The Calcutta Chromosome

by Amitav Gosh

  Urmila stared into the glassy wall of rain, hugging her knees. It was all so unclear now: the call from the Club, the fish-seller in the morning, Romen Haldar, Sonali Das. It was so hard now to know what was a part of it and what wasn't: the kitchen window which looked out over the Haldar house, was that a part of it? Her parents? Her brothers? Her sister-in-law? (No, not her.) Was it a part of it that she was dressed in this horrible, dirty sari, spattered with turmeric stains and fish-blood; was it a part of it that she'd knocked on the Gangopadhyayas' door and woken them up this morning? And so strange to think that all this had happened when the only thing she was thinking of was how she had to cook shorshe-ilish as soon as possible, so she would be able to catch the BBD Bagh minibus and get to the Great Eastern Hotel on time for the Minister of Communications' press conference. Now, thinking of it, it seemed so long ago; she could hardly remember why the Minister of Communications and his press conference were so important, why she had been in such a hurry to get there, why the news editor had been so insistent: what would the Minister have said anyway? That communications were good? That ministering to them was his life's mission? How odd it would have been to sit at a keyboard, trying to think of a good sentence to lead with: Today the Minister of Communications announced at a press conference that he believed strongly that communications were the key to India 's future. In a way it seemed less odd to be here, almost, sitting on this leaky veranda, with the smell of shit everywhere, than to listen to some fat old man from Delhi talking into a screeching microphone; it was easier to understand why she was here, crouching in this damp corner of this decrepit outhouse than it was to know why she had been trying to cook a fish so that her brother could get into a First Division football team; it made more sense to be listening to Murugan going on about Ronald Ross than it did to be worrying about whether she would be able to fight her way into a BBD Bagh minibus so she wouldn't be late for a press conference at the Great Eastern. This even though she had never heard of Ronald Ross before, never met this man before, this man sitting pushed up against her now, his leg against hers. He wasn't like anyone she knew, but there was nothing wrong with that, of course, it was nice to meet someone new, and his beard was nice too, sort of like a stiff brush. What would it be like to touch it – his beard – she began to wonder, and then to her surprise, she realized, why yes, she was touching him, but not his beard – his thigh was against hers, pleasantly warm, not clammy. Out on the road the buses were still roaring by, in the rain; she could see people huddling behind the misted windows, hurrying along down the pavement, under their umbrellas, rushing into the Nandan cinema complex and the Academy of Fine Arts. How odd to think that all that separated them from her and Murugan was a paltry little wall, just one little wall, yet it did the job just as well as if it was the Great Wall of China, for they couldn't see her or him. In a way it was like being in a test tube: that was probably what it felt like, to know that something was going to happen on this side of the glass but not on the other; that there was a wall between you and everyone else, all those people in the buses and the minibuses, hurrying to work from Kankurgachi and Beleghata and Bansdroni, after their morning rice, with the smell of dhal still buried deep in their fingernails; they were so far away, even though they were just on the other side of the wall; they wouldn't know even if he had his shirt off and she was running her nails down his chest to his belly; they wouldn't know if he had his trousers down, around his ankles, and her hand was in his lap instead of her own, her forefinger picking through the curly hair of his groin; they wouldn't know if her blouse was off and his arm was around her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast and his thumbnail rubbing on her nipple; they wouldn't know, they wouldn't have the faintest idea, rushing past on their way to work, and actually, it wasn't so hard to imagine, his arm around her shoulder and his hand upon her breast. It would be like an experiment too; that was exactly what it would be like, the feel of him between her legs, his lips on her neck the sense of something animated deep inside her. What other word could there be for it, but 'experiment', something new, something which she knew was going to change her even if it lasted only a few minutes, or even seconds; something that was happening in ways that were entirely beyond her own imagining, and which she was powerless to affect in anyway.

