One late summer evening while crossing a twilit hill a policeman who had parked his squad car in the lot beside the abandoned train tracks over a high moldering stone wall from the cemetery saw me after closing time and yelled to come over. When I foolishly did he looked at me from head to toe as if I wasn’t real. I didn’t feel quite real myself.
“What are you doing in the cemetery?” he said, with almost savage emphasis on the word. I told him I found it “peaceful.” For some reason he seemed to find this explanation enough and let me go.
I worked throughout much of that period as a bagger at a market not far from where I lived. It was a job as drearily pointless as it sounds – bagger.
I worked there for nearly three years filling untold sacks of paper under seventy watt floresecent lighting. As I bagged I ruminated on the cemetery – the odor of scotch pines around proud family tombs and the grandeur of the purple stained glass windows within, of decaying leaves and autumn afternoons and low wind blown clouds. Usually I dreamed myself back into its black gates. As you can imagine I wasn’t much of an employee.
These flights of fancy were one of the reasons I was dismissed. The other had to do with Eileen whose winter gray eyes and freckled forehead for, some reason, beguiled me.
She worked as the assistant accountant behind the oak door of the manager’s office which a cloud of heavy grey smoke perpetually hung. The nicotine that Mr. Hennessey was addicted to.
“Have you finished your novel yet?” is what he constantly asked, that ridiculous smile on his face, his robin's blue eyes fixed on me like a cat pining an injured bird. He was well aware of my aspirations. But I never attempted any response beyond "...Not yet!” my voice dry as an ash vase.

He Saw the Lane

Throughout the last three years I’ve been reading Freedom Song, a collection of three novels by Amit Chaudhuri – an author with a talent for enshrining the pleasures of the everyday and of the near waking dream.
Reading these often sensual and evocative stories told partly through a prism of childish wonder, particularly A Strange and Sublime Address – about a ten-year-old’s visit to his uncle’s Calcutta home during summer vacation and Freedom Song about an pleasant extended visit by a woman named Mini to the Calcutta home an old friend – reawakened memories of visiting my maternal grandparent’s home in Bala Cynwyd Pennsylvania and memorably combing through its rooms, hallways and chest drawers on holidays. Chaudhuri’s tales are as much about Calcutta, its myriad lanes and back streets and apartment dwellings where life occurs through sequential unremarkable daily rituals, as they are about the character’s. The novel’s each have spare rudimentary plots - a woman wandering through the silent rooms of a spacious apartment on an early autumn afternoon while everyone else sleeps, a retirement age manager of a financially depressed state-owned candy manufacturer daydreams over his newspaper and cup of tea in a building tucked behind “a huge rusting gate that opened reluctantly to outsiders,” three people on an uneventful car trip to a health clinic on the outskirts of Calcutta. These are the essense of whole chapters. The novellas at moments approach preciousness but not to the point of marring the stories.
I liked especially this passage – “Winter came only once a year, and it changed the city. It gave its people, as they wore their sweaters and mufflers, a sense of having gone somewhere else, the slight sense of wonder and dislocation of being in a foreign city. Even the everyday view from their own houses was a little strange. Smoke traveled everywhere, robbing the sunlight of its fire. Afternoon, with its gentle orange-yellow light, was the warmest time of day, though the wet clothes, assisted by a breeze, dried more slowly than in summer. And as the orange light fell on the brickwork and sides of the houses, it was easier to tell, from the flushed rose center that now appeared on a terrace and now a parapet, that its origins lay in fire.”