by Amitav Ghosh
Seen as a whole, it wasn’t altogether encouraging, but still Balaram could not but be grateful that the lump so neatly avoided Destructiveness and Secretiveness and Acquisitiveness and all the other moral quicksands which lie around the ear. It was only much later, when Alu was older, that Balaram noticed Amativeness or, to put it bluntly, the Organ of Sex blossoming tumescently just above the hair-line. He jotted it down in his notebook with horrified embarrassment; no doubt it had something to do with Self-Abuse. Ever after he did his best not to look at it.
As for the rest of Alu’s head, it took Balaram years before he could even begin to make sense of certain protuberances, and some were to remain puzzling for ever. But in a general way he was more or less sure that there were distinct depressions over the organs of Self-Esteem, Vanity and Cautiousness. On the other hand, there was a pleasing undulation over Benevolence, just below the crown. To Balaram’s great relief the crown itself with its collection of religious organs was absolutely flat. And the two pronounced horn-like protuberances on both sides of the crown probably held Firmness, Hope and Wonder, while the depressions at the temples almost certainly spelt the lack of Poesy and Wit (over neither of which was Balaram likely to shed any tears). But the strangest part of that strange head was the forehead, for it was enigmatically flat exactly where all the higher Perceptive and Reflective faculties ought to have been, except for a mysterious bump in the centre, where the hair began. That bump could be anything – Language, Eventuality, Cause …
Many, many years were to pass before Balaram discovered its function.
Balaram often wished there was something to be learnt from Alu’s physiognomy, but the boy’s face gave very little away. It was a compact face, of what Kretschmer called the shield-shaped type: that is, straight at the sides with a rounded jaw and chin – with large eyes and generous lips. The nose was of the kind which the Barbarini manuscript names Lunar – short, with a rounded end. But those were mere classifications; there was nothing to be learnt from them. Looking at his face, nobody could have called the boy handsome or ugly. If there was a word for it, it was ordinary. In fact, with his stocky build and being as he was, neither tall nor short nor dark nor fair, Alu would have been nothing other than ordinary to look at if it were not for his head.
When Alu was much older and had to sit on the floor because he had grown too heavy for the arms of the easy chair, Balaram often used to wonder aloud, patting him gently on Benevolence, at how the two of them came to be so unlike each other. After all, they were blood relatives and there ought to have been something to show for it, something in the skull. There could no longer be any doubt, he used to say, that the skull and therefore the character are to some degree hereditary. Wasn’t that why Lombroso was so celebrated – for demonstrating the hereditary nature of character? Wasn’t that why the American laws of 1915 prescribing sterilization for confirmed criminals were enacted?
But, laws or not, there was no discernible resemblance between Alu and Balaram. Balaram’s head was long, narrow and finely modelled. It was almost flat at the back and sides, and, except for two barely perceptible undulations over Vanity, it betrayed not the slightest trace of a Lower Sentiment or Propensity. But it had not always been so. When Balaram first began to read about phrenology, he had discovered a few signs of liveliness on his Amatory Organ. Balaram was, and always had been, extremely prudish. Such was his embarrassment at his discovery that in a few weeks he managed to rub a fair-sized depression into the back of his neck.
Balaram’s physiognomy reflected his cranium perfectly. He had a thin, ascetic face, with clean lines, a sharp ridge of a nose and wide, dreamy eyes. His high, broad forehead rose to a majestic dome, crowned with a thick, unruly pile of silver hair. It was an astonishing forehead: it shone; it glowed; it was like a lampshade for his bulging Higher Faculties – Language, Form, Number, the lot. It was a striking face even in repose. Sometimes, when he was animated, it was lit with such a bright, pointed intensity that it imprinted itself on the minds of everyone who saw him in those moments.
