‘I sell mirrors in the city of the blind.’ - Kabir
“Bom Bolenath. Bom Shiva.”
The young sannyasi brushed his dreadlocks out of his face and held his chillum ready to be lit by one of his disciples. His parents had named him Aubrey, but now he preferred to be known as Firangi Baba, the foreign sadhu. It worked well with the locals.
Aubrey had taken Kolkata by storm. Every night he held court in an abandoned mansion in Black Town. His ancestors had lorded over Bengalis from what they had called White Town, but Aubrey had crossed over. Not that it mattered. He had made a useful discovery. The servitude his peers had forced upon Bengalis a hundred years earlier was still around. The colonizers were gone, but the country’s elite had ruthlessly made the British divide-and-conquer strategy the
