MATRIMONIAL ENQUIRIES

‘‘You will go to Calcutta tomorrow and call on the IG ,’ the SP told me one afternoon in his chamber. With a great effort I concealed a what- the- fuck frown. I had great regards for the SP, and even today  a visit to him is a pilgrimage, and I come back lighter. But that day, I thought he was finally punishing me for having slept on his shoulder, a year ago, while travelling from Asansol to Durgapur.

I had never quite liked this call -on funda from my NPA ( National Police Academy) days, actually I did not like anything which came in way of enjoying my drink in the evening with a bunch of like- minded friends. The British had opened up the Higher or Covenanted Civil Services to the Natives over a hundred years ago, and it was with savage energy that social graces were taught to make the browns pucca sahebs, the  tradition sticking  on long after the stroke of midnight in 1947. The liturgical quad consisted of calling on, the fine art of dining with forks and spoons,   raising a toast and knotting a tie.

I recalled vividly the PMC ( President Mess Committee)  advise  the probationers to call on the members of faculty at NPA after “ascertaining their identity and convenience over telephone”.

‘ Hello, am I speaking to Mr. Mahapatra….. sir , I am MVSN Surya Prasad, would seven in the evening tomorrow be a good time to call on you and ma’am?’, he illustrated one day before going on to suggest that all carry a visiting card to be left with the officer’s orderly or PA in case he was not present.

Calling on was a serious business, especially after a rumour had been tactically floated that marks for Diro’s ass ( Director’s assessment)  would also be based on call-ons. It was taken up by the KTPs ( Keen Type Probationers) [5]  as seriously as the bandh gala dining rituals with their selection of correct cutlery and sequence , muffled silence, ruminant mastication and unfulfilled appetite,  or even the painfully bedevilling sacrament of raising a toast.

‘ Better wear your uniform  properly,’ the  SP added, as soon as the orderly had departed after leaving us each with a cup of tea and the ubiquitous cream cracker. It was said more as a warning than advice. Those days, people could be ticked off for wearing uniforms improperly, unlike today when there is a huge tolerance for all kinds of deviations. Seniors  could even tick off the SP if his probationer’s turn out was shoddy. But today I was not intimidated about the uniform thing. I was not even bothered , I wore my uniforms properly , not to pass scrutiny, but because I had pride in them. The stars on the shoulder of my Vimal Rider uniform pointed correctly, the Silvo polished buckle and crest shone brightly, the sleeves were folded a proper regulation and even the laces I would carefully slip straight through the five pairs of eyelets of my dark tan Oxford shoes without a twirl.

I was concerned more by this Lone Wolf call on. I had been through our group  call ons in Calcutta during the Barrackpur days without missing any - the DG,HS and CS at Writers’,  CP and his officers at Lalbazaar and Great Eastern, officers of IB and CID. I did not quite like this and smelt something fishy.

“ Sir, any idea why he has sent for me?’ I asked though I had this nagging suspicion that the matter could be matrimonial in nature and was worried about Vikas, my unmarried younger brother who had competed in the IPS the year after me and was floating free in the air like an element  waiting to be compounded.

As newly recruited officers of the civil services, one of the first jobs that most, if not all, did was to get married. A few solemnised their pre exam blooming love, some moved on from their previous affairs, a substantial picked up among the fellow probationers , a few tactically to get their cadres changed, but a vast majority were grabbed up for arranged marriages. It started right at LBSNAA, Mussourie where prospective in- laws poured in for a dekkho[10] at young officers on way to Whispering Windows or even at Hari’s Tea stall. Stories of senior IPS officers stalking young officers were all too common.

‘ We were scolded by the DG for spending an extra day while calling on senior officers at Gauhati and missing out on training at Deragaon PTC, but then  after a few weeks, he asked me to call on an IG who had missed seeing me during the Gauhati call on,’ Pinda had lambasted during the debriefing session of the senior batch of 40th RR.

Much earlier Mathur saheb , two years my senior, who had come to LBSNAA  ( Lal bahadur Shastri National Academy  of Administration), Mussourie to complete his Foundation Course along with twenty four of his raucous batch mates, had told me about an incident during his district probation days in Madhya Pradesh.

‘ The zonal IG had sent for me to call on him and to come with  a list of the year’s Civil Services List,’ he recounted one evening over a bottle of Raja Rum at 14 Mahanadi.

So one day he went in a one tonner,dressed  in his tunic and cross belt with a sword dangling.

