoid our home.
 
“When I married and moved out, he lived alone in the large house. Like a ghost, encircled by the rank residue of bitter memories. I found it difficult to connect with him. Slowly but surely, I gave up the effort. He stopped existing in my life long before he met his end in a lonely hospital room.
 
“I truly missed him. I missed his attachment to me, his deep affection. I missed even more the far closer connection I had with my mother, who was my friend, almost my model. But she was also the person who had betrayed me. She was too intent on seeking her own satisfaction, no matter what the consequence was for her family or her child. She wanted her affair and whatever it meant for her unfulfilled life. I loved her and yet I could not but hate her too.”
 
I looked at the photograph in my hand and I looked at her. Something of the melancholy showed on her face when she went quiet, absorbed in her thoughts.
 
We are constantly told that our destiny is in our hands, we can make of our lives whatever we want. What does a little girl do when she is trapped in a toxic family, where she needs love and certainty and contends with tension and hostility? How does she cope with two caring parents who are caught up in an unending spiral mutual neglect and suspicion? With her scant resources, she must struggle painfully just to survive. to hope one day to breathe the air of trust and confidence that should be every child’s right.
 
I hold now in my hand a faded copy of the photo of a little girl in a dance pose, with a festive dress and melancholy face, and a sketchy notion of what transpired in her later life, and say a silent prayer that my two little girls – and their little girls and all little girls – have a brighter look on their face and go forward in life with a little more of joy and assurance.

Mornings are glorious in Santiniketan. I was visiting Santiniketan in the sixties and staying in the home of the Vice Chancellor of ViswaBharati University. There was a sizable lawn next door and, early one morning, I woke and saw a man going around and around in a circle.
 
As I walked up to him, I saw a tall, bearded foreigner and was about to say Good Morning in English. He pre-empted me, by speaking in Bengali, and that too sardonically, “Finally, you are awake!” He justified the dig with his next sentence, coupled with an elaborate gesture of his arm, “Bright morning!”
 
Paul Detienne had displayed his three most characteristic ploys in the very first minute of our encounter. He could speak Bengali better than a native. He loved sarcasm. His arms, like his face, was not just expressive, they were dramatically demonstrative.

These were not features one expected in a Jesuit missionary. But Detienne seldom did anything very expected. When he said he was Belgian, I quickly suggested, “Why don’t we talk in French? I want to improve my spoken French.” He countered, “But I want to improve my Bengali. I’d rather we talk in Bengali.” After some haggling, we reached a deal. He will speak to me in Bengali; I will speak in French.
 
That created what Thurber would have called “a hullabaloo of misunderstanding.” Since I worked in an office near Park Street and he was often there for his work, our paths crossed frequently, and we stopped and talked at street corners. We attracted attention. Passersby stopped and chided me, “What’s wrong with you? That sahib is talking Bengali and you are talking some gibberish. Can’t you be polite and talk to him in English?” One time, when went to the Flury’s tea shop for some coffee, two persons, after hearing our conversation from the next table, came to help me, “It is all right if you don’t know English. Just tell us what you want to say in Hindi, and we will translate it for him in English.”
 
Detienne relished such confusion. He would pull their leg and say, “English is a far cry for him. He can’t even speak Bengali well. I am trying to teach him a little bit.”
 
Sometimes he would drop by my office. If I was busy, he would not waste his time, but talk instead with my secretary, my assistant, or even the receptionist. In short order he knew their name, where they lived, whether they were married, what they liked to eat. One time my assistant made the mistake, while serving him tea, of using the word ‘sugar’ instead of the Bengali equivalent, and Detienne said, “If you are a Bengali, and you don’t know the Bengali word for sugar, you need to improve your language. If you know the word, but choose to use a word from another language, then you need to improve your idea of yourself.” He said it gently and with a smile, but he detested the practice he had noticed of Indians mixing English words while speaking an Indian language.
 
I took him home to meet my parents and my brothers. He told Ashis, “I have a better beard than yours,” and he deliberately poked Pritish by mispronouncing his name as British. My mother wanted to know about his family and Detienne disclosed that all his brothers, six of them, were priests in different countries, mostly Africa, except one. His mother had apparently said that she needed one near her and would not let him join the Jesuits. The youngest brother was to get married, and Detienne wanted the bride to wear a sari, a Benarasi, for the evening reception. My mother dictated the steps involved in wearing a sari; I translated her words into French and my secretary typed them out. We helped Detienne buy a beautiful sari and he carried it to Brussels. But my mother’s instructions or my translation was poor, and the bride had to seek emergency help from the Indian Embassy before the reception. But, reported Detienne, the bride looked gorgeous and he was the hero of the evening.
 
