The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  But there he was, in front of his bookcase again, smiling. She could see his smile clearer than ever now; and today, with the smell of failure already bitter in her nostrils, it stung, for she could see that it was at her that he was smiling, even though his smile was not mocking but melancholy.

  And so, with her worries gnawing at her mind anew, Mrs Verma quickened her pace.

  Just before leaving her house she had spoken to an acquaintance of hers, an Indian doctor in the hospital in Ghardaia, far to the south-west, deep in the Sahara. He or, rather, his wife was more or less her last hope. All her other Indian acquaintances in various hospitals in Algeria had said no, some rudely, some nicely. The young doctor’s was the last name on her list, and now he had said no, too. She couldn’t really blame him, for Ghardaia was a long way away and in any case she had got such a bad connection that he had barely understood what she was trying to say. At the end of her long explanation he had shouted: You want a young Indian woman? Why? She had begun to explain all over again, but the phone was crackling wildly, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine what he heard, for suddenly he shouted, very angrily: No, we don’t have a maidservant, and if you want one you should go back to India, Mrs Verma, instead of asking for my wife.

  Then he had slammed the phone down.

  So now, despite that unbelievable stroke of luck three days ago, she was back exactly where she had started. It looked as though it was all over.

  Mrs Verma pulled the anchal of her sari tight over her head and walked straight on. She was always careful to keep her head covered when she went out into the streets of El Oued; it seemed appropriately modest somehow in that land of cavernous hoods.

  But she was still conspicuous as she walked down the Avenue, not only because so many of her own and her husband’s patients greeted her with deep bows and their hands on their hearts, but also because her sari was brilliantly orange. Otherwise there was nothing at all remarkable about a short, pleasantly plump, honey-complexioned woman in her mid-thirties striding briskly down a dusty avenue in a small town. If there was anything to distinguish her from the thousands of other similar women who were probably doing the same thing in thousands of other small towns around the world, it was something which had no connection with her at all. It was the stark lunar majesty of the immense golden sand-dunes which towered above the avenue.

  And so Mrs Verma hurried on down the Avenue Mohamed Khemisti, as strikingly visible as a newly flowered anemone on a beach, walking even faster now, for there was her father again, stooping over his bookcase, smiling, saying in his firm, gentle way: Stop worrying about it; it won’t work. It’s pointless. Can’t you see – the issue is political? Haven’t I told you? It’s the very same mistake that the Rationalists made.

  Kulfi, who was sitting next to the window, saw her first. Alu, opposite her, was staring down into a glass of thick mint tea; and Zindi, sitting between them, was testing Boss’s forehead with the back of her hand, trying to decide whether he was running a temperature or not.

  Kulfi spotted the orange sari when Mrs Verma was still a long way down the street. Very slowly, as though she were afraid to trust her eyes, her thin, tired face froze, and then suddenly she shot upright on her hard steel chair and struck the tin table-top with her fists.

  Zindi looked up at that, and when she saw Kulfi sitting deathly rigid in her chair, gripping the edges of the table, her eyes feverishly bright, a great tide of weariness washed over her. She knew the symptoms; she could hardly not. In those two months she had watched the onset of Kulfi’s attacks of chest pains more than a dozen times. She had always done what she could to help her; but this time, with Boss already ill, in an unknown town in the middle of the desert, with nowhere to spend the day but the sand-dunes, an almost irresistible longing to let go gripped her – a yearning to give up, like them.

  But instead she leant forward, saying instinctively: Kulfi, do you want to lie down?

  In answer Kulfi turned, eyes glittering, and her arm went up and pointed rigidly out of the window.

  Then Zindi saw her, too: a short woman in a bright orange sari, with a comfortable, homely face and a prominent upper lip, walking briskly down the street, smiling and nodding at people as she passed them by.

  The men at the other tables, who had watched the two women enter the café with frowning disapproval, were staring at them now. Zindi, suddenly self-conscious, pulled Kulfi’s pointing hand down and growled: Be still, Kulfi – people are watching. Let me think. Kulfi pulled her arm free, sprang to her feet and stood poised above the table like a bird about to take flight. Zindi reached out again and this time she took hold of her sari and pulled her down hard. Kulfi crashed down on the chair with a gasp. What’re you doing? she snapped. Can’t you see? She could help us.

  Wait, I have to think, Zindi began, but her voice died in her throat and then she forgot Kulfi altogether as the days-old knots of fear in her stomach uncoiled and something seemed to shoot up her spine in a warm jet, bathing her in a blessed shower of relief. Her cradled arms lifted Boss’s head to her cheek and, kissing him, she whispered: Allah! You’re saved now; saved in the middle of the desert. They’re your countrymen; they’ll have to do something for you.

  Yes, said Kulfi, swaying on her chair, that’s right. I knew something was going to happen today. I could feel it in my heart. I prayed to Bhagwan Sri Krishan this morning, and he told me. He said: Something’s going to happen today. It won’t go on like this any more.

  Kulfi leant forward and squinted into the sunlight. She looks very respectable, she said anxiously. Good family. She smoothed her hair back, ran her fingers through the drapes of her sari and stood up, muttering to herself: What’ll she think? Hair all in knots, no powder, nothing … in the middle of the desert.

