The Calcutta Chromosome Read online

  'Like what?' said Urmila.

  'The Calcutta chromosome.'

  With a discreet cough, the waiter parted their curtain, and placed their orders on the table.

  Urmila waited till he had left. 'What was that you just said?'

  'The Calcutta chromosome,' said Murugan. 'That's my name for what she was working towards.'

  'Now I'm really lost,' said Urmila. 'I've lived here all my life and I've never heard of this thing you're talking about.'

  'And who knows if you ever will?' said Murugan. 'Or whether I will. Or whether it exists or has ever existed. At this point in time it's still all guesswork on my part.'

  'But you must have something to found your guesses on,' said Urmila.

  Murugan made no answer. 'Go on,' Urmila prompted, almost pleading. 'We're caught in this together, after all. I have a right to know.'

  Murugan hesitated. 'Are you really sure you want to know?'

  She nodded.

  'OK, I'll tell you what started me off,' said Murugan reluctantly. 'It seemed to me from Farley's letter that Mangala was actually using the malaria bug as a treatment in another disease.'

  'What disease?'

  'Syphilis,' said Murugan. 'Or to put it more precisely, syphilitic paresis – the final paralytic stage of syphilis. From Farley's account it seems there was an underground network of people who believed that she possessed a cure. Remember that we're talking about the 1890s – long before the discovery of penicillin. Syphilis was untreatable and incurable: it killed millions of people every year, all around the world. These people who came to see Mangala may have believed that she was a witch or a magician or a god or whatever: it doesn't matter – the conventional medical treatments for syphilis at that time weren't much more than hocus-pocus either. Let's just stick with that old saying about no smoke without a fire. If a whole crowd of people believed that Mangala had a cure, or a halfway effective treatment, it must have been because she had a certain rate of success. People aren't crazy: if they travelled long distances to see her they must have thought she offered some kind of hope.'

  'What do you think that treatment was?' said Urmila.

  'I'm just guessing wildly here, OK? But if you twisted my arm, I'd say that she'd stumbled upon some variant of a process that got a guy called Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel in 1927. Guess what that treatment was?'

  Urmila looked up from her plate. 'You know perfectly well I have no idea,' she said. 'What was it?'

  Murugan poked a finger into the crisp, rounded top of his dhakai parotha, releasing a puff of steam. 'All right, I'll tell you,' he said. 'What Wagner-Jauregg showed was that artificially induced malaria often cured, or at least mitigated, syphilitic paresis. What he'd do is, he'd actually inject malarial blood into the patient by making a little incision. It was a pretty crude process, but the weird thing is that it worked. In fact, until antibiotics, the WagnerJauregg process was pretty much a standard treatment: every major VD hospital had its little incubating room where it grew a flock of anopheles. Think about it: hospitals cultivating disease! But on the other hand, what could be more natural than fighting fire with fire? You could say vaccines work on the same sort of principle really, but what they do is to prime your immune system against themselves. This is the only instance known to medicine of using one disease to fight another.

  'To this day no one really knows how the WagnerJauregg treatment worked. Not that anyone's losing any sleep over it. It was a scientific scandal and medicine was almost grateful to turn its back on it once antibiotics came along. Old Julius didn't worry too much about how it worked either. He was no biologist, remember: he was a clinician and a psychologist. He thought the process worked by raising the patient's body temperature. It didn't seem to bother him that no other fever had the same effect.

  'But it's quite possible that malaria worked on paresis through a different route: the brain, for example. One of the things that syphilis does is that it muddies up the blood! brain barrier. Malaria works on the brain too, in different ways: that's why falciparum malaria is also called cerebral malaria. But other kinds of malaria have weird neural effects too. A lot of people who've had malaria know that: it can be more hallucinogenic than any mind-bending drug. That's why primitive people sometimes thought of malaria as a kind of spirit-possession.

  'Enter Mangala: it looks like she hit upon this treatment too, at about the same time as the Herr Doktor. But she added a little twist to it. From what we know of her technique, it sounds like she was working with some weird strain of malaria – that is, by some kind of primitive horsebreeding method she had developed a strain that could actually be cultivated in pigeons. My hunch is that she found some way of making the bug cross over, so that the bird could be used like a test tube, or an agar plate.

  'Now here's the really wacky stuff. I'll just stick my neck out and say it: I think what happened was that somewhere down the line Mangala began to notice that her treatment often produced weird side effects – what looked like strange personality disorders. Except that they weren't really disorders but transpositions. She began to put two and two together and found that in fact what she had on her hands was a crossover of randomly assorted personality traits, from the malaria donor to the recipient – via the bird of course. And once she saw this she became more and more invested in isolating this aspect of the treatment, so that she could control the ways in which these crossovers worked.'

  'I'm not sure I follow,' said Urmila. 'What exactly are you trying to say?'

