Our fates, they say, are written the moment we are born, our destiny sealed by a combination of celestial chronology and terrestrial geography. I was born, in the ancestral home in Shyambazar, on the fifth day of the month of Agrahayan, in the year 1304, by the Bengali calendar, a Saturday, at precisely eleven minutes past seven in the morning. Those details, and the corresponding position of the heavenly bodies at the time, so we Hindus believe, set the course of my life as certainly as iron tracks do a railway engine. From an early age, time, date and place of birth are etched into a Brahmin’s consciousness as if into granite, such is their importance. In the same way, the details of my death had also been written, marked on a tablet which I was not yet privy to. Still, I awoke that morning, burdened with the sense that the day would be a black one.
I had slept fitfully, my nightmares replete with visions of Irani, or Atchabahian, or whoever he was, dressed in military fatigues and charging towards me with bayonet fixed.
I rose before the sun, showered and, having dried myself, donned my sacred thread, the mark of the Brahmin, looping it over my head and one shoulder with a self-conscious solemnity that I had not felt in many a year.
I cannot quite describe my state of mind. Fear, agitation, all those emotions I expected, were curious in their absence. It is true my heart was heavy, yet my mind was curiously clear, as though freed from the shackles which daily bound it. It may sound strange, but the thought that my destiny was written and unchangeable was strangely liberating.
The dining room was empty. Miss Colah did not seem the type to rise early, and Sam, though his hours had improved since he’d achieved victory over the opium, still rarely surfaced before seven. I troubled the maid for nothing more than a glass of orange juice, took it out to the veranda and watched the sun climb over the bay, the same sun which would have risen and warmed Calcutta for more than an hour already. My thoughts strayed to my homeland. Shonār Bangla, we called it, Golden Bengal. It was always easier to appreciate that epithet with the benefit of distance and the rose-tinted yearning that blinded the wandering son to its blemishes.
I sat down and began going through Irani’s papers, trying to work out the meaning of the columns of numbers. I do not know how long I had been at it, but the sun was high by the time the insolent creak of footsteps on floorboards fractured my introspection. I turned in the expectation of once more seeing the maid and instead found Sam standing in the doorway.
‘Bad night?’
He had a way of sensing my mood. He said it was a Bengali characteristic, wearing one’s heart on one’s face.
‘I do not see how we get through this time,’ I said. ‘Even if Gulmohamed and Irani are working together, even if they killed Mukherjee, I just cannot fathom how we could prove it. And if we cannot do that, well, I’m finished.’
‘We’ve been in tight spots before,’ he said. ‘We come through them. It’s what we do. The show goes on.’
‘All shows come to an end eventually,’ I said. ‘Maybe this is simply my time?’
He walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘We aren’t leaving the stage, not now, and certainly not before belting out one final hurrah.’