If you asked anyone in the lane how long the Sheikhs had been part of it, you would get, depending on who you asked, three or four different answers, none of them quite agreeing, and all of them, in their own way, correct.
Haripada, who remembered further back than most, would tell you it began with Hashem Sheikh’s own father, Golam Sheikh, who had come up from a village near Faridpur as a young man with nothing but a bullock cart and a talent for judging the quality of rice by smell alone, and had set up his first grain stall at the mouth of the lane in the years before either Bipin Babu or Satyen Babu had been born.
Saroj Bala, if pressed, would tell you that the friendship as she understood it had truly begun with her own mother-in-law, who had trusted no one else in Kolkata to weigh her rice honestly and had said so, loudly and often, until the whole lane simply accepted the Sheikh family’s grain stall as an unquestioned fixture of the neighbourhood’s daily life.
And Hashem Sheikh himself, if you caught him in an expansive mood over a cup of tea, would simply laugh and say that as far as he was concerned, the friendship had begun the day his own father had carried a fevered, six-year-old Bipin Babu on his shoulders half a mile to the nearest doctor, at two in the morning, because the boy’s own father had been away in Dhaka on business and there had been no one else close enough to help.
Whatever the precise beginning, by the time Arun and Uma were old enough to have opinions about such things, the arrangement had settled into something so thoroughly ordinary that none of the children had ever once thought to remark on it.
The grain stall at the mouth of the lane — expanded, over three decades, into a proper shopfront with a blue-and-white awning and Hashem Sheikh’s name painted above the door in careful gold letters — was simply where rice and lentils and, on special occasions, the good imported tea came from.
Hashem Sheikh himself, a broad, unhurried man with a laugh that carried the length of the lane and a memory for exactly which household preferred which grade of rice, was simply Hashem Chacha to every child on the street, Hindu and Muslim alike, as thoroughly woven into the fabric of their daily lives as the mango tree between the two larger houses, or the tank behind them, or the tram bell that marked the hours from the main road.
It was Hashem Sheikh’s eldest son, Jamil — sixteen that year, broad-shouldered like his father and possessed of the same easy, unhurried laugh — who had, over the years, become something close to a fifth member of the lane’s tightly bound circle of children, though the precise nature of the bond had shifted as everyone grew older, the way such things always do.
In their youngest years he had been simply another boy to race to the tank and back, indistinguishable in the general chaos of childhood from Debabrata or Arun.
As they’d grown, he had settled naturally into a friendship with Debabrata specifically — the two of them close enough in age that they had, for two years running, studied together in the evenings for their respective examinations, Jamil for his matriculation, Debabrata for his Presidency entrance, each pushing the other through the particular misery of algebra with the comfortable, competitive affection of boys who had grown up trading marbles before they’d ever traded formulas.
Hashem Sheikh’s younger daughter, Nasreen, was closer in age to Uma — a quiet, watchful girl of eleven who had, over the years, developed an unlikely and deeply loyal friendship with her considerably louder neighbour, the two of them united by a shared, fierce dislike of being told to sit still and a shared, equally fierce love of the kite-flying that overtook the lane’s rooftops every winter.
It was, in fact, a kite that occasioned the particular afternoon that would, years later, come to stand in Kamala’s memory as the clearest single illustration of exactly what the lane had been, in those years, before anything came to break it.
“Yours is losing,” Nasreen announced to Uma, with the flat, satisfied certainty of a girl watching her own kite gain the advantage in the tangled aerial battle overhead, where a dozen strings crossed and recrossed against the pale winter sky, each household’s rooftop contributing its own small contingent to the general chaos.
“It is not losing.
It’s positioning.”
“It’s tangled with Arun’s and neither of you can get free, that’s not positioning, Uma, that’s simply losing together.”
This was, upon inspection, entirely accurate — Arun’s kite and Uma’s had drifted into an unfortunate knot some thirty feet above the rooftop, and both children were now engaged in the delicate, increasingly frantic business of trying to work the strings loose without losing either kite to a rival household’s blade-string, a hazard that had claimed no fewer than three kites already that afternoon from the rooftops further down the lane.
“If you’d just let me pull mine—”
“If you’d just let me—”
“Both of you stop pulling,” came Jamil’s voice, arriving on the rooftop at a run with the particular calm authority of the oldest child present, Debabrata close behind him, the two of them having abandoned their own algebra revision the moment the shouting from the roof had reached the veranda below.
“You’re only tightening the knot.
Uma, let out your line — no, let it out, don’t reel it in — there.
Now, Arun, yours will drift free on its own if you stop fighting it.”
The kites separated, a moment later, with the particular satisfying suddenness of a knot finally giving way, and both children whooped with the specific triumph of disaster narrowly averted, already forgetting, in the way children do, that either of them had ever been remotely at fault for the tangle in the first place. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“You always know how to fix it,” Uma said to Jamil, with the frank, uncomplicated admiration she reserved for people who had proven themselves reliably useful.
“How do you always know?”
“Practice,” Jamil said, settling himself on the low parapet beside Debabrata with the easy comfort of a boy on a rooftop he had climbed a hundred times before.
“My father taught me.
He says every knot in the world comes loose the same way — you stop fighting it, and you find the one thread that’s actually holding, and you pull that one, gently, instead of pulling at all of them at once and making it worse.”
“That sounds like something he’d say about more than kites,” Debabrata observed, with the particular dry humour he’d inherited, whether he liked to admit it or not, rather more from his father than from his mother.
“He says most things sound like they’re about more than what they’re actually about, if you listen for long enough,” Jamil said, grinning.
“I’ve stopped asking whether he means it or whether he simply enjoys sounding wise in front of his own children.”
