Later, while travelling, I noticed (from the middle of a country field) the towers of Manhattan in the distance, emerging from a yellow industrial cloud.

And then my father arrives through the same door. He is looking for a plastic duck, a bath toy, I don’t understand why he needs it, let alone for whom, it can’t be for my children, they’re too old.‘So you don’t know for whom?’ ‘No, I assure you.’ ‘Well, you should have an idea!’ ‘No, I don’t, you have to explain it to me.’ ‘Really, you don’t know?!’  My obtuseness exasperates him. Fortunately, I wake up before he gets really angry.

This extract and the illustrations have been taken from Diane Muer’s ‘In Dreams‘

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, with illustrations by Sunandini Banerjee

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Baisakh and Jaishtha were over and it was now the month of Asharh. At the very beginning of Asharh was the festival of Punyaha, formally marking a new year of revenue collection from the tenants. Traditionally, a feast is organized by the zamindar for his subjects on this occasion. For my part, I wished to invite many people to the katcheri for a meal; I never got to see many of them at the katcheri otherwise. As none of the villages were located nearby, I sent Ganauri Teowari to all the distant hamlets to invite people to the feast. The day before the festival the sky became overcast and it was raining little drops; the next day, the heavens broke loose and the rain poured in torrents. Meanwhile, long before noon, and apparently indifferent to the rain, crowds of people had begun arriving at the katcheri in response to the invitation. Soon, it became difficult finding them a place to sit. Many of the invitees were women who had come with their children: I arranged for them to be seated in the katcheri office where they found themselves such space as they could.

It was not much trouble feasting people in these parts. I had not known that there could be a region so poverty-stricken as where I now lived. Compared to the average person here, even the poor in Bengal were better off. My guests had come braving the torrential rains to have a meal consisting of cheena grains, plain yoghurt, coarse jaggery and a sweet laddu each. These items were considered good enough to make up a regular feast.

An unknown boy of about eleven had been working hard since early morning. His name was Bishua, he said. He was a poor boy and must have come from a remote hamlet. Around ten in the morning he asked for some food. The Lobtulia patowari who was in charge of the stores brought him a measure of cheena grains and a bit of salt. I was standing nearby. Dark as ebony, with a beautiful face—the boy was like a living statue of the boy Krishna that had been chiselled out of stone. A delighted smile lit up his face as he anxiously unwound a part of his coarse cotton dhoti and put out the end to receive the trifling meal. I can vouch that even the poorest of Bengali boys would not deign to eat cheena grains, let alone be delighted with them. For I had once tried chewing on cheena grains, and the taste that has stayed with me will prevent me from ever referring to it as a pleasant item of food.

Somehow, despite the rain, we managed to attend to the feast for the brahmans. Late in the afternoon, I noticed three women who sat in the courtyard with their leaf plates before them and their two little ones around them—all of them streaming wet in the rain. There were heaps of cheena- grains on the plates but no one had bothered to serve them with either jaggery or yoghurt, so there they sat, looking at the katcheri with patient and expectant eyes.

I called the patowari and took him to task: ‘Who is serving these people? Why have they been kept waiting? In any case, who has seated them outdoors in the open courtyard?’

‘Huzoor,’ replied the patowari, ‘they are doshads by caste. If we seat them indoors, everything will have to be thrown away—no brahman, gangotri or chhatri will touch the food. Besides, where else can I seat them?’

When I myself went out in the rain to supervise the service for the poor doshad women, the others immediately hurried forward to serve them. Each one of those women ate such vast quantities of cheena grains, jaggery and the sour and watery yogurt, that it seemed miraculous. When I saw how eagerly they ate this humble fare, I made up my mind to invite them to a proper civilized meal. A week later, I had the patowari invite the women and their children from the doshad village. That day they were treated to a typical Bengali feast of meat and fish dishes, fluffy luchis made of flour, chutney, yoghurt, and several kinds of desserts made of creamy milk and rice, surpassing anything they might have even imagined. I will remember for long their wonderstruck and joyous expression, their shining eyes. Bishua, the vagabond gangota lad was also amongst the invitees.

I was riding back from the survey camp one day when I came across a man squatting beside a clump of kash making a meal of finely ground kalhai-dal or sattu. For lack of a bowl, he was mixing the sattu on one end of the dirty garment he was wearing. It was such a massive pile that it seemed incredible to me that a single person—albeit a Hindustani with a hearty appetite—could eat so much. The man stood up deferentially as soon as he saw me and salaamed.

‘Forgive me, Manager Sahab,’ he said, ‘it’s just a little meal that I’m having, Huzoor.’ I could not see what there was to forgive in a man who sat by himself in the wilderness, quietly having a meal. ‘You don’t have to get up,’ I said, ‘do carry on with your meal. What are you called?’ The man continued to stand as he answered respectfully, ‘Huzoor, this person is known as Dhautal Sahu.’ He looked as though he was over sixty. His was a tall and thin frame, his complexion dark. His feet were bare and all he wore was an extremely dirty dhoti and a merzai. This was the first of my encounters with Dhautal Sahu. ‘Do you know Dhautal Sahu?’ I asked Ramjyot Patowari on my return to the katcheri. ‘Certainly, Huzoor,’ said Ramjyot. ‘Is there anyone in these parts who does not know Dhautal Sahu? He’s a well-known rich moneylender, owner of lakhs of rupees—most people in these parts have borrowed from him. He lives in Naugachhia.’

