I turned and looked out at the distant rice fields, where a flock of white cranes was circling to land. “I used to try and save baby crows all the time when I was a child,” I said. “But Dadamoshai said I was interfering with nature. He thinks we need more songbirds and fewer scavengers.”
The man stood up and dusted his hands, and then smiled broadly. “I just realized we’ve had a long and involved discussion and I don’t even know your name!”
“Layla.”
“Lay-la,” he repeated softly, stretching out my name like a caress. “I’m Manik Deb. Big admirer of the Rai Bahadur. Actually, I just dropped by the house and left him a note on the coffee table. Will you please see he gets it?”
“I will do that.”
“Goodbye, Layla,” Manik said. “And thank you for the lesson on ornithology. It was most enlightening.”
With that, he turned and walked off down the road toward the river. A thin sheet of golden rain followed Manik Deb, but he did not turn around to see it chasing behind him.
On the veranda coffee table there was a crushed cigarette stub and a used matchstick in the turtle-shaped brass ashtray. Tucked under the ashtray was a note folded in half, written on the bottom portion of a letterhead that Manik Deb had borrowed from Dadamoshai’s desk. The note was addressed to my grandfather, penned in an elegant, slanted hand:
7th April 1943
Dear Rai Bahadur,
I took a chance and dropped by. I am trying to contact Boris Ivanov and I understand that he is staying with you. Could you please tell him that I would like to meet with him? He knows where to get in touch with me.
Sincerely,
Manik Deb
I took the folded note and placed it on my grandfather’s desk on top of his daily mail. That way he would see it first thing when he got home.
* * *
Later that day, at lunch, I watched my grandfather carefully as he sat across from me. Had he read the note? Who was Manik Deb?
Dadamoshai took his mealtimes very seriously. He always sat very prim and straight at the dining table, as if he was a distinguished guest at the Queen’s formal banquet. Most days he and I ate alone. We sat across from each other at the long, mahogany dining table designed for twelve. All the formal dining chairs were gone except four. The others lay scattered about in the veranda, marked with tea stains, their rich brocade fading in the sun. My grandfather had a constant stream of visitors whom he received mostly in the veranda, and it was often that we ran out of chairs.
Dadamoshai had just bathed and smelled of bittersweet neem soap. His usual flyaway hair was neatly combed back from his tall forehead, the comb marks visible like a rake pulled through snow. He was dressed in his home clothes: a crisp white kurta and checkered lungi, a pair of rustic clogs on his feet. His Gandhi-style glasses lay folded neatly by his plate. His bushy brows were furrowed as he deboned a piece of hilsa fish on his plate with the concentration of a microsurgeon. Unlike Indians who ate rice with their fingers, Dadamoshai always used a fork and spoon, a habit he had picked up from his England days. The dexterity with which he removed minuscule bones from Bengali curried fish without ever using his fingers was a feat worth watching.
“A man came by to see you this morning, Dadamoshai,” I said nonchalantly, but I was overdoing it, I could tell. I helped myself to the rice and clattered noisily with the serving spoon.
Dadamoshai did not reply. I wondered if he had heard me.
“Ah yes,” he said finally, “Manik Deb. Rhodes Scholar from Oxford and—” he paused to tap a hair-thin fish bone with his fork to the rim of his plate “—Bimal Sen’s future son-in-law.”
“He’s Kona’s...fiancé?” I was incredulous.
“Yes,” said Dadamoshai, banging the saltshaker on the dining table. The salt had clumped with the humidity. He shook his head. “That Bimal Sen should think of educating his daughter instead of palming her off onto a husband. With money, you can buy an educated son-in-law, even a brilliant one like Manik Deb, but the fact remains, your daughter’s head is going to remain empty as a green coconut.”
I was feeling very disconcerted. Bimal Sen was the richest man in town. The family lived four houses down from us, in an ostentatious strawberry-pink mansion rumored to have three kitchens, four verandas with curving balustrades and a walled-in courtyard with half a dozen peacocks strutting in the yard. The Sens were a business family, very traditional and conservative. Kona was rarely seen alone in public. Her mother, Mrs. Sen, was built like a river barge and towed her daughter around like a tiny dinghy. I remembered Kona vaguely as a moonfaced girl with downcast eyes. I knew she had been engaged to be married since she was a child. It was an arranged match between the two families, but I had not expected her to marry the likes of Manik Deb. It was like pairing a stallion with a cow.
“Is he Bengali?” I finally asked. Had I known Manik Deb was Kona’s fiancé, I would have avoided talking to him, let alone engaged in silly banter about koels and crows. My face flushed at the memory.
“Oh yes. He is a Sylheti like us,” Dadamoshai said. “The Debs are a well-known family of Barisal. Landowners. I knew Manik’s father from my Cambridge days. We passed our bar at the Lincoln’s Inn together.”
Barisal was Dadamoshai’s ancestral village in Sylhet, East Bengal, across the big Padma River. The Sylhetis were evicted from their homeland in 1917. Once displaced, they became river people. Like the water hyacinth, their roots never touched the ground, but grew instead toward one another. Wherever they settled, they were a close-knit community. You could tell they were river people just by the way they called out to one another. It could be just across the fence in someone’s backyard, but their voices carried that lonely sound that spanned vast waters. It was the voice of displacement and loss, the voice that sought to connect with a brother from a lost homeland—and the voice that led Dadamoshai to connect with Manik Deb’s father in England.
“A most extraordinary young man, this Manik Deb,” Dadamoshai was saying, helping himself to some rice.
“How so?” I asked. My appetite was gone, but my stomach gnawed with questions.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what makes Manik Deb—like you say—so extraordinary?” I tried to feign noninterest, but my voice squeaked with curiosity. I absentmindedly shaped a hole in the mound of rice on my plate.
“He has an incisive, analytical mind, for one thing. Manik Deb has joined the civil service. His is the kind of brains we need for our new India.”
Chaya, our housekeeper, had just entered the dining room with a bowl of curds. She was a slim woman with soft brown eyes and a disfiguring burn scar that fused the skin on the right side of her face like smooth molten wax. It was an acid burn. When Chaya was sixteen, she had fallen in love with a Muslim man. The Hindu villagers killed her lover, and then flung acid on her face to mark her as a social outcast. Dadamoshai had rescued Chaya from a violent mob and taken her into his custody. What followed was a lengthy and controversial court case. Several people went to jail.
Dadamoshai turned to address her. “Chaya, Boris Sahib will be having dinner with us tonight. Please remember to serve the good rice and prepare everything with less spice.”
With that, Dadamoshai launched on a long discussion of menu items suitable for Boris Ivanov’s meal, and Manik Deb was left floating, a bright pennant in the distant field of my memory.
CHAPTER 2
On the day of the school inauguration, Boris Ivanov donned a magnificent Indian kurta made of the finest Assamese Mooga silk, custom tailored to fit his six-foot-four,