The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  The Star collapsed today, said Professor Samuel. Abu Fahl and the others were meant to be painting the basement. But when it happened only Alu was inside. He was trapped in the basement, right in the middle of the building. Abu Fahl saw the whole thing. And all the others. There wasn’t a wall left standing. Tons and tons of concrete. All of it right on him. But we have to be grateful. It was only him, just one man, while it could have been everyone.

  The lines and ridges on Zindi’s cheeks seemed to sink deeper. Her jowls trembled and then the whole of her face collapsed inwards. She struck her forehead with the heel of her palm. Him, too! she cried, and her voice rasped like sandpaper on lead. All the others and now him!

  Zindi rose and went to Karthamma. Putting her arms around her, she pulled her head on to her shoulders and for a long while the two women held each other in a firm, consoling embrace, until Zindi took her hand away and stroked Karthamma’s head in recognition of the especial poignancy of her grief. Then Zindi took her by the arm and led her towards the women’s room. At the end of the corridor Zindi turned to the men and said, in a voice taut with determination: All the others and now him. But he’ll be the last. No more weeping! The time has come to do something.

  It was a long time before Zindi came out of the room. She went straight to Rakesh, took Boss from him and carried him into her own room. The men straggled aimlessly in behind her. She found the comforter she had bought for Boss, washed it and put it in his mouth. Then she seated herself on a mat at one end of the room with the baby on her crossed legs. She sat stiffly upright, her face grimly set. When Zindi sat like that the massive stillness of her presence reached into every corner of the room and patterned everything, every object, every person around her like iron filings around a magnet. She gestured to the men to unroll mats and seat themselves. Then she pulled a brass kerosene-stove before her, pumped it till it hissed and lit it. Carefully placing half a cob of corn, scraped clean of its seeds, on the flame, she asked: Where are the others?

  Still there, said Professor Samuel. I went as soon as I heard, and so did everyone else. We came to take you.

  No, said Zindi. I’m not going. There’s nothing to be done there, God knows. It was here that the whole business started and it’s here that we’ll fight it. God give me strength, he will be the last.

  What are you talking about? A note of pleading had crept into the Professor’s voice. What do you mean, ‘it started here’?

  Zindi’s eyes narrowed into sharp, brilliant points and bore into the Professor’s. You know very well what I mean, she said. You’ve heard it before. You’re not a child. Frowning Abusa was the first. Then Mast Ram. Then the others, and now this. Are they accidents?

  Professor Samuel dropped his head. In the silence Karthamma slipped into the room. At length Abu Fahl gripped his knees and leant forward: So what is it, then, Zindi? Tell us. We want to hear it again.

  Zindi pressed damp tobacco into an earthen cup with her thumb. The cup was part of a narjila made from a glass bottle, a length of rubber tubing and two bits of hollow bamboo. She stuck the cup on one of the bamboo tubes and gingerly flicked the glowing corncob on to the tobacco. Abu Fahl took the narjila from her and pulled hard on the rubber tube. The corncob glowed and smoke bubbled through the water in the bottle.

  In the fog of silence hanging in the room, the gurgling of the narjila echoed eerily, like waves on a distant cliff. Karthamma shivered and shifted closer to Zindi. The hairs prickled on their necks and stood in runnels on their arms as they waited for Zindi to begin, yet again, on her terrible litany of calamities.

  Perhaps Abusa the Frown was the beginning, even though he wasn’t the first. In a way, it was his goodness, his good fortune, his gentleness and the love everyone had for him that lay behind it all: Frowning Abusa, cousin to Abu Fahl’s mother, Zaghloul the Pigeon’s brother-in-law (and cousin as well), raised to manhood with them in the same village in the Nile Delta; named by the whole village the moment he was born, for he was taken from his mother with his face bent and a frown carved for ever into his forehead because his mother had dreamt of barbed wire the night before. He could have had no better name, for he was always apart, frowning and silent – at home, when he walked to the fields, even when the cousins and uncles who grew like grass in his village played and sang all around him – and strangely everyone loved him for it.

  He came to the house as soon as he arrived in al-Ghazira, and he lived in it for a year and a half, frowning silently in a corner, seldom speaking. Every last dirham he earned he sent back to the village; his only clothes were his one good jallabeyya and the grey fellah’s cap his grandfather had made him for his first frowning visit to Alexandria to get his passport. He rarely spoke, but no one ever forgot him. It was to him that everyone turned when there was trouble. Mariamma’s last voyage brought a good time. There had never been so much money in the house. Everyone had a good regular job, everyone was bringing in good money. And then, as though that weren’t enough, Jeevanbhai Patel appeared. That was soon after his wife died. He was too old to look after his tottering house near the Souq, so he begged to rent a room – it was all he could ask for: food on time, people around him to help him forget his loneliness and all that had happened to him. So he was given the corner room, next to the women. And since he paid double no one minded his sad, wizened monkey’s face, nor the red pan-stained teeth sticking out of his mouth like mudguards, nor the huge lock he put on his door. Soon there were television sets in the house, transistors, washing machines even – the best you could find in the shops in Hurreyya – the courtyard was bursting with poultry, and there was a goose or chicken for dinner every night. That was sign enough, though nobody saw it then, for the whole of the Ras and everybody in al-Ghazira looked at Zindi’s house and saw it prospering and too much good fortune invites its own end.

  Late one night – it was a Thursday night and everybody had been paid for the week – when everyone was sitting on the roof, drinking tea and talking, there were knocks on the door, soft but unmistakable. Zaghloul the Pigeon, always eager, ran down and opened the door.

  A boy lay on the path outside squirming like a wounded rat, with blood pouring from his head. That was how Mast Ram came into the house.

  Somehow, from some remote part of the north Indian hills, Mast Ram had trickled into the plains, where a relative put him into the hands of a labour contractor. Once they were in al-Ghazira, Mast Ram found himself with only a third part of the wage that he had been promised in his pocket, for the contractor took all the rest. Mast Ram was young enough to burn at the injustice of it. One night he found something to drink, and his rage grew too large for him to hold. In front of all the others he flew at the contractor’s throat.

  That was how he found himself with his skull split half-open, without a job, without a place to stay, and blood all over his clothes.

  All he could think of then was a certain house his relative had told him about. So somehow he wrapped a pajama around his head and dragged himself across al-Ghazira to the Severed Head, trailing blood, and crawled into the house, blood, wounds, injustices and all.

  He couldn’t be turned away – his relative had stayed in the house once, and he was a good enough man. Besides, somehow, despite the state he was in, Mast Ram had managed to bring his papers with him. Still, the moment he came under the light in the corridor everybody shivered and nobody knew why. He was ugly, there could be no doubt about that – his face was so closely covered with pock-marks and holes it looked as though it had been dug up to lay the foundations for something better. But it wasn’t just his ugliness – Abusa was uglier, with his barbed-wire face, and Abu Fahl, and Alu with his potato head. Of the lot only Rakesh wasn’t ugly; and Zaghloul, of course, is any girl’s dream. But with Mast Ram it was something more than just ugliness: it was the way his eyes darted about, like a snake’s, always open, never missing the slightest movement.

  But, still, Professor Samuel tied a bandage around his head and a mattress was p
ut out for him in the corridor (for the house had never been so full). He lay on his mattress all through the next day. The day after that everybody could see there was nothing wrong with him any more, so Abu Fahl told him to go out to work with the others. Mast Ram didn’t move. They left him alone that day, and the next day everybody forgot about him because that was the day Kulfi came home crying.

  At the time Kulfi used to cook in a rich Ghaziri’s house. The pay was good, the work simple, and the whole house was air-conditioned. It was a small family and they liked Kulfi, so she was happy there and everybody envied her. But there was a daughter in the family and that was where the trouble started, for she was fat and very ugly. She couldn’t keep her hands away from ghee and butter, and so on some days her face was covered with so many bursting pimples it could have been taken for a pot of boiling water. Her parents had done everything they could to marry her off, but nothing worked. Then one day they heard of a boy. His family was poor, but he’d worked hard, got a scholarship, gone to America and come back with a suitcase-ful of degrees. Now he wanted to go into business and he needed capital. Of that the girl’s father had plenty. So they came to an understanding, and it was decided that the boy would come to their house to meet the girl.

