Last year, Ruchir Joshi travelled around rural India for our ‘Work’ issue, documenting parts of the country’s informal economy, and meeting people with working lives that are unseen, or unique, or damaging. The resulting series, ‘Moving Parts’, includes visits to both the manager of a silica quartz factory and the victims of its lung-clogging dust (in ‘Prajapati’ and ‘Hajiriya and Gajiriya’); a conversation with a man who lives by ‘country-made pistols’ fashioned from steering rods; and a ride through the country with a pair of entrepreneurial road-contractor brothers (‘Guddu and Pintu’).

The series closes with this video, which shows Shahid, a manual tyre-cutter, at work. It is a craft that takes years to learn, and which allows him to imitate perfect, machine-cut treads.

You can read some of the essays mentioned above by visiting our issue page for Granta 109, or by buying the issue and benefiting from our online discount.

Guddu and Pintu are looking at a road that cuts through fields of sugar cane.

‘Twelve per cent, minimum,’ says Guddu, who’s younger.

‘What are you saying? At least twenty percent, look at how the edges are going.’

Pintu is taller and older, but he never pulls rank unduly.

‘Maybe you’re right, maybe twenty, twenty-two,’ Guddu says, quickly correcting his calculations so as not to contradict his elder on such an insignificant detail. ‘You see, bhaiya, we are also contractors but our roads don’t crumble like those made by some other people.’

Guddu and Pintu are first cousins, their fathers being brothers, and they examine roads the way I imagine wine-tasters assess a new vintage or a strange grape. They come from a land-owning Thakur family, a landlord-warrior caste, but now, like many of their generation, they’ve branched out into other kinds of money-making: they run a medium-sized road construction company, with ambitions to expand beyond laying roads locally.

We pull into the small town of Khhair and we stop to look at a roadside tyre-retreading workshop – at least Pintu and I do, while Guddu looks at a new connector that’s just been laid. I can see his mouth working, as if he’s tasting the thing for body, fruitiness, tannins, after-presence, profit.

‘Arre! The bugger’s checking out roads again! He never stops! Oye, Guddu! Look this way, yaar!’

But Guddu will not budge till he pronounces his judgment. ‘Thirty crores that Bansal took for this! What can you say, really? And people call this a government.’

Pintu is consoling. `Well you know that fucker is in trouble with his construction business. Huge losses. He has to make it up somewhere doesn’t he?’

Back in the car, we take a short-cut. The road, which leads through fields full of white-plumed kans grass, turns out to be under construction. The two cousins have agreed to show me ‘the road business’ as they call it, and as tour guides they are infinitely polite and solicitous of my needs and comforts. As the car wheels roll over sharp stone chips, Guddu and Pintu begin to explain how a road is made.

‘See, first you have to break up the old road,’ Guddu starts.

‘You have to break it up completely if you’re doing the job properly,’ Pintu chimes in.

‘Completely’, Guddu agrees, ‘smash up all the old asphalt.’

‘Unless you’re cutting corners, of course.’

‘Like this fellow…’ Guddu points to the moonscape below our car, ‘isn’t completely cutting corners. See how he’s broken up the road? But it’s not done properly, the asphalt bits are too big. But there are some people in our business who won’t even break up the old road! They just say they’ve done it and lay the new tar on top… and at the end of the next monsoon, you have another contract! For the same stretch of road!’ Pintu is grinning now, as if marvelling at the beauty of the scheme. Guddu keeps his eyes on the road while Pintu leans forward from the back seat. `You see, bhaiya, it’s like this, it’s all a matter of proportion.’

‘Percentage,’ says Guddu.

‘Proportion,’ insists Pintu.

‘Proportion, how? Well, when you go for a road contract, either to repair or make a completely new one, you have to go to the relevant officer in the relevant government department. But the thing is, the man giving out the contract can’t avoid the system. He has people below him to feed and people above him also waiting to be fed, his superiors. So, if some new officer comes to the post and decides to try some funny honesty stuff, he will be transferred to an obscure job before he finishes registering his kids in the local school!’

‘Just moved to a post where he can do no harm! People depend on the money up and down the chain, you see. You are not alone, so that you can become some clean mahatma who won’t take money. It’s not just your money, you are affecting other people’s expected incomes!’

I turn back to Pintu. ‘So, proportion, you were saying.’

