The Calcutta Chromosome

by Amitav Gosh

  Urmila laughed.

  'What's up?' said Murugan.

  'I often had a dream when I was a child,' Urmila said, with a laugh in her throat. 'I dreamt I would open the front door of our flat one day and find a small group of gods and goddesses outside, ringing the bell with the tips of their clay fingers. I would open the door and welcome them, hands folded, and they would float in on their swans and rats and lions and owls, and my mother would lead them to the little Formica-topped table where we ate. They would seat themselves on our chairs while my mother ran in and out of the kitchen, making tea and frying luchis and shingaras, while we watched in awe, our hands joined in prayer. We would offer sweets to the swan and the owl, and Ma Kali would smile at us with her burning eyes, and Ma Shoroshshoti would play a note or two on her sitar and Ma Lokhkhi would sit crosslegged on her lotus, holding up her hand, looking just as she does on the labels of ghee tins.'

  She paused at the open door of a workshop. 'Let's try this one,' she said, leading him in. They stepped through the open doorway, into the workshop's dimly lit interior, and found themselves staring into a teeming crowd of smiling, flesh-coloured faces.

  Urmila spotted a moving figure somewhere among the stationary images. 'Is somebody there?' she called out.

  'Who is it?'

  The figure vanished as quickly as it had appeared, behind a six-foot dancing Ganesh.

  'We just wanted to talk to you,' Urmila said.

  An elderly man materialized suddenly in front of her, detaching himself from a pantheon on a plinth. He was wearing a dhoti and a string vest and his thin, ill-tempered face was screwed into a scowl. Stepping away, Urmila very nearly impaled herself on a spear, upraised in the hands of a serene Ma Durga.

  'Careful,' the man snapped. He looked her over suspiciously as she straightened her damp, dirt-streaked sari. 'What do you want?' he said. 'We're very busy right now; no time to talk.'

  Urmila stiffened, falling immediately into her professional manner. 'I am a reporter for Calcutta,' she said, in a crisp, firm voice. 'And I'd like to ask you a question.'

  The man's frown deepened. 'What question?' he said. 'Why? I don't know anything. We're not involved in politics.'

  'It's not about politics.' Urmila thrust Murugan's drawing into his hands. 'Can you tell me what kind of image this is?'

  The man narrowed his eyes, directing a sharp glance at Murugan. 'I've never seen anything like this in my life,' he said, handing the drawing back. 'I know every divine image there is and I've never seen one like this.'

  Urmila turned to Murugan to translate, but he cut her short.

  'I got that,' he whispered. 'But something tells me he's in denial mode.'

  'You don't know anything about this image, then?' Urmila said to the man in the dhoti. 'Are you sure?'

  'What did I tell you?' the man said, his voice rising. 'Haven't I said "no" already? How many times do I have to say it?'

  A couple of younger men had gathered around them now. Urmila held the drawing out to them but the older man cut her short.

  'What can they tell you?' he said. 'They're just boys.' He herded Urmila and Murugan quickly towards the door, muttering under his breath. He saw them to the door and shooed them impatiently off: 'Go on, go on, there's nothing for you here.' He watched them leave and then disappeared into the interior of the workshop.

  'Well,' said Murugan, dusting his hands. 'I guess that's as much as we're going to get from him.'

  Urmila was about to walk away when Murugan pulled her to an abrupt halt. 'Look!' he said, with a sudden intake of breath. 'Over there.' His finger was pointing at a child, a six- or seven-year-old girl, who was sitting by the roadside playing with a doll.

  'At what?' said Urmila.

  'Look at what she just put into her doll's hands,' Murugan whispered into her ear.

  Now, looking closely, Urmila noticed that the girl was trying to push a tiny semicircular object into the unyielding grasp of her sightless plastic doll. 'What is it?' she said. 'I can't tell.'

  'Don't you see?' said Murugan. 'It's a little stylized microscope, just like the one I saw.' He gave her a nudge: 'Go on, ask her, ask her where she got it.'

  Urmila took a step forward, and as her shadow approached, the girl glanced up, her eyes widening warily. Urmila gave her a reassuring smile and sank slowly down to her knees, beside her.

  'Why, how beautiful,' she said, speaking softly, in a child's Bengali, pointing at the tiny microscope, now firmly lodged in the dolls hands.

