Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Give me another, another buti, something harder still, Alu begged, at the feet of the Master.

Shombhu Debnath turned his face away: I have nothing more to teach you. The time has come for you to grow from an apprentice to a weaver. Skill is not enough; you have all that you ever will. Technique is just the beginning. The world is your challenge now. Look around you and see if your loom can encompass it.

Alu looked.

Bomb-buti? Too dull, too easy, bottles and scraps and hints of blood. Refugee-buti? Too much corrugated iron and leaning tin sheets. Some angles were impossible with a kamthakur. War-buti? Too much chaos; the loom demands order. Antiseptic-buti? Buckets in the air?

Instead, Alu conjured up six yards of majestic howdah’d elephants, trunks curled over villages, lords of the world.

Politics-buti; nothing more immediate in the world, for that very week Bhudeb Roy had answered the call of the People and mounted a caparisoned elephant and toured Lalpukur and the villages around it to announce his plunge, his nose-dive, his lake-emptying leap into politics. Hundreds of the People had followed him, racing after the elephant, pushing and jostling, fighting to get at its shit. Elephant droppings make good manure.

Nervously Alu spread six yards of politics-buti in front of Shombhu Debnath.

Shombhu Debnath’s red eyes flamed. He snatched up the cloth and ripped it apart. He flung it on the earth and ground it into the dust with his bare feet. He spat upon it, blew his nose upon it, and tried to vomit. When he finished there was no cloth left. Five hundred rupees of cotton and sweat swallowed by the dust.

Filth, he said, filth; uglier than the man and filthier. He smiled at Alu, not in triumph, but sadly: You can never learn jamdani because jamdani is dead, with the world which made it. Beauty doesn’t exist; it is made like words or forts, by speakers and listeners, warriors and defenders, weavers and wearers. That world has washed away. Jamdani is only a toy for the wives of contractors and mahajans now. Stop now: no one can make a thing beautiful alone. No one would understand him. Only a madman would try. Stop now, or you’ll be nothing but a toymaker, piecing together your politics-butis with these elephants and the filth that rides on them.

Shombhu Debnath was suddenly leering at him; his mouth fallen open, baring teeth that dripped like fangs. No, he said. I can’t allow that. Wait. Wait a moment. I’ll get you a knife. You can cut your thumbs off and give them to me. I’ll pickle them in mustard oil and chillis and hang them up for the village to see — Alu grown to manhood at last.

Alu turned and ran — away from Shombhu Debnath’s red eyes, his dripping blackened teeth, and ashen knot poised on his head like a nesting cobra — straight back to the safety of his loom. He sat there for a day and a half, scratching on cloth with his kamthakur. And then, one morning, while the village shook with the thunder of planes flying eastwards, his shuttle began its knocking again.

By the time Maya came back from Balaram’s house, he had two rows finished. He called out to her and pushed the heddle up so that she could see the figures fresh upon the cloth.

What is it? she said, gazing at the cloth: firm, tip-tilted, dimpled shapes, like green mangoes on a branch.

What do you think it is? said Alu.

I don’t know, said Maya. What?

It’s Maya-buti.

Maya-buti! The back of her hand rose to cover her mouth. She shook with stifled laughter.

What’s the matter? said Alu. Don’t you like it? She kept her face covered.

All right, said Alu. He picked up a blade and bent down to cut the pattern off the loom. Maya darted forward and caught his hand. No, she cried. Let them be.

Alu sank back to the bench, and she drew her hand slowly back. He turned away, his fists clenched. Maya, he called out.

What?

Do you think if I talked to Balaram we could get married?

Married? Maya whispered. She sank on to her knees beside him. How could we get married? You’re only sixteen; barely out of shorts.

What do you mean? Alu said angrily. Half the boys of my age in the village are already married.

Yes, said Maya, but their uncles aren’t schoolteachers.

That doesn’t matter; I’ll talk to him.

No, said Maya sadly. I can’t get married. Not now. Not till Rakhal marries. She raised her voice and shouted above the drone of another flight of planes: Who would look after them? And then a voice burst upon them, a hoarse, piercing wail. Maya leapt back and turned away, and a moment later Shombhu Debnath staggered into the courtyard. He made his way across, weaving drunkenly, and leant against one of the poles of the loom-shed. He thrust his face forward at Alu, until it was so close that Alu could feel the toddy steaming off his own face. No time for your butis now, he said. The radio’s declared war, real war, with armies and planes.

Shombhu Debnath was wrong; not about the war, but about the butis.

With the beginning of the war, the stream pouring over the border became a deluge. The boundaries of Lalpukur began to outrun Balaram and his buckets of carbolic. Balaram ran out of money. The new refugees hardly had bodies; they hadn’t even the strength to laugh when he tried to raise a collection.

Balaram gave up. He staggered, exhausted, back to his study with a bucket in his hands. He put it on his knees and stared into its dry bottom. He reached into it, wet his fingers with the last few diluted drops of antiseptic and anointed his forehead. Beaten, he said. Beaten by filthy money.

But that very day Rakhal handed Alu more money than he had ever earned before. The busy traders of Naboganj (who were as busy as ever, following laws no war could suspend) had fought grim internecine battles of their own, over Maya-buti, and money had poured out of their ironclad purses. So Alu worked as he had never worked before and Balaram had money for a new antiseptic offensive.

How tortuous, said Balaram, taking Alu’s money, is the path of reason.

Later it was a puzzle. Sub-Inspector Jyoti Das lost himself in that labyrinth of cause and effect. While writing his report he found a newspaper-cutting in the file; a yellowed scrap of paper, left there perhaps by some conscientious clerk. ‘Teacher battles with germs,’ it said, ‘saves thousands.’ The report claimed that Lalpukur had stayed germ-free when thousands of other villages on the border were consumed by disease, because of the efforts of one Balaram Bose, a teacher, who had doused the village in waves of antiseptic.

Even cheap disinfectants cost money. How could he afford it? Jyoti Das wondered. After all, Lalpukur wasn’t Calcutta with its fund-raising drives, women’s clubs melting discarded jewellery, and eager schoolboys skewering flags into collars, pinning them to the war effort.

He was in school, too, then, but the phalanxes of fund-raisers had not claimed him. He had had to live with a different worry. What would the purple herons do that winter? Where would they go, with shrieking planes circling their retreat and the air thick with the dust of worriers and warriors? The herons proved hardier than he had imagined. They were in the lake at the zoo as they always were, supercilious, undismayed by human strife.

But the antiseptic?

Extremists have money, said the Deputy Inspector-General, chewing cryptically. It comes across the border. That’s why they’re extremists.

Jyoti Das was not wholly satisfied. He put the matter to Bhudeb Roy, not without a note of accusation, for the only reference to Balaram in Bhudeb Roy’s reports of that period was a short note which claimed that Balaram had wilfully and maliciously destroyed his best cabbage patch by drenching it with disinfectant.