The Calcutta Chromosome

Amitav Ghosh

For Koeli This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At His command, Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death. Sir Ronald Ross

(Nobel Prize for Medicine, 1902)

AUGUST 20: MOSQUITO DAY

Chapter 1

IF THE SYSTEM hadn't stalled Antar would never have guessed that the scrap of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been rescued from a fire: its plastic laminate had warped and melted along the edges. The lettering was mostly illegible and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot. But a four-inch metal chain had somehow stayed attached: it hung down in a rusty loop from a perforation in the top left-hand corner, like a drooping tail. It was the chain that tripped the system, not the card.

The card turned up in one of those routine inventories that went flashing around the globe with metronomic regularity, for no reason that Antar could understand, except that it was what the system did best. Once it got started it would keep them coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping only when it stumbled on something it couldn't file: the most trivial things usually. Once it was a glass paperweight, of the kind that rain snowflakes if you turn them upside down; another time it was a bottle of correcting fluid, from an irrigation overseer's office just south of the Aral Sea. Both times the machine went into a controlled frenzy, firing off questions, one after another.

Antar had met children who were like that: why? what? when? where? how? But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/IIe systems it was something else — something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. He'd been using his Ava for a couple of years now and he was still awed by her eagerness to better herself. Anything she didn't recognize she'd take apart on screen, producing microscopic structural analyses, spinning the images around and around, tumbling them over, resting them on their side, producing ever greater refinements of detail.

She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen. He'd tried routing her to her own encyclopedias, but that wasn't good enough. Somewhere along the line she had been programmed to hunt out realtime information, and that was what she was determined to get. Once she'd wrung the last, meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into the horizonless limbo of her memory. That time with the paperweight it had taken him a full minute to notice what was going on. He was reading: he had been lent a gadget that could project pages from a magazine or a book on the far wall of the room. So long as he didn't move his head too much and hit the right key in a steady rhythm, Ava couldn't tell that she didn't exactly have his full attention. The device was illegal of course, precisely because it was meant for people like him, who worked alone, at home. Ava didn't notice the first time but it happened again with the correcting fluid: he was reading, staring at the wall when she went deadly quiet. Then suddenly warnings began to flash on his screen. He whisked the book away but she already knew something was up. At the end of the week, he received a notice from his employer, the Interrnational Water Council, telling him that his pay had been docked because of 'declining productivity', warning him that a further decline could entail a reduction in his retirement benefits.

He didn't dare take any more chances after that. He took the gadget with him that evening, when he went on his hour-long daily walk to Penn Station. He carried it to the franchise doughnut shop where he was a regular, down by the Long Island Railroad ticket counters, and handed it back to the Sudanese bank-teller who had lent it to him. Antar's retirement was only a year away and if his pension rates went down now he knew he wouldn't be able to work them up again. For years he'd been dreaming of leaving New York and going back to Egypt: of getting out of this musty apartment where all he could see when he looked down the street were boarded-up windows stretching across the fronts of buildings that were almost as empty as his own.

He stopped trying to get the better of Ava after that. He went back to his job, staring patiently at those endless inventories, wondering what it was all for.

Years ago, when Antar was a boy, in Egypt, an archaeologist had turned up at the little hamlet where his family lived – on a strip of land reclaimed from the desert, on the western edge of the Nile Delta. The archaeologist was a woman, a very old Hungarian emigre with skin that was as brittle and closely veined as a dried eucalyptus leaf. No one could pronounce her name so the village children named her al-Magari, the Hungarian.

The Hungarian visited the village several times over a period of a few months. On the first few occasions she brought along a small team of assistants and workers. She'd sit in a canvas-backed chair, under an enormous hat, and direct the excavations with a silver-tipped cane. Sometimes she would pay Antar and his cousins to help, after school, or when their fathers let them off from the fields. Afterwards the boys would sit around in a circle and watch as she sifted through the sand and earth with brushes and tweezers, examining the dirt with magnifying glasses.

'What is she doing?' they'd ask each other. 'What's it all for?' The questions were usually directed at Antar, for he was the one who always had the answers at school. The truth was that Antar didn't know; he was just as puzzled as they were. But he had a reputation to live up to, so one day he took a deep breath and announced: 'I know what they're doing: they're counting the dust; they're dustcounters.'

'What?' said the others, mystified, so he explained that the Hungarian was counting the dirt in the same way that old men count prayer beads. They believed him because he was the brightest boy in the village. The memory stole upon Antar one afternoon, a brillliantly sunlit vision of sand and mud-brick and creaking waterwheels. He'd been struggling to keep himself awake while a particularly long inventory went flashing by. It was from an administrative building that had been commanndeered by the International Water Council – some wretched little Agricultural Extension Office in Ovambooland or Barotseland. The Investigation Officers had run everything they could find through Ava, all the endless detritus of twentieth-century officialdom – paper-clips, filecovers, diskettes. They appeared to believe that everything they found in places like those had a bearing on the depiction of the world's water supplies.

Antar had never quite understood why they went to so much trouble, but that morning, thinking of the archaeologist, he suddenly knew. They saw themselves making history with their vast water-control experiments: they wanted to record every minute detail of what they had done, what they would do. Instead of having a historian sift through their dirt, looking for meanings, they wanted to do it themselves: they wanted to load their dirt with their own meanings.

He sat up with a start and said, in Arabic: 'That's what you are Ava, a Dust-Counter, ' Addaad al-Turaab.'

He said it under his breath, but Ava heard him anyway. He could have sworn that she was actually startled: her 'eye', a laser-guided surveillance camera, swivelled on him while the screen misted over with standby graphics. Then Ava began to spit out translations of the Arabic phrase, going through the world's languages in declining order of population: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali . . . It was funny at first, but when it got to the dialects of the Upper Amazon Antar couldn't bear it any longer. 'Stop showing off,' he shouted. 'You don't have to show me you know everything there is to know. Iskuti; shut up.'

But it was Ava who silenced him instead, serenely spitting the phrases back at him. Antar listened awestruck as 'shut up' took on the foliage of the Upper Amazon.

Chapter 2

ANTAR WAS WAITING to sign off when the card and chain showed up on Ava's screen. His eyes kept straying to the timeline; he'd been hoping to get off a few minutes early. His neighbour, a young woman who had moved in next door a few months earlier, had invited herself over that evening. She was going to bring dinner. Antar wanted some time to himself before she came: he'd been planning to get a shower and go for his usual evening walk to Penn Station. There was still half an hour to go before he got off, at six.

Restive as he was, Antar probably wouldn't have given the card a second glance; left to himself, he'd have disspatched it with a keystroke, sent it tumbling into the unbounded darkness of Ava's heart. It was only because Ava went into one of her trances of unrecognition over the metal chain that he took a closer look. The chain was made up of very small interlocking metal spheres. It was scuffed and rusted with all the nickel-plating gone, but Antar knew what it was the moment he saw it. He'd worn one himself, for years, while he was working at LifeWatch.

LifeWatch was a small but respected non-profit organization that served as a global public health consultancy and epidemiological data bank. Antar had worked there much of his life, as a programmer and systems analyst. In a sense he worked there still except that LifeWatch had long since been absorbed, along with many other such independent agencies, into the mammoth public health wing of the newly formed International Water Council, Like most of hi,s colleagues, Antar had been assigned to an inconsequential 'At Home' job to see him through to retirement. He was still technically on the Council's payrolls, but he had never set foot in its New York offices. He had not had reason to: they communicated with him through Ava whenever they wanted, which wasn't often.

Antar could remember a time when those little chains had been standard issue at LifeWatch, along with bar-coded identity cards. Some people preferred to wear their cards on clips; he'd always liked the chains himself. He liked the feel of the metal balls, running through his fingernails; they were like miniature worry-beads.

He lingered over the chain for a moment. They hadn't been around for years now and he couldn't quite recall when they were first introduced: probably some time in the 1980s. He had been at LifeWatch for well over ten years by that time. He had joined immediately after graduating from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow: this was in the days when the Russians were still handing out scholarships to students from poor countries; when Moscow was the best place in the world to study linear programming. Life Watch had advertised internationally for a programmer and analyst, to bring their accounts online. It was a number-crunching job, not what he had been trained for. But, on the other hand, it was safe, secure, settled, and it offered an American salary and a guaranteed visa. He'd responded immediately, without really expecting to get the job: he knew the competition would be fierce. As it turned out, he was third on the shortlist but the two people who were ahead of him got other offers.

Antar rubbed his fingertips, overcome by a tactile nostalgia, recalling the feel of those chains and those laminated plastic ID cards. The chains came in two sizes, he rememmbered: you could wear them around your neck or thread them through a buttonhole. He'd always preferred the shorter chains.

He took his time, keying in answers to Ava's questions. In the meanwhile Ava was toying with the card, flipping it over, blowing up segments in random order. Suddenly a symbol flashed across the monitor, shooting off at an angle, rotating and diminishing as it went. It caught Antar's eye just before it spun off the edge of the screen. He lunged at the keyboard, and tracked slowly back. When he had the symbol centred he froze the frame.

It was years since he'd seen the once-familiar logo of LifeWatch, a neatly stylized image of two intertwined laurel wreaths. And here it was now, in front of him, plucked out of the bottom of a lost ID card. Antar turned the card over, on Ava's screen, intrigued at the sight of the symbol, so well known and so long forgotten. He brought the card back on screen, life size, and blew it up, slowly. There couldn't be any doubt about it: it was a LifeWatch ID.

He guessed the card was from the mid-eighties or early nineties or thereabouts – a time when he had spent so many hours with spreadsheets that he'd got to know every name that ever appeared on Life Watch's payroll. Looking at that grubby old card suspended in front of him he began to wonder whom it had belonged to. He was sure he'd know the name – that at the very least. He might even recognize the face in the picture.

Without thinking, he tapped in a sequence of commands. Ava's screen went momentarily blank as she began reconstructing the card, restoring the original. Almost immediately Antar regretted the command. The process could take a while, and sign-off time was just twenty-five minutes away now. He gave his chair a kick, annoyed with himself. As the chair spun around, he noticed that a word had appcared on the screen, under a line that said 'Point of Origin'. Jamming his foot on the floor, he brought the chair to a halt.

He didn't usually bother to check where the inventories originated: they came through in such quantities it didn't seem to matter much. But he was curious now, especially when 'Lhasa' appeared on his screen. He tried to think back to the eighties and nineties and whether Life Watch had had an office there at the time. Then he noticed that the word 'Lhasa'

was prefixed by a symbol which indicated that the item had merely joined the information flow there. It had been found somewhere else. He looked over his shoulder and discovered that the pale outline of an enormous white triangle had begun to materrialize in his living room, a few feet away. Ava had started to create a holographic projection of the reconstructed card: the cloudy triangle represented the top left-hand corner, hugely magnified. He began to drum his fingers on the arms of his chair, wondering whether he had the energy or the inclination to ask Ava where the card had been found. It was always hard to tell when something came through Lhasa.

Lhasa was the International Water Council's continental command centre for Asia. The Council's officers called it the de facto capital of Asia because it had the unique distinction of being the only command centre in the world that was in charge of not one but several major Hydraulic Regions: the Ganges-Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the transYangtze, the Hwang-Ho. The Council's information streams for the eastern half of the continent were all routed through Lhasa. This meant that the card could have entered the system anywhere between Karachi and Vladivostok.

He looked over his shoulder again. Ava was taking longer than he'd thought: she was just getting started on the photograph, at the top righthand corner of the card. He glanced at the timeline. He really didn't have much time if he was going to walk down to Penn Station before his neighbour, Tara, came over.

Idly, waiting for Ava to put the photograph together, he typed in another command, asking for a follow-up narrative on the card's chain of provenances. Ava took an instant longer than usual, but it was still no more than a couple of seconds before she produced the name of the city where the card had been found.

It was Calcutta.

Chapter 3

WAITING FOR AVA to get on with the card, Antar pushed his chair back, on its castors, until he could look into his kitchen, through the door of his living room. There was a window above the sink, and by craning his neck he could just about see the back of Tara's apartment, on the far side of the building's air-shaft. He was relieved to see that she wasn't home yet; the apartment was still dark.

He slumped back in his chair, yawning. His eyes began to glaze over at the thought of the steaming cup of sweet, dark tea that was waiting for him at the neon-lit doughnut shop in Penn Station; of the other regulars who occasionally dropped by to sit around the plastic-topped table – the Sudanese bank-teller, the well-dressed Guyanese woman who worked in a Chelsea used-clothes store, the young Bangladeshi man from the subway news-stand. Often they just sat in companionable silence around a circular plastic-topped table at the back of the shop, sipping tea or coffee out of paper cups while watching tapes of Arabic and Hindi films on a small portable monitor. But every once in a while, there would be a discussion, or they would exchange tips – about a gadget that was on sale somewhere, or some new scam for saving on subway tokens. Antar had started going to the doughnut place because the owner of the franchise was an Egyptian, like himself. Not that he missed speaking Arabic: far from it. He got plenty of that all day long, from Ava. Ever since she was programmed to simulate 'localization' Ava had been speaking to him in the appropriate rural dialect of the Nile Delta. Her voice-reproduction capabilities had been upgraded so that she could even switch intonations depending on what was being said – from young to old, male to female. Antar had grown rusty in the dialect; he was just fourteen when he left his village for Cairo and had never been back. At times he had trouble following Ava. And then there were times when he would recognize the authorship of a long-forgotten relative in an unusual expression or characteristic turn of phrase.

