The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  And then, one morning, Shombhu Debnath in a final challenge threw down a pattern which covered his whole loom. Alu hardly slept for days on end. At the end of it his loom rolled out six yards covered with the dazzling pointillism of the hundred thousand diamonds, the lokhkhohira-buti.

  Give me another, another buti, something harder still, Alu begged, at the feet of the Master.

  Shombhu Debnath turned his face away: I have nothing more to teach you. The time has come for you to grow from an apprentice to a weaver. Skill is not enough; you have all that you ever will. Technique is just the beginning. The world is your challenge now. Look around you and see if your loom can encompass it.

  Alu looked.

  Bomb-buti? Too dull, too easy, bottles and scraps and hints of blood. Refugee-buti? Too much corrugated iron and leaning tin sheets. Some angles were impossible with a kamthakur. War-buti? Too much chaos; the loom demands order. Antiseptic-buti? Buckets in the air?

  Instead, Alu conjured up six yards of majestic howdah’d elephants, trunks curled over villages, lords of the world.

  Politics-buti; nothing more immediate in the world, for that very week Bhudeb Roy had answered the call of the People and mounted a caparisoned elephant and toured Lalpukur and the villages around it to announce his plunge, his nose-dive, his lake-emptying leap into politics. Hundreds of the People had followed him, racing after the elephant, pushing and jostling, fighting to get at its shit. Elephant droppings make good manure.

  Nervously Alu spread six yards of politics-buti in front of Shombhu Debnath.

  Shombhu Debnath’s red eyes flamed. He snatched up the cloth and ripped it apart. He flung it on the earth and ground it into the dust with his bare feet. He spat upon it, blew his nose upon it, and tried to vomit. When he finished there was no cloth left. Five hundred rupees of cotton and sweat swallowed by the dust.

  Filth, he said, filth; uglier than the man and filthier. He smiled at Alu, not in triumph, but sadly: You can never learn jamdani because jamdani is dead, with the world which made it. Beauty doesn’t exist; it is made like words or forts, by speakers and listeners, warriors and defenders, weavers and wearers. That world has washed away. Jamdani is only a toy for the wives of contractors and mahajans now. Stop now: no one can make a thing beautiful alone. No one would understand him. Only a madman would try. Stop now, or you’ll be nothing but a toymaker, piecing together your politics-butis with these elephants and the filth that rides on them.

  Shombhu Debnath was suddenly leering at him; his mouth fallen open, baring teeth that dripped like fangs. No, he said. I can’t allow that. Wait. Wait a moment. I’ll get you a knife. You can cut your thumbs off and give them to me. I’ll pickle them in mustard oil and chillis and hang them up for the village to see – Alu grown to manhood at last.

  Alu turned and ran – away from Shombhu Debnath’s red eyes, his dripping blackened teeth, and ashen knot poised on his head like a nesting cobra – straight back to the safety of his loom. He sat there for a day and a half, scratching on cloth with his kamthakur. And then, one morning, while the village shook with the thunder of planes flying eastwards, his shuttle began its knocking again.

  By the time Maya came back from Balaram’s house, he had two rows finished. He called out to her and pushed the heddle up so that she could see the figures fresh upon the cloth.

  What is it? she said, gazing at the cloth: firm, tip-tilted, dimpled shapes, like green mangoes on a branch.

  What do you think it is? said Alu.

  I don’t know, said Maya. What?

  It’s Maya-buti.

  Maya-buti! The back of her hand rose to cover her mouth. She shook with stifled laughter.

  What’s the matter? said Alu. Don’t you like it? She kept her face covered.

  All right, said Alu. He picked up a blade and bent down to cut the pattern off the loom. Maya darted forward and caught his hand. No, she cried. Let them be.

  Alu sank back to the bench, and she drew her hand slowly back. He turned away, his fists clenched. Maya, he called out.

  What?

  Do you think if I talked to Balaram we could get married?

  Married? Maya whispered. She sank on to her knees beside him. How could we get married? You’re only sixteen; barely out of shorts.

  What do you mean? Alu said angrily. Half the boys of my age in the village are already married.

  Yes, said Maya, but their uncles aren’t schoolteachers.

