"I wish reassurance could be bought and sold at market places.

You'd be rich. I'd be broke.

And you'd be self-employed. See?"

"Yeah."

I went to a reunion of old friends a few days ago.

It was one of those occasions where (almost) everyone got a little tipsy, and went slightly maudlin, and told old, old stories, or maybe it was all the smoke, and not the drink.

A lot of people have changed. De wears better fitting clothes now. Bi drinks a little, and Ra drinks a lot. Pu is in love with a girl, and he used to be in love with two other girls, but those didn’t work out, and this was a guy who shied away from girls like he thought he’d get a venereal disease just by thinking about sex. Quiet, shy Lambda, the guy who once accidentally touched this young teacher’s breast, and then actually apologized to her, he was that much of a doofus, he wears Ray-bans now. Even in the evenings.

And Sou has finally sprouted facial hair. Finally. After years and years of being ribbed about it. And Arnie has a girlfriend. And Andoo can dance.

Supro was this really, really carefree guy. Laughed a lot, the kind of guy who never seemed to have any worries. Now he calls himself a misogynist, chain smokes, and is all too ready to talk about all the times this bitch, or that bitch bought movie tickets for him because they wanted to make out with him.

And Ri couldn’t make it. He’s still at Haldia, stoned out of his mind. He uses heroin to put himself to sleep, and cocaine to help wake himself up in the mornings.

A used to be fat. Very fat. He was really smart, and funny, too, but not many people looked past the fat, and the ridiculously thick moustache that he had. Now he’s clean-shaven, thinner than I am, and has hair just the right length, with streaks. He looks very cool. He’s happier, too. Or so he says.

Everybody loves the new, hep A, they were all exclaiming over him.

I wish someone would take this stranger away, and bring me back my fat, bumbling friend.

“What’s with this thing, this Safi thing? You know, this syrup thingy that is advertised as a blood purifier? What’s a blood purifier, besides a dialysis machine? A liver?”

Laugh. “I don’t know. Blood purifier, my ass! The stuff some people will buy, man, it amazes me.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“You know, speaking of dialysis, I saw this man once. He had an arterio-venous fistula.”

“Oh, an artificial one, for dialysis? Where?”

“Medicine, the cold wards.”

“Jeez, when was this? You should have told me, I’d have come taken a look at him too.”

“Nah, he had uremic encephalopathy. His kidneys had shut down, the fellow was jerking every time someone touched him. When I went to examine him, bugger caught my arm, gave me quite a start, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But the fellow died a few hours later. I thought I’d go take a look at him again, and I’d have taken you along. But when I asked, they said he’d died already.”

“Hmm.”

“But the arterio-venous fistula was quite characteristic, you know. Large, too. The pressure differential was huge, felt like there was an electric current there.”

“Damn. I wish I’d been there.”

“Yeah. It really was something.”

I was standing outside the eye wards, listening to some music. I think I was playing Fountains of Wayne.

I saw a man come toward me, and he said, “Sir, may I ask you something?” He had on a dirty green shawl, and he had a straggly beard, I think he’d be two or three years older than I am.

I removed my earphones, and he drew me to one of the benches in the corridor and took out a file. It was dirty green too. He took out a couple of prescriptions from it.

He talked very fast. He said he had a daughter who was 10 months old, and she had a tumor on her chin. They took her to the local doctor who couldn’t do anything with it.

He stopped for a few moments, and then he said that he wouldn’t lie, and he took her to Medical College. He stopped again, and said, “Should I tell this to the other doctor? Will he be angry that I didn’t come here straight away?”

I almost laughed. I reassured him, and he said that they went to the OPD, and they referred him to the Pediatric Surgery department. They referred him to the pathology department for an FNAC. He came back with the report, but then they referred him to our college, and he came to our OPD, and they referred him to Pediatric Surgery again.

Here he stopped, and handed me the prescriptions. There was one from the OPD at Medical College and the new one from ours. I saw the one from Medical College, and the reason they had referred her to our college was that their Operation Theater was under repair.

I was reading this when he said that he wanted some help.
Well, this happens fairly regularly at our college; so much so, in fact that I have evolved a strategy to deal with it: I took my wallet out and showed him the couple of tenners I had, and told him that I could only afford to give him ten rupees.

He started, and said that he didn’t want my money. He wanted me to take him to the pediatrics department, and introduce him to someone. He told me the names of the three people from his village in Nadia who had graduated from NRS, Samrat Banik, Bimal Das, and someone else, I can’t remember.