A heavy price for my nomadic life is the number of friends one lost in pre-internet days. When I connected with Detienne again after twenty-five years, he had mellowed somewhat, but he still retained his proclivity for sarcasm and dramatic gestures. He was a literary celebrity, for he had produced a stream of witty, enjoyable books that had gained popularity among discriminating readers. I took it as a great compliment when one or two remarked that some of my own writing reminded readers of the flavor of Detienne.
 
I have a whole collection of Detienne’s books. I woke up early this morning, made a cup of coffee and walked out on the deck with a Detienne book. I looked at Detienne’s picture on the cover and half expected him to jump out, make an oversized gesture and say, “Finally, you are awake!”
 
I turned the pages and, toward the end, this is what I came across:
 
“My time has come to leave. I have finished all that I had to say.
​But not quite.
I will hope to see you again.”

I never understood my father’s unbounded affection for the young man. It bordered on admiration. I admired men who wrote good poety or played good cricket. What did father see in the small, thin man who limped as he walked, from a sad legacy of polio?
 
During those post-war years, inflation was a big topic and father invited a friend, a reputed professor, to give a talk on the subject. Strangely, father asked this young student to preside and introduce the professor. The professor knew the student too and suggested something stranger. He wanted the student to speak and he would preside. That’s the first time I heard the man. I was in school and knew nothing of inflation or economics. Yet I understood everything he said and realized the importance of inflation for ordinary people.
 
Some years later, when I had joined college and begun exploring my father’s library, I was surprised to find a thin book, For Democracy. The author, I recognized from the photo at the back, was the young person father liked so much. He had written a book! Curious, I started on it. I was spellbound.
 
Few books, beyond Aristotle, Freud and Marx, have influenced me as much as that modest book. It gave me the clearest idea of what a democratic society means. It certainly does not mean Modi’s India or Trump’s USA, majoritarian societies that mistreat or disempower minority groups. But, more than what it said, the way it said it changed my way of thinking.
​
It took little for granted and argued step by step, in the most limpid prose, leading the reader from the premise to the conclusion in clear, simple, unambiguous reasoning. I am not easily impressed, but the book bowled me over.
 
I was deeply moved and impressed. I immediately took his address from my father and went to see him in his tiny apartment. He made tea and we talked for a long time. He talked like nobody else I had encountered, nor have I met anybody since. He listened intently, as if his life depended on it. Then, before he responded to you, he summed up what you had said, often presenting it better than you had done. If he agreed with you, he said why and carefully mapped the area of accord. If he disagreed, he graciously laid out the grounds.
 
He was the living Bible of good exchanges, scrupulously courteous and punctiliously fair. He took the best interpretation of what you said, either to build on it or, if he thought it wrong, take each strand, analyze it fairly and discard it, often with your agreement. 

​I later saw him in public debates, with top-notch scholars and silver-tongued politicians, reducing them to rubble in minutes. He used the simple device of cutting through metaphors and verbiage, and laid out their logic in the sunlight of crystal-clear words. He eschewed drama and embraced direct talk. He supplanted sound and fury with simple syllogism. He was passionate in his faith in fairness and ardent in his loyalty to reason, and, thank Heavens, he won each time. David-like, he quietly slew the Goliaths of slick orators, glib lawyers and pugnacious party leaders.
 
Then I got to see the other side of him when I joined the university and encountered him as an instructor. I felt comfortable with him and thought of him more as a counsellor than a professor. I discussed all manner of things with him, whether it was an unobliging girl friend or a confusing family issue. I had no hesitation turning up at his home if my mind was troubled. He would make me listen to Bach and make me coffee. His patient hearing and thoughtful clues were just the salve my restless heart needed.
 
My years overseas cut off our personal contact. I heard of his administrative role in two universities where political activists paid him scant respect and scantier heed. I heard of painful rumors that he twice tried to end his life. I wanted to talk to him again. I was to visit Kolkata on a World Bank mission, and I called from Washington to make sure that I could meet him.
 