After he began thinking about heredity and character seriously, Balaram often wondered what a child of his would look like. Once, on one of his frequent visits to Calcutta, he put the question to Gopal Dey, his oldest and dearest friend. They were walking in the ornamental gardens of the National Library at the time (it was a beautiful garden in those days when B. S. Kesavan was the director of the Library, not an overgrown, bureaucratized swamp as it is now). Gopal was tired. He had spent a long hard day at the High Court, and after hours of ploughing through briefs he was in no mood to speculate about the children Balaram might have had. In any case, it was a difficult question. If Balaram had had children, they would in all likelihood have been Toru-debi’s children as well, and, in contrast to the lean ascetic Balaram, Toru-debi, with her soft woolly cheeks and dimpled face, was a bundle of pleasantly unruly plumpness, even though her eyes, somewhat at odds with the rest of her face, had been honed into pinpoints of concentration by her years at her sewing machine.
Toru-debi had never permitted Balaram to examine her skull, and never would, but for years Balaram had carefully observed her head in the mornings when her hair clung to her head after her bath, and as far as he was concerned he knew it as intimately as one of his plastic demonstration skulls. It was a large head, with a not inconsiderable cranial capacity; more or less evenly rounded, except for well-marked protuberances on the median over the bregma, on the religious organs, and another on the occipital bone. That was an odd one: once upon a time he would have had no hesitation in entering it under Philoprogenitiveness, or a remarkably well-developed Love of Children. But over the years he had watched it slip sideways, towards the asterion, until it became something else altogether. Sometimes he interpreted it as Constancy, but the suspicion always lurked somewhere in his mind that actually it was the yet unclassified organ of Tenacity (or, not to mince words, plain bloody Obstinacy). As for the rest, he could guess at a luxuriant growth on Constructiveness or the Mechanical Sense (for even sewing needed a mechanical sense of a kind), but he had never been very sure about the exact location of that organ. And then, of course, there was that swollen lump above the ear meatus, which he had no alternative but to interpret as Destructiveness. It was certainly true that her face, usually so tranquil (mainly because she hardly seemed to recognize the existence of a world outside her sewing room), was quite transformed when she was angry. In a rage she was capable of doing anything at all.
If you and Toru had a child, Gopal said sharply, it would probably be quite ordinary.
Oh? said Balaram, disappointed, and turned away to look at the extravagant stucco façade of the National Library.
Gopal had not really believed in phrenology or physiognomy or Balaram’s theories of heredity ever. And over the years he had developed a positive hostility to them. That may have been because in one of their earliest arguments on the subject Balaram had said to him, in a long-regretted flash of temper: You ought to be preserved in methylated spirit. You’re a discovery. You’re the only person alive with a Phlegmatic organ.
Gopal had little vanity. Even in those days, well before middle age, he knew himself to be short and paunchy. He knew his broad face with its childishly rounded cheeks to be pleasant, but nothing more. But he was not phlegmatic; anybody who cared to look at his eyes, shining behind his gold-rimmed glasses, would know that at once. But the trouble with people like Balaram was that theories came first and the truth afterwards.
Take, for example, Balaram’s theory about Dantu.
Dantu, their friend and ally through all their most difficult times in college, had vanished soon after his final examinations (in fact he had had very little to do with Balaram after the Accident, but that’s another story). A year after college they heard that he had found a good job with a tea company. But soon after he vanished again. They often wondered what had happened to him, but this time he really hadn’t left a trace. But then, one day, more than twenty years
afterwards, with the help of his new-found theories Balaram declared confidently that Dantu had become a sadhu; that he had abandoned worldly life and was wandering around the country with a begging-bowl. Why? Simple. Because of his sharply domed head, of course, and his thin, hollow face and those two long, peeping front teeth from which he took his name. It’s his bregma, said Balaram. I can see now that it was Veneration that had pushed his skull up so sharply. Besides, he always had the look of a saint.
Nonsense, said Gopal, but only to himself, for he knew how touchy Balaram was about his theories. Nonsense; politics interested Dantu much more than religion – it’s just that your theory doesn’t allow for a Political organ.
And, sure enough, a year or so later he came upon an article in a newspaper about a Shri Hem Narain Mathur (which was only Dantu under his real name) who had been arrested somewhere in north Bihar for organizing the landless labourers of the area to agitate for fair wages. He snipped the article out and showed it to Balaram later, but he didn’t say, as he had planned to: Veneration is a long way from leading strikes. What about your theory now?
