HORIHOR HADN’T RECEIVED the letter from home.

When he left Contentment this time, Horihor had gone first to Gowari Krishnonogor. Though he knew no one in that area, he had deluded himself with the hope that work would be easier to find in a large urban marketplace. After spending a few days in Gowari, he found out that the local households of lawyers and zamindars paid a daily honorarium for reciting the Devimahatyam on their premises. He spent fifteen days in the hopes of getting such a job, till he finally ran out whatever little savings he had managed to bring with him from home.

Horihor was in a severely dire situation. He was stranded alone in an unfamiliar area, without a single friendly face for help or reassurance. Once his scant money ran out, he was obliged to move out of the thatched-hut hotel he had been staying in. After much asking around, he discovered that the local Hori temple provided meals and shelter to newly arrived destitute brahmins in the city. Once he went and described his situation, they did give him a bed in one corner of a small room, but Horihor was acutely uncomfortable in the place. First, he was kept up at nights by a group of ganja-smoking men, who laughed and talked loudly to each other till the small hours of the morning. Second, he occasionally woke up at night to see women coming in and going out of the temple area . . . and none of them looked like pious women from decent households, who had come to offer their prayers to the deity.

He spent a few nights there in considerable discomfort, using the daylight hours to visit every well-to-do lawyer and zamindar he could find. Sometimes, when he returned late at night to the temple, someone else would be stretched out in his corner, on his bed, comfortably snoring. Horihor would have to spend those nights lying in the veranda. When this became more frequent, Horihor had a slightly heated exchange with the people who did this—the aforementioned smokers. The lord alone knows what the group then went and said to the secretary of the temple, but the secretary babu then called Horihor in and informed him that it was against the temple’s rules to let anyone stay for more than three nights, so Horihor should seek alternate accommodation from that night onwards.

So, late that evening, Horihor found himself and his bundles back on the streets, bereft of even the lowly shelter he had found at the Horishobha. He made his way down to the Khore river and washed himself in its waters. He had earned a full rupee at a timbre storehouse that day by singing songs in praise of the goddess Shyama. He now took that rupee to the market, exchanged it for smaller denominations, and with some of it bought some yogurt and puffed rice for his dinner. Eating it proved almost impossible. He had only