I inspected the contents and found that almost ten thousand rupees worth of deeds had become defunct because of a failure to appeal in the courts in time. Then he opened another fold of the long flowing urani draped around his chest and took out yet another bundle of equally faded and decrepit looking documents.

‘Huzoor, will you have a look at these?’ requested Dhautal. ‘I thought I should go to the district courts and have the lawyers look through them, but then, I’ve never filed a case. It doesn’t suit me. When I ask them to pay up, the defaulters keep saying they will, but they never do.’ I found they were all defunct deeds. The total value would amount to anything between four to five thousand rupees.

‘A good man always gets cheated, Sahuji,’ I told him, ‘it is not in you to be a mahajan. The only ones who will be successful in moneylending in these parts are professionals like the Rajput Rashbehari Singh—the sort who have eight hired men armed with their sticks to do their bidding. He lets his men loose in the defaulter’s fields and extracts both capital and interest by seizing the crops. No one is going to return a loan to a good-natured person such as you. Do not lend out any more money.’

I could not convince Dhautal. ‘Not everybody cheats, Huzoor,’ he maintained. ‘There is still the sun and the moon, and there is still the good Lord above us all—He who looks after the poor and the lowly. Besides, one cannot let money sit idle: Huzoor, money has to be let out at an interest. That is our business, after all.’ I did not understand this bit of logic. What kind of a business was it to lose one’s capital in the hope of earning interest? That day, before my eyes, Dhautal Sahu casually tore up fifteen to sixteen thousand rupees worth of defunct deeds. He tore them up as if it was rubbish; of course, they had turned into worthless paper. While he was doing this neither did his hands shake nor did his voice tremble.

‘I made my money selling raichi and reri seeds,’ he said. ‘Not a single coin did I inherit from my forefathers: It was I who made the money, and now, the loss is mine. If you want to do business, Huzoor, profit and loss is part of the game.’

Photographs, but also voices, of the kind one used to hear on the radio, issuing from those cathedral-shaped receivers, voices that swelled and fell away again with what was called le fading. With my ear glued to the wireless I became attached to those voices, which from time to time almost faded away completely. Where were they speaking from, who were these beings that sang, and sometimes chanted? Over there, where they lived, was that not the arrière-pays? There were place names listed on the turning dial, and I would try to link these voices to them—they were names I could even find on a map—but sufficiently remote and sufficiently other as to be tinged with the absolute. I remember becoming obsessed with the name Aberdeen, and even now I know that I could not arrive in Aberdeen without a feeling of holy dread.

There was also the science of perspective, in the Tuscan Quattrocento—the dolce prospettiva: dolce, what a fascinating word for it!—and especially its deployment by certain painters, major or minor, who I suspected of using it with other preoccupations in mind than that of merely putting an image together. For example, the monuments that are simplified according to perspective, because they are at a distance from the viewer, are they modified merely because of distance, or are the remaining, simplified aspects of their appearance a sign, still just perceptible to us, of another way of being, and of existing, in the light here all around us on earth, but which over there would be lived more intimately, and be better understood? But I found it was impossible to pursue these reflections further, and confusion invaded my mind, quite naturally I came to think, because here we no longer dispose of or cannot recall those higher modes of thought and feeling.

In a much earlier book, I had tried to describe these phantasms of mine, some of which I had simply dreamt, others I had actually tried to apply. For I am forced now to admit, I was very much given to dreaming in the way I have described, so anyone could say to me, and with reason: ‘Are these reveries of yours not simply an aspect of who you are, and no business of ours?’ And yet no one among us was prepared to consider that there may be something universal in these things, given how our consciousness of the world is structured. The latter, in fact, undergoes language like a kind of prism through which our perception of what is becomes diffracted and is deformed, or even appears double, tinged with what then appears to be supernatural colour. Our engagement with reality is disturbed as much as it is constructed by language, in which case the arrière-pays would be no more than a linguistic illusion, much as we might speak of an optical illusion. It would be a trick or a turn in speech, something almost impossible to straighten out, which explains how this reverie might exist at the very heart of our relation with ourselves and is not just personal to me.

I close my eyes—what do I see before me? Nothing indistinct but something very near and clearly visible. To my left and right are some very ancient stone walls, stretching in front of me all the way to the horizon, which is not that far away, under the fine blue sky of a summer’s day. Between these walls and, apparently growing under my feet, there is a stretch of tall, wild grass, with a few nettles, and apparently rising clear of this confusion, three or four scattered rocks. Nothing else, save that emanating from everything I see at this instant is a very strong impression of reality; I am at liberty to assert these things because this vision of mine is not something I have just invented for the occasion but an experience I have actually lived, and one indeed that I have had often. I often see these stones and grasses, and my immediate reaction is always the same—this place exists, or rather it is, and I am in it, it is my here, it is even a here that brings with it no elsewhere. For when I am in it I imagine nothing else, nothing even that might be close by, the other side of these walls to the left and right of me.