‘Proportion is a kind of vivek. You know the word in our Hindi, don’t you? Vivek?’

‘Yes, of course. Conscience?’

‘So it’s a kind of vivek, a fine-tuning of conscience on part of the officer, that “I won’t be too greedy.” That the work also needs to be done. You see?’

I don’t, but I nod anyway.

Pintu gives me an example. Suppose a government department has a budget to make a road for ten crore rupees. In each department there is a norm – say ten per cent or maybe twelve per cent of the budget – that the contractor applying for the tender has to take in cash and give in advance to the officer in charge of the project; the officer then grants the tender to the contractor and work begins; then the contractor calculates his own profit on making the road – the official figure he’s allowed is, again, say fifteen per cent, but what with the investment of the bribe, the man needs to make twenty per cent, so he puts aside two crores immediately, before breaking a single chip or buying a single vat of tar.

‘So, if he pays the officer ten per cent, and he himself needs twenty per cent, that leaves…what?’ Pintu asks.

‘Seventy per cent, in this case seven crores.’ Guddu is clearly the figures guy in the team.

‘Okay?’ Pintu re-arranges his long legs in the back seat as we move on to a smoother portion of the road. ‘Okay? So. Now, say the officer is feeling greedy. Or he has debts to pay off, or say his daughter’s getting married and there’s the matter of the dowry, yes? So he decides ten per cent is not enough, ten or fifteen, whatever the norm is, in that particular department. He asks for, let’s say, twenty-five per cent. Loses his vivek and demands it, yes? Now, the road has to be made and the contractor also has to make his money – he’s not in this game for charity, right?’

‘Right. So…’

‘So, you have to do all this – break up the old road, get new stone chips for the bed of the road, dig the bed deep and wide according to specifications, have a certain consistency of tar that you lay on top, have a certain number of days to allow parts of the road settle before you make the next stretch, while your labour just sits around. All this is the man’s cost, so first thing he does is he saves his twenty per cent, protects his profit of two crores, and so the road is now made from, what?’

Guddu provides the final read-out. `The road is officially supposed to be made from eighty-five percent of total budget, with a fifteen per cent fee for the contractor. Now, if twenty-five per cent goes to the officer, that leaves seventy-five. Now minus from that the contractor’s twenty per cent, which leaves only fifty-five per cent to actually make the road.’

We’ve now moved on to a fairly good stretch of tarmac running parallel to a railway line. In the distance I see a row of electricity pylons ranged across the flat, north Indian farmland and then I notice something odd: echoing the towers are pillars, tall modernist vases of new, light brown concrete, sprouting abstract ikebanas of steel rods. These pillars troop across the green, stretching into the sky, an exact distance apart from each other, so far connecting nothing to nothing.

‘That is the Taj Corridor!’ Guddu’s voice leaps with excitement.

‘Don’t call it that!’ Pintu grins. ‘Madam-ji now insists everyone call it the Yamuna Corridor.’

This is part of one of the most controversial construction projects in the country. The madam in question is the megalomaniac Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayavati. Along with grand residences and massive statues of herself (made by the same local sculptor who once served Saddam Hussein), the corridor is another stamp that the madam will leave on the state. It is a six-lane, access-controlled, aquaducted super-highway that will stretch from Delhi to the corner of Agra where the Taj Mahal sits. The road, which met with huge protests on its inception because of the potential damage to both the countryside and the target monument, has been shelved and revived several times; now Mayavati has pushed it through, building it under the more neutral name of Yamuna, the river that it will accompany along its course.

When our road passes under the Corridor’s route, we get out of the car. One huge pillar looms above us, a few metres to the left.

‘You know,’ Guddu says, ‘they will have scoured concrete surface all the way through, latest technology, no tar, no chips, no stones, just pre-fab slabs of road, just imagine the profit. Six lanes, but expandable later to eight.’

Pintu puts his fists on the small of his back and stretches. ‘You know…’ he arches himself back to regain his full height, ‘…this thing is going to pass right over the village where we were born.’

Guddu also extends the joints of his shoulders. ‘Yes…they’ve acquired land from all of us. Very good money. But as a farmer – we were gentleman-farmers once, you know – you don’t want to sell land, but there was no choice.’