It was a relief to escape from those voices in the evenings; to step out of that bleak, cold building, encaged in its scaffolding of rusty steel fire escapes; to get away from the metallic echo of its stairways and corridors. There was something enlivening, magical almost, about walking from that wind-blown street into the brilliantly lit passageways of Penn Station, about the surging crowds around the ticket counters, the rumble of trains under one's feet, the deep, bass hum of a busker's didgeridoo throbbing in the concrete like an amplified heartbeat. And of course there was the tea. The owner brewed it specially, for himself and Antar, in a chipped enamel pot, thick and syrupy, with a touch of mint – just like Antar remembered from his boyhood. He ran a finger around his damp collar. It was clammy inside today: too hot if he shut the window and too damp if he left it open. Downstairs, the building's front door was opening and closing in a steady rhythm: he could feel the impact through the floor, every time it slammed shut. The people who worked in the warehouses and storage spaces on the first three floors were on their way home now, a little early because of the long weekend ahead. He could hear them on the street, shouting to each other as they walked towards the subway station on 7th Avenue. He was always relieved when the banging stopped and the building fell silent again.

There was a time when there were nothing but apartments in the building, all rented to families: large, noisy Middle Eastern and Central Asian families – Kurds, Afghans, Tajiks and even a few Egyptians. He had often had to knock on his neighbours' doors, asking them to keep it down. Tayseer, his wife, had become very sensitive to noise after she was confined to bed in the last trimester of her pregnancy. In the past she had never noticed when the neighbours made a racket shouting across the air-shaft, or when their kids skateboarded in the corridors. She had grown up within earshot of the canopied souks around the Bab Zuwayla in Cairo: she liked the bazaarish feel of the building, with everyone dropping in on each other and sitting out on the stoop on summer evenings, while children played around the fire hydrant. She liked the building, even though the neighbourhood scared her, especially the heavy traffic on either side of it – the West Side Highway at one end and the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel at the other. But she'd wanted to move there anyway: she thought it would be easier having a baby there, with so many women and children around.

In the end it didn't matter: an amniotic embolism killed her and the baby in the thirty-fifth week of her pregnancy.

They were all gone now, all those noisy, festive families that had so attracted Tayseer. They had been syphoned slowly away into small towns and suburbs by the demands of their expanding businesses and their ever-growing famillies. Antar had sometimes thought of moving too, but never with much conviction.

At first he had expected that the building would fill up around him after his old neighbours left – just as it had in earlier generations, with one wave of migrants moving out and another moving in. But somewhere down the line the pattern had changed: an alteration in the zoning regulations had prompted the building's owners to start converting empty apartments into commercial properties. Soon the only residents left were ageing holdovers like himself: people who couldn't afford to move out of their rent-controlled apartments. Every year the building grew emptier of people, while the storage spaces expanded.

The man in the next apartment had been there since before Antar moved in. He was a keen chess player and claimed to be related to Tigran Petrossian. Antar played with him occasionally, losing badly every time.

Then one summer – was it fifteen or twenty years ago? – the chess player began to waste away. He couldn't play chess any more; he barely had the strength to move the pieces. His nephews drove up from North Carolina, where the rest of his family had settled. They cleared out his apartment and loaded everything into a yellow moving truck. Before they left they gave Antar a gunmetal chess set, as a memento; he still had it somewhere. Antar had watched from his living room window as they carried the chess player away in the truck.

Next it was the woman in the apartment below. She had been in the building since the sixties, when she first came to America from Azerbaijan. She had grown old in that apartment, brought up two children there; she had nowhere to go, especially after her eyesight began to fail. In that familiar space she could still manage on her own; she would have been at a loss anywhere else. Her children had let her stay, giving in to her entreaties against their better judgement. They'd fly in to visit, every other month, from the small Midwestern town where they lived. They arranged to have food delivered to her twice a week, from an uptown grocery. And one day the delivery boy killed her, battering her head in with a cast-iron skillet. It was Antar who found the body. He had grown accustomed to the rhythm of her movements, and when he didn't hear the familiar tapping of her cane for a whole day, he knew something was wrong.

He'd lived alone on the fourth floor for four years. Then, a few months ago Maria, the Guyanese woman from the doughnut shop, brought Tara to Penn Station and introoduced her to the other regulars. Tara was small and birdlike, with a fine-boned beak of a nose. She was youngish – in her thirties, Antar reckoned – a good deal younger than Maria. He guessed at once that she was from India: the connnection was obvious really, because Maria was a Guyanese of Indian origin and he knew she still had relatives there.

The two women made an interesting contrast, although they seemed very easy with each other. Maria was tall, stately and unfailingly well dressed although she barely made minimum wage. Tara on the other hand seemed so uncomfortable in Western clothes that it was clear she'd just arrived: the first time she came to Penn Station she was wearing a loose white shirt that hung halfway down to her knees and a pair of dark trousers that flapped limply above her ankles.

But there was nothing awkward or freshly arrived about her manner. She gave Antar a smile and a crisp nod when they were introduced and slipped into the chair next to his. 'What's that you're drinking?' she said, tapping his cup. Mint tea, he explained, the owner of the shop brewed it especially for him, Egyptian-style.

'Splendid!' she said. 'Exactly the kind of thing I had in mind. Would you be good enough to ask him if I might have some too?'

Antar was taken aback by her voice: the plummy accent and the unexpected turn of phrase. On the way out, walking towards the Broadway exit, Maria took him aside to say that Tara was looking for an apartment; that she had just found a job and needed a place to stay, in Manhattan.

'What does she do?' Antar asked.

'She's in child-care,' said Maria.

'You mean she's a babysitter?' Antar was surprised: somehow Tara didn't strike him as someone who would choose to look after children for a living.

'Yes,' said Maria. She went on to explain that Tara had been brought into the country by a Kuwaiti diplomat and his family, to care for their children. The arrangement hadn't worked out so she'd found another babysitting job, in Greenwich Village. But the family she was working for now couldn't give her a place to stay.

Antar nodded. Although Maria didn't say so, he guessed that the change of jobs had made Tara's status illegal and that she needed to find a place where she could pay cash without having to deal with a lot of questions.

He shrugged. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'There's nothing I can do.'

Maria raised her eyebrows. 'But I've heard there's lots of empty space in your building,' she said. 'Isn't there a vacant apartment on your floor?'

Antar was taken aback. 'How do you know where I live?' he said. One of the unwritten rules of the doughnut shop was that they never enquired too closely into the details of each other's lives. Maria made a bemused gesture. 'Oh, I just heard from someone .. .'

she said. Her voice trailed away.

Antar had grown accustomed to having the fourth floor entirely to himself: he balked at the thought of having a neighbour again. 'It wouldn't be right for her,' he said. 'The building's in terrible shape, and so's the apartment.'

But he gave in when Maria begged him to show Tara the building: the neighbourhood would scare her off anyway, he decided. He was proved wrong: Tara took an instant liking to the apartment and moved in within the month. It still took him by surprise when he went into his kitchen and saw lights blazing across the air-shaft. For years he had kept the kitchen window curtained because all there was in the airrshaft were dead rats and pigeons. Now he frequently found himself lingering there longer than he needed to. Antar's eyes strayed to the timeline once again. 'Is it a quarter to six already?' he said out loud, inadvertently.

Instantly Ava bellowed confirmation, calling out the hour in the style of a village watchman in Egypt, perfect in every detail, down to the tapping of a wooden staff.

Chapter 4

THE PHOTOGRAPH on the ID card had begun to take shape in the centre of the living room, top downwards. The first detail to appear was a patch of hair, carefully trimmed, but rather thin and discoloured: definitely a man's hair. Then came a pair of bright black eyes. It occurred to Antar to wonder whether he might be Egyptian, whoever he was: he could have been – but he could just as well be Pakistani or Indian or Latin American. But once the cheeks and nose and mouth appeared, Antar had no doubts left. He'd always been good at placing people, he prided himself on it, it was a talent you developed when you spent a lifetime working for a global agency. The man was Indian, he was sure of that. The image was huge now, and it was shaking a little, like a banner in the wind. The face was full, moonlike, the cheeks as puffed as a trumpeter's, the aggressively jutting chin ending in a carefully trimmed goatee. It was the nose that gave Antar pause – a boxer's nose, sunken at the bridge. It looked out of place in that well-fed, rounded face. And it also looked somehow familiar.

Antar got up from his chair and stepped back: it was oddly disconcerting to look at a flat, two-dimensional image in a three-dimensional projection. He stepped to one side and then to the other, keeping his eyes on the image's mouth. He noticed that the lips were slightly parted as though in mid-sentence. The beginnings of a memory began to take shape in his mind – of someone glimpsed in elevators and corridors, a tubby little man with a pot belly, always immaculately dressed – pinstriped suits, razoredged trousers, starched shirts, always buttoned at the wrist, even on the hottest of summer days. And a hat – he'd always had a hat. That was why it had taken Antar so long to recognize him. He had never seen the man's hair; his head was usually covered – no wonder, really, with hair like that. The image grew clearer in Antar's mind: he remembered seeing the man strutting busily down corridors, shoes clicking on marble, with files tucked under his arm; he had a recollection of an unplaceable accent, neither American nor Indian nor anything else, and a loud, screeching, selfsatisfied voice; a voice that would fill crowded elevators and echo through the Trust's polished lobby, leaving behind a trail of amused glances and whispered questions: 'Who the hell is that?' and 'Oh, don't you know? That's our own Mr ... '

He recalled a meeting, a conversation somewhere, years ago, sitting across a table. But just as the memory was beginning to take on an outline, it dissolved. The name: that was the key. What was his name?

It began to appear, a few seconds later, slowly, letter by letter, and then suddenly Antar knew. Already, when there were no more than four letters in front of him, he had darted over to Ava's keyboard and fed it in, along with a search command.

The name was L. Murugan.

The first search drew a blank, so then Antar took Ava hurrying into the Council's vast archives where the records of all the old global organizations were kept. It took a full ten minutes before the doorkeeper systems allowed him into the stacks, but once he was in, it was a matter of moments.

He smiled when the old-fashioned file turned up in front of him: a tiny little character, the Arabic letter 'ain, blinked at him from the top of the screen, above the heading 'L. Murugan'. He knew that symbol: he had put it there himself. Someone in the office had started a pool, taking in bets to see who used Spellcheck most often. They'd all devised symbols for themselves, to mark their work. He'd chosen the 'ain because it was the first letter in his name, 'Antar.

But the file surprised him: he had expected something longer, bulkier; he had a recollection of feeding in a lot of material. He flipped quickly through it, going straight to the end.

On reaching the last line, he sat back, rubbing his chin. He remembered it now – he had typed it in himself, just a few years ago.

Subject missing since August 21 1995, it said, last seen Calcutta, In-dia.

Chapter 5

WALKING PAST St Paul's Cathedral, on his first day in Calcutta, August 20 1995, Murugan was caught unawares by a monsoon downpour. He was on his way to the Presidency General Hospital, on Lower Circular Road, to look for the memorial to the British scientist Ronald Ross. He had seen pictures of it and knew exactly what to look for. It was an arch, built into the hospital's perimeter wall, near the site of Ross's old laboratory. It had a medallion with a portrait and an inscription that said: In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gateSurgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner inwhich malaria isconveyed by mosquitoes. He hadn't far to go when the rain caught up with him. He felt the first drops on his green baseball cap and turned to see an opaque wall of rain moving towards him, across the green expanse of the Maidan. He quickened his pace, swearing at himself for having left his umbrella behind at the guest house. The snack vendors at the Fine Arts gallery, racing to cover their baskets with tarpaulin, stopped to stare as he trotted past, in his khaki suit and green baseball cap.

He had packed an umbrella of course, a Cadillac of an umbrella, which opened at the touch of a button: he knew perfectly well what Calcutta was like at this time of year. But the umbrella was still in his suitcase, in the guest house on Robinson Street. He had been so eager to make his pilgrimage to Ross's memorial that he had forgotten to unpack it.

The rain was hard on his heels now. He spotted the gates of the Rabindra Sadan auditorium standing open, a short distance away, and began to run. A honking minibus sent a jet of water shooting up from a puddle as it roared past, drenching his khaki Prado trousers. Still running, Murugan made a forefinger gesture at the conductor, who was hanging out of the door of the bus, watching him. There was a shout of laughter and the bus sped away, spitting parasols of grey-green exhaust. Murugan turned into Rabindra Sadan just ahead of the rain, and went leaping up the stairs. The outer gallery of the auditorium was brightly lit and hung with posters: he could hear a microphone scratching and humming inside. He could tell that a big event was under way: people were pressing in around the door of the auditorium, trying to push through. A television crew went rushing past, as he watched, carrying cables and cameras. Then the light; dimmed and he was alone in the gallery. Turning away, he looked out through a window, at the walls of P. G. Hospital, in the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the memorial to Ross. But just then the auditorium's loudspeakers came alive and a thin, rasping voice began to declaim. It forced itself on his attention, insistent in its amplified gravity.

