The Calcutta Chromosome Page 3

  She cast a quizzical, raised-eyebrow glance at her friend, Sonali, but failed to catch her eye. Sonali did not seem in the least bit put out by the man. In fact she was smiling at' him. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I didn't follow.'

  The man flipped his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the auditorium. 'What the hell is going on in there?' he said, a little slower this time.

  Urmila answered before Sonali could, in the hope that he would go away. 'It is an award ceremony,' she said. 'For Phulboni, the writer – to mark his eighty-fifth birthday.'

  Instead of going away, the man now started to introduce himself – muttering a name that sounded like Morgan. Sonali gave him a smile that could easily be mistaken for a sign of encouragement. You could hardly blame him for lingering.

  'Phulboni?' said Murugan, scratching his beard. 'The writer?'

  'Yes,' Sonali said softly. 'Our greatest living writer.'

  Urmila gave Sonali a nudge. 'Sonali-di,' she said. 'There's something I wanted to ask you… '

  The man went on, without missing a breath, as though he hadn't heard her. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I think I've heard of him.'

  Sonali reached into her handbag, took out a cigarette and began to fumble with a lighter. Urmila was mildly shocked: she knew Sonali smoked of course, she had seen her light up in her office. But here, in public?

  'Sonali-di!' she said in an undertone. 'Everyone in Calcutta is here; what if someone sees…?'

  'It's all right, Urmila,' Sonali said wearily, gesturing at the empty hallway. 'No one's looking this way.' She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke into the air, throwing her head back.

  'I remember,' Murugan said suddenly. "Phulboni" is the guy's pen-name, right?'

  'That is right,' Sonali nodded. 'His real name is Saiyad Murad Husain. He began writing under a pen-name because his father threatened to disown him if he became a writer.'

  'That's just a legend,' said Urmila.

  'Phulboni would be the first to tell you,' Sonali said with a laugh, 'that legends aren't always untrue.'

  Suddenly the writer's voice rose, booming out of a loudspeaker. 'Mistaken are those who imagine that silence is without life; that it is inanimate, without either spirit or voice. It is not: indeed the Word is to this silence what the shadow is to the foreshadowed, what the veil is to the eyes, what the mind is to truth, what language is to life.'

  Sonali blew out a cloud of smoke. 'Just listen to him!' she said, cocking her head to catch his voice. 'He's really worked himself up today. He often gets like this nowadays, especially when he's speaking English. You should have heard him the other day at the Alliance Francaise.'

  Urmila noticed, to her dismay, that Sonali was smiling at Murugan again, almost as if she were egging him on. Her heart sank. Sonali was always doing things like this – stopping to talk to strangers, getting into conversations in the lift and missing her floor and so on. As a rule Urmila didn't mind: if anything she thought it endearing that someone as celebrated as Sonali Das should take such evident pleasure in talking to people she didn't know. But today Urmila was in a hurry: she had an assignment to finish and she needed to talk to Sonali.

  Earlier in the day she'd dropped in on Sonali, at her fifth-floor office, to suggest that they go over to the ceremony together, hoping to talk to her on the way. But inevitably, they ended up in one of those taxis whose drivers seemed incapable of finding their way from one end of Chowringhee to the other. She and Sonali had spent the entire twenty minutes of the drive from the magazine's Dharmatola office to Rabindra Sadan hanging over the front seat and issuing minute by minute instructions: 'Turn right here… look out… bus ahead… dog there… ditch in front.'

  And now, just when she had finally got her alone, here was this odd-looking man in the cap and the goatee.

  Urmila considered making a more forceful interruption and then decided against it. She was still a little unsure of herself with Sonali: in fact it hadn't been at all easy to go up to her office today, without an invitation.

