D Sibaji Bandyopadhyay or, do the two contending parties collide with each other only to collude at another level? There is absolutely no difficulty in identifying the people referred to as 'they^ Anyone aware of the topographical layout of colonial Calcutta and the principles of apartheid, 'apart-hate', that is, knows that Esplanade then was the centre of 89 'saheb-para', an area exclusively earmarked for the whites. The location as well as the foreign-sounding name gives the word "Esplanade' the elevated status of a power-sign, a sign that bears the sure imprint of the erstwhile colonial masters. And since 'they' are at the apex of power, the multitude referred to as 'we' can only occupy a lower rung, and consequently, 'Chowringhee', the name given by subordinates, can be no more than an appendage to the more prestigious one. But the novel is set in a period long before which that secret 'tryst with destiny' had been honoured and power transferred. Then, has a similar kind of transference reconstituted the dyad too and reversed the sign of inequality in favour of the underdogs? A probe into the large-scale political transformations begun at the midnight stroke as well as the mundane issue of the dyad calls for the same line of action: a close interrogation of the transferrees. And that requires a more precise understanding of the pronoun 'we'. Though Chowringhee begins in the first person plural, the novel immediately switches over to its predominant mode of narration, the first person singular. But within that space, at certain strategic points and narrative bends, sudden and subtle changes take place in the form of utterance. For example, in the second paragraph's first sentence, the form of address is altered to second person: Do you remember me?' ['Amake mone ache ki?'] This rhetorical question is of crucial importance. It obliquely refers to an immensely popular novel written previously by Shankar, in fact, his maiden venture: Kato Ajanare (1955). The link between the two texts hinges on the identity of the author as well as the narrator, for in both cases, the name 'Shankar' not only appears on the cover and title-page, it also designates the agent of narration. By making the real and the fictive name identical, this rather unusual technique of first-person narration tends to blur the dividing line between author-person and narrator-persona. As a single complex, the 'author-narrator' combine can easily be manipulated to give, and that too quite unobtrusively, an added authority to the narrator's testimony and a semblance of actuality to a world of fiction. So much so, that the reader may unknowingly be seduced into believing s/he is reading not just a novel written in an autobiographical vein, but a full-fledged autobiography, a record of real events, a personal dossier, in fact. The query 'Do you remember me?' is underlined by the tacit assumption that readers of Chowringhee are well acquainted with the earlier text. The muted suggestion or rather the implied imperative in the casual question being, in case readers have not kept track of things, they should immediately make amends and read, preferably buy and read, the two novels, and thus keep the two capitals, cultural and economic, linked in a perpetual circularity. The question achieves two ends at one stroke: first, it establishes the credentials of the 'author-narrator'; second, it delim- Numbers 25-26