‘ Hello Parshuram, ‘ the IG flashed a weak smile to acknowledge Mathur saheb’s salute.

‘Sir, here’s the list,’ the young officer came to the business straight away and thrust a piece of handwritten in the hands of the IG who started to read it , eyebrows arched, snatching sheepish looks at the probationer in front of him, and then stopped.

‘ What do you mean by this ?’ he shouted, waving the sheet of paper, his eyeballs travelling over his nose to hit Mathur saheb, ‘ how dare you?’

‘ Kya thha paper mein,  Mathur Saheb?’ Shrikant asked, his eyes gleaming in the incandescence of the single rod heater Irayanbu  had left in the room.

“Kya Thha?’ Mathur saheb let out a guffaw, his epiglottic fart shaking up his body.

‘ I had prepared a list of all my batch mates mentioning their caste and marital status, this is what that fellow wanted , and his whole purpose of calling me was to enlighten about these things only, except that he did not like the idea of I reading his mind,’ Mathur saheb explained.

‘ Sir, surely you had not wanted me to come just with a paper cutting of the list of successful candidates of Civil Services which I am certain you must have read already,’ I told him, before being shown the door by the IG , and denied the courtesy of even a cup of tea.

Sure enough , I was not wrong and when the SP spoke, I realized that Pinda and Mathur saheb has talked about a trend quite common , and probably carrying on from the colonial times. A batchmate, much after my proposed call-on, almost had to face contempt of court for not agreeing to marry a High Court judge’s daughter.

‘ I think he has to make some enquiries for his daughter’s marriage,’ the SP hinted.

‘ But sir, Vikas’s marriage has already been fixed ,’ I let out an alarm of sorts.

' Arrey,  why are you panicking, you first hear him out na,’ the SP said, and was about to close the chapter when I thought of salvaging something good out of a bad deal . A year earlier when I had been sent to lead a contingent of the 13th SAP in the Combined Police Parade at the Maidan in Calcutta ,  I had not been provided with a vehicle even though it was a hugely ceremonial occasion, and for a few days I had to do with commuting in my cross belt and sword in the yellow taxis.  I better take a vehicle , if for nothing else than to avoid my uniform getting crushed, I said to myself.

‘ Sir, may I take my jeep to Calcutta?’ I asked and was promptly rewarded with the permission.

I reached 34 Ballygunge Circular at  around lunch,  and after eating a hearty meal at my wife’s uncle’s house, drove to Moore Avenue, Tollygunge, the headquarter of Police Wireless. It was a quite a big campus dominated by a huge steel tower that shot through towards the sky, there was an abundance of trees and a big garden lay in front of a three- storeyed building painted a dull pink and cream. I entered the dimly lit foyer and sure enough an unexcited constable greeted me, supremely clueless about the Visiting Card I thrust in his hand , but after a swift shuffle of feet , an Inspector came out and ushered me in.

I saluted as smartly as I could . The IG sat under a light that dropped just above him, illuminating his immediate surrounding in an otherwise not brightly- lit room. The furniture was classier than what I had seen in many police offices , the succession board was done a different  black and brass unlike the usual wood and white of other offices, but what stood out were the telephones that lay arranged neatly to his left- the zaniest ones I had seen so far. He scanned me for close to a minute.

‘Please sit down,’ he said and made some inane conversation as the orderly brought in tea and biscuits. He was pleasantly polite, like most Indian men are when the matter of their daughter’s marriage is at hand.

As the conversation continued,  he suddenly let his right hand drop behind him to open a drawer and drew out  a post card size black and white photo . After checking furtively that no third person was around , he turned towards me. I was sure by this time he must have pressed the button for the red light to glow outside his room.

‘ He is your batch mate, isn’t he?’ he asked , and immediately put me at ease because it wasn’t going to be  about Vikas.

I craned my neck and saw  my friend’s Saxon’s photo, with his trademark beatific smile that could have put Arun Ramayan Govil’s look like a scowl.

‘ Oh yes, sir, and what a fine person he is ,’ I gushed in support of my squadmate.

‘But his eyelids look to be very droopy,’ he got into second gear,’ does he take drugs?’

A wave of pity for Saxon swept over me. So many times  the unfortunate Saxon had been wrongly singled out by Jassa Ram, the Drill Instructor,  for smelling drunk at morning PT.

‘Bahut buri baat hai,’ he would admonish Saxon in a  baritone Desi and Bidee voice.

