The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  Why? Balaram said, and smiled.

  Reassured by his friendliness the young man invited him out for a cup of tea. Balaram went, glad of an excuse to put off his entry into the newsroom. When they were sitting at the tea-stall the young man showed Balaram his advertisement. He wanted a teacher for a primary school in a village called Lalpukur, about a hundred miles north of Calcutta, near the border.

  It was a very new settlement, the young man explained. Most of the villagers were refugees from the east. His was the only family which owned land in the area.

  And where are you from, sir? he asked Balaram.

  I’m from East Bengal, too, Balaram said. From Dhaka.

  I see, he said. A few of the villagers are from there as well.

  Anyway, he went on, after finishing with his bachelor’s degree in science he had trained as a schoolteacher. Now that the time had come to find a job, he had decided to start a school of his own instead – in Lalpukur where it was really needed and where he could keep an eye on his land. It would be both an income and something worthwhile. Besides, why work for someone else when you could work for yourself?

  But he needed another teacher – he wouldn’t be able to handle it all on his own. He looked at Balaram, his eyes shining with enthusiasm: You’ll never believe how eager those children are to learn.

  When Balaram left the young man and went up to the newsroom, he was greeted with slow handclaps and broad smiles. He discovered that a number of that morning’s papers had carried his question to Frédéric Joliot – and the answering laughter – in their reports.

  He applied for a day’s leave at once and walked out of the office. He walked down to the Hooghly, hugging his sweaters around him, and watched the boats sailing languidly down the river. He stood there all afternoon and then went down to the High Court.

  Gopal was patient with him that day, for Balaram’s terrible distress was stamped large on him. They went for a long walk across the green expanse of the Maidan. Halfway across Balaram stopped and waved a hand at the tall buildings and snarling traffic of Chowringhee. In a place like this, he said, people can’t think about the difference between what they are and what they ought to be. Nothing can change people here. Not science, or history, or reason. Nothing. Nothing could ever be taught here. Not really; not so that it changed anything.

  But what makes you think, said Gopal, that you could teach?

  I’ve been reading the book I showed you, Balaram answered. Look – he ran his hands over the upper parts of his temples and the sides of his head – look: Hope, Wonder, Ideality and Firmness. What could make a better teacher?

  He went back home and for ten days he battled with Toru-debi. A week later they were in Lalpukur. He only learnt the young man’s name when they reached the village. It was Bhudeb Roy.

  How different Bhudeb Roy was then! His squama occipitus, even though not quite flat, was certainly not the knobbly tribute to Progeniture it became after the birth of his fifth son. Nor did he then possess those distinctive egg-like growths on Combativeness and Destructiveness above the asterion and the ear meatus.

  Balaram often admitted that a good deal of his reconstruction of the young Bhudeb was mere conjecture. A long time had passed after all, and he had only just discovered phrenology when he first met Bhudeb Roy. But he had a good memory and, thinking about it later, the reason why he had taken such an immediate liking to the shy young man was obvious to him: their heads were remarkably alike at the time; almost mirror images of each other. It would have been impossible to distinguish their parietal regions, with Conscience and Hope, from each other without instruments. And he was absolutely certain that on that first day, in the tea-shop outside the Amrita Bazar Patrika office, he had seen distinct signs of a swelling on the middle of Bhudeb Roy’s frontal bone, in front of the coronal suture, right over Benevolence, and another striking growth over Ideality at the temples.

  But, then, as Balaram used to say to Gopal later, a science can only tell you about things as they are; not about what they might become.

  Ideality withered on Bhudeb Roy’s temples because he never really believed in anything. Even afterwards, when the organ of Order under his eyebrows bloated and grew into a bent for straight lines, he never had real passion. Balaram would have forgiven him anything if he had. But he hadn’t. Those obscene little swellings, Balaram claimed, were just funguses feeding on the dead matter of his head.

  Nor, in Bhudeb Roy’s youth, were those bits of his skull immediately over and outside the obelion as distended and hideous as they were to become later.

  But wait, Gopal would interrupt Balaram. You only noticed Vanity and Self-Esteem after he began hanging up his portraits all over the school.

