The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  The constable screwed up his eyes and peered out of the window into the darkness. Just some local people, saar-ey, he said dismissively, gathered outside the arrack-shop across the road.

  The other constable came back, leading a bare-chested man in a green lungi. He was a powerfully built man, with a broad muscular chest, but now his eyes were bloodshot and he hung his head. Dubey looked him over and told a constable to switch the neon lights off and train a light on the prisoner’s face. Das smiled wrily: Copy-book technique.

  Dubey gave him a twitch of his lips in acknowledgement. Then, patting his open palm with the cane, he walked up to the prisoner and said softly: I just want to know one thing, that’s all. Where is that man now?

  The prisoner hung his head in silence. Dubey looked at him for a moment, then he spun on his booted heel and smiled thinly at Das: Why don’t we see what the Union Secretariat can do?

  Das hesitated, taken by surprise, but Dubey was watching him, smiling. He got up and went up to the man in the lungi, trying hard not to advertise his nervousness by swallowing. He took Dubey’s cane from him and prodded the man in the chest. Listen, you, he said. He raised his voice, for he could sense a hint of a tremor at the back of his throat: Don’t make trouble for yourself. Just tell us: where is that man now?

  The prisoner stared silently at Das’s shoes. Das rubbed his right hand. Then he pulled his hand back and smashed the back of his palm across the prisoner’s face, swivelling with the blow, throwing all his weight behind it. The man howled and clutched his cheek. Slowly he crumpled to his knees.

  Das stuffed his smarting hand into his pocket before the temptation to rub it could become irresistible. He felt his bile churn and rise, searing the back of his throat. He glanced across the room hoping Dubey would not notice his hand shaking. Dubey raised a congratulatory eyebrow. Tough cop, he said.

  Suddenly Das was startled. He seemed to hear a chant somewhere: Hul-lo hul-lo, jol-ly fel-low. The noise outside had grown; now scattered shouts pierced the rumbling. He heard the chant again, close by. Looking around him he spotted a pair of eyes peeping through a crack in a shuttered window. He said quickly: Dubey, we should move to some other room. This isn’t at all suitable.

  Dubey rapped out an order and the prisoner was led out of the room holding his bleeding cheek. Dubey made a remark as they followed the prisoner out, but the noise had grown so loud that Das could not hear him. What? he shouted.

  I said, we’ve got to get him to talk now or … Das strained forward to hear him, but Dubey’s words were lost, for suddenly the noise outside gathered itself together and erupted into a full-throated roar. In the moment’s silence that followed Das heard a thin voice piping: Hul-lo hul-lo, jol-ly fellow. Then another roar, even louder. They could hear the glass rattling in the windows. Quickly they moved into a small windowless room inside.

  What are they shouting? Das asked, trying to speak calmly. Dubey did not answer.

  Han? Dubey?

  I don’t know, Dubey said shortly.

  Das thought for a moment. You mean to say, he began. A stone flew through the outer room and rolled down the corridor towards them. Preoccupied, Das picked it up and rubbed it between his hands. You mean to say, he said, that you haven’t passed your departmental language examinations?

  There were more shouts outside, and stones clattered on the shuttered windows. Frowning, Das went on: Doesn’t it hold up your salary increments?

  It’s much worse, Dubey confided in a rush. Not only are they holding up my increments, now there’s talk of withholding payment into my gratuity and provident funds. It’s terrible – you don’t know. You chaps in your home states are lucky; you don’t know what it’s like for us. (Das flinched as a roar shook the walls.) I’ve got myself a teacher and I’ve tried to learn the bloody lingo, but it’s impossible. You’d never believe the kinds of words these buggers think up.

  A constable stood before them, nervously shifting his weight from leg to leg. He looked scared. Saar-ey … , he said.

  Dubey went to the prisoner and prodded his chin up with the point of the cane. Look, he said, tell us the truth and you’ll be out of here in ten minutes. We don’t want to keep you – just tell us the truth. Don’t talk, and I’ll see to it that you’re here for ten years. Now, just tell us: where is that man right now? Don’t make me lose my temper.

  The man swallowed and brushed a trickle of blood from his cheek. There was a heavy thud on the outer door of the station, and they heard it creak. Dubey ignored it. Looking straight into the prisoner’s eyes, he laid the tip of his cane on the bridge of his nose. Come on, where is he now?