  'It's mine,' the girl said defensively, closing her fist upon the doll's hand.

  'Yes, of course it's yours,' said Urmila. 'Your father gave it to you, didn't he?'

  The girl nodded, moving her head slowly up and down.

  She cocked her head at the workshop. 'My father is in there,' she said. 'He's made a lot of them.'

  'Oh?' said Urmila, nodding encouragement.

  'He made them for the big puja tonight,' the girl offered. 'Really?' Urmila smiled. 'I didn't know there's a puja tonight.'

  'There is,' the girl nodded vigorously. 'Today is the last day of the puja of Mangala-bibi. Baba says that tonight Mangala-bibi is going to enter a new body.'

  'And whose is that?' Urmila said.

  'The body she's chosen, of course,' the girl said. 'No one knows whose it is.'

  Murugan hissed into Urmila's ear: 'Ask her about Lutchman.' But before Urmila could say another word a man burst out of the workshop. Picking up the girl, he took her inside. Then the elderly man in the dhoti appeared again, carrying a stick.

  'Why are you still here?' he shouted at Urmila. 'Why were you talking to that child? Are you kidnappers? I'm going to call the police, right now.'

  'Don't bother,' said Urmila, rising to her feet. 'We're going.' She tapped Murugan on the arm and set off briskly down the lane.

  Chapter 36

  ANTAR WAS DRIFTING OFF to sleep when Ava began to emit an urgent summons. It wasn't very loud and Antar felt it before he heard it, in his belly, reverberating through the floor.

  Antar made his way gingerly into the living room, and spotted the outer nimbus of a package, deep inside Ava's delivery slot. It was a folder from the personal terminus of the Council's Assistant-Secretary General for Human Resources. It began by thanking him for the time and effort he had already invested in the L. Murugan case. Then, in polite but uncompromising language, it informed him that since he was already 'cognizant of the details' it had been decided that he should proceed with a further investigation of the matter. He was thus given authority to open up a direct line to the Council's representative in Calcutta, in order to conduct whatever interrogations were necessary (there followed a lengthy sequence of codes and clearances).

  Antar spent a few minutes lashing together a raft of commands to take Ava through to Calcutta. When he was ready he went into the kitchen and splashed water over his face.

  Tara's apartment was still dark, except for a light in the living room, which she always left on, night and day. As Antar was patting his face dry something shot up out of the air-shaft and began to knock furiously on the glass window pane. Antar recoiled, throwing his arms up: it was a pigeon, flapping against the glass. Its beady red eyes fixed on him for an instant, and then it was gone.

  Antar poured himself a glass of water and carried it into his living room. Then he began the process of arming the raft.

  It took exactly 5.65 seconds before the raft came to a stop at the personal terminus of the Director of the Council's office in Calcutta. It ran up against a barrier and began to thrash about, like a fish at a lock, sending back frantic signals: there was no one in the office and the only person who was directly connected was the Director himself. And the Director was at his residence, with the privacy controls in his surveillance system activated. Ava wouldn't be able to get through without a Shatter Command.

  Antar looked up the code in his list of clearances and fed the command in. It took Ava just an instant to break through and a moment later a h
olographic projection of the Director appeared in Antar's living room, half-size. He was standing under a shower, a tall paunchy Peruvian. His eyes were closed and he was crooning to himself and scratching his balls.

  Resisting the temptation to say 'Boo!' Antar cleared his throat with a gentle cough.

  The Director opened one eye very slowly, looking around in disbelief. When he saw what was happening, his hands flew down to cup his genitals. He began to scream, his voice rising from a soundless wheeze into a high-pitched shriek. He dropped to all fours and began crawling furiously, dripping soap and water on the floor. Antar guessed he was heading for a towel, but he couldn't see the rest of the bathroom: to him, the director looked frantically stationary, in the middle of his living room, as though he were crawling on a conveyor belt.

  The Director jumped to his feet, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his middle. 'You fucking son-of-a-bitch,' Ava translated, into gleefully demotic Arabic, as the Director began to scream at Antar. 'You can't do this! I'll have you brought to book I'll see you pay for this! You'll go to jail, you wait… '

  Antar tried to explain but he wouldn't listen. So Antar hit the bathroom with the Alert signal until he quieted down and went to look for his clothes.

