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door:
    â€œWell, at least we met again.”
    â€œYes. Couldn’t stay for the wedding, please accept my apologies.”
    â€œYou go back tomorrow?”
    â€œTomorrow.”
    â€œTake this,” said Pakhi finally, handing me a biscuit tin.
    â€œWhat is it? It seems quite heavy.”
    â€œSome sweets for your wife and children. Remember to take them with you.”
    â€œOf course I will. Calcutta’s sweets are famous all over. Unmatched around the world. They’ll be thrilled.”
    â€œWhy don’t all of you come over to Calcutta for a holiday?”
    â€œYes, let’s see . . . this job . . . all right, goodbye . . .”
    As soon as I turned to leave, I heard a comment – probably from a grandmother type. “Oh, you’ve got gray hair!”
    I was about to come up with a light-hearted riposte when Pakhi softly touched my shoulder and said, “Yes, our Gagan Baran, he too has gray hair now.”
    Casual words, a casual incident, but will I ever forget the way she said those words! Never! In those words, in that little touch of her hand, I realized clearly that evening that Pakhi still loved me – it was probably the only time that I realized, fleetingly, what love is.
    Out on the street, the strains of the shehnai made me melancholy. “Nice story. Ve . . . ery nice,” the contractor said, sighing loudly.
    The writer said, “But the moral is clear. You get the one you lose and so on. Love is somewhere else, in the distance, even if maybe it’s only a wish for love, only imagination – not real at all. Many people have propagated this point of view over the ages, I don’t subscribe to it.”
    â€œLook, I don’t know of any points of view,” said the Delhi man. “I don’t think about such things either. Eat, drink, and be merry. I have no other viewpoint.”
    â€œWe’re unanimous about that,” the contractor smiled.
    â€œBut both of you told us sad stories,” the doctor smilingly quipped. “How about a happy one now?”
    â€œOf course, of course.”
    â€œThe story of my marriage. Barring those who die before their time, everyone – fine, maybe not everyone, but most people – eventuallyends up marrying someone or the other; there’s nothing unusual about that. Still, there was something interesting about my marriage, it’s not a bad story.”
    â€œNever mind the modesty. Let’s hear the story.”
    The doctor began . . .

Chapter Four
    .          .          .
    D R. A BANI’S M ARRIAGE
    I had been practicing barely a year when I got married. I hadn’t thought of getting married quite so young. Having gotten myself a chamber in Dharmatala and a telephone connection, I even had a small car, but no clients to speak of. According to my calculations, the estate my late father had left for his only son would last five years or so – if I couldn’t build a practice by then, shame on me.
    I had decided to not even think of marriage until I was earning at least a thousand a year. All those people who got into their wedding finery the moment they got their sixty rupees a month jobs gave me palpitations. It’s all very well to get married, but what about things like children, illnesses, the wife’s whims, your own demands? And even if you managed to provide for all of these, there were the tiffs, theheartache, the conflicts. All that was not for me. Or so I had thought. But things turned out differently.
    The year I graduated from college my mother passed away, which meant I had no real family anymore. Unmarried young doctors normally tend to live slightly undisciplined lives; being the person I had become, with no roots and no need to answer to anyone, it would have been easy to become debauched. But I succeeded in restraining myself – not through some extraordinary strength of character,