The Calcutta Chromosome

Chapter 24

IT WAS seven fifteen in the morning and Urmila was nearing the end of her tether. She was in the kitchen, grinding spices, perspiration dripping off her face on to her grease-spotted sari. She had already been up an hour: she had given her parents their breakfast; she had cleaned the kitchen; she had fed and bathed her nephew and niece; she had washed her younger brother's uniform for his afternoon football match. She would have to leave within the hour if she was to be on time for the press conference at the Great Eastern Hotel. But there was still the business of the fish to deal with, and there was no sign of a fish-seller yet.

Urmila looked out of the kitchen window, trying to estimate how long it would take her to run to Gariahat Bazaar and back. She was in trouble, she knew, unless something miraculous happened soon: it would take at least half an hour if she had to go down to the bazaar, what with picking out a fish and bargaining and all the rest – there was no way around that.

The flat was on the third floor, boxed in on every side by other multi-storey buildings. The kitchen window was the only part of the flat that had a view, other than the balcony. It commanded a glimpse of a sliver of the city: she could see the ragged, spreading skyline of south Calcutta stretching away longitudinally, from the park below – a vista of mildew-darkened roofs vanishing into the smudged glow of a lowering monsoon sky.

Down below, in the park, the usual half-dozen cricket matches were already in progress. She could hear the thud of wood on leather and a few drowsy voices, shouting encouragement. In another corner of the park half a dozen men were busy swinging clubs and doing push-ups, below the tin roof of a body-building school. Further away, RashBehari Avenue was stirring in anticipation of rush hour. But the roadsides were still relatively empty except for a few shoppers hurrying back from Gariahat Bazaar, along the short-cut, with clumps of vegetables hanging over the tops of their nylon shopping bags.

The short-cut to Gariahat Bazaar curved off from the main avenue a few hundred yards away. It was a long, narrow lane whose principal landmark was a rambling, oldfashioned house, with a gravel driveway, a pillared portico and a well-tended garden. The house was clearly visible from the kitchen: Urmila's eyes often fell on it when she was working there. It was Romen Haldar's residence.

Just then the doorbell rang.

'The bell's ringing, Urmi,' her mother called out from her bedroom. 'Can't you hear it?'

Her father was out on the balcony with his paper, going through the Announcements column, a favourite morning pastime. He was reading the entries out aloud to himself, spitting out the names like chewed fish-bones. He put the paper on his knees and looked up. 'Who is it?' he called out. 'Someone go and have a look.'

Almost immediately her sister-in-law's voice came floating out of her bedroom: she was feeding her baby and couldn't get out of bed. Her older brother had already left to catch a morning train. Her younger brother was in the bathroom, snapping his fingers and singing, 'Disco diwana'.

Then her mother called out, in her softest, most cajoling voice: 'Go and have a look, Urmi, no one will if you don't… '

I'm busy here! she wanted to scream. Can't you see; I'm busy here, trying to get things ready before going to work…?

The doorbell rang again and now her six-year-old nephew ran into the kitchen and began to tug at her sari. 'Open the door, Urmi-pishi,' sang the boy. 'Urmi-pishikirrni-pishi, open the door, open the door… '

She slammed the heavy pestle on the pitted surface of the mortar, brilliantly coloured now with turmeric and chili, and pushed past her nephew, who was lying flat on the floor. The boy stretched out his hands as she went by and fastened his fingers on the bottom of her sari. She dragged him along for a couple of paces and then slapped his clenched fist.

He erupted into a wail and went racing to his parents' bedroom, crying: 'She hit me, she hit me, kirmi-pishi hit me…'

As she undid the doorlatch, Urmila heard her sister-in-law's voice break into a scream: 'How dare you hit my son?'

She flung the door open and found a young man standing outside, beside a large covered basket. She had never seen him before; he looked very young to be a vendor. He was dressed in a lungi and a greying T-shirt.