  He went on grumbling while he dressed. 'You don't know what it's like here,' he muttered, pulling on his trousers. 'I have to run the whole office myself.'

  'Is it hard work?' Antar said, trying to sound sympathetic.

  'Hard work!' cried the Director laughing sarcastically. 'That's the problem; there's no work at all, now that the river doesn't flow through the city any more. I have to make work for the office. I keep recommending projects but the people here won't let the Council touch a thing: I've never seen anything like it. In the last year they've only let us start one project. And you know what that is?'

  'What?' said Antar.

  'A shelter!' said the Director, throwing up his hands. 'A shelter for the needy is how we describe it. They have a big fort here, called Fort William. It was built by the British in the eighteenth century. The Council requisitioned it, but then couldn't figure out what to do with it. The only thing everyone could agree on was the shelter idea. So that's what I do now, I run a shelter.'

  He had finished dressing and was sitting at his terminus, looking through his files. 'All right, what was it you were asking about?' he said, looking over his shoulder. 'An ID card in an inventory? That's easy -there's only one place it could have come from.'

  He made a couple of short-sighted jabs at his keyboard. 'Yes,' he said. 'I thought so. It was in an inventory that came from the Fort William Shelter.'

  'Go on,' said Antar.

  'Well,' said the Director, 'it seems to have been found in the Department of Alternative Inner States… '

  He gave Antar a wink, over his shoulder. 'What we oldtimers used to call asylums,' he said. 'It says here it was entered into the system this morning. They found it while registering an inmate. They always do a strip search when they bring someone in.'

  Peering into the panel, he gave Antar a sly grin. 'From what I can see here,' he said, 'I would say the guy you're looking for is experiencing an inner state that is about as alternative as it can be.'

  'Who was he?' asked Antar.

  'He wouldn't give a name,' said the Director.

  'Where was he found?'

  The Director peered at his panel again. 'It says here,' he said, 'that he turned himself in at a railway station – a place called Sealdah.'

  'When can I talk to him?' said Antar.

  'You want to talk to him?' groaned the Director. 'You realize I'll have to bring him here? This is the Council's only secured communications facility here – right in my home. What if he experiences an alternative inner state while he's here? What if he wrecks the place? What if he wrecks the terminus?'

  'I'll make sure you're insured,' said Antar. 'Just have him here: as soon as you can.' He cut the Director off before he could protest.

  Then he stumbled back to bed.

  Chapter 37

  WALKING PAST the pavement stalls on Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road, Urmila caught a whiff of the irresistible smell of fish cutlets and dhakai parotha wafting through the doors of the Dilkhusha Cabin.

  'I'll die if I don't eat soon,' she remarked to Murugan.

  She lost no time in propelling him into the eatery. Leading him to a curtained booth, she slid on to a bench and signalled to Murugan to seat himself opposite her. A waiter appeared almost immediately, with two limp menu cards in his hand. Urmila ordered for them both, and as soon as the waiter left, she pulled the curtain shut.

  'Tell me,' she said, leaning across the table. 'Who is this Lachman you keep talking about?'

  'You mean Lutchman,' Murugan corrected her. 'That's how Ronnie Ross would have said it; that's how he spelt it, anyhow.'

  'But the name must have been Lachman,' said Urmila. 'Ross probably just spelt it in a British kind of way.'

  'Same difference,' said Murugan. 'Who knows what his mother called him? We weren't there. Anyways, Lutchman was this young guy who walked into Ronnie Ross's life on May 25 1895 at 8 p.m., offering himself as a guinea pig. He ended up spending the next three years doing everything for Ron, from slicing his breakfast bagels to counting his slides. Every time Ron went running off in the wrong direction, Lutchman was waiting to head him off and show

  him the way to go. He claimed to be a "dhooley-bearer" by trade, but my guess is that he was leading Ronnie by the nose.'

  'But,' said Urmila, 'how would he have known about where to lead Ronald Ross?'

  'It's a long story,' he said. 'I'll cut it short for you: a few years ago I found a letter that was written in Calcutta, by an American missionary doctor called Elijah Farley. Before he got religion Farley was doing medical research back in the States, at Johns Hopkins. As a student he'd worked with some of the biggest names in malaria research.

