The Third Life
Bholanath divided his heart into three parts. On the bypass he was a trader of happiness—his business: happy homes, happy housewives, and happy households. He did not call his office an office but an akhra, a den. On the platform of that akhra, a large tin hoarding announced: “Come, cast off all the burdens of your life.” Before lifting the shutters each day, he glanced once at the board, then raised the shutter with self-satisfied calm. In the commerce of life there is always some division of the heart. For Bholanath, it was thirty–thirty–forty. Thirty percent he lived in truth, thirty percent in the jugglery of imagination, and the remaining forty percent—what it was, even he had never quite known. His thirty percent truth was lodged in his trade, a truth he constantly tried to swell and inflate. Alongside it was his cherished household—his wife Komola, plump, the color of a ripe brinjal, soft as a boiled potato, yielding and tender. Komola was her name, but her essence was pal...