The last few students were just exiting Raktim’s classroom when Joy’s father strode in, hauteur and irritation stamped on his face like permanent fixtures. He was of medium height and dusky, and had dark circular patches on his cheeks, as if he had applied black shoe polish and forgotten to rub it off.

“I need to talk to you urgently,” he said. He attempted to yank out a chair from behind a bench, but in his excitable state he banged it against the bench, and it dropped sideways to the floor. He shot a look at Raktim, as if to say, “Retrieve it, you dope—what the hell are you just sitting there for?”

Raktim looked on without moving, his eyebrows raised.

The man would not bend to pick up the fallen chair. Instead he pulled out another one and plonked himself onto it, facing Raktim.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Bose?” asked Raktim.

“I sent my son here to learn English. The idea was to prepare him for a good career. You’ve taught him some English all right, but you’ve turned him into a vegetable! He speaks of not wanting to join the rat race and all kinds of other nonsense. You’ve spoilt his mentality; you’ve spoilt his life! It’s a criminal act, really. I could drag you to a court of law, and if I’m not doing it, it’s only for Joy’s sake—since you’ve so thoroughly brainwashed him! You can thank him that all I’m asking for now is for you to return the fee. After all, you’ve defeated the very purpose of my sending him here. You’re lucky I’m not demanding compensation!”

Though he was just twenty-eight years old, Raktim had seen enough of the world not to be astonished. Joy’s father, he knew, was a powerful real-estate baron with political connections. He also knew the man to be thoroughly unscrupulous.

“Joy’s a fine, earnest boy,” he replied. “He’s intelligent and hard-working. I don’t think you should worry about him. He’ll find his own way.”

“Find his own way? So this is the kind of toxic idea you’re feeding him! You speak as if he’s lost in the world. Let me assure you he’ll never be lost so long as I’m around. I’m taking him out of your classes—they’re exactly the reason he’s losing his way. It’s simple human psychology: people who haven’t made it big in life, whose best option is to teach others for a living, can’t stand the sight of others succeeding.”

“You count yourself successful, sir?”

“Of course, a hundred percent! What do you mean by that? Go ask around and see what people tell you.”

Mr. Bose’s voice had risen sharply, and Joy, who had been hanging around outside the room, made a sudden entry at this juncture.

His father immediately shouted, “Joy, I’m taking you off this course!”

“Papa,” said Joy, “why are you creating a scene here? This course is important to me, and I’m going to stay.” He walked up to his father and put a hand on his arm. “Come, Papa, let’s go. We can discuss this at home.”

“Chatterjee, you’ve turned my son against me,” Mr. Bose growled through clenched teeth. “Don’t for a moment think you can get away with this!”

“You shouldn’t say that, Papa. I think you should apologize to sir.”

“What?”

“Please apologize.”

“Are you out of your mind, Joy? What magic has he worked on you—!” He broke off as Joy led him toward the door.

“Good night, sir, and I’m really sorry.”

Similar allegations had been made against Raktim before. All I do is teach English and be myself, he thought. That was enough to raise the hackles of some people. But he felt proud of Joy.

When he got back home, he told his father and Sabita what had happened. All three tensed up a bit, but the tension was thin, like the film of ice that forms in a refrigerator when it’s switched on after defrosting. If you expose the film to the atmosphere, it melts in no time.

That night, as Raktim lay down in bed, his mind was so active that he did not fall asleep for a long time.

There was a belief that, when you died and turned to spirit, one of the first things you went through was a life review. The events of that afternoon triggered in Raktim a similar train of memories, going back to the time when he had first started to live, really live—when he was struggling to be reborn in spirit. The past came back to him as if he were watching a movie.

Raktim Chatterjee wished his roll number were one, so that he could go and deliver his piece as soon as the proceedings began. But his roll number was eleven—which meant he would have to wait till the ten recitationists before him had all taken their turn. The longer he waited, the more his heart pounded and the more he felt like a death-row inmate about to face his executioner. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, but the stratagem barely worked.

He had a knack for recitation, and he had prepared well, putting a great deal of thought into how he should tackle his piece, where the pauses should be and how long he should hold them, how to modulate his voice, which gestures he should apply where. He had practiced endlessly, declaiming to the wall in his room until, in his own estimation, his performance was beyond reproach. But it was one thing to excel for himself, and quite another to be as good before others. Audiences rattled him.

