I know almost nothing about A.B. Bardhan. I wish I knew nothing about him, that I didn’t have the information that comprises the ‘almost’. Because, when I look at the picture of his room, my ignorance creates a sense of intimacy. The information I have comes to mean nothing—he was a member of the Communist Party; he appeared on television, haranguing the governments; he was from Barisal and became a trade unionist (these details I’ve gathered after his death). There’s a fatal belief that people have about writing—especially the writing of fiction, or of reportage that’s based on the same conventions—that you can add up important details, put together the principal information, and make up a ‘character’. But can our sense of familiarity with a character actually come from this? Virginia Woolf challenged this notion in 1924: “Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before [novelists] and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, ‘Come and catch me if you can’.... Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.” I put my attempts to know A.B. Bardhan to one side. When I look at the room and sense recognition, it doesn’t come from the facts I have told you—the facts that, even in their most skeletal form, should begin to point to a life.