  But it wasn’t easy to interrupt Balaram once he had started on the subject. Just look at the skin around his squamous suture, he would say. It’s a monument to Acquisitiveness and Secretiveness. There Gopal would stop him firmly. He knew for certain that Balaram had begun to talk of Bhudeb Roy’s Acquisitive organ, on the upper edge of the front half of the squamous suture, only after he discovered that Bhudeb Roy was taking fifty rupees for himself from the parents of each child he admitted to the school. And as for Secretiveness, on the posterior part of the squamous suture, he had no doubt that Balaram had noticed that long after he heard that Bhudeb Roy had another steady trickle of money flowing in from the police station in the next village, in exchange for secret monthly reports on almost everybody in Lalpukur. It’s only natural, Balaram explained to him once. Lalpukur is a border town and the police are given money from their headquarters to get information. If they didn’t spend it somehow, the funds would lapse and they’d have to go without their own cuts. Besides, it has to be said of them that they’ve proceeded on sound phrenological principles in choosing Bhudeb Roy to be their informer: his cranial capacity is enormous – there can’t be any doubt that he’s as clever as a fox – and he has exactly the right kind of squamous suture.

  But, Gopal objected, you only noticed his squamous suture after you heard about his links with the police. What comes first, then, the act or the organ?

  Balaram did not give him a proper answer. Instead he said: But tell me, is any of it untrue?

  And then Gopal was reduced to silence. He had met Bhudeb Roy on his first visit to Lalpukur, soon after Balaram had moved there. He had looked like a fairly ordinary young man then, with thinning hair and a large pleasant face. He was stout even then but far from fat, and in his starched white dhoti and kurta he had even possessed a certain kind of grace.

  When Gopal saw him years later he had flinched, as anybody would on seeing for the first time that huge slab-like face nodding upon the rolls of flesh of a massively swollen neck. The sockets of his eyes had bulged forward as though to startle a hangman, but curiously the eyes themselves had shrunk into tiny, opaque, red-flecked circles. His mouth had grown into a yawning, swallowing, spittle-encrusted chasm, stretching across the entire width of his huge jaw. His upper lip had shrunk away altogether, while his lower lip had looped upward almost to the tip of his nose. His head was bare and shiny, except for a few limp hairs which he combed vainly over the gnarled swellings on the sides of his head. His ears stuck out of his head at right angles and waved occasionally like banana leaves in a breeze. His body had changed, too – his legs had become two dimpled pillars of flesh and his arms had shot forward till they dangled at his knees. And above it all, for Bhudeb Roy was usually prone, rose his stomach, surging turbulently above him in an engorged, hairy mass, straining at the thin cotton of his kurta.

  It was not till he discovered criminology, Balaram claimed, that he found a science adequate to Bhudeb Roy. And even Gopal had to admit that there was a remarkable resemblance between Lombroso’s photographs of voluminous jaws and peaked zygomatic arches, of razor-like upper lips and sadly delinquent beetle eyes, and parts of Bhudeb Roy’s physiognomy. No wonder, Balaram said, the police chose him.

  But Balaram’s discovery was to become a
dilemma. Soon after he showed those photographs to Gopal, Bhudeb Roy arrived in his house one evening to ask a favour of him. There was nothing unusual in that. Balaram had always been polite to Bhudeb Roy for the sake of the school. And Bhudeb Roy, for his part, had always had a great respect for Balaram’s learning, a respect he never lost. At that time he even had what Gopal, for one, took to be a deep affection for Balaram. But Balaram himself thought otherwise. No, he told Gopal once, all his attempts at kindness, all those little things he always does for me, have nothing to do with me. They’re just a part of his regret for his own lost youth.

  Bhudeb Roy came to Balaram’s house because a sixth son had recently been born to him. The astrologers had already seen the boy, he confided to Balaram swaying his gnarled head forward, but their prognostications were not good, and he was worried. The palmists would be no use until the boy’s hands grew a bit. In the meantime, he said, drawing his rubbery lower lip back in a smile, I may as well have phrenology. After all, it’s scientific, and I’m a man of the future. Let it not be said that Bhudeb Roy hung back when the opportunity to have the first phrenologized baby in Bengal, perhaps in Asia, was at hand.