'Every city has its secrets,' the voice began, 'but Calcutta, whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere, by the workings of paradox, secrets live in the telling: they whisper life into humdrum street corners and dreary alleyways; into the rubbish-strewn rears of windowless tenements and the blackened floors of oil-bathed workshops. But here in our city where all law, natural and human, is held in capricious suspension, that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life; like any creature that lives in a perverse element, it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld – in this case, in silence.'

Taken by surprise, Murugan looked up and down the glass-fronted hall. It was still empty. Then he noticed two women running up the stairs. They came pelting into the hall and stood by the door, wiping the rain from their hair and shaking it off their saris. One of them was in her midtwenties, a thin aquiline woman with a fine-boned face, dressed in a limp, rather bedraggled sari. The other was taller and older, in the beginnings of a youthful middle age, darkly handsome and quietly elegant, in a black cotton sari. She had a broad streak of white running all the way down her shoulder-length hair.

As he made his way across the hall, Murugan noticed that both women had press tags pinned to their shoulders, over their saris. When he was a few paces away he recognized a familiar logo: both their tags bore the name of Calcutta magazine.

It gave Murugan a twinge to see the magazine's Gothic masthead again: his parents had been faithful Calcutta subscribers. The sight of that familiar lettering, reproduced in miniature, created an instant sense of connection with the two women.

Craning his neck he saw that the younger woman was called Urmila Roy; the tall, elegant one was Sonali Das.

Murugan stepped up and cleared his throat.

Chapter 6

URMILA WAS just about to ask Sonali a question when she was interrupted. She spun around, in annoyance, and discovered a short, oddlooking man standing at her elbow, clearing his throat. Her eyes widened as she took in his green cap, his little goatee and his mud-spattered khaki trousers. Then he said something, very fast. It took her a while to work out that he was speaking English: the accent was like none she had ever heard before.

She cast a quizzical, raised-eyebrow glance at her friend, Sonali, but failed to catch her eye. Sonali did not seem in the least bit put out by the man. In fact she was smiling at' him. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I didn't follow.'

The man flipped his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the auditorium. 'What the hell is going on in there?' he said, a little slower this time.

Urmila answered before Sonali could, in the hope that he would go away. 'It is an award ceremony,' she said. 'For Phulboni, the writer – to mark his eighty-fifth birthday.'

Instead of going away, the man now started to introduce himself –

muttering a name that sounded like Morgan. Sonali gave him a smile that could easily be mistaken for a sign of encouragement. You could hardly blame him for lingering.

'Phulboni?' said Murugan, scratching his beard. 'The writer?'

'Yes,' Sonali said softly. 'Our greatest living writer.'

Urmila gave Sonali a nudge. 'Sonali-di,' she said. 'There's something I wanted to ask you ... '

The man went on, without missing a breath, as though he hadn't heard her. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I think I've heard of him.'

Sonali reached into her handbag, took out a cigarette and began to fumble with a lighter. Urmila was mildly shocked: she knew Sonali smoked of course, she had seen her light up in her office. But here, in public?

'Sonali-di!' she said in an undertone. 'Everyone in Calcutta is here; what if someone sees ... ?'

'It's all right, Urmila,' Sonali said wearily, gesturing at the empty hallway. 'No one's looking this way.' She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke into the air, throwing her head back.

'I remember,' Murugan said suddenly. "Phulboni" is the guy's penname, right?'

'That is right,' Sonali nodded. 'His real name is Saiyad Murad Husain. He began writing under a pen-name because his father threatened to disown him if he became a writer.'

'That's just a legend,' said Urmila.

'Phulboni would be the first to tell you,' Sonali said with a laugh, 'that legends aren't always untrue.'

Suddenly the writer's voice rose, booming out of a loudspeaker.

'Mistaken are those who imagine that silence is without life; that it is inanimate, without either spirit or voice. It is not: indeed the Word is to this silence what the shadow is to the foreshadowed, what the veil is to the eyes, what the mind is to truth, what language is to life.'

Sonali blew out a cloud of smoke. 'Just listen to him!' she said, cocking her head to catch his voice. 'He's really worked himself up today. He often gets like this nowadays, especially when he's speaking English. You should have heard him the other day at the Alliance Francaise.'

Urmila noticed, to her dismay, that Sonali was smiling at Murugan again, almost as if she were egging him on. Her heart sank. Sonali was always doing things like this – stopping to talk to strangers, getting into conversations in the lift and missing her floor and so on. As a rule Urmila didn't mind: if anything she thought it endearing that someone as celebrated as Sonali Das should take such evident pleasure in talking to people she didn't know. But today Urmila was in a hurry: she had an assignment to finish and she needed to talk to Sonali. Earlier in the day she'd dropped in on Sonali, at her fifth-floor office, to suggest that they go over to the ceremony together, hoping to talk to her on the way. But inevitably, they ended up in one of those taxis whose drivers seemed incapable of finding their way from one end of Chowringhee to the other. She and Sonali had spent the entire twenty minutes of the drive from the magazine's Dharmatola office to Rabindra Sadan hanging over the front seat and issuing minute by minute instructions: 'Turn right here ... look out ... bus ahead ... dog there ... ditch in front.'

And now, just when she had finally got her alone, here was this oddlooking man in the cap and the goatee. Urmila considered making a more forceful interruption and then decided against it. She was still a little unsure of herself with Sonali: in fact it hadn't been at all easy to go up to her office today, without an invitation. Urmila had been working at Calcutta since college, three years ago. She prided herself on dealing with hard news, on being the only woman on the reporting desk. She no longer thought anything of storming into the Home Secretary's office in Writer's Building, or of asking pointed questions at the Chief Minister's press conferences. But when it came to Sonali Das she found herself becoming unaccustomedly shy and tonguetied. Sonali was such a presence in the city; the kind of person you read about in film magazines and newspaper gossip columns; whose name you grew used to hearing on the lips of your aunts and cousins, pronounced with equal measures of censoriousness and admiration, envy and outrage. She was one of those people whom everyone talked about without quite knowing why.

In part, her fame was due to her late mother, a famous stage actress from the forties and fifties. But Sonali had acted in a couple of Bombay films herself while still in her teens. The first one created a sensation, because it wasn't the usual song-and-dance affair. But then, just when she looked set for a big career, she left Bombay and came back to Calcutta. A few years later, she published a wonderful little memoir, funny, but also wistful, even sad. It was mainly about her mother, but also partly about her own childhood – about her mother's friends in the literary world, about the old studios in Tollygunge and Bombay, about accompanying her mother when she acted with jatra companies that travelled the countryside staging vast historical melodramas. A radical young director turned the book into a play; the play, in turn, was filmed, to much acclaim from critics and film societies. From then on, Sonali Das was permanently famous, even though she never did anything else – or at least not until she agreed to join Calcutta, at the owner's special request, to look after the women's supplement.

Urmila was intrigued to hear of Sonali's appointment at the magazine, but she hadn't for a moment imagined that they would become friends. And then one day she found herself standing beside Sonali in the lift. She recognized her instantly, even though she'd only set eyes on her once before, years ago. She was much changed, but Urmila decided at once that the changes were all for the better: that white streak in her hair, for instance – she was right to let it show. It suited her, marked her out. After the first quick glance, Urmila kept her eyes carefully on the lift door, determined not to stare. But before she knew it Sonali was talking to her. Within minutes they were sitting in the magazine's grimy little canteen, drinking tea and chatting.

Urmila had broken her watch strap that morning, while struggling to keep her footing on a crowded minibus. She felt foolish mentioning it: what possible interest could someone like Sonali Das have in a broken watch strap? But far from being bored, Sonali proved to be very useful: she told her about a stall near Metro Cinema where you could get your watch strap fixed for a couple of rupees. Urmila was astonished that she should know about something like that.

And now, in the same indiscriminately helpful way, Sonali was telling the stranger with the goatee that the Vice-President had come all the way from Delhi to give Phulboni his award.

Urmila could tell that the only way they were ever going to get rid of the man was by going into the auditorium. 'Come on, Sonali-di,' she said, jogging her arm. 'Let's go, or we'll miss everything.'

Sonali took a last, long drag on the cigarette and stuck the glowing tip into a sand-filled ashtray. 'I'm afraid we have to go now,' she said flashing Murugan a smile. 'My friend here has work to do.'

Urmila led the way to a door and pushed it open. The auditorium was packed: waves of heads rippled away towards the brilliantly floodlit stage, where a tall, whitehaired man was standing at a lectern, wearing a plain white shirt and an old fashioned, high-waisted pair of trousers of a faded military green. The spotlights above had cast long shadows over his craggy face, but there was no mistaking the dark, glittering eyes beneath the jutting brow. Urmila froze: she had heard so much about him, read so much he had written, but she had never set eyes on him before, not in the flesh.

She took a hesitant step along the darkened aisle. Absently she noted that the Vice-President was swaying sleepily on stage, behind Phulboni. The writer was gripping the edge of the lectern, leaning forward, speaking in a low, rasping voice. 'The silence of the city,' he said, 'has sustained me through all my years of writing: kept me alive in the hope that it would claim me too before my ink ran dry. For more years than I can count I have wandered the darkness of these streets, searching for the unseen presence that reigns over this silence, striving to be taken in, begging to be taken across before my time runs out. The time of the crossing is at hand, I know, and that is why I am here now, standing in front of you: to beg – to appeal to the mistress of this silence, that most secret of deities, to give me what she has so long denied: to show herself to me ... '

Urrnila cast a glance over her shoulder, down the aisle. She noticed that Murugan had followed close behind and was standing at her side, trying to push his way into the auditorium. An usher walked up, torch in hand. He glanced at Sonali's press tag and then at Urmila's and waved them through. Walking down the darkened aisle Urmila looked back again. She was relieved to see that the usher was leading Murugan firmly out of the auditorium. On the stage there was a minor commotion: the VicePresident's drowsily nodding head had knocked against the back of his chair.

Chapter 7

SUMMONING a dedicated Dakala-class courier signal Antar sent off a message to the Council's headquarters to let them know he had found the ID card of a LifeWatch employee missing since August 21 1995. Then he settled back in his chair and began to browse through the file that Ava had fetched from the Council archives. They'd want it back in an hour or so, and he knew he ought to go through it, just in case headquarters wanted him to do any followup work. From the look of it he estimated it would take him twenty minutes or so – leaving him just enough time for a walk to Penn Station before his dinner appointment with Tara. In a few minutes he discovered that the file consisted largely of notices and newspaper clippings that had appeared at the time of L. Murugan's 'disappearance'. For the most part they merely reproduced the gossip that had circulated in the office. At the time, Antar remembered, everyone had assumed that 'disappearance' was just a euphemism for suicide. Some of the clippings referred to the obviously desultory search that had been launched by the Indian police immediately after the

'disappearance': it wasn't hard to see that they, no less than Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch, had decided on a euphemistic use of the word. It was the last item in the file that gave Antar pause. It was an article from an unexpected source, LifeWatch's internal newsletter. The piece had the reminiscent, quietly respectful tone of an obituary although the writer was careful to describe Murugan as 'missing' rather than 'dead'. It began on the customary anecdotal note, referring to him as 'Morgan' –

'the name by which his friends knew him'. It described him as a 'cocky little rooster of a man'; it talked, not without fondness, of his combativeness, of how he could never resist an argument, of his apparently unstoppable fluency; of the many contributions he had made as LifeWatch's principal archivist. It touched on his 'global' childhood spent wandering between the world's capitals with his technocrat father and spoke briefly of his love of Hollywood B-movies and old American TV serials – 'the only constant, as for so many, in a peripatetic, internationalized comingof-age'. It was as a graduate student at Syracuse, the article said, that

'Morgan' first discovered the great love of his life: the medical history of malaria. He spent several years teaching in a small college in upstate New York, and during this time he came to be increasingly interested in one highly specialized aspect of this subject: the early history of malaria research. Later, even while working for LifeWatch, he had seized every spare moment to pursue this avenue of research – often to the detriment of his own career. He had published little or nothing in those years, but he had often claimed, in his flippant way, that he enjoyed the happy situation of being pre-eminent in his field by virtue of having it all to himself. This subject was the research career of the British poet, novelist and scientist, Ronald Ross. Born in India in 1857, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his work on the life cycle of the malaria parasite. At the time it had been widely assumed that this epochal discovery would lead to the eradication of what was possibly the world's oldest and most widespread disease: an expectation, alas, that had been sadly belied, as Life Watch had discovered to its cost. In occasional moments of seriousness, Murugan had been known to admit that his interest in this rather obscure subject had initially had a biographical origin. The last crucial phase of Ronald Ross's work was done in Calcutta, in the summer of 1898. Murugan was himself born in that city, although he left it at an early age.

