‘where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom’ ( St Cyril Road, Bombay ) - Amit Chaudhuri

Each view has a history. You sense you're where others have been.

It does like writers, but it's also Calcutta now, not the Calcutta of 25 or 30 or 100 years ago. They maybe haven't got over the idea of it, but the reality, the context that produced that, has disappeared.

Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.