Calcutta .

It was a city I had visited a couple of times on my concert tours, but never to play there. It had been a point of passage on the way back from Australia and New Zealand , little more than a hotel room near the airport. I could recall only one exchange with Leo about the place. I remarked on the poverty (which I had never been close enough to see) and he answered with a noncommittal shrug.

Now the plane was lowering flaps for landing at Dum-Dum Airport , and I still had no idea what I expected to find here. I only knew I had to look, to learn what Leo had been doing in those hidden months before our final meeting.

It was just after dawn when we landed, with a blood-red November sun steaming up over the Bay of Bengal . The monsoon was over, and this was supposed to be the cool season, but as we stepped off the plane the humidity curled around me like a blanket. The air seemed to bleed your strength away. The walk to the terminal and the wait for baggage became a major effort.

I went straight to the new Grand Hotel on Chowringhi Road , hardly noticing the flat, wet land and the drooping coconut palms. At the hotel I went to bed, but I was too nerved up and overtired to sleep. After an hour of tossing and turning I ran the deep bath full of rusty-colored water — a sign in the room warned me not to drink it — and stretched out to think of the day ahead.

I knew exactly one person in Calcutta : Chandra Roy; Chanter Chandra we called him, back in the old days when we had played together.

He had been a fiddle player, a child prodigy and still a fast-developing adult when he had suddenly abandoned his musical career, returned to India , and disappeared. Maybe that’s too strong a term — I still had an address for him at the University of Calcutta ; but he had certainly vanished from western life. I hadn’t seen him for more than two years.

Chandra. As I sat on the bed and dried myself I decided to head over and see him at once. But when I was half-dressed I lay back and closed my eyes for a moment, and when I woke the room was growing dim. It was suddenly seven o’clock at night.

I was very hungry, but I didn’t want to waste the rest of the evening. I took a native cab and we set off to hunt for Chandra’s supposed home address, passed on to me by an oboe player before I left London .

A combination of jet lag, medication, and low blood sugar made the ride through the darkening streets curiously unreal. What I saw was always distant or distorted, the mirror of an unpleasant real world. Since the hydrological project to increase the flow of the Hooghly River , many of Calcutta ’s worst abominations had been removed. Now at least there was adequate drinking water. But the bustis were still there, the ultimate slums that formed the home for over four million people. Life in them was still below subsistence level. The cab skirted one of the bad ones. The smell of decay, excrement, and underfed humanity was like a black canker on a rose-red evening. My driver, oblivious to the dull-eyed skeleton creatures that we passed, chattered on cheerfully in a mixture of Bengali and English, telling me how the city was improving now, how things had grown better all through the nineties, and how the new century had ushered in a golden era.

“I am telling you, we will be seeing the better times. Very good better times,” he said, in the curious Welsh-like Indian lilt. He swerved to avoid a legless man who was dragging himself slowly across the street. “I am seeing that you are a stranger here, and you maybe are finding this surprising. But it is so.”

Chandra, according to my friend the oboe player, lived in Alipore, a southern suburb of the main city. It took more than an hour to find his house, weaving back and forth along the flat streets. The driver leaned out of the window most of the time, singing out Bengali questions to the small groups of people who stood deep in unfathomable conversation on most street corners.

We found the house at last. It was certainly big enough to notice, a great pile of rambling Edwardiana that could have been transported to Henley or Thames Ditton without seeming at all out of place. A seven foot brick wall kept it safe from prying eyes.

After a brief negotiation (my driver’s hourly rate was less than I received for one second of concert playing) he agreed to eat chuppattis at my expense and wait for as long as I needed him — all night, if I wished it, he told me cheerfully. He was so pleased with the arrangement that I knew he believed he was overcharging me.

I was led inside by an old servant in a long, flowing robe. Chandra stood by a small table. He was almost unrecognizable. In little more than two years he had changed from a thin-faced ascetic to a roly-poly, smiling cherub. His eyes glittered with surprise and pleasure when he saw me, and that turned to a look of wonderment when he got a good look at my scarred face.

“I had read about your accident.” He shook his sleek head in concern. “No one told me how serious it must have been.”

In the world of music, news travels fast. Chandra must still be connected, even if he never performed.

He led the way to a sparsely furnished study. Over glasses of hot, sweet tea we sat down to talk. After playing catch-up on Chandra’s activities for the past two years, I offered a version (slightly edited) of my own past six months. People were mistaking me for my brother, I said. My brother had obviously left unfinished business — I thought it was in Calcutta . It was my wish to complete it, but my knowledge of what he had been doing was limited. He had mentioned walking in the Maidan before he died, but nothing of business detail. I even lacked his business address.

Chandra grimaced and nibbled on a marzipan plum. A servant stood discreetly outside the door, waiting for any request for food or drink.

“You have no company name or address?” Chandra waved a plump hand. “Hopeless. You can advertise in the newspapers, perhaps. But unless he was active in the business community here I think you will find it impossible to learn much. There is more chance for anonymity in this city than anywhere else in the world. Tomorrow, if you wish, I will ask at the University. He was your twin, was he not?”

I nodded.

“Then if you have no picture of him, perhaps we could put your photograph in the papers, and ask for information.”

I hesitated. “Maybe in a few days,” I said at last. “Let me settle in here first, and get used to the city. There’s no rush.”

“Would you care to stay here, rather than in a hotel?” asked Chandra. He smiled. “The Calcutta Zoo is in Alipore — a mile or so from here.”

He knew my habits. I shook my head. It had not escaped me that Chandra had made no move to show me most of his house, or to introduce me to members of his family. It was past midnight — the talk had rambled all over the world, following our mutual acquaintances — and he was beginning to yawn. “All the world passes through Calcutta ,” he had told me. “I do not need to travel to keep up with people.” But as eldest son in a thriving family jute business, he did need his sleep. He was up these days with the sun — when he used to be ready to go to bed.

“And the violin?” I couldn’t resist the question as we stood again at the front door, waiting for my driver.

For answer he held up his left hand, the fingers facing towards me. The horn-hard calluses built up by twenty years of daily playing had reverted to become soft pads of tender flesh. Forty thousand hours of practice, down the drain. He would probably never play again. As the cab took me north to the hotel, the difference between East and West ceased to be an abstraction, something that Kipling had invented for a poem. And I wondered again what the time in the Orient had done to Leo, how it had changed him inside the western exterior.