He said, urgently, that he didn’t want to be turned away again.

And then he showed me the FNAC report. It said that she had an embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a very malignant tumor.

I looked back at him, and I saw he had tears in his eyes. He pointed to a woman coming toward us, and he said that was his mother, with his daughter. I saw the child. She was crying, and she had a piece of cloth around her chin, but you could see the outline of a large lump, with three twisted segments.

I would have taken him, but I don’t know anyone in Pediatric Surgery. It is a post-graduate discipline, and we don’t have any classes with them. I told him that, I told him that going with me, and going by himself would come to the same thing.

He asked, “But will they ask me to go somewhere else?”
I said, “No, you’ve come to the right place. Just tell the doctor exactly what you’ve told me, and you’ll be fine.”
“They won’t be angry that we went to Medical College first?”
I smiled, and put my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Of course not. All medical colleges are equivalent. It is all the same.”

And then he asked the question that I was praying he would not ask. “But will she get better?”
I replied, carefully, “They will cut it off. The tumor will be gone.”
He looked up at me. We both knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

I told him I had class, and left him waiting for the doctor.

There wasn’t anything else I could have done.
There wasn’t.

When the sun set, the sky looked like the ribbed edge of a beach, sand which the waves had lapped at as the tide ebbed.

Would you choose a cause over power?
I don’t know.
Over life?
Probably not. No.
Why?
I would rather be darkness than a point of light.
Darkness prevails, and the night lasts longer than the lightning bolt.
Yes. But, speaking in your own brand of cryptic utterances, the comet burns in the sky for only a few days, but its memory endures for much longer.
He laughed. Yes, he said, but you see the comet against the darkness. It suits the night to let the comet be seen.
So why aren’t you the Sun? It is bright, and it is forever.
You’re forgetting entropy. The sun must die, too. Only the night is forever.

Can you see the sun in the water? In that patch?
Yes. What do you think that shape in the middle of the disc of the sun looks like?
You mean the cloud?
Yes.
I don’t know. A wolf?
Yes. A wolf.

He looked at the water, choked with the water hyacinth.
Is that a flower?
No, he said. It is only paper. Only paper.

“No. You have no self.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is like… um, you know, like they say people wear masks, right? You know, modify their behavior according to the people around them?”

“Yes?”

“Well, you don’t just wear masks, you transform, you know, transfigure yourself into these completely different people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ok. Look at this. You know, around thatha-patti? You have a Tamil accent. A Tamil accent, for God’s sake! And when you talk to some of your friends from college, you have those slightly elongated vowels, you know, that just hint at a Bengali accent. And when you talk to your old school friends, you have a very distinctive Hindi accent. And when you talk to me, and to some of your friends, you speak flawless English. What is that?”

“What is what?”

“This. Your… your chameleon reflex. Why do you have this obsessive need to blend in?”

“I don’t have an obsessive need to blend in. Most of my friends at college laugh at my Bengali, which they shouldn’t, because it’s almost perfect, but it is like the standing joke. So you don’t call that conformity, do you? If I was so good with accents, I could have faked that, right?”

“ No. You don’t care about surface stuff like that. You wont fake a Bengali accent, but you will adapt your English accent to put them at ease. Your stance, your expression, your entire um… ethos, you know, it… just completely changes. Fundamentally. I bet you are brisk at your college, and you stand around like the rest of our relatives at family things, you’re this joke-cracking, funny-thing-saying person around your friends, and I’ll bet you walk around, drawling slightly, and being consciously oblivious of things, like the JU people, when you go there.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No. You know, your blog?”

“What about it?”

“You know your writing is fantastic, right? It is wonderful. But have you ever written anything personal in it?”

“Sure I have.”

“No. No vague allusions. Something definite, something about what you are feeling, or something?”

“Well-”

“No. You haven’t. Because your blog is not an outlet, it’s a mouthpiece.”

“Oh, come on. I’m just not that much of an exhibitionist.”

“Ok. Have you ever written anything personal? Something so visceral that you couldn’t bear to let anybody see it? Ever?”

“Well…”

“See. That’s what I mean. It’s like you’re always watching, and you project to people what they want to see. And you are good enough to do it. You’re like that ‘Pretender’ guy. You are put in a situation, and it’s like a new, complete, fully-fleshed, made to order personality leaps to the fore. Its no illusion, either, you manage incredibly detailed personalities, you know, with… with depth, you know? And I have no idea how you do it.”