'You slut,' the voice followed Urmila through the open doorway. 'You think I don't know what you're up to, coming home late every night? I'll teach you a lesson; I'll teach you to hit my children… '

Urmila stepped out and slammed the door behind her. Embarrassment lent a note of shrillness to her voice as she snapped: 'What's the matter? What do you want?'

The young man gave her a cheerful grin, exposing a wide gap in his front teeth. Urmila was suddenly ashamed, mortified at the thought that she had allowed her sister-in-law to provoke her in front of a complete stranger. Inadvertently, she drew the back of her hand across her forehead. Her face contorted into a grimace as the ground spices burnt a smarting furrow across her face and brow. She wiped her eyes hurriedly with the end of her sari.

'What do you want?' she said again, more evenly.

The young man was squatting beside the basket now. With another smile he pulled back a layer of paper and plastic to reveal a pile of fish, gleaming silver in the earlymorning light.

He grinned. 'I just came to ask whether you need any fish this morning, didi,' he said. 'That's all.'

Chapter 25

'I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU here before,' Urmila said, kneeling beside the basket of fish. She began to examine the fish, pulling back their gills – out of habit, for today she really didn't care what she bought or for how much.

The young fish-seller gave her a cheerful smile, bobbing his head. 'I'll be coming regularly now,' he said. 'Buy one and see: I have the best fish in the market, fresh out of the water.'

'Every fish-seller says that,' said Urmila. 'It doesn't mean a thing.'

The fish-seller bristled. 'If you don't believe me, go and ask around,' he said. 'I sell to all the best houses. Why, do you know Romen Haldar's house, in the next lane?'

Urmila looked up, raising an eyebrow.

'Let me tell you,' he said proudly. 'They buy all their fish from me. Only from me: you can go and ask if you like.'

Reaching into the basket he moved a couple of fish out of the way. 'Here, let me show you something,' he said. 'Do you see this one here, this big ilish? I'm keeping that for them. I'm on my way there right now. I told them I'd bring them something special this morning.'

'I'll take it,' said Urmila.

The fish-seller shook his head. 'No,' he said, grinning. 'I can't give you that one: that's for them. But I'll give you this other one, it's just as good – here, look.'

Urmila gave him a perfunctory nod. 'All right,' she said, 'that one.' She told him to cut it up and went in to fetch her purse. By the time she came back, the fish-seller had a packet ready for her: he had wrapped the fish in bits of paper and stuffed it into a plastic bag.

Urmila clicked her tongue in annoyance when she saw the packet. 'You shouldn't have wrapped it up,' she said.

The fish-seller mumbled an excuse and began counting his money. Urmila went inside. She had no time to lose now. Hurrying into the kitchen she tipped the contents of the packet onto a plastic plate, in the sink. The chunks of fish fell out with a thump, scattering all over the sink. Urmila grimaced: the paper in which the fish was wrapped had turned into a soggy mess. She touched a piece of fish gingerly and the tip of her finger came away with a bit of paper attached. She had trouble shaking it off; it had dissolved into a wad of sticky glue.

Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she stole a quick glance out of the window. RashBehari Avenue was jammed with buses and minibuses, all belching thick clouds of smoke. She had no more than half an hour to spare if she was to get to the Great Eastern Hotel in time for the press conference. She began to scrub furiously.

After a few minutes she realized that her scrubbing was only making matters worse by working the paper deeper into the chunks of fish. She threw up her hands, thoroughly irritated now, and peeled a scrap of paper off her fingers. It was thin, cheap Xerox paper: the kind that accumulated in vast quantities in the Calcutta copying room.

So this is where it all ends up, she thought, as fishwrapping.

She glanced at the plastic bag again and saw that it was still full of paper. A few bits and pieces were dry; the blood hadn't seeped through to them yet. She tipped the paper out on the counter and held a sheet flat with the back of her hand.

It was a large, legal-size photocopy of a page of very fine English newsprint. The typeface was unfamiliar, old fashioned: she knew at a glance that the page wasn't from any of the current English-language papers printed in Calcutta. She made space for it on a shelf and spread it out.

