The rain had always belonged to Nirmal Karmakar. For six decades it had fallen from his brushes across the faces of heroes and heroines, streamed down painted windows and gathered in imaginary puddles beneath the feet of lovers. He knew how to make a wet street glisten beneath a streetlamp, how to give a woman’s…
Last Winter of Hooghly Slush
Somewhere between the winter fields of Bengal and the frozen lakes of Boston, a little piece of winter learnt to travel. The first thing Tushar learnt about ice was that it had a sound. It was not the crack of a branch beneath a foot or the brittle snap of a dried leaf, but a…
Staircase to the Sky
The first time Haran saw the place where the tower was to stand, the land lay beneath a pitiless sun, the red earth cracked into a thousand small maps. Beyond the village, sal trees climbed low hills, their leaves whispering in the hot wind, while cattle nosed at dry grass beside a pond reduced to…
Seven Thousand Gallons
Somewhere between the place where a thing is made and the place where it is needed, its value can change beyond recognition. Calcutta, November 1796. The Hooghly smelt of wet earth, fish, tar and rotting timber, its brown waters shouldering past the ghats beneath a sky heavy with rain. Boatmen called to one another across…
Trial of the Two Tufts
In Lake Market, a man’s reputation could be weighed in mustard seeds, measured in fish scales, or, in exceptional circumstances, judged by the length of hair growing from the back of his head. The bazaar woke each morning to a symphony that no orchestra could reproduce. Fishmongers bellowed the virtues of their rohu, vegetable sellers…
Throw My Body in the Gutter
“Throw my body in the gutter,” were the words that kept on throbbing inside Kabir’s head as he stared at the lifeless body of his father. The room was not that small, yet it seemed impossibly claustrophobic considering the hundreds of people who had gathered there to pay their last respects to Shomoresh. The ceiling…
The Oldest Covenant
The rain had begun before sunset, first as a thin patter on the high windows of the hospital and then as a furious drumming that seemed to shake the old building at its foundations. By nightfall, Poona was swallowed by water and darkness. The gutters overflowed. The neem trees bent beneath the wind. Somewhere beyond…
The Last Breath
The child had stopped breathing before the sun reached its highest place. Yet his mother continued to warm a little brass bowl of water beside the hearth, fearing the fever might return. Outside, the settlement baked beneath an obdurate summer sky. The mud walls of the houses had turned the colour of old turmeric, the…
When She Chose to Live
The ravines of Chambal had a way of making every sound seem farther away than it really was. A twig breaking on the other side of a gorge could sound like a rifle being cocked beside your ear; the cry of a peacock could travel through the gullies like a warning from another world. In…
The Legend of Goli Kha
In the Topsia of the 1980s, before flyovers sliced through the sky and apartment towers began sprouting like ambitious weeds, there were lanes where the afternoon sun seemed to arrive hesitantly and leave even more reluctantly. The neighbourhood breathed in layers. From one end came the wood and metallic clatter of hand-pulled rickshaws and handcarts,…