  He’s on a boat for al-Ghazira, the prisoner said in halting Hindi. Mariamma. It left two days ago.

  In his disappointment Dubey smashed his cane on the floor, so hard that it splintered and broke. Das patted him on the back: Never mind, you’ll get your report anyway. I’ll talk to the DIG.

  Dubey ignored him. Glaring, he shouted at the prisoner: Why al-Ghazira?

  The prisoner was no longer hanging his head. He was looking straight at Dubey, and there was a faint hint of triumph in the angle of his head. He said nothing.

  Dubey shouted again: Why al-Ghazira? Does he have connections there? People who work with him?

  The outer door was groaning and creaking ominously now, and the constables were cowering in a corner. The prisoner was still silent. Das tapped Dubey on the shoulder, but his hand was brushed away. Doubling his splintered cane, Dubey held it to the prisoner’s stomach. He drew his arm back: Come on, quickly. Does he have connections there?

  Silently the prisoner nodded. Turning to Das, Dubey said sharply: Any more questions? Das shook his head.

  Good, said Dubey. He waved to a constable. Let him go after we’ve gone, but keep an eye on him.

  In the outer room shards of glass from a broken window-pane crackled under their shoes. Das noticed an orange glow filtering in under the door. He put his eye to a crack in the shutters and looked out. He caught a glimpse of flaming palm-leaf torches and a dense mass of people thronged into the narrow road outside the police station. Then suddenly there was another eye opposite his and a voice was singing: Hul-lo hul-lo, jol-ly fel-low.

  Das jumped back. Dubey, he said, maybe you should issue arms to the constables. Dubey nodded and spoke to the Head Constable. They watched the constables filling registers, unlocking the arms cabinet and fingering the rifles inside.

  Dubey said: Let’s hope they don’t join the crowd – they haven’t got their dearness allowance for three months.

  The Head Constable prised the heavy outer door open and prodded the tip of his ancient rifle through. A hush fell on the crowd. The other constables fanned out behind him and the two officers stepped out.

  Their driver had prudently taken their car to a lane a little way off when the crowd had begun to collect. The constables cleared a path for them with jabs of their rifles. Das walked quickly, trying not to notice the angry silence rustling around them and the shuffles and the lunges that were arrested by indecision. He could see no faces, only shadows flickering in the torchlight. He forced his head up and slowed his pace. He sensed running feet behind him, and he felt his muscles stiffen with tension. He looked down without turning his head. It was the same little boy.

  They were at the edges of the crowd now. He could feel the tension snapping in the air; he saw feet thrust out, arms drawn back, hesitating, waiting for a lead. Then they were through, climbing into the car, trying not to look back.

  Das sank into his seat and breathed deeply. Then he saw the boy’s face again, at the window: Hul-lo hul-lo, jol-ly fel-low. The boy drew his head back, opened his mouth and spat. But Jyoti Das had already managed to wind the window up, and the spit dribbled harmlessly down the glass.

  Next moment the car jumped forward and the boy was thrown aside. The crowd roared and surged into the lane, but the car was already picking up speed. They heard two stones strike the roof and roll off clanging loudly. And
then they turned a corner and left the crowd far behind them. The gob of spittle was soon blown off the window.

  Really, Das said, looking at Dubey, it’s incredible. Something should be done about it – stopping your increments and your gratuity and provident fund instalments! Can’t the Officers’ Association do anything?

  Dubey shook his head. He was huddled morosely in a corner. How’s a man to live? he said. At least you people get city-compensatory allowance; in this place we don’t even get that. And it’s not bad enough for a hardship allowance, either.

  For a while Dubey stared silently out of the window. Then he clenched his fists and muttered: Someday I’ll clean the place up, really clean it up. Chaos, nothing but bloody chaos. Give me one battalion of the Central Reserve Police, just one, and I’ll clean them up like they’ve never been cleaned up before. They won’t know what hit them. These local constables are no good. They’re paid by those buggers – same lingo, same bloody people … Just one battalion.

  He saw Das looking at him and stopped. He drew a deep breath. So, Das! Congratulations!

  Congratulations? Das said, bewildered. Why?