Possibly this biographical connection had something to do with the obsessive nature of Murugan's interest in this subject. In 1987 he let some of his friends know that he had finally written a summary of his research in an article entitled 'Certain Systematic Discrepancies in Ronald Ross's account of Plasmodium B'. Although some of his colleagues expressed interest, none of them ever got to see this article. It received such negative preliminary reports at all the journals to which it was submitted that Murugan decided to revise it before putting it in circulation. As it turned out, however, the revised article fared no better than the original. The new piece bore the unfortunate title 'An Alternative Interpretation of Late Nineteenth-Century Malaria Research: is there a Secret History?'. It met with an even more hostile reception than the earlier version, and it only served to brand Murugan as a crank and an eccentric. In 1989 Murugan wrote to the History of Science Society proposing a panel on early malaria research for the Society's next convention. When the proposal was rejected he sent pages-long E-mail messages to members of the review committee, jamming their mailboxes. A year later the Society took the unprecedented step of revoking his membership. He was warned that he would face legal action if he tried to attend any further meetings. It was then that Murugan finally gave up trying to argue his case in public. Generally speaking, Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch treated his

'research' as a harmless if time-consuming hobby: no one thought the worse of him for it, except when it detracted from his regular work. But it was soon apparent to those who knew him well that he had taken his ostracism from the scholarly community very hard. Indeed, this may well have been the proximate cause of his increasingly erratic and obsessional behaviour. It was at about this time for instance, that he began to speak openly about his notion of the so-called 'Other Mind': a theory that some person or persons had systematically interfered with Ronald Ross's experiments to push malaria research in certain directions while leading it away from others. His advocacy of this bizarre hypothesis gradually led to his estrangement from several of his friends and associates. Murugan believed that the developments in malaria research that occurred in the early 1990s – such as Patarroyo's immunological work, and the breakthroughs in research on antigenic variations in the Plasmodiumfalciparum parasite – were the most important advances in the subject since Ross's work almost a century before. Murugan persuaded himself (and tried to persuade others) that these developments would have the effect of vindicating his life's work. The turning point came in 1995

when he began to lobby to be sent to Calcutta, the site of Ross's discoveries: he was particularly intent on getting there before August 20, the day that Ross had designated 'World Mosquito Day', to commemorate one of his findings.

Unfortunately LifeWatch had no office in Calcutta: nor would it have been possible to justify the expense of opening one purely for Murugan's sake. However, when it became clear that Murugan was determined to go even if it cost him his job, various people within the organization put their heads together and manufactured a small research project that would allow him to spend some time in Calcutta, although on a greatly reduced salary. To Murugan's great delight, the paperwork was concluded just in time to allow him to reach Calcutta on August 20 1995. Later, after Murugan's 'disappearance', there were those who sought to blame Life Watch for allowing him to go at all. However, the fact was that the organization had done everything in its power to dissuade him. Representatives of the Personnel Department, for example, held several meetings with him in July 1995, shortly before his departure, trying to argue him out of pursuing this project. But by this time the plan had become such an idee fixe that in all likelihood nobody could have dissuaded Murugan from following the course he had decided upon.

'It is unnecessary therefore', the article continued, 'to seek to blame Murugan's well-wishers at LifeWatch for the sad events of August 1995: it would be more appropriate to join them in grieving for the loss of an irreplaceable friend.'

Chapter 8

THE TORRENTIAL downpour had now thinned to a gentle drizzle. Murugan made his way quickly out of the premises of Rabindra Sadan, to the traffic-clogged edge of Lower Circular Road. Ignoring the beleaguered policeman on the traffic island, he stepped straight into the flow and marched right through, holding up a hand to ward off the oncoming cars and buses, apparently oblivious to their screeching brakes and blaring horns. The pavement on the other side was jammed with pedestrians. Murugan was almost swept off his feet by the onrush of people heading towards Harish Mukherjee Road and P. G. Hospital. No sooner had he managed to fall in step with the crowd than he heard a voice calling out to him. He came to a sudden halt only to find himself pushed ahead by the relentless flow of pedestrians.

He threw a quick glance over his shoulder as he was propelled forward. He heard the shout again: 'Hey, mister, where you going?' Sure enough, bobbing up and down in the torrent of people behind him was the head of a gaptoothed, emaciated boy – a tout of some indeterminate kind, who had accosted him earlier in the day, right outside his guest house.

Murugan quickened his pace and the boy shouted again, at the top of his voice: 'Wait, mister; where you are going?' He was wearing a discoloured T-shirt with a print of a palm-fringed sea and the words PATTAYA BEACH. Murugan was dismayed to see him again, so close behind: it had taken him the better part of an hour to shake him off earlier. Murugan fought his way to the wall that flanked the pavement, and waited for the boy to catch up. 'Listen, friend,' he said, first in his halfremembered Bengali and then in Hindi. 'Stop walking behind me: you're not going to get anything out of me.'

The boy bared his teeth in a smile. 'Change dollar?' he said. 'Good rate.'

Murugan exploded. 'Don't you get it?' he shouted. 'How many ways do you want me to say it: no, na, nahin, nyet, nothing, nix. I don't want to change dollars, and if I did you'd be the last person on the planet I'd go to.'

Reaching into his pocket he pushed a handful of coins into the boy's hand. 'That's all you're going to get from me,' he said. 'So take it and shove off.'

He ducked quickly back into the crowd, leaving the boy staring at a palmful of coins. He was at the corner of Harish Mukherjee Road now. Ducking down, Murugan turned the corner and pushed himself flat against the wall. Hidden by the fast-moving crowd, he watched his pursuer running off in the other direction; he saw him looking around, scanning the street. Then the boy broke away and plunged straight into the traffic, racing towards the Victoria Memorial, in the distance.

'And good night to you too,' Murugan said, stepping back into the crowd.

The crowd thinned out after the corner. The red-brick buildings of P. G. Hospital were on his left, well behind the shoulder-high perimeter wall and the narrow ditch that ran along it. He slowed his pace, watching the wall for the memorial arch.

Then suddenly there it was, across the ditch, momentarily spotlighted by the headlights of a passing truck: an arch framing a rusted iron gate. At the apex was a medallion, with Ronald Ross's bearded head in profile. Under it, to the right, was an inscription: In the small laboratory se-venty yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald RossI.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed bymosquitoes. On the left, carved in marble, were three verses of Ross's poem, 'In Exile'.

Murugan ran his eyes over the familiar lines: This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At His command, Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death. I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.

O death where is thy sting?

Thy victory O grave? Ronald Ross Murugan began to laugh. Turning around he spread his arms out and began to declaim, from the same poem, in a deep, gleefully stentorian voice: 'Half stunned I look around

And see a land of death

Dead bones that walk the ground

And dead bones underneath; A race of wretches caught,

Between the palms of need

And rubbed to utter naught,

The chaff of human seed.' He was stopped by the sound of hand-claps from the other side of the wide street. 'Very good, mister,' a voice called out. Murugan dropped his arms and peered into the treeshaded darkness on the far side of the road. He caught a glimpse of a printed T-shirt and a grinning, gap-toothed face.

'Are you following me, chaff of human seed?' he shouted, cupping his hands. 'Why? Why, what's in it for you?'

The boy replied with a wave and darted into the traffic. Murugan spotted a truck rumbling towards him, from the direction of the Race Course. He waited until the truck drew alongside, blocking him from the boy's view. Then he turned, pulled himself over the wall and dropped down on the far side of the arch.

His feet landed in something soft and yielding. At first he thought it was mud; he could feel the dampness soaking through the soft leather of his new loafers. A moment later the smell hit him. 'Shit,' he said, under his breath, looking around.

He was in a narrow, overgrown stretch of wasteland at the back of the hospital's main buildings'. Facing him were a few nondescript outhouses and a small cement structure that housed a water-pump. In the reflected light from the hospital's wards, towering above, Murugan could see a pack of dogs scavenging in an open refuse dump close by. Shading his eyes he peered into the shadows: there was no one in sight except for an old man, squatting against the wall, some distance away, washing his buttocks. Heaps of broken masonry lay in front of him. Scattered among them were neat piles of turds, ashen in the reflected light of the neon street lamps.

Murugan clamped a hand over his nose and flattened himself against the wall. He heard footsteps approaching at a run, on the other side; they stopped, receded, came back again. He heard the boy muttering to himself then walking off, in a hurry. Breathing again Murugan began to move sideways, bracing himself against the wall with his open hands. Pushing along the wall, his left hand chanced upon the rim of an opening in the rough brick surface. Murugan leaned over to take a look and discovered that the opening was actually a little alcove: or rather, a gap where a few bricks had been removed from the back of the memorial arch. He thrust his hand gingerly inside. It brushed against something; a small object. His fingers closed on it and he pulled it out. It was a little clay figurine.

Murugan held the figurine out at arm's length, into the dim glow of the distant street lamp. The figure was made of painted clay, and it was small enough to fit quite easily into the palm of his hand. It reminded him of the little images of gods his mother had carried with her on their travels.

The central part of the figurine was a simple, semicircular mound, crudely modelled and featureless except for two large stylized eyes, painted in stark blacks and whites, on the baked clay. They gave Murugan a momentary start; they appeared luminous in the dim neon glow, staring directly up at him, out of his open palm. They seemed to fix upon his eyes, holding his gaze; he had to blink before he could look away. He turned the object around in his palm. To the right of the mound was a tiny bird, unmistakably a pigeon, clearly and carefully modelled –

feathers, eyes and all. Growing out of the other side of the mound was a little protuberance, like the amputated stub of an arm. The arm had a small metal object attached; Murugan could not tell what it was – all he could see of it was a little metallic cylinder. He brought the figurine closer, examining it carefully, trying to work out what the metal object represented.

Then once again he was interrupted: 'Mister; I find you; what you doing here?' The boy was peering over the wall, his face right above Murugan's head, laughing.

Murugan lost his temper. 'Get out of my sight, you son of a bitch,' he shouted.

The boy made a leering face and wagged his head. Then he caught sight of the figurine in Murugan's hand. He shot out an arm and snatched the object from Murugan.

Murugan lunged at the figurine, but his hand caught the boy's fist and knocked it out. It crashed to the ground, on the other side of the wall. The boy dropped off the wall and fell to his knees beside it. Pulling his head up, Murugan looked over the wall. The boy was on all fours, gathering up the pieces of broken clay. He looked at Murugan over his shoulder and spat out a curse.

'You asked for it,' Murugan said. 'It's not my fault.' Keeping his back to the wall, Murugan began to move to his left, stepping carefully over the excrement and debris. He came to a stop at a dilapidated red-brick outhouse, built so close to the ground that it was almost completely hidden by the boundary wall. The structure seemed like an abandoned shell, with branches of peepul growing out of the cracked plaster and grinning holes marking the old windows and doorways.

.

Murugan pushed his head gingerly through a gaping window. 'Hello,'

he called out. 'Anyone there?'

Suddenly there was a flapping, whooshing sound and he was hit in the face. A flock of pigeons swirled past, brushing his face with their feathers.

Murugan threw himself back and covered his head with his arms. A sound rang in his ears; it was only after a few seconds had passed that he realized he had screamed. Then he heard a pebble strike the ground, beside him. He looked up and saw the boy, hanging over the boundary wall, his arm flexed to throw another stone.

Murugan ducked through a passageway, into the main drive and headed for the hospital's gates, at a run. Several taxis were waiting at the entrance, on Gokhale Road. Murugan jumped into one and slammed the door. 'Let's go,' he cried, 'let's go, move it.'

The Sikh taxi driver turned to look at him, unhurriedly. 'Go where?'

he said, in Hindi.

'Robinson Street,' Murugan said, gasping breath. 'Between Loudon and Rawdon Street.'

The driver turned the ignition key. The old Ambassador started up with a roar and pulled slowly away.

Murugan sat crouched by the window, scanning the road and the pavements. Seeing no sign of the boy, he sank back into the seat. His eyes fell on his shoes; they were covered with brown stains. He caught a whiff of a foul odour and thrust his feet under the front seat, hoping the smell would not reach the driver. But the odour lingered; he couldn't rid himself of it. He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand, took the shoes off and dropped them out of the window.

He sank into his seat, breathing a sigh of relief. But a moment later there was a thud on the back windshield. He looked around just in time to see his second shoe flying through the air. It struck the window and bounced off, leaving a long brown stain on the glass. The driver stuck his head out of the window and began to shout at the boy, who was racing towards them through the traffic. Then the lights changed, the cars behind began to sound their horns and the taxi pulled away.

As the taxi turned into Lower Circular Road, he glanced over at the brilliantly lit facade of the Rabindra Sadan auditorium. He noticed two women hurrying down the stairs, and thrust his head out of the window. The taxi was moving a little faster now and he only had a brief glimpse of them, heading for the gate.

He was almost certain they were the two women he'd spoken to earlier in the evening.

Chapter 9

THE ARTICLE IN the LifeWatch newsletter was wrong on one point. There was only one meeting between Murugan and a representative of the Personnel Department before Murugan's departure for Calcutta. One morning Antar arrived at his cubicle at LifeWatch's headquarters on West 57th Street to find a file waiting on his screen: it contained a complete record of Murugan's requests for reassignment. Antar was sure that the file had been routed to him by mistake: he was only techically a member of Personnel; he dealt almost exclusively with accounts. He lost no time in shooting off a query to the Director of his department. A couple of hours later the Director sent him a message asking him to drop by.

The Director was a serious and conscientious Swede who never lost an opportunity to remind his staff that their real business was caring.