“Oh bullshit. People are different around different people. I’m sure you don’t act the same way around your teacher and your best friend.”

“Yeah, but I am the same person. My thoughts, my opinions, for God’s sake, my accent doesn’t change!”

“So you think I let myself be swayed by any argument? I beg to differ.”

“No. You argue really well. That’s what I am saying. You can argue any side of a debate. It’s just what I’m saying. Whatever the argument is, you can conjure up a personality that believes implicitly in it. You see?”

“Oh, blah. I refuse to listen to this scurrilous nonsense. Go study or something.”

***

“So that’s what she said to me.”

Silence.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“As in, I’m still waiting on the oh-no-of-course-nots, and the words, that like soothing balm ease a fractious spirit.”

Laugh.

“Well??!”

“You know, she’s not completely off the mark.”

“Oh, come on!”

“No, just think about it. You do do it, you know. Switch personas.”

“Yes, but so does everyone else.”

“Not to the extent you do. She is right, you can argue any side of an issue. Convincingly, you know. I can’t, I believe something, I can probably come up with some views from the opposing camp, but with you, it’s...”

“Yes, that just means if I put my mind to it, I debate well.”

“I don’t know. Ok, tell me this. Of the different personas, you say you put on like everyone else, which is the real you?”

Pause. "What do you mean, the real me?"

“There. See?”

“No, I don’t ‘see’!”

“Sometimes I think the real you is the poet, and sometimes, I think it’s the goof. But I can’t tell, either. Because you can’t tell. Its like you are under the spotlight, always, in your own grand opera.”

“Ok. That’s it. This conversation is over. I’d rather go talk to the dog.”

He saw a lot of graffiti on the streets when he was out the other day.
Much of it was political, some of it was not.
R----- loves P----, one said. He was standing next to it for a long time, and he wondered if it was R----- or P----- who had scribbled it on the wall with chalk.
A bus roared across, and it spat out a gout of black smoke, which flirted gracefully with the air into which it dissolved.

***
I saw a woman crying in the street, yesterday. Not out loud; quietly, you couldn’t tell if you weren’t looking very carefully. She wiped away her tears as soon as they appeared at the angles of her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, which teased her eye-shadow (or was it mascara?) out into a dark stain.
She was walking quickly, with short, hurried steps. There was a worried looking man behind her. When she was waiting to cross the road, he came and stood behind her, and when she started walking again, he almost didn’t follow. He hesitated, I saw it in his face, the desire to walk away. I know that expression. And then he walked off after her.

***
He was walking with her past New Market, when he nodded at the Globe theater, and he said, we shall go in there one day, and I shall kiss you in the friendly darkness, and ten years later, when it is some large, anonymous retail outlet chain, or a sparkling clean McFood, or McCoffee outlet, we will be able to look at it and say that we knew this place when it was big, and crumbling, and dusty, and had a soul.

***
The streets leave their own graffiti on us.
Dark smudges of grime, heavy smoke that lingers in our nostrils.
The loss of our ability to make eye contact.
And the way girls walk in a crowded place, guarding their breasts with their arms.

***

As he wakes up, the first thing that he thinks is that it is too warm. It's much too warm for winter. He feels feverish, [Flash: malaria, Pel-Ebstein in small print at the bottom of the column to the right in his textbook, someone-saying-low-grade-fever-in-the-evening-is- tuberculosis] almost like it is too warm inside his body. He needs to think about it for some time before he sees that it is actually the blanket that is too warm. Or maybe it's the heavy lunch [Flash: Specific Dynamic Action of food, protein has the highest value] that he had before he fell asleep, or maybe he constitutionally produces too much heat.

Maybe they could write that for his epitaph, [Flash: visual of tombstone, bluish-grey, and the opening credits of "Six Feet Under"] they could write that he was warm, and he was nice to sit next to in winter.

It is dark already, and he can't see the window slats any more, it must be five, no, six, maybe? [Flash: Bart Simpson on a skateboard.]

He smiles, and thinks, man, you are completely colonized; American culture is so very [Flash: Mcdonald's Happy Meal, the cover of his copy of "The Great Gatsby"] intrusive.
There's absolutely no connection, but he is suddenly glad that he's half and half so he has an excuse for not being an angavastram-wearing freak who is conditioned to think that rice and curds are some kind of panacea [Flash: someone's voice floating, smiling, over the phone, saying, "'Panacea!' You're such a nerd!"] on the one hand, or some freak vociferously defending the relevance of Rabindrasangeet today [Flash: Someone in a Kacchha-deowa-dhuti saying, "Bengali Culture is the greatest in the world; Exhibit-A: Rabindrasangeet."] on the other.