  'What am I saying? Well, what I'm saying is this: I think Mangala stumbled on something that neither she nor Ronnie Ross nor any scientist of that time would have had a name for. For the sake of argument let's call it a chromosome: though the whole point of this is that if it is really a chromosome, it's only so by extension, so to speak – by analogy. Because what we're talking about here is an item that is to the standard Mendelian pantheon of twenty-three chromosomes what Ganesh is to the gods; that is, different, non-standard, unique – which is exactly why it eludes standard techniques of research. And which is why I call it the Calcutta chromosome.

  'One of the reasons why the Calcutta chromosome can't be found by normal methods is because unlike the standard chromosomes it isn't present in every cell. Or if it is, it's so deeply encrypted that our current techniques can't isolate it. And the reason why it isn't present in every cell is because unlike the other chromosomes it's not symmetrically paired. And the reason why it's not paired is because it doesn't split into eggs and sperm. And guess why that is? I'll tell you: it's because this is a chromosome that is not transmitted from generation to generation by sexual reproduction. It develops out of a process of recombination and is particular to every individual. That's why it's only found in certain kinds of cells: it simply isn't present in regenerative tissue. It only exists in non-regenerating tissue: in other words, the brain.

  'Let me put it like this: if there really is such a thing as the Calcutta chromosome only a person like Mangala, someone who's completely out of the loop, scientifically speaking, would be able to find it – even if she didn't know what it was and didn't even have a name for it. For what we have here is a biological expression of human traits that is neither inherited from the immediate gene pool nor transmitted into it. It's exactly the kind of entity that would be hardest for a conventional scientist to accept. Biologists are under so much pressure to bring their findings into line with politics: right-wing politicians sit on them to find genes for everything, from poverty to terrorism, so they'll have an alibi for castrating the poor or nuking the Middle East. The left goes ballistic if they say anything at all about the biological expression of human traits: it's all consciousness and soul at that end of the spectrum.

  'But if you think about it, it figures that certain kinds of traits would have a biological correlate. But who said they have to be determined by biology? Maybe it even works the other way around – that they leave their imprint on biology. Who knows?

  'A
nd just because those biological correlates aren't transmitted by sexual reproduction, it doesn't mean that they can't be transferred between individuals by other methods. And that's where Mangala comes up to bat. Remember that she started at the deep end, by stumbling upon the process of transmission, rather than the chromosome itself – after all she didn't know what a chromosome was. No one did back then. Remember that it was malaria that led her to it. Remember that one of the extraordinary things about the malaria bug is that it has the capacity to 'cut and paste' its DNA – unlike any creature we know of except the trypanosome. Remember that's one of the reasons why it's been so hard to develop a malaria vaccine. Because what's special about the malaria bug is that as it goes through its life cycle it keeps altering its coat-proteins. So by the time the body's immune system learns to recognize the threat, the bug's already had time to do a little costumechange before the next act.

  'Perhaps what Mangala chanced upon was just this: that the malaria bug, because of its recombinatory powers, can actually digest this bit of DNA by splitting it up and redistributing it. Then, when it's reintroduced in a patient whose bloodlbrain barrier's been made spongy, perhaps it can carry the information back and make some tiny little rewirings in the host's wetware.

  'I reckon that once she stumbled on the process she dropped everything else and began to concentrate on refining it – in two directions. One was in trying to figure out some way of side-stepping the syphilis step. And the other was in trying to stabilize the chromosome during the process of transference. Because what was happening till then was that the bug was breaking it up in the weirdest ways and she wanted to be able to control the kinds of traits that were being transmitted.

  'It's my guess that by about 1897 Mangala had run into a dead end, and she'd come to the conclusion that the existent strains of malaria wouldn't let her go any further. That's why she was so desperate to have Ronnie figure the whole thing out and publish it. Because she actually believed that the link between the bug and the human mind was so close that once its life cycle had been figured out it would spontaneously mutate in directions that would take her work to the next step. That was what she believed, I think: that every time she reached a dead end, the way ahead was by provoking another mutation.'

  Pushing away her empty plate, Urmila said: 'How?'

  'By trying to make certain things known.'

  'So did she succeed?' she asked.

  Murugan smiled. 'I think we're going to find out.'

  'How?'

  'My guess is that that's what this experiment is about.'

  'But why in this way? Why not…?'

  'Don't you get it?' said Murugan. 'She's not in this because she wants to be a scientist. She's in this because she thinks she's a god. And what that means is that she wants to be the mind that sets things in motion. The way she sees it, we can't ever know her, or her motives, or anything else about her: the experiment won't work unless the reasons for it are utterly inscrutable to us, as unknowable as a disease. But at the same time, she's got to try and tell us about her own history: that's part of the experiment too.'

  'Why are you talking about her as if she was still alive?' said Urmila. 'Are you really trying to say that she is? That she somehow managed to…?'

  Murugan smiled. 'Well,' he said. 'What do you think?'

  Crossing her arms, Urmila hugged herself, suddenly cold. 'I don't know what to think,' she said. She took hold of the booth's curtain and tweaked it back.

  The moment she looked into the cabin, everything seemed to stop; it was as though everyone in the room had turned to stare – the other customers, the waiters, the dishevelled college students at the next table – as though they had been waiting all along to see her face.