  Balaram answered him with vague mumbles. His first instinct, knowing what he did about the hereditary nature of the criminal physiology, was to refuse. What would he say to Bhudeb if his son was exactly like him?

  And just then Bhudeb smiled again and said reassuringly: You’ll like the little swine – he’s just like me.

  But at the same time Balaram was flattered. It was the first time he had been consulted like a doctor or a surgeon. In a way it was more than a triumph for his science – it was a personal victory. Besides, Bhudeb would be terribly offended if he refused.

  So he agreed (later he was to hit himself so hard on his troublesome Vanity that his scalp bled).

  The next day, without telling Toru-debi, Balaram packed his instruments in a bag, along with a copy of Combe for reference, and walked over to Bhudeb Roy’s house, a little way down the path which ran past his own house. Bhudeb Roy was lying flat on his back on a mat under a mango tree in his garden. His stomach billowed above him like a sail in a high wind, while he fanned it gently with a palm leaf. He struggled to his feet when he saw Balaram. Followed by his five sons he led Balaram into his newly built, peacock-green house.

  Balaram knew the worst as soon as he saw the child in its cradle, shrieking with rage at being woken from its evening sleep. Somehow he found the heart to go through the motions of a perfunctory examination. It was difficult, for the child, thoroughly resentful at being handled by a stranger, screamed and clawed at him with an ominous strength. Finally he wetted Balaram’s shirt, and Balaram almost dropped him. He stopped then and washed his hands and put away his instruments. He had seen enough.

  Well? said Bhudeb Roy as he led him out, smiling indulgently. What do you think? Then he saw Balaram’s grim face and stopped short.

  What’s the matter? he cried. Balaram-babu, tell me quickly, what’s the matter? Balaram walked straight on, without a word. Wait, Bhudeb Roy shouted after him, Balaram-babu, wait. Have some tea, biscuits, fish, dinner, anything …

  Balaram walked straight on, down the garden, towards the dirt path, frowning. Bhudeb Roy hurried behind him waddling, pulling up the folds of his dhoti. His five sons ran out behind him. Wait, he cried again plaintively. Tell me, Balaram-babu, what is it?

  Balaram stopped only when he was halfway to his own house. When Bhudeb Roy caught up with him, panting in great shuddering sighs, Balaram said: Bhudeb-babu, I don’t know how to tell you this. I beg that you will not misunderstand. The exhibit, that is to say your son, has distinct protuberances above the asterion and over the temporal muscles above its ears. Furthermore, his mandible and zygomatic arches are already developed to so extraordinary a degree that I can only tell you, with the utmost regret, that he reproduces almost exactly the structure of the Typical Homicidal. With careful nurture you may perhaps be able to hold him down to mere felony, but no further, I fear, no further. Pray, Bhudeb-babu, for I know you believe in prayer, pray that you may not be his first victim.

  Balaram turned, lean and erect, his cloud of white hair lifting in the breeze, and walked away while Bhudeb Roy sank to the dust with a punctured cry.

  Next morning Toru-debi woke to find that six of their coconut palms had been axed and all their lemon trees uprooted during the night. Nonder-ma, who always knew, told her the whole story.

  When she had heard her through, Toru-debi went to the middle of the courtyard. She stood, legs apart, holding a huge stone pestle above her head, and shouted: Listen, you. If I ever hear again that you’ve gone out of this house with those instruments, there’ll be nothing left in your study. Those books have cursed you, and now you’re trying to drag me down with you. But I won’t go.

  Balaram did not leave his study or even acknowledge that he had heard her. There were times, he knew, when Combativeness ruled her so completely that argument was futile. Those were the times when it was best to do as she said.

  After that Balaram’s evening walks around the village with his Claws and his bag of instruments ceased. The notebooks of observations of over three hundred of the village’s living heads that he had so carefully compiled in a decade’s painstaking work were frozen. Balaram’s study became a prison and his evenings would not pass.

  On those long evenings, Balaram tried to see the matter rationally, but he could not find it in himself to forgive Bhudeb Roy. But there was little he could do: reason is not a good weapon with which to wreak revenge.

