Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Soon her smile faded away, for she saw that it was a vulture.

Actually Mrs Verma saw them before Kulfi had reached the door. She always glanced into that café when she passed it, for she had once done a series of blood tests on the owner’s wife and ever after he had always come out to greet her when he saw her walking by.

This time, looking in, she caught a glimpse of an unaccustomed shade of yellow somewhere in the dark interior. Something unexpected, something vaguely familiar about the drape of the cloth, lodged in her mind and drew her to a puzzled halt. She looked again and now there could be no doubt: it was a woman in a sari.

She started walking again, shaking her head. Miss Krishnaswamy the nurse perhaps; but, no, she’d asked her whether she wanted to come, and Miss K. had said no, she had to stay and cook lunch. And not Mrs Mishra, either; she was at home, too — she’d seen her that morning, across the square.

And neither of them had saris of quite that shade, and in any case they wouldn’t be sitting in a café. Mrs Verma stopped again and looked back in bafflement, not allowing herself to believe that it could be true: it couldn’t be; it would be too heaven-sent; too much luck; no one was that lucky in this world.

A moment later Kulfi came rushing out of the café and Mrs Verma saw that it was true; that she was indeed a woman in a sari, and quite young, too — exactly the right age in fact.

By the time Kulfi caught up with her Mrs Verma was so elated, so consumed by surprise, that she heard barely a word of Kulfi’s babbled explanations.

The only occasions when other Indians had come to El Oued in the two years Mrs Verma had spent there were when she and her husband, or Dr Mishra and his wife, invited some of their friends and acquaintances from the hospitals in Ouargla or Ghardaia, or even Tamanrasset in the far south, to come up for a holiday. Those visits needed months of advance planning; supplies had to be hoarded, parties organized and leave applied for. Those were the only Indians, as far as she knew, who had ever come to El Oued.

Of course other foreigners, mainly tourists, passed through El Oued every year, in a trickle which varied slightly with the seasons, like the height of the water-table. They were French mainly, with a sprinkling of Germans and a handful of Italians. Sometimes they arrived by bus, with rucksacks on their backs and water-bottles which could have emptied lakes. Or else they came in specially equipped jeeps or vans bristling with compasses to help them find their way south to the Mzab and the Ahaggar — the Heart, they said, of the Sahara. They often turned up at the hospital with upset stomachs or sunburn and talked to her in halting English about the legends of Légionnaires and Mécharistes and the veiled men of the Tuareg; about their childhood dreams of the desert and the promise of dangers and hunger and hardship that had drawn them there. In her first year there she had listened in astonishment and protested, thinking of the lacquered roads and swift buses, the air-conditioned hotels and brimming swimming-pools, the pylons and oil-derricks she had always encountered on her journeys south. But soon, rather than spoil their holidays, she had decided to keep her silence.

Not that everyone merely passed through; many people came just to visit El Oued as well. And there was no doubt about it; it was an extraordinary place. At first, she’d taken it very much for granted. But once someone led her and her husband to the top of the minaret of Sidi Salem.

The sight had taken her breath away.

If you looked down on El Oued — the old town, that is — from the top of the minaret or the new tower in the Hôtel du Souf, what you saw was a fine carpet of thousands and thousands of small yellowish-white domes, ringed by a sea of gigantic golden dunes. The houses stretched into that golden horizon like banks of confectionery at a feast. Every house had not one but dozens of tiny domes, perched on walls which sloped away at bewildering angles. If you walked through the lanes of the old town, every few steps you had to stop and marvel at the brilliant blue borders on the limestone walls; at the little sand-roses encrusted on the houses; the lush, vivid green of the doors. And then, beyond that knotted carpet of domes were the date palms, vast basins of sunken, dusty date palms, only their fronds visible above the sand, doggedly fighting the marching dunes.

But she knew that when she left it would not be the domes or the palms or anything like that that she would see when she tried to remember how it had looked. It would be the dunes. Even now, after two years, whenever she looked at them she was beggared, humbled, all over again, just as she had been the very first time.

These were no ordinary dunes: they were the great towering crescents of the Grand Erg Oriental. When you saw them poised above you, stretching towards the horizon in gigantic scalloped arcs, you could only be silent; they were outside human imagination, a force of nature displaying itself in space, like a typhoon or earthquake rendered palpable and permanent.

There were lots of other things about El Oued — fine points of Saharan architecture and archaeology and anthropology. Erudite visitors temporarily humbled by diarrhoea or dysentery often told her about those things. She would listen to them and then send them on to Dr Mishra. He took an interest in that kind of thing.

As for herself, she preferred people.

Mrs Verma tried to listen as the thin, pale woman chattered excitedly on: … and, then, you know the firm gives him a holiday bonus, so we thought why not? Everyone else buys VCRs and TVs but we already have all those things and we thought, you know, we should see the world, too, especially since we have an ayah and everything. Of course, it was a problem, you know, our house there is so huge and I didn’t know who to leave it with, servants are so unreliable nowadays, but if you think of all that you can nev -er do anything …

But the one thought on Mrs Verma’s mind was: Two years, two years , and not so much as a hint of an Indian tourist; and now, in the space of three short days, just when we need them …

She saw old Hem Narain Mathur standing beside his bookcase, smiling, and this time she smiled triumphantly back.

Raising herself on tiptoe, Mrs Verma stole a look over Kulfi’s shoulder and immediately fell back flat-footed. An indescribably vast woman swathed in some kind of immense black tent was bearing down on her, like a migrating Bedouin camp. She had a baby in her arms, and following close behind her, with his hands behind his back, was a man with a strangely distended head, and huge, staring, watchful eyes.

It occurred to Mrs Verma that this was the husband the pale woman had been talking about all this while. Her first reaction was of mild relief: as soon as she had heard about the husband some subterranean layer of her mind had busied itself with calculating whether this new factor would entail an even more dramatic revision of her casting than she had allowed for when she first saw the woman in the sari. But the moment she saw him she knew there was nothing to worry about: her first choice wasn’t ideal perhaps, but certainly this husband of hers was no contender for the role of mythological hero.

It occurred to her that she had said almost nothing all this while. Scolding herself for her thoughtless selfishness, she reached out, took Kulfi’s hand in her own and smiled. Kulfi broke off in mid-sentence, silenced by the sweetness of her smile. Mrs Verma said softly: I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. My name is Uma Verma, Dr Uma Verma. My husband and I work in the hospital here. He’s in ENT and I’m a microbiologist.