Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Failure? prompted Jyoti.

Inability to fulfil your commission, corrected his contact. Nobody wants to get involved.

But there were two flashes of light in Egypt as well: one the encounter in Alexandria when he knew that he had sighted the right flight-path; and the other a letter from his engineer uncle in Düsseldorf with a hint about a job for him in Germany as well as a draft for a few hundred dollars.

The money bought him a ticket to Tunis, but once there it was all darkness. When he rang the embassy a voice asked him for his name, designation, rank, business, and then informed him gleefully that they had received a telex from the Ministry notifying a Shri Jyoti Das to show cause why he should not be suspended for dereliction of duty.

Luckily there were a few more hundred dollars from Düsseldorf, waiting poste restante. What could he do, but put them in his pocket and set off to look for the only people he knew in that continent?

So there he was, in the desert, lying on a sofa, terrified of the future, without a past, aware only of the prickings of his painfully virginal flesh, and there, suddenly in the doorway, was Kulfi.

There I was, he said to Alu, lying on a sofa thinking of a vulture, and I looked up and there she was in her yellow sari, framed in the doorway, like an oriole in a Mughal miniature.

You can’t give her a proper cremation, Mrs Verma; your own scriptures won’t permit it.

Why not? she demanded.

Well, Dr Mishra said, I can think of two perfectly good reasons. To begin with, I think I could undertake to persuade anyone who’s interested that her death was largely accidental — sudden shock, etc. Do you agree?

Mrs Verma nodded uncertainly: How does it matter anyway?

There, he cried. You see how you pay the price for your well-intentioned ignorance? Don’t you know that, strictly speaking, someone who’s died accidentally is not entitled to a proper funeral? If you don’t believe me, have a look at the Baudhayana Dharmasutra — you can see for yourself. The argument, if I recall correctly, is that someone who dies accidentally can’t enter Pitrloka anyway, so why bother? I can’t quite remember offhand, but I think in scriptural times the bodies of people who died accidentally were thrown into rivers or left in forests. That should give you something to go on, except that, as you’ll notice if you look out of the window, there aren’t many forests here, nor rivers, and it’s possible that the Algerians might be a little upset if we dumped her in an artesian well. So maybe we can just leave her on a sand-dune somewhere and give some of Mr Das’s vultures a nice meal. What do you think?

Dr Mishra burst into laughter. Poor Mrs Bose, he said chuckling. She didn’t do anything right. Didn’t she know that she ought to have made a gift of a cow to a Brahmin before dying? It would have been so easy, too. All she had to do was call out for me; I’ve always wanted a cow. And now she’ll have to answer for it, poor thing. She’ll be stuck on the banks of the Vaitarani, with no cow to lead her across it into the underworld.

Mishra-sahb, Mrs Verma said, do you think this is the right time for your jokes?

If you think I’m joking, he said evenly, why don’t you go and take a look at the Smritis yourself? The trouble is you can’t, of course, because you don’t know any Sanskrit.

Tell me, Mrs Verma said curiously, where did you learn?

From my grandfather, he said. What do you think I was doing all those years when my father was away in England? My grandfather was a real old Kanyakubja pandit; he used to give me vivas till the day he died. But, to come back to the point, there’s another reason why you can’t give Mrs Bose a proper cremation: I think you could see quite as well as I could that she was within hours of adultery. It can’t have been the first time, either. You ought to see what your law-giver Manu has to say about giving funerals to adultresses and fallen women.

Gazing at him in wonder, Mrs Verma said: Do you really believe in all this, Mishra-sahb?

All what?

Manu and the Smritis and everything?

Of course I don’t believe it. You know that quite well — I don’t believe a word of it. Dr Mishra stabbed a finger at her: But you appear to believe it, so you ought to know what your beliefs imply. I think it’s time someone showed you, Mrs Verma, that ignorance is a poor foundation for belief.

You shouldn’t have bothered. I know quite well how ignorant I am.

That’s not the point. I think you’re old enough to learn that you can’t just do what you like on impulse. There are certain rules.

Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That’s how you and your kind have destroyed everything — science, religion, socialism — with your rules and your orthodoxies. That’s the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.

Alu had little interest in Jyoti Das’s visions of birds. Never mind all that, he said. Tell me what became of the others.

The others?

Hajj Fahmy, Professor Samuel, Chunni, Rakesh and all the rest. What happened after you ambushed us at the Star?

Jyoti Das had to think hard to put a face to every name.

They were questioned, he said shamefacedly, mainly about you and Zindi at-Tiffaha and all the rest of you who got away. I wasn’t there then; they wouldn’t let me stay. I only saw them the next day. They were taken straight to the airport next morning to be deported — sent back to India or Egypt or wherever they had come from. I only saw them from a distance. They had plainclothesmen all around them, and no one was allowed to go close. Many of them looked as though they were in a bad way. Only Professor Samuel seemed calm. He even seemed to be trying to quieten some of the others. When they were being taken out of the lounge to the plane, he turned and saw me. I think he recognized me — I don’t know. But, whatever it was, he stopped and shouted: This is not the end, only the beginning. Why? I shouted back. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The plainclothesmen were pushing him then, but he managed to hold them off for a moment. He smiled at me and shouted, even louder: How many people will you send away? The queue of hopes stretches long past infinity.

It was some time before Alu spoke again. He said: And what will happen to them now?

I don’t know, said Jyoti Das. They might be tried or they might be allowed to go straight home. Anyway, nothing serious will happen to them — no one worries too much about things which happen far away. And it’s you they wanted — not them.

And what happened to Hajj Fahmy?

He died the same day, Jyoti Das said. Of shock, the Ghaziris claimed.

A little later he added: When they took Hajj Fahmy’s body home the next day, they found that his family already knew. They were waiting, dressed in mourning. His widow said that her son Isma’il had told them the moment it happened.

So what will you do now, Mrs Verma? Dr Mishra asked. Will you clean the body for the cremation? Do you know how to do it?

After a moment’s hesitation, Mrs Verma nodded. She said: It shouldn’t be too difficult for a doctor.

But you’ve always had nurses to stand between you and any real pain, Mrs Verma. Not that a corpse feels pain, of course. But what have you ever done to a corpse other than cut it up anyway? No corpse has ever presented you with anything which wasn’t in Gray’s Anatomy . This is a little different, isn’t it?

I’ll manage, said Mrs Verma.

It’s not quite as easy as you think, Dr Mishra said with relish. You’ll have to reach into the bowels and clean out all the dead faeces. You’ll have to scrape the insides of the rectum and the anus to make sure that they’re absolutely clean; that not the faintest trace of mortal shit remains to defile the sacred fire. Are you sure a well-brought-up woman like you will be able to do it, Mrs Verma? I’m not.