When the first contestant recited “Casabianca,” Raktim was at least partly attentive, but after that he began to lose focus, and by the time his teacher, seated on a staff chair at the back of the class, called out his name, he was in a stupefied daze.

Knees wobbling, he walked up to the dais, feeling foggy and heavy-headed, not to say ashamed that he was so uncontrollably sweating and trembling. He summoned all his will to fight down these feelings.

“‘Death the Leveller,’ by James Shirley,” he announced, pausing after the title and then again after naming the poet. Then he began: “The glories of our blood / Are shadows, not substantial things.” He stressed “glories” and “blood,” holding out his arms at shoulder height with the palms open. He shook, and his voice trembled, but he managed to hold his own. In the second line he paused again, quite effectively, after “shadows,” and when he said “substantial,” he gave the word the necessary punch. Practicing at home, he had employed a gesture here as well, bringing up his right hand and clenching his fist. Now, however, he thought better of it. After all, he would be coming up with another gesture in the very next line, “There is no armour against Fate.”

Here he wagged his right forefinger by way of emphasis, but his extended hand began to shake like a leaf in a storm. A ripple of sniggers and giggles passed through the classroom. At once Raktim’s teetering confidence collapsed. His mind went blank, and though in the days leading up to this moment he had known every line of the poem like the back of his hand, now his memory deserted him. Gregory, his benchmate, with whom he had left a copy of the poem, mouthed, “There is no armor.” (It was a liberty they were permitted to take.) Raktim threw him a desperate glance and hastened through the next few lines, too nervous to carry out all the hand movements he had prepared.

And then again the panic attack wrapped its fingers around his throat and choked him into silence. He stood there like an idiot, sweating, ears buzzing, trying but unable to think, until the teacher mercifully announced, “Okay, thank you, Raktim. Next speaker, please!”

He was in boarding school at that time, and it had got into his head that his father had put him there to stave off ill luck. Once he had heard an aunt caution his father, “A posthumous child brings bad luck to the family. He’ll be your ruin unless you do something about it. He’s snatched away your wife; who’s to say he won’t snatch away your wealth as well? You’d better get a priest to perform the necessary rites before it’s too late.”

Raktim did not see any priest coming to their house, nor had he any idea if someone could perform such rites in absentia, but he associated his being sent off to a boarding school with his aunt’s warning, and it shrank him inside. It was not something he could talk about with his friends, but sometimes in his bed at night, when everyone around him was asleep, he took up the matter with God. “Why did you take away my mother?” he would ask.

Still, he had a strong suspicion that, though his mother was not physically present, she was there in spirit for him, and he would talk to her and tell her about all the important things that happened to him. He had to do it in his mind, for he knew that otherwise he would be taken for a lunatic.

When the school-day ended after the class recitation test, he neither stayed back to play nor went home, but walked alone to the vast stretch of green space called the maidan. He knew where the secluded spots were, and he took himself to one of them and lay down on the grass amidst a cluster of trees. He looked up at the sky and watched, hypnotized, the endless expanse of blue above. A broken stream of clouds was moving across the sky like small boats on a sea, and he wished he could board one of them and travel far, far away.

Then a vision appeared on the face of the tranquil blue, as if it were a screen: he was standing, elegantly dressed in well-ironed school uniform, at the center of a stage; the spotlight was trained on him and, in the semi-darkness ahead, a hundred eager eyes watched his every movement. He gave a small, crisp bow and began: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”

He was Macbeth, the well-loved army general who wanted to be king, a once-good, sensitive man whose lust for power clashed violently with his moral sensibilities and drove him to the brink of a mental breakdown. It was the dead of night, and as he made his secret way to the benevolent King Duncan’s chamber with a dagger in his belt, he imagined a second dagger dangling before him, dripping blood. He reached out to take it. He was all a-tremble, and his voice shook, but these were the natural consequences of his “heat-oppressed brain.”

As the need arose, Raktim raised his voice or dropped it to a murmur, commanding the stage in masterly fashion, his hands and body speaking with an eloquence that matched his tongue’s. When at last he was through, there was a moment’s lull before the audience erupted into thunderous applause. He bent his head in a dignified bow and left the stage, feeling so light that he thought he might be able to fly.

