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algebra books from his college years (nearly twenty-five years old, saved from a clearout sale to the bikriwalla), and scraps of leftovers sent down irregularly from upstairs, and Khastagir, the free government school down the road, on Mahim Halder Street, where the teachers have trouble solving elementary quadratic equations and the pupils have to sit cross-legged on the floor, being cooked in the heat in the summer because there are no fans. Such is the way his world is configured and he cannot yet put a shape to the lineaments of his desire to escape it, let alone articulate the desire. Not yet.
    Someone has done some bargaining behind the scenes so that Sona is expected to give maths tuition to Sougata, his thick neighbour, in exchange not only for dinners, but also for tuition in English, his weakest subject; the flimsiest subject in his school, in fact, for the English teacher in Khastagir hardly knows how to transpose a sentence from the simple present tense to, say, the past continuous, such is the state of government schools. But Sona has been asked to soak up the lessons passively, not actively participate; just an audience of one witnessing the English classes between Sougata and his tutor.
    The English tutor, Dibyendu Majumdar, a second-year undergraduate in the English Department of Presidency College, does not think that the deal is as good for him as it is for his employer. A stereotype of the Bengali aantel – the word, with ironic appositeness, is a bastardised form of the French intellectuel – Dibyendu has all the appurtenances to go with the role, straggly beard, glasses, khadi kurta, jute shoulder-bag, and resents being made to be on the giving end of the two-for-one offer. He takes out his resentment, in so far as he is intrepid enough to do so, in pathetic dribs and drabs, on Sona, the added extra. Dabbling in fiery left-wing politics in college has clearly made him more sympathetic to the lot of the have-nots further afield than the one right under his nose. Instead of resenting Mala Saha, which would have been the logical thing to do, since it is she who foisted Sona on him without increasing his pay, he diverts it to focus on the wrong person; money breeds a lot of attitudes in men and a particular stripe of obsequiousness is high on the list for people of his kind.
    So Dibyendu takes pains to explain a point over and over again to Sougata, but a rare question or request for clarification from Sona – rare because he has been told obliquely but repeatedly, so that there can be no ambiguity in his own mind about it, that he is only a watcher – will be met with silence, or with an expression of irritated reluctance, sometimes even a mocking ‘I see your head is full of cow-dung.’ Dibyendu puts petty obstructions in the way of Sona, such as not allowing him to share Sougata’s textbooks, or setting Sougata homework while making it obvious that Sona is not going to be given any.
    Sona, electrically alive from the earliest time that he can remember to being excluded to the margins, from where he watched everyone else get their share while he only looked on in silence, has sniffed this politics of mean-mindedness in the air from the moment he walked in on his first class.
    Already hobbled by the sense of obligation this exchange tuition entails, he is further humiliated by Dibyendu-da’s gratuitous cruelties and, as always, recoils deep inside himself to nurse the word so frequently used of him, ‘beggar’, as if it were a talisman, in a prolonged, introspective agony, his soul’s equivalent of pushing his tongue ceaselessly against a wobbling tooth that hurt. And then, suddenly, over the course of a few weeks, he crosses the line as he knew he would, an invisible fence beyond which it does not hurt him any longer, or even touch him: he is deaf and blind to it. All that remains within that insulated self are his mother’s words, the words that have been embossed on his impressionable soul –