  Kulfi, wait, Zindi said quickly. You can’t just go like that. What’ll you tell her? She looks a proper babu’s wife. She’ll ask you all kinds of things, she’s bound to: Who’re you? What’re you doing here? and all that.

  So? said Kulfi. I’ll tell her something.

  Yes, Zindi said sharply, but what?

  I could tell her something like – we got off the bus …

  No. Zindi shook her head. What you’ll tell her is this. You’ll tell her that you’re tourists; that Boss is your son and that you and Alu are married.

  What? Kulfi’s lips curled thinly back. Married to him? she spat, her voice jagged with contempt. Married to that thumbless half-wit? It’s no use, she won’t believe it. Not when she sees him and his withered thumbs.

  Alu’s head dropped and involuntarily his hands hid themselves between his legs.

  Zindi jabbed Kulfi’s thigh with a forefinger. Listen, she said, you’ll do exactly as I say or you can go on alone. You’ll tell her that Alu is your husband. Never mind his thumbs; he can hide them in his pockets. You’ll tell her that he works for an oil firm in al-Ghazira – she’ll like that. Babus’ wives like people who work for oil firms. Tell her I’m your ayah and you’ve brought me along to look after Boss. Tell her that you’ve come sightseeing; that we’ve arrived here by mistake and Boss has suddenly fallen ill, and that we need a place to spend a night or two. That should satisfy her.

  She won’t believe me, Kulfi said. She’ll know I’m not married the moment she sees me. There’s no sindur on my head and there aren’t any bangles on my arms. She’ll know at once.

  Tell her something, tell her you’ve lost your things – anything, it doesn’t matter.

  Zindi snatched at Kulfi’s arm as she started forward. And listen, she hissed. Not one word about the Bird-man following us. Do you understand?

  Do you think I’m a fool? Kulfi glared at her.

  The orange sari was passing the window now. Zindi gave Kulfi a push – Go on, tell her – and watched as she darted out of the door. Then she looked up. The stretched white sky seemed to be smiling at her at last, and she smiled back. But a moment later she picked out a tiny speck, hovering like a mote in the sunlight, far above, and
gazed at it with gathering unease.

  Soon her smile faded away, for she saw that it was a vulture.

  Actually Mrs Verma saw them before Kulfi had reached the door. She always glanced into that café when she passed it, for she had once done a series of blood tests on the owner’s wife and ever after he had always come out to greet her when he saw her walking by.

  This time, looking in, she caught a glimpse of an unaccustomed shade of yellow somewhere in the dark interior. Something unexpected, something vaguely familiar about the drape of the cloth, lodged in her mind and drew her to a puzzled halt. She looked again and now there could be no doubt: it was a woman in a sari.

  She started walking again, shaking her head. Miss Krishnaswamy the nurse perhaps; but, no, she’d asked her whether she wanted to come, and Miss K. had said no, she had to stay and cook lunch. And not Mrs Mishra, either; she was at home, too – she’d seen her that morning, across the square.

  And neither of them had saris of quite that shade, and in any case they wouldn’t be sitting in a café. Mrs Verma stopped again and looked back in bafflement, not allowing herself to believe that it could be true: it couldn’t be; it would be too heaven-sent; too much luck; no one was that lucky in this world.

  A moment later Kulfi came rushing out of the café and Mrs Verma saw that it was true; that she was indeed a woman in a sari, and quite young, too – exactly the right age in fact.

  By the time Kulfi caught up with her Mrs Verma was so elated, so consumed by surprise, that she heard barely a word of Kulfi’s babbled explanations.

  The only occasions when other Indians had come to El Oued in the two years Mrs Verma had spent there were when she and her husband, or Dr Mishra and his wife, invited some of their friends and acquaintances from the hospitals in Ouargla or Ghardaia, or even Tamanrasset in the far south, to come up for a holiday. Those visits needed months of advance planning; supplies had to be hoarded, parties organized and leave applied for. Those were the only Indians, as far as she knew, who had ever come to El Oued.

  Of course other foreigners, mainly tourists, passed through El Oued every year, in a trickle which varied slightly with the seasons, like the height of the water-table. They were French mainly, with a sprinkling of Germans and a handful of Italians. Sometimes they arrived by bus, with rucksacks on their backs and water-bottles which could have emptied lakes. Or else they came in specially equipped jeeps or vans bristling with compasses to help them find their way south to the Mzab and the Ahaggar – the Heart, they said, of the Sahara. They often turned up at the hospital with upset stomachs or sunburn and talked to her in halting English about the legends of Légionnaires and Mécharistes and the veiled men of the Tuareg; about their childhood dreams of the desert and the promise of dangers and hunger and hardship that had drawn them there. In her first year there she had listened in astonishment and protested, thinking of the lacquered roads and swift buses, the air-conditioned hotels and brimming swimming-pools, the pylons and oil-derricks she had always encountered on her journeys south. But soon, rather than spoil their holidays, she had decided to keep her silence.