  On your foreign trip, you fool. Don’t you see? If you give your DIG or whoever the line that the Suspect has joined up with some Middle Eastern terrorist groups or something, they’ll have to send you there to follow up. That’s why I wanted to get that man to confess that the Suspect has connections there – all for your sake. Now you can safely put it in your report. It’s very simple: there are hundreds of terrorist groups and things there and he’s bound to get involved with them. You must follow up that angle and even use a bit of pressure perhaps. And you watch; if you’re sensible, you’ll get a foreign trip. To al-Ghazira. Don’t let them take you off the case now.

  Really, Das thought, he’s not at all as stupid as people say. In fact, he’s quite shrewd. He felt a little dizzy; he had never been abroad before. A pleasant thrill of apprehension coursed through him and he shivered.

  I wonder what daily allowances and travel allowances the Ministry will give you, Dubey said enviously. Lucky bastard. God, the things you’ll be able to buy! Everything imported.

  Jyoti Das did not answer. He was thinking of al-Ghazira. A new sky, a whole new world of birds. Wasn’t al-Ghazira on one of the major migration routes? He would have to do a bit of reading at the National Library. What would the colours be like? he wondered.

  That night Dubey took him to dine with the Chief Administrator of Mahé. When they arrived, Jyoti spent a long time marvelling at the house: a great blue mansion, set in a luxuriance of magnolia, hibiscus and frangipani, with a façade draped in tiers of jalousies and wooden shutters. The Administrator, a tall, smiling man, answered Jyoti’s questions with a casual wave – the French built it, their administrator lived here before – he was clearly bored with an explanation too frequently asked for. He led them to a paved terrace behind the house that looked out over the Mahé river and the sea beyond. They drank cold beer and listened to the shouts of fishermen in butterfly-sailed boats wafting in on the sea breeze.

  Soon Dubey was very drunk and the Administrator was frowning worriedly. He went into the house, and when he came back he said: Come up, we’ll have dinner now. He tried to hurry them up a wooden staircase to his apartments above, but halfway up Dubey caught Jyoti by the elbow and ran down the stairs, while the Administrator called after them, annoyed. Still holding Jyoti’s arm Dubey led him to a glass-panelled door at the far end of the terrace. Like boys, they cupped their hands and peered through the glass. Jyoti could see nothing, for it was very dark inside. Dubey tried the handle on the door, and it opened, creaking on rusty hinges. Light streamed in from the terrace, and Jyoti saw that they were in a large, high-ceilinged room, divided by fluted columns. Chandeliers covered with grimy sheets of tarpaulin hung from the ceiling. A wall of dust-encrusted mirrors shone dully at the far end of the room. The room hummed with the roaring of the sea outside.

  This was the ballroom, said Dubey. He looked about him open-mouthed, his eyes shining with wonder. Jyoti was surprised; he had not thought Dubey capable of wonder.

  This is where all those French lords and ladies used to dance, Dubey said. He slid a foot along the wooden floor, leaving a trail in the dust. Then he raised himself on his toes and swung his plump, sleek body around in a drunken pirouette.

  Not bad, no? he said. He stopped and stared wistfully out to sea.

  Chapter Nine

  Becalmed

  At dawn on their second day at sea, while two boils quivered ripely on Alu’s left leg, Mariamma’s engine spluttered, broke into a whine, and then coughed sullenly into silence. Sajjan was at the wheel then: a lean, sunken-cheeked boy, not yet sixteen though already stamped with that dour arrogance which sometimes marks the mechanically skilled. Hajji Musa Koya, who usually took the wheel at dawn, was still dozing, propped against the wheelhouse with a sun-bleached blanket draped over his chest. An almost-empty arrack-bottle had been tucked with drunken parsimony into the waist of his lungi.

  Sajjan went to the rails, leant over and spat into the sea. For a moment he stood looking down at Hajji Musa’s skullcap and wispy white beard. Then, shaking him by the shoulder, he shouted: Get up, Hajji, get up, up.

  Hajji Musa, hovering near wakefulness, snorted into his beard: All right, boy, stop shouting. You know what to do – go and do something.