On a gloomy autumn evening, I finished my work downtown and directed the rented car to his Lake Town home. He looked older and frailer, with a graying forelock and thicker lenses. But his smile was radiant.
 
We were meeting after a decade, but an intangible nexus had endured. I told him of my new life abroad, my work and my family. He talked of the intervening years, the tumultuous experiences of his work as a university head and his current thoughts about society and its evolution. He continued to write, he said, then ruefully added that he was not sure anybody was reading or paying attention.
 
We had tea together and time seemed to have slipped away.
 
When I left at dusk, he limped to the door to say goodbye. From the car, in the pallid evening light, I had my last view of the man who had taught me how to think straight and how to speak direct. Maybe some activists and politicians did not care for him. I did. To me, he was special. He was always what his name said he was, untarnished.

My parents were both Bengalis, but they came from different states with very different genealogies. They came to know each other, in a very limited way then permissible, only because father’s sisters went to the same college as my mother and they became friends. Amazingly, that friendship lasted as well as the marriage itself. An astounding example was that when a sister, my aunt, was murdered in her home, my mother, defying all well-meaning dissuasion, decided to go there herself and cleaned the blood spots personally.
 
My parents were, like other couples who succeed in making a go of their marriage, were both similar and different. Father was outgoing and gregarious. He loved company and made no secret of it. His work fortunately permitted endless socialization. He invited friends and strangers alike at the drop of a hat, to the occasional discomfiture of mother.  He played tennis, his adversaries invariably turning up eventually for tea at our home.
 
Mother was essentially a more introspective person. She went along with father’s bent for hospitality, ardently cooking up a storm when father overdid and invited a large number. But she shone best in one-on-one talk with people she really liked. She had been an educator, but for many years she was just a homemaker rearing her children, yet her wits were razor-sharp. She listened quietly and avidly, but when her views differed, she expressed them gently but articulately.
 
In societies where it is customary for children to pay adoring homage to their parents even when the parents are far from ideal, it may seem invidious for a son to comment objectively on his parents’ relationship. I do so in an earnest effort to understand the air I breathed and the untraditional template I saw. Of their three children, I lived the longest with them, even through my college and university days, and saw their relationship change direction many times. Yet there was a vibrancy to their link that somehow endured.
 
The clearest sign of that was the way they handled their differences. Given their different backgrounds, their perspectives often varied. Mother came from a relatively comfortable middle-class family; my father had been through financial straits. He had a streak of concern about security that my mother, though cautious, usually lacked. Father came from a small family, his two sisters had careers and were independent; he tended to seek friends outside. Mother was the youngest of a huge family and was the darling of her brothers and sisters; all her thinking started with them. Father loved travel and was prepared to rough it. Mother was essentially a homing pigeon, liked nothing better than a pleasant palaver over a cup of tea.
 
It is interesting the way they reconciled their oddities. Father handed over family finances to mother entirely, trusting her scrupulous record-keeping, and felt free of worries. His sisters were old friends of my mother anyway; he went about developing a warm and close relationship with two of mother’s closest brothers. Mother wasn’t keen on travel but went along with father’s enthusiasm for vacation travel twice a year; at other times, she let him travel on his own, if he wanted.

​I cannot recall more than two occasions when they had an overt conflict of views. One time mother, clearly upset, went out of the house (I wouldn’t stop following her and walked beside her), but she only walked round the block and came back home in an hour. The rarity of their overt differences, I am certain, was because they never missed their early-morning and late-afternoon tea together, where children could join but were not really welcome. I have scant doubt that those were occasionally covert negotiating sessions.
 
When I visited friends, I immediately noticed a surprising difference in their family. You could see immediately the lack of power parity between their parents. The males clearly dominated, took major decisions; the women went along, though often resented it, sometimes harbored a grudge. At home, mother’s soft voice and dulcet tone scarcely concealed that she was a fully equal partner. Mother was the early riser and made their private morning tea. The day she took a job and went back to work after many years, father started making the tea. When they moved to a new home near her place of work, mother took back the function. When father retired from work, he swiftly resumed the charge. They shared work – and they shared power. Father never learned to cook, just as mother never learned to shop. They both learned to respect the other’s preference even while they followed their own preference.
 
