Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

He laughed when he heard of the school’s straits. Why didn’t you tell me? he said. A simple thing like that and there you are sitting all long-faced and weepy. You wait, there’ll be a crowd outside the school tomorrow.

There was; not precisely a crowd perhaps, but quite as good as far as Balaram was concerned. Rakhal had gone off to the banyan tree and found a few of his old cronies. He had slapped a few backs and twisted a few arms. Bolai-da, who was well disposed towards the school, had added a few encouraging words, and it was done. Next morning six young men stepped nervously into the school.

The Pasteur School of Reason was in business at last.

Once a lead had been given the more timid picked up courage. In a few weeks the school had twenty-two students. There were, after all, as Balaram knew, so many people in Lalpukur who had nothing to do; people who spent the long days dreaming of learning a trade. In a few months the school had forty-eight students, many more than it could take comfortably, and Balaram had to close the rolls and turn away new applicants. The School of Reason was full: it had ten-year-old boys, married men with families who did odd jobs during the day, young men saving to marry, wizened old men too bent to work in the fields. There were women, too, young and old. Women had overcome their initial suspicion of the school after they had been given the lead by a determined and desperate young widow of twenty-five who had three children and no means of support apart from a cousin’s capricious generosity. Balaram did his best to encourage them to join, and when he closed his rolls the school had eighteen women. All but two of them had opted to join Toru-debi’s tailoring section.

Soon the school was producing more cloth than Rakhal could handle alone, and he had to hire the occasional helper (who went down in Balaram’s register as Assistant Sales Managers). The Tailoring Section did even better than Weaving; they were taking in orders from all the villages around Lalpukur, for their work had somehow, by word of mouth, acquired a reputation for durability. At the end of six months the school had earned a substantial sum of money. Balaram was frankly envious when he added up the total. I wish, he said wistfully to Alu and Shombhu Debnath, I wish Pure Reason had a product — something one could sell to gauge its worth.

But he was also delighted. After paying off arrears of salaries, buying new stocks of yarn and so on, there was still a fair amount of money left. Part of it was spent on acquiring a new loom and a secondhand sewing machine for the school. The rest was used to start a fund which would help the students acquire their own sewing machines and looms after they graduated. Balaram gave the students a little lecture when he started the fund. You won’t be in the school for ever, he said, and you must think of the future. You may think you would rather have the money in your pockets now, but you would only regret it later. Someday you’ll have to start working on your own and, if you don’t have any machines then, your skills will be wasted. It’s then that you will thank me for starting this fund.

The students clapped. Balaram looked around his courtyard, crowded with smiling students, and he was filled with pride. Afterwards, earthen cups of tea were handed out to everyone (Nonder-ma had been busy making tea for hours, in preparation). The courtyard was full of laughter and cheerful optimism.

The school is a success, Balaram said to Shombhu Debnath, waving a hand at the courtyard. It’s a greater success than anything we could have imagined.

Shombhu Debnath grunted. He had wrapped a white cotton shawl over his bare shoulders for the occasion, but he had not changed out of his usual red gamcha. He looked slyly at Balaram. But that’s not all, Balaram-babu, he said, is it? A success of this kind wouldn’t be enough for you. You have something else in mind, don’t you?

Abruptly Balaram turned and walked away. Shombhu Debnath’s voice followed him: What is it, Balaram-babu? When are you going to tell us?

He was not to know till a few more months had passed.

The school was nearing the end of its first year then. Some of the more promising students in the Weaving Section had graduated beyond coarse weaving, and had started producing fairly intricately worked saris. The Tailoring Section had more orders than it could handle and the list never seemed to stop growing. All but two of the students passed the small examination Balaram set them. When Balaram did his accounts, after Rakhal had handed him the money the traders had paid him in Naboganj for that month’s consignment of cloth, it was apparent that the school had made a handsome sum of money.

Balaram called another meeting. Classes were cancelled that evening, and everyone in the school crowded into the courtyard, cheerfully expecting a repeat of the earlier meeting. To begin with, it was. Balaram read out the accounts and explained how much money had been spent on salaries and how much exactly had been put away in the students’ fund. But when he read out the total figures at the end of it there were still three thousand rupees left unaccounted for.

There was a curious hush. Balaram was suddenly solemn. Today, he said, I have to say something very difficult; I have to tell you about a dream. The school as you see it today has only two departments. But when I first dreamt of it, when the idea was first born in my mind, there was a third department as well. The time has come to tell you about that third department, because at last we have enough money to realize that dream. Let me put it like this: Practical Reason and Pure Reason are fine and wonderful things, and what we have already achieved in this school, even though I should not be the one to say it, is in its own way fine and wonderful. Practical and Pure Reason are like two halves of a wheel: without one, the other is incomplete and useless. But a wheel, by itself, is useless, too — it cannot roll forward on its own. Left to itself, it only falls on its side. In the same way, our school, too, is in danger now of falling on its side, into a bed of smugness and complacency, like a wheel which has nothing behind it. It is doing well, true; but a school is not a shop or a factory. A school, like Reason itself, must have a purpose. Without a purpose Reason decays into a mere trick, forever reflecting itself like mirrors at a fair. It is that sense of purpose which the third department will restore to our school. It will help us to remember that we cannot limit the benefits of our education and learning to ourselves — that it is our duty to use it for the benefit of everybody around us. That is why I have decided to name the new department the Department of the March of Reason. It will remind us that our school has another aspect: Reason Militant.

Most of the students had drifted into apathetic boredom during Balaram’s speech. A hum of subdued talk ebbed around the courtyard. Balaram raised his voice. The first task before the Department of the March of Reason, he explained, was to disinfect the village — disinfect it so thoroughly that no trace of a corrupting germ would surface in it again. And to that end the remaining three thousand rupees would be spent on purchasing carbolic acid.

There were a few murmurs of protest: most of the students would much rather have had the money they had helped to earn for themselves. But there were others who were curious, and some of the younger students remembered seeing Balaram busy with buckets of carbolic acid during the war and after; it had looked like fun — licence to douse one’s neighbours’ houses with pungent liquid. So Balaram had no shortage of volunteers; fourteen students offered to go with him to Naboganj to help bring back the carbolic acid.