The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  So he half-listened as Gopal’s distraught mind wandered to the day Balaram had told him of his burnt books. It was 1967, and Alu was eleven then. Eleven. Jyoti Das had turned eleven in January 1964. On his birthday he was taken to the Alipore Zoo in Calcutta. His father, who was a minor revenue official, took leave from his office for the expedition (using up his last casual leave, he complained later to Jyoti’s mother).

  All morning they wandered listlessly from cage to cage, staring at grimacing baboons and mangy hyenas. Jyoti’s father kept up a constant drone of complaint: about the jostling crowds and gangs of young thugs with their blaring transistors; about crawling beggars let in probably because they gave a share of their pickings to the gatemen; about the boys prodding the monkeys with sticks; about mismanagement and white tigers that had gone grey, and other miserable beasts whose increasing miscegenation was marked by names like those of ascending generations of computer chips – tigon, litigon … litiligon, titilitigon … Where would it lead? Where would it all end?

  Leaving the white tigers behind, they wandered towards an area of relative peace on the far side of the lake which lay in the centre of the zoo. Jyoti’s father spotted a snack-bar near cages of wattled cassowaries and Chinese silver pheasants, with tables and chairs laid out in the shade. He seated himself at a table and motioned to Jyoti’s mother to sit. A moment later they were hit by a blast from a transistor and a group of young men danced past, holding hands and doing something between a twist and a bhangra. Two of them were fighting over a bottle of rum wrapped in a handkerchief. Inevitably, they tripped, howling with laughter, and the bottle exploded on the pavement.

  Jyoti’s father, glaring, nervously wiping his forehead, muttered: Chaos; that’s all that’s left. Chaos, chaos. The note of unease in his voice caught in Jyoti’s mind, as it always did, churning up a drifting cloud of fears. He got up and ran down to the railing by the lake. There, with the chaotic surging of human life invisible behind him, he saw a shimmering, velvety carpet of ducks and cormorants and storks covering the lake. Somewhere in that mass of birds his eyes picked out a pair of purple herons with their long bills raised to the sky and their brilliantly coloured wings outstretched. He had been told that every year they flew across the continent to winter in that lake; in that lake and no other. Looking at them in the flesh he was struck with wonder, and as he watched them he gloried in the peace, the order, the serenity granted by a law on such a vast and immutable scale. He could have stayed there for hours, but soon his father’s voice was behind him: Always day-dreaming, worthless boy. Never works. He’ll never pass his examinations … And he was led away by the collar of his birthday T-shirt.

  They went home and Jyoti was sent to his desk to study as usual. But that day, while he was doodling with his pencil to pass the time, he saw the lines take a new, sinuous, muscular shape. He covered one sheet, threw it away, tried another, and another until he saw quite clearly a purple heron wheeling in the sky, its neck outstretched. Then his father was back again to check: Never studies. He’ll never pass. Shame, shame for the family … But Jyoti’s drawing was already hidden away under an exercise-book. He knew it to be ordained for him to redeem his father’s failures, to do even better than all his successful uncles, the engineer in Düsseldorf, the Secretary in Delhi, and to do it by sitting for the Civil Service examinations and becoming a Class I officer – of whatever kind, in the administration, in the police, in the railways, it didn’t matter – but with his name in the Civil Service gazette and a genuine officer’s dearness allowance to guard against inflation. But he knew, too, that acquiescence could buy safety for his own, real world – for neither his father nor the Civil Service could wage war against a clear winter morning’s vision of purple herons.

  Do you want the exact date? Gopal asked, for the young officer in plain clothes had straightened up suddenly. I could try to remember.

  No, no, Jyoti Das said quickly. He smiled. I’m just writing a report, not a biography.

  A biography?

  Even Gopal, with all his love for his friend, would never have thought of writing Balaram’s biography. Once, as a joke, he had suggested it to him: Balaram, so many odd things happen to you, someone should write your biography. Maybe I will.

  Balaram had thought about it quite seriously. He had pushed his hair back, and for a whole minute he sat absolutely still, with his eyes shut. Then he had said, with absolute finality: You’re wrong. Nobody could write my biography, because nothing important ever happens to me. There wouldn’t be any events to write about.