He will brush his teeth when he gets out of bed. Then he will go play
with the dog.
He turns over, and falls asleep.

My grandfather has three children, and six grandchildren.

For quite some time, I was my grandfather's pet grandchild. Don't get me wrong, he loves all his grandchildren equally, but I was his first grandchild, and… Ok, I can't quite explain or qualify this. But I was.

And then, my cousin, Su, was born. This was when I was about 12, and firmly accustomed to being the cock of the walk. And I realized that my grandfather was talking about him all the time. And, of course, not quite realizing at the time that superannuation is in the nature of
things, I didn't like it at all. I liked Su, but I didn't like the fact that he existed, if that makes any sense.

I dealt with it, but it took me a long while.

Now Su has a brother, Vi. And when I went over to my grandparents' yesterday, everybody was clustered around Vi in the drawing room, and Su, I saw was sitting alone in the bedroom. No one noticed he wasn't around.

I could have told him it was going to happen eventually.

The worst thing about it is that I see his parents completely ignoring him. And it doesn't help that Vi is one of the cutest children I have ever seen. Everyone is in raptures over him.
I am no expert on family dynamics, but I realize that I am very lucky that after my sister was born, I still got a lot of time, from my Mom, my Dad, my grandparents, everyone. I was never made to feel completely overlooked.

And even though a few years ago, I quite desperately wanted the focus to shift away from Su, I would never have wished this on him.

Prologue: The City of Gold

The city was cold and dark. It was a thousand miles below the surface, where there was desert, and rock, and pitiless sun; and nothing else. Or so tradition said.

Far below the city in a chamber gouged out of the living rock sat a woman. She was clad in a shroud, and on her finger was the ring of the dead, the ring that was put on a person’s finger after death, just before the burial.

Though she was insulated from the city by an unspeakable weight of rock, she could see all that happened in every part of it. She was the spirit of the city.

The chamber she was in had no obvious source of light, and yet was diffusely illumined. She was on a slab of rock, the only thing the bare chamber contained. Above that slab was the opening of a long shaft, her one corporeal link with her city and its people. Along one side of the chamber was a sluggishly flowing stream- the blood of the city, it was called. The water was bitter, and dark- and always blood-warm. It was said that the stream would flow for as long as the spirit of the city remained within her chamber. And this water was the lifeblood of the city, and in its dark stream was what made the city prosperous, and her people rich: innumerable granules of gold that the stream brought from somewhere along its course in the rock.

The woman looked young, and her hair was long, and as black as a raven. As black, indeed, as the rock that surrounded her. But her hands were calloused and hard from constant contact with the rock.

There had been a spirit, for as long as the city had existed, imprisoned in that little bubble in the rock- and the city had existed for thousands of years. No one knew who had built the first tunnels, or indeed the last, since none of the tools the people of the city had now could make even a dent in that black rock. No one even knew if the ancestors of the people of the city had themselves hewed it out of the rock, or had found it empty and settled in it.

The city existed as a single tunnel, in a series of five rectangular spirals, one below the other, each turn of the great spiral tunnel connected to the ones above and the one below by shafts, which had rudimentary steps carved into them at intervals. And set along the walls of the tunnel were doors, which led to the chambers in which the people lived.

The end of the tunnel, at the termination of the last and lowest spiral was the Hall of the Dominus, the lord of the city, the master of much of the wealth the city contained. No one was allowed in that last chamber, without express permission, on pain of death. Because that is where the shaft connecting the spirit to the city opened, at the foot of the throne on which the Dominus sat. The walls of the hall were veined with gold, and there were torches all around, and guards who, it was said, never slept.

And so she waited, in her chamber alone, and tired. She watched the people of the city: their crowded marketplaces, the areas where they harvested the gold, the stifling, dangerous tunnels that connected them to other cities, much higher up, closer to the dangerous surface.
And sometimes she sang:
“In the city of gold, will be born the one,
Who will lead the child of man into the sun.”

It was an old couplet, part of the tradition of the city. Men said that it was an old wives tale. But the spirit knew what it meant, and she waited for the Golden One as time grew gnarled in the city of gold.