Mother was a teacher and administrator before she married. When she went back to work, she again assumed a similar role. She did well and was loved and admired. I knew her capability at first hand. So, I was surprised, in fact a little disappointed, when father died suddenly in a botched surgery, she seemed to come apart. I had not anticipated her acute vulnerability. Then I realized that that was the dark side of a successful relationship: when it works, it is very pleasing; when it ends, it is very crippling.
 
I needed to wait. The mother I knew returned in time, a little aged, a little scarred, but return she did. It was a measure too of my father’s legacy of magic in her life. She savored her new innings. At ninety, I asked her, “Tell me, which was the most remarkable year of your life?”
 
She replied, without a moment’s pause, “Why, of course, this year.”

After two years in the factory, I had a prize post in the company’s headquarters, and went to work on an elite street of the city. The hitch was my boss didn’t want me. I had been foisted on him by the works director who believed, inexplicably, that I was ‘a man of ideas.’ My boss wanted his nephew to take the position and treated me as a pariah. I needed to get on his right side. How I had no idea.
 
My boss was a golf champion. I hated the game. He was a regular club goer. I shrank from the idea of joining a club and drinking beer with him. I had to think of something else.
 
His secretary was a pretty, short-haired woman. On the briefest acquaintance, Stacia said to me, “You are going to be trouble. With your outlandish ideas, you are a threat to this company. I will call you Menace instead of Manish.”
 
With that witty renaming, I saw an opening. I knew she had a master copy of all letters sent out. Could I have a copy of the boss’s letters, I asked, say the last 500?
 
“Why? You will understand nothing without the files,” she replied.
 
“I don’t want to understand anything. I just want to find out his style.”
 
“Good grief,” she said, but later quietly passed me a huge sheaf of his recent letters. I could have kissed her.
 
I studied the letters thoroughly over the weekend. Clearly my boss followed certain iron rules. One, the letter must be short and sweet, reeking of friendliness. Two, it has to strike a positive note, even if you are saying No.  Three, any complicated things you have to say should be separate, in an attachment. Four, cut out legalese or formal phrases, say things simply. The biggest rule: always sound like an affable, eager-to-help uncle.
 
I meditated on these rules as if my life depended on them. I swallowed them all.

​The following week two of my reports came back from the boss with the notation ‘Good,’ followed by a third that had ‘Excellent’ scribbled on it. More ‘Excellent’s in the next two weeks. The third week the boss called me in.
 
“You have a way with words,” he murmured. I had never seen a smile on him before. “I want you to do something for me.”
 
He had been invited to give a talk to the Material Management Association and he wanted me to prepare some talking points.

​I saw him two days later. I said, “Instead of talking points, I have written the entire speech for you.”
 
He eagerly took the papers and glanced. Then he nearly jumped.
 
“I am supposed to talk about managing materials. You start off with golf!”
 
“Nobody wants a stuffy discourse. They would be bored to death. You need to tell a story about materials management. What better story from a golf champion than one that starts with golf?”
 
He was still dubious, “This looks pretty short. I have to speak for at least ​a half-hour.”
 
“People go to sleep after twenty minutes. Even if they are listening to Demosthenes. If they want more, let them ask questions.”
 
I left him still shaking his head in disbelief.
 
The next week he called me in his office and, miracle of miracles, offered me tea and biscuits.
 
“Your speech was a great hit.” That ‘your’ was honey in my ears.
 
“They listened,” he practically beamed, “and then asked a lot of questions. Wow!”
 
On the way out, I crossed Stacia in a fetching blue dress. She inquired, “Menace, what is he so jolly about today?”
 
“I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe he is in love with you.”
 
She struck me with the folder she had in hand, but I quickly sidestepped and returned to my office.
 
The next five years I wrote every speech and presentation my boss made anywhere.
 
Years later, when I was working in the World Bank, the President intended to prepare a note endorsing Mother Teresa for the Nobel Prize. Since I was the only staff member who was from Kolkata and knew the Mother personally, I was asked to contribute.
 
I don’t remember what I wrote but, later on, found myself ghostwriting quite a few speeches. I still believed in stories instead of discourses.

I was lucky to find a job the moment I came out of the university. I felt I wasn’t so lucky that the job was in an industrial town an hour’s drive from the city. I had no car. I would take a train Sunday evening, arrive and stay in the apartment the company had allotted me during the week, and Friday evening return to the city. I resented the exile from city life. I thought sullenly of friends who had found jobs in the city and could explore its charms with new-found affluence. I forgot, of course, to think of the friends who had found no jobs at all.
 
