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Parul, Parul this, Parul that, there was no end of talk about her endless virtues’ – he notices Prafullanath getting fidgety, being overly fussy about dunking his next biscuit in his tea, clearing his throat to prepare himself to say something to him, but paralysed in the attempt – ‘and then one day, right in the middle of the street, at two in the afternoon, in full view of the world, there she was, screaming her throat cracked, tearing out her hair in clumps and shoving them into her mouth, handful by handful, swallowing it all. They had to send her back to the country.’
    He pauses to inhale the odour of small triumph that has suddenly suffused the room. The old man will not try to send out hints asking him to stop again this evening; maybe tomorrow, but that will be a new battle. Today, he has broken the old man’s back, he has won. Again.
    He resumes his recounting of the scandal with the insane maidservant next door. ‘Much whispering, much talk about how a young woman could go mad suddenly like that. So many people said so many things, I kept my mouth shut, as always, the wise never talk, only listen, all this gossip about something that may have happened to her in the Datta house, after all with that young man there, I didn’t say anything, of course . . .’
    Prafullanath fixes his eyes on the tattered, yellowed calendar opposite and attempts to shut out the low babble in the only way he knows: by concentrating on the fact that the year it is from, 1957, was the year his life began to turn to rubble.
    ‘C-o-n-j-u-g-a-t-i-o-n,’ Dibyendu-da writes on Sougata’s exercise book. Sona copies it diligently, awaiting an explanation. ‘From the Latin conjugare , meaning “to join together”,’ Dibyendu-da adds and Sona writes that down too, as if he were taking dictation. He hopes that this will ease his path towards mastering it; at the moment, it is an impenetrable forest from a particularly malevolent fairytale. Standing at the edge of that darkness, where ‘be’ becomes ‘am’, ‘is’ or ‘are’, depending on who one is talking about, and thorny thickets of ‘has been’, ‘have been’ and ‘had been’ – where does this ‘been’ come from? what does it mean? – Sona is stabbed momentarily with despair that he is never going to reach the illuminated freedom on the other side: English is going to defeat him. But a pluckiness, born from that very despair, reasserts itself: if there are rules, as there are in mathematics, then he will master those rules, and their exceptions, and the truth will reveal itself. He just has to concentrate and a world different from numbers will unfurl slowly and invite him in.
    The private English tuition had been the idea of Mala Saha, Sougata’s mother. News of Sona’s preternatural mathematical abilities – at the age of eleven he had already mastered differential calculus and was champing at the bit to get to integral calculus – had spread quickly in the closed world of Basanta Bose Road. It was she who had suggested to Sona’s Boro-jyethima that the boy should look in a couple of evenings a week to help Sougata with his mathematics homework; Sougata was not the brightest of students in his famous English-medium school, St Lawrence, especially in arithmetic, and the prospect of starting algebra and geometry next year was terrifying. The matter could have been idly mentioned, within the course of aimless chit-chat, and could have died an equally idle death, so how exactly it managed to translate into action remains a mystery to Sona, to a large measure because he has not grown up with good or favourable things happening to him, from new clothes and proper meals to fancy, fee-paying, English-medium schools and private tuition. They happen in the lives of the lucky ones, like all his cousins, but he and his sister, Kalyani, have not been born into it. The world is as it is, and Sona makes do with Suranjan’s hand-me-downs, and Chhoto-jyethu’s