Summary

A Post Office on Sunday: Around midnight Piya wakes and joins Kanai who tells her about Nirmal. Nilima believed that Nirmal became involved in Morichjhapi because of his revolutionary ideology, but Kanai believes that it was because of the poet Rilke’s words that, “life is lived in transformation” (282). He tells Piya one of Nirmal’s stories about Lord Canning, a man who wanted to build a great city on the Matla River. Canning was warned by a shipping inspector, Henry Piddington, that a city built on the river would be vulnerable to cyclones and tidal surges, but Piddington was dismissed as crazy and the city was built. A tidal surge destroyed the city only five years later.

A Killing: Kanai, woken by voices at 3 a.m., finds Horen and Nogen looking...