That was just it, the reason why phrenology was rubbish – all theory and no facts. He had said so, as he never tired of repeating, since the very first time Balaram had shown him the copy of Practical Phrenology that he had discovered in a secondhand bookshop in College Street.
As it happens, we know exactly when that happened. It happened on 11 January 1950 at 4.30 in the afternoon. We know the date because that was the day Madame Irène Joliot-Curie, Nobel Laureate in physics and daughter of the discoverers of radium, Pierre and Marie Curie, arrived in Calcutta ablaze with glory.
Balaram was thirty-six at the time. He was working as a sub-editor on the Amrita Bazar Patrika, which was still, at that time, Calcutta’s best English newspaper. He had been working there for close on fourteen years, ever since he left college, so he was fairly well known in the office then. That was probably why he was allowed to go to the airport with the staff reporter that day.
Of course, Balaram had planned for the day ever since the papers had announced the date of the Joliot-Curies’ arrival in Calcutta on their way back from the Science Congress in Delhi. There were other scientific stars scheduled to arrive on the same day: Frédéric Joliot, Irène Joliot-Curie’s husband, with whom she had shared her Nobel; J. D. Bernal, the English physicist later to win the Nobel himself; Sir Robert Robinson, distinguished chemist and president of the Royal Society.
But in that whole gathering of luminaries there was only one person Balaram wanted to see and that was Madame Irène Joliot-Curie. He had read about the Curies since he was thirteen. Radium had powered the fantasies of his adolescence; he had celebrated Marie Curie’s second Nobel with fireworks. For him Irène Curie was a legend come alive, a part of the secret world of his boyhood, an embodiment of the living tradition of science. He would have gladly given up his job only to see her.
On 9 January, two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Balaram went to the news editor and asked permission to go to the airport with the staff reporter. It’ll help, he said in explanation, with the subbing of the story and the headlines. The news editor, always busy, hardly looked up: Yes, of course, do what you like. But on the tenth Balaram went to him again, just to make sure. Yes, yes, the news editor snapped, didn’t I say so?
The eleventh was bitterly cold by Calcutta’s sultry standards; the coldest day the city had had in years. Balaram wrapped himself up carefully in two sweaters, an overcoat and a new muffler. At Dum-Dum airport two of his childhood heroes were pointed out to him in the waiting crowd, the physicists Meghnad Saha and Satyen Bose. But Balaram, busy scanning the skies, hardly noticed them. When he spotted the silvery Dakota with the Star Lines emblem painted on its wings, he hopped about flapping his overcoat, almost beside himself. The staff reporter, long accustomed to the famous, said quite sharply: Can’t you stand still for a moment?
Madame Joliot-Curie climbed out first, wrapped in a grey overcoat, with a cloth bag in one hand. She was taller than he had expected, with clearly drawn jowls, grizzled hair and bright, sharp eyes. Her husband came out next, smiling, his tie tucked into his crumpled trousers. And then came J. D. Bernal, dapper, elegant, hat in hand, exuding ease and grace. Balaram tried not to look at him. But of course it wasn’t his fault. The difference between him and Irène Joliot-Curie was not the difference between two individuals. It lay outside either of them; it was a geographical difference, a spatial difference, the difference of two opposed traditions – one which produced Louis Pasteur, battling himself into paralysis, and Marie Curie’s revolutionary fervour, and another which turned out these clever, passionless, elegant sleepwalkers. (He was wrong about J. D. Bernal, of course, but he didn’t know it then.)
Balaram pressed forward with the reporters, towards the three figures standing by the plane on the runway. Faintly he heard one of the reporters remark to Professor Joliot that they looked tired.
We flew over high altitudes, Professor Joliot said in answer, over 9000 feet, and this has somewhat told on us. He turned to his wife and smiled. She nodded, running the back of her hand across her forehead. With an electric thrill of excitement Balaram saw that she was looking straight at him.
Balaram knew that he had to say something. He knew Professor Joliot was wrong; 9000 feet wouldn’t tire a Curie. The Curies lived in the highest reaches of the imagination.