  Sajjan stepped over him and bent down to run his hands over the steel hoop of a hatch. Then, spreading his legs, he took a firm grip on the hoop and pulled. The hatch creaked but would not open. He pulled off his oil-soaked vest and wound it around his hands. Then he spat on the hinges and pulled again, grunting, and now the hatch squeaked open, leaking whiffs of acrid diesel fumes.

  Mariamma was not a big boat, and at first glance her unusually broad waist made her seem smaller than her twenty-eight-odd feet. Her hull sat high in the water, squat and ungainly, but strong. She had a low cabin, deep in the waist, and a tiny wheelhouse with barely enough space for two men to squeeze into, set well forward, close to her bows. Fence-like wooden rails, warped by the sea air, ringed her splintering decks. A rusty tube-well, which was sometimes used to pump water out of the bilges, perched on the stern like a heron, with its spout angled sharply over the rails.

  In the many long and peaceful years she had spent in Calicut harbour and the backwaters around Alleppey, Mariamma’s prow and the sides of her cabin and wheelhouse had acquired a dense coating of murals – out of the cabin grew emerald palms and houses with banks of crimson tiles; ochre tigers leapt on the wheelhouse; and fiery-eyed silvery fish stared out of the prow into the horizon. When Hajji Musa had decided to turn Mariamma to the lucrative al-Ghazira trade he had had her painted a nondescript bluish grey in the hope that it would make her less visible to coastguards and harbour police. But the contractor had mixed water in the paint and every year splashes of blue-grey flaked off till only a few patches, floating like clouds on the colours beneath, remained.

  Hajji Musa had also installed a 400-horsepower diesel engine and he had strengthened Mariamma’s bulkheads so that jerrycans of diesel fuel could be stored below deck. Over very short distances, when, for example, prudence required her to drop quickly below a horizon, Mariamma could do 35 miles per hour and sometimes even 40, but at the cost of a shuddering that threatened to dismember her. At her usual cruising speed of 20 to 25 knots she took the heaviest seas with the placid confidence of a tug in a harbour.

  When he first took to the business Hajji Musa had listened carefully to the stories people told up and down the Malabar coast of boats setting off for al-Ghazira with twenty, forty and even (so they said) a hundred eager emigrants, but only to run out of fuel halfway, or else to be swallowed into the sea with the first mild gale, borne down by sheer weight. Unlike many other boat-owners, the Hajji’s cupidity was easy-going, and he had that love of life peculiar to the morose. So he took note of the stories and made a few rules which he never broke – he sailed only in winter, a
fter the retreat of the north-east monsoon when the sea was like a lagoon and he could be sure of a gentle breeze behind him. And he never took more than eight passengers, but he charged them almost three times the going rate. Yet, despite his high rates, he never had any trouble finding passengers, for he had a considerable reputation and people were willing to pay extra to make sure that they were not left stranded on a sandbank at low tide somewhere in the Arabian Sea. His overheads he covered by a little discreet trafficking in the highly priced hashish of the Idikki hills. And he always carried enormous quantities of diesel fuel: apart from the mounds of jerrycans below deck, there were a few drums in the cabin and a couple in the stern which also served to curtain off a plastic slop-bucket.

  Alu and the two other male passengers, Rakesh and Professor Samuel, had found themselves a place to sleep not far from the bucket, in the narrow space that was shielded from the wind by the cabin. There they had erected a rain-shelter, a sheet of tarpaulin which was harnessed to the cabin at one end and to the deck-rails at the other. Hajji Musa often looked at the flapping sheet with melancholy misgiving: It’ll overturn the whole boat if it catches a gust. But Rakesh, who was very thin and a little sickly, insisted that they keep it; they had to have something to keep the deadly morning dew from their chests, especially in winter and at sea; there was no telling …

  The men were not alarmed when they heard the engine die out: twice before the engine had coughed and spluttered, only to drum back into its regular rhythm moments later. After a while, yawning and stretching, they drifted to the wheelhouse. Hajji Musa was squatting near the open hatch, silently smoking a biri. Sajjan was idly shining a torch down at the engine. It was still dark, though the eastern sky behind them had turned scarlet. The sea, tinged with violet, was lapping gently at Mariamma’s sides.

  Alu squatted beside Hajji Musa: What’s happened? Hajji Musa, in his perfunctory Hindi, scratching his skeletal ribs, answered: Don’t know. Let’s see. We’ll have to let it cool before we do anything.