Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

And then, in his exhilaration, he knew also that he was grateful. Even six months of hellish confusion were worth a journey which helped you through time even before it had ended.

He had returned from his journey to Mahé, over six months ago, ripe with enthusiasm. The DIG, he thought, could be no less enthusiastic. After all, it was he who had taken up the case and followed it through, even when he, Jyoti Das, had thought it a dead end. The DIG had trusted his own judgement and gone ahead, and in Mahé he had been proved right, after a fashion. So Das worked hard on his report of his visit to Mahé, ignoring his mother’s recommendations of prospective brides. He assumed that once the DIG was shown the hard facts he would leap to push the case through. In fact Das reckoned that he would have to fight hard to play a part in the follow-up.

But when he sent the file up it disappeared and the DIG said not so much as one word about it. A week later Das put up an application for travel allowances and foreign allowances and so on, hoping to prod the DIG into doing something. But nothing happened. When he went to meet the DIG in his room he was leaning back in his chair, mournfully toying with half a cabbage. He refused to discuss the case and instead brought the conversation menacingly around to Das’s stationery indents. Exorbitant, he said, and unaccountable — enough to stock a new shop.

Das left the room bewildered. Nothing happened for a couple of months, though Das put up regular memos and reminders. He even cultivated a humiliating familiarity with the DIG’s personal secretary. Nothing came of it: a veil had fallen.

After another couple of months, during which he slipped from anger into sleepless, nail-biting frustration, and then finally into frustrated resignation, the DIG summoned him to his office. The problem, he said, absent-mindedly snapping a carrot into bits, was that if he, Das, were to go there had to be a replacement. It would be impossible for the office to manage without so valuable an officer. The answer was, obviously, a replacement. He had already looked at the service lists and decided upon a suitable replacement: a young police officer. Unfortunately, the application he had sent to the higher-ups in the Secretariat had been turned down. Therefore the delay. Of course, the case was important, but the office couldn’t do without a replacement.

He looked at Das meaningfully.

Again Das went away bewildered. It seemed to him that the DIG was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t understand what.

He was still scratching his head a week later when he was called to the DIG’s office again. The key to the problem, the DIG said, crumbling a piece of fried potato, was the replacement. He told Das the name; it meant nothing to him. Anyway, the DIG said carefully, stressing certain words, solve the replacement problem and we’ll see about your foreign trip. Go away and think about it. Go to Delhi if you like. You have an uncle there in the Ministry, no?

Grand-uncle, sir, Jyoti Das said automatically.

Still confused, he took a week’s leave and went to Delhi to meet his mother’s uncle, the Secretary. It was embarrassing, for Jyoti hadn’t met him in years, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be acknowledged. But in the event it turned out well: his grand-uncle was keen to buy a house in Calcutta, and wanted Jyoti’s father to look around for something suitable. On the assurance that it would be done, he set to work, and within a week the DIG’s application was cleared.

After that, the DIG’s office burst into a storm of activity: files hurtled about, the DIG spent hours on the telephone, and suddenly one day Jyoti heard that everything had been worked out. The rest took less than a week.

The day before he was to leave, the DIG came to his office, patted him on the shoulder and said: Don’t worry about the delay. Time gives a case a chance to develop properly. And don’t hurry when you get there. Take your time. Let the case mature. Then, as a token of his good wishes, he presented Jyoti with a crate of Golden Delicious apples.

And, like one of those golden apples, al-Ghazira rotated slowly below him, as the plane banked. He squinted down, through the glare of the midday sun on white gypsum-laden sand. Black roads cut through the expanses of whiteness; he picked out the radial patterns of planned roads at one end of the town, and a large square far away, with huddled, twisting lanes dribbling out of it. As the plane came in to land, blinded by the glare of the sun, he forgot the Barbary falcon and the Saker falcon and the other birds he hoped to see, for he knew suddenly that al-Ghazira wasn’t a real place at all, but a question: are foreign countries merely not-home, or are they all that home is not?

He was already older.

In the crowded, luggage-cluttered, airsick chaos of the airport Das spotted Jai Lal with relief. He was a short, dapper man, with the last traces of adolescent acne still lingering incongruously on his thin, aquiline face. He had met — rather, bumped into — him once, at the head offices of the Secretariat in Delhi. Jai Lal had not paid him much attention then, for he was a few years his senior. But Das knew him by reputation: everyone who had met him talked of his clipped urbanity and his powerful connections with awe.

Hullo, Das said, sticking out his hand, I’m—

Yes, Jai Lal said, tapping his hand perfunctorily, we’ve met, haven’t we?

Jal Lal waved a few cards with careless arrogance and they were soon out of the airport. The air outside was like hot steam, and the sweat leapt from Das’s pores. He followed Jai Lal to his car, suppressing an urge to linger in the airport and watch the extraordinary assortment of people. But Jai Lal was already at his car, arguing with the porter in Hindi.

As soon as Das had shut his door, Jai Lal said: What happened, Das? Why did you take so long? I must have sent you over a dozen telexes. Couldn’t you have come a little earlier?

With an effort Das wrenched his eyes away from the billowing concrete folds of the airport’s tent-like roof. He sighed: You don’t know what trouble I’ve been having. My DIG wanted a replacement, one particular replacement, for my post, and it took months and months to arrange the transfer. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Let me just say I’m lucky to be here at all. But forget all that. Have there been any developments in the case?

Lal laughed acidly. He reached out and pressed a button. He waited until the metallic twanging of an electric guitar had filled the car. Yes, he said, you could say there’ve been developments in the case. In fact you could call your case overdeveloped. Your man’s dead.

Oh? After the plane and the airport, Das could find no stronger reaction in himself. I suppose, he said, I’d better telex back to stop them sending next week’s foreign allowance.

Lal thought for a moment. No, he said, there’s no hurry. But maybe we’d better telex them to approve your return ticket. You know, to tell you the truth, frankly, I don’t think there was any need to send you all the way here. I could easily have handled it myself. After all, it’s my job. I even wrote to HQ. But your boss was very keen to keep his fingers in the case, and the higher-ups insisted. But, if they were going to send you, at least they could have sent you earlier.

With an aching sense of loss, Das watched the shining metallic bulbs of al-Ghazira’s desalination plant diminishing in his window. Anyway, he said, tell me what happened. I might as well know.

Nothing much, said Lal, as far as I can tell. I only heard about it yesterday, from one of our sources — someone really reliable, who’s been living in the same house as your suspect. You see, that’s the thing: we chaps in the field do all the work, build up our sources and our networks, and then they send you people out, with no experience of local conditions. And that, too, when it’s too late. There really wasn’t any need.