  Urmila had been working at Calcutta since college, three years ago. She prided herself on dealing with hard news, on being the only woman on the reporting desk. She no longer thought anything of storming into the Home Secretary's office in Writer's Building, or of asking pointed questions at the Chief Minister's press conferences. But when it came to Sonali Das she found herself becoming unaccustomedly shy and tongue-tied. Sonali was such a presence in the city; the kind of person you read about in film magazines and newspaper gossip columns; whose name you grew used to hearing on the lips of your aunts and cousins, pronounced with equal measures of censoriousness and admiration, envy and outrage. She was one of those people whom everyone talked about without quite knowing why.

  In part, her fame was due to her late mother, a famous stage actress from the forties and fifties. But Sonali had acted in a couple of Bombay films herself while still in her teens. The first one created a sensation, because it wasn't the usual song-and-dance affair. But then, just when she looked set for a big career, she left Bombay and came back to Calcutta. A few years later, she published a wonderful little memoir, funny, but also wistful, even sad. It was mainly about her mother, but also partly about her own childhood – about her mother's friends in the literary world, about the old studios in Tollygunge and Bombay, about accompanying her mother when she acted with jatra companies that travelled the countryside staging vast historical melodramas. A radical young director turned the book into a play; the play, in turn, was filmed, to much acclaim from critics and film societies. From then on, Sonali Das was permanently famous, even though she never did anything else – or at least not until she agreed to join Calcutta , at the owner's special request, to look after the women's supplement.

  Urmila was intrigued to hear of Sonali's appointment at the magazine, but she hadn't for a moment imagined that they would become friends. And then one day she found herself standing beside Sonali in the lift. She recognized her instantly, even though she'd only set eyes on her once before, years ago. She was much changed, but Urmila decided at once that the changes were all for the better: that white streak in her hair, for instance – she was right to let it show. It suited her, marked her out.

  After the first quick glance, Urmila kept her eyes carefully on the lift door, determined not to stare. But before she knew it Sonali was talking to her. Within minutes they were sitting in the magazine's grimy little canteen, drinking tea and chatting.

  Urmila had broken her watch strap that morning, while struggling to keep her footing on a crowded minibus. She felt foolish mentioning it: what possible interest could someone like Sonali Das have in a broken watch strap? But far from being bored, Sonali proved to be very useful: she told her about a stall near Metro Cinema where you could get your watch strap fixed for a couple of rupees. Urmila was astonished that she should know about something like that.

  And now, in the same indiscriminately helpful way, Sonali was telling the stranger with the goatee that the Vice-President had come all the way from Delhi to give Phulboni his award.

  Urmila could tell that the only way they were ever going to get rid of the man was by going into the auditorium. 'Come on, Sonali-di,' she said, jogging her arm. 'Let's go, or we'll miss everything.'

  Sonali took a last, long drag on the cigarette and stuck the glowing tip into a sand-filled ashtray. 'I'm afraid we have to go now,' she said flashing Murugan a smile. 'My friend here has work to do.'

  Urmila led the way to a door and pushed it open. The auditorium was packed: waves of heads rippled away towards the brilliantly floodlit stage, where a tall, whitehaired man was standing at a lectern, wearing a plain white shirt and an old fashioned, high-waisted pair of trousers of a faded military green. The spotlights above had cast long shadows over his craggy face, but there was no mistaking the dark, glittering eyes beneath the jutting brow. Urmila froze: she had heard so much about him, read so much he had written, but she had never set eyes on him before, not in the flesh.

  She
took a hesitant step along the darkened aisle. Absently she noted that the Vice-President was swaying sleepily on stage, behind Phulboni.

  The writer was gripping the edge of the lectern, leaning forward, speaking in a low, rasping voice. 'The silence of the city,' he said, 'has sustained me through all my years of writing: kept me alive in the hope that it would claim me too before my ink ran dry. For more years than I can count I have wandered the darkness of these streets, searching for the unseen presence that reigns over this silence, striving to be taken in, begging to be taken across before my time runs out. The time of the crossing is at hand, I know, and that is why I am here now, standing in front of you: to beg – to appeal to the mistress of this silence, that most secret of deities, to give me what she has so long denied: to show herself to me… '

  Urrnila cast a glance over her shoulder, down the aisle. She noticed that Murugan had followed close behind and was standing at her side, trying to push his way into the auditorium. An usher walked up, torch in hand. He glanced at Sonali's press tag and then at Urmila's and waved them through. Walking down the darkened aisle Urmila looked back again. She was relieved to see that the usher was leading Murugan firmly out of the auditorium.

