Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri

college hall. I waited in front of the lodge, loitering invisibly while people went about, rushing, as they always do, with a special motivated speed at lunchtime. The only thing fixed in that scene was the porter, who sat inside his lodge, in a world a little detached from ours, and ignored me stolidly. When the clock struck one, I began to walk towards the hall, and Shehnaz came from behind and caught up with me, somewhat breathless. We curved round the grassy oval patch together, and entered a looming tunnel and then emerged into the second quad, with a large square of green to ourright, and to our left, the L-shaped facade of the old buildings, with their consecutive staircases and rows of neighbourly windows. It must have been a warm day, for Shehnaz was wearing a white cotton top, with a message supporting the Palestinian cause printed boldly upon it, ending in a vivid exclamation mark; I noticed then how small her breasts were, two small bumps beneath her loose top, and how bony and thin she was, her collar bones radiating delicately and symmetrically beneath her neck, their outlines becoming clearer as she bent forward.
    The hall had great length and depth, and yet, from the moment one joined the queue collecting trays and food, one failed to see it in perspective. That day I realized, with the disappointment one feels when discovering another person’s hidden nature, that Shehnaz was a vegetarian. With a plate full of peas and salad, she stood waiting for me to pay at the till. Feeling ill at ease, we then sat facing each other at one of the interminable parallel tables that ran from one end of the hall to another. Light filled the transparent sections of the stained-glass windows. Beneath themwere portraits of the dead Masters of the college, luminous presences in costume, and beneath the portraits was the table at which the Chinese graduates sat. They looked no older than boys, with straight black hair and clean, animated faces, leaning across to shout to each other in Chinese, drawing back dramatically, or lolling forward, collapsing, and settling a head upon a crooked elbow on the table. In appearance, they were more Westernized than Indians, at ease in their European clothes, industriously devouring steak and kidney pie, but they hardly spoke to the English students, forming a little island at that table at lunchtime, buoyant, and full of movement. They made a domestic noise, like brothers watching a football match on television, with sounds that signified violent disagreement, or native exclamations of astonishment, but they might have been, for all I knew, discussing mathematical formulae or their syllabus. With the Chinese table as our background, Shehnaz and I ate together, more or less silently.
    When we came out from the hall, we sat for some time on one of the benches on the edge of the greensquare, with our backs to the library windows. From there, while we talked, we could see people who had finished lunch appearing both from the hall and the Senior Common Room. Though I was not aware of it then, Mandira’s room, which she had newly occupied, was behind us, over our shoulders. I would later become familiar with its rectangular window, whose shutter was lifted on hot days. On the roof above the room, there was a skylight, a narrow glass lid framed by wood, its simple, straight angles standing out against its darker background, and clearly discernible in this brief, summarized version from below. It was by this skylight that I would later identify Mandira’s room.

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    T he road that led to Shehnaz’s college passed, at one point, over a canal. Then the road became, for a very tiny distance, a bridge, and one could sit on the wall on one side before entering the college on the left.
    The canal had its own life. Ducks climbed curiously on to its bank or paddled upon the water with the utmost seriousness; twigs, branches, and leaves drifted in from the south and travelled northward. Sometimes