You can Google anything, get a result, so I typed in Karnani Estates: bright as a fish it surfaced: touched its blue pulse, opening to a sepia tinted record of WW2 Calcutta: scrolled down with the speed of a mine-shaft lift to the photo: unmistakable, the five-story edifice; after all these years, my eye nimble as a monkey, up and down its stuccoed walls, resting on a fretted balcony front, on to the edge of the flat roof, where as a boy I had watched clouds.
The photo pre-dated my stay, when the Yanks were there, who left, as Yanks do, the flats let out; number eksowatara, 'thene thala,' the liftman closed the lift cage, pulled the lever: in the photo, I struggled for an inward glimpse of that corridor entry to our home; how perennial the glide over its checkered stone floor; how inexorably this day a world away has come.
