India

Arjun Sengupta is nine years old, and the best place in the world is the flat roof on top of his family's house in Calcutta, at five o'clock, when the wind comes in off the river and the kites go up all over the para. His kite is saffron paper with a band of dusk-violet along the bottom edge. His brother made it. Kanai is six feet away across the gap, losing.

Downstairs is the grown-ups' world: his father's chair, and the wireless in the corner with the amber light behind its dial, going on every evening in careful English about somewhere four thousand miles away.

Then one Sunday afternoon the voice says that India is at war — and nobody in that house was asked.

There are two rice meals in a day, and everything in the Sengupta house arranges itself around them. Shanti has kept this Calcutta household for longer than either of her sons has been alive: the fish market before light, the stove, the tray carried up to the roof. Ask her where the day has got to and she can tell you at once, because she knows where the rice is.

Her husband copies out an empire's paperwork at a desk he will not be promoted past. Her elder son has taken to watching the soldiers on the main road a little too long. And in the corner of the front room stands a brown box with a cloth face, whose dial comes up amber in the evenings and speaks English about somewhere else.

It has always kept to its hour. This year it stops.