Poor Saxon! the teetotaller’s  only fault was that he would often stand next to either Bhasky or me during the morning PT,  and the fumes of our previous evening’s boozing, by the diffusive process of olfactory ventriloquism, would effusively gush out through his mouth. On the fields of NPA we would play ball with Jassa in mock admonition despite Saxon’s  protest at the molestation of his reputation, but here, in front of the IG and his inquiring stare, there was no way that I was not going to defend by squad mate’s squeaky clean .

‘ No way, sir, he doesn’t even smoke or drink,’ I said, thinking that would calm down the frayed nerves of a prospective dad-in-law.

‘ There are so many people who don’t smoke or drink but take drugs, and why do his eyelids droop ’ he probed with the experience of a seasoned policeman and anxiety of a marriageable girl’s father.

‘ I can assure you he doesn’t do drugs,’  I said firmly and wondered whether the IG had ever held a mirror to his face. His eyelids were also heavily drooping.

‘He is such a fine athlete, and had almost won the Tonk Cup,’ I lied through my teeth, and had Bijlee or Chandini , the two mares who normally carried Saxon during the riding classes, heard me , they would have choked on their hay. For the uninitiated, the Tonk Cup is awarded to the best Equestrian in the batch.

As soon as he was relieved that his prospective son in law was not a junkie, the IG suddenly changed gear, became formal,  and spoke into the speakerphone of his intercom to announce my departure.

‘I am sending the ASP Burdwan to you, you will show him around the entire  Control Room and workshops so that he can write his his tour diary,’ and waved me off. To be frank, I liked his style.

The wireless units, like most things technical,  held no fascination for me. I quickly went through the motions, the Inspector HQ through with dignified emotions. Quickly we completed the formalities of gathering material for my tour diary. I was eager to utilize  the chance of a Calcutta visit to check at the WBPSC Bhavan, Tollygunge the results of my departmental exams. Well that is a story already told I guess.It was a rather fruitless day, I had failed in all the papers of the Departmental, and despite my certificate and vetting, the enquiry did not result in matrimony.

CROSSING THE BENGAL FRONTIER

“The exams consisted of papers in Accounts and Law ( with books and without books) and a language paper, and it was compulsory for non- Bengali officers to pass  in Bengali which consisted of three parts- Written, Oral or Viva and Dictation. Officers who passed all papers at one go were also rewarded with an extra increment, like the ones who underwent a vasectomy after two children. The Bengali paper for abangalis deserves a separate narration, and I would do it shortly.”

- from The Departmentals and Mister Sho Hai.

I really had trouble in learning to speak Bengali , which for a Hindi speaking person should have been actually easier since roots of both lay in Sanskrit . But I think learning language is more of a knack than due to any shared linguistic ancestry. Had it been so, I, brought up in a predominantly Bengali neighbourhood in Dhanbad , would have learnt it very early.

But I had no such knack , and studied in a Jesuit school which had been unfortunately split into separate sections for Bengalis and non Bengalis in what was Bihar's most cosmopolitan district. Even though I counted the Bengalis Anupam, Anil and Jude amongst my closest friends, the language of interaction would always remain Hindi.

If I had learnt to speak Bengali later on , it was primarily because of the encouragement from people in West Bengal. Bengalis profoundly encouraged anyone trying to learn their language- I guess it is so with most of the provincial linguistic communities in India. There was no question of anyone laughing to make you feel conscious if you mispronounced a word or committed any howler which incidentally one did with dead certainty and alarming frequency those days.  In my entire two years of learning to speak the language , only once I had someone make fun of my Bengali. It was in a village under  Galsi Police station where I had been undergoing my thana training . We had gone to attend to an information about  suicide by a married woman, and in the course of the visit, I must have said something and a young lad of 16-17 laughed , mimicking me. His laughter had not even died down when the local Pradhan took hold of his hair, and violently boxed his ear.

' Shala, tor kono lojja nei,ekhuni khoma cheo', he rattled him up and the poor boy immediately apologized.

Contrast this with the way the Hindi wallahs make fun of other Hindi spoken by Bangali babu or Sardarji or a Madrasi. Forget this, within the Hindi world, there is a linguistic hierarchy so that even a Balliatic laughs at Bihari's Hindi only to be sniggered at by the fellows in Allahabad and Lucknow - the UPites, despite having the holiest city Benaras and Ram's Ayodhya never got over the fact that it was the kings of Bihar who had  ruled over the mightiest empires in India!  The Dilliwala , ruling India for the seventh time in the country's history, as in so many other things, takes a dig at the Hindi spoken not only by the Bihari, but also by the guy from Etawah and Bhopal and Sonepat. Even the Bihari, whose Hindi occupied the lowest rung in the language varna system, was derisive of the Bengali Babu's Hindi. Making fun of language was a trait that the Hindiwallas passed on to the Bengalis as well, so much so that the Bongs who would never laugh at a Bihari's Bengali would roll over with laughter at another Bong's Hindi- they also inspired the care- a -fig -for- gender Hindi of Marwaris in Kolkata.