Below them, in the courtyard, Hashem Sheikh himself had arrived at the blue gate — ostensibly to deliver a fresh sack of the good rice Saroj Bala had ordered for the coming week, though he lingered, as he generally did, rather longer than any delivery strictly required, engaged in an unhurried conversation with Bipin Babu and Satyen Babu that had wandered, as such conversations between the three men generally did, from the price of grain to the state of the harvest to the news from Delhi, and from there into the kind of easy, wide-ranging talk that men who trust each other completely allow themselves once the actual business of an afternoon has been settled.
“Your boy’s grown taller than mine,” Satyen Babu observed, watching Jamil’s figure on the rooftop above.
“He eats twice what Debabrata does and sleeps half as much,” Hashem Sheikh said, with visible pride disguised as complaint.
“I tell his mother it’s a wonder he hasn’t simply floated away like one of those kites.”
“He’ll do well in his examinations, I think,” Bipin Babu said.
“Debabrata says he has a genuine head for figures — better than his own, if my son is to be believed, though he’d never admit that to anyone but me.”
“He wants to study engineering, if the results come good.
Build bridges, he tells me, though I don’t know where he got such an idea — certainly not from a father who has spent thirty years selling rice and has never built anything grander than a stack of sacks.” Hashem Sheikh laughed, the big, easy laugh that carried the length of the lane, and then added, more quietly, with the particular warmth of a man speaking about something that mattered to him rather more than his tone let on, “But I tell him, if that’s what he wants, then that’s what he’ll have.
My father carried sacks so that I could own a shop.
I intend for my son to build something neither of us could have imagined, if he’s clever enough to manage it.
That seems to me the whole point of it — each generation reaching a little further than the last.”
“A fine philosophy,” Bipin Babu said.
“It’s the only one worth having,” Hashem Sheikh said.
“I don’t much care what god a man prays to, or what flag he marches under, if he holds to that one thing — that the whole purpose of a life well lived is to leave the next generation standing a little taller than you stood yourself.
I’ve watched all of you children grow up together in this lane for twenty years now, and I’ll tell you plainly, gentlemen — Hindu house or Muslim house, Congress man or whatever new party you two keep threatening to split yourselves over — I have never once, in twenty years, seen a single reason to believe that any of it matters half as much as what happens on this stretch of ground, among people who have decided to be neighbours properly, rather than simply by accident of geography.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
There was a brief, comfortable silence after this — the kind that follows a true thing said plainly among old friends — and then Satyen Babu, who could rarely resist finding the political angle in any sentiment, however warmly meant, said, “You should say that at a public meeting, Hashem.
Half the demagogues in this city would benefit from hearing it.”
“The demagogues,” Hashem Sheikh said, hauling the rice sack up onto his shoulder with the easy strength of a man who had been doing exactly this for thirty years, “are not interested in what happens on a lane like this one.
They are interested in what happens in a crowd, where nobody has to look their neighbour in the eye while they say the things they say.
That is the whole danger of them, if you ask me — not that they believe what they preach, but that they’ve found a way to make sure nobody preaching it ever has to stand close enough to someone different from themselves to remember that the difference was never the thing that mattered.”
He said it lightly enough, over the practical business of setting down a rice sack, that none of the three men gathered under the mango tree that afternoon thought to dwell on it for more than a moment — a passing observation, wise in the unhurried way of a man who had spent thirty years watching a lane’s worth of ordinary human decency accumulate, brick by brick, into something he trusted implicitly.
None of them could have known, that particular winter afternoon, with the kites still crossing overhead and Jamil’s easy laugh still carrying down from the rooftop, exactly how much weight that observation would come to bear, a decade later, when the demagogues Hashem Sheikh spoke of so lightly finally did find their crowd — nor how completely the fate of his own family would come to depend, in the end, on precisely the kind of close, ordinary, unremarkable neighbourliness he had just described: on people who had, in fact, stood close enough to remember.
Up on the rooftop, the kite battle continued into the last of the winter light, Uma and Nasreen’s rival kites now flying in careful, deliberate concert rather than tangled opposition, the two girls having declared, somewhere in the last hour, a temporary and mutually beneficial alliance against a particularly aggressive kite flown from a rooftop three houses down.
“When I’m grown,” Nasreen said, watching her string with narrow concentration, “I want a shop like Abba’s.
Not selling rice — I don’t much care about rice — but something.
Somewhere people come and I know all of their names and what they need before they’ve finished asking for it.”
“I want to go to college like Deba-da,” Uma said.
“Properly.
Not just visit the library the way he lets me sometimes when he thinks nobody’s watching.”
“Girls can’t always—”
“Girls can do whatever they decide to do,” Uma said, with the flat, unshakeable certainty that had characterized nearly every opinion she’d ever held, on any subject, since she was old enough to hold one at all.
“Nobody’s told me otherwise yet, and I don’t intend to listen if they try.”
Nasreen laughed — a real, delighted laugh — and said, “I believe you, Uma.
I think if anyone tried to tell you otherwise, you’d simply argue at them until they gave up and let you have your way, the same as you do with everything else.”
“That,” Uma said, with considerable satisfaction, “is exactly the plan.”
Below them, in the fading light, the mango tree cast its long shadow across the twelve feet of shared ground between the blue gate and the rust-coloured one, and a little further down, past both gates, the third and unofficial entrance to the same wide, tangled family the lane had built for itself over thirty years — the awning of Hashem Sheikh’s shop, lit now with the first lamp of evening, gold letters catching the last of the light.
Nobody in the lane that winter thought of it as three houses.
They thought of it, if they thought of it at all, simply as home — as unremarkable, and as entirely unshakeable, as the mango tree itself.