  That doesn’t matter; I’ll talk to him.

  No, said Maya sadly. I can’t get married. Not now. Not till Rakhal marries. She raised her voice and shouted above the drone of another flight of planes: Who would look after them? And then a voice burst upon them, a hoarse, piercing wail. Maya leapt back and turned away, and a moment later Shombhu Debnath staggered into the courtyard. He made his way across, weaving drunkenly, and leant against one of the poles of the loom-shed. He thrust his face forward at Alu, until it was so close that Alu could feel the toddy steaming off his own face. No time for your butis now, he said. The radio’s declared war, real war, with armies and planes.

  Shombhu Debnath was wrong; not about the war, but about the butis.

  With the beginning of the war, the stream pouring over the border became a deluge. The boundaries of Lalpukur began to outrun Balaram and his buckets of carbolic. Balaram ran out of money. The new refugees hardly had bodies; they hadn’t even the strength to laugh when he tried to raise a collection.

  Balaram gave up. He staggered, exhausted, back to his study with a bucket in his hands. He put it on his knees and stared into its dry bottom. He reached into it, wet his fingers with the last few diluted drops of antiseptic and anointed his forehead. Beaten, he said. Beaten by filthy money.

  But that very day Rakhal handed Alu more money than he had ever earned before. The busy traders of Naboganj (who were as busy as ever, following laws no war could suspend) had fought grim internecine battles of their own, over Maya-buti, and money had poured out of their ironclad purses. So Alu worked as he had never worked before and Balaram had money for a new antiseptic offensive.

  How tortuous, said Balaram, taking Alu’s money, is the path of reason.

  Later it was a puzzle. Sub-Inspector Jyoti Das lost himself in that labyrinth of cause and effect. While writing his report he found a newspaper-cutting in the file; a yellowed scrap of paper, left there perhaps by some conscientious clerk. ‘Teacher battles with germs,’ it said, ‘saves thousands.’ The report claimed that Lalpukur had stayed germ-free when thousands of other villages on the border were consumed by disease, because of the efforts of one Balaram Bose, a teacher, who had doused the village in waves of antiseptic.

  Even cheap disinfectants cost money. How could he afford it? Jyoti Das wondered. After all, Lalpukur wasn’t Calcutta with its fund-raising drives, women’s clubs melting discarded jewellery, and eager schoolboys skewering flags into collars, pinning them to the war effort.

  He was in school, too, then, but the phalanxes of fund-raisers had not claimed him. He had had to live with a different worry. What would the purple herons do that winter? Where would they go, with shrieking planes circling their retreat and the air thick with the dust of worriers and warriors? The herons proved hardier than he had imagined. They were in the lake at the zoo as they always were, supercilious, undismayed by human strife.

  But the antiseptic?

  Extremists have money, said the Deputy Inspector-General, chewing cryptically. It comes across the border. That’s why they’re extremists.

  Jyoti Das was not wholly satisfied. He put the matter to Bhudeb Roy, not without a note of accusation, for the only reference to Balaram in Bhudeb Roy’s reports of that period was a short note which claimed that Balaram had wilfully and maliciously destroyed his best cabbage patch by drenching it with disinfectant.

  How is it, Bhudeb-babu, said Jyoti Das, that your reports mentioned nothing of this business of fighting disease and all that?

  I was busy then, Bhudeb Roy smiled blan
dly, with political matters.

  Jyoti Das persisted: But tell me, Bhudeb-babu, where did he find the money for the antiseptic?

  Who knows? Bhudeb Roy said with a vague wave. There was so much chaos then, the war seemed to be right in the village.

  Yes? Jyoti Das prompted.

  But he never had an answer. Bhudeb Roy didn’t wish to speak of it. The war was right on us then, he said abruptly. It fell on us.

  It did. It fell after a day of fearful silence, when a mist hung about the village till midday, and a gathering expectancy snaked through the huts and houses and hung in the air, as real and prickly as knotted hessian.

  It was a day when people huddled into their houses and shacks. Nobody wanted to let themselves out into the fingers of the fog, though nobody could have said why. Perhaps it was the silence; the sudden muffling of the usual far-away bursts of shooting.

