The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  After that, grey, sour days, waiting for his permission to proceed Cairowards to be cleared. And more grey days even after the permission arrived, for nobody in the embassy in Cairo would meet him. His contact said: The news is spreading fast; everyone’s heard about the business in al-Ghazira and your, your …

  Failure? prompted Jyoti.

  Inability to fulfil your commission, corrected his contact. Nobody wants to get involved.

  But there were two flashes of light in Egypt as well: one the encounter in Alexandria when he knew that he had sighted the right flight-path; and the other a letter from his engineer uncle in Düsseldorf with a hint about a job for him in Germany as well as a draft for a few hundred dollars.

  The money bought him a ticket to Tunis, but once there it was all darkness. When he rang the embassy a voice asked him for his name, designation, rank, business, and then informed him gleefully that they had received a telex from the Ministry notifying a Shri Jyoti Das to show cause why he should not be suspended for dereliction of duty.

  Luckily there were a few more hundred dollars from Düsseldorf, waiting poste restante. What could he do, but put them in his pocket and set off to look for the only people he knew in that continent?

  So there he was, in the desert, lying on a sofa, terrified of the future, without a past, aware only of the prickings of his painfully virginal flesh, and there, suddenly in the doorway, was Kulfi.

  There I was, he said to Alu, lying on a sofa thinking of a vulture, and I looked up and there she was in her yellow sari, framed in the doorway, like an oriole in a Mughal miniature.

  You can’t give her a proper cremation, Mrs Verma; your own scriptures won’t permit it.

  Why not? she demanded.

  Well, Dr Mishra said, I can think of two perfectly good reasons. To begin with, I think I could undertake to persuade anyone who’s interested that her death was largely accidental – sudden shock, etc. Do you agree?

  Mrs Verma nodded uncertainly: How does it matter anyway?

  There, he cried. You see how you pay the price for your well-intentioned ignorance? Don’t you know that, strictly speaking, someone who’s died accidentally is not entitled to a proper funeral? If you don’t believe me, have a look at the Baudhayana Dharmasutra – you can see for yourself. The argument, if I recall correctly, is that someone who dies accidentally can’t enter Pitrloka anyway, so why bother? I can’t quite remember offhand, but I think in scriptural times the bodies of people who died accidentally were thrown into rivers or left in forests. That should give you something to go on, except that, as you’ll notice if you look out of the window, there aren’t many forests here, nor rivers, and it’s possible that the Algerians might be a little upset if we dumped her in an artesian well. So maybe we can just leave her on a sand-dune somewhere and give some of Mr Das’s vultures a nice meal. What do you think?

  Dr Mishra burst into laughter. Poor Mrs Bose, he said chuckling. She didn’t do anything right. Didn’t she know that she ought to have made a gift of a cow to a Brahmin before dying? It would have been so easy, too. All she had to do was call out for me; I’ve always wanted a cow. And now she’ll have to answer for it, poor thing. She’ll be stuck on the banks of the Vaitarani, with no cow to lead her across it into the underworld.

  Mishra-sahb, Mrs Verma said, do you think this is the right time for your jokes?

  If you think I’m joking, he said evenly, why don’t you go and take a look at the Smritis yourself? The trouble is you can’t, of course, because you don’t know any Sanskrit.

  Tell me, Mrs Verma said curiously, where did you learn?

  From my grandfather, he said. What do you think I was doing all those years when my father was away in England? My grandfather was a real old Kanyakubja pandit; he used to give me vivas till the day he died. But, to come back to the point, there’s another reason why you can’t give Mrs Bose a proper cremation: I think you could see quite as well as I could that she was within hours of adultery. It can’t have been the first time, either. You ought to see what your law-giver Manu has to say about giving funerals to adultresses and fallen women.

  Gazing at him in wonder, Mrs Verma said: Do you really believe in all this, Mishra-sahb?

  All what?

  Manu and the Smritis and everything?

  Of course I don’t believe it. You know that quite well – I don’t believe a word of it. Dr Mishra stabbed a finger at her: But you appear to believe it, so you ought to know what your beliefs imply. I think it’s time someone showed you, Mrs Verma, that ignorance is a poor foundation for belief.