And it suddenly occurred to him that the Raktim he saw in this vision was the real him—that he was not, in the actual sense, what he seemed to the world. What appeared to others was just a shadow of himself, and now he desperately wanted—urgently, with his heart and soul—to be the person his imagination had projected. And he sent a promise to his mother: “Ma, you’ll see, I’ll become exactly like that version of myself.”

The more he thought of it, the more the idea possessed him. Gooseflesh prickled his skin. He revisited his vision, and when he saw himself as he could be—brilliant, charismatic —he shouted out to the air, “Yes, that’s the real me! I’ll become myself. Nothing in the world can stop me.” A few people passing by stopped briefly in their tracks to watch him, but he was oblivious to their presence. A new hope stirred in him. The breeze caressed his face, the trees gave him a thumbs-up, and the heavens cheered him on: “Go for it, Raktim, go for it! Believe in yourself! Anything’s possible! You can do it!” When a nearby crow cawed from a tree, it seemed to be egging him on.

He rose and went home, his head buzzing with resolve. Entering his bedroom, he shut the door, hunted out a copy of Macbeth from his bookshelf, and leafed through it to the dagger scene. Had it not been for a lack of confidence, he would have chosen Macbeth’s dagger speech for his recitation, but he had not felt up to the challenge, and “Death the Leveller” had been the easier option. Since then, however, things had changed.

He was not sure of some of the words in the passage, and so, holding the book in his right hand and giving free rein to his left to express himself, he read through the passage—slowly, loudly, clearly, amending his delivery as he went along. Then he read it again, quickening his pace to give it a more natural, conversational feel.

From then on, at odd hours of every day and religiously at bedtime, Raktim became the murderous Macbeth, reliving his own vision in the privacy of his room and with increasing frequency. Early in the morning, he would go back to the place in the maidan where he had first received his inspiration. The combination of sky and open fields never failed to work its magic on him. He would stand before an imaginary audience and recite. Sometimes he would be dimly aware of the movement of others in the vicinity, people taking their morning constitutionals, but they in no way distracted him from his routine.

It was the winter vacation, and he was back home. He had goofed the final Math paper, and morning and evening he tiptoed, thief-like, toward the letter box, filled with fear. He did not breathe properly for those days; his breaths were shallow, his fingers shook, and the school report never arrived. He dreaded his father’s reaction if his results were bad, and he kept watching the latter for any tell-tale signs that his report had come without his knowledge.

His father, Nishikant Chatterjee, had a powerful physical presence which could open doors that were closed to others. He was a huge, fair, clean-shaven, graying man who rarely smiled. When, prior to its independence from the British, India had been broken up into two countries, Nishikant had been torn away from his ancestral roots and forced to begin life from scratch, all over again. It had taken some doing, but he had made the transition successfully. It helped that he belonged to an aristocratic, land-holding, zamindar family of East Bengal, which, post-partition, had become a part of Pakistan and was later to be known as Bangladesh. Though, in the changed circumstances, he had lost his privileged family status, his deportment was still that of a member of the ruling class.

Nishikant wanted his son to be good in all academic subjects, but, above all, he wanted him to be good in Math. At the time Raktim did not know why. Later he learnt that it was primarily because one needed mathematical skills in business.

Raktim felt very guilty as he waited. He felt small and ashamed of himself, and he did not know how he could explain to his father. It felt as if the end of the world would be upon him at any moment. Every time his father called him, he shuddered and thought, This is it. Now it’s all over. Now I’m finished. He could not play properly and he could not read or study without thinking about it, though still in the evenings he sat at his desk for hours, because his father wanted him to study and Raktim didn’t want to make him even angrier.

But study Math he could not. The subject just didn’t interest him. It was dry and did not relate to his life except in a purely formal way, and when he was alone there was no room in his mind or heart for things that were solely formal. Turning his mind to his Math studies was like throwing a tennis ball at a brick wall and expecting it to stick. There were so many other urges within him yearning to express themselves, other attractions that drew his attention far more forcefully and urgently.