  It grew worse as the day wore on. Early in the evening the fog crawled out of the ponds again, and a still, fetid dampness clamped itself on the village. It reached everywhere. It crept into Alu’s loom and dampened the warp yarn and made it stick. Alu had to work slowly, painfully prising the yarn apart. He would have stopped, but a consignment had been promised to a hungry merchant in Naboganj and the work had to be done.

  As the murky twilight was fading away, Maya brought him a kerosene-lamp, and hung it from a nail in the loom-shed. Where’s Rakhal? Alu asked.

  In Naboganj, she answered.

  And your father?

  She jerked her head at his hut. He’s in there, I think, she said. Sleeping.

  She went to the kitchen and put a match to a lamp’s wick. It would not light. She shook it and tried again. At that moment the roar of a plane overhead broke clammily through the fog, shaking the courtyard. The lamp fell from her hands and smashed on the earth. The flames leapt up for a moment, on the spilt kerosene, and died away. Maya stood transfixed for a moment, looking down at the blackened oil. Then she hitched up her sari and ran across the courtyard to the loom-shed.

  What’s the matter? said Alu, looking up from the loom.

  I’m afraid. She reached forward and put a hand on his shoulder. She stood there for a while, watching him. Then she slipped down to the bench and Alu felt her thighs beside his and smelt her smoky warmth. He put out his hand and touched her cheek. She turned all at once, and threw her legs across his, and sat straddling him, her face on his, bouncing with the rhythm of his legs as they pushed the pedals of the loom. Don’t stop, she whispered urgently into his ear, he’ll wake up if you do.

  Alu jerked on the shuttle-cord again, and the shuttle shot across, while she tore at the buttons of his trousers, ripped them off and thrust her hands inside. Don’t stop, she hissed again. Then, with a heave of her hips, she threw her thin sari up, past her waist. She flung her arms around his neck, pressed her knees to his ribs, and sank upon him.

  Don’t stop, she cried into his ear, faster, and the shuttle pounded through the parted, twitching limbs of the warp, and the cloth poured out, tangled and damp; gushed forth, in a surge of joyful abundance, till the sky burst, with an explosion which sent a gale tearing through the bamboos and seared the tips of the mango trees, and the fog flared scarlet over the village while hundreds of glowing sparks fell out of the sky.

  The whole village was running, stumbling through the fog, before Alu and Maya were out of the courtyard. They picked their way through the murky darkness of the bamboo thickets, tripping on shoots and stumps, helping each other along. Then at the edge of the thickets they heard someone crashing through the bamboo. The noise grew louder and they stopped, holding each other’s hand, and peered into the grey fog. They could see nothing but the swaying outlines of bamboo. Then the footsteps were upon them, and Maya screamed.

  It’s only me, Shombhu Debnath gasped, panting for breath.

  Maya, stupefied: But weren’t you at home, sleeping?

  No, no, he said. He smiled crookedly. I’m going home now. Now, go. Run. Go and see. It’s a plane, fallen out of the sky, on the school.

  He stumbled off in the darkness, and they ran out of the bamboos, into the lanes, and with the rest of the village they poured down into the school, and craned over the shoulders of the crowd which had got there before them and caught a glimpse of a flaming fuselage, driven into the earth like a broken stake.

  Beside it, sitting quite still, legs crossed, her face brilliantly lit by the flames, was Parboti-debi. She was staring up into the sky, oblivious of the crowd, all her haggardness vanished, smiling serenely, gratefully.

  Chapter Four

  Signs of New Times

  The plane was like an exclamation mark fallen on Lalpukur from the sky. The war ended a few days after the crash, and not long after some of the refugees flowed back to the new country across the border, and the others wandered off to the cities or spread out over the country. Soon they were half-forgotten.

  But nobody in Lalpukur forgot the crash.

  The professional interpreters of portents split immediately: a proper fight had long been in the offing anyway, ever since the numerologists had ganged up with the astrologers against the palmists and sabotaged a move for a licensing system and a union to guarantee uniform rates for predictions irrespective of methods used. After the crash things took a new turn. The numerologists assumed the leadership of the End of the World Signalled camp and heaped scorn on the palmists and their theory of Signs of New Times. Whose palm do you read an aircrash on? they sneered. God’s? The astrologers, warily neutral for once, took the conservative view that it meant nothing at all: crashes and tempests and earthquakes were normal in Kaliyug. What else could you expect in the Age of Evil?