The print was so fine she had trouble reading it. She turned on a light and looked at it again, turning instinctively to the top margin to look for the paper's name. The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: ' Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898.'

The page was divided into eight columns, each containing dozens of announcements of a routine kind: 'D. Attwater, Esq. transferred to Almora as Deputy Magistrate, Revenues', 'So-and-so to quit his post in the Port Authority, Calcutta, in order to become Assistant Harbourmaster in Singapore' and so on. Urmila skimmed quickly through it. She could not see why anyone would go to the trouble of copying something like that, a record of old bureaucratic appointments. She was about to sweep it into the wastebin when she noticed that one of the announcements had been underlined, in ink.

Squinting at the page she read: 'Leave approved for Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham, Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta, 10-15 January… '

Urmila cast a quick glance at the clock above the dining table. She really had no time to lose now, not a minute; if she didn't get the fish done in the next ten minutes she would be late for the press conference.

She knew she ought to get on with the cooking. But instead she found herself pulling out the two other bits of paper left in the plastic bag.

The next page was even more puzzling than the first. It was a copy of a sheet of paper with a list of names under an elaborate and unfamiliar logo. Holding the logo up to the light, she saw that it said 'South-Western Railways'. Handwritten beneath it were the words: '10 January 1898, Passenger list, Compartment 8'. Under this was a list of names. Urmila looked quickly through them; they seemed like British names. She read a couple of them to herself, spelling them out slowly: Major Evelyn Urquhart, D. Craven, Esq., Sir Andrew Acton… ' Then she noticed that a name at the bottom of the list had been underlined. It was: 'C. C. Dunn, Esq.'.

That's strange, she thought. The other name was D. D. something.

She didn't bother to look. She pushed the page aside and spread out the only remaining sheet.

It was a copy of another page of The Colonial Services Gazette. This one was dated 30 January 1898. She cast a quick glance over it: another long list of transfers, leaves approved, positions filled. Again one of the announcements was underlined. It read: 'The public is notified that Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham is currently on leave pending his retirement. He will be replaced by SurgeonMajor Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service.'

'Haven't you started cooking yet, Urmi?' her mother called out from the bedroom. 'It's getting late.'

Urmila started. She was furious with herself now for wasting so much time staring at used Xerox paper. She snatched the sheets off the shelf, flung them aside and hurried over to the sink.

The paper-wrapped fish had turned into a stinking, glutinous mess. It was all she could do not to vomit into the sink.

Chapter 26

SUDDENLY URMILA found herself shaking with indignation. She knew she was on the verge of one of those periodic seizures of outrage which sometimes gripped her when she was working on her investigative articles. She was so angry now that she stopped caring about the time about the press conference at the Great Eastern, the news editor, even the Minister of Communications from Delhi. She stuffed the pieces of fish back into the plastic bag and marched to the door. On her way out she snatched up the sheets of Xerox paper, crumpling them into a ball, in her fist.

Her mother had come out of her bedroom to see what the matter was. Her mouth fell open, seeing Urmila marching out of the flat in her grease-spattered sari, clutching a ball of paper and a bag of fish. 'Where are you going, Urmi?' she cried.

'I'm going to return this fish,' Urmila said, letting herself out. 'We can't eat this: it'll kill us. Look at this filthy paper it's wrapped in. I'm going to make that man take it back: I paid more than a hundred rupees for this fish. I'm not going to be cheated like this.'

The front door of their flat opened on a narrow, corridorlike veranda that served three other apartments beside their own. Urmila was certain she would find the fish-seller outside, knocking on the doors of the other flats. But the veranda was empty: she looked to her right and then to her left. There was no sign of the young man with the basket of fish.

Urmila stood undecided for a moment and then she went to the neighbouring door and rang the bell. Several minutes later the door opened and a middle-aged man dressed in pyjamas and a cotton vest looked out suspiciously. 'Yes?' he said. 'What do you want?'

