No-one could remember exactly when the record-player first started appearing on the crowded Calcutta street. If you ask the people that grew up there, they will tell you that he was just always there, as much a part of the street as the Punjabi tea-shop, the storefront Kali temple, and the Bihari rickshawallahs napping in their conveyances, which also served as their home for the night. The record-player came in the middle of the morning rolling along his apparatus on a cart, and set it up directly in the middle of the street, so that the cows, rickshaws, and pedestrians had to go around him, like a river parted by a high rock. But nobody minded, because for the price of a half-anna coin (which was nothing, even in those days), he would play the song of your choice. He might be asked to play a song by name, or just given the money and asked to play music, and then he took out the huge shellac 78-rpm disc, stiff and shining, wound up the handle to the side of the player, and set the arm on a particular groove. All at once, the street became an instant party.

The records he played were truly cosmopolitan - Saigal, Noor Jehan and other artistes of the Hindustani cinema; Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey from America; obscure English balladeers whose recordings he got from the leavings of the thousands of English families going home after the sun set on their empire. The people of the street didn't care what he played, the music was the thing, and as soon as he put something on everyone commenced dancing, the little boys and girls in wild exuberance, the rickshawallahs in jerky gestures, the respectable ladies peering from their balconies with a clapping of their hands, the accountants and clerks in the shops tapping their feet, the street dogs barking in chorus, even the pujari in the shopfront temple nodding his head with pleasure.

The player wailed out its music in wavering speed, so that what was meant to be a mournful ballad became a tinny, squeaky cartoon soundtrack and what was meant to be a throbbing swing number was transformed into a lament. The people of the block didn't care; the music was the thing. It drew children of all classes out of their homes and running on the street behind him. The record-player had seen, he had caused, more happiness than most people. 

At some point the record-player started bringing along a large black box, and announcing, "Delhi dekho, Bombay dekho". It was a viewing-machine, into which children peered to see pictures of the Red Fort, Gateway of India, Qutab Minar. For five paise they could see ten slides. The price included the playing of a record, suitable accompaniment to the slides being exhibited. The record-player thus brought to the block all the thrill of the moviegoing experience, in miniature, alfresco, and on the cheap.

But not just Delhi and Bombay, one day he had a set of slides of San Francisco. Delhi dekkho, Bombay dekho, Amrika dekho, he called, and the children and the hawkers and the merchants were all drawn to the viewing machine where they saw the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the cable-cars. The soundtrack to this viewing was a recording of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and Caruso.

It was not just children that he took on this visual voyage. He also found steady custom among the Bihari rickshawallahs, who lined up with their spare change and for whom Delhi and Bombay were equally far off. All this was in the forties, you see, and the war...

This was in the forties, the time of the war, and of partition, and many people had lost part of their lives in the killings. In that very street, anyone from the quarter will tell you, the army was called out and a curfew was declared. "Even air and water will not move after nine o'clock," declared Major Smythe, the garrison commander. Every night the army jeeps would roll slowly down the street. One night one of the rickshawallahs, who slept in the doorway of Khan the fruit merchant, stepped out and squatted over the gutter to urinate, his back to the street. At that moment a jeep came by. "Hands up!" shouted the British officer. The rickshawallah didn't understand English, or he was a little deaf, or he was fixed where he was by his immense fear. The soldiers didn't repeat their order. There was a crack, and the rickshawallah's body tumbled forward into the gutter, joining its recent efflux.

There had also been the great hunger of '43, when the white men took the supplies of Burma rice intended for Bengal and gave it to their own soldiers - `to fight fascism' - and three million brown people sank slowly to their knees and never got up. On this very street there were old women dragging along their infants sucking at their withered dugs, pleading to the closed shutters: rice, a fistful for rice for my children, mother, god bless you and your seven generations. In the morning the police came and took away those who found final shelter in the night. Some of the Marwaris formed a relief committee and brought sacks of rice from god knows where, and the Marwari women started cooking the rice in huge steel pots on the street early in the morning. By seven o'clock there was a mob of people that spilled clear across the tram tracks to Burra Bazaar. If people brought pots, the women ladled out the rice gruel into the pot; with others, they poured it into their cupped fists, and they ate it standing there, raising their hands to their mouths and their beings invaded by food, for the first time in weeks, and they sank coughing to the footpath, but got up again and held out their empty hands, asking with bright hopeful eyes for more. By ten that day the police had to be called in, the food was running out, and at ten thirty the food was finished and the fine strapping police on horseback drove with batons into the ranks of the hungry who had not been fed, would not be fed that day or the next or the one after that, and so could do nothing but empty out their lungs in screaming, as the whole street became one profound wail of hunger, and the police on their horses flew into the crowd and trampled them like elephants over grass.

In this way, and others, people lost people.

But then the white people were forced to leave and it was all over; brown people could swim in the pools reserved for Europeans and the nation was independent at last. Those who could swim in the pools they had been kept out of felt very happy.

