Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Then one morning Chunni said: Mast Ram has fallen in love with Kulfi. And soon it was clear that she was right. He was just a boy after all. His eyes never left Kulfi. He took to sitting in the courtyard, waiting for her to pass by. He even tried to talk to her, but Kulfi, like most people, shuddered whenever she saw him and ran into her room.

And then one morning Mast Ram rose very early and hid himself in the courtyard. He knew Kulfi was the first to get up in the morning. He lay flat behind the rabbits’ cage and when she came out of the room he leapt out. In his hands he held half of all the money he had saved in his time in al-Ghazira. That was how desperate he was.

Think of Kulfi: on her way to her morning shit, half-awake, when this man with snake’s eyes jumps out from behind the rabbits and flings money at her feet. She screamed and flung her tin of water right into his face and, while he was still hopping around spitting out water, she locked herself safely into the shithouse.

After that there was no sleep for Mast Ram. He spent his nights squatting in a corner, brooding. Abu Fahl said he should be watched, so for a while he was never left alone; but then people forgot him again, for that was when the Professor was arrested.

The day we heard everyone was stunned. How? How did it happen? Had he talked about queues again, at his new job, even after everyone had sat around him at night and told him not to, at least a hundred times?

No. It was something else altogether.

The Professor had a fine job in those days: the best in the house, and one of the best anyone in the Ras could hope for. He was a manager’s assistant in a huge supermarket in Hurreyya Avenue. He spent his days wrapped in air-conditioning and the smells of freshly frozen Australian lamb and Danish mutton, French cauliflowers and Egyptian cabbages, Thai rice and Canadian wheat, English cod and Japanese sardines, prawns and shrimps and lobster from the world over … All that and nothing to do but sit at a desk and add up numbers. It was just luck, getting that job. Of course, it made good sense for them, for they paid him less than they should have because he had no work permit.

The morning he was arrested the Professor left the house in a great hurry. He had been told to get to the shop early, but when he woke up he found that he had no clean trousers to wear. So, neat as ever, he tied on a starched white lungi and went off. Nobody noticed on the bus and, since he was early that day, no one saw him go into the shop. Once he was behind his desk all they could see of him was his spotless white shirt.

At about eleven o’clock, when most of the other people in the shop were drinking tea in a back room, a rich and beautiful Ghaziri woman came into the shop. Seeing no one, she wandered about until she spotted Professor Samuel at his desk at the far end and she went up to him and asked in Arabic: Please, can you tell me where the prawns are kept?

Now, the Professor had been working hard since morning, staring at figures, adding them, dividing them, and he was just a little confused. The moment he saw her he stood up. She was very beautiful: no burqa for her; she was dressed in the most expensive of European clothes and her hair was piled high on her head.

She asked him again, and this time he was even more confused. He heard the word gambari and knew that he had heard it before but couldn’t remember what it meant. Scratching his head, blinking distractedly, he stared straight into her face and tried to speak.

The woman had been just a little alarmed when the Professor first stood up. Now, with him staring at her, mouth open, a tiny chill of fright crept up her spine. She looked quickly over her shoulder, wondering whether to call out. As it happened, the Professor’s desk was at one end of a long, deserted corridor of shelves. It was the darkest and gloomiest part of the shop. When she saw that she was really scared.

The Professor was still thinking, half about gambari and half about his accounts and figures, so absent-mindedly he did something he would never otherwise have done in public: he reached down, pulled his lungi up over his knees and tied it up at his waist, as people do when they’re at home.

The rich woman saw this blinking, staring man suddenly pulling his clothes up. She saw him baring his stout, hairy legs, and in terror she cowered back into the shelves.

Just then the Professor remembered. Gambari! Oh, gambari ! he cried, flinging his arms open and rushing towards her. Come, Madam, come, I will show you gambaris like you’ve never seen …

The woman leapt backwards with the strength of the terror-stricken, right into the shelves. The Professor shrieked — No, Madam, that’s the tomato sauce! — and lunged forward to save her. She swooned into the shelves, the Professor fell upon her and five hundred bottles of American tomato sauce fell upon them.

When the other attendants arrived after the crash they saw the Professor sprawled on an unconscious rich lady, lying in a small blood-red lake. When the Professor stood up and tried to explain they fled, too, right into the street, where they screamed and screamed till the police arrived.

Abu Fahl and Alu had to spend a lot of money to get him out of gaol, and there’s at least one shop in Hurreyya now which will never hire an Indian again. After that the Professor had to be content with the job Jeevanbhai gave him, so that was another person in the house who’d lost a good job.

Again, in the telling of that story Mast Ram was forgotten. But he had forgotten nothing: not his broken skull, or the contractor, or Kulfi, or the shrivelled flowers and the dead rabbits. He crouched in a corner and brooded and brooded on the whole of his life and fate until jealousy and hate were pouring from his body like sweat in the midday sun and he was no longer a man but an animal, beyond reason and sanity. One night he roused himself from his corner and prowled around the house until he found Abu Fahl’s crowbar. In the dead of night, while the whole house slept, he fell upon the locked door to the women’s room with the crowbar. He attacked it as though it were a wild animal, and while he beat upon it he screamed, in his nasal, mountain Hindi: Why not me, you cunt? You’d fuck a dog if it had money, why not me?

By the time Abu Fahl got to him he had almost battered the door down and the women inside were cold with fear. And then for the first time in his life Mast Ram fought. Even Abu Fahl couldn’t hold him down, and Alu and Zaghloul had to help.

And still we couldn’t rid ourselves of him, for by then he had grown into us like a curse. The others would have been willing to forget the past, but it was no use; Mast Ram’s half-crazy head was a storm of love and hate and envy, and Abusa the Frown was at the centre of it.

Soon after that the fever hit the house, and one day while Rakesh, Zaghloul and Chunni were lying in bed, half-delirious, Mast Ram slipped out with his passport and his papers and went straight to the police and told them how Abusa’s work permit had lapsed a year ago. They caught Abusa next morning, on his way to the sheikh’s garden. They lay in wait for him in a car and Mast Ram pointed him out.

When they caught him Abusa lost his head. He fought, and he fought so well he cracked a policeman’s jaw. If it weren’t for that, perhaps it would have been all right; a little money in a few places would have got him out in a matter of days. But after that nothing could save him.

Abu Fahl and the others did everything they could, but it all came to nothing. Nobody could tell them when they would see Abusa again.

At first Abu Fahl wept. Abusa was dearer to him than any of his own brothers. Then he put his revolver in his pocket and set out to scour the town for Mast Ram.