Urmila was momentarily at a loss for words: a long history of disputes and quarrels lay between this family and hers. Trying to smile, she said: 'Did a fish-seller ring your bell this morning? A young man in a T-shirt and a checked lungi?'

The man looked her over sardonically, his eyes travelling slowly from the plastic bag stuffed with fish to her crumpled spice-stained sari.

Urmila held her ground. 'Did you see him?' she said again.

'No,' said the man. 'We were asleep until you rang the bell.'

'What?' said Urmila. 'The fish-seller didn't come here? With the basket… '

'What did I tell you?' the man snapped. 'Didn't I tell you we were fast asleep?' He slammed the door on her.

Urmila ran up one flight to the fourth floor, the highest in the building. The floors in their building were exactly alike, each with four identical flats, lined up next to each other along an open veranda. There was no sign of the fishseller on the fourth floor. She turned and went pelting down, stopping at each landing to look up and down the long verandas. The man wasn't anywhere in the building so far as she could tell. She checked the veranda on the ground floor twice, and then ran out to the small paan shop on the pavement, near the entrance to the building.

The stall-owner was sitting cross-legged on the counter, saying a prayer before starting the day's work. She had to wait until he opened one eye. 'What's this?' he said, in surprise, staring at her dishevelled hair and her crumpled night-time sari. 'Why are you outside in this state?'

She asked him about the fish-seller, and he shook his head: 'No, I haven't seen anyone; I've just got here, as you can see.'

She turned on her heel and headed down the road. 'Where are you going?' the paan-wallah called after her.

'I'm not going to let that man rob me in broad daylight,' she said. 'I'm going to find him and get my money back.'

The paan-wallah gave a derisory laugh. 'It's no use,' he said. 'Those vendors are too clever for the likes of you.'

'We'll see!' Urmila shouted back, over her shoulder.

RashBehari was thronged with its usual morning crowd of pedestrians, some hurrying towards Lansdowne, some towards Gariahat. People turned to stare at Urmila as she went marching along swinging her clenched fists. There were a few jeers and catcalls from loiterers, standing against the railings and squatting by the road. Urmila walked on, oblivious of her soiled sari and her soggy bag of fish.

She turned into a lane, off RashBehari, and almost before she knew it she was standing before a pair of tall wroughtiron gates. A portly chowkidar in khaki uniform was on guard at the gate. Right above him was an elaborately carved marble nameplate, set deep in the wall. It bore the name 'Romen Haldar' written in richly ornamented, cursive Bengali.

The chowkidar looked her up and down, suspiciously. 'What's your business here?' he said, placing himself in front of her, rapping his stick on his thigh.

Urmila pushed him aside, barely pausing in her stride. 'You don't need to concern yourself with my business,' she said. 'You stay where you are and think about your own business.'

She marched off, down the driveway towards the covered porch that led into the house. The chowkidar gave chase, waving his stick and shouting: 'Stop: You can't go in.'

'Tell me something,' Urmila threw back at him, over her shoulder. 'Did the fish-seller come here today?'

'What fish-seller?' said the chowkidar. 'We don't have any fish-sellers coming here. Do you know whose house this is?'

'Yes,' said Urmila.

With a sudden burst of speed, the chowkidar ran around her, trying to block the driveway. But Urmila was used to forcing her way past doorkeepers and secretaries; he was no match for her. She stepped around him, unimpressed. He followed, mouthing imprecations.

The chowkidar's shouts caused a stir inside the house. An elderly man appeared on the porch, pen in hand, dressed in a starched white kurta and dhoti. 'What's the matter?' he demanded, peering irritably down the driveway.

He spotted Urmila and a frown appeared on his forehead. 'Yes, what is it?' he said, looking her over distastefully. 'What do you want? No appointments today – all appointments have been cancelled.'

Urmila ignored him. 'I want to see Mr Romen Haldar,' she said.

The secretary glowered at her, over the rim of his spectacles. 'What business do you have with Mr Haldar?' he asked.

'I want to ask him about a fish-seller who came to my flat this morning,' Urmila said defiantly.

