Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

The next day, while Shombhu Debnath and Maya were at the school and Rakhal was away in Naboganj, their huts caught fire. They burnt down to a heap of smouldering ashes and rubble before Maya and Shombhu even knew of it. Later, sifting through the rubble they found two charred kerosene-tins that were not their own.

They lost everything: the grain they had stored away, hanks of yarn, their pots and pans, Rakhal’s carefully accumulated shirts and trousers. The ear-rings and the two brass pots which were Maya’s only mementoes of her mother had vanished, too.

Balaram took it for granted that Shombhu Debnath, Maya and Rakhal would come to live in his house. Where else could they go? So Alu carried the few odds and ends Maya had recovered from the ashes back to their house. Maya stumbled after him, blinded by her tears.

Later, they went back to fetch Shombhu Debnath and found him squatting beside the rubble staring into the sky. Maya, he said softly, remember — this is what happens when a man ties himself down and builds a house. It burns down. Nobody has to do it: it’s only Sri Krishna reminding you what the world’s like.

He would not leave the rubble, though Maya did her best to persuade him. Maya’s own grief was swept away by another worry: what would Rakhal do when he came back from Naboganj and heard about the fire? She knew he might do anything at all when he heard about the kerosene-tins they had found, and she knew she would be powerless to stop him.

But to her surprise Rakhal did nothing when he was told. He asked Alu innumerable questions about the kerosene-tins, and later he spent a long time scratching about in the ashes, looking for scraps of his clothes. When he found none he went back quietly with Alu and Maya and fell peacefully asleep on a mat in the shed he had helped to build.

Maya trembled with relief. But a few days later Alu saw Rakhal hiding sacks of old soda-bottles, tin cans and rusty nails in the rubble of their huts.

Rakhal was making bombs again.

At last we meet Assistant Superintendent of Police Jyoti Das properly. He is a slight man, of medium height, dark, with straight black hair. He has a long, even face with a rounded chin and a short, straight nose. His only irregular features are his eyebrows, which are slightly out of alignment, one being a fraction higher than the other and slightly more sharply curved, and that tends to make him appear a little surprised even when he is not. His eyes, which he has trained over the years to record the minutest details of plumage and colouring, are sharp and meticulously observant. He is clean-shaven and prides himself on it, for it distinguishes him from his colleagues, who tend generally to be aggressively moustached. He is pleasant- if not good-looking, and he looks younger than his twenty-five years. He is often mistaken for a college student.

He is waiting in a small police station a few miles from Lalpukur. The police station is on the main road that runs from Naboganj, past the outer fringes of Lalpukur towards Calcutta. It is a tumbledown old police station, with cracked tiles and gaping holes in the plaster of its yellow walls. Jyoti Das is sitting beside (but not behind) the Head Constable’s desk in a damp gloomy room lined with tattered duty-charts and bunches of keys. The room is acrid with the smell of burnt spices wafting in from the constables’ quarters, and he can hear a drunk or a lunatic talking to himself somewhere in the cells inside.

It is eleven in the morning and Jyoti Das is waiting to meet Bhudeb Roy for the first time. Bhudeb Roy is already half an hour late, though it was he who specified ten-thirty in his telegram to Calcutta, and Jyoti Das is more than a little irritated and impatient. But he is not surprised, for, though he has never met Bhudeb Roy before, in a way he knows him well. After being handed the case he has had to read all the reports Bhudeb Roy has ever filed, and he has not had the impression that Bhudeb Roy is a man who is likely to be unduly flustered about keeping someone waiting. Jyoti Das smiles, remembering the arguments he has often had with his colleagues about their pungent views on filthy little district and mofussil politicians who have suddenly come into so much power that they think nothing of pushing around gazetted officers of the Government of India.

The Head Constable, a big, burly man with an oily face and handlebar moustaches, who has been standing stiffly at the far end of the room looking out of the window, sees Jyoti Das’s impatience and begins to worry. ASP-shaheb, he says, will you have some tea? Jyoti Das smiles and nods.

Assistant Superintendent of Police, the constable calls Jyoti Das. He is not wrong, for that is Jyoti Das’s rank technically. But actually Jyoti Das has a different designation now. About a year ago he was seconded out of the police to an organization which likes to make itself inconspicuous under the name of Union Secretariat (though it has an arsenal of other names stocked away for various contingencies). Like most of his colleagues in the intelligence services Jyoti Das still holds a rank in the police, his parent organization, but officially he is now called a Deputy Central Research Officer. Still, whatever his official designation, one cannot really call someone Deputy Central Research Officer, or even DCRO. On the other hand, ASP is a name, a rank, a class, a standard of living, a life-insurance premium, a metaphysic, while DCRO means nothing, not even what it says.

Besides, few, even in the Union Secretariat, know precisely what their ranks and designations mean in terms of salaries, benefits and seniority. Its sister organizations have their own rankings, blessed by tradition, and only the oldest of the secretarial staff are able to reckon the fine shades of parity between ranks in the different organizations. More than once have the highest levels of the Ministry resounded with the noisy strife of organizations at war with each other over a misunderstanding between officers on ranking or precedence or Additional Dearness Allowance. Inevitably, in their dealings with other organizations and services, the officers of the Union Secretariat tend to fall back on the common factor in their rankings — the police. Correspondence and liaison would be impossible otherwise: officers would end up being dragged before protocol committees for writing semi-official letters to seniors or some such thing.

Four years have passed since Jyoti Das sat for the Civil Service examinations and, somewhat to his surprise, was awarded a good enough result to qualify for the police. He was only twenty-one then; one of the youngest people to qualify. But his father, who had carefully supervised his preparations for the examinations, was not at all pleased. He had intended Jyoti’s first attempt at the examinations to be a kind of trial run, as it were, a preparation for a really serious attempt the year after. It upset all his plans when Jyoti got a place in the police. He had wanted Jyoti to enter one of the coveted, prestigious services, perhaps the Administrative Service like his mother’s uncle, the Secretary, or the Foreign Service, or even at a pinch the Audits and Accounts Service. It appalled him to think of Jyoti spending his life shouting ‘Quick march’ at constables in funny shorts, and dealing with petty criminals and all kinds of other nastiness. And, anyway, he sneered, what are the police going to do with him ? Do you think they have time for people who sit around painting birds ? You mark my words; he’ll end up being suspended for immoral behaviour and spend the rest of his life hanging around our necks.

He spent months trying to persuade Jyoti to turn down the police and sit for the examinations again. But for once Jyoti was stubborn; the police was a Class I service like any other, he said; and gazetted, too, a secure job with a good pension and gratuity scheme and a house-rent allowance. What more could they want? He had done enough to please them, and if they didn’t like it they would just have to live with it — the examinations had been pure agony and nothing anyone could do would make him sit for them again.