It wasn’t, however,  just due to the generosity of the Bengalis that I managed to learn to speak the language well enough to pass the Oral Test. `It was also due to the magnanimity of the Board for Oral Test which was Moderate, unlike the Extremist Written Bengali group. It would  even pass guys from the Land of Five Rivers who spoke Bengali not with a rosogulla in their mouth but sugarcane clenched between their teeth,  and rarely failed anyone thrice. Most cleared at one go, I did in the second.

It was only our lack of knowledge of Bengali punctuation signs that led to our failure in the first attempt at Bengali Dictation- most of us did not know that that the full stop or poorna viraam was called Daandi. The result was that whenever the person reading out the passage from Kapaalkundala would say daaNdi, we would write it as a word and not put the punctuation sign instead. The upshot of this all was that passage  was splattered with the word "daandi" and most failed. Soon after the exam, the fault was realized, a note made and all passed during the second shy.

The Bengali Written paper in the Departmentals was a tough one to crack. It consisted of a pair of passages for translation- Bengali to English and English to Bengali, comprehension, one essay and a letter, generally to one's mother. Translations from Bengali were from Kapaalkundala again, highbrow sadhu bhasha stuff, written by Bengal’s first Calcutta University graduate, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya. This made the start torrid like the first few overs of swinging pace bowling on a dreary English morning. As such,the Bengali script became difficult as soon as it entered the world of juktakkhors ( not only is their construction very complex, their pronunciation, at times, unrelated to the sound of their components) and if you combined this with the very limited vocabulary, the paper appeared to be too insurmountable a challenge. I think the paper setters and examiners took it as a personal affront if some abangali would pass in just one or two attempts , and would, therefore, be ruthless in setting and parsimonious in evaluating.

Sometimes I wondered whether setting the written Bengali paper was their way of getting a revenge for shifting the capital from Calcutta over 75 years ago and giving Subhash Chandra Bose a short shrift, an occasion to demonstrate the richness of the language of Tagore, remonstrate against Centre for withholding funds to Bengal and to protest against Rajiv Gandhi for calling Calcutta "a dying city". The more the Khottas, Udes, Hindustanis, Shordarjis, Meros , Madrasis assembled together for the Bengali Written exam, the more the mirthful banter at the expense of the Bengalis flowed - ma bokbe, aloo posto dim shiddho, supercillous aan”tlami, fish in pulses and other peculiar culinary practices.

I was not alone in finding Written Bengali difficult . A senior IAS officer once confided that he would get chits prepared for the likely questions in the exams and hide them inside his socks , but the problem was that when he would take them out, he did not know which chit was for which question! Another senior recently commented that one officer took to wearing uniform and carrying his service revolver to the examination hall as signs to prove how no- nonsense -dead- serious approach he had towards clearing the exam. Most of them relied upon the ability of a friendly colleague to sit outstretched from the seat to allow copying. One even arranged for a look alike imposter to write the paper ( but he somehow failed). Most of us took tuitions, and I also did when I had just one chance left before I was due for my promotion.

Despite the tuitions, I was a bit diffident and had requested a batchmate to arch out a bit to enable me to confirm that I was on the right track. I had cajoled him  to sit in front of me , a decision I had made during the Settlement Camp. The camp,  held the previous winter  over six weeks in Alipurduar for Revenue, Police and Judicial services recruits,  was memorable for many reasons : my first exposure to the incredibly beautiful Jalpaiguri district where if you took an eastward ride from Coronation Bridge you came across miles of tea gardens, a few dots of army units  and some famous forest sanctuaries on either side of the road, the southern  Himalayas  hills giving you snow-capped company right through while white rivers like Leesh, Geesh and Teesta  streaked playfully across your path ; field visits carrying Gunter's chain; lots of tennis ball cricket in a  ground around which we had shacked up in tents , played mischief like school kids in the lazy afternoon classes sparing neither the Camp Commander nor the Divisional Commissioner and reviewed the day’s proceedings in the Old Monk's Tent.

