Temple Subscription Ledger

Description

The godown syndicate’s annual accounts carry a page of charitable disbursements. A hospital. Two schools. A bathing ghat. Relief after the last inundation. A well at Barrackpore. A dispensary.

And, between the well and the dispensary, a standing annual subscription to the temple at Baranagar.

It is not hidden. It is not large. It is listed in the same hand and the same column as the well, and it has been paid every year for longer than anybody currently in the room has bothered to ask about.

What It Reveals

• Mandir Mahakali is funded, in part, by the merchant consortium — and therefore by every subscriber to the godown syndicate.
• Emma and Georgiana are subscribers. Their family’s Indian income has been helping to pay for the thing they crossed the world to stop.
• A documentary route to the temple and to Ghosh that never goes near Baranagar. A line in a ledger, in Calcutta, in daylight.
• Corroborates the money side of Roy’s suppressed allegations about the temple’s patrons.