'Let's get you away from your screen for a bit,' he said to Antar. 'I've got a more human job for you today.' He called up Murugan's file and took Antar through it. 'See if you can't talk some sense into this man Murugan: hard economic sense, I mean. Tell him about pension schemes and medical benefits and all that sort of thing. You'll see from the records that this gentleman already pays out a third of his salary in alimony: effectively he's not going to be earning anything if he goes off to Calcutta on this wild-goose chase.'

Antar E-mailed Murugan that very afternoon. A couple of days later, shortly before the lunch break, Antar heard a loud, screeching voice echoing through the department's open-plan office. He knew at once who it was even though he could not see him from his cubicle. Murugan was carolling greetings to his acquaintances: 'Hey there, how are you doing on this fine day? Enjoying the low pollen count?'

Antar and his neighbour in the next cubicle exchanged startled glances.

The voice rose several decibels: 'Which one of you is called Ant ... Ant ... ?'

'Over here,' Antar shouted, jumping to his feet. He found himself holding his hand aloft, like a schoolboy, so that it peeped out over the plywood top of his cubicle.

'Stay right where you are Ant,' Murugan called out cheerfully. 'I'll find my way to you.'

A minute later he appeared at the entrance to Murugan's cubicle; a dapper, pot-bellied man, in a dark three-piece suit and a felt hat. They were about the same age, Antar estimated; both in their early forties.

'Hey there, Ant,' Murugan said, beaming at him, holding out his hand. 'This is some heap you've built yourself out here.'

Disconcerted by the man's manner, Antar gave him a thin smile and gestured at a chair. Pulling out a list of figures he plunged straight into the little speech he had prepared, explaining why a move to Calcutta would be a career disaster.

Murugan sat through the monologue in silence, stroking his goatee, his bright, piercing eyes fixed on Antar. When Antar ran out of breath and paused, he gave him a nod of encouragement.

'Go on, Ant,' he said, 'I'm listening.'

Antar had saved his trump card for the last. He played it now. 'And have you thought about your payments?' he began. Halted by a momentary twinge of embarrassment, he stopped to clear his throat. 'Your payments to your ex-wife, I mean?' he said. 'You'll barely have enough to support yourself if you go ahead with this.'

Suddenly Murugan leaned forward, looking into Antar's eyes. 'You ever been married, Ant?' he said.

Startled, Antar fell back in his chair. Without meaning to, he nodded.

'And you're not now?'

'No,' said Antar.

'Yeah.' Murugan pursed his lips, as though confirming something to himself. 'I could tell.'

'How?'

'Just could,' said Murugan. 'So let's hear it, Ant: you paying alimony too? You seem to know a lot about the subject.'

'No!' Antar said vehemently. 'My wife died, in her first pregnancy . .

.'

'That's too bad,' said Murugan. 'Were you together long?'

'Yes.' The directness of the question took Antar off guard. 'I was orphaned you see, and her family kind of adopted me when I was in my teens, in Egypt. She was everything to me–' He cut himself short, flustered. Murugan pulled a sympathetic face: 'Shit happens.' He glanced at his watch and pushed his chair back. 'Come on, let's go grab a bite.'

Antar's head was reeling from the barrage of questions. 'Grab – a –

bite?' he said, momentarily uncomprehending.

Murugan gave a hoot of laughter: 'Get some lunch, something to eat.'

Antar had brought his lunch with him, of course. It was right behind him, in his briefcase; a sandwich and an apple. He liked to have lunch in his cubicle, by himself. But he could not bring himself to say so now.

'All right,' he said. 'Let us go.'

Out in the corridor, on the way to the elevator, Murugan declared cheerfully: 'Sounds like you got a pretty raw deal, huh?'

Trying to turn the conversation away from himself, Antar said quickly: 'And what about you?'

'My divorce was pretty straightforward,' Murugan said offhandedly as they joined the lunchtime queue at the elevator bank. His voice seemed to grow louder as they stepped into the elevator. 'The whole thing was a mistake – arranged by our families. Didn't last but a couple of years. No kids.'

Murugan gave a screech of laughter that went spiralling tinnily around the elevator. 'How did we get on this subject anyway?' he said.

'Oh yeah, you were telling me I'm going to be a deadbeat divorce if I go to Calcutta.'

Antar intercepted a stare from an acquaintance and dropped his eyes. He kept them down until they stepped off the elevator. They went to a small Thai restaurant, right around the corner from the building where LifeWatch had its offices. The waiter took their orders, and a moment of constrained silence followed. It was Antar who spoke first. 'Why are you so determined to go to Calcutta?' he blurted out suddenly. He regretted it once he'd said it; he was not in the habit of inviting confidences from strangers, especially someone as loud and brash as this. Yet, appalled as he was by the man's voice and manner, he couldn't help feeling an inexplicable sense of kinship with him. Murugan smiled. 'Shall I tell you why I have to go, Ant?' he said. 'It's simple: I don't know how many years I have left, and I want to do something with my life.'

'Do something with your life?' Antar said, on a note of derision.

'What you'll be doing is throwing away all your prospects – at LifeWatch, anyway.'

'But look at it this way,' said Murugan. 'You could find a thousand people – no, two thousand ... maybe ten – who could do what I'm doing now. But you won't find another person alive who knows more than I do about the subject I specialize in.'

'And that is?' Antar asked politely.

'Ronald Ross,' said Murugan. 'Nobel-winning bacteriologist. Take it from me, as far as the subject of Ronnie Ross goes, I'm the only show in town.'

A look of some scepticism must have crossed Antar's face, for Murugan added quickly: 'I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but it's not really that big a claim. Ross wasn't a Pasteur or a Koch: he just didn't have as much variety to his game. His stuff on malaria was about the only cutting-edge work he ever did. And even that was a freak one-off thing. Do you know how long it took him?'

Antar answered with a polite shake of his head.

'The actual research, the hands-on stuff, took just three years, door to door; three years spent entirely in India. He kicked off in the summer of 1895, in a little hole-in-the-wall army camp in a place called Secunderabad and ran the last few yards in Calcutta in the summer of 1898. And for only about half that time was he actually in the lab. The rest went into cleaning up epidemics, playing tennis and polo, going on holidays in the hills, that kind of stuff. The way I figure it, he spent about five hundred days altogether working on malaria. And you know what? I've tracked him through every single one of those five hundred days: I know where he was, what he did, which slides he looked at; I know what he was hoping to see and what he actually saw; I know who was with him, who wasn't with him. It's like I was looking over his shoulder. If his wife would have asked, "How was your day, honey?" I could have told her.'

'And how did you get to learn about all that?' said Antar, raising an eyebrow.

'Look,' said Murugan, 'the great thing about a guy like Ronald Ross is that he writes everything down. You've got to remember: this guy's decided he's going to rewrite the history books. He wants everyone to know the story like he's going to tell it; he's not about to leave any of it up for grabs, not a single minute if he can help it. He's figured on a guy like me coming along some day and I'm happy to oblige. If you think about it, it's not a whole lot to know about: five hundred days of a guy's life.'

'Was Ross really that interesting?' Antar said.

'Interesting?' Murugan gave a shout of laughter. 'Yes and no. He was a genius, of course, but he was also a dickhead.'

'Yes,' said Antar, 'go on, I'm listening.'

'OK,' said Murugan, 'picture this: here's this guy, a real huntin', fishin', shootin' colonial type, like in the movies; plays tennis and polo and goes pig-sticking; good-looking guy, thick moustache, chubby pink cheeks, likes a night out on the town every now and again; drinks whisky for breakfast some mornings; wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life for the longest time; sort of thought he'd like to write novels; had a go, wrote a couple of medieval romances; then said to himself, "Hell, this isn't working out like I thought, let's try writing poems instead." But that didn't pan out either and then Pa Ross, who's this big general in the British Army in India, says to him, "And what the fuck do you think you're doing, Ron? Our family's been out here in India since it was invented and there's no goddam service here doesn't have a Ross in it, you name it, Civil Service, Geological Service, Provincial Service, Colonial Service ... I've heard of them all, but no one told me about no Poetical Service yet. You need to dry out your sinuses, kid, and I'm going to tell you where you're going to do it so listen up. There's this outfit that's short on Rosses right now: the Indian Medical Service. It's got your name on it, written so large you can read it from a space shuttle. So kiss goodbye to this poetry shit, poetry just don't cut it." 'So young Ronnie snaps off a salute and scoots over to medical school in London. He coasts for the next few years, writing a few poems, doing gigs on open-mike nights, dreaming up outlines for his next novel. Medicine is the last thing on his mind, but he gets into the Indian Medical Service anyway and the next thing you know he's back in India toting a stethoscope and carving up vets. So he coasts again, a couple of years, playing tennis, riding, same old same old. And then one morning he gets out of bed and finds he's been bitten by the science bug. He's married, he's got kids, he's about to hit his midlife crisis; he should be saving for the power lawnmower and what does he do instead? He looks in the mirror and asks himself: "What's hot in medicine right now?

What's happening on the outer edge of the paradigm? What's going to bag me a Nobel?"

And what does the minor tell him? You got it: malaria that's where it's at this season.

'So the bulbs go off in Ronnie's head until he's strung out like the Brooklyn Bridge on a clear night: "Sure," he says, "why didn't I think of it before? That's the ticket: malaria.'"

'Did Ross have malaria himself?' Antar asked.

'He got it about halfvay into his work,' said Murugan. He directed a sharply appraising glance at Antar. 'Why'd you ask?

Have you ever had it yourself?'

Antar nodded. 'Yes,' he said, 'a long time ago, in Egypt.'

Murugan sat up. 'That's funny,' he said. 'The malaria rates are pretty low in Egypt.'

'I suppose I was an exception,' said Antar.

'So was yours a freak case? Or was there a localized outbreak?'

'I don't know,' said Antar shortly.

'Do you ever get relapses?' Murugan persisted.

'Sometimes,' Antar said.

'That's how it goes,' Murugan said with a wry smile. 'You think it's gone for ever and suddenly, it's hey, long time no see.'

'So you get them too!' Antar said, raising his eyebrows.

'Do I ever!' Murugan laughed. 'But you know, I don't worry about it too much. I guess it's because malaria isn't just a disease. Sometimes it's also a cure.'

'A cure?' Antar said. 'For what?'

'Ever heard of Julius Wagner-Jauregg?'

'No.'

'He won the Nobel too; for stuff he did with malaria. He was even born the same year as Ronnie Ross, but in Austria. He was a psychologist: had a couple of serious run-ins with Freud. But the reason his name is up there in the bright lights is that he discovered something about malaria that Ross couldn't even have begun to guess at.'

'What?' said Antar.

'He discovered that artificially induced malaria could cure syphilis - at least in the dementia paralytica stage when it attacks the brain.'

'It sounds incredible,' said Antar.

'Sure,' said Murugan. 'But it still got him the Nobel in 1927. Artificially induced malaria was the standard treatment for syphilitic paresis until the forties. Fact is, malaria does stuff to the brain that we're still just guessing at.'

'But to come back to Ross,' said Antar. 'You say he didn't catch malaria until he was well into his work? So what got him interested in it, then?'

'It was the Zeitgeist,' said Murugan. 'Malaria was the cold fusion of his day; the Sunday papers were scrambling to get it on their covers. And it figures: malaria's probably the all time biggest killer among diseases. Next to the common cold it's just about the most prevalent disease on the planet. We're not talking about a disease which shoots off the charts suddenly some century like the plague or smallpox or syphilis. Malaria's been around since the big bang or thereabouts, pegged at about the same level all along. There's no place on earth that's off the malaria map: Arctic circle, freezing mountaintop, burning desert, you name it, malaria's been there. We're not talking millions of cases here; more like hundreds of millions. We don't even know how many, because malaria's so widespread it doesn't always get on the charts. And besides, it's a master of disguise: it can mimic the symptoms of more diseases than you can begin to count – lumbago, the 'flu, cerebral haemorrhage, yellow fever. And even when it's properly diagnosed it's not like quinine is always going to get you home safe. With certain kinds of malaria you can mainline quinine all the livelong day and come nightfall you'll still be gathering freezer-burn in the mortuary. It's only fatal in a fraction of all reported cases but when you're dealing with hundreds of millions, a fraction adds up to the population of an economy-size country.'

'So when Ross began,' Antar said, 'was there a new interest in malaria?'

'You bet,' said Murugan. 'The mid-nineteenth century was when the scientific community began to wake up to malaria. Remember this was the century when old Mother Europe was settling all the Last Unknowns: Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas, even uncolonized parts of herself. Forests, deserts, oceans, warlike natives – that stuff's easy to deal with when you've got dynamite and the Gatling gun; chicken-feed compared to malaria. Don't forget it wasn't that long ago when pretty much every settler along the Mississippi had to take time off every other day for an attack of the shakes. It was just as bad in the swamps around Rome; or in Algeria, where French settlers were making a big push. And this was just about the time that new sciences like bacteriology and parasitology were beginning to make a splash in Europe. Malaria went right to the top of the research agenda. Governments began to pour money into malaria research – in France, in Italy, in the US, everywhere except England. But did Ronnie let that stop him? No, sir, he just stripped off and jumped right in.'

Antar frowned: 'You mean Ross didn't have any official support from the British government?'

