The Calcutta Chromosome Page 16

  He offered to give her a few lessons but she declined. 'You've been to plenty of trouble already,' she said. 'I won't put you to any more. Lucky will show me: he knows a little about these things.'

  'Lucky?' That was the name of the young man from the Penn Station news-stand. Antar tried to imagine him, with his fixed smile and his oddly spaced teeth, sitting in front of his laptop, trying to steer Tara around the Net. He had his doubts but he decided to keep them to himself.

  As it turned out, Lucky was evidently a good teacher, for Tara soon found her way around the Net. Antar monitored her closely for the first few days. Then he grew tired of following her around childcare bulletin boards and left her alone.

  She got her new job within a few days and had been inordinately grateful ever since. That was why she had wanted to come over tonight. 'I can't afford to take you out,' she said. 'So the least I can do is make sure that you eat properly every once in a while.'

  Chapter 29

  ON LOWER CIRCULAR ROAD, halfway to the P. G. Hospital, Urmila found herself reading and rereading the bright yellow lettering on the side of a crowded minibus that was jammed up close against her window. The taxi was idling in the traffic, imprisoned by the customary morning throng of cars and buses. Hesitantly Urmila raised her eyes to the windows of the minibus: a dozen people seemed to be staring at her. She turned quickly away.

  This was probably the bus she would have been on right now, if she'd been on her way to work. They were probably on it, all the usual crowd: the old man in the dhoti who worked in the Accountant-General's office and was writing a book on something or the other; the railway clerk who carried a huge tiffin-carrier full of food to the Strand every morning; the woman from All India Radio, who had tried to get her to join the 'BBD Bagh Minibus Passengers' Club' last week.

  Urmila shrank into the seat. The crumpled sheets of paper were scraping uncomfortably against the tender spot between her breasts. She wanted to reach in and pull it out, but she couldn't, not with that minibus so close to her window.

  What if they could see her now, the 'BBD Bagh Minibus Passengers' Club'? What if they were to learn that she was on her way to P. G. Hospital with a complete stranger? What would they think? What would they make of it?

  Suddenly she was furious. 'What does the P. G. Hospital have to do with my pieces of paper?' she said, turning upon Murugan. 'Why are you taking me there? What are your intentions?'

  'You wanted an explanation, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'That was the deal. And I'm going to give you an explanation, but I'm going to begin exactly where I want to.'

  'And you want to begin at the P. G. Hospital?' she said.

  'That's right,' he said. 'That's why I'm taking you there.' She noticed the taxi driver watching them in his mirror. She leaned over and waved her packet of fish under his nose. 'What're you looking at, you cabbage-head?' she snapped. 'Keep your eyes on the road.'

  Chastened, the driver dropped his eyes.

  'Wow!' said Murugan. 'What was that all about?'

  'And you,' she cried, turning on him in fury. 'Who are you, exactly?' Suspicion was raging in her mind now; she began to recall all the stories she had heard about foreign con-men and kidnappers and prostitution rings in the Middle East. 'I want to know who you are and what you are doing in Calcutta. I want to see a passport.'

  'I don't have my passport with me right this minute,' said Murugan. 'But you can have this.' He took out his wallet and handed her his ID card.

  She looked it over carefully, examining the lettering and matching the photograph with his face.

  When they reached the Rabindra Sadan auditorium, Murugan tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed down the road. 'Over there,' he said. 'Stop, over there.'

  'Here?' Urmila found herself looking at a brick wall, across a narrow ditch. 'Why here? There's nothing here; we've left the hospital entrance behind: it's over there.'

  'We don't need the entrance,' said Murugan, handing the taxi driver a fifty-rupee note. 'There's something I want to show you right here.'

  'But there's nothing to see here,' Urmila said suspiciously. 'It's just a wall.'

  'Look over there,' said Murugan, counting his change.

  He pointed over his shoulder at the memorial to Ronald Ross. 'Did you get an eyeful of that?'