  Not that everyone merely passed through; many people came just to visit El Oued as well. And there was no doubt about it; it was an extraordinary place. At first, she’d taken it very much for granted. But once someone led her and her husband to the top of the minaret of Sidi Salem.

  The sight had taken her breath away.

  If you looked down on El Oued – the old town, that is – from the top of the minaret or the new tower in the Hôtel du Souf, what you saw was a fine carpet of thousands and thousands of small yellowish-white domes, ringed by a sea of gigantic golden dunes. The houses stretched into that golden horizon like banks of confectionery at a feast. Every house had not one but dozens of tiny domes, perched on walls which sloped away at bewildering angles. If you walked through the lanes of the old town, every few steps you had to stop and marvel at the brilliant blue borders on the limestone walls; at the little sand-roses encrusted on the houses; the lush, vivid green of the doors. And then, beyond that knotted carpet of domes were the date palms, vast basins of sunken, dusty date palms, only their fronds visible above the sand, doggedly fighting the marching dunes.

  But she knew that when she left it would not be the domes or the palms or anything like that that she would see when she tried to remember how it had looked. It would be the dunes. Even now, after two years, whenever she looked at them she was beggared, humbled, all over again, just as she had been the very first time.

  These were no ordinary dunes: they were the great towering crescents of the Grand Erg Oriental. When you saw them poised above you, stretching towards the horizon in gigantic scalloped arcs, you could only be silent; they were outside human imagination, a force of nature displaying itself in space, like a typhoon or earthquake rendered palpable and permanent.

  There were lots of other things about El Oued – fine points of Saharan architecture and archaeology and anthropology. Erudite visitors temporarily humbled by diarrhoea or dysentery often told her about those things. She would listen to them and then send them on to Dr Mishra. He took an interest in that kind of thing.

  As for herself, she preferred people.

  Mrs Verma tried to listen as the thin, pale woman chattered excitedly on: … and, then, you know the firm gives him a holiday bonus, so we thought why not? Everyone else buys VCRs and TVs but we already have all those things and we thought, you know, we should see the world, too, especially since we have an ayah and everything. Of course, it was a problem, you know, our house there is so huge and I didn’t know who to leave it with, servants are so unreliable nowadays, but if you think of all that you can nev-er do anything …

  But the one thought on Mrs Verma’s mind was: Two years, two years, and not so much as a hint of an Indian tourist; and now, in the space of three short days, just when we need them …

  She saw old Hem Narain Mathur standing beside his bookcase, smiling, and this time she smiled triumphantly back.

  Raising herself on tiptoe, Mrs Verma stole a look over Kulfi’s shoulder and immediately fell back flat-footed. An indescribably vast woman swathed in some kind of immense black tent was bearing down on her, like a migrating Bedouin camp. She had a baby in her arms, and following close behind her, with his hands behind his back, was a man with a strangely distended head, and huge, staring, watchful eyes.

  It occurred to Mrs Verma that this was the husband the pale woman had been talking about all this while. Her first reaction was of mild relief: as soon as she had heard about the husband some subterranean layer of her mind had busied itself with calculating whether this new factor would entail an even more dramatic revision of her casting than she had allowed for when she first saw the woman in the sari. But the moment she saw him she knew there was nothing to worry about: her first choice wasn’t ideal perhaps, but certainly this husband of hers was no contender for the role of mythological hero.

  It occurred to her that she had said almost nothing all this while. Scolding herself for her thoughtless selfishness, she reached out, took Kulfi’s hand in her own and smiled. Kulfi broke off in mid-sentence, silenced by the sweetness of her smile. Mrs Verma said softly: I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. My name is Uma Verma, Dr Uma Verma. My husband and I work in the hospital here. He’s in ENT and I’m a microbiologist.

  She stopped, for Kulfi was brushing her hands across her eyes, and it didn’t seem as though she had understood much. I do a bit of gynae, too, she added quickly, though it’s not on the contract.

  But that didn’t appear to make much of an impression, either, so then she said simply: You’re very, very welcome.

  Next moment Zindi was upon her, her heavy-jowled face blazing hope. You’re a doctor? she cried in her guttural Hindi. A real doctor? God be praised.

  She thrust Boss into Mrs Verma’s arms. What’s happened to him, Doctor? she said, her voice honed sharp by days of unvoiced worry. What’s happened to him, Doctor? Tell me what�
��s happened to him.

  Mrs Verma felt his forehead with the back of her hand. I’m not in paediatrics, she said apologetically, but I don’t think it’s anything serious. Perhaps he has a little fever. Has he been like this for long?

  Ten days, Doctor, Zindi said. Ten whole days.

  Ten days! Mrs Verma was shocked. She turned to Kulfi: Why haven’t you taken him to a doctor before this?

  There wasn’t any time, Doctor, Zindi cried, the words pouring out of her in a wailing, unthinking wave. There just wasn’t any time. First, we were on the ship and we couldn’t take him to the doctor there, though I did give him a few tablets. Then we had to get off at Tunis. I thought we’d find a doctor there, and actually we were on our way but then suddenly something happened and we had to rush off and that made him worse. Then in Kairouan I thought I’d take him, but we had to rush off again, and after that it was just a mess and all we could think of was how to get to the border …