My supposedly one-month Christmas vacation to Calcutta became a lifelong homelessness. I was just promoted to Class IX which was in charge of the annual school Saraswati Puja. I had stood first. I had bought my new textbooks, which, alas, I would never read. The shift to Calcutta was the start of a cascading series of changes. I became distant from Ma. My voice had broken when we were in Bhowanipur, at Dada’s in law’s house. When Ma came a few months later I was shy to go to her. This was pretty weird: I was the baby boy! There fell a screen of self-consciousness that never lifted. I loved her, I worshipped her, but I stopped being as natural to her as, say, Sonada. We shifted from house to house, and after Didi’s marriage, in 1952, had lost all center. Our family as I had known it in...