Haji Harry

In the 980th year of the 2nd millennium of the Anno Domini, the 80th year of the 20th century, the leap year of our Lord 1980, a frail and strange-looking tiny boy was born to a mentally unstable beggar lady in a flimsy cloth shanty beside the Belur Math Kali Temple on the banks of the river Hooghly in India’s Kolkata city. At that very moment, some eight thousand kilometres away, a healthy and handsome boy was also born to a Punjabi lady in the United Kingdom’s port city of Liverpool on the banks of river Mersey.

The sudden strike of a matchlight on the deck of a sixteen-footer diesel steamer on the still waters in the dead of a moonless night revealed a scarred and pocked face of a scary-looking man. He lit a thin mini cigar of tobacco flakes wrapped in a Diospyros melanoxylon leaf tied with…