Dhaka, May 15 -- Beniapukur in Kolkata is a largely Muslim area, one of several minority ghettos that have been described as a "territorialised form of hyper visibility and containment". What this means is that such areas stand out in a largely Hindu city as sites of demographic difference that are dramatised by the sheer weight of minority numbers but that are kept in place, so to say, by the invisible cordon of the majority community. I have faint memories of Beniapukur from my childhood and youth spent in the nearby Park Circus area. Park Circus in those years was a cosmopolitan place where religious, linguistic and class identities coexisted in tolerant understanding if not in seamless harmony. Today, it seems to have gone the way of ...