  She pushed the curtain quickly shut.

  'But what about Lutchman?' she said. 'Nothing you've told me proves any connection between Mangala and Lutchman. For that matter who was Lutchman? What was his past?'

  'You've got me there, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'That's where I keep coming up short. All I have is bits and pieces – no beginning, no middle and definitely no end.'

  'Give me examples,' said Urmila. 'What are these bits and pieces you're talking about?'

  'Farley's letter is the main source,' said Murugan. 'Farley says there was another guy working with Mangala at Cunningham's lab. He seems to have been about the same age as Lutchman and he fits the same general profile.'

  'That's not much to go on,' said Urmila.

  'That's true,' Murugan acknowledged, 'except that a couple of references in the letter seem to suggest that this assistant was the same guy who turned up at Ross's door on May 25 1895.'

  'Like what?' said Urmila.

  'Well, one thing we know about Lutchman, from another source, is that he was digitally challenged – that is, his left hand was missing a thumb. It doesn't seem to have made any difference to his manual skills. He was probably born that way, because his index finger seems to have retrained itself to do the thumb's job… '

  Something stirred in Urmila's mind, a distant memory.

  'What's up?' said Murugan. 'Why're you frowning?'

  She bit her lip: 'I thought I'd remembered something, but I can't place it. Anyway, go on. Does Farley say anything about the assistant's hand?'

  'Nothing explicit,' said Murugan. 'But there's a sentence where he says: "he was surprisingly deft given the circumstances". Something like that, anyway. My guess is that the "circumstances" he's referring to had something to do with the guy's hand.'

  'Is that all?' Urmila said in disappointment.

  'There's just one other thing. At the end of the letter Farley said that the assistant had been using an assumed name.'

  'So what was his real name then?'

  'I wish I knew,' said Murugan. 'But I don't. Farley didn't mention it in his letter. He left Calcutta the same day he posted the letter. He was seen boarding a train at Sealdah Station and a young man who fits the assistant's description was carrying his luggage. They were also seen getting off the train together later, at a deserted little station. Farley was never seen again. A few months later, in May 1895, "Lutchman" walked into Ronald Ross's lab in Secunderabad.'

  'That could just be a coincidence,' said Urmila.

  'Could be,' said Murugan. 'But there's another coincidence left to account for.'

  'Yes?'

  'It's just this,' said Murugan. 'I've established from a different source that Lutchman's name wasn't a real name either.'

  'What was it?' said Urmila. 'Laakhan.' said Murugan.

  Urmila's hands flew to her mouth. 'Tell me,' she said. 'Quick: what was the name of the station where Farley and the assistant were last seen?'

  'Renupur,' said Murugan.

  She stared at him soundlessly.

  Murugan took hold of her hand and shook it. 'Hey, wake up,' he said. 'What's up?'

  'It's just that I think I may be able to fill in a part of the picture,' Urmila said.

  'How come?'

  'Last night I went home with Sonali-di and she told me something: a story she'd heard from her mother, about something that happened to Phulboni many years ago.'

  Chapter 38

  IN 1933, SOON AFTER he got his first and only job, Phulboni was sent on a trip to the remote provincial town of Renupur.

  Phulboni was working for a well-known British firm, Palmer Brothers, which made soaps and oils and other household goods. The company was famous for its extensive distribution network, which reached into the smallest towns and villages. Every new recruit to the company had to spend a couple of years travelling within a region, visiting village shops, getting to know the local merchants, sitting in tea-stalls, visiting fairs and fairgrounds.

  Being new to the job, Phulboni had never heard of Renupur. Upon making enquiries he was pleasantly surprised to discover that, tiny though it was, the town boasted a railway station. A train that connected Calcutta to the cotton market of Barich passed through it every other day.

  As the cro
w flies, Renupur was no more than three hundred miles from Calcutta but the journey was a slow and rather tedious one, meandering as it did through Darbhanga and a wide swath of the great Maithil plain. But far from being dismayed at the thought of spending two days on a train, Phulboni was delighted: he loved everything to do with the railways – stations, engines, Bradshaws, the acrid creosote smell of teakwood sleepers. There was nothing he liked better than to daydream by an open window with the wind in his face. He was particularly enthusiastic on this occasion because he had been told that the forests near Renupur offered good hunting. Typically, he had spent his first month's salary on a new.303 rifle. Now he was looking forward to the prospect of putting the gun to use.

  It was mid-July. The monsoons had set in and the whole of eastern India was awash in rain. Several of the famously restless rivers of the region had burst their banks and swept across the broad, flat plains. Those waters, so full of menace to those they nourished, presented an entirely different aspect to a casual spectator in a train, watching from the safety of a tall embankment. The still waters, lying in great silver sheets under the lowering monsoon skies, presented an enchanting, bewitching spectacle. Phulboni, raised amidst the hills and forests of Orissa, had never seen anything like this before: this majestic, endless plain mirroring the turbulent heavens.