  But they’re wrong, said Balaram, telling Gopal the story on his veranda in Calcutta. If it has no meaning, why would it happen? Of course it has a meaning, but the meaning must be read rationally – not with the hocus-pocus of these Stone Age magicians.

  Balaram stopped and looked at Gopal with a hint of a challenge glinting in his eyes. Of course, he said, some people think it rational to believe that events don’t have a meaning.

  Gopal looked away and blew wearily into his cup of tea. With Balaram forty years weren’t enough to forget an argument.

  Balaram was lying in a chaotic, noisy general ward in the Medical College Hospital, his legs encased in plaster, like gigantic boiled eggs. He could have had a private room had he wished. Dantu and the others who had rushed down from the first-floor balcony to the flower-bed where Balaram lay writhing in agony had tried to persuade him to take one. They knew his father could afford it. But even then, between screams of pain, Balaram had managed to sob: No, my father mustn’t know. So Balaram had gone into the general ward and Dantu had decided not to write to his father about the accident.

  Accident, he called it. There were others at that fateful meeting at the top of the stairs on the first floor of the Presidency College building (led by Middle Parting and his unremorseful friends) who called it the Fool’s Fall.

  Almost two days had passed before Gopal heard of it. One evening Dantu, his hollow face haggard and strained, knocked at the door of the room he was staying in then. Gopal, he said pleading, sucking his teeth in distress, can you come with me to see Balaram now? I can’t face him alone – not with what I have to say to him.

  Come where? Gopal said in surprise.

  To the hospital, of course.

  Hospital? Gopal cried. What do you mean?

  Dantu took off his spectacles and squinted at him: Don’t you know? And then he hit himself on the thigh. Of course, he exclaimed, no one remembered to tell you about it. I was too busy with Balaram in the hospital, and the other Rationalists … well, there aren’t any other Rationalists now. Those who haven’t gone over to the Science Association are busy trying to keep out of sight.

  Gopal caught his arm and dragged him into the room, and later they almost ran all the way to the hospital. When they reached the foot of Balaram’s bed, Gopal saw him smiling through the t
win white mounds of his plastered legs and he collapsed on to a chair.

  Balaram surveyed them calmly: Well? There was no answer. Gopal panted helplessly, staring at the white expanse of plaster. In the end it was Dantu who broke the silence.

  Balaram, he said abruptly, I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving the Rationalists, too.

  Balaram nodded as though he had expected it; and Dantu, who had braced himself for an argument, was suddenly deflated. I told you, he said weakly, I told you it wouldn’t work. I told you it was a mad idea.

  Balaram shrugged, smiling: But I had to try, didn’t I? Grimacing, Dantu began to drum on the rusty steel bedpost.

  And you, Dantu? Balaram said. Are you joining the Science Association, too?

  Dantu snorted: You should know better than that, Balaram. He began to say something else, stopped, and toed the floor meditatively. Then with a long sigh he patted Balaram’s plaster casts. All right, Balaram, he said, I’ll go now.

  Quickly Balaram called out: Wait. He reached under his pillow and drew out a book wrapped in a tattered brown-paper cover. Give me your pen, he said to Gopal and, taking it, began to scribble on the title-page.

  When he had finished he held the book out to Dantu. Here’s something for you, he said gravely. Look after it; put it in that old bookcase of yours.

  The book fell open in Dantu’s hands and he saw that it was the Life of Pasteur. Biting his lip, he squeezed Balaram’s shoulder. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll look after it. He raised the book in a brief salute, and hurried away.

  Don’t lose it, Balaram called out after him. You’ll need it someday; someday it’ll help you remember Reason.

  It’s all my fault, Gopal said afterwards, wringing his hands. I’m responsible, no one else. I shouldn’t have let it happen.

  What could you have done? said Balaram.

  I don’t know, but I shouldn’t have let it happen. I knew it would happen, I knew it. I should never have let you become president of the Rationalists. I foresaw it: I knew you would bring disaster on yourself and the society if you ever became president.