In last week's edition of the Courier, Editor-at-Large Afsan Chowdhury wrote about Tikatuli, the Dhaka locality where he had grown up: "It was a neighborhood where no child could ever get lost because every home belonged to everyone in the neighbourhood. It was this neighbourhood culture that kept Bangladesh resilient through a hundred crises, including 1971. That culture gradually weakened and is now gone. What exists now is for the readers to decide."

Afsansaheb's words, formed by the cerebral delcacy of his poetic being, resonate in my memories because I, too, grew up in a Bengali para: Park Circus in Kolkata. In the 1960s - unlike now (when it appears to have become an Urdu/Hindi-speaking Muslim enclave) - Park Circus was both cosmopolitan and egalitarian.

Bengalis and non-Bengalis, Muslims and Hindus and Christians and Parsees and agnostics and atheists all filled its homes and streets without a care for what was happening in the rest of the city, the state, the country or the world. We were a universe unto ourselves.

Park Circus was not a class-conscious para at all. My father, M.A. Latif, was a Cambridge-educated Barrister from Lincoln's Inn. We lived in a rented flat in Nasiruddin Road, on premises owned by Justice S.A. Masud of Calcutta High Court. In 1971, those premises hosted several Bangladeshi families fleeing genocide. Also, the famed Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali was literally my next-door neighbour for a while.

However, my para friends were not illustrious at all, just as I was not. I failed examinations in Bangla and Mathematics and yet played street cricket with friends from the bustee - the proto-slum - who lived just across the street. Potol was the best bowler I have faced. Whenever he bowled, I was out. My vengeance? I kicked the brick-built wicket away, and the game ended in a fight. That fight ended when Potol became an alcoholic and died of liver cirrhosis after I had left for Singapore. I had grown up by then. But I have not forgotten the chachi from another nearby slum who worked intermittently at my home. She washed my bum till I was 10. A relative disliked her immensely because she was apparently an unchaste woman. I could not care less. Her smile made me a chaste man.

Park Circus was a microcosm of the concept of para. Para represents the most intimately socialised localisation of identity. This is a universal phenomenon but it possesses a certain astringency in Bengal. Para embodies the intermediate distance between home and the rest of the village, town, city, state, nation and world.

Para is the known and felt neighbourhood, its intimate immediacy contoured but not contained by the relationships that an individual develops with larger spaces of economic, political and social affiliation and belonging. The agency of para is revealed in the proliferating geography of demarcating paras that dot Bengal.

Hence, the names of several localities in cities and villages of West Bengal, Bangladesh and Tripura end with the suffix para. In one account, historically, paras often consisted of people who had similar livelihoods, for example, Muchipara (the habitus of muchis, or cobblers); or the same caste background (such as Bamunpara, the locality of Brahmins).

With the long-overdue decline of caste-based segregation, the ethnic "purity" of a para has lost much of its semantic significance. The term now refers to a person's neighbourhood, where he grew up, perhaps went to school, travelled to study in a college in a different para, fell in love with a person from a para several miles away, and brought her to meet his parents in the para of his birth.

The neighbourhood is the moving centre of the existential locale of everyday life.

A para is quintessentially a face-to-face society. No one is anonymous there. People have known names and lineages against which their merest movements are measured instinctively. Of course, this degree of recognition can be oppressive: No secrets can be kept outside the home. The sight of a woman and a man unrelated by family or marriage ties, walking together, provokes the sociological interest of everyone else. In a para, every neighbour is a loving pest.

Intimate privacy is sexual transgression. The sight of a couple who should not be a couple is relayed back to parents or broadcast in loud whispers which alert the rest of the para that a moral calamity is about to occur. Gossip is the lingua franca of the para. Women (grandmothers and mothers, in particular) are the unchallenged poets of an autocratic oral tradition. Young men and women in love flee to the privacy of rootless civic spaces to circumvent the unwanted attention of unwelcome adults. But the para lives on.

Afsansaheb says about Tikatuli that what exists now is for readers to decide.

So it is for Park Circus.

But his para, and mine, will somehow live on, I think.

It happens.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be contacted at epaaropaar@gmail.com