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‘If you study hard, very, very hard, and do nothing but study, and do well in school, be the “first boy” in class every year, there will be an escape from this, escape for all of us.’
    The words save him yet again from an intractable situation. He knows he has been invited to Sougata’s to give, not to receive. He bites down hard on the fact, steels himself and takes all the barriers in the way to his one chance of acquiring English as challenges, much as getting his head around trigonometry or logarithm had been. Once framed that way, he knows he will keep at it, with the doggedness of a switched-on machine, until he gets the better of it; in this, algebra is no different from the cheap exclusionary politics that the world plays against him. After Dibyendu-da leaves each evening, when it is Sona’s turn to teach maths to Sougata, he deliberately sets problems well above Sougata’s ability to solve. While the other boy is thus occupied, racking his brains and chewing the end of his pencil, Sona borrows his English books and concentrates on the lesson recently finished with Dibyendu-da with such ferocious will that he has his jaws locked tight and his temple throbbing by the end of it. He knows he is racing against the great winner, time.
    In four weeks, Sona has wrestled to the ground all forms of tenses, including the supremely eloquent and difficult future perfect continuous, has begun to get the hang of clauses, and has started grappling with the capricious and illogical absurdities of English prepositions.
    As eldest daughter-in-law of the Ghosh family, married to Adinath, Sandhya has a set of elusive duties no less binding for their status as tacit and unformulated. They lie in a nebulous notion of tradition, of the way things are done and have been done for generations, of the overweeningly important idea of what the world thinks, especially if that world consists of her elders. Of the several of these duties, one is being in charge of the prayer room (a miniature temple, really) up on the terrace, and all the rituals of daily worship – cleaning out the room in the morning, giving the deities fresh water, cut fruits, crystallised-sugar sweets and flowers, watering the tulsi plant, then repeating the same chores in the evening, except then it is a more ceremonial affair involving the ringing of a big brass bell, sprinkling of water from the Ganga (kept in a frog-green plastic water-bottle), more flowers, the lighting of incense sticks and copra and frankincense, which fill the whole room with dense, aromatic smoke, lighting small terracotta lamps, carrying the brazier of copra into each room in all four storeys of the house and sanctifying it with the holy smoke . . . The rituals have their own shape and place and rightness, and over her twenty-three years in the Ghosh family, Sandhya has devolved and delegated a lot of tasks to the other daughters-in-law, but this she keeps to herself, although she is beginning to find the business of climbing up and down the stairs to take the brazier into every room of the house laborious and harsh on her legs and tightening knees.
    This evening she has been uncharacteristically late with the evening worship, but her jaa Purnima’s call – ‘Buliiiii, come inside, don’t stand on the verandah at this hour, everyone can see you’ – has elbowed her out of her reverie. The prayer room has a white marble floor, a large bell suspended from the ceiling and a whole fleet of statuettes, framed pictures and figurines of a dozen gods and goddesses and saints arranged along two raised stone daises set against the wall. Her older son, Supratik, at the age of fourteen, had once impudently said, ‘Ma, there are thirty-three crore Hindu gods and goddesses. You seem to have a fair few of them here. How do you know that sending up prayers to all these different deities won’t cancel each other out?’
    At the centre of the wall facing east a niche has been carved out, with