Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

tangail= A class of jamdani(q.v.) sari. Although jamdanis were traditionally woven by Muslims, Hindu weavers who moved during Partition from Tangail, now in Bangladesh, developed India’s modern jamdani industry. West Bengali jamdanis are often called Tangail jamdanis, and they typically have many buti (small, usually floral motifs, created as a repeat against a plain ground) woven throughout the field, often diagonally.

tangi= A kind of (lethal) axe.

tanpura= A long-necked plucked lute. Its body shape slightly resembles that of the sitar, although it has no frets — and the strings are played open. It has four or five (occasionally six) wire strings, which are plucked in sequence in a regular pattern to create a harmonic resonance on the basic note. It is exclusively an instrument of accompaniment, usually to a vocal recital.

tashar= A type of ‘raw’ silk. The entry in Hobson-Jobson is ‘tussah, tusser’.

toka= A wide-brimmed hat made of dried palm leaves.

ufff= Most commonly an expression of irritation, this can be an intensifier in contexts that express admiration and even fear.

This book could not have been written without the generosity of the Free Word Centre and the Belgian literary organisation Het Beschrijf/Passa Porta, which gave me a six-week residency in the Passa Porta writers’ apartment in Brussels in autumn 2011. Passa Porta also gave me a crucial three weeks in the apartment in summer 2012. I am very grateful to them for their support.

I would like to thank the following people for all their help and support:

Penny Hoare.

Peter Straus.

Clara Farmer, Poppy Hampson.

Suzanne Dean.

Sudeep Chakravarti, JM Coetzee, Judy Corbalis, Mahasweta Devi, Jean Drèze, Damon Galgut, Grant Gillespie, Michelle de Kretser, Dominic Leggett, Vestal McIntyre, Alison Mercer, Anuradha Roy, Amartya Sen, Rose Tremain.

Sreyashi Dastidar, Devashri Mukherjee, Tushita Patel, Deeptanil Ray.

Sumanta Banerjee, Arpita Bhattacharjee, Krishnendu Bhattacharjee, Kate Bland, the late Satyesh Chakraborty, Swapan Chakraborty, Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Soumitra Das, Kanchan Datta, Ilke Froyen, Anik Ghosh, Shreela Ghosh, Meru Gokhale, Mandy Greenfield, Durgapada Hajra, Jenny Hewson, Ieuan Hopkins, Ian Jack, Seema Jayachandran, Pradip Krishen, Udayan Mukherjee, Amiya Nayek, Basudeb Nayek, Susannah Otter, Rohini Pande, Nicci Praça, Ritwik Rao, Debdulal Ray, Saktidas Roy, Chiki Sarkar, Malabika Sarkar, Sudipto Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Ruth Warburton.

Richard Elwes, Tim Gowers, Christian Lübbe.

For giving me a home away from home: Anubha Das, Bulbul Mitra, Devashri & Udayan Mukherjee, Brinda Sirkar.

PERMISSIONS

Parts of the descriptions of saris in the ‘Glossary’ are from The Sari: Styles, Patterns, History, Techniques by Linda Lynton. © 1995 Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames & Hudson.

Some of the entries on trees and flowers in the ‘Glossary’ are from Pradip Krishen’s Trees of Delhi (Dorling Kindersley: Delhi, 2006), by kind permission of the author.

The lines from Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (Quercus, 2009), translated by Carol Brown Janeway, appear by kind permission of author, translator and Quercus Books.

The sentence from James Salter’s Light Years (Penguin Modern Classics, 2007) is reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books UK.

The sentence from War and Peace , translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and published by Vintage Classics in 2008, appears by kind permission of Random House UK.