  There was turmoil in the house: great preparations. The girl’s mother, half-crazy with worry, ran about roasting chickens, boiling legs of lamb, pouring buckets of saffron into every pot of rice. The father went to the Swiss shop in Hurreyya and bought so many sweets and cakes they had to close down for the whole day. All Kulfi had to do was cook a couple of vegetables and heat the food.

  It looked very simple. The car arrived. The boy got out, his mother got out, and there were little cries of joy in the house for they couldn’t have wished for nicer people. Then they saw his grandmother, and suddenly everyone was nervous, for despite her burqa they could see that she was as thin as a whip, with fangs and a moustache.

  All went well for an hour or so: though the grandmother’s voice shrilled through the house, the boy and the girl talked prettily to each other through her mother. When it was evening the men said their prayers and afterwards they asked for dinner.

  All this while the grandmother had been peering suspiciously at all the signs of wealth around her. When the talk of dinner came up, she said: So you have someone to cook for you?

  The girl’s mother, wanting to impress her, said: Oh, yes. An Indian woman.

  At that the grandmother rose and said to the boy: Come on, let’s go. (Later they found out that she’d been against the marriage from the start – didn’t want another woman in the house.)

  His mother was furious. Why? she said. Why now? Before dinner and everything? Think of your indigestion.

  No, we’re going, said the grandmother. I’m not going to eat food cooked by an Indian. Don’t you remember how your uncle told us that these Indian women spit into the food because they like the flavour?

  Commotion. The girl’s mother pleaded with her, told her it wasn’t true, Kulfi was a good clean girl who never spat into the food or anything like that, but the grandmother wouldn’t budge. Not a bit.

  Almost in tears now, the girl’s mother pleaded with them and said: Come into the kitchen and right in front of you I’ll ask Kulfi whether she spits into the food.

  The boy frowned at his grandmother (he was very eager to get his capital), so she had to agree. They all went to the kitchen – the grandmother, the boy, the girl, almost everyone in the house – and crowded around to watch.

  At that time Kulfi knew very little Arabic. She knew simple things like ‘too hot’ and ‘more salt’, but little else. The girl’s mother remembered this with foreboding once she was in the kitchen but it was already too late.

  She gestured to Kulfi to watch and leant over a pot and made little spitting noises. Then she screwed up her face and gestured as though to say: Do you do this?

  Kulfi was already very nervous. She saw the woman bending over the pot, spitting and gesturing, so she thought to herself, Why, here’s something new – and as helpfully as she could she made a sign to the woman to wait. For a moment she blew and puffed, and when at last she had worked up a good mouthful of spit she bent over the pot and spat right into it. Then she looked up and smiled at the woman. There, she thought, you can’t do better than that and I’m not going to eat it anyway.

  Pandemonium. Kulfi was out on the street in a minute. It was a pity, for the family was a nice one. But in the end the girl’s mother had to promise that she would never again have an Indian in the house, before the marriage could go ahead.

  But Kulfi was without a job, and what with hearing the story over and over again nobody noticed Mast Ram. Then one day Abu Fahl remembered him and took him out with the others to teach him how to paint houses. It was the simplest job in the world, even for someone who was just a boy like Mast Ram. But he wouldn’t work. He’d sit by himself, smoke cigarettes and do nothing, nothing at all. Far from doing any painting, he wouldn’t even scrape the floor afterwards to take off the stains.

  One day Abu Fahl said: Enough. If he won’t work, he’ll have to leave. So they tied his things together and threw them out of the house. But Mast Ram wouldn’t go. He sat in a corner and held on to the bars in the window, while his eyes ran around the room like spiders. He made Abu Fahl mad with anger. He got his crowbar, stood with his legs apart, towering over Mast Ram, and raised it above his head to break his skull again, where the crack still showed.