  You shouldn’t have bothered. I know quite well how ignorant I am.

  That’s not the point. I think you’re old enough to learn that you can’t just do what you like on impulse. There are certain rules.

  Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That’s how you and your kind have destroyed everything – science, religion, socialism – with your rules and your orthodoxies. That’s the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.

  Alu had little interest in Jyoti Das’s visions of birds. Never mind all that, he said. Tell me what became of the others.

  The others?

  Hajj Fahmy, Professor Samuel, Chunni, Rakesh and all the rest. What happened after you ambushed us at the Star?

  Jyoti Das had to think hard to put a face to every name.

  They were questioned, he said shamefacedly, mainly about you and Zindi at-Tiffaha and all the rest of you who got away. I wasn’t there then; they wouldn’t let me stay. I only saw them the next day. They were taken straight to the airport next morning to be deported – sent back to India or Egypt or wherever they had come from. I only saw them from a distance. They had plainclothesmen all around them, and no one was allowed to go close. Many of them looked as though they were in a bad way. Only Professor Samuel seemed calm. He even seemed to be trying to quieten some of the others. When they were being taken out of the lounge to the plane, he turned and saw me. I think he recognized me – I don’t know. But, whatever it was, he stopped and shouted: This is not the end, only the beginning. Why? I shouted back. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The plainclothesmen were pushing him then, but he managed to hold them off for a moment. He smiled at me and shouted, even louder: How many people will you send away? The queue of hopes stretches long past infinity.

  It was some time before Alu spoke again. He said: And what will happen to them now?

  I don’t know, said Jyoti Das. They might be tried or they might be allowed to go straight home. Anyway, nothing serious will happen to them – no one worries too much about things which happen far away. And it’s you they wanted – not them.

  And what happened to Hajj Fahmy?

  He died the same day, Jyoti Das said. Of shock, the Ghaziris claimed.

  A little later he added: When they took Hajj Fahmy’s body home the next day, they found that his family already knew. They were waiting, dressed in mourning. His widow said that her son Isma’il had told them the moment it happened.

  So what will you do now, Mrs Verma? Dr Mishra asked. Will you clean the body for the cremation? Do you know how to do it?

  After a moment’s hesitation, Mrs Verma nodded. She said: It shouldn’t be too difficult for a doctor.

  But you’ve always had nurses to stand between you and any real pain, Mrs Verma. Not that a corpse feels pain, of course. But what have you ever done to a corpse other than cut it up anyway? No corpse has ever presented you with anything which wasn’t in Gray’s Anatomy. This is a little different, isn’t it?

  I’ll manage, said Mrs Verma.

  It’s not quite as easy as you think, Dr Mishra said with relish. You’ll have to reach into the bowels and clean out all the dead faeces. You’ll have to scrape the insides of the rectum and the anus to make sure that they’re absolutely clean; that not the faintest trace of mortal shit remains to defile the sacred fire. Are you sure a well-brought-up woman like you will b
e able to do it, Mrs Verma? I’m not.

  Mrs Verma cast a quick, uncertain glance at the corpse and wiped her forehead with the fall of her sari. I don’t know, she said.

  You see, said Dr Mishra, it’s not as easy as you think.

  Then Zindi rose to her feet and plodded slowly to Mrs Verma’s chair. She put her hand on her shoulder and glowered across the table at Dr Mishra. Don’t worry, she said, her tongue tripping indignantly over the Hindi syllables. I’ll help you. We’ll do it together. I’ve often done it: we clean out the bodies of our dead, too.

  Dr Mishra lowered his head, momentarily embarrassed. Wonderful, he said, under his breath. Now we can have an international feast of love over our adulterous corpse.

  Mrs Verma stood up and took Zindi’s arm. Come on, she said, we’d better start now.

  Not so soon, Mrs Verma, Dr Mishra called out. You can’t do anything to the corpse yet. You have to contact the authorities first. They may want an autopsy.

