The bell reaches you before the tram does. Near the Rashbehari crossing it is a flat, tinny note that runs ahead of the carriage, and nobody stepping off the kerb bothers to look up. The smell of frying drifts over from a stall by the tram stop. A woman moves a bag of vegetables to her other hand. A boy slips between two taxis.
Somewhere along this stretch of south Calcutta, on October 14, 1954, a short-sighted man of fifty-five walked into the path of a tram, and the accounts disagree over whether he heard anything at all.
Jibanananda Das lived another eight days, most of them in Shambhunath Pandit Hospital. He died on October 22, so today is the seventy-second anniversary, and the city will mark it with garlands, a reading in a college hall, a line from 'Banalata Sen' pinned under his photograph.
The poet in these tributes belongs to dusk. Gentle, faraway, wandering a country of rivers and owls. Few picture him sitting in a corridor, waiting to hear whether a college would keep him.
In 1928 he joined City College in Calcutta as a lecturer in English. A Brahmo foundation was a natural landing place for the son of a Brahmo family from Barisal, and his first book of poems had just come out. Two years later he was gone. Biographers disagree on why.
Some blame falling enrolment, which left the college trimming staff; others the uproar over his poem 'Campe', which parts of the Bengali press found indecent. The reason mattered less than the timing. Around then he married Labanya Das, and a household, later with two children in it, depended on an income that had stopped.
The jobs after that are easy to list and hard to make sense of. Private tuition, paid by the hour and gone by the month. A spell selling insurance, a trade that rewards charm and persistence, two qualities rarely attached to him. Short appointments at colleges away from the city.
His letters of those years return to work, to a vacancy somewhere, a friend who might know someone. In the evenings he wrote, in exercise books, for a readership that was small and slow to form.
In 1934, between odd jobs, he wrote the sonnets that became Rupasi Bangla. 'Banalata Sen' reached a magazine the following year, when he found steadier work at Brajamohan College in Barisal. The post lasted eleven years. It also pulled him out of the conversation.
Literary Calcutta ran on being seen, at tea stalls and editorial desks and the upstairs rooms of the Coffee House on College Street, and a poet on the far side of the delta could send his poems in but could not sit at the table when they were discussed.
Buddhadeb Bose called him the loneliest of poets, and the phrase has since done much of the explaining. It is a handy phrase, because it turns an economic fact into a temperament. A man shut out of work becomes a man who prefers distance, and nobody has to ask who set the terms. Much of Jibanananda's solitude was what rent and a college calendar left him.
The records say little about how the household coped in the thin years. Poets' earnings were rarely recorded. Bengali literary magazines then ran largely on goodwill; contributors were paid in copies or not at all, and a poem could win a writer a name without adding a rupee to the month.
Anyone who has pitched an editor and waited three weeks for a reply will recognise the arithmetic, though the scale was different.
Partition upended the balance he had found. He left Barisal for Calcutta in the unsettled years around 1947, and the river country that fills his poems now lay across a border. Calcutta was by then crowded with refugees from East Bengal, families camped on the platforms of Sealdah, everyone after the same few jobs.
A middle-aged poet with an English degree was one more name on a long list. There was a short spell at a magazine, and a post at a college in Kharagpur that did not last. In 1953 Howrah Girls' College offered him a position. It was a salary, and the crossing to it meant the Howrah Bridge, where trams then shouldered through lorries, handcarts and walkers. He had barely settled into the routine when the tram came.
He was a restless walker, and the pavements of Calcutta were where much of his thinking got done. He covered miles on foot, by most accounts, often lost in thought and unaware of the traffic around him.
Calcutta took him in fragments. A term here, a few months there, tuition in the afternoons, never enough hours in one place to add up to a post he could call his own.
Trams were then the transport of a salaried city, and they ran, as the surviving ones still do, on fixed rails that no passenger could bend. The network has been thinning for decades, and Calcutta argues every few years over whether to keep what is left. Defenders speak of heritage and of a slower city, one that once had room for a poet crossing the road.
His name sits on seminar posters and in school syllabuses on both sides of the border. Anthologies keep appearing, and scholars argue over editions and punctuation. None of it reaches back to the household of 1954. Barisal claims him, the boy who grew up there. Calcutta claims him too. Each tells the story from the angle that suits it, and in neither version do wages get much room.
After his death the family went through his papers. There were poems nobody had seen, along with novels, short stories, essays and diaries, much of it written in whatever hours work left over. The novels are the odd part: he wrote many, in prose plain and unlike the poems, and none appeared while he lived.
Maalyaban, written in 1948, was not published until 1973. The rest surfaced slowly, edited by scholars across decades. Rupasi Bangla, the sonnet sequence that Bengalis now treat as a map of their countryside, was among the manuscripts, and it reached print in 1957, three years after the tram.
Towards evening the avenue fills again. The carriages climb it slowly, lit from inside, a few passengers asleep against the glass, and the bell goes ahead of them over the crossing, past people looking down at their phones. At the corner a tea seller rinses glasses and does not look up.
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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh.