I have often wished for more Bengalis to share my love for the profane. Of course, profane is not alien to Bengal — it just lurks in its underbelly, carried into the air by rare and maverick writers. Nabarun Bhattacharya was one of them. In his anarchic universe, he created the Fyatarus, characters who were obscenely profane, who could fly above the ordinary and the regular, who were absurd like the absurd unclassified self of a city. They were Djinn-like creatures who refused category or gentility. They consistently delighted in creating a nuisance. They consistently delighted in creating a nuisance. Sometimes pissing on the IPL pitch in the last over, sometimes desecrating fancy diplomat dinners.

I have longed for something, anything that would invoke the inner Fyataru in the reader. It’s tough to transcribe the absurdity of Nabarun’s work, much as profanities escape translation when carried from the vernacular into sanitised, common languages. Translations don’t adequately capture the ironic tone that the Bengali originals have. Yet profanities have one thing in common. They are at war with the language of the genteel; the bhodro.

It is that same story that I am narrating here. Of the insignificant taking on the giant system. Of the underdogs that are screaming to be heard. Of sound that is physical and sensual, and that is to be heard over and alongside melody. This story is about sound — bass in particular — and about the way it is rising from the unconscious of cities, making Bengal tremble. For this story is about Bengal, and Bengal is more than Calcutta.