  Chapter 33

  AFTER MAKING SURE his message to Tara had gone through, Antar went to the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water. Tara 's apartment was still dark but her white lace curtains were billowing spectrally in the gentle evening breeze. She had left her windows open again, an inch or two at the bottom. Antar bit his lip: it was odd that he hadn't noticed before. He always worried when she did that. He still hadn't grown used to the idea that there was someone else living here now; opening her own windows, closing her own doors.

  Another time when she left the windows open, a storm hit unexpectedly, in the afternoon. Ava warned Antar early, interrupting one of her interminable inventories to let him know that bad weather was on the way.

  He went around his apartment, shutting the windows. It was when he got to the kitchen that he noticed Tara had left her windows open – not all the way, but a good four or five inches. The white lace curtains in her living room were flapping in the gale.

  He checked again half an hour later, and the curtains were gone: the wind had torn them off the rails. The rain was pouring in, driven by the wind. Over the next couple of hours Antar found himself drawn to the kitchen window again and again. He felt somehow responsible; as though he was to blame.

  It was too dark to see what the wind and the rain were doing to the interior of the apartment. But he could imagine it all too well: the water streaming over the bare wood floor, collecting in puddles around the rush mats she had laid out, so carefully and precisely.

  Tara 's friends, Lucky and Maria, had helped carry her things up the stairs when she first moved in, a few months ago. Antar had marvelled at how few things she had: a futon, some sheets and mats and a couple of tables and chairs that looked like they'd come off the street. The only things on the walls were a few calligraphed scrolls. And now the scrolls were ruined: he could see them flapping on the walls of her living room in ragged flurries of white, torn to ribbons by the wind.

  What was worse was that he had no way of letting her know. This was before her beeper: she was still working at her other job then and he didn't have her phone number. All he could do was wait.

  The storm was over by the time the lights came on in her apartment. Antar hurried into the kitchen to tell her what had happened and discovered that it wasn't Tara who'd come in. It was Lucky, and he'd already got busy cleaning up. Antar kept a discreet eye on him over the next hour or so: he didn't seem to know that he could be seen. He took off his T-shirt and his trousers and wrapped a dishtowel around his groin, like a loincloth. Then he got down on his knees and mopped the floor, not once but twice. Antar watched worriedly, wondering whether he'd do any damage. Lucky was notoriously clumsy, always dropping trays and spilling tea: 'all thumbs', as Tara often said.

  Shortly afterwards Antar heard Tara 's door banging shut.

  He went into the kitchen to see if she'd come home at last.

  He was in time to see her tiredly unslinging her handbag and dropping it to the floor. Then Lucky came hurrying out of another room – to greet her, as Antar thought. But instead he did something that amazed Antar. He flung himself down on the floor in front of Tara and touched his forehead to her feet.

  Tara 's first, instinctive response was to look up, across the apartment, in the direction of Antar's kitchen window. She was very embarrassed when she saw Antar standing there. She gave him an awkward wave and then muttered something to Lucky, who pulled himself up, looking sheepish.

  Antar was embarrassed too, but he managed a smile and a wave. He had always assumed that they were just friends; he'd even wondered if they were lovers – though Lucky did seem a bit young for her. But Tara explained later that they were related in some complicated way:
thus the greeting.

  And now she'd done it again: left her window open. Antar shrugged: well, at least it wasn't raining today. He lowered his sweating face to the sink and sluiced water over it.

  He was on his way to his bedroom when the phone rang. He took the call in his living room, dropping into the chair that faced Ava's screen.

  It was Tara, sounding a little breathless. 'You got my message?' Antar said.

  'I did indeed,' she answered. 'You sounded so mysterious; I had to find out what you were up to.'

  'Oh, nothing important,' said Antar. 'Just some routine stuff that's going to take longer than it should. '

  'Oh, really?' she said. 'Sounds frightfully important.'

  'Also I don't feel well.'

  'Can I help?' Her voice was immediately full of concern. 'Is there anything I can do?'

  'I'll be all right; I've been through this before.'

  'I could come by,' she said. 'Just say the word.'

  'No. Thank you.' He decided to change the subject. 'Where are you calling from?' he said.