‘Anyway,’ Pintu turns his back to the road and steps a bit into the fields, ‘once this thing is up, you know what they will do for entertainment in the village?’

‘What?’ I also turn away from the road.

‘Every evening the people will climb the embankment to the highway and watch the cars whizz by for hours.’ Pintu positions himself.

‘Pintu Bhaiya is right!’ Guddu is on the other side of the road out of respect for his older brother and me, the guest. He calls out over his shoulder. ‘That’s what they will do, sit there and gawp at the speeding cars and how there is no wear and tear on the tyres!’

‘Well, who can blame them? It won’t be like our country roads, which eat up rubber as if it was a sweet dish!’ Pintu and I are angled away from each other as we each begin. Guddu has started a bit before and I can hear his piss slapping into the bushes, interrupted by the noise of passing cars and motor-cycles. For a while we water the countryside, communing silently like proper Indian men. By the time Pintu and I finish, Guddu is back near the car, holding out a bottle of water in his left hand. Pintu holds out his hands absently as Guddu pours water over them. He’s still looking up admiringly at the invisible highway arching over us. ‘What a road it will be, hain? What a piece of work!’

The day after my visit to the silica factories in Godhra, I am taken to meet three dead men.

Heading east on the highway to Indore with Magan, my guide from the workers’ union, we turn on to a secondary road and wind our way through the countryside. The air is fresh and, again, the fields are green and full. But up close, I’m suddenly not sure about the quality of the crop. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the stalks of corn and millet look thin and reedy; they already rustle too much.

Every now and then we pass a village set back a little from the road, the thatched roofs steep and descending almost to the ground. We reach a village called Kharkua – Salty Well – and we gun off the road and on to a dirt track. Parking in a lane, we walk through a small gate in a thorn hedge and then down through a field to a thatched house. As we approach, Magan calls out and there is a quiet, almost inaudible response from within.

Ducking almost to a crouch, we pass under the roof and enter the shadowy vault of the hut. There are two men standing there. Both are younger than thirty, but I can’t tell their age with any precision – they both look young and old at the same time.

‘This is Hajiriya and this is Gajiriya,’ Magan tells me. The men greet me with small gestures of folded hands, not quite meeting my eyes. Both are wearing the traditional short tribal dhoti and frayed T-shirts. Behind the men sits an old woman, staring into the distance. ‘And this is the boys’ mother,’ Magan says. The woman looks at me but says nothing, giving us only the faintest of nods. Magan turns to me ‘You know she has five sons, all afflicted with the illness. The older three are not here, two are at work and one has gone to another village, and then there are these two here. Can you imagine?’

As I finish nodding to the men and their mother, I see there is another woman, maybe in her early thirties, standing a bit further back. There are four kids clinging to her but looking straight at me, children between the age of two and eight. She is the wife of one of the older brothers, the only one who’s married.

The younger woman pushes the children off and gestures to me to sit on the large string bed. I do so, sinking into the net, my legs awkwardly crossing the wooden frame. There is a nervousness, a timidity of greeting that makes me uneasy. I’ve hardly been expecting a cheerful reception, but nor did I expect such a passive welcome.

Hajiriya and Gajiriya are not the first tribals to have gone looking for work in a city. That bleak migration, that long, slow yo-yo-ing between the unreliable land and the brutal town has been happening since the arrival of industrialisation in the nineteenth century. The difference is that these two migrant workers have come back with their future hacked off.

They live in an old space, connected simply to the land around it, which should normally be liberating; but here, hard poverty has dried everything up, squeezed, wrinkled and made brittle all the soft edges you find even in the simplest of India’s rural households. I look around and see the bumpy, mud walls, the bent tree trunks on which the loft is supported above the main seating area. There are odds bits of vegetation and vessels hanging from the walls and rafters, chickens running around, a big billy-goat tethered just outside, chewing something. I notice there is no offer of tea or anything to eat, unusual even among the poorest villagers, and it occurs to me there may not be any milk or tea to offer visitors. Or maybe they just don’t want to offer it to us.

Magan sits next to me and starts to chat with Hajiriya in a mixture of Hindi and Bhilali, going through what sounds like a check-list. Did this happen? No. Has so-and-so come yet? No. Have you had this letter? No. How’s the coughing and the breathlessness? What about this medicine? Yes. You and him both? Yes. Since when? What about the other brothers?