'No, sir: the Empire did everything it could to get in his way. Besides, when it came to malaria the British were non-starters: the front-line work was being done in France and the French colonies, Germany, Italy, Russia, America – anywhere but where the Brits were. But you think Ross cared? You've got to hand it to the guy, he had balls, that motherfucker. There he is: he's at an age when most scientists start checking their pension funds; he knows sweet fuck all about malaria (or anything else); he's sitting out in the boonies somewhere where they never even heard of a lab; he hasn't set hands on a microscope since he left medical school; he's got a job in this dinky little outfit, the Indian Medical Service, which gets a couple of copies of Lancet and nothing else, not even the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine, forget about the Johns Hopkins Bulletin or the Annales of the Pasteur Institute. But our Ronnie doesn't give a shit: he gets out of bed one sunny day in Secunderabad or wherever and says to himself, in his funny little English accent, "Dear me, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself today, think I'll go and solve the scientific puzzle of the century, kill a few hours." Never mind all the heavy hitters who're out there in the ballpark. Forget about Laveran, forget about Robert Koch, the German, who's just blown into town after doing a number on typhoid; forget about the Russian duo, Danilewsky and Romanowsky, who've been waltzing with this bug' since when young Ronald was shitting himself in his crib; forget about the Italians who've got a whole goddam pasta factory working on malaria; forget about W. G. MacCallum out in Baltimore, who's skating on the edge of a real breakthrough in hematozoan infections in birds; forget about Bignami, Celli, Golgi, Marchiafava, Kennan, Nott, Canalis, Beauperthuy; forget about the Italian government, the French government, the US government who've all got a shitload of money out there chasing malaria; forget them all. They don't even see Ronnie coming until he's set to stop the clocks.'

'Just like that?' said Antar.

'That's right. At least that's how it began. And you know what? He did it; he beat the Laverans and the Kochs and the Grassis and the whole Italian mob; he beat the governments of the US and France and Germany and Russia; he beat them all. Or that's the official story anyway: young Ronnie, the lone genius, streaks across the field and runs away with the World Cup.'

'I take it you don't go along with this,' said Antar.

'You said it, Ant. This is one story I just don't buy.'

'Why not?'

A waiter appeared at their table and placed bowls of soup in front of them. Rubbing the palms of his hands together, Murugan lowered his head into the lemonscented cloud that was rising from his soup bowl.

'I take it,' Antar persisted, 'that you have your own version of how Ronald Ross made his discoveries?'

'That's certainly one way of putting it,' said Murugan.

'So what's your version of the story?' said Antar.

'I'll tell you what, Ant,' said Murugan, picking up his spoon. 'I'll read you all three volumes some day when we're on an around-the-world cruise: you buy, I'll talk.'

Antar laughed. 'All right,' he said. 'What about a couple of pages, just for starters?'

Murugan lifted a long, dripping braid of noodles to his mouth with a pair of chopsticks. He slurped them up with a loud vacuuming sound and sat back in his chair, dabbing a paper napkin on his goatee. There was a brief pause and when he spoke next his voice was soft and matter of fact.

'Can I ask you a philosophical question, Ant?'

Antar shifted in his chair. 'Go ahead,' he said, 'although I should tell you I'm not one for big questions . . .'

'Tell me, Ant,' Murugan said, fixing his piercing gaze upon Antar's face. 'Tell me: do you think it's natural to want to turn the page, to be curious about what happened next?'

'Well,' said Antar, uncomfortably. 'I'm not sure if I know what you mean.'

'Let me put it like this, then,' said Murugan. 'Do you think that everything that can be known should be known?'

'Of course,' said Antar. 'I don't see why not.'

'All right,' said Murugan, dipping his spoon in his bow1. 'I'll turn a few pages for you; but remember, it was you who asked. It's your funeral.'

Chapter 10

WHEN THEY WERE out of the auditorium Urmila thought she had her chance of getting Sonali to herself. 'Do you have a couple of minutes?'

she began. But Sonali was already hurrying down the driveway, towards the street.

Urmila caught up with her at the gates, at just the moment when a burst of applause sounded inside the auditorium, signalling the end of Phulboni's speech.

'I'm sorry I had to leave so early,' Sonali said. 'I would have liked to stay for the rest but it's past eight and I really must get home now.'

'Oh.' Urmila made a half-hearted effort to conceal her disappointment. 'You have to go right this minute?'

Sonali paused. 'Yes,' she said. 'I'm expecting someone. Why?'

'It's just that I was hoping to talk to you,' Urmila said.

'About what?'

'About him,' said Urmila, inclining her head towards the auditorium.

'Phulboni.'

'What about him?'

'I've got to write an article about him,' said Urmila. 'And I've been wondering about a couple of things. Someone told me that you might be the person to talk to.'

'Me?' Sonali was taken aback. 'I don't know if I'll be able to tell you very much.'

She stood undecided for a moment. Then with a glance at her watch, she said: 'Well, why don't you come home with me? We can talk until my guest comes.'

Without waiting for an answer Sonali stepped out and flagged down a taxi. Ignoring Urmila's protests, she bundled her in and climbed in after her. 'Alipore,' she said to the driver, and then rolled her window down as the taxi trundled past the cool darkness of the Race Course. Just before the Alipore Bridge the taxi ran into a traffic jam and came squealing to a halt. Sonali turned to Urmila. 'What was it you wanted to ask me about?' she said, her voice rattling to the rhythm of the idling car.

'About some of Phulboni's early stories,' Urmila said. Sonali raised her eyebrows. 'But why me?' she said. 'Who told you to ask me, of all people?'

Urmila hesitated. 'Someone I know,' she said.

'Who?' said Sonali.

'You know her too,' said Urrnila. 'Or at least you did. She talks about you a lot, anyway.'

'Who is it?' said Sonali. 'You're making me curious.'

'Mrs Aratounian.' Urmila said the name with a warm smile.

'Mrs Aratounian?' cried Sonali. 'You mean Mrs Aratounian of Dutton's Nursery on Russell Street?'

'Yes,' said Urmila. 'The same Mrs Aratounian. Do you remember her?'

Sonali nodded, but the truth was that she hadn't seen Mrs Aratounian in years and was just barely able to recall a neat, rather forbidding woman, dressed in a black skirt and gold-rimmed glasses. She'd always reminded Sonali of the Irish nuns at her convent school: she had just that kind of ringing voice and abrupt manner. She was from an Armenian family that had been in Calcutta for generations, Sonali remembered: they'd owned Dutton's Nursery for ever.

'My God!' she exclaimed..'Dutton's! It must be years since I last went there.'

'But you know,' Urmila said, in a rush, 'the first time I ever saw you was at Dutton's.'

'At Dutton's?' Sonali glanced at her in astonishment. 'Why, I didn't know we'd met before I started working at Calcutta.'

'We didn't exactly meet.' Urmila was embarrassed now; she wished she hadn't mentioned it.

It had happened years ago: Urmila was in her last year in school and the reason she was at Dutton's Nursery that morning was that she was the student representative on the Grounds and Gardens Committee. She'd been taken there by the teacher-members of the committee, in the school van.

She was nervous: Mrs Aratounian scared her with her flinty voice and her drill-sharp eyes. The last time she was at the Nursery she'd put out a hand to touch a rose, when she felt someone's gaze boring into her. She spun guiltily around, snatching back her hand, and sure enough, Mrs Aratounian was watching her from the far side of the room. 'That's a plant, not a dog,' she said, with a glint of her goldrimmed bifocals, 'and the reason it has thorns is that it doesn't want to be petted.' Urmila had felt so small she'd wanted to erase herself, like a smudge of chalk. On this occasion the visit began well. Mrs Aratounian went out of her way to be kind. She pointed to a stand of potted chrysanthemums and said: 'Pick one out, dear, and I'll let you have it. Just this once.'

Urmila was looking over the chrysanthemums when there was a sudden commotion at the door. She turned to see Sonali Das walking in. Dutton's was full of people – it was the time of year when everyone was buying seeds and plants. Sonali's entrance created a sensation: she had just published her book and her picture was everywhere. She was dressed in a green and white chiffon sari, with a huge pair of sunglasses pushed back over her hair, looking every bit the film-star. Urmila had recently seen one of her films: she watched her open mouthed, shrinking back into the chrysanthemums, mortified at the thought of being seen in her grimy school uniform and her two thin braids. While talking to Mrs Aratounian, Sonali was joined by a tall, powerfully built man, with a massive, heavy-jawed face. His jaw and eyebrows stood out in sharp outline, under a head that was almost completely bald. It was evident that the two of them had come together. He seemed old for her, Urmila decided, but he wasn't bad looking, in a thuggish way. She wondered who he was.

Then the man said something to Mrs Aratounian. To Urmila's utter horror, Mrs Aratounian turned and pointed in her direction, at the chrysanthemums. For a brief moment Urmila stood undecided. By the time she had recovered, it was too late. They were standing right in front of her and Sonali was craning around, reaching for a flowerpot. Urmila sidestepped quickly, ducking out of her way. But in her hurry she jogged Sonali's hand. The pot fell to the ground and shattered with a terrific crash, showering the floor with leaves, petals and earth. Aghast, Urmila dropped to her knees. She began to sweep up the scattered earth and pottery, keeping her eyes on the floor, not daring to look up. She was near tears.

Then a very large pair of hands descended to the floor, in front of her, filling her entire field of vision. The hands were matted with thick, curly hair and the knuckles were the size of walnuts. Distracted though she was, Urmila noticed that one of the hands was partly paralysed, with the thumb, lying stiffly curled against the palm. Then the hands began to help her, awkwardly sweeping the earth together.

Urmila raised her head and found herself looking at the man who had followed Sonali into the shop. He was staring at her – not angrily, but with a fixed, appraising gaze. Something about his look frightened Urmila and she dropped her eyes. The next thing she knew, Sonali's arms were around her, helping her up. 'Poor thing,' she was saying to Mrs Aratounian. 'It's not her fault: I'll pay.'

Urmila got a terrific scolding on the way back to school, in the van. But soon enough her teachers lost interest in her and began to gossip about Sonali Das and the man she was with.

Urmila discovered to her surprise that she knew his name: it was Romen Haldar. She'd heard him talked about at home: he lived in a huge house just down the road from their flat. She knew he was a wealthy builder and contractor, and that he had a lot of influence in a major club. Her younger brother, who dreamt of playing in the First Division, often talked of him.

Now, recalling the incident, Urmila was able to laugh. 'It was years ago,' she told Sonali. 'I knocked a pot of flowers out of your hand: chrysanthemums.'

'I don't remember,' said Sonali.

'Of course not,' said Urmila. 'But you were very nice about it. So was Mrs Aratounian. She became a real friend after that.'

'So you know Mrs Aratounian well?' Sonali asked.

'I visit her occasionally,' Urmila said, 'at her flat on Robinson Street. She's always been very kind to me. She's very interesting in her own crusty way. Besides, her flat is so peaceful – with all those plants and comfortable chairs and sofas. It's nice to escape from the magazine every once in a while. I drop in whenever I can.'

'I heard Mrs Aratounian retired and sold Dutton's,' Sonali said. 'Must have made a fortune, with that location.'

'I don't know,' Urmila said. 'I never asked. But actually I think she's having trouble making ends meet;'now that she's retired. She's always thinking up little schemes for making extra money. "I've been in business all my life," she says – you know how she talks – "and as sure as an egg's an egg, I'm not going to stop now.'''

Sonali laughed. 'What are her schemes?' she said.

'Her latest is that she's going to take in paying guests and turn her flat into a businessman's guest house.'

'No!' Sonali exclaimed in disbelief.

'Yes,' Urmila continued. 'She's even stuck a board on her door. The trouble is, no one ever sees it unless they're going up the stairs, so she hasn't had any guests yet.'

'What made her think of it?' Sonali asked.

'I asked her that,' said Urmila. 'And she said she got the idea because an old house on the other side of Robinson Street is being turned into a hotel, by a developer. She said: "The blackguard actually has the cheek to hang a sign on the lawn. Plain as a wart on the nose. 'Site for the Robinson Hotel.' If he can do it, why can't I?'" And then suddenly Urmila froze in an attitude of dismay with her hands clapped over her open mouth.

Sonali smiled, and took a cigarette out of her handbag. . 'She meant Romen, I suppose?' she said drily, flicking open her lighter. 'Romen showed me that house on Robinson Street the other day. He's very proud of it; he's actually going to rebuild the place.' She puffed at the flame and allowed the smoke to curl slowly out of her pursed lips. Urmila began to mumble hurried apologies.

Sonali laughed: 'Don't worry. I really don't mind what people say about Romen. You should hear how the wags go on about him at his club. Of course the Calcutta Wicket Club is the last place in the world where wags still survive and live to say waggish things. You should hear them when they start on Romen.'

She gave Urmila a reassuring pat on the arm. 'Have you ever met Romen?' she said.

'No.' Urmila shook her head. 'I just saw him that one time, at Dutton's, with you.'

'I think you'd like him,' Sonali said. 'He's had an extraordinary life, you know.'