  Mrs Verma stopped abruptly. That’s right, Dr Mishra smiled. In the meanwhile all you can do is lay the body out properly. I don’t suppose you know how to do that, either, Mrs Verma? Well, let me tell you. First, you have to find a clean place on the floor somewhere and you have to purify it with Ganga-jal. If I remember correctly, you’re meant to cover it with cow dung, too. But since you’re not going to find much cow dung on the sand-dunes, I suppose you could always use camel dung instead and do a few penances when you get back. However, personally I feel compelled to advise you strongly to leave that step out altogether. After that you have to lay the body out straight, with the head pointing south and the feet north.

  Mrs Verma dusted her hands briskly. We can lay her out on the veranda, she said to Zindi. That’ll be the best place. But first we have to clean it out properly.

  They went into a bathroom and came back carrying buckets and mugs. When the first few mugfuls had splashed over the veranda Dr Mishra began to sniff the air suspiciously. Then, throwing back his head, he burst into laughter. Mrs Verma, he gasped, tell me, is that carbolic acid in those buckets?

  Yes, of course, Mrs Verma said.

  He nodded weakly. The world has come full circle, he groaned. Carbolic acid has become holy water.

  Mrs Verma dropped her bucket, went up to his chair, and stood over him, arms folded. What does it matter? she cried. What does it matter whether it’s Ganga-jal or carbolic acid? It’s just a question of cleaning the place, isn’t it? People thought something was clean once, now they think something else is clean. What difference does it make to the dead, Dr Mishra?

  For a microbiologist, Dr Mishra said, wiping his eyes, you’re not very rational, Mrs Verma.

  Mrs Verma pulled her sari tight around her waist. Shall I tell you something? she said. I hate microbiology, I hate it.

  Is a microbiologist who takes a bit of someone’s piss or pus and runs tests on it really so different from a mechanic who takes a crankshaft or a spark-plug out of a car and checks it to see whether anything’s gone wrong: whether the steel’s rusted or the porcelain’s cracked; whether there’s grime or dust somewhere in the machinery?

  The specimens even come to you in bottles, labelled with names or numbers, like so many dirty spark-plugs. It’s not even like being a surgeon: at least the surgeon sees the whole machine, even though it’s all shrouded and chloroformed, face covered and weeping mothers hidden away, every trace of its humanity blanketed. The microbiologist has only her test-tubes. At least the surgeon can see how the parts mesh, how the crankshaft connects to the gear-box. And at the end of it, after he’s done all his oiling and his tightening and his replacing, he can, if he wants to (though he doesn’t, of course) go and take a look at the entire contraption lying dead in the morgue, or ticking away in its room. What does the microbiologist do? Where does she go to see whether all her shelf-fuls of piss are clearing up or dripping blood?

  And when you do find something in a specimen can you really help wondering sometimes where all those microbes and bacteria and viruses come from? Whether they can really, all of them, be wholly external to our minds?

  And just as you let yourself wonder whether sometimes they are anything other than a bodily metaphor for human pain and unhappiness and perhaps joy as well you cut yourself short, for it dawns on you yet again that ever since Pasteur that is the one question you can never ask.

  Then you feel exactly as you did when you once helped in a general practice and found people straying in, all through the day, with nothing wrong with them – nothing that a mechanic could have repaired at any rate – complaining: I have this pain, Doctor, and that pain, Doctor, and I think this or that has gone wrong here or somewhere else. Then, too, you almost began to speak till you realized yet again that the tyranny of your despotic science forbade you to tell them the one thing that was worth saying; the one thing that was true. And that was: There’s nothing wrong with your body – all you have to do to cure yourself is try to be a better human being.

  The phone rang an hour after the police had come and gone, when Mrs Verma and Zindi had almost finished with the cleaning of the corpse.

  Dr Mishra managed to get to it first. It’s the police, he hissed at Mrs Verma with his hand on the mouthpiece. You’ll see, they’ll never allow your cremation. I told you, there was no point wasting your time explaining to them. Why should they allow it? Why should it make any difference to them whether some passing Indian tourist happens to die here? Why should they agree to bend the rules?