  'The playground at 97th and Riverside,' she said. 'My little monster's trying to climb a fibreglass dinosaur.'

  'You're at the playground?' Antar said in surprise. 'But I don't hear any children.'

  She laughed. 'No. Most of them are down with the sprinklers, getting soaked to the skin.'

  Antar paused, in puzzlement. Something didn't seem quite right. 'Do they have public phones at the playground?' he asked.

  'No,' she said. 'Or at least I'm not using one if they do. One of the sitters lent me her – what do you call them? those portable thingummyjigs. I suppose I'd better let you go now. Let me know if you change your mind about dinner. I can be over in a couple of minutes.'

  'Did you say a couple of minutes?' Antar said. 'But surely it'll take you at least half an hour to get here from 97th street. Even by taxi… '

  'Justa manner of speaking…' she said quickly.

  At exactly that moment Ava emitted a ping, to warn him that she was about to go into standby mode. An instant later Antar heard the same sound relayed down the telephone line.

  'I'd better get off,' Tara said.

  Antar started. 'Wait a minute…' he cried into the telephone. But the line had gone dead.

  Antar stared at the receiver not quite sure of what had happened. For a moment it had sounded as though Tara were in the room with him and her mouthpiece had picked up Ava's ping.

  He put the back of his hand against his forehead and wasn't surprised to find it very hot. He knew he was really feverish now.

  He decided it was time to lie down.

  Chapter 34

  WITH HIS POCKET DIARY resting on his knee, shielded from the splashing rain by a protective arm, Murugan began to draw on an empty page with a ballpoint pen. When he had finished, he tore the page out of the diary and passed it to Urmila. It was a sketch of a figurine, a semicircular mound with two painted eyes. On one side of the mound was a tiny pigeon, and on the other a small semicircular instrument…

  'Ever seen anything like this before?' he said.

  Urmila examined the drawing minutely, frowning in concentration. 'I probably wouldn't have noticed if I had,' she said. 'It's like so many temple images – except for that thing over there. What is it?' She pointed at the instrument.

  'My guess is that it's a version of an old-fashioned microscope,' Murugan said.

  'So who or what is it an image of?'

  'If I had to take a guess, I'd say that that was the demiurge of Ron's discovery,' he said. 'My guess is that she's the one behind this whole experiment.'

  'You think it was a woman?' said Urmila.

  Murugan nodded.

  'Where did you find it?' Urmila asked.

  'Over there,' said Murugan, pointing his pencil at the wall: it was raining so hard now that the alcove was barely visible, even though it was no more than a few yards away. He began to explain how he had found the little figurine there the night before. Urmila listened intently, and when he had finished, she gave a little nod, as though confirming something to herself.

  'It's strange,' said Urmila. 'Just the other day, I was reading a book of Phulboni's essays – you know, the writer who was given the award at Rabindra Sadan yesterday? What you were saying reminded me of something he wrote a long time ago. I remember the passage almost by heart. "I have never known", it begins, "whether life lies in words or in images, in speech or sight. Does a story come to be in the words that I conjure out of my mind or does it live already, somewhere, enshrined in mud and clay – in an image, that is, in the crafted mimicry of life?"

  'Apparently,' Urmila continued, 'Phulboni wrote a story many years ago: about a woman, bathing…' Her voice deepened in tone, in imitation of the writer's: "'… A woman no different from the hundreds of women you see every day, from the windows of your cars and buses, a woman washing off the day's dirt in the dank, weed-rich water of a pond, in a park – a pond like so many in our city, like Minto Park, or Poddopukur, or anyone of a dozen others. The woman kneels, in the soft, glutinous mud, the water rises in a dark curtain to her throat, allowing her to momentarily slip the top of her mud-browned sari off her shoulders, and run the tips of her fingers over her breasts, scrape a sliver of soap across the hardened skin of childbitten nipples, then run her hand down, below, past the folds of a wasted belly, and even further, down, down, scraping that foaming sliver past the parted lips that have vomited a dozen children into her husband's bed, and further still into the velvet dampness of the mud, the soap clinging to her fingers, and then, without warning her foot slips, and she finds herself, for one panic-stricken moment, clutching at the mud which is suddenly as soft, as pliant and yielding as death itself, her hands clawing at that depthless murk, and then, when the face of extinction seems to be looking unsmiling into her eyes, the edge of a fingernail scrapes suddenly upon something solid, something abrasive, something with redeeming, saving, lifegiving edges, something blessedly hard, something that can give her the moment's handhold she needs to claw her way back to the surface and seize a breath of our city's dankly sustaining humours.