Slowly, between the silences and asides, I put the story together for myself. Their father died a while back, leaving a small piece of land that doesn’t yield enough, specially for five brothers, with nothing much to harvest between February and August. When the labour contractor came to the village, saying that there is work in the silica factories, when he offered crazy amounts of money per day, who didn’t want to go? First the two older brothers went, then the third, then Hajiriya, and finally, for the longest stint, Gajiriya, who is the youngest. All the work was ‘unofficial’ – all the payment was in cash and there was no record on paper. At night they slept in sheds provided by the factory or in huts nearby. Every now and then they took a break, came home on the bus, bringing back the money and a cough.

‘Here we can’t make much,’ Hajiriya says, ‘maybe thirty to forty rupees a day, at most. There they said they would pay two rupees per sack, however many boris we could fill in a day. So if I filled sixty boris that meant a hundred and twenty rupees. Per day.’

Later, as an exercise, I try and do the sums in Sterling. Forty rupees is about sixty pence now, but a few years ago it was less, between forty and fifty pence. One hundred and twenty rupees is £1.62 today, three or four years ago it would have been about £1.30 for almost twelve hours of labour. Two rupees per bori, per sack, is an almost indecipherable £0.0271. I give up – the different numbers don’t talk
the same language.

‘And how long did you work there?’

‘I worked there for less than a year, but not in one go. I would come home after every couple of weeks. Gajiriya went on and off for about two years.’

When I ask at what age they went, the boys tell me ten and eleven, but Magan later corrects that: ‘They would have gone at about thirteen or fourteen. No ten-year-old can pick up one of those boris.’

‘I am twenty,’ says Hajiriya, ‘and this fellow is…how old are you, rey? He’s seventeen.’

Gajiriya squats next to me, staring at the ground, saying nothing, nodding every now and then, to agree or disagree. When I ask him something, other people answer for him. It doesn’t feel as if he’s unable to talk; there seems to be no physical impediment. It’s as if life has robbed him of speech, as if a disbelief at his own condition has turned him mute. Following his gaze downwards, I notice something: there are small balloons at the end of each of Gajiriya’s fingers, the fingertips are swollen, turning each finger into a weird probe shape. Arching over its swelling, the thumb of his left hand still has a long, manicured vanity nail, typical of western Indian men.

‘I came and warned you, didn’t I?’ Magan breaks the silence. ‘Four years ago, right? Before these two went.’

‘Yes, you did. We didn’t listen to you.’ The old woman’s voice is clear. ‘Even when the older ones came back coughing, we didn’t listen.’

She quickly covers her mouth with the end of her sari, as if she shouldn’t have allowed the words to come out.

‘We should have listened.’

We’ve been joined by a third young man, who lives next door. I can see his thin body under the torn vest, bulging with the same distensions as Hajiriya and Gajiriya, arms swollen where they shouldn’t be, muscles absent where they should be, his torso caved in, his eyes cul-de-sacs. I try and calculate how much each of these young men weighs – none seems to be more than fifty kilos, all the flesh horribly redistributed by the silicosis. The medicines given to silicosis victims are basically the ones for tuberculosis and these are nothing more than elaborate placebos. The compensation the Farmers and Workers Union is demanding from the Government is a million rupees for the family of a worker who has died from silicosis and half amillion for a victim who is still alive. It’s still a demand – there is no agreement yet from any authority.

At some point, I feel I should try and say something. I open my mouth but nothing very much comes out. Every question I think of sounds stupid. The answers are all there, inscribed on the faces and bodies of everyone around me.

I take recourse to my camera and it’s just as bad. What do I frame? I ask the three boys to stand up for a ‘portrait’. First each one alone and then all three together. Then one of Hajiriya and Gajiriya with their mother. I distrust the pictures the moment I take them, pictures that have been taken many, many times over, too many times, in independent India. The subaltern in his sparse habitat, the tribal as victim, the afflicted industrial worker as photographed object.

As I’m photographing the boys, they start talking about the contractor who came to recruit them.

‘Does he still come?’ I ask.

‘He doesn’t come.’ Hajiriya shakes his head. ‘He knows we know. We all know what those factories do to you.’

‘So now they are recruiting from much further away,’ Magan adds, ‘from other states, all the way north in Rajasthan, from further south in Gujarat.’