  Mrs Verma smiled: Why don’t you hear what they have to say first?

  They all gathered around to watch as Dr Mishra listened to the voice at the other end. He said nothing beyond an occasional oui and startled mais peut-être. Gradually his face fell and when he put the phone down it was with a grimace, half-rueful, half-angry.

  What did they say? Mrs Verma demanded.

  I don’t believe it, he said, shaking his head. They’re not in their right minds. They’ve made a mistake.

  Tell us what they said, Mrs Verma cried.

  They said it’s all right; they’re willing to look the other way. Only, we have to cremate her quietly, somewhere in the dunes, and quickly.

  Mrs Verma bit back a cry of delight. You see, she said, they know how important it is to die properly. Haven’t you heard how during their war of independence the French used to blow up the bodies of the Algerian dead to demoralize the guerillas, because they knew how important it is to Muslims to be buried with their bodies whole and undesecrated? I knew the Algerians would understand: if there’s one thing people learn from the past, it is that every consummated death is another beginning.

  And wood? Dr Mishra cried suddenly, when Mr Verma was about to leave the house to fetch a land-rover from the hospital.

  Where are you going to get wood from? You have to have wood if you’re going to cremate her. Or do you think her body’s so pure now that it’ll go up like a lump of phlogiston when you put a matchstick to it?

  Mrs Verma fell into a chair. That’s true, she said, biting her lip. That’s going to be a problem.

  Delightedly, Dr Mishra called out after her husband: Stop, you don’t have to go now. It’s all called off.

  But Mrs Verma waved him on. Nonsense, she said. Of course we can find the wood if we try. Go on, get the land-rover; we’ll arrange for wood somehow.

  All right, so what’s your plan now, Mrs Verma? Dr Mishra said. Are you going to send us out to chop down date palms?

  Mrs Verma laughed: No, no, Dr Mishra, you won’t have to do anything. Mr Das and Mr Bose can do it. It’s quite simple: there’s that old table in the kitchen – the top’s plywood, but the legs are good, solid wood. Then there’s that huge crate-like thing the refrigerator was packed in. I’ll ring up Manda-bahen, too; there’s bound to be lots of wooden boxes and things lying about your house, considering all those expensive things you’re always buying. I know old Miss K. has some termite-ridden old boxes she wants to get rid of.

  Dr Mishra s
hook his finger violently in her face. You can’t do it, he cried. You just can’t do it. I won’t let you. You can’t put that poor woman on some termite-ridden bonfire and set her alight. That’s not a cremation; that’s like roasting a tandoori chicken.

  I don’t see what’s wrong with it.

  There’s everything wrong with it. You can’t do it like that. You have to have the right wood.

  What wood?

  I don’t know, Dr Mishra snapped, flinging up his hands impatiently. There has to be some sandalwood; I remember that.

  Sandalwood? Mrs Verma said. Come with me.

  She led him across the drawing-room and knelt beside Hem Narain Mathur’s old bookcase. Reaching into the gap behind the books she drew out two battered sandalwood bookends, carved like elephants. One had no trunk and the other lacked a leg.

  Since they can’t be used for beautification purposes any more, she said, they might as well be added to the pyre.

  Dr Mishra stormed out of the room without another word.

  Mrs Verma rang Mrs Mishra and Miss Krishnaswamy and then sent Jyoti Das and Alu to their houses. Over the next couple of hours the two men carried a number of crates and several pieces of old furniture into Mrs Verma’s garden and chopped them up. When Mrs Verma went out into the garden later, there was a sizeable pile of wood chopped up and ready.

  That’s plenty, she said. We won’t be able to fit any more into a land-rover. She noticed Alu standing beside her, shuffling his feet awkwardly. Yes, Mr Bose? she said.

  He began to say something, but his voice sank into an inaudible mumble. What’s the matter? she asked a little impatiently. Do you want to say something?

  I don’t want your book, he said in a rush, holding it out to her. The Life of Pasteur …

  Oh, she said, pushing it back, that’s a problem. I don’t want it, either. What do we do with it now?