  'Well, the last thing he ever wrote was this letter in which he described a visit to Cunningham's laboratory in Calcutta. He saw some stuff there that was – oh, maybe three or four years ahead of the state of play in the international scientific community. None of it made any sense to him, of course, because it didn't fit with anything he'd ever been taught.'

  'Don't talk so fast,' said Urmila. 'I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to tell me. Are you talking about Cunningham's own research?'

  Murugan laughed: 'No. Cunningham didn't have a clue.'

  'So who was doing this work, then?'

  'The way Farley saw it,' said Murugan, 'it was the people in the lab, Cunningham's servants and assistants.'

  'But surely,' said Urmila, 'Cunningham's assistants would have told him what they were doing.'

  'It's like this,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham's assistants were a pretty wild mix. You see, he didn't want educated college kids from Calcutta messing around in his lab, and asking questions and stuff. So what he did instead was he'd train his own assistants.'

  'Who were they?' Urmila asked. 'And where did he find them?'

  'In the last place anyone would think of looking,' said Murugan. 'At Sealdah railway station. The station hadn't been around that long, but if you wanted to find people who were pretty much on their own, down and out with nowhere to go, that was the place to look. Cunningham used to check out the whole station every once in a while and when he saw a likely looking kid he'd offer them room and board in exchange for work – nothing fancy, just a minimum-wage kind of job around the lab, sweeper, "dhooley-bearer", that sort of shit. They'd jump at it, of course: what did they have to lose? They'd live in those outhouses near the hospital wall, and help around the lab. It was a nice, cosy little set-up.'

  'So he taught them?' said Urmila. 'And trained them and so on?'

  'Not really,' said Murugan. 'He may have taught them how to read a little English and he probably showed them a couple of things – but just monkey-see, monkey-do kind of stuff. They probably didn't give a shit anyway. But there was this one person, a w
oman, who took to the lab like a duck to water. My guess is that within a few years she was way ahead of Cunningham in her intuitive understanding of the fundamentals of the malaria problem.'

  'But who was this woman?' said Urmila. 'And what was she called?'

  Murugan smiled: 'The way Farley tells it,' he said, drawing his sleeve across his damp forehead, 'her name was Mangala.'

  Urmila gasped. 'Mangala?' she cried. 'You mean like Mangal-bibi -like the name the girl said?'

  'I guess you could call her a prototype,' said Murugan. 'And as for who she was – who knows? The only indication we have that she even existed was in this letter written by Elijah Farley. And even that letter isn't around any more: at least it's untraceable in the catalogues.'

  'What did Elijah Farley say about her?'

  'Not much,' said Murugan. 'All he knew was what Cunningham told him – which was that he found her at Sealdah Station, that she was dirt poor and that she probably had hereditary syphilis. But then the big question is: did Cunningham find her or did she find him? Anyway, Farley saw things happening in the lab that left him in no doubt that she knew a whole lot more about malaria than Cunningham could ever have taught her.'

  'Really?' said Urmila, her forehead wrinkling in disbelief. 'Is it possible that she could have taught herself something as technical as that?'

  Murugan shrugged. 'Similar things have been known to happen,' he said. 'Think of Ramanujan, the mathematician, down in Madras. He went ahead and reinvented a fair hunk of modern mathematics just because nobody had told him that it had already been done. And with Mangala we're not talking about mathematics: we're talking about microscopy, which was still an artisanal kind of skill at that time. Real talent could take you a long way in it – Ronnie Ross's career is living proof of that. With this woman we're talking about a whole lot more than just talent; we may be talking genius here. You also have to remember that she wasn't hampered by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone who was conventionally trained: she wasn't carrying a shit-load of theory in her head, she didn't have to write papers or construct proofs. Unlike Ross she didn't need to read a zoological study to see that there was a difference between culex and anopheles: she'd have seen it like you or I can see the difference between a dachshund and a Dobermann. She didn't care about formal classifications. In fact she didn't even really care about malaria. That's probably why she got behind Ronnie Ross and started pushing him towards the finish line. She was working towards something altogether different, and she'd begun to believe that the only way she was going to make her final breakthrough was by getting Ronnie Ross to make his. She had bigger things in mind than the malaria bug.'