  Gopal, half-offended because Balaram had taken his joke seriously, had retorted: That doesn’t matter at all. Think of Dr Johnson – nothing ever happened to him.

  Balaram had smiled with total certainty, like a gifted child, and said: How could anyone write a biography of the discovery of Reason?

  Gopal had said no more, but of course Balaram was wrong, and he knew it. Even Reason discovers itself through events and people.

  Balaram’s birthday, for example. Nobody knew exactly when it was. His parents had never told anyone because of something their family astrologer had said after working out the newly born infant’s horoscope. All that Balaram knew was that he was born in 1914.

  It was a difficult year to choose from, for Reason was embattled that year. Balaram could have chosen a date as many of his friends in college would have, to mark one of the many terrorist strikes against the British in Bengal. In distant Europe there was always the declaration of the First World War, and its assortment of massacres and butchery. Or there was the day in early August when an American judge in San Francisco, arbitrating on the second-ever application by a Hindu for citizenship in the United States, took refuge in prehistory and decided that high-caste Hindus were Aryans and therefore free and white. And, equally, there was another day in August when the colonial government in Canada rewrote a different prehistory when it turned the eight thousand Indians on board Kamagatamaru back from Vancouver, after deciding that the ancient racial purity of Canada could not be endangered by Asiatic immigration. Or, at much the same time, there was the date of the launching of a drive by the imperial government to recruit Indians for an expeditionary force to join Algerians and Vietnamese and Senegalese in defending the freedom of the Western world from itself.

  But Balaram chose none of those dates. Even reading about them he suffered, for he saw them as abysses tearing apart the path of Man’s ascent to Reason. Instead, he vacillated between any one of several dozen days in May and June when Jagadish Chandra Bose, in a laboratory in south London, demonstrated to stunned audiences of scientists and poets and politicians, all half-deafened by the ringing of sabres in Europe, that even a vegetable so unfeeling as a carrot can suffer agonies of fear and pain.

  But, as Gopal said to him once, if it were not for an astrologer’s accidental remark, you wouldn’t have been able to choose your birthday.

  Balaram was surprised at that. Astrology isn’t chance, he answered. It’s quite the opposite.

  Again Gopal let it pass. He knew Balaram to be dissimulating: if it were not for a chance whim of his father’s, Balaram would not have discovered science at all.

  Balaram was born in Dhaka, then the capital of East Bengal, now of Bangladesh. His father, who had moved to Dhaka from the little village of Medini-mandol in the nearby district of Bikrompur, was a prosperous timber merchant. He owed his prosperity to obliging relatives in Burma, who provided him with a connection with the rich Burmese teak forests. He was also very conservative. Long after their neighbours in the old Kayet-tuli quarter of Dhaka had acquired electric lights, their house was still lit by kerosene-lamps. Then suddenly, in 1927, when Balaram was thirteen, his father changed his mind and festooned their house with bulbs.

  That was the turning-point, and in a way it was an accident. Had Balaram been accustomed to those bulbs with their spiral filaments from his childhood, had they arrived a year before or after he reached the enchanted age of thirteen when the
whole world comes alive for the first time, they would probably never have been touched with magic. His brother, for instance, who was ten at the time, hardly gave them a moment’s thought. Not so Balaram. He was bewitched from the very first time he used one of those large, unwieldy switches. After that he couldn’t find enough to read about electricity. He read about the Chinese and Benjamin Franklin, and Edison became one of his first heroes. In school he pursued the physics teachers with questions.

  But it was already too late. His teachers had decided that he had a gift for history, and this new enthusiasm for science would pass. Balaram did everything he could, but his teachers – in those days in Bengal teachers knew everything – would not let him change his subject to the sciences. So instead Balaram read.

  When, at sixteen, he matriculated quite by chance with a sheaf of distinctions, his teachers decided that he must go to Presidency College in Calcutta to study history. They told him of the legend of Suniti Chatterji, the Professor of Philology, and his mastery of several dozen languages, and of a brilliant young philosopher called Radhakrishnan, only recently appointed professor (and still decades away from becoming President of the Republic).

