The postmaster’s office was located in the village of Ulapur. It was a quaint village, there was an indigo plantation nearby, and so the manager—an Englishman goaded by the need for communication—had arranged for the setting up of a post office.

The postmaster was a young man from Calcutta. Stationed here, away from the known limits of civilization, he often felt like a fish out of water. The plantation workers seemed to have their own community. Social miscegenation between two different classes of people seemed all but impossible.

In truth, the boy from the city wasn’t good at mixing with people. Uprooted and exiled to a foreign land, his feelings oscillated between arrogance and shame. He rarely met any of the villagers. He wrote poems: poems of endless waiting, poems in which the marrow of life seemed to resonate with the faint tremble of young leaves, where the memory of existence was rejuvenated by the sight of rain clouds. He longed for the security of metal roads, of tall houses which blocked the sight of clouds in the open sky. The city was spreading its tentacles, calling him back.

The postmaster’s salary was meager. Evenings would arrive with plumes of smoke rising from the cowshed. The evening would be as still as the cadence of lost poetry, the silence all around would shake the fault lines of the heart; and as all of this would take place, the postmaster would light his lamp.