Kolkata is a recurring point in Saleem Sinai’s mental and political geography: first encountered through his ability to enter distant lives and places, it later figures in his explanation of the forces shaping India’s intervention in the Bangladesh war. The city connects private journeys to histories that exceed any one traveler’s control.

A City in the Telepathic Map

From a hideout in a broken-down clocktower, Saleem begins to explore the country through other people’s perceptions. His first journeys are a kind of mental tourism: he visits the Taj Mahal through an Englishwoman’s eyes, travels to Madurai, and sleeps in a Calcutta drainpipe. The city is one stop in a restless itinerary that takes him across India before curiosity draws him beyond borrowed impressions and toward public affairs.

Political Turmoil and the War

In recounting the circumstances that brought him and Parvati-the-witch together in Dacca, Saleem places the city within a wider political struggle. He says Indian intervention was shaped not only by the refugee crisis and the war’s military course, but also by the Delhi government’s concern over the declining influence of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s Awami League and the rising popularity of the Mukti Bahini. He further links intervention to anxiety that unrest could spread into West Bengal, including Kolkata and its surroundings. In this account, the defeat of Tiger Niazi marks not an end to political conflict but the beginning of a campaign against the Left in the region.

Routes, Rivers, and Recurrence

Kolkata’s place in Saleem’s story is not confined to a single visit. His account repeatedly makes movement the means by which separated worlds meet: he remembers the train journey that takes Amina Sinai and Ahmed Sinai toward Bombay, later travels to Pakistan aboard the SS Sabarmati, and describes the pursuit of the buddha along the river Padma, understood in his mythic narration as the goddess Ganga. These routes give the city’s political setting a larger frame: places are joined by journeys, while historical forces redirect the lives moving through them.

Narrative Significance

Saleem’s account makes geography unstable and personal without reducing politics to private destiny. Kolkata enters both as a place glimpsed in a child’s telepathic travels and as part of the West Bengali landscape invoked to explain the wider stakes of war. The contrast joins the intimate scale of an individual’s movements to the competing political currents that shape borders, military campaigns, and reunion.