The Land and Land Revenue Department which conducted the Settlement Camp was one of the oldest departments in the state, and as such departments go, had an obsession for changelessness. It insisted that the Settlement Camp officers wear shorts during field visits and use service latrines, perpetuating, at public expense, the abominable practice of manual scavenging even after forty five years of our Independence and fifteen years of of one of the longest elected communist governments in the world!  The joining instructions , we read with a chuckle, contained directions on do's and don't's of bringing and keeping cycle and servants, storing firewood  and cleaning of lanterns.

But the camp was also memorable for exposing to me the precocious proficiency of a batchmate in Bengali.  I saw him carry thick novels of Bankim Chandra and Sharat Chandra and heard him speak in chaste Bengali with a dazzling fluency. I had made mental note of this mastery for future use, and finally after flunking in Written Bengali for a third time ( which is not as bad or rare as you think it seems), I picked on him to bail me out. To be fair to him, he cooperated like a true friend. But after sometime, I realized that  my benefactor was not batting properly.

‘I  don’t think you are going to pass ,’ I told BN and got up, some fifteen minutes before the bell,and handed over my Bengali answer script to the invigilator who accepted it  with a smile. He proceeded to fold his hands in a namaskar and extend a warm invitation in Bengali to come again.

'Abaar aashben,' he said.

'Nischoy dhekha hobey', I also waved an affectionate goodbye to Guin Babu to acknowledge his  invitation. The kind - hearted ministerial staff, one of the many such invigilators, had become a familiar face for people like me who kept on coming back to to the exam hall at West Bengal Public Service Commission building at Tollygunge  every six months for writing our departmentals.

He must have seen me struggle with my paper, not just from what I was writing but also from where I was trying to copy . It is not that  what my benefactor batchmate wrote would have been substandard stuff on that  balmy afternoon . I was sure he must have answered his paper quite well, but his problem, in my view, was  homesickness in matters scriptural.  He  was  a  proud Telugu bidda, with great longing for the script of his mother tongue . When he wrote Bengali which had a much more pointed script, like the present POTUS's , he wrote with such an overwhelming homesickness that the end product morphed into letters which resembled Odiya more than Bengali. If I could not follow what he was writing in his letter to his mother about his first day in office, there was little chance that the jabakusumed examiner would.

It is a different matter altogether that on being let down by by my batchmate ‘s handwriting I had to fall back on my knowledge of Bengali brushed up by Tamluk mastermoshai.

As luck would have it, I passed and he flunked yet again.

THE DEPARTMENTALS AND MISHTER SHO HAI

A few days ago, the results of Departmental Exams of IPS officers  appeared in the Whatsapp IPS West Bengal Group of my phone. From Pankaj Dwivedi to Harikrishna Pathak. Two officers had passed completely, for the others a few remained to be cleared.The message just took me back to days over twenty five years ago, of writing those exams in alternate cycles of  Calcutta’s muggy May and wonderful winter. The exams were held biannually at the WBPSC Bhavan which had been recently constructed -  old timers talked about sitting in dimly lit halls somewhere near Sealdah for those departmentals.

These bi-annuals were welcome breaks from the mundane world of district training as officers got a week's leave to come to West Bengal’s capital city , hole up at either at Hungerford or Kyd's Street, talk about their SPs and DMs, prepare something about the exams and most important of all,  strategize about seating arrangements. These visits  were occasions to unwind and explore what was then called Calcutta ; the chicken rolls at Kusum's; the Mutton Rezala at Nizam's;  the many restaurants  and street food joints in Park Street, Free School Street , New Market and  Kyd's Street  ; the  cinema halls Roxy, Globe, Metro, New Empire and their bars.

Backpackers roamed in large numbers, attracted by its cheap hotels and abundance of drugs , in the historic Sudder Street whose ambience had once electrified a precocious Rabindranath Tagore to pen a long poem Nirjharer Swapna- bhanga about a century ago. Once Mrityunjay and I even went to a modest roadside restaurant styled Vishwa Hindu hotel near the examination centre at SP Mukherjee Road where we were surprisingly attended upon by female waiters , and soon realized that the restaurant was just a front , the place actually witnessed more activity and customers during the night.

The "lady wives" ( as the wives are called in many uniformed services parlance)  got to know one another better,  did a bit of shopping on the side , mostly in and around the Chowringhee and for many, including my wife, who came from cities where ogle, brush and cat calls greeted women in public places, Calcutta appeared much safer and civilized in its attitude towards women. Bonhomie among batchmates used to be strong during those early years of service before the rat race of professional rivalry would come to affect it, as is common in most organizations.

The departmentals  did not affect the inter se seniority,that is the seniority within the same batch like the exams at NPA, Hyderabad,  and so were not taken up that seriously,  but since failure could  push back promotion for upto an year if not cleared within the five- six times,  they were  not  ignored either. It meant not being promoted as an additional SP from SDPO after completion of four years of service ( and in my batch two out of seven , or was it  three, had an extended six months as SDPO). No less important was the fact passing meant a jump from Basic Rs 2200/- scale to the Senior Scale of Rs. 3000/- scale , a very handsome, eagerly awaited pay rise in those difficult days.

The exams consisted of papers in Accounts and Law ( with books and without books) and a language paper, and it was compulsory for non- Bengali officers to pass  in Bengali which consisted of three parts- Written, Oral or Viva and Dictation. Officers who passed all papers at one go were also rewarded with an extra increment, like the ones who underwent a vasectomy after two children. The Bengali paper for abanagalis deserves a separate narration, and I would do it shortly.

It was on a warm July in 1990, just after the taxing Passing Out Parade practice session at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad when I opened  a mail my batchmate Zulfi had received from Government of West Bengal informing about the results of our first departmental held the previous December. We were a batch of seven from West Bengal cadre , and there were results of six of us. But surprisingly there was no mention of my name. I thought there has been an oversight, and I would chase it up once I returned to Bengal after finishing the second phase of training at Hyderabad.

After about three months I got the chance. I had gone to the West Bengal Telecom HQ, having been called over for certain matrimonial enquiries ( more about it later ) , and after being done with it, and also having collected all information to be written in my tour diary,  I hurriedly went , without even changing to  civvies,  to WBPSC Bhavan. The lift took me to the sixth floor where the concerned section was located, and at four in the afternoon, I was quite surprised to see a few persons working. The babus had not quite expected an IPS officer to come in ceremonial uniform  and make enquiries about departmental results. The dealing assistant was just too overwhelmed  when I explained my problem in a manner that was short neither on agitation nor animation. He also seemed to be in agreement with my apprehension that someone had blundered.

'Boshun,' he offered me a chair,  and  went to open a dull green coloured almirah from which he took out a file and a register and started looking up for my results, turning the over pages with his spit coated middle  finger. I also craned my neck to offer help. After sometime, he located the relevant page, read something with furrowed eyebrows, then looked at me deeply , asked me to settle back in my chair, rubbed his eyes,  and after allowing for the phosphenes to fade, exhaled . I thought he was going to tender some apology for an oversight which he had just detected. I prepared myself to be magnanimously forgiving, straightened the creases of my frown and promptly wore a smile.

'Mishter Sho Hai, the results are sent to candidates who have either passed completely or partially, but as per the rule, no communication is required to be made with candidates who have not cleared a single paper, ' he started to explain the rule position, as most clerks do before they deliver the punch. But for people who are used to deliver the punch through the impersonal letters and telegraphic signals,  the sudden emergency to deliver it personally to an agitated and flustered IPS officer in ceremonial uniform  was too much, and Malakar Babu waited for me to infer and grasp the enormity of the mishap.

'So I have failed in all the papers?' I asked, betraying no emotion of my disbelief. He nodded, words failed him at my quick realization,  and in sheer gratitude for my composure , he drew up a long and sad face  to join me in my personal grief.

'Mishter Sho Hai,' he said in a voice brimming with sympathy and encouragement,' chinta korben na, if this time you have failed subjectively, next time you will pass subjectively '. I got up as I  felt no need to discuss the subject anymore, and it was just as well as  I could see from the corner of my eyes that some other clerks were walking towards us, and would probably subject me to more ridicule.

I ran down the six floors without waiting for the lift, and, shelved my plan to visit New Market, and instead asked Barrister Singh to drive straight to  Barrackpur and look up my friend Sanjay Chander who was recuperating with a long plaster over a leg fractured in a law and order situation which had turned violent at Gourisankar Jute Mills.

He was delighted to see me, and as I narrated the PSC experience, his pain considerably lessened, as pains normally do in the face of bigger pains. I cleared all my papers except written Bengali in the second attempt, and passed Written Bengali even before Bankim Chandra Ramesh. But for quite some time , my wonder had not diminished even one bit as to how I managed to flunk each of the papers till my my first Superintendent of Police enlightened me , a year later, with a sublime piece of truth - Je kono ghatna ghot te par e or any thing can happen. But about that Mahabodhi session some other time.