  Urmila's eyes widened in surprise as they followed his finger to the marble plaque at the apex of the modest little arch. 'No,' she said. 'I've never noticed it before.' She began reading aloud: '''In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes.'''

  She shook her head. 'It's strange,' she said. 'I've changed buses here hundreds of times. I can't even begin to count how often I've walked past this wall. But I've never noticed that inscription up there.'

  'No one notices poor Ron any more,' said Murugan. He set off towards a gate a short distance down the road. 'Follow me,' he said, beckoning her on. 'I'll show you something else.'

  A chain hung suspended from the gateposts, just loose enough to let one person through at a time. Murugan went first and when Urmila caught up he pointed across the hospital's busy compound to a graceful red-brick building set well back in the grounds.

  'When Ronald Ross came to work here in 1898,' Murugan said, 'that building over there was all there was of the P.G. Hospital.'

  'How do you know?' she said.

  He laughed. 'It's simple,' he said. 'You happen to be speaking to the world's greatest living expert on Ronnie Ross.'

  'You mean you?' she said.

  'You said it.' He turned on his heel and set off down a path that was bustling with uniformed hospital staff.

  'Look over there,' he said, pointing ahead at a complex of boxy new buildings all painted a drab, municipal yellow. 'None of those was here when Ronnie was doing his malaria research in Calcutta. It was just trees and bamboo and greenery around here – except for a couple of labs and outhouses where the servants and attendants lived.'

  He held a handkerchief to his nose as they walked past an open rubbish dump where crows, dogs and vultures were fighting over scraps of food and blood-soaked bandages. Nearby, a row of men stood lined up against a wall, unheeding of a notice that pleaded: 'Please do not urine here.'

  Murugan came to a halt in an open space, between two wards, one of which bore a sign, 'Ross Memorial Ward'. He pointed to an old-fashioned red-brick bungalow that had been incorporated into one of the hospital's newly added wings. 'Look over there,' he said. 'That was Ross's lab.'

  He went over to the bungalow and drew her attention to a marble tablet, set high in the wall. The tablet bore a stylized image of a mosquito, and under it an inscription.

  'It's too far up to read,' Urmila said. 'Doesn't it say that it was in this laboratory that Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross made the momentous discovery that malaria is conveyed by the bite of a mosquito?'

  'Something like that,' said Murugan.

  Urmila pulled a quizzical face. 'What a strange little building,' she said. 'It looks so shut in on itself. It's hard to believe that anybody could discover anything in there.'

  'What's even harder to believe,' said Murugan, 'is that this was once one of the best-equipped research laboratories in the whole of the Indian subcontinent.'

  'Was it?' she said, in surprise.

  He nodded: 'That's right. And you know who set it up?'

  'How would I know about that?' she snapped.

  'But you do know,' said Murugan, 'as a matter of fact, you've got his name right there.' He pointed at the piece of paper that she had tucked into her blouse.

  Turning her back to him, she took the ball of paper out of her blouse. 'Here it is,' she said. 'Show me.'

  He pointed to one of the lines that had been marked in ink. 'That's him. Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham.

  'That's the guy who set up this place,' said Murugan. 'Like Ronnie Ross he was a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, which was a u
nit of the British Indian Army. But Cunningham was more or less a senior citizen, years older than Ross. And he was a research scientist too – a pathologist. In fact he was a Fellow of the Royal Society; he had an FRS tagged to his name, which was one of the fanciest tags you could get those days. Cunningham did a lot of his work in Calcutta right here in this lab. He made it into the best equipped research centre in this part of the world. It was Ron who made it famous, but he couldn't have done it without old D. D. '

  'I'll take your word for it,' said Urmila. 'But I still don't see how this makes those papers so special.'

  'Patience, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'I'm just getting started. Come on.'

  He headed back the way they had come and led her through a passageway to the narrow dirt-filled space that separated the Ross Memorial Ward from the hospital's boundary wall. The memorial arch was now a few yards to their left, and over the top of the wall they could just see the clogged traffic on Lower Circular Road.

