The Frequency Log at Esplanade

The Frequency Log at Esplanade

The receiver sits between two saucers on a wooden ledge off the Gariahat–Dharmatala tram line. It is an older transistor set, its telescoping aerial pulled out to its full five-foot slant, angled toward the high masonry of the arcade to catch what it can of the evening ionosphere. When the tram grinds through the points outside, the iron wheels send a burst of electrical chatter through the speaker—a dry, ripping sound that drowns the broadcast for three seconds, then leaves the carrier wave whistling in the clear.

Bimal-da turns the fine-tuning knob by a fraction of a millimetre.

Near the lower edge of the thirty-one-meter band, a voice in Farsi cuts through the atmospheric flutter: formal, rapid, carrying the hollow, compressed acoustic of a distant shortwave broadcast. On my phone, illuminated against the oilcloth table, a Reuters wire dispatch updates: Iran says its naval forces captured an American Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle near the Strait of Hormuz; the Pentagon calls the vehicle an older, unclassified model that simply malfunctioned and drifted.

"Iran says it captured an American underwater drone," I tell him, reading off the glass. "The Pentagon says the vehicle malfunctioned."

Bimal-da does not look up from his register. It is a blue-ruled student exercise book with marbelized covers, its pages divided by hand into five pencil columns: Date, UTC, Frequency, Language, Remarks. He uncaps a black Reynolds ballpoint, writes 15:18, and beside it, in neat Bengali script, notes the dial setting in the thirty-one-meter band.

"A machine that stops working is an accident," he says, writing. "A machine taken from the sea is a trophy. The ocean does not care which word they file."

He once showed me a 1934 Port Trust ledger he had salvaged from a paper merchant on Strand Road—shipping manifests where the arrival of coal colliers and timber ketches from Rangoon was recorded in iron-gall ink. In those books, if a barge went aground at the James and Mary Sands, the clerk did not speculate on intentions. He recorded the sounding, the draft mark, and the hour of the tide. The ink had faded to rust, but the numbers remained stubborn.

Now, between the two of us, three separate descriptions of the same square mile of saltwater compete for authority.

On the radio, the Farsi broadcaster reads with the steady, unhurried cadence of a state claiming a victory. On the phone screen, the wire service balances the two statements in adjacent paragraphs, suspended in professional neutrality. And on a financial feed below the wire, war-risk premiums and freight costs are already elevated for crude carriers crossing the Gulf.

I look at the map rendered in blue pixels on the phone. I wonder what it means to work on a tanker in a channel where even the water beneath the hull may contain machines no one aboard can see—machines moving beneath the hulls for missions the crews above may know nothing about, until one of them fails and surfaces into politics.

Bimal-da listens through one more station ID, then turns the volume pot to the left until the switch clicks off.

The sudden absence of the carrier wave leaves the corner surprisingly quiet. He does not leave the radio hissing in the background. He collapses the aerial section by section, pressing each chrome cylinder into the next until the tip snaps into its plastic cradle. In the fifth column of the ledger, under Remarks, he does not write about drones or the Pentagon. He writes: Carrier steady in the 31-meter band. Heavy interference from local tram line. Two accounts of one object in the water.

He closes the register, lays the pen across the marbled cover, and places his palms flat against the wooden ledge. Outside, the headlights of the Gariahat car sweep across the tea glasses on the shelf, pause at Dharmatala, and rattle away into the dark.

Sources & Reference:
* Reuters, Sep 8, 2026: Iran says it captured US submarine drone in Strait of Hormuz
* The Times of India: 153 years on, Kolkata trams now run on two truncated routes: Shyambazar-Dharmatala and Gariahat-Dharmatala