  On the stage there was a minor commotion: the VicePresident's drowsily nodding head had knocked against the back of his chair.

  Chapter 7

  SUMMONING a dedicated Dakala-class courier signal Antar sent off a message to the Council's headquarters to let them know he had found the ID card of a LifeWatch employee missing since August 21 1995. Then he settled back in his chair and began to browse through the file that Ava had fetched from the Council archives. They'd want it back in an hour or so, and he knew he ought to go through it, just in case headquarters wanted him to do any followup work. From the look of it he estimated it would take him twenty minutes or so – leaving him just enough time for a walk to Penn Station before his dinner appointment with Tara.

  In a few minutes he discovered that the file consisted largely of notices and newspaper clippings that had appeared at the time of L. Murugan's 'disappearance'. For the most part they merely reproduced the gossip that had circulated in the office. At the time, Antar remembered, everyone had assumed that 'disappearance' was just a euphemism for suicide.

  Some of the clippings referred to the obviously desultory search that had been launched by the Indian police immediately after the 'disappearance': it wasn't hard to see that they, no less than Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch, had decided on a euphemistic use of the word.

  It was the last item in the file that gave Antar pause. It was an article from an unexpected source, LifeWatch's internal newsletter. The piece had the reminiscent, quietly respectful tone of an obituary although the writer was careful to describe Murugan as 'missing' rather than 'dead'. It began on the customary anecdotal note, referring to him as 'Morgan' – 'the name by which his friends knew him'. It described him as a 'cocky little rooster of a man'; it talked, not without fondness, of his combativeness, of how he could never resist an argument, of his apparently unstoppable fluency; of the many contributions he had made as LifeWatch's principal archivist. It touched on his 'global' childhood spent wandering between the world's capitals with his technocrat father and spoke briefly of his love of Hollywood B-movies and old American TV serials – 'the only constant, as for so many, in a peripatetic, internationalized coming-of-age'.

  It was as a graduate student at Syracuse, the article said, that 'Morgan' first discovered the great love of his life: the medical history of malaria. He spent several years teaching in a small college in upstate New York, and during this time he came to be increasingly interested in one highly specialized aspect of this subject: the early history of malaria research. Later, even while working for LifeWatch, he had seized every spare moment to pursue this avenue of research – often to the detriment of his own career. He had published little or nothing in those years, but he had often claimed, in his flippant way, that he enjoyed the happy situation of being pre-eminent in his field by virtue of having it all to himself.

  This subject was the research career of the British poet, novelist and scientist, Ronald Ross. Born in India in 1857, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his work on the life cycle of the malaria parasite. At the time it had been widely assumed that this epochal discovery would lead to the eradication of what was possibly the world's oldest and most widespread disease: an expectation, alas, that had been sadly belied, as Life Watch had discovered to its cost. In occasional moments of seriousness, Murugan had been known to admit that his interest in this rather obscure subject had initially had a biographical origin. The last crucial phase of Ronald Ross's work was done in Calcutta, in the summer of 1898. Murugan was himself born in that city, although he left it at an early age.

  Possibly this biographical connection had something to do with the obsessive nature of Murugan's interest in this subject. In 1987 he let some of his friends know that he had finally written a summary of his research in an article entitled 'Certain Systematic Discrepancies in Ronald Ross's account of Plasmodium B'. Although some of his colleagues expressed interest, none of them ever got to see this article. It received such negative preliminary reports at all the journals to which it was submitted that Murugan decided to revise it before putting it in circulation.