For the next two years I used the local trains at least twice a week, sometimes more if there was a mid-week holiday. Very rarely I used a company car to visit the city, and thrice I accompanied a colleague who used his motorbike like a lance through urban traffic. Slowly I got used to the local trains, their plain look, hard plastic seats, numerous stops and piercing whistles. I began to like them.

What I liked most was the cavalcade of people who joined me on this fleeting passage. It changed a lot, and that was the beauty of it. When I briefly met Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author, in Washington he narrated how he had grown up insulated in his father’s house, meeting only the elite of Lima. When his father, concerned by his ‘effeminate’ affinity for literature, put him in a military school, he got to meet the children from all layers of society. My family wasn’t elite, and my parents cultivated a variety of friends, but the local trains let me rub shoulders with a far greater variety of people. There were the affluent who needed to make a short trip and preferred the rail to a dusty car voyage; the middle-class professors, clerks, salesmen, students and housewives making their regular trips for work or pleasure; and the vast number of simple folk, factory workers, female domestics, delivery men and all kinds of small traders on their usual round. Most were ready to talk when they sat next to me and I asked a question or two, and a few were amazingly forthcoming.
 
Mala, who sat opposite me and changed a bandage on her arm as the train moved, was candid when I asked how she was wounded. “An animal,” she said. “An animal did it. My husband. He drinks more than he earns. When I say anything, this is what he does.” Her family does not want her to leave him, and he may create a problem with her little child. She has to work at a quarry during the day and endure his abuse at night.
 
Two college students who travelled with me gave me an object lesson. Bijon, who commuted to the city every day, for he couldn’t afford to live there, returned to his village every evening, exhausted, quickly munched some puffed rice and went to teach poor boys in a night school. Arijit, even younger, did his classes and then proceeded to his cleaning job in the city restaurant before returning late to his town. “Why a cleaning job? Why can’t you get some better work?” I asked, only to be dumbfounded by his reply, “My illiterate mother is a maid in three houses and does cleaning. I want her to know that, though I read and write, I too do a cleaning job.”
 
Professor Adhikari, a balding, bespectacled man, said he couldn’t live in the city, for he had a bedridden daughter in a small-town charitable hospital, but he did not really mind the commute. “I am widower,” he explained, “and I rent a tiny room next to a club. It is very noisy. The club members never listen to my request to keep the volume down. The three hours I spend on the train is the quietest period I get to study.” Embarrassed, I stopped asking him any more questions, and he returned to a book he had already taken out of his cloth bag. As if to reassure me, he warmly said goodbye to me when he left, and even expressed the hope that he would see me again.

Rather different were ebullient Sujit and Romola, brother and sister, who were going for a weekend picnic and wanted me to vacate the window seat for them. I did so readily and was promptly rewarded with scones and pastries from Flury’s, a confection titan. As we talked, they revealed that their mother, ill for a while, had passed away six months ago – and, further, their father was set to remarry in eight weeks. I did not have to be a Freud to divine that their high-spirited picnic was, alas, a ruse to avoid a weekend encounter with their father.
 
My most memorable encounter was with an elderly man, indistinguishable in appearance from others of his age and but indefinably distinguished in his bearing. Eyes riveted on him the moment he entered the train. Before sitting next to me he politely nodded his head, as if to seek my approval. As the train started and I started reading again, he gently coughed and asked, “The book you are reading, isn’t in English, is it?” He had noticed the title and I explained that it was a French novel by Marguerite Duras. He then talked of the advantage of knowing a foreign language, citing the unusual reason that the ‘foreign’ then does not remain foreign. He asked what I did, and then reciprocated by saying that he was a union leader and politician. He talked frankly of the problems of his double role and narrated how he had embarked on union activity from a deep sense of injustice to workers. He spoke of the need to balance the fair with the practical, the right with the acceptable. Spellbound, I listened to a masterly analysis of what is and what should be.
 
Two years later, I was transferred to the company’s headquarters in the city and my odyssey in local trains ended. It seemed to me that the phantom train, carrying a vast and varied assortment of interesting people, that had been traversing my life every week, bringing me the exciting savor of worlds unknown, had suddenly lost its way in an impenetrable fog. No more whistles, only the honk of an impatient city car.