  Balaram listened to them quietly, and they took his silence for acquiescence. But Balaram was not thinking of their Calcutta at all, with its philology and philosophy and history. He had his own vision of Calcutta. For him it was the city in which Ronald Ross discovered the origin of malaria, and Robert Koch, after years of effort, finally isolated the bacillus which causes typhoid. It was the Calcutta in which Jagadish Bose first demonstrated the extraordinarily life-like patterns of stress responses in metals; where he first proved to a disbelieving world that plants are no less burdened with feeling than man.

  Balaram knew of Presidency College, too: it was there that Jagadish Bose had taught two young men – Satyen Bose, who was to appropriate half the universe of elementary particles with the publication of the Bose–Einstein statistics; and Meghnad Saha, whose formulation of the likeness between a star and an atom had laid the foundation of a whole branch of astrophysics.

  And of course there was the gigantic figure of C. V. Raman, whose quiet researches in the ramshackle laboratories of the Society for the Advancement of Science, in Calcutta, had led to the discovery of the effect in the molecular scattering of light which eventually came to be named after him. In 1930, when Balaram was ready to go to college, the newspapers were already talking of Raman’s candidature for the Nobel.

  Long before his teachers spoke to him about it, Balaram knew that he would go to Calcutta and to Presidency College.

  But his father would not hear of it. He had been brought up on tales of the wickedness of the city; and, besides, there was the expense. Dhaka, he said, had a perfectly good university and, if it was good enough for the whole of Dhaka, there was no reason why it should not be good enough for his son (and it was true that Satyen Bose was teaching there then). He didn’t understand Balaram at all. He could never have understood that Balaram was launching on a pilgrimage, a quest to retrace the steps of Jagadish Bose and Meghnad Saha from their native district of Bikrampur to Calcutta and Presidency College.

  Balaram’s father would not budge, not even when one of Balaram’s teachers threatened to bombard the local and national newspapers with letters denouncing rich men who wanted to deprive young India of talent. Then chance intervened again. Riots broke out in Dhaka University that year. A lecturer’s house in their own neighbourhood was attacked by a mob.

  Balaram’s father gave in at last, just in time. The day Balaram arrived in Calcutta accompanied by an uncle, the newspapers announced that C. V. Raman had won the Nobel Prize.

  Balaram’s uncle took him as far as the two gatehouses outside the Eden Hindu Hostel, just off College Street, where he was to live. He looked up at the heavy ornamental brickwork of the façade, at the imperial baroque pilasters and the long rows of shuttered windows, and with a hasty blessing he abandoned Balaram.

  Balaram was left to cope with his new world alone. His one consolation was that Professor C. V. Raman could not have been more than a few hundred yards away.

  The interior of the Eden Hindu Hostel was even more imposing than the façade. There was an immense quadrangle in the centre with cascades of columns rising three storeys high on all sides of it. Balaram made his way round the quadrangle through a high, echoing corridor. It was terrifying after the cheerful chaos of Dhaka’s Kayet-tuli.

  After wandering through the corridors for half an hour, he found his room and unpacked his luggage. He arranged the few books he had brought with him on the bookshelf and set out the jars of pickles and sweetmeats his mother had sent with him in a neat row on a windowsill. Then, pulling his dhoti up to his knees, he tiptoed to the door and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. He stepped out and walked quickly down the corridor, trying to keep to the shadows. He slipped down the staircase and came to a corner. He hesitated for a moment, and then, making up his mind, he stiffened his back resolutely and went on. It was only after he had turned the corner, when it was already too late, that he noticed a group of students standing in the corridor. Two of them wore European clothes – baggy trousers and collarless shirts. The others were dressed as he was, in dhotis and long kurtas, but somehow their kurtas were different, smarter.

  He hesitated for a moment, but they had already noticed him and he decided not to draw attention to himself by turning back. As he walked on he saw there wasn’t enough room in the corridor to slip around them. He saw that they had stopped talking and were looking at him with pointed interest. He could feel his stomach churning with nervousness.