The secretary's jaw dropped. 'Fish-seller?' he said. 'What fish-seller?'

'A young man,' Urmila said. She tried to describe him but all she could recall of his appearance was a fading T-shirt and a big, gap-toothed grin. 'He sells fish here regularly,' she said. 'He was on his way here right now; he told me so.'

She lifted up the packet of fish and held it out towards the secretary. 'Look: he sold me this just this morning.'

The secretary recoiled. 'Keep that filthy thing away from me,' he cried, snatching back a spotless, cotton-clothed arm. 'What nonsense is this? No fish-seller has set foot in this house for years.'

'He told me that he sold fish to Mr Haldar.'

'He was lying,' said the secretary.

Urmila stared at him, her head reeling. 'But the man told me… ' she began.

The secretary made an impatient gesture. 'Enough,' he said. 'You can be off now.'

Urmila's tone hardened. 'No,' she said. 'I will not leave until I see Mr Haldar himself.'

'I see,' said the secretary. Raising a hand, he made a sign to the chowkidar, who was standing at the door. 'Shyam Bahadur,' he said. 'Show this lady the way out.'

Urmila pointed a finger at him, looking him directly in the eyes. 'I don't think you know who I am,' she said, in a firm, cool voice. 'Let me tell you: my name is Urmila Roy and I am a Calcutta reporter. Perhaps you should think a little before you do anything.'

The secretary's scowl deepened and he launched into a threat-laden diatribe. Urmila listened quietly; she had become all too used to situations like these over the last couple of years. In her own way she had even come to relish them.

She waited impassively until he ran out of breath. 'Now will you please take me to Mr Haldar?' she said, silkily. 'Quickly, please; I don't have much time. In a short while I have to be at the Great Eastern Hotel, for a press conference with the Minister of Communications.'

The secretary began to splutter. 'You don't understand,' he said, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his spotless kurta. 'I can't take you to Mr Haldar because I don't know where he is. He's disappeared. He's missed two appointments already.'

Urmila stared at him, open mouthed, 'But he's meant to come to our flat for dinner tonight,' she began to explain, meaninglessly. 'That's why I'm cooking this fish; that's why I'm going to be late for the press conference… ' She shook the bag of fish under his nose once again.

The secretary sneered. 'You're either mad or dreaming,' he said. 'Mr Haldar is booked on a flight to Bombay this evening – he has to attend a meeting there. He had no plans to visit you or anyone else here.' With a gesture of dismissal, he turned to the chowkidar. 'Take her away,' he said. 'I'm not going to waste any more time on this nonsense.'

Urmila allowed herself to be led out of the room, but at the porch she broke suddenly free. 'You're lying,' she shouted, shaking off the chowkidar's hand. 'I don't believe you. You're not going to get away with this -you'll see… ' The chowkidar placed a restraining hand on her arm.

Trying to evade his grip Urmila stumbled. And then the gravel path was flying up to meet her.

Chapter 27

WHEN NEXT she opened her eyes Urmila was lying in the shade of the pillared portico of the Haldar mansion. Her sight was blurred and her head was spinning. A large indistinct shape was hovering above her, and beyond it were about a dozen hazy faces, looking anxiously down at her. A voice was shouting in her ear; she couldn't tell what it was saying; the accent was odd. Someone was fanning her with a newspaper; someone else was offering her a glass of water. The chowkidar was somewhere in the middle distance, gesticulating and arguing with someone she couldn't see.

Gradually, as her vision cleared, she saw that the large blur in front of her was a face, the face of a man, a man with a short, trimmed beard. He looked somehow familiar. 'Miss Calcutta:' he was shaking her shoulder. 'Come on, wake up. Where'd you get these? I've got to know.'

'Get what?' she said. He was waving something at her, but she couldn't see what it was.

'These,' he said impatiently. 'This stuff you brought with you; these papers.'

Brushing his hand away, she sat up. 'Who are you?' she said. 'Why are you shouting at me like this?'

