But he had a job that was secure, a furnished flat; he had a good beginning in Calcutta. It is useless to speculate what his life and the lives of his wife and his children might have been like had he kept his job. But he had left it one day on an impulse, ready to listen to no one else, and they vacated the apartment, and moved to a small flat on Swinhoe Street. From there, later, they went to Fern Road, where, probably, Bhaskar was conceived. Below their flat, two doors away, there was a jeweller’s, with a collapsible gate and a fat man in a dhoti and cap leaning behind a counter. Finally, they came to Vidyasagar Road. After Bhaskar’s birth (his eyes were so large and dark that they seemed to be outlined with kohl), his mother suffered from a brief but acute spell of depression, such as is common to women after the experience of childbirth. She even wanted to go home; it seemed, strangely, that she could take no more of the marriage. A few days later the depression disappeared and she never spoke of it again.
