OPU HAD BEEN nursing a secret for the past few days. He hadn’t taken anyone into his confidence, not even his sister, for the secret had been too momentous to share. He had discovered it one afternoon a few days ago while surreptitiously exploring his father’s wooden lockbox of books.

It had been an afternoon just like this one—golden and hot. The shadows of the trees were dense, short, and piled around the trunk; they hadn’t yet begun to elongate and thin out along the east or the west. Taking advantage of his father’s absence, Opu had slipped into the room that held Horihor’s locked book box. Shutting the door behind him, he had pulled out the box and had been flipping through the books eagerly, looking for stories and pages with pictures. One of the books was called Shorbo Dorshon Shongroho: A Collection of All Philosophies. The book was clearly ancient: the thick, once-white marble-paper pages were turning brown, and there were large spots of discolouration on the cover. When he had opened it, silverfish had scurried out in all directions.

Opu had always had a soft spot for mysterious old books. He had lifted this one to his nose and inhaled deeply. He didn’t understand what ‘collection of philosophies’ meant, but the smell of the old book enchanted him. It made him think of his father, who was so often gone from home.

He had stuffed the other books back into the box and hidden this one under his pillow.

It was in this book that he had discovered the secret. It was astonishing and frankly difficult to credit—yet there it was, printed on a proper sheet of book paper, in a real book. While describing the many qualities of quicksilver, the author said that if one filled vulture eggs with quicksilver and left them in the sun for a few days, then the eggs acquired the ability of letting humans fly. All a human had to do to fly was to hold the egg inside his mouth.

At first, Opu couldn’t believe his eyes. So he read that bit again . . . and again. Then he hid the book inside his own broken-lidded book box and wondered at this amazing secret.

‘Do you know where the vultures’ nest is, Didi?’ he asked his sister.

His sister had no idea. So he asked the neighbourhood boys. Shotu, Neelu, Kinu, Potol, Nyara—he asked everyone. Some of them said that the closest tree that housed vultures was the tallest one at the other end of the northern fields. Opu was all for hunting that tree down, but his mother told him off for roaming about all afternoon under the blazing sun. To placate her, he had to stay home after lunch and pretend to take a nap. But the moment he was alone, he took the book out of his box and read those lines over and over again. How could people not know of this simple way to fly? Was there only one copy of this book, and was his father the only person to have it? Could he possibly be the first person to have discovered the flying-egg recipe?

Thrilled but conflicted, he lowered the book on his face and breathed in. The aroma of old books engulfed him. His faith in the book’s accuracy was restored.

He wasn’t worried about the quicksilver. Quicksilver meant mercury, and he knew that the black stuff on the back of the mirror had mercury in it. It was the vultures’ eggs that he had been racking his brains about. Where on earth could he get those?

Some afternoons, his sister’s silliness would interfere with his reveries of flying.

‘Come see this, Opu!’ she would call from the kitchen, then sprint to the clearing between the back of the house and the bamboo grove. There, she would put down a handful of rice that she had saved from lunch.

‘Wait for it,’ she would whisper to her brother, then raise her voice. ‘Come, Bhulo . . . t-u-u-u-u-u!’

Then she would look at her brother, face alight with anticipation and joy. Anyone might think that she was waiting for the land of mysteries to suddenly pop up in front of them.

After a few moments of complete silence, a disturbance would begin deep within the grove. It would advance rapidly towards them, rustling leaves and breaking twigs on its way. Then suddenly, it would materialize in the form of a thin dog, its tail wagging frantically.

‘There he is!’ Durga would exclaim. ‘It’s like magic, the way he appears! Isn’t it?’ Then she would laugh in delight.

Feeding the stray had become a source of daily amusement to Durga. Despite her mother’s scoldings, she always saved a little rice for him, sacrificing some from her own meal if she had to. It never failed to amaze her how she seldom saw the dog at other times, but how quickly he appeared when she called, apparently out of nowhere. Every afternoon she put the rice down, called the dog, and quickly shut her eyes. Her heart would oscillate wildly between hope and the anxiety of disappointment. ‘Maybe he won’t come today,’ she would think to herself. ‘Surely he can’t be here every day—who knows where he really lives?’

But Bhulo never disappointed her. Within moments of her calling him, he would appear out of the woods, panting hard and wagging his tail. And every time this happened, a thrill of delight would shoot through Durga.

‘What if I call out softly?’ she would wonder sometimes. ‘He lives deep inside the grove—would he still be able to hear me?’

One day she did lower her voice significantly when calling out. But within moments, Bhulo came scampering out of the woods and began devouring the rice.

Opu, however, wasn’t impressed with this stray nonsense. He was too focused on flying to be distracted by this silly feeding thing that his sister had set up.