I visit Gaur in winter. 'Someone has died,' informs the driver that day, his tone reminding me, in a bloodless way, of my first school lesson: Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. My co-passenger is my new friend, Jim Ishmael. I had met him the previous day and because he is the student of a student, he chooses to address me as 'Ma'am'. I am taken by his name. It is the best kind of cocktail I can imagine – Joseph Conrad's man in Africa mixed with the egotistic, wanderlust-bitten American of Herman Melville. No, he does not tell me 'Call me Ishmael,' so I settle on 'Jim'.
'What could be the religion of the dead man?' wonders our driver, Ganesh, as he stubs out the incense sticks stuck into the crevices of the dashboard. Guru Nanak and Lokenath Baba sit together at the front, their white beards in brotherly togetherness, inhaling joystick smoke. Jim and I do not answer the driver's wayward question. He probably thinks we have not heard him, for he raises his voice and offers a self-explanatory truism, 'Whether he is burnt or buried – for either way, we go back to the earth – drivers know that the road is the ultimate destination.'
The silence of the cold December morning disturbs me in a way that is difficult to explain. So I tell the driver, almost without thinking, 'The dead man must be cold'. But the driver is not paying attention to my words. 'He must have been a driver,' he continues with his monologue, and before I can ask why, he gives me the reason: 'Only drivers know that the road to death is the road itself.' With a co-passenger named Jim Ishmael, it is perhaps not extraordinary that explorations of death filter into my consciousness like the sunlight between the thick foliage of the mango orchards that line the road on either side, their imagined sticky syrupy sweetness still half a year away.
The 16 kilometres from Malda to the ancient ruined city of Gaur pass in a favourite Bengali indulgence: criticism. Jim finally starts talking, and his conversation lights up with complaints – against politicians who have not served Gaur well, against teachers who have been miserly with marks, against the general rules that maintain balance in the world, against the Archaeological Survey of India and history itself. One of his questions unnerves me: 'But why do you care for history? Why do you want to know how dead people lived?' Before I can take shelter in George Santayana's words, that 'those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,' he has convicted me: 'I hate two things: history and religion. Both are about the dead.'