3 ideas
In January 1964, after the theft of a relic of the Prophet from Srinagar's Hazratbal shrine, riots broke out in both Khulna/Dhaka and Calcutta. Tridib, a Calcutta intellectual, was in Dhaka with the narrator's grandmother and his English lover May Price to bring her aged uncle back to India. When a mob attacked the old man's rickshaw, May got out of the car to intervene, Tridib went after her, and he was killed.
The narrator puts a compass on an atlas and draws circles around Khulna. He finds that far-off foreign cities lie closer to it than Srinagar does, yet Srinagar's violence reached Khulna and Calcutta at once. A border drawn to separate two peoples turns them into mirror images. An event on one side echoes on the other, so partition locks the two populations in reflexive enmity instead of setting them free of each other.
Tridib teaches the narrator to see places through detailed, disciplined imagining built from maps, stories and specific facts rather than vague fantasy. The narrator can then hold a truer picture of London or Dhaka than people who live there. On this view, reality includes the places people inhabit in their minds, and imagining carelessly amounts to letting others do your imagining for you.