'Really?' Urmila said in a noncommittal voice. She remembered hearing that Romen Haldar had started with nothing; that he'd arrived at Calcutta's Sealdah Station without a coin in his pocket. Sonali nodded. 'You'll see,' she said. 'He's not at all the person people make him out to be. You'll meet him tonight: it's him I'm waiting for. He said he'd come over this evening.'

The taxi stopped at a pair of heavy steel gates. Sonali began to fumble in her handbag, looking for money to pay the driver. A uniformed chowkidar stepped out of a booth. He took a careful look before allowing the taxi to enter the exclusive residential complex. There were four blocks of flats in the estate, set well apart, each at an angle to the others, so that every veranda looked out on its fair share of Alipore's greenery.

As the taxi swung around the complex, Sonali glanced at one of the estate's parking areas. Urmila followed her eyes to a discreet little sign hanging over an empty spot. It said: Reserved, R. Haldar. Sonali sighed. 'Romen isn't here yet,' she said. 'We can talk until he comes.' Chapter 11

SCRIBBLING A DATE on the restaurant's brightly coloured paper napkin, Murugan placed it before Antar.

'Here's the deal,' he said. 'It's May 1895. We're in the military hospital in Secunderabad, it's so hot the floors are shimmering, no fans, no electricity, a roomful of jars, all neatly stacked up on shelves, a desk with a straight-backed chair, a single microscope with slides scattered about, one guy, in uniform, hunched over the microscope and a swarm of orderlies buzzing around him. That's Ronnie and the other guys are the chorus line, or so Ronnie thinks anyway. "Do this," he says and they do it. "Do that," he says and they scramble. That's what he's grown up with, that's what he's used to. Mostly he doesn't even know their names, hardly even their faces: he doesn't think he needs to. As for who they are, where they're from and all that stuff, forget it, he's not interested. They could be buddies, they could be cousins, they could be cell-mates; it would be all the same to Ronnie.'

'Wait a minute,' Antar interrupted. 'May 1895? So Ronald Ross is at the beginning of his malaria research?'

'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Ronnie's just got back from a vacation in England. While he was over there, he met with Patrick Manson, in London.'

'Patrick Manson?' Antar raised an eyebrow. 'Do you mean the Manson of elephantiasis?'

'That's the man,' said Murugan. 'Manson's one of the alltime greats; he's lived in China so long he can skin a python with chopsticks; he's the guy who wrote the book on filaria, the bug that causes elephantiasis. Now he's back in England where he's become the Queen's head honcho in bacteriological research. Doc Manson wants to get the malaria prize –

for Britain, he says, for the Empire: fuck those Krauts and Frogs and Wops and Yanks. He may be a Scot but come gametime he roots for Queen and Country: you don't have to sell him on how no Scotsman ever saw a finer sight than the London turnpike: he's bought it already.'

'If I remember correctly,' Antar said, 'Manson proved that the mosquito was the vector for filaria. Am I right?'

'Right,' said Murugan. 'Now he's got a hunch that the mosquito has something to do with the malaria bug too. He doesn't have time to do the work himself so he's looking for someone to carry the torch for Queen and Empire. Guess who walks in? Ronnie Ross. Trouble is Ronnie's not exactly a front runner at this point. In fact the century's biggest breakthrough in malaria research has happened recently but it's passed Ronnie by. Way back in the 1840s a guy called Meckel found microscopic granules of black pigment in the organs of malaria patients – black spots, some round, some crescent shaped, tucked inside tiny masses of protoplasm. For forty years no one can figure out what this stuff is. The breakthrough comes in 1880: Alphonse Laveran, a French army surgeon in Algeria, runs out to get some lunch, leaving a plate cooking under his

'scope. He gets back from his hickory-grilled merguez and guess what?

One of those crescent-shaped granules is moving. He sees it beginning to jive, turning into a miniature octopus, throwing out tentacles, shaking the whole cell.

'So Laveran puts two and two together: hey, this thing moves, it's a bug. He faxes the Academy of Medicine in Paris; tells them he's found the cause of malaria and it's a critter, a protozoan – an animal parasite. But Paris doesn't buy it. Pasteur's the boss out there and he's sent the smart money chasing after bacteria. No one buys Laveran's protozoan critter: it's like he said he found the yeti. Some of the biggest names in medicine get busy refuting "Laveranity". The only converts are the Italians: they become born-again Laveranites. In 1886 Camillo Golgi shows that Laveran's parasite grows inside the red blood cell, eating its host and shitting black pigment; that the pigment collects in the centre while the bug begins to divide; he demonstrates that the recurrence of malarial fevers is linked to this pattern of asexual reproduction.

'Ronnie's a wallflower while this party's heating up. He's on the antiLaveran bench. He thinks Laveran's bug doesn't exist: he's spent the last several months trying to catch a glimpse of it and hasn't succeeded. He's even published an article trying to prove that Laveran was hallucinating. The first time Ronnie ever sees the bug is in Manson's lab. He converts, and Manson sends him hustling back to India to look for the vector.'

Antar broke in: 'So it was Manson who was responsible for conceiving of the connection between malaria and mosquitoes?'

'It wasn't exactly a new idea,' said Murugan. 'Most cultures that had to deal with malaria knew there was some connection. '

'But,' Antar persisted, 'you're saying it's Manson who first gave Ross the idea?'

'You could say Manson pointed in the general direction,' said Murugan. 'Except that he sent him down the scenic route. He had this screwball theory that the malaria bug was transmitted from mosquito to man via drinking water. His plan was to get Ronnie to do the grunt work on this theory of his.'

'And Ross believed in this theory?'

'You bet.'

'So what happened?' said Antar.

'OK, we're back in 1895, right? Ross can't wait to get started on Doc Manson's mosquito-juice theory. He gets off the ship at Madras and takes a train up to join his regiment, the 19th Madras Infantry. They're stationed in a neighbourhood called Begumpett in Secunderabad. On his way up Ronnie sticks needles into anything that moves. When he pulls into Begumpett he begins to offer money for samples of malarial blood –

real money, one rupee per prick! Think about it. This is 1895; one rupee can buy a family of four enough rice to last a month. There's so much malaria in this place, the mosquitoes are doing double shifts and can't keep up. And here's Ronnie willing to pay real money for a few drops of malarial blood, and he can't find a single taker. Someone's put out the word that this weird doctor's blown into town and he gets his rocks off putting naked guys into bed with mosquitoes. No one's going near him; they're crossing the street to get away. Suddenly Ronnie finds himself starring in a bad-breath commercial: every time he steps out on Main Street, Begumpett, it's empty.

'Then suddenly his luck changes. On May 17 1895, just when it begins to look really hopeless, he gets his first perfect case of malaria - a patient called Abdul Kadir. Ronnie goes into high gear: he strips Abdul Kadir, shoves him into a bed, drapes a wet mosquito net over him and releases a test-tube full of mosquitoes into it. Next morning he harvests his crop and suddenly Ronnie's laboratory is the happening place in Begumpett. Until then he's observed only two of the flagellate forms of the parasite. On May 18 he flattens one of Abdul Kadir's mosquitoes (mosquito number 18) and he finds sixty parasites in a single field. He's so excited he does back-flips all the way to his desk. He's found a "wonder case" he writes Doc Manson. That's just the beginning. The first time Ronnie sees the crescentsphere transformation of the parasite is on June 26 1895, in Abdul Kadir's blood. Over the next couple of months Abdul Kadir's blood guides him through all the critical phases of his research.'

'Can a single case make that much difference?' said Antar.

'Ronnie thought so,' said Murugan. 'He was convinced that Abdul Kadir was crucial to his work. He'd looked at a fair number of blood samples already but none of them ever showed him what Abdul Kadir's did. You'd think a bug like the malaria parasite wouldn't look for any teacher's pets, but maybe it doesn't work that way. Maybe it shows itself more clearly in certain cases. That's what Ronnie thought, anyway. He became hooked on Abdul Kadir and his blood. Days when Abdul Kadir's parasites went into remission Ronnie was climbing the walls. "Alas! the wonder case which fortune has sent me is drying up", he wrote Doc Manson on May 22. The dickhead had an ego so big he thought Fortune was putting him on its cover. He clearly knew that Abdul Kadir was a special case. But he never stopped to ask himself how come this guy just walked through the door when he needed him most. He thought it was just luck.'

'Let me be clear about this,' said Antar. 'Are you suggesting that Abdul Kadir's arrival at the hospital on May 17 wasn't just coincidence?'

'You've got to wonder,' said Murugan. 'Look at it this way: Ross knows no one else will come near him even when he doubles or triples his one-rupee per prick rate; on July 17 he writes Doc Manson: "The bazaar people won't come to me even though I offer what is enormous payment to them. I offer two and three rupees for a single finger prick and much more if I find crescents – they think it is witchcraft." But Ronnie never stops to ask himself: why's this guy Abdul Kadir here, if no one else is? How come he doesn't think this is witchcraft? What makes him so special? Where's he from? What's he doing here? What's his story? We're not talking deep therapy: just plain, everyday curiosity. But Ronnie keeps all his curiosity for the life cycle of the malaria parasite; about the life cycles of its hosts he couldn't care less.'

'So what are you suggesting?' Antar said sharply.

'I'm not suggesting anything at this point,' said Murugan. 'I'm just giving you the facts and the chronology.'

'All right,' said Antar. 'Go ahead.'

'OK,' said Murugan. 'We fast forward to the week after Abdul Kadir's arrival: May 25 1895. Doc Manson thinks Ronnie's getting sidetracked, so he's written to remind him of his theory: that "the beast in the mosquito . . . gets to man in mosquito dust". He wants Ronnie to make a cocktail from dead mosquitoes and feed it to someone.

'Ronnie gets out his glasses and starts mixing. Trouble is, he hasn't got anyone to give it to: can't find anyone fool enough to volunteer. Same old story: Ronnie's in his lab in Begumpett, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

'And what do you know? Ronnie gets lucky once again. Or maybe it's not just luck; maybe he left Doc Manson's letter out on his desk and someone read it. Maybe. Anyway, on May 25 1895, at exactly 8 p.m., a guy called Lutchman walks into Ronnie's life. He volunteers to drink Ronnie's cocktail. Ronnie pops the corks and breaks out the mosquito margarita.

'This Lutchman's a "healthy looking young fellow" Ronnie notices: just the guinea pig he's been looking for. He explains the experiment to Lutchman and hands him the dead-mosquito concoction. Lutchman makes like he doesn't already know what it is, and swigs it. Ronnie's a little anxious but he doesn't let on. All he knows about Lutchman is that he's a "dhooley-bearer": in other words the British government pays him to shovel shit. Ronnie knows Her Imperial Majesty wouldn't be too pleased about this little experiment of his if she got to hear of it up in her castle on London Bridge or wherever. Later he covers his tracks by writing Doc Manson: "Don't for heaven's sake mention Lutchman at the British Medical Association ... he is a government servant. To give a government servant fever would be a crime!"

'Lutchman has a fever next morning: 99.8 at 8 a.m. ("Looking ill", Ronnie notes). Looks like it's time for Doc Manson to jump out of his bathtub; maybe malaria really is spread through mosquito-dust. Ronnie gets ready to pop the corks; he's about to call his agent. But then comes the letdown. Young Lutchman doesn't just look healthy; he is healthy. He's allergic to mosquito-dust, is all. A day later he's so fit he could run the Begumpett marathon: no sign of malaria in his blood. That's the end of the line for the mosquito-dust theory. Ronnie's free to go back to Abdul Kadir again: he's been headed off at the pass.'

'Wait, wait,' Antar broke in. 'I want to be clear about this. Are you arguing that Lutchman was sent to Ross's lab specifically in order to disprove Manson's theory?'

'I'm not arguing anything,' said Murugan. 'Just taking the facts as they come. And the facts are these: Ronnie's been working on the malaria bug for about a month when Abdul Kadir and Lutchman walk into his life. Ronnie hasn't made a secret of what he's doing: he's put the word out about needing malaria patients. If someone was watching let's just say if –if someone was watching, if someone was looking for a research scientist to do certain kinds of experiments, then this is when they would have picked up the buzz. So this someone, who's watching carefully, maybe reading Ronnie's lab notes and his letters to Doc Manson, this someone decides, OK, it's time to get a new player in place. The first thing they've got to do is to make sure Ronnie doesn't get any patients. So they spread the word about witchcraft; it flies through the bazaar; Ronnie becomes the bogeyman of Begumpett.

'By mid-May they know Ronnie's getting desperate, no patients, no parasites, no nothing. He can't get anyone to come to his parties and he can't figure out why. This is when they send him Abdul Kadir who's got industrial-size parasites; they hold Ronnie's hand as he puts his first twos and twos together; they're happy, everything's on schedule, they're leading Ronnie exactly where they want him to go. And then Ronnie gets his letter from boss-man Manson; suddenly everything flies off track. Ronnie goes off into left field, with this mosquito-powder stuff. They go wild: they know there's nothing at the end of that trail; they have to find a way to turn him back in the right direction. So what do they do? They send him Lutchman.'

'But why Lutchman?' said Antar.