  What Bhudeb Roy made of the incident was a mystery. When Toru-debi made Balaram go with her to his house a month later to offer condolences after his baby son had died of double pneumonia, he was as courteous to Balaram as he ever was. But Balaram was not deceived. He saw Combativeness growing on the back of Bhudeb Roy’s head like a new potato, and secretly he was afraid.

  About a year later Alu arrived in Lalpukur.

  So, in an odd way, Bhudeb Roy was partly responsible for the surge of enthusiasm with which Balaram greeted Alu. The moment he saw him Balaram knew his evenings would never be empty again.

  Though a long time passed before the boy would let Balaram examine him, once they started he grew to enjoy his sessions with Balaram almost as much as Balaram did himself. To eliminate all taint of the haphazard, Balaram worked out a timetable for the examinations. Since Alu was in the fourth class of the Lalpukur school then, Balaram scheduled his examinations early in the morning, before school, three times a week, and after school another three times a week, with holidays on Sundays. The timetable, with the days shuffled around for variety every week, was pinned up on the door of Balaram’s study late every Sunday evening. But neither he nor Alu paid it much attention. Alu was always somewhere in Balaram’s study in those days – rummaging around in the bookshelves, leafing through books in some dusty corner, or often just dozing, leaning against the easy chair’s clawed legs.

  Balaram could not have hoped for a better subject. But still something worried him.

  It may be his bregma, he told Gopal. He’s so completely impassive. Nothing, nothing at all, seems to make an impression on him.

  They were sitting at a grimy marble-topped table in Nizam’s Restaurant, behind the New Market in Calcutta. The waiters in their lungis were making so much noise running between the tables and the kitchen outside that Gopal had to lean forward to hear Balaram clearly.

  He’s still just a boy, Balaram, he said, prodding a kebab with his forefinger. You can’t expect him to be as enthusiastic about phrenology as you are.

  But Balaram was still worried. It wasn’t natural for a boy of ten to be quite so impassive. Alu betrayed no emotion about anything at all. It was obvious, for instance, that in his impassive way he hated school – if there could be such a thing as an impassive hatred. He never opened a schoolbook, never wrote so much as a word in his hard-bound exercise-book. He went off to school obediently enough, but always ha
nging back, as though waiting for a miracle to strike the school off the fields of Lalpukur.

  It was already a matter of deep embarrassment to Balaram, and it would be worse if his own nephew, studying in the very school he was teaching in, were to fail in the examinations. Bhudeb Roy, whose sons somehow always won all the prizes the school offered, never let Balaram forget it. Not very bright, that boy Alu, he would say, is he, Balaram-babu? Perhaps you should beat him a bit?

  Balaram would look straight at him until his opaque little eyes shifted.

  The trouble was that he was bright, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent. There could be no doubt about it. He had to have some intelligence to read as much as he did.

  How much he read! Far too much, in fact, for a boy of ten. He would read almost anything he happened to come across in Balaram’s study: history, geography, geology, natural history, biology … Anything at all. And not just in Bengali. It had taken him amazingly little time to learn English. And then Balaram had tried to teach him a little French the same way he had learnt it himself, from a grammar and a pocket dictionary. Alu had proved so quick in learning that Balaram had decided not to teach him any more for fear of confusing him. But then one day he had found him reading a French primer on his own, with the help of the pocket dictionary.

  He had learnt to speak a number of languages, too. Cycle-shop Bolai, who had once served in the Army somewhere in the north, had taught him Hindi. And he was fluent in the villagers’ dialect, which Balaram, after sixteen years in Lalpukur, could barely understand.

  Most of the people of Lalpukur belonged originally to the remote district of Noakhali, in the far east of Bengal close to Burma. They had emigrated to India in a slow steady trickle in the years after East Bengal became East Pakistan. Most of them had left everything but their dialect behind. It was a nasal sing-song Bengali, with who knew what mixed in of Burmese and the languages of the hills to the east. Many of them had learnt the speech of West Bengal, but it had only made their own dialect more dear to them – as a mark of common belonging and as a secret weapon to confuse strangers with. It was their claim that it was impossible for anyone born outside Noakhali to understand their speech when they spoke fast. And yet after only two years Alu spoke it so fluently that the whole village had learnt to be careful not to talk about Balaram when he passed by.