Who exactly was lost? Who made it through? People soon forgot. What happened to that clerk who worked in the jeweler's office? Had he returned to his family in Gujarat or had the bad time claimed him? And that beggar that used to sit at the crossroads, mumbling obscenities and Vedic hymns under his breath - where was he? Did the police take him away, or did he finally succumb to the filth he ate, or was the problem that he didn't have even that to eat? The famine wouldn't have claimed him; the beggars of the city did had done better than everybody else, experienced as they were at finding food in unexpected places. It was the people who didn't think they would ever need to go out looking for something so elemental as food that didn't make it through, middle class people, inexperienced in hunger. So what happened to the beggar?

People asked such questions only in the first year or two after the great hunger. But they had their lives to get on with. Those who were lost were lost. There were no memorials, no plaques, no records. The white people, when they left, had filled up the schools, the libraries, with their history textbooks and their poetry; these were never replaced, and the children of the street sang "Round and round the mulberry bush," and knew the exact dates of Ethelred the Unready and Richard Lionheart, and they wept over the murder of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury cathedral. There was a nation to be built, new babies to take to the temple, sweets to be bought for the Kali puja. A new cinema had been built at Chowringhee and the young girls fell in love with Ashok Kumar, the young bucks with Devika Rani.

In the record-player's viewing-machine, a picture of a girl started appearing in the middle. Between Humayun's tomb and Hanging Gardens, there she was - a small, shrivelled girl, neither smiling nor frowning, her intense eyes directly meeting the viewer's gaze. Since none of the pictures had captions, everything was equally mysterious. Sometimes somebody complained, perhaps the rice-merchant, saying, what is this, this is not Amrika, I paid for ten slides and I got nine, give me one more. Without changing expression the record-player put in one more slide, of Union Station or the Presidio.

But once in a while a child would look up from the machine, up at the player, with an expression that was not one of delight or wonder, and run away fast. The man went on playing his records.

But even the records - if people listened closely to the words, as they rarely did, they might pick up whole phrases that did not belong to the song - in the middle of "Doggie-woggie-wop," for instance, the jeweler's son was sure he heard the line, "and the blood that flows at sunset." Within the good-natured cacophony of the Hindi songs others picked up the wails of the hungry. But people rarely listened to the lyrics, the music was the thing, and anyway the sound was so tinny that it was difficult to separate, identify, and comprehend human voices from their musical accompaniments. But often the inner ear can pick up what our normal faculties cannot, and so, as the record-player played the songs people bought, his audience became increasingly uneasy, for reasons unknown to their rational minds. The urchins would try to dance with the abandon of former times, and the music would be superficially the same, but after a few halting steps, they would quieten, and look here and there, and shuffle off.

Rumors began to circulate about the record-player. The Marwari ladies may have started them. They forbade their children to listen to the music or, especially, look inside the viewing-machine. The children sneaked out, anyway, and lined up along with the rest till one of their mothers, who had been watching, came down and dragged them out of the line, slapping them all soundly, even the ones that were not hers. As she left, she glared at the record-player, who, as usual, had no emotion on his face.

But even the taking away of the Marwari children didn't make much of a difference in the line in front of the viewing-machine; the rickshawallahs still needed their entertainment. The Marwari women had to be content with looking down from their balconies and being subjected to the music too early in the afternoon when people were still resting. So they shared certain speculations about the content of the pictures with their servants and maids; and their servants and maids went to the other houses they worked in and further shared those speculations. Finally the pujari got up one evening in his shopfront temple and began denouncing the record-player loudly, ringing a giant brass bell as he did, so that all the street came out on to their balconies, stoops, and windows to look and hear. "Go away, go away, evil man! Why have you come here, evil man! Go away, go away!" 

The record-player showed no reaction. He cranked up the gramophone with a Noor Jehan song that would ordinarily have set the street-urchins dancing. Then the rice-merchant came down from his first-floor office, clearly intent on doing him harm. The rice-merchant was a big man; he picked up the entire gramophone as it was playing and lifted it high above his head. "I'll break this bastard machine of yours, bastard, over your bastard head." The rice-merchant's voice was raised for the benefit of the extensive audience he was enjoying, up and down the street. The record-player finally looked at him, his eyes met the rice-merchant's, and everything froze for a second.

The rice merchant put down the gramophone gently on its stand. "Who is that girl?" he asked.

The record-player remained silent.

The Marwari women, looking down from the rooftops, took up the question. "Who is that girl?"

The pujari on his temple stoop repeated, "Yes, yes, who is that girl?"

"WHO IS THAT GIRL?" the whole street asked.

The record-player, after all these years, finally spoke. He looked slowly around the street, up at the balconies, the shops, the stoops, and met every person's gaze. He met every single person's eyes, if only for a second. Then he spoke.

"She is the daughter you have lost." 

Then he packed up his equipment, his gramophone and his viewing machine, and walked out of the street and was never seen again.

Suketu Mehta