Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

And in a way that was the strangest thing of all; that he was talking. For Alu was a very silent man. I’ve seen him in the house every day for six months now, so in a way I know him well, for you can know a lot about a man by watching him daily. Whenever he was in the house he was quiet; most of the time he was in pain, too, for he always had boils bursting out all over him. And the rest of the time, when he wasn’t at work, he was at Hajj Fahmy’s — weaving, they say. In all those months I wonder if I’ve exchanged more than ten words with him. It wasn’t just me. As far as I could tell, all the others were friendly with him, but none of them was his particular friend. There were rumours about him and Karthamma, but no one could tell what to make of those. She’s a tall woman, very dark, with the temper of an animal, but also an animal’s courage, for she was the one person in the house who was never afraid to defy Zindi. Anyone else who did that, Zindi would have thrown out long ago, but not Karthamma. For Karthamma has a baby — the child Zindi was holding in her arms that night — and poor, childless Zindi treasured her for that alone; because she was a mother and because she had given her a son. If pure will could change flesh and blood, that baby would be more hers now than his mother’s.

Maybe the rumours about Karthamma and Alu were true, maybe not. But Zindi believed them anyway; perhaps because she wanted to, because she hoped that Alu would take Karthamma’s mind off the baby. But I, who have seen the world a bit, used to wonder: what could silent Alu and Karthamma have in common? Sometimes you saw them in the courtyard, she rubbing oil on the boils on his back. She was fond of him, maybe she even loved him, but to me it seemed the love of a sister, not of a lover. Did he talk to her? Perhaps; for, after all, she had stolen the money anticipating something. But if she recognized the Mr Alu she saw that night she must have been the only one in the Ras. To everyone else he was a quiet morose man, tormented by boils. A mild man, you would have said, who didn’t care much about anything.

But last night nobody else seemed to remember the man as he was. I was the only one who saw him and recognized a mystery. I saw a man I knew, but I heard a voice I had not heard before. I hate mystery: unless mystery is the tool of business it is its enemy. But, hate it or not, there he was in front of me, as great a mystery as any I’ve seen, and I could find no explanation.

He was talking softly, but there was a force in his voice which carried it over the clicking of the shuttle, so that nobody missed a word; an extraordinary force, perhaps you could call it passion. It was like a question, though he was not asking anything, bearing down on you from every side. And in that whole huge crowd nobody stirred or spoke. You could see that silently they were answering him, matching him with something of their own.

That was another mystery, for the people who were there are rarely quiet — at work, at night, in the cinema. But last night, peering into the courtyard under Zindi’s arm — which as fastidious men you may well appreciate wasn’t easy, or greatly facile, if one may put it as such, for as you may know, when Virat Singh, the famous wrestler, the great marble-biceped pehlwan of Bareilly, was living here, he once attempted to press his suit a little forcefully with her, but since he was not greatly to her taste she overpowered him, merely by baring an armpit and blowing gently upon it — but anyway, as I was saying, last night, peering under Zindi’s arm in not altogether salubrious conditions, I saw that very crowd absolutely silent, listening to a man, hardly more than a boy, talk, and that, too, not in one language but in three, four, God knows how many, a khichri of words; couscous, rice, dal and onions, all stirred together, stamped and boiled, Arabic with Hindi, Hindi swallowing Bengali, English doing a dance; tongues unravelled and woven together — nonsense, you say, tongues unravelled are nothing but nonsense — but there again you have a mystery, for everyone understood him, perfectly, like their mother’s lullabies. They understood him, for his voice was only the question; the answers were their own.

And what of me, looking out of Zindi’s dear, half-forgotten arms, in those few moments while her eyes were busy and Abu Fahl elsewhere? I will tell you: I saw mysteries, all around me, one growing out of another, and I could find no grasp on them, not the slightest hold. I was afraid. I was so afraid, I breathed and sniffed until my nose ran, grateful for Zindi’s generosity.

He talked about Louis Pasteur. They listened without a sound as he told them in detail about Louis Pasteur’s life, his experiments and his discoveries, how he went out into the villages of his country, leaving behind the security of his laboratory, and found cures for incurable diseases, restored the vanishing livelihood of thousands of weavers by saving the silkworm, made milk pure for the world, destroyed the venom in dogs’ teeth, and so many other things.

But yet, he said, Pasteur had died a defeated man.

Why? he asked, and you could feel — if such a thing is possible — the silence beginning to stir.

He, and others before him, he said, had thought over the matter for a long, long time, and at last, in the Star, it had fallen to him to discover the answer. There, in the ruins, he had discovered what it was that Pasteur had really wanted all his life — an intangible thing, something he had not understood himself, yet a thing the whole world had conspired to deny him.

Purity. Purity was what he had wanted, purity and cleanliness — not just in his home, or in a laboratory or a university, but in the whole world of living men. It was that which spurred him on his greatest hunt, the chase in which he drove the enemy of purity, the quintessence of dirt, the demon which keeps the world from cleanliness, out of its lairs of darkness and gave it a name — the Infinitely Small, the Germ.

And when Alu came to that all his old mildness vanished. He let the loom be and sat with his hands folded on his lap, absolutely still, but his voice grew in strength and power until it reached beyond the courtyard and into the lanes and gullies outside.

He told them about germs: how they are everywhere and nowhere; how they flow freely from hand to hand, how they sweep through a thousand people in a day, in a minute, faster than a man can count, throwing their coils around people wherever they may hide.

Pasteur had discovered the enemy, the Germ, but he had never been able to find him. All his life he had tried to launch war but, like a shadow, the enemy had eluded him, and in the end Pasteur had died defeated and bewildered.

Why? Because for all his genius Pasteur had never asked himself the real question: where is the germ’s battleground? What is it that travels from man to man carrying contagion and filth, sucking people out and destroying them even in the safety of their own houses, even when every door and window is shut? Which is the battleground which travels on every man and every woman, silently preparing them for their defeat, turning one against the other, helping them destroy themselves?

That was the real question, and Pasteur had never known it.

Then he leapt to his feet and with a sigh the whole crowd rose with him. He shouted in Arabic: Wa ana warisu , and I am his heir, for in the ruins of the Star I found the answer.

Money. The answer is money.

The crowd gasped, and while they were still reeling he shouted again: We will wage war on money. Are you with me?

And the whole crowd shouted back: Yes. Yes. Yes.

No money, no dirt will ever again flow freely in the Ras. Are you with me?

And again the crowd roared: Yes.