He looked at her nonplussed. 'Don't you remember me?' he said. 'We met that day, at that auditorium.'

'What do you mean, we met?' she said. 'I don't know your name, or who you are, or what you do or anything.'

'I'm L. Murugan,' he said. 'I work for LifeWatch.' Murugan took out his wallet and handed her a card. 'I know who you are,' he said. 'I don't recall the name exactly, but I know you work for Calcutta magazine.'

'That's all you need to know,' she said. 'Now kindly explain what you are doing here.'

'Me?' said Murugan. 'I wanted to ask Mr Haldar's permission to visit his Robinson Street property, so I thought I'd come and introduce myself.'

'And why were you shouting at me?'

'I've got to know where you found these.' He produced the crumpled bits of Xerox paper she had found in the packet of fish. 'Can you tell me?'

'How dare you?' she cried. She lunged at his hand and snatched the papers away. 'These are mine. They belong to me.'

'They're not yours,' he said, grabbing at them. 'They have nothing to do with you.'

'They're mine and I'm going to keep them,' said Urmila.

She screwed the papers into a tight little ball and tucked them into the front of her blouse.

Murugan gritted his teeth. 'Look,' he said. 'You've found something that just might be the key to one of the mysteries of the century, and all you want to do is start a custody battle?'

Urmila rose slowly to her feet. 'Why do you want them so much?' she said. 'They're just bits of waste paper.'

'OK,' said Murugan. 'I'll tell you what: I'll save you the trouble of flushing them down the toilet. Give them back to me.'

'There is no need to get agitated,' she said coldly. She rose to her feet, and directed a look of enquiry at the faces around her. 'Where's my fish?' she demanded, of no one in particular. Someone handed the soggy packet back to her. Taking a firm grip on it she set off down the path, towards the gate.

Murugan ran after her. 'Wait up,' he said, trying to collect himself. 'Look, what is it that you want? Do you want money or something?'

She threw him a contemptuous glance and walked on. 'Then what?' said Murugan.

'I want to know what's in those papers.'

He caught hold of her elbow. 'Look,' he said, in as placatory a voice as he could muster. 'You haven't even told me your name. All I know about you is that you work for Calcutta .'

'My name is none of your business,' she answered, shaking his hand off. 'And kindly do not touch me.'

'Oh, so is that going to be your attitude?' said Murugan, his voice rising. 'So what shall I call you, then, since I'm not going to be granted the honour of an introduction? Miss Calcutta? Or perhaps even just Calcutta, or would that be too intimate? Too affectionate, you think? Your husband might begin to suspect some hanky-panky, some panking hankies, some untoward hanking and panking… '

'I'm not married,' Urmila said coldly.

'Oh, better and better: you just made my day, Calcutta, I'm going to count the seconds till the hanking ends and the panking begins, but before we start heaving our hanks let me tell you something, Calcutta, let me feed a little factoid into your database: let me tell you how this works: let me set your priorities a little more in line with the real world. You don't get to ask me the questions: you see what I'm saying? It's Dr Morgan who gets to decide what you deserve to know and when.'

She narrowed her eyes. 'Is that so?' she said.

'You want an explanation,' he said. 'You're going to get it. But I'm going to choose the weapons and the venue.'

He ran to the road and stopped a taxi.

'Po G. Hospital,' he said, to the Sikh driver. 'Quick; let's go.'

Chapter 28

ANTAR SHIVERED: he felt distinctly ill now. He would have to find a way of letting Tara know that he wasn't up to having dinner with her.

Fortunately she'd been wearing a beeper the last few weeks. Switching screens, he keyed in a few words: Regret must cancel dinner; explain later. He called up her number and dialled the message through.

The beeper had come with a new job Tara had found, a few weeks ago. The woman she was working for now was a stockbroker who often worked late: she liked to stay in constant touch with her four-year-old and had insisted that Tara carry a beeper.

The job was a good one, Tara said, much better than the one she'd lost: the pay was fair and better still, the boy was good-natured and his mother relatively undemanding. Tara never lost an opportunity to thank Antar for helping her to find the job.