He would daydream and enter another world, where there was no failure, no criticism, no hatred; where there was only success, adulation, and love. He would be an ace footballer, the star center-forward of the East Bengal Sporting Club, and as he dribbled past defender after defender on the confounded Mohun Bagan team, how the crowds roared, how their lusty cheers rent the sky! And when the ball left his boot like greased lightning and crashed like a cannonball into the back of the Mohun Bagan net, how his teammates lifted him up on their shoulders! How a Special Someone seated among the spectators leapt with joy and melted in warm admiration! How, in the evening, on a private flower-potted terrace, with the full moon shining overhead and the stars twinkling in all their wondrous glory, that Special Someone and he held hands and sipped champagne, and looked soulfully into each other’s eyes, and exchanged lingering kisses that were much, much more intoxicating than the wine!

Every time he heard a sound behind him he would start and stiffen, looking hard at the book he kept in front of him as a ruse. He began to daydream more and more, for it seemed to relieve him from his unbearable tension. But he felt at the same time that he was doing something terribly wrong, and whenever he dished out false, calculated answers to his father’s questions about his studies, he felt rotten inside.

He missed the report when it finally came, and as he sat down to dinner that night, he sensed its shadow on the grim lines of his father’s face. He stared at the table, clutched the sides of his chair, and shivered.

“What do you do in school?”

Raktim did not answer. He did not even look up.

“Do you study?”

Raktim braved a timid, split-second glance at his father and read utter disgust all over him.

“Why don’t you answer me, you fool! Have you lost your power of speech?”

“N…N…No.”

“No what?”

Raktim wished the floor would open up beneath him and swallow him, chair and all.

“Do you have any idea how much you got in Mathematics?”

Silence.

“Answer me!”

“No.”

“Is ‘No’ all you can say? Don’t you know any other word?”

What if I answered ‘No’ again? Raktim thought. What would happen?

“Why did you tell me you’d done well in your tests? Where did you pick up the habit of lying? What boys do you mix with in school these days?”

Raktim’s mouth was dry. He wanted to guzzle down some water but did not dare. He could dare, however, to think insolent thoughts, and he told himself, I don’t need to pick up lying from anyone—I’m an original genius!

“Go and get your Mathematics book. You can skip dinner tonight. From tomorrow, you will put in four hours of Mathematics every day.”

It was only the next day that Raktim saw the report. He had passed in Math, but barely.

The next year and the years after that, it was always the same story: Raktim never managed more than fifty percent in Math, though others were getting seventy or eighty percent—or, God knows, even ninety or ninety-five or a hundred per cent!

Set in Calcutta and Bhutan, HOWLS traces the life of Raktim Chatterjee, a boy born posthumously to a materially successful but emotionally distant father, who values mathematics, ambition, and control over emotional expression. When Raktim grows up and decides to teach, his father sees his choice almost as an act of treachery.

In the prologue, Raktim is confronted by the father of one of his students, who accuses Raktim of “spoiling” his son by encouraging him to question convention and think independently. The scene reflects the book’s central question: how far can you defy the status quo and live a life of your own? What does it cost you?

The opening chapters show Raktim as a bumbling school-boy, who is passionate about recitation but, because he trembles all over when it comes to the crunch, cannot get his act together. Lonely though he has always been, thanks in part to his strained relationship with his father, he draws emotional succour from feeling his mother’s loving presence around him and communing with her. These intensely private moments are central to his sanity and survival.

Later, when he grows up and slips away to the picturesque Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan as an English teacher, he experiences his first taste of true freedom. In the congeniality of his new surroundings, love and friendship flourish: his students, as innocent as dewdrops, become family; a like-minded teacher, Jimmy, turns into a close friend; and he falls headlong in love with a girl visiting her father.

Such bliss does not last. Raktim and Jimmy’s popularity don’t go down well with the missionary Father who runs the school. Initially enamoured of them, he turns hostile once he discovers that their rapport with the children undercuts his own influence. As a result, Raktim’s days in the school are numbered. Nevertheless, it is a richly formative experience that restructures the way he looks at himself and at life.

He retraces his steps to Kolkata, but does not return to his father’s home. Failing to find employment, he runs out of money, becomes a vagabond, learns, and grows.

While HOWLS is rooted in a specific cultural milieu, it touches universal issues: the loneliness of being “different,” self-discovery, love, friendship, the search for roots, and human vulnerability in the face of the mysteries of existence. When life overwhelms him, Raktim howls. He discovers there is magic in it.

I hope these opening chapters introduce a protagonist who will resonate with anyone who has ever felt out of step with the world.