  Murugan pointed to a couple of low, ramshackle tinroofed structures, nestling in the mounds of earth and debris that were piled up against the wall. 'You see those outhouses over there?' he said. 'That's where Ronnie Ross's servants lived. One of them, a guy called Lutchman, was Ross's right-hand man. He used to breed the pigeons that Ross used for his research right over there.'

  'Pigeons?' said Urmila distractedly, casting a distasteful glance at the little heaps of excrement that lay half-hidden in the debris. 'I thought you said he was working with mosquitoes and malaria.'

  'Well, let me put it like this,' said Murugan. 'Ronnie Ross didn't always work with your usual plain-vanilla kinds of malaria. In Calcutta he began working with a related avian species, halteridium – you could call it a bird version of malaria.'

  'Really?' Urmila looked up warily at the trees around them.

  'Yes,' he said. 'And to keep him supplied with material for his experiments, his assistants, Lutchman and his crew, kept a large flock of infected birds – right over there. And they released their entire flock here, in September 1898, just days after Ross finished his final series of experiments.'

  He picked a stone off the ground. 'Let me show you something,' he said. He tossed the stone in the direction of the outhouse. It landed in the debris, and moments later, a flock of pigeons took to the air with clucks of alarm and a frantic beating of wings. Murugan stood back and watched the birds circling above.

  'I wouldn't be at all surprised,' he said, 'if there were a couple of descendants of Lutchman' s flock up there.'

  Chapter 30

  STANDING ON tiptoe Urmila peeped over the boundary wall at the office-going traffic, streaming down Lower Circular Road, past the hospital. She was surprised by how sheltered and self-contained the bungalow was, how far removed from both the bustle of the hospital and the noise of the nearby traffic.

  'How quiet it seems here,' she said, glancing from the outhouse to the Ross memorial. 'It's hard to believe that I go past this place twice every day, at rush hour.'

  'Exactly what Ronnie Ross thought,' said Murugan. 'Thought he'd found the lab of his dreams when he first got here.'

  Urmila stepped back from the wall. 'So how was it that Ross came to be here?' she said. She ran her eyes over the smoothed-out sheets of paper in her hands. 'Was it this man D. D. Cunningham who invited him here?'

  'No,' said Murugan. 'Exactly the opposite. Cunningham did everything he could to make sure that Ross wouldn't get here. Ronnie wrote him begging letters every couple of months, and Cunningham's answers were always the same, short and simple: no dice.'

  'But still,' said Urmila, 'Ronald Ross did come here, didn't he?'

  'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham stonewalled Ross for more than a year. And then one day, in January 1898, right out of the blue, Cunningham caved. In fact he handed in his resignation and left for England in such a hurry he forgot to pack his boxer shorts. On January 30 the Government of India finally approved Ronnie Ross's transfer to Calcutta.

  'The official story is that all this was just coincidence: old Cunningham was aching for the honeysuckled cottages of Ye Olde England. Well, where he ended up was in a boarding house in Surrey with a view of the municipal gasworks. You're going to tell me he left his cosy little setup out here for that just because he was homesick for English muffins? Well, let me tell you: I don't buy it.'

  'So what are you saying then?' said Urmila. 'Why do you think he left?'

  'I don't have the answer to that,' said Murugan. 'But it's clear that something happened round the middle of January 1898 that made Cunningham change his mind. And it was no accident either: somebody worked pretty hard to set it up.'

  Urmila examined her papers again. 'Here, look at this,' she said, pointing at a line. 'It says here that D. D. Cunningham was granted six days' leave in the middle of January – from the 10th to the 15th of February. That's when it must have happened.'

  'Right,' said Murugan. 'And look at the date on that railway reservation chart: on the 10th of January 1898 somebody called C. C. Dunn took a train to Madras.'

  'And who was that?'

  'No one,' said Murugan. 'That's just it. I think someone is trying to get the message across that D. D. Cunningham travelled to Madras under a false name on that day.'

  ' Madras?' said Urmila scowling at the papers. 'Why Madras? What could have happened there? I suppose there's no way of finding out since it happened so long ago?'