But the truth was that if Antar had helped at all, it was only in a rather roundabout way. One morning, about a month ago, he had noticed her hanging about her apartment at a time when she was usually out at work. Pushing up the kitchen window, he called out: 'What's the matter? Not going to work today?'

She stuck her head into the air-shaft, and gave him a rueful smile. Her wispy hair was tied in an untidy knot and she looked as though she hadn't bothered to change after getting out of bed.

'I would if I could,' she said. 'But the job's not mine any more.'

'What happened?'

'Well,' she said. 'The gloss that was put on the matter was that I had rather reluctantly been allowed to depart. But the fact was they needed someone with the right papers so they could get a tax write-off.' She shrugged and made a face.

'Oh,' said Antar. 'Well, that's too bad.' It took him a moment to digest this bit of news.

'Haven't you found anything else yet?' he said. 'I thought babysitters were snapped up the minute they hit the market.'

Tara shook her head resignedly. 'The best jobs are posted on the Net,' she said. 'And I can't afford a susbscription. Come to think of it, I can't afford a computer and wouldn't know what to do with it if I could.'

'On the Net?' Antar was astounded. 'Babysitting jobs? You're joking. Surely?'

'I wish I were,' she said. 'But it's true. I've looked in the Irish Echo and India Abroad: not a thing in either.'

She gave him a bleak smile and a nod. 'I must go now,' she said. 'Or my tea will get cold. And the way things are going, I suspect it wouldn't be wise to waste a tea bag.' She ducked back inside.

The conversation resounded in Antar's mind through the day as he sat staring at Ava's screen: the precariousness of her circumstances weighed on him in ways he couldn't quite understand. The next morning he was in and out of the kitchen every few minutes until he spotted her, pottering around her apartment.

Leaning over the sink, he shouted: 'Listen: I have an idea.'

She gave him a wan smile. 'Yes?' He could tell she'd been up late, worrying.

'I have an old laptop in my cupboard,' he said. 'I could hook it up with Ava and run a cable through to you. You could have as much time on the Net as you wanted. I've upgraded it a couple of times and it can run the software. The Council gives me twenty hours a week free, and I hardly ever use even a fraction of that. I've got at least a thousand hours coming to me. You can have them.'

Her thin, fine-boned face lit up. 'Really?' she said. 'Could you really do that?'

She hesitated, as though she couldn't believe her luck: 'Are you sure it would be all right? I don't want to get you in any trouble.'

Antar made an attempt at nonchalance. 'It's very irregular, of course,' he said. 'The Council's paranoid about security. But I think I can rig it. If you're careful and you don't try to fool around we'll both be all right.'

'I'll be very careful,' she said earnestly. 'You have my word: I won't do anything that might get you in trouble.' Antar set up the link later that day.

It gave him a twinge to leave his old laptop behind with her: it was an early nineties Korean-made model, sleek and black, with beautifully rounded edges. He'd always loved it: the heft and weight of it in his hands, the muted click of its keyboard, its old-fashioned chrome detailing.

He offered to give her a few lessons but she declined. 'You've been to plenty of trouble already,' she said. 'I won't put you to any more. Lucky will show me: he knows a little about these things.'

'Lucky?' That was the name of the young man from the Penn Station news-stand. Antar tried to imagine him, with his fixed smile and his oddly spaced teeth, sitting in front of his laptop, trying to steer Tara around the Net. He had his doubts but he decided to keep them to himself.

As it turned out, Lucky was evidently a good teacher, for Tara soon found her way around the Net. Antar monitored her closely for the first few days. Then he grew tired of following her around childcare bulletin boards and left her alone.

She got her new job within a few days and had been inordinately grateful ever since. That was why she had wanted to come over tonight. 'I can't afford to take you out,' she said. 'So the least I can do is make sure that you eat properly every once in a while.'