'Let me put it like this,' said Murugan, 'whoever picked Lutchman knew exactly what they were doing. For one thing, they knew enough about microscopy to make sure that he didn't have any malaria parasites in his blood. Ronnie was being second guessed here. Somebody had figured out what was going to happen if Ronnie got a positive result after feeding Lutchman mosquito water. He was going to link the parasites to Doc Manson's theory and bingo! there goes the schedule. Months, maybe years could go by while Ronnie chases around Begumpett, making the 19th Madras Infantry drink dead mosquitoes.

'So they stepped in; they sent him someone who didn't have any parasites. Remember that this is a place where the rates of malaria in the general population are so high they're off the charts. It isn't easy to find people who don't have any trace of the parasite in their blood. But these guys reach into their bag, pick out someone who's just right, and then they send him over to Begumpett General. It works: Ronnie's back on track, and right on schedule. And better still they've planted Lutchman exactly where they want him, where he can run interference for the whole team.'

'But,' said Antar, 'wouldn't Ross have noticed something so obvious?'

'Ronnie?' Murugan laughed. 'Ronnie wouldn't have noticed if Lutchman wore it on a T-shirt. If anything but a parasite comes calling, Ronnie's out to lunch. The way Ronnie tells it, he was short of help at the time, so he decided to hire Lutchman as a houseboy-cum-gofer. All that Ron ever knew about him was that his name was "Lutchman" and that he was a "dhooley-bearer" by trade.

'For the next thirty-four months – the entire period that Ron's working on malaria – Lutchman sticks to him like roll-on deodorant. Starting May 1895, until July 1898, when Ron makes his final breakthrough in Calcutta, Lutchman almost never lets Ron out of his sight. He gets pretty good at doing luggage impersonations. "I left Secunderabad with the smallest possible 'kit'," says Ronnie, "my microscope and my faithful Lutchman."

'It gets so that even Ron can't help noticing that Lutchman's making some pretty important connections for him. In April 1897, Ron takes a break in the Nilgiri Hills. He takes Lutchman with him, to Ootacamund

– "a bit of England placed on the rounded tops of the Nilgiri Hills", says Ron. But Ron goes down to the Westbury coffee estate in a valley, looking for malaria parasites, and there for the first time in his life, he gets malaria.

'While he's recouping Lutchman succeeds in planting a crucially important idea in his head: that the malaria vector might be one particular species of mosquito. "Oh, yeah?" says Ron; he thinks Lutchman's full of shit: he's been getting a lot of negative results but it's never occurred to him that they might have something to do with family differences among mosquitoes.

"Tell you what, Lutch," says Ron, "next time I want your help I'll ask for it." But after Lutchman plants this little seed something begins to stir in the mud; a creature begins to take shape in Ron's head.

'He starts eyeballing every different species of mosquito he can get his hands on. Trouble is Ron doesn't know a goddam thing about mosquitoes: he's never even heard the word anopheles. He ends up chasing after Culex, Stegomyia –going every which way but ahead. Now Lutchman cuts in once again. On August 15 1897 he goes into a huddle with the rest of his crew and decides something's got to be done double quick.

'The way Ronnie tells it: "Next morning, 16 August, when I went again to hospital after breakfast, the Hospital Attendant (I regret I have forgotten his name) pointed out a small mosquito seated on the wall with its tail sticking outwards." Ronnie kills it with a puff of tobacco smoke and cuts it open: nothing. But at last he's on the right track: Lutchman's got him chasing after the real malaria vector. Ron still doesn't know they're called anopheles: names them "dappled-wing mosquitoes".

'Next day Lutchman makes sure Ronnie gets more of the same: sends him a jarful of anopheles with the same attendant. "Sure enough," says Ronnie, "there they were: about a dozen big, brown fellows, with fine tapered bodies and spotted wings, hungrily trying to escape through the gauze covering of the flask which the Angel of Fate had given to my humble retainer! – dappled-winged mosquitoes' ... " Angel of Fate my ass! With Ronnie it always has to be some Fat Cat way up in the sky: what's under his nose he can't see.

'On August 20 1897 Ronnie makes his first major breakthrough: he sees the placement of Plasmodium zygotes in the stomach sac of Ano-pheles stephensii. "Eureka," he says to his diary, "the problem is solved."

"Whew!" says Lutchman, skimming the sweat off his face. "Thought he'd never get it."

'Later Ron asks him: "Yo, Lutch, where'd you get that hot tip about mosquito species?" Lutchman plays dumb: "Oh, some villagers up in them hills happened to mention it one morning while grazing their goats." And you know what? Ron buys it. He thinks Lutchman hit upon this bright idea while gambolling in the hills with happy natives.

'What gets me about this scenario is the joke. Here's Ronnie, right?

He thinks he's doing experiments on the malaria parasite. And all the time it's him who is the experiment on the malaria parasite. But Ronnie never gets it; not to the end of his life.' Chapter 12

THE TAXI SLOWED to a crawl on Chowringhee. Every time Murugan turned to look back he was certain he'd spot the boy with the printed Tshirt, weaving through the traffic at a run. But there was still no sign of him when the taxi turned onto Theatre Road. Murugan's fingers began to unclench.

Halfway down Theatre Road Murugan spotted a roadside vendor selling rubber slippers and stopped the taxi. He spent several minutes choosing one for himself and felt much better for it. He jumped into the taxi and waved the driver on, impatient to get back to the guest house on Robinson Street.

The guest house was one thing he could congratulate himself on. It was just down the road from where Ronald Ross had lived while he was in Calcutta. Ross had stayed at a 'Europeans only' boarding house at number three; the Robinson Guest House, where Murugan was staying, was on the fourth floor of number twenty-two.

Murugan had found the place entirely by accident, listed in a dogeared typewritten roster at the airport's tourist information desk. The woman behind the desk had been trying to nudge him towards five-star hotels like the Grand and the Taj. She was doubtful when he picked the Robinson Guest House. It was a recent entry on the list, she told him; she couldn't vouch for it, she didn't know of anyone who'd stayed there. He would do better to go to a hotel.

'But it's exactly where I want to be,' Murugan said in triumph, 'on Robinson Street.'

He had no idea what it would be like of course, and was pleased when Robinson Street proved to be leafy and relatively quiet, lined with large modern blocks of flats and a few old-fashioned colonial mansions. Number twenty-two was one of the older buildings, a massive fourstorey edifice, studded with graceful columned balconies: probably once the grandest building on the street, its Doric facade was now much bruised and discoloured, its plaster blackened with mildew. He went up to the fourth floor in a rattling birdcage of a lift that ascended through the centre of a winding teakwood staircase. When the lift came to a stop Murugan stepped gingerly onto the splintered planks of a wooden landing. A beam of sunlight, shining through a hole in a stained-glass window, revealed a small sign beside the tall door to his right. It said: The Robinson Guest House. Beneath it was a nameplate for N. Aratounian.

Dragging his leather suitcase behind him, Murugan went to the door and rang the bell. Several minutes later he heard footsteps on the other side. Then the door swung open and he found himself looking at an ashen-faced, elderly woman in a frayed dressing gown and rubber slippers. 'Hi,' said Murugan, sticking out a hand. 'Any vacancies today?'

Ignoring his hand, the woman looked him up and down, frowning through her gold-rimmed bifocals. 'What do you want?' she said, peremptorily.

'A room,' said Murugan. He tapped the sign by the door. 'This is a guest house, right?'

Mrs Aratounian cocked her head so she could examine him through the lower halves of her glasses. 'I don't believe you've introduced yourself,' she said.

'The name's Murugan,' he said. 'But feel free to call me Morgan.'

Mrs Aratounian sniffed. 'You'd better come in, Mr Morgan,' she said.

'I don't have much to offer by way of accommodation but I'll show you my spare room. You can decide for yourself whether you want to stay or not.'

She led Murugan through a musty drawing room, cluttered with doilied peg-tables, silver-framed photographs and porcelain statuettes. Pushing open a door, she ushered him into a large sun-lit room with very high ceilings. A mosquito-netted bed stood marooned in the centre of the marble floor, like a drifting raft. Directly above it, suspended from an iron hook, hung a bulbous, long-stemmed ceiling fan. At the far end of the room was a small balcony. Crossing the room, Murugan went out, leaned over the balustrade and looked up and down the street – from the tree-lined cemetery at the Loudon Street end, to the traffic on Rawdon Street, to his right. Shading his eyes, he threw a glance diagonally across at number three Robinson Street. He caught a brief glimpse of a large, old-fashioned colonial mansion, set within high walls and surrounded by ornamental palms. He noticed that the front of the house was covered with bamboo scaffolding and that the driveway was littered with piles of bricks and cement.

Murugan pumped a fist: the location was as good as he could have hoped. 'I'll take it,' he said to Mrs Aratounian. He dumped his luggage on the bed, took a shower and went off to look for the Ross memorial. That was just a few hours ago, but now, Robinson Street looked quite different. It was packed with cars, all the way down its length: not the usual Ambassadors and Marutis but big expensive Japanese and German cars. The cars were disgorging men in starched dhotis and kurtas and bediamonded women in dazzling saris. A wedding was in progress in the compound of a large multi-storeyed block of flats. Music was blaring under the chequered awning of a colourful pandal. A brilliantly illuminated archway over the entrance bore the legend 'Neeraj weds Nilima', spelt out in flowers. The whole street was lit up – all except number three which seemed, in contrast, to be sunk in a well of darkness although it was right next door to the wedding. Walking towards the guest house Murugan paused at the gateway of number three. All he could see of the mansion was the high wall, plastered with handbills and painted slogans; the brilliance of the surrounding lights seemed to have deepened the shadows around the compound. Going over to the steel gates, he saw that they were fastened by a heavy chain. He banged on the gates, just in case there was a watchman inside to let him in. There was no answer. Stepping back, Murugan looked up at the mansion's looming silhouette: it was much more imposing close up than he had expected.

Suddenly, there was a power cut and the lights went out, all the way down the street. There followed an instant of absolute stillness; everything seemed to go quiet, except the chirruping of the cicadas in the nearby trees and the trumpeting of conches in the far distance. In that instant Murugan heard the soft bell-like ringing of metallic cymbals, somewhere within the mansion. He looked up, at the shuttered windows above, and saw a flickering orange rectangle materialize in the darkness. He jumped, startled, and looked again. It was merely dim firelight, leaking through the ragged edges of a rotten window frame. Then with a deafening roar, a generator came on at the wedding next door, and an interrupted filmsong screeched upwards through the octaves as a recordplayer came slowly back to life. Murugan was certain now that the mansion wasn't empty: from the sound of it there was some kind of ceremony under way inside. He stepped up to the gates and rattled the chains. To his surprise, they fell away from the gatepost: someone had forgotten to lock them. Murugan pushed the gate open and stepped in. It was dark but his keychain had a small flashlight attached. He took it out, switched it on and shone it ahead. The beam lit upon heaps of bricks and cement, lying in the driveway. There was a colonnaded portico at the apex of the curved drive, covered with a net of bamboo scaffolding. Murugan could see a doorway beyond, leading into the pitch-dark interior of the house. Bits of grit and cement lodged in Murugan's rubber sandals as he walked up the driveway. He shook them out and went up to the portico. It led into a vast hallway. He pointed his flashlight into the darkness. The beam skimmed over piles of mattresses and mosquito nets, stacked neatly in the corners.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: 'Anyone in?' His voice was no match for the deafening roar of the nearby generator. He looked around, following the uneasy shadows that skimmed over the cavernous darkness of the hallway. Then his ears picked up a sound, a dull pounding, like a drum. It seemed to be somewhere within the house, but it was hard to be sure because of the generator and the blaring loudspeakers. He was about to go further into the hallway when a second beam of light appeared in the doorway. He heard an angry voice shouting: 'Who is that? Kaun hai? What are you doing here?'

He spun around and his flashlight fell on a man in a Nepali cap, running towards him, gesturing angrily with a chowkidar's nightstick. Murugan gave him a two-fingered salute, affecting a cockiness he did not feel. 'Just looking around,' he said.

The Nepali watchman shook his stick under Murugan's nose, turned him around and began to push him down the steps of the portico.

'Just taking a look,' Murugan said mildly. 'I didn't touch a thing.'

The watchman launched into a long tirade; Murugan could only catch snatches of it: he was telling him that no one was allowed in, there was construction going on inside.

Halfway down the driveway, the watchman reached up and pointed angrily at a large tin signboard. It was nailed into the trunk of a tree, beside the driveway. Murugan was surprised that he had missed it on his way in. It said: Site for the Robinson Hotel: private property; no tres-passing; proprietor and developer Romen Haldar. Murugan shook his arm free and went over to take a closer look. The watchman followed close behind, his voice growing louder. Murugan turned on him suddenly. 'Who's that?' he said. 'Who is Romen Haldar?'

The watchman paid no attention to his question. He took hold of his elbow, jerked him sideways and began pushing him towards the gate. Murugan caught a glimpse of the hilt of a sheathed kukri, sticking out of the top of his trousers.

As the watchman pulled the gate open, Murugan turned to take a last look, shining the beam of his flashlight into the debris-strewn garden. It fell upon a clothes line, strung between the trunks of two palms. Hanging amongst the dhotis, underwear and saris was a T-shirt with a print of palm trees and a beach.

Then the watchman gave him a shove and slammed the gates shut.

Chapter 13