Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Still there, said Professor Samuel. I went as soon as I heard, and so did everyone else. We came to take you.

No, said Zindi. I’m not going. There’s nothing to be done there, God knows. It was here that the whole business started and it’s here that we’ll fight it. God give me strength, he will be the last.

What are you talking about? A note of pleading had crept into the Professor’s voice. What do you mean, ‘it started here’?

Zindi’s eyes narrowed into sharp, brilliant points and bore into the Professor’s. You know very well what I mean, she said. You’ve heard it before. You’re not a child. Frowning Abusa was the first. Then Mast Ram. Then the others, and now this. Are they accidents?

Professor Samuel dropped his head. In the silence Karthamma slipped into the room. At length Abu Fahl gripped his knees and leant forward: So what is it, then, Zindi? Tell us. We want to hear it again.

Zindi pressed damp tobacco into an earthen cup with her thumb. The cup was part of a narjila made from a glass bottle, a length of rubber tubing and two bits of hollow bamboo. She stuck the cup on one of the bamboo tubes and gingerly flicked the glowing corncob on to the tobacco. Abu Fahl took the narjila from her and pulled hard on the rubber tube. The corncob glowed and smoke bubbled through the water in the bottle.

In the fog of silence hanging in the room, the gurgling of the narjila echoed eerily, like waves on a distant cliff. Karthamma shivered and shifted closer to Zindi. The hairs prickled on their necks and stood in runnels on their arms as they waited for Zindi to begin, yet again, on her terrible litany of calamities.

Perhaps Abusa the Frown was the beginning, even though he wasn’t the first. In a way, it was his goodness, his good fortune, his gentleness and the love everyone had for him that lay behind it all: Frowning Abusa, cousin to Abu Fahl’s mother, Zaghloul the Pigeon’s brother-in-law (and cousin as well), raised to manhood with them in the same village in the Nile Delta; named by the whole village the moment he was born, for he was taken from his mother with his face bent and a frown carved for ever into his forehead because his mother had dreamt of barbed wire the night before. He could have had no better name, for he was always apart, frowning and silent — at home, when he walked to the fields, even when the cousins and uncles who grew like grass in his village played and sang all around him — and strangely everyone loved him for it.

He came to the house as soon as he arrived in al-Ghazira, and he lived in it for a year and a half, frowning silently in a corner, seldom speaking. Every last dirham he earned he sent back to the village; his only clothes were his one good jallabeyya and the grey fellah’s cap his grandfather had made him for his first frowning visit to Alexandria to get his passport. He rarely spoke, but no one ever forgot him. It was to him that everyone turned when there was trouble. Mariamma ’s last voyage brought a good time. There had never been so much money in the house. Everyone had a good regular job, everyone was bringing in good money. And then, as though that weren’t enough, Jeevanbhai Patel appeared. That was soon after his wife died. He was too old to look after his tottering house near the Souq, so he begged to rent a room — it was all he could ask for: food on time, people around him to help him forget his loneliness and all that had happened to him. So he was given the corner room, next to the women. And since he paid double no one minded his sad, wizened monkey’s face, nor the red pan-stained teeth sticking out of his mouth like mudguards, nor the huge lock he put on his door. Soon there were television sets in the house, transistors, washing machines even — the best you could find in the shops in Hurreyya — the courtyard was bursting with poultry, and there was a goose or chicken for dinner every night. That was sign enough, though nobody saw it then, for the whole of the Ras and everybody in al-Ghazira looked at Zindi’s house and saw it prospering and too much good fortune invites its own end.

Late one night — it was a Thursday night and everybody had been paid for the week — when everyone was sitting on the roof, drinking tea and talking, there were knocks on the door, soft but unmistakable. Zaghloul the Pigeon, always eager, ran down and opened the door.

A boy lay on the path outside squirming like a wounded rat, with blood pouring from his head. That was how Mast Ram came into the house.

Somehow, from some remote part of the north Indian hills, Mast Ram had trickled into the plains, where a relative put him into the hands of a labour contractor. Once they were in al-Ghazira, Mast Ram found himself with only a third part of the wage that he had been promised in his pocket, for the contractor took all the rest. Mast Ram was young enough to burn at the injustice of it. One night he found something to drink, and his rage grew too large for him to hold. In front of all the others he flew at the contractor’s throat.

That was how he found himself with his skull split half-open, without a job, without a place to stay, and blood all over his clothes.

All he could think of then was a certain house his relative had told him about. So somehow he wrapped a pajama around his head and dragged himself across al-Ghazira to the Severed Head, trailing blood, and crawled into the house, blood, wounds, injustices and all.

He couldn’t be turned away — his relative had stayed in the house once, and he was a good enough man. Besides, somehow, despite the state he was in, Mast Ram had managed to bring his papers with him. Still, the moment he came under the light in the corridor everybody shivered and nobody knew why. He was ugly, there could be no doubt about that — his face was so closely covered with pock-marks and holes it looked as though it had been dug up to lay the foundations for something better. But it wasn’t just his ugliness — Abusa was uglier, with his barbed-wire face, and Abu Fahl, and Alu with his potato head. Of the lot only Rakesh wasn’t ugly; and Zaghloul, of course, is any girl’s dream. But with Mast Ram it was something more than just ugliness: it was the way his eyes darted about, like a snake’s, always open, never missing the slightest movement.

But, still, Professor Samuel tied a bandage around his head and a mattress was put out for him in the corridor (for the house had never been so full). He lay on his mattress all through the next day. The day after that everybody could see there was nothing wrong with him any more, so Abu Fahl told him to go out to work with the others. Mast Ram didn’t move. They left him alone that day, and the next day everybody forgot about him because that was the day Kulfi came home crying.

At the time Kulfi used to cook in a rich Ghaziri’s house. The pay was good, the work simple, and the whole house was air-conditioned. It was a small family and they liked Kulfi, so she was happy there and everybody envied her. But there was a daughter in the family and that was where the trouble started, for she was fat and very ugly. She couldn’t keep her hands away from ghee and butter, and so on some days her face was covered with so many bursting pimples it could have been taken for a pot of boiling water. Her parents had done everything they could to marry her off, but nothing worked. Then one day they heard of a boy. His family was poor, but he’d worked hard, got a scholarship, gone to America and come back with a suitcase-ful of degrees. Now he wanted to go into business and he needed capital. Of that the girl’s father had plenty. So they came to an understanding, and it was decided that the boy would come to their house to meet the girl.

There was turmoil in the house: great preparations. The girl’s mother, half-crazy with worry, ran about roasting chickens, boiling legs of lamb, pouring buckets of saffron into every pot of rice. The father went to the Swiss shop in Hurreyya and bought so many sweets and cakes they had to close down for the whole day. All Kulfi had to do was cook a couple of vegetables and heat the food.