‘We will kill that contractor if he comes here again.’ Suddenly there is a small pulse from Gajiriya. ‘The villagers will all gather and kill him.’

Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, is an ugly, treeless, light-brown town. Driving into the city from the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh, the green of the fields – planted with pearl millet and sorghum, anjan trees and mangoes – disappears abruptly, as though vegetation has no permit to enter. Once we cross the border from MP, official-looking boards appear at the roadside, bearing the slogan Nirmal Gujarat – Spotless Gujarat – part of a campaign to encourage cleanliness in the state’s towns and villages.

It was here that in 2002 the right-wing Hindu government set in motion a pogrom against Gujarat’s Muslim population. Fifty-nine people were burned alive in a railway carriage on tracks leading south from Godhra, a Muslim mob blamed for the murders, and ‘revenge’ unleashed. In the violence that followed, nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed, and hundreds more raped or burned out of their homes. The ‘Nirmal Gujarat’ advertised on the boards has since been trying to wipe away the bloodstains. One of the great propaganda projects undertaken by the State government has been to promote Gujarat’s economic success since 2002, an orgiastic rush for profits encouraged by the authorities and internalised by many middle-class Gujaratis.

Prajapati is a squat, square little man in his late-fifties, the manager of a stone-crushing factory in an industrial zone on the edge of town. In Godhra, and nearby in Balasinore, these factories process silica quartz, used for making glass and as a scouring agent for muddy pipes on oil rigs and in tunnelling equipment. Waiting at the factory gates, I can see workers walking about, some of them with little yellow snouts strapped to their faces, like children’s party-masks of Hanuman, the monkey god. And I can hear a constant sound, like a mini-landslide of grinding rock. But having announced myself to the clerk at the front desk, the machinery comes to a halt on the other side of the wall, replaced after a few minutes by the rattle of an engine coming round the corner. Prajapati appears on a motorbike that’s about 800ccs too light for him. He bumps up to me on the hard mud road and slowly parks his machine. I can’t see his eyes behind his gold-rimmed shades.

His handshake is limp, just a light clasp of sweaty fingertips, no palm involved at all. Most Gujaratis are averse to unnecessary touching, especially with strangers. I am Gujarati myself, and I switch to the language as I greet him. This throws Prajapati slightly – I can tell from his introduction that he has been prepping his Hindi for the guy from Delhi.

‘Oh, are we Gujarati?’ He asks, relaxing slightly.

‘Yes, yes, parents from Ahmedabad.’

‘Right, okay, right. I was on my way to have my lunch when my man called, but I turned right around and came back. Come, let’s sit in my office.’ He turns to the clerk. ‘Ei, switch on the AC!’

As a tube-light flickers on, Prajapati settles himself into a swivel chair under a small shelf holding statues of various gods and goddesses each with their own dedicated incense stand. Prominent in the middle is a lurid calendar depicting a baby Krishna draped with an old garland of yellow flowers. Behind and to the side is a big plate-glass window through which you can see into the main shed. It’s an office exactly like a million factory offices all over India, spartan except for the rattling air-conditioner, a tiny green-lit bunker from which a man can brutalise those working in the heat outside.

The fine dust generated in these factories gets into the lungs, disabling them and turning the blood into water. The disease is called Silicosis, and there is no cure; all one can do is stave off the inevitable. Over the last two decades, the victims in this part of India have mainly come from the Bhil and Bhilala tribes in the neighbouring districts of Alirajpur and Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh, where uncertain harvests and failed state support have pulled the ground from under them. Despite protests by trade unions and inspections by human rights agencies, the factories have continued to operate with impunity under the state Government, another of whose slogans is Garvi Gujarat, Proud Gujarat.

‘I really don’t know what the fuss is about,’ he says, cutting to the chase, Gujarati to Gujarati. ‘All the factories here have installed new extractors since 2006 as required by the agencies. It’s not that we weren’t careful before, but now we are extra careful. It’s never been as bad as people claim, but now there’s no problem at all.’ Costing roughly 350,000 rupees, and another 50,000 to install, extractors are far cheaper than compensation. Why would any sensible profit-seeker hesitate?

When I ask about the deaths among the tribals from Madhya Pradest, Prajapati’s guard drops. Now it’s him and me, two Hindus of upper caste, and he expects me to understand.

