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Standing in front of our home on the left is Mother, Mrs. Tatini Bala Dutta; youngest sister Sayoni in the middle; and the brother who got sick and precipitated the sale of the house stands to the right. The kid in the front is a neighbor's daughter.

I had not seen my mother and my youngest sister, Sayoni, since 1968, the year I left India for Canada on a Canadian university scholarship for postgraduate studies in physics. So when I first returned to India in 1980, I took a weekend trip to visit them. They lived in Laheriasarai, my sleepy little hometown, about four hundred miles northwest of Kolkata, where I was staying.

Laheriasarai, not too far from the foothills of the Himalayas, was accessible from Kolkata by an overnight train. Soon after the train left the city, I stretched myself on my sleeper seat and slept through the night. The ride was restful and, thankfully, trouble-free. Usually these rides were known to be fraught with incidences of physical violence perpetrated by hooligans out to rob nighttime travelers.

After the train unloaded me at the Laheriasarai railway station the next morning, I stood on the platform for a few minutes and took in the ambience. The station hadn't changed since the last time I had seen it twelve years earlier: two long platforms, one on each side of the railway tracks, connected by an overhead bridge. It was still housed in the same one-story building with three waiting rooms at one end and a small room at the other for the ticket counters. The station was separated from the outside by a gate through which the arriving passengers exited. Outside the gate, three-wheeled cycle rickshaws were lined up waiting to ferry the exiting passengers to their destinations. I hired one. The driver, a scrawny, swarthy man, was clothed in a soiled dhoti and a shirt and had a turban on. He appeared to be in his forties.

"Bengal Lodge, please." My home was in the neighborhood of this lodge.

The sun wasn't up yet. Small-town Laheriasarai was slowly waking in the unfolding soft light of early morning. A handful of people were out on their morning walks, and a few shopkeepers had begun to raise the store shutters to get ready for the day's business. The air felt cool, fresh, and soothing. My rickshaw driver leisurely wended through the sparse streets, went halfway around a roundabout surrounding the town's only clock tower, and headed straight down toward my home, just the way I thought he would. Until the road forked, the landscape looked familiar: grocery and clothing stores, a bookstore, a gas pump, a bunch of restaurants and a pharmacy, and the road that led to the branch post office. Soon, the restaurants would be serving breakfast—puris and spicy peas and potato curries—and the sidewalks would be lined with noisy peddlers hawking flowers to the women headed for the temples to make offerings to the gods, the sweet fragrance of roses and Champa and Rajanigandha filling the air.

I found myself back in my youth.

The rickshaw took the right fork, and suddenly the landscape changed. The lane that used to lead to the home of Prof. Palit, my college English professor, had disappeared. New establishments—tailors, boutiques, and furniture places—had replaced the run-down small houses on the left of the road. Housing complexes had sprung up on the right. New roads and lanes had been laid to cope with the town's swelling size and population. The sleepy little hometown of my youth had taken on an urban appearance.

"Which house?" the driver asked as he reached what must have been the neighborhood of the Bengal Lodge.

Despite my earlier confidence, I was unable to point out the house. The gigantic centuries-old banyan tree that canopied our neighborhood and commanded the town, and where townspeople congregated in the evenings to socialize, was missing. In its place, there were business offices, retail stores, and restaurants. New buildings had come up near the...