  '''And when her torso rises above the water, her breasts bared, her hair hanging black to her knees, her arms fling an arc of water high into the air, and she screams: 'She saved me; she saved me,' and at once all the other bathers plunge in, their feet churning the silky brown water into a frothing bog, and taking her by the arms, they drag her ashore, while she goes on screaming, through mouthfuls of water: 'She saved me, saved me.'

  '''When she is lying on the grass, they pry open her fist and see that it has fastened upon an object, a polished grey stone with a whirl of white staring out of its centre like an all-seeing eye. She screams, spluttering through jets of swallowed mud and water; she will not part from that tiny shape that gave her the handhold she needed to keep from drowning, but the others tear it from her, for they know that the rock that saved her, that the small, life-giving lump of stone was none other than a miraculous manifestation of… of what? They do not know; believing only in the reality of the miracle… '"

  Pausing to catch her breath, Urmila turned to Murugan. 'And then,' she said, 'one day, many years later, Phulboni was going past a park and what did he see but a little shrine, decorated with flowers and offerings. He stopped to enquire, but no one could tell him whose shrine it was and how it had come to be there. Determined to find out he went to Kalighat, to one of the lanes where these images are made. And there he found someone who told him a story that was very much like his own, yet the man had never heard of Phulboni and had never read anything he had ever written, and by the time he had finished, it was Phulboni who was no longer sure which had happened first or whether they were all aspects of the coming of that image into the world: its presence in the mud, the writing of his story, that bather's discovery or the tale he had just heard, in Kalighat.'

  Murugan ran a fingernail through his goatee. 'I don't get it,' he said.

  Urmila put out a hand to
test the rain. It had thinned to a light drizzle now. She gave Murugan a sharp prod in the ribs. 'Come on,' she said, 'let's go.'

  'Go where?' said Murugan.

  'To Kalighat,' she said. 'Let's go and see if we can learn anything about that image you saw.'

  Chapter 35

  ON THE WAY to Kalighat, watching the rain-slicked streets through the misted glass of the taxi's window, Urmila had a vivid recollection of the lane they were going to: she remembered a narrow alley, winding through low, tin-roofed sheds, pavements that were lined with rows of grey-brown clay figures, some just torsos, full-breasted but headless, with tufts of straw blossoming out of their necks, some legless, some without hands, some with their arms curved in phantom gestures around invisible objects weapons, sitars, skulls.

  She had an aunt who lived nearby, in a big, old-fashioned house that towered above the lanes around it. As a child she had often walked through the lane, to visit her aunt. She had watched in amazement as breasts and bellies took shape under the craftsmen's kneading fingers, wondering at the intimacy of their knowledge of those spectral bodies. At her aunt's house she would go to the balcony and look down on the lane and its rows of clay images, watching the image-makers at their work; noting details of the different ways in which they modelled heads and hands; observing how the images changed with the seasons; how phalanxes of Ma Shoroshshotis appeared in January, each embellished with the goddess's swan and sitar; Ma Durgas in autumn, with the entire pantheon of her family ranged around her and Mahishashur writhing at her feet.

  The taxi came to a halt at the corner of the lane, and they stepped out into the fine foglike drizzle. Murugan paid and then Urmila led him quickly towards the low, bamboowalled workshops at the end of the lane. Hundreds of beatifically smiling faces floated by them as they hurried past, some draped in tarpaulin, their eyes unpupilled, their arms outstretched in immobile benediction.