  'So you'd think,' said Murugan, 'I mean it's not like you can look up something that happened in Madras in 1898 in the back issues of Time, right? But the fact is that I do happen to know about a guy called C. C. Dunn who was in Madras about that time. Only I'd never connected him with D. D. Cunningham. Not until this morning, when I took those papers out of your hands. They were the missing link, you see; they tie it all together.'

  'And how did you learn about this C. C… whoever he was?'

  'Because someone wanted me to,' said Murugan. 'It's a long story. Are you sure you're up for it?'

  Urmila nodded emphatically.

  'A few years ago,' Murugan began, 'I was trying to update the malaria archive at the outfit where I work. I was three months into the North Africa and Middle East files when I came upon a weird report of a small, extremely localized epidemic in northern Egypt, about thirty miles south of Alexandria. The population of a tiny hamlet was wiped out in a period of a few days. There were no recurrences, no further outbreaks. This hamlet was settled by a family of migrants from the south – Coptic Christians. They didn't have much to do with their neighbours and they were a long way from the nearest village. When their bodies were discovered they were already in an advanced state of decomposition.'

  'What sort of epidemic was it?' said Urmila.

  'No one's sure,' said Murugan. 'There were no autopsies. In fact the only reason we know about it at all is because a British health officer wrote a short report on it. This was in 1950, soon after the war, and the British were basically still running the place. This health officer was a competent, nononsense guy, from the sound of it: he'd spent his whole career in Egypt. By the time he visited the hamlet the bodies had been disposed of. But he reported two kinds of anecdotal evidence about the symptoms of the deceased: swollen neck glands and large numbers of tiny skin perforations, like insect bites. He thought it might be an exceptionally virulent strain of malaria but he had no way of confirming his hunch. People from the surrounding villages said that there might be a survivor: the body count left one fourteen-year-old boy unaccounted for. He was reported to have been seen at the railway station in a nearby town at about the time of the outbreak. The health officer thought he might be a carrier, and he tried to find him. He thought an examination of the boy might yield a clue to what had happened. But he was never found.'

  'So they had no idea what happened?'

  'Basically, no. The health officer admitted he didn't know what the fuck had happened. He added that the only time he'd heard of similar symptoms was some twenty or more years before
, down south, in Luxor. Someone had told him that the archaeology buff Lord Carnarvon had died of a mosquito bite that had led to a fever and swollen neck glands. He even quoted from a letter written by his lordship's daughter, just before he bit the dust. "You know the mosquito bite on his [Papa's] cheek that was worrying him at Luxor, well yesterday quite suddenly all the glands in his neck started swelling and last night he had a high temperature and still has today.'"

  'I don't follow,' said Urmila. 'We were talking about something that is supposed to have happened in Madras in 1898. How did we end up in Egypt fifty years later?'

  'That's exactly what I'm trying to explain,' said Murugan. 'That's what comes next. What happened was this: after I found the health officer's report, I began asking around to see if anyone had any leads on this. I even posted some queries on a couple of chat groups on the Web. One day I logged on and there was this long message waiting for me: pages and pages long. There was no address or anything on it: it had been sent anonymously. I soon discovered that whoever sent it went to a lot of trouble to make sure that I wouldn't find out who they were: it had been routed and re-routed so many different ways I couldn't even begin to trace it.'

  'And what did the message say?' Urmila asked.

  'It was an excerpt from a book written by a Czech psycho-linguist. The excerpt was about a Hungarian highsociety type, who became a distinguished amateur archaeologist and professional eccentric – one Countess Pongracz. Towards the end of her life she moved to Egypt. The last time she was seen was in 1950: she was on her way to do a dig somewhere near this hamlet where the outbreak happened. No one knows what happened to her.'

  'I still don't see the connection with Madras in January 1898,' said Urmila.

  'I was just getting to that,' said Murugan. 'In her youth La Pongracz was a kind of prototype of a sixties jet-setter, travelling around the world, picking up gurus and stuff. And in January 1898 she was nineteen years old, just starting on her long career. And where do you think she was?'