'It's strange,' said Urmila. 'Just the other day, I was reading a book of Phulboni's essays – you know, the writer who was given the award at Rabindra Sadan yesterday? What you were saying reminded me of something he wrote a long time ago. I remember the passage almost by heart. "I have never known", it begins, "whether life lies in words or in images, in speech or sight. Does a story come to be in the words that I conjure out of my mind or does it live already, somewhere, enshrined in mud and clay – in an image, that is, in the crafted mimicry of life?"

'Apparently,' Urmila continued, 'Phulboni wrote a story many years ago: about a woman, bathing…' Her voice deepened in tone, in imitation of the writer's: "'… A woman no different from the hundreds of women you see every day, from the windows of your cars and buses, a woman washing off the day's dirt in the dank, weed-rich water of a pond, in a park – a pond like so many in our city, like Minto Park, or Poddopukur, or anyone of a dozen others. The woman kneels, in the soft, glutinous mud, the water rises in a dark curtain to her throat, allowing her to momentarily slip the top of her mud-browned sari off her shoulders, and run the tips of her fingers over her breasts, scrape a sliver of soap across the hardened skin of childbitten nipples, then run her hand down, below, past the folds of a wasted belly, and even further, down, down, scraping that foaming sliver past the parted lips that have vomited a dozen children into her husband's bed, and further still into the velvet dampness of the mud, the soap clinging to her fingers, and then, without warning her foot slips, and she finds herself, for one panic-stricken moment, clutching at the mud which is suddenly as soft, as pliant and yielding as death itself, her hands clawing at that depthless murk, and then, when the face of extinction seems to be looking unsmiling into her eyes, the edge of a fingernail scrapes suddenly upon something solid, something abrasive, something with redeeming, saving, lifegiving edges, something blessedly hard, something that can give her the moment's handhold she needs to claw her way back to the surface and seize a breath of our city's dankly sustaining humours.

'''And when her torso rises above the water, her breasts bared, her hair hanging black to her knees, her arms fling an arc of water high into the air, and she screams: 'She saved me; she saved me,' and at once all the other bathers plunge in, their feet churning the silky brown water into a frothing bog, and taking her by the arms, they drag her ashore, while she goes on screaming, through mouthfuls of water: 'She saved me, saved me.'

'''When she is lying on the grass, they pry open her fist and see that it has fastened upon an object, a polished grey stone with a whirl of white staring out of its centre like an all-seeing eye. She screams, spluttering through jets of swallowed mud and water; she will not part from that tiny shape that gave her the handhold she needed to keep from drowning, but the others tear it from her, for they know that the rock that saved her, that the small, life-giving lump of stone was none other than a miraculous manifestation of… of what? They do not know; believing only in the reality of the miracle… '"

Pausing to catch her breath, Urmila turned to Murugan. 'And then,' she said, 'one day, many years later, Phulboni was going past a park and what did he see but a little shrine, decorated with flowers and offerings. He stopped to enquire, but no one could tell him whose shrine it was and how it had come to be there. Determined to find out he went to Kalighat, to one of the lanes where these images are made. And there he found someone who told him a story that was very much like his own, yet the man had never heard of Phulboni and had never read anything he had ever written, and by the time he had finished, it was Phulboni who was no longer sure which had happened first or whether they were all aspects of the coming of that image into the world: its presence in the mud, the writing of his story, that bather's discovery or the tale he had just heard, in Kalighat.'

Murugan ran a fingernail through his goatee. 'I don't get it,' he said.

Urmila put out a hand to test the rain. It had thinned to a light drizzle now. She gave Murugan a sharp prod in the ribs. 'Come on,' she said, 'let's go.'

'Go where?' said Murugan.

'To Kalighat,' she said. 'Let's go and see if we can learn anything about that image you saw.'

ON THE WAY to Kalighat, watching the rain-slicked streets through the misted glass of the taxi's window, Urmila had a vivid recollection of the lane they were going to: she remembered a narrow alley, winding through low, tin-roofed sheds, pavements that were lined with rows of grey-brown clay figures, some just torsos, full-breasted but headless, with tufts of straw blossoming out of their necks, some legless, some without hands, some with their arms curved in phantom gestures around invisible objects weapons, sitars, skulls.

She had an aunt who lived nearby, in a big, old-fashioned house that towered above the lanes around it. As a child she had often walked through the lane, to visit her aunt. She had watched in amazement as breasts and bellies took shape under the craftsmen's kneading fingers, wondering at the intimacy of their knowledge of those spectral bodies. At her aunt's house she would go to the balcony and look down on the lane and its rows of clay images, watching the image-makers at their work; noting details of the different ways in which they modelled heads and hands; observing how the images changed with the seasons; how phalanxes of Ma Shoroshshotis appeared in January, each embellished with the goddess's swan and sitar; Ma Durgas in autumn, with the entire pantheon of her family ranged around her and Mahishashur writhing at her feet.

The taxi came to a halt at the corner of the lane, and they stepped out into the fine foglike drizzle. Murugan paid and then Urmila led him quickly towards the low, bamboowalled workshops at the end of the lane. Hundreds of beatifically smiling faces floated by them as they hurried past, some draped in tarpaulin, their eyes unpupilled, their arms outstretched in immobile benediction.

Urmila laughed.

'What's up?' said Murugan.

'I often had a dream when I was a child,' Urmila said, with a laugh in her throat. 'I dreamt I would open the front door of our flat one day and find a small group of gods and goddesses outside, ringing the bell with the tips of their clay fingers. I would open the door and welcome them, hands folded, and they would float in on their swans and rats and lions and owls, and my mother would lead them to the little Formica-topped table where we ate. They would seat themselves on our chairs while my mother ran in and out of the kitchen, making tea and frying luchis and shingaras, while we watched in awe, our hands joined in prayer. We would offer sweets to the swan and the owl, and Ma Kali would smile at us with her burning eyes, and Ma Shoroshshoti would play a note or two on her sitar and Ma Lokhkhi would sit crosslegged on her lotus, holding up her hand, looking just as she does on the labels of ghee tins.'

She paused at the open door of a workshop. 'Let's try this one,' she said, leading him in. They stepped through the open doorway, into the workshop's dimly lit interior, and found themselves staring into a teeming crowd of smiling, flesh-coloured faces.

Urmila spotted a moving figure somewhere among the stationary images. 'Is somebody there?' she called out.

'Who is it?'

The figure vanished as quickly as it had appeared, behind a six-foot dancing Ganesh.

'We just wanted to talk to you,' Urmila said.

An elderly man materialized suddenly in front of her, detaching himself from a pantheon on a plinth. He was wearing a dhoti and a string vest and his thin, ill-tempered face was screwed into a scowl. Stepping away, Urmila very nearly impaled herself on a spear, upraised in the hands of a serene Ma Durga.