The short-cut to Gariahat Bazaar curved off from the main avenue a few hundred yards away. It was a long, narrow lane whose principal landmark was a rambling, oldfashioned house, with a gravel driveway, a pillared portico and a well-tended garden. The house was clearly visible from the kitchen: Urmila's eyes often fell on it when she was working there. It was Romen Haldar's residence.

Just then the doorbell rang.

'The bell's ringing, Urmi,' her mother called out from her bedroom. 'Can't you hear it?'

Her father was out on the balcony with his paper, going through the Announcements column, a favourite morning pastime. He was reading the entries out aloud to himself, spitting out the names like chewed fish-bones. He put the paper on his knees and looked up. 'Who is it?' he called out. 'Someone go and have a look.'

Almost immediately her sister-in-law's voice came floating out of her bedroom: she was feeding her baby and couldn't get out of bed. Her older brother had already left to catch a morning train. Her younger brother was in the bathroom, snapping his fingers and singing, 'Disco diwana'.

Then her mother called out, in her softest, most cajoling voice: 'Go and have a look, Urmi, no one will if you don't… '

I'm busy here! she wanted to scream. Can't you see; I'm busy here, trying to get things ready before going to work…?

The doorbell rang again and now her six-year-old nephew ran into the kitchen and began to tug at her sari. 'Open the door, Urmi-pishi,' sang the boy. 'Urmi-pishikirrni-pishi, open the door, open the door… '

She slammed the heavy pestle on the pitted surface of the mortar, brilliantly coloured now with turmeric and chili, and pushed past her nephew, who was lying flat on the floor. The boy stretched out his hands as she went by and fastened his fingers on the bottom of her sari. She dragged him along for a couple of paces and then slapped his clenched fist.

He erupted into a wail and went racing to his parents' bedroom, crying: 'She hit me, she hit me, kirmi-pishi hit me…'

As she undid the doorlatch, Urmila heard her sister-in-law's voice break into a scream: 'How dare you hit my son?'

She flung the door open and found a young man standing outside, beside a large covered basket. She had never seen him before; he looked very young to be a vendor. He was dressed in a lungi and a greying T-shirt.

'You slut,' the voice followed Urmila through the open doorway. 'You think I don't know what you're up to, coming home late every night? I'll teach you a lesson; I'll teach you to hit my children… '

Urmila stepped out and slammed the door behind her. Embarrassment lent a note of shrillness to her voice as she snapped: 'What's the matter? What do you want?'

The young man gave her a cheerful grin, exposing a wide gap in his front teeth. Urmila was suddenly ashamed, mortified at the thought that she had allowed her sister-in-law to provoke her in front of a complete stranger. Inadvertently, she drew the back of her hand across her forehead. Her face contorted into a grimace as the ground spices burnt a smarting furrow across her face and brow. She wiped her eyes hurriedly with the end of her sari.

'What do you want?' she said again, more evenly.

The young man was squatting beside the basket now. With another smile he pulled back a layer of paper and plastic to reveal a pile of fish, gleaming silver in the earlymorning light.

He grinned. 'I just came to ask whether you need any fish this morning, didi,' he said. 'That's all.'

Chapter 25

'I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU here before,' Urmila said, kneeling beside the basket of fish. She began to examine the fish, pulling back their gills – out of habit, for today she really didn't care what she bought or for how much.

The young fish-seller gave her a cheerful smile, bobbing his head. 'I'll be coming regularly now,' he said. 'Buy one and see: I have the best fish in the market, fresh out of the water.'

'Every fish-seller says that,' said Urmila. 'It doesn't mean a thing.'

The fish-seller bristled. 'If you don't believe me, go and ask around,' he said. 'I sell to all the best houses. Why, do you know Romen Haldar's house, in the next lane?'

Urmila looked up, raising an eyebrow.

'Let me tell you,' he said proudly. 'They buy all their fish from me. Only from me: you can go and ask if you like.'

Reaching into the basket he moved a couple of fish out of the way. 'Here, let me show you something,' he said. 'Do you see this one here, this big ilish? I'm keeping that for them. I'm on my way there right now. I told them I'd bring them something special this morning.'

'I'll take it,' said Urmila.

The fish-seller shook his head. 'No,' he said, grinning. 'I can't give you that one: that's for them. But I'll give you this other one, it's just as good – here, look.'

Urmila gave him a perfunctory nod. 'All right,' she said, 'that one.' She told him to cut it up and went in to fetch her purse. By the time she came back, the fish-seller had a packet ready for her: he had wrapped the fish in bits of paper and stuffed it into a plastic bag.

Urmila clicked her tongue in annoyance when she saw the packet. 'You shouldn't have wrapped it up,' she said.

The fish-seller mumbled an excuse and began counting his money. Urmila went inside. She had no time to lose now. Hurrying into the kitchen she tipped the contents of the packet onto a plastic plate, in the sink. The chunks of fish fell out with a thump, scattering all over the sink. Urmila grimaced: the paper in which the fish was wrapped had turned into a soggy mess. She touched a piece of fish gingerly and the tip of her finger came away with a bit of paper attached. She had trouble shaking it off; it had dissolved into a wad of sticky glue.

Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she stole a quick glance out of the window. RashBehari Avenue was jammed with buses and minibuses, all belching thick clouds of smoke. She had no more than half an hour to spare if she was to get to the Great Eastern Hotel in time for the press conference. She began to scrub furiously.

After a few minutes she realized that her scrubbing was only making matters worse by working the paper deeper into the chunks of fish. She threw up her hands, thoroughly irritated now, and peeled a scrap of paper off her fingers. It was thin, cheap Xerox paper: the kind that accumulated in vast quantities in the Calcutta copying room.

So this is where it all ends up, she thought, as fishwrapping.

She glanced at the plastic bag again and saw that it was still full of paper. A few bits and pieces were dry; the blood hadn't seeped through to them yet. She tipped the paper out on the counter and held a sheet flat with the back of her hand.

It was a large, legal-size photocopy of a page of very fine English newsprint. The typeface was unfamiliar, old fashioned: she knew at a glance that the page wasn't from any of the current English-language papers printed in Calcutta. She made space for it on a shelf and spread it out.

The print was so fine she had trouble reading it. She turned on a light and looked at it again, turning instinctively to the top margin to look for the paper's name. The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: ' Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898.'

The page was divided into eight columns, each containing dozens of announcements of a routine kind: 'D. Attwater, Esq. transferred to Almora as Deputy Magistrate, Revenues', 'So-and-so to quit his post in the Port Authority, Calcutta, in order to become Assistant Harbourmaster in Singapore' and so on. Urmila skimmed quickly through it. She could not see why anyone would go to the trouble of copying something like that, a record of old bureaucratic appointments. She was about to sweep it into the wastebin when she noticed that one of the announcements had been underlined, in ink.