Mahadev Govind Ranade. Leaving aside his air of self-importance, he looks marginally foreign, as all statues do. - Amit Chaudhuri

Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look.

Writers don't so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it's an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room ... And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments ... but the houses and lanes in which people live.

... the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt.