As we proceeded on our tour, I asked Nishanathbabu, ‘Tell me, how long have Nepalbabu and his daughter been here?’

‘Nearly two years, give or take a month.’

I made a mental note of the fact that it was roughly around the time of Sunayana’s disappearance from Calcutta. I asked again, ‘You don’t recall the exact date?’

Nishanathbabu pondered for a while before answering, ‘They arrived two years ago … probably in the month of July. I remember it was a couple of days after my wife discontinued her studies.’

‘Your wife … studies …?’

‘Oh, my wife had got it into her head lately that she wanted to be educated and acquire English manners. Over a ten-month period, she had visited Calcutta quite regularly and had enrolled herself in a girls’ school there. But eventually, she gave it all up because she wasn’t up to it. A couple of days after she left school, Nepalbabu arrived with Mukul.’

I digested this piece of information and returned to the earlier topic. ‘What duties on the farm is Nepalbabu in charge of?’

Nishanathbabu’s smile was vitriolic. ‘He conducts scientific experiments, plays chess and nit-picks over everything I do.’

‘Over what you do?’

‘That’s right. He doesn’t approve of the way I run the farm. He believes if he were to administer it, the place would run better.’

‘In other words, he does precious little?’

After a moment of silence, Nishanathbabu replied, ‘Mukul is a very hard-working girl.’

Mukul may well have been hard-working; she made up for her father’s utter uselessness through her own untiring efforts. But why had she developed a headache when she heard of our arrival? Besides, what reasons could she have for scrutinizing us from the window?

We had reached the intersection. The road stretched ahead and beyond. Huts and cottages stood here and there along the route. The huts were separated by wide stretches planted with rose bushes and other floral plants. In spite of regular and plentiful irrigation, the plants were wilting.

At the crossing, Nishanathbabu pointed to the huts at the far end and told us, ‘Rashik lives in the hut that’s furthest from here. The one on this side belongs to Brojodas; there he is, sitting on the porch, busy with something.’

He made his way to the hut. ‘Hello, Brojodas, what are you up to?’ he asked.

On the porch in front of the hut, an elderly man with a pestle gripped between his knees was grinding something into powder. A short, rotund man with a salt-and-pepper thatch of hair, he wore beads around his neck. A tilak of sandalwood paste marked his forehead, indicating that he was an ardent devotee of the god Vishnu and belonged to the Vaishnav faith. At the sound of Nishanathbabu’s voice, he stood up respectfully and replied with a smile, ‘One of the cows is ill. I am preparing a laxative for her—neem leaves, the husk of sesame seeds and some herbal seeds.’

‘Oh, good. If