Balaram strained eagerly forward, brushing a shock of his springy black hair off his eyes. But, sir, he said loudly, hardly aware of what he was saying, are you not accustomed to keeping high altitudes?
It was only a silly impulse; he knew that the moment he said it. It meant nothing. But it was too late. There was a moment’s awkward silence and then everyone, led by Professor Joliot, burst into laughter. Even Madame Joliot-Curie smiled.
For Balaram each peal of that laughter carried the sting of a whiplash. He turned, humiliation smarting in his eyes. They were all the same, all the same, those scientists. It was something to do with their science. Nothing mattered to them – people, sentiments, humanity. He pushed his way through the crowd and ran and ran till he reached Dum-Dum village.
Back in Calcutta he wandered down the roaring traffic of Dharmotolla, away from the buses and trams of the Esplanade. He could not bear the thought of compounding his humiliation by going back to the office or facing Toru-debi at home. He went where his feet led him, and inevitably they took him to College Street. Soon, chewing acidly on his humiliation, he was back among the familiar crumbling plaster façades and the tinkling bells of trams; the students pushing their way to bus-stops and the rows of stalls piled high with secondhand books. A little way from the wrought-iron gates of Presidency College he absent-mindedly picked up and paid for a tattered old book. It was called Practical Phrenology.
He walked down to the Dilkhusha Cabin in Harrison Street, found a quiet table and ordered a cup of tea. After a while he opened the book and desultorily skimmed over a few pages. Then, with gathering excitement, he began to read.
At four o’clock he took a tram to the High Court. Gopal was busy in his chambers, but Balaram dragged him out to a roadside tea-stall run by a Bihari, in the Strand. Look, he said, handing him the book. Look what I’ve found.
Gopal was not particularly pleased at being pulled out of his chambers at a quarter past four in the afternoon, especially since he had an important tax suit coming up the next day. He fingered through the book, looked at the photographs of typical criminal types with distaste and handed it back to Balaram.
Balaram, he said warily, you’ve never studied science. You know nothing of anatomy. People like you and me just don’t know enough about these things. We should leave them alone.
How does that matter? said Balaram. There are ideas in science like anything else. Do you ever tell me to stop reading history? Do I ever tell you to stop reading novels?
Gopal looked at his watch. It was four-thirty and he was late. To me, he said, this looks
like rubbish.
Don’t you see? said Balaram, stuttering with excitement, eyes blazing. Haven’t I always told you? What’s wrong with all those scientists and their sciences is that there’s no connection between the outside and the inside, between what people think and how they are. Don’t you see? This is different. In this science the inside and the outside, the mind and the body, what people do and what they are, are one. Don’t you see how important it is?
I think, said Gopal stolidly, that if you must keep on with this science business you’d better go to hear Madame Curie this evening when she opens the Institute of Nuclear Physics. And now I have to go.
Balaram did go to hear her, and so did Gopal. They stood far back in the crowd, behind cheering groups of schoolchildren and college students, and watched her cut the tape. She looked incongruous, surrounded by ministers and governors and petty pomp – a simple housewifely figure in a plain dress. Balaram listened intently as she began to speak of the importance of nuclear physics and the new chapter in the prosperity of mankind it had opened.
But then Gopal dug him in the ribs and winked, unkindly reminding him of a little defeat. Once, about three and a half years ago, a harassed chief sub had asked Balaram to compose a banner headline. After a good deal of hard thought he came up with: Nuclear bomb dropped – Hiroshima disappears. The chief sub had not thought it fit to print. ‘A-bomb’, he said, was better than ‘nuclear’ (it was some years before the paper worked out a house style on the matter). And anyway Balaram had chosen the wrong type-case. It rankled absurdly for years.
Balaram looked hard at Madame Curie and, soon after, he left without a word to Gopal. Next morning, he was on his way up to the newsroom when a man stopped him. He was a youngish man, not past his late twenties, Balaram judged, dressed in grey trousers and a blue sweater. Could you tell me where the advertising department is? he asked nervously. His Bengali had a slight but distinct rural slur.