‘Look…have you ever been to these people’s villages? Have you seen, you must have seen…’ – he leans forward – ‘how much these people drink? All that local hooch. They lie around all day, drinking, and it’s that liquor that destroys their lungs more than anything else.’

Prajapati opens a button of his synthetic shirt. The air-conditioning isn’t proving effective yet. His tone changes, a hard edge under the affable chat. ‘Look, we do say clearly that it’s dangerous work. We have never denied that we work with somewhat hazardous materials but we take all precautions. I mean, look at me, what do you see?’

Leaning back in his swivel chair, his gold frames glinting, folds of muscle gone to paunch, his fingers loaded with astrological rings, Prajapati waits for a beat and answers his own question:

‘I mean, if all this is so dangerous why has nothing happened to me? I’ve been here since 1980! I weigh, what, seventy-nine, eighty kilos? I am fit, for my age, that is. I’m fifty-nine, I am active, I work here too, I run this place. I’m here six days out of seven, sometimes every day of the week!’

‘It must be strenuous, running this factory, especially in the heat?’

‘It is, it is, Joshi bhai, it’s not a picnic. But that is the exact point, we all do what we have to, to fill our stomachs!’

‘At our age we need to have regular medical check-ups, don’t we?’

At the mention of medicine, Prajapati suddenly becomes cheerful.

‘Regular! Reg-gu-lar! Every six months, I go to Baroda!’ Prajapati names a doctor in the nearest big city. ‘He’s the leading chest specialist, you know? Some would say the very best in whole of Gujarat! I get a thorough check-up every six months, no fooling around!’ Prajapati scratches the hair on his chest lightly, as if remembering the touch of the physician. ‘You see, these people, these workers, they come and go, but I’m the one who has to stay here.’

After a while, the clerk comes in and makes a small grunt. Prajapati stands up and invites me to take a walk around the main shed.

‘The only hazardous area is the collection chamber in the silo, where the crusher sends down the processed stone.’ Prajapati jumps on to tightly packed sacks, called boris, and strides forward as if walking on a rocky beach.`What we do is make sure nobody spends too much time inside the area. It’s not fully automated yet. We’ll get there one of these days. But workers never get exposed, they only go in when the dust has settled.’

We make our way to the back of the shed, past a machine two floors high that seems to be pouring rock into an equally huge receptacle just out of sight on the other side of a high wall. We pass into a shaded back section of the shed where there is a metal-walled chamber, with a door that is shut. Prajapati gestures to the clerk, who opens the door.

At first it seems there is another wall just behind the door, an opaque, light brown screen, moving and shimmering in place. As I get to the door, I can sort of see there is a source of light somewhere in the shed, and then, when I step in, I understand. From a high opening, sunlight fights its way down through the thick murk of dust, losing the battle by the time it touches what must be ground. The faint illumination silhouettes a massive cylinder, at the bottom of which I can make out an opening; there is something white and cloth-like below the opening, an empty bori, I guess, because next to it are small walls of packed sacks. Suddenly, I am inhaling the mist of acrid granules enveloping my face. I can’t see beyond fifteen feet.

‘Go in, go in, nothing will happen to us.’ Says Prajapati from outside the door.
The clerk adds his own encouragement. ‘Yes, go right in if you want! Nothing happens!’

I am scared to breathe, but after a few moments there is no choice. As my eyes adjust, I see three figures on the far side of the funnel, their outlines fuzzy, standing directly in the residue of sunlight. One of them watches the other two moving a sack as if in slow motion. The bottom half of these men’s faces are covered with the Hanuman masks. The funnel is clearly dormant, but the dust is alive, rising up even as it closes in around us. I start to back away. Even though I’m not five feet inside the chamber, for a moment I’m terrified I’ve lost the door.

‘My father encouraged me to lead the life I wanted to lead,’ explains writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi, ‘because he had not been able to be the artist he had wanted to be.’ In ‘Tracing Puppa’ from Granta 104: ‘Fathers’, Joshi remembers his father’s struggle to overcome social and political convention, to be his own man. In this interview for Granta.com, Joshi explains how he came to write ‘Tracing Puppa’, reflects on the ‘energy of book-crazed Calcutta’ and confesses to ‘secretly or not so secretly dreaming of writing for Granta’.