  When Mast Ram saw Abu Fahl, with his bull’s shoulders, standing over him, holding the crowbar with both hands and glaring with his one, red eye, fear began to steam off his skin. For once his eyes were still. He cowered against the wall and began to weep.

  It was Frowning Abusa who stopped Abu Fahl. Wait, he said. Maybe he’ll be able to do some other kind of job.

  At that time Abusa was working in a rich sheikh’s house as a gardener. The sheikh was one of the brave ones who had bought land on the outskirts of the town. He had built himself a palace there but he could do nothing about the land, which stayed desert, despite all his efforts.

  Now, Abusa had one great gift: all living things grew under his fingers as though to please him alone. In his village ever since he started working on his father’s land, their cotton grew longer and heavier than anybody else’s. In years when the whole village’s fields lay devastated by worms their crops threw off insects at will as though they found strength in Abusa’s very presence. Within a month of taking the job with the sheikh he made grass push through the sand. The sheikh, in his gratitude, doubled Abusa’s wage within the year and soon Abusa was earning a lot of money. Abusa knew the sheikh would listen to whatever he said, so no one doubted he would find Mast Ram a job there.

  Abusa never talked about his work (or much else), so no one knew how Mast Ram was faring in his new job. No one gave it much thought, either, then suddenly some odd things began to happen. First, four men from one of the construction gangs in the Ras died, when a high-tension cable fell right on them. They died in agony, thrashing about on the ground. That was the first time such a thing had happened. Then one of Hajj Fahmy’s sons drove his truck right off the embankment at a hundred kilometres an hour. It was impossible to explain, for he had driven along that road for years. By the time they found him they couldn’t pick his body out of the wreckage. Soon after, fever hit the first few shacks on the outskirts of the Ras.

  In the middle of all that stories about Mast Ram began to reach the Ras: how a live flowering bush had withered and died moments after Mast Ram touched it; how Abusa’s famous pumpkins, each one the size of a fattened sheep, were opened and found to be as hollow as footballs after Mast Ram had watered them.

  None of it was Mast Ram’s fault. He was as bewildered as everyone else by the death which surrounded him. In the end Abusa, fearing for his job, had to put him to laying paving stones so that the garden would be safe from his hands.

  Then people began to notice a change in Mast Ram. He saw how ev
ery living thing flourished and grew under Abusa’s hands and he was filled with admiration, even love. He took to following Abusa wherever he went, inside the house and outside, staring up at him with dog’s eyes. Abusa for his part was always kind to him, like a stern brother.

  Mast Ram began to do everything he could to earn Abusa’s respect. Abusa had a few rabbits which he kept in a cage in the courtyard. He looked after them well and they bred faster than they could be eaten. One day Mast Ram decided to feed the rabbits. Next morning there was a dead rabbit in the cage. Everybody in the house saw it, but nobody said a word, not even Abusa. The next day Mast Ram fed the rabbits again. Again, the morning after, they found a dead rabbit. That evening, when Mast Ram went to feed the rabbits yet again, Abusa stopped him and quietly, in their own language, half signs, half words, he told him not to feed the rabbits again.

  Mast Ram said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes.

  After that Mast Ram’s behaviour became even stranger. At that time Abusa had taken a great liking to Kulfi. He spent a lot of time looking at her and sometimes he even bought her presents. Kulfi used to toss her head and pretend not to care, but of course she was pleased, for like everyone else she liked Abusa.

  Then one morning Chunni said: Mast Ram has fallen in love with Kulfi. And soon it was clear that she was right. He was just a boy after all. His eyes never left Kulfi. He took to sitting in the courtyard, waiting for her to pass by. He even tried to talk to her, but Kulfi, like most people, shuddered whenever she saw him and ran into her room.

  And then one morning Mast Ram rose very early and hid himself in the courtyard. He knew Kulfi was the first to get up in the morning. He lay flat behind the rabbits’ cage and when she came out of the room he leapt out. In his hands he held half of all the money he had saved in his time in al-Ghazira. That was how desperate he was.