FOR SEVERAL YEARS now, Opu has shared a warm friendship with old Norottowm Daash Babaji. Babaji was a fair-skinned, handsome old man, always cheerful. He lived in a simple little hay-roofed hut in the Ganguly neighbourhood. He disliked loud gatherings and enjoyed his solitude, so he wasn’t often seen at the Gangulys’ temple courtyard in the evenings. He was a gracious host, however, and over the years, Horihor often visited him at his home. He had been taking his son along ever since Opu was a little boy, and that is how the friendship between the boy and the old man had begun. These days, Opu was old enough to visit Norottowm Daash on his own. Upon reaching the hut, he would call out: ‘Grandpa, are you home?’ The old man would come out eagerly and lay down a woven palmyra-leaf mat for Opu in his veranda. ‘Welcome, my grandson,’ he would always say. ‘Come in, come in. Have a seat.’

Opu was painfully shy almost everywhere except in his own home; it was almost impossible to get a word out of him in company. But with this placid, simple-souled man, he forgot all reticence. Their relationship was sunny, unconstrained and full of delight—much like a child’s relationship with his friends and playmates. Norottowm Daash had no family; he lived alone in his hut. A fellow Vaishnav girl from his own caste came in during the day to do his domestic work for him. So Opu could sit with him and chat uninterrupted till late evening, telling him about his own life and listening to Norottowm Daash’s stories. He knew, of course, that Norottowm Daash was older than his father—older, perhaps, than even the village elder Awnnoda Roy. But the difference in ages had never affected the ease he felt in the old man’s presence. Indeed, it was his extreme seniority that had made Opu think of him as a kindred soul—as the sort of person one could open up to. His sense of embarrassment and wariness always fell away in the flow of their talks. He laughed heartily in that hut, and talked freely about those things that he dare not bring up around other grown-ups for fear of being labelled a rotten, overripe child. Besides, he cherished the regard in which Norottowm Daash held him. The old man often told him, ‘My child, you’re my Gour. I’m sure Gour had looked exactly like you at your age—as auspiciously handsome, as pure, and with just such kindly eyes . . .’

Anywhere else, talk like this would have deeply embarrassed Opu. But to Norottowm Daash, he would merely grin and say, ‘Then it’s time you showed me the pictures in that book!’

So the old man would bring out ‘that book’—his cherished copy of Prembhokti Chondrika: The Light of Love and Faith. It was a dearly loved book; he read it often in the solitude of his hut, enchanted and absorbed. It was, however, a bit short on pictures. There are only two in the whole book, right at the end. After showing him the pictures, the old man always told Opu, ‘I’ll leave you this book before I die, my grandson. You won’t disrespect it, I know.’

Sometimes, while Opu was there, one of Babaji’s disciples would come around in the hopes of reciting some of their own devotional verses to their guru. But an annoyed Norottowm Daash would wave them away every time. ‘It’s good that you’ve written poems, but I don’t want to hear them. After such verse-masters as Bidyapoti and Chondidaash, this stuff frankly grates on my ears. Go find someone who cares about modern poetry and recite it to them.’

An undercurrent of freedom flowed through his simple, unadorned life. Despite his youth, Opu could feel the exhilaration of it. Time spent in this hut gave him the same kind of happiness he felt from watching trees and birds, from inhaling the smell of freshly turned earth. On his way back, he would pick a palmful of karnikara flowers from Norottowm Daash’s courtyard. When he reached home, he would make a pile of them on the bed. After the lamp-lighting hour, his father would make him sit down with his books. Study-time seldom exceeded an hour, but to a restless Opu, the hour felt like an interminable journey into midnight. The moment his father let him off, he would run to the bed and dive in, inhaling the aroma of the hut’s karnikara. His tired mind and body would be flooded with every happy memory of the day, easing his resentment at being chained to the books and missing out vital hours of playtime. He would turn himself on his belly so he could smother his face into the flowers.

One day, in the middle of all this, Durga suddenly said, ‘Opu, d’you want to have a picnic?’

With the onset of winter, women and children from the village had been going into the woods, right past their house, for the multi-day feast of Koluichondi. Their mother went too, but didn’t take them with her. The feast required everyone to bring and cook their own food in the woods, and his mother never had enough in the larder for a public meal for the whole family. Other families unwrapped expensive rice, daal, ghee and milk. His mother took out thick-grained rice, pasted Bengal gram and maybe a brinjal or two. When the third-eldest mistress from Bhubon Mukhujje’s household served her children rice, bananas, fresh milk and sugarcane jaggery for dessert, Shorbojoya averted her eyes. Her heart broke to see the plenty on other people’s plates. Her Opu loved that dish—soft, boiled rice mashed with bananas, jaggery and milk. And here she was, unable to give him even the same quality of rice, never mind any of the other things! By the time she finished her joyless feast, sunset reds had descended on the quiet woods. Throughout the walk home, all she could think of