When I find myself in times of trouble, I turn into Chhabi Biswas.

When the man-on-the-bike looks like he is charging straight into the side of my car in an obscene, violent gesture, somehow checks himself at the last moment, but does not spare the driver of my car, spewing abuses at him and threatening to beat him up, I step out. I eject myself in a slow and deliberate movement and appear right in front of the man-on-the-bike, my feet planted firmly on the ground. To lend a contemporary touch, I lean forward ever so gently. I look straight into the man's eyes, towering over him. I am no longer that fat, short, middle-aged woman any more. I am Chhabi Biswas.

I am authority. As Chhabi Biswas, or to be fair to him, as the character played by Chhabi Biswas, the great patriarch of the Bengali screen, I tick all the right boxes: the right gender, class, height, voice. Chhabi Biswas could quell the rebellion of his offspring, often manifest in his pretty college-going daughter's desire to marry the man without prospects, by just walking down the curvy staircase of an art deco house somewhere in the south Calcutta of the Fifties and Sixties. Not much of that art, or the décor, remains now, though there is a lot of "art dekho", which is not exactly the same.

But his authority remains. As I tower over the man-on-the-bike - the trick is to work yourself into that height and never step down - I emit steady authority. I see the man-on-the-bike slowly retreating into his shell, revving up his machine and turning, only muttering one more abuse towards the driver, who is less than Chhabi Biswas almost on all counts.

Chhabi Biswas comes to my rescue in my moments of domestic crisis. When I cannot tear my 10-year-old away from the laptop or my phone, I summon the great man. As we all know, just towering over a tech-savvy 10-year-old does not help. She ignores. She ignores reality that is not virtual, till it gets into action. Besides, she knows that I am at a disadvantage: she already knows more than I do about the laptop and the phone. She is a second-generation Millennial.

So I get into the Jalsaghar act. I ride Tufan, my white charger, and rage, rage into her screen. It is a tragedy, of course, but she looks up at least. Though she says I remind her of Don Quixote, which she has been taught in class in an abridged version. No, she says, of Ursula of The Little Mermaid, Disney version, whom I don't know. Ursula is a bad character, my daughter explains, and does not win.

But even Chhabi Biswas is rendered futile sometimes. An old ashwattha tree was cut down recently in my neighbourhood one morning, in front of everyone's eyes. I arrived at the scene of crime and pulled myself up to my full height, which was Chhabi Biswas's height. I tried to pull off the rest of the act, the quiet command, the silent emission of authority. But to no avail. The tree was chopped down, packed away in a waiting truck and sent off. One man appeared and claimed he had brought the men who cut the tree down on the order of "Someone Above". Who that was was never spelt out.

There are authorities higher than Chhabi Biswas.