  As it turned out, however, the revised article fared no better than the original. The new piece bore the unfortunate title 'An Alternative Interpretation of Late Nineteenth-Century Malaria Research: is there a Secret History?'. It met with an even more hostile reception than the earlier version, and it only served to brand Murugan as a crank and an eccentric.

  In 1989 Murugan wrote to the History of Science Society proposing a panel on early malaria research for the Society's next convention. When the proposal was rejected he sent pages-long E-mail messages to members of the review committee, jamming their mailboxes. A year later the Society took the unprecedented step of revoking his membership. He was warned that he would face legal action if he tried to attend any further meetings. It was then that Murugan finally gave up trying to argue his case in public.

  Generally speaking, Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch treated his 'research' as a harmless if time-consuming hobby: no one thought the worse of him for it, except when it detracted from his regular work. But it was soon apparent to those who knew him well that he had taken his ostracism from the scholarly community very hard. Indeed, this may well have been the proximate cause of his increasingly erratic and obsessional behaviour. It was at about this time for instance, that he began to speak openly about his notion of the so-called 'Other Mind': a theory that some person or persons had systematically interfered with Ronald Ross's experiments to push malaria research in certain directions while leading it away from others. His advocacy of this bizarre hypothesis gradually led to his estrangement from several of his friends and associates.

  Murugan believed that the developments in malaria research that occurred in the early 1990s – such as Patarroyo's immunological work, and the breakthroughs in research on antigenic variations in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite – were the most important advances in the subject since Ross's work almost a century before. Murugan persuaded himself (and tried to persuade others) that these developments would have the effect of vindicating his life's work. The turning point came in 1995 when he began to lobby to be sent to Calcutta, the site of Ross's discoveries: he was particularly intent on getting there before August 20, the day that Ross had designated 'World Mosquito Day', to commemorate one of his findings.

  Unfortunately LifeWatch had no office in Calcutta: nor would it have been possible to justify the expense of opening one purely for Murugan's sake. However, when it became clear that Murugan was determined to go even if it cost him his job, various people within the organization put their heads together and manufactured a small research project that would allow him to spend some time in Calcutta, although on a greatly reduced salary. To Murugan's great delight, the paperwo
rk was concluded just in time to allow him to reach Calcutta on August 20 1995.

  Later, after Murugan's 'disappearance', there were those who sought to blame Life Watch for allowing him to go at all. However, the fact was that the organization had done everything in its power to dissuade him. Representatives of the Personnel Department, for example, held several meetings with him in July 1995, shortly before his departure, trying to argue him out of pursuing this project. But by this time the plan had become such an idee fixe that in all likelihood nobody could have dissuaded Murugan from following the course he had decided upon.

  'It is unnecessary therefore', the article continued, 'to seek to blame Murugan's well-wishers at LifeWatch for the sad events of August 1995: it would be more appropriate to join them in grieving for the loss of an irreplaceable friend.'

  Chapter 8

  THE TORRENTIAL downpour had now thinned to a gentle drizzle. Murugan made his way quickly out of the premises of Rabindra Sadan, to the traffic-clogged edge of Lower Circular Road. Ignoring the beleaguered policeman on the traffic island, he stepped straight into the flow and marched right through, holding up a hand to ward off the oncoming cars and buses, apparently oblivious to their screeching brakes and blaring horns.

  The pavement on the other side was jammed with pedestrians. Murugan was almost swept off his feet by the onrush of people heading towards Harish Mukherjee Road and P. G. Hospital. No sooner had he managed to fall in step with the crowd than he heard a voice calling out to him. He came to a sudden halt only to find himself pushed ahead by the relentless flow of pedestrians.

  He threw a quick glance over his shoulder as he was propelled forward. He heard the shout again: 'Hey, mister, where you going?' Sure enough, bobbing up and down in the torrent of people behind him was the head of a gaptoothed, emaciated boy – a tout of some indeterminate kind, who had accosted him earlier in the day, right outside his guest house.