  He decided to be brave. He stepped up to them and said: Excuse me. Could you tell me where I might get a good view of Professor C. V. Raman?

  The young men looked at each other in puzzlement. One of them said politely: Could you say that again, please? He was in European clothes and he had gold-rimmed spectacles and lustrous, pomaded hair, parted down the middle. He shall remain unnamed, for he was later to rise to prominence in Congress politics and achieve renown for his venality. He may still be lurking in some Calcutta suburb today.

  Balaram cleared his throat: I was only asking if you could tell me where I might get a nice view of Professor C. V. Raman.

  The puzzlement on their faces deepened. It occurred to Balaram that they could not understand his Dhaka accent. Stammering with embarrassment he repeated himself, very slowly.

  There was a snort of laughter. Middle Parting silenced it with a wave. He said to Balaram, gravely fingering his chin: But have you bought a ticket?

  A ticket?

  Oh, yes. And they’re quite expensive. Anyway, why do you want to see C. V. Raman? Usually villagers want to see the High Court and the Museum first. I didn’t know C. V. Raman had appeared on the programme.

  I’m from Dhaka, sir, Balaram said.

  Oh, I see, said Middle Parting. Same thing. Anyway, wouldn’t you like to see the Museum and the High Court first?

  Not right now, I think, Balaram said, edging away. Later perhaps. I was on my way to see …

  No, wait. Middle Parting caught his elbow. But you must, you must see the Museum. How can you be in Presidency College if you haven’t seen the Museum? He winked at the others and turned back to Balaram: And how can you see the Museum without Museum practice?

  There was a snort of laughter. Balaram looked at him in surprise: Museum practice? What is that?

  Middle Parting rubbed his chin. We’ll show you, he said. Free, since you’re new, though most people charge quite a lot. I hope you’re grateful.

  Balaram found himself being led into the middle of the quadrangle. Middle Parting lifted Balaram’s right hand, palm outwards, and explained: That’s how you have to stand when you look at the images of the Buddha. Naturally you have to take your kurta and vest off as well. Now, please take them off.

  Balaram tried to wrench his hand free. Later perhaps, he said. Maybe some other day. Thank you for
so much information, but now I must go.

  Take it off, Middle Parting said again. He twisted Balaram’s hand a little. Balaram threw a desperate glance around him. The others were standing in a circle around him. There was no escape. Fumbling, weak-kneed with shame, he took his kurta and vest off. His chest was pathetically bare and thin. He looked at his feet, trying not to hear their laughter.

  That’s right, said Middle Parting, still grave. And then, when you go into the Greek room, you have to take the rest off as well.

  There was a chorus of laughter and cheers. Balaram, horror-struck, struggled to speak, but his throat was as dry as baked clay. He managed to stammer hoarsely: I think I’ll leave Greece for next year. Thank you very much, and now, if I may …

  For next year? Middle Parting pulled a face of mock-surprise. How can you be in Presidency if you leave Greece for next year?

  Balaram began to back away. Middle Parting waved to the others, and with cheerful whoops they lunged at him, snatching at his dhoti. Balaram lurched as the cloth was ripped away. He fought off their hands with a desperate strength, struggling to keep a few shreds around his waist. There was only one thought in his mind: that his drawers were dirty and even death would be better than standing in the middle of that great quadrangle in dirty drawers.

  It was lucky, he said afterwards, that there is so much cloth to a dhoti.

  Still, it was just a matter of time. He was losing fistfuls of cloth every second.

  It was at that precise moment, when Balaram was clinging to his last few wisps of white cotton, that Gopal appeared. It took Gopal no more than a glance to understand what was happening. He ran across the courtyard and flung himself at Middle Parting and his friends. Heaving with all the strength in his shoulders, he pushed two of them aside and spread his arms across Balaram. He was very angry. He shouted, his spectacles tottering on the edge of his nose: Leave him alone. Why can’t you leave these new students alone? Why don’t you go into the streets if you want to fight?