Chapter 29

ON LOWER CIRCULAR ROAD, halfway to the P. G. Hospital, Urmila found herself reading and rereading the bright yellow lettering on the side of a crowded minibus that was jammed up close against her window. The taxi was idling in the traffic, imprisoned by the customary morning throng of cars and buses. Hesitantly Urmila raised her eyes to the windows of the minibus: a dozen people seemed to be staring at her. She turned quickly away.

This was probably the bus she would have been on right now, if she'd been on her way to work. They were probably on it, all the usual crowd: the old man in the dhoti who worked in the Accountant-General's office and was writing a book on something or the other; the railway clerk who carried a huge tiffin-carrier full of food to the Strand every morning; the woman from All India Radio, who had tried to get her to join the 'BBD Bagh Minibus Passengers' Club' last week.

Urmila shrank into the seat. The crumpled sheets of paper were scraping uncomfortably against the tender spot between her breasts. She wanted to reach in and pull it out, but she couldn't, not with that minibus so close to her window.

What if they could see her now, the 'BBD Bagh Minibus Passengers' Club'? What if they were to learn that she was on her way to P. G. Hospital with a complete stranger? What would they think? What would they make of it?

Suddenly she was furious. 'What does the P. G. Hospital have to do with my pieces of paper?' she said, turning upon Murugan. 'Why are you taking me there? What are your intentions?'

'You wanted an explanation, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'That was the deal. And I'm going to give you an explanation, but I'm going to begin exactly where I want to.'

'And you want to begin at the P. G. Hospital?' she said.

'That's right,' he said. 'That's why I'm taking you there.' She noticed the taxi driver watching them in his mirror. She leaned over and waved her packet of fish under his nose. 'What're you looking at, you cabbage-head?' she snapped. 'Keep your eyes on the road.'

Chastened, the driver dropped his eyes.

'Wow!' said Murugan. 'What was that all about?'

'And you,' she cried, turning on him in fury. 'Who are you, exactly?' Suspicion was raging in her mind now; she began to recall all the stories she had heard about foreign con-men and kidnappers and prostitution rings in the Middle East. 'I want to know who you are and what you are doing in Calcutta. I want to see a passport.'

'I don't have my passport with me right this minute,' said Murugan. 'But you can have this.' He took out his wallet and handed her his ID card.

She looked it over carefully, examining the lettering and matching the photograph with his face.

When they reached the Rabindra Sadan auditorium, Murugan tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed down the road. 'Over there,' he said. 'Stop, over there.'

'Here?' Urmila found herself looking at a brick wall, across a narrow ditch. 'Why here? There's nothing here; we've left the hospital entrance behind: it's over there.'

'We don't need the entrance,' said Murugan, handing the taxi driver a fifty-rupee note. 'There's something I want to show you right here.'

'But there's nothing to see here,' Urmila said suspiciously. 'It's just a wall.'

'Look over there,' said Murugan, counting his change.

He pointed over his shoulder at the memorial to Ronald Ross. 'Did you get an eyeful of that?'

Urmila's eyes widened in surprise as they followed his finger to the marble plaque at the apex of the modest little arch. 'No,' she said. 'I've never noticed it before.' She began reading aloud: '''In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes.'''

She shook her head. 'It's strange,' she said. 'I've changed buses here hundreds of times. I can't even begin to count how often I've walked past this wall. But I've never noticed that inscription up there.'

'No one notices poor Ron any more,' said Murugan. He set off towards a gate a short distance down the road. 'Follow me,' he said, beckoning her on. 'I'll show you something else.'

A chain hung suspended from the gateposts, just loose enough to let one person through at a time. Murugan went first and when Urmila caught up he pointed across the hospital's busy compound to a graceful red-brick building set well back in the grounds.

'When Ronald Ross came to work here in 1898,' Murugan said, 'that building over there was all there was of the P.G. Hospital.'

'How do you know?' she said.

He laughed. 'It's simple,' he said. 'You happen to be speaking to the world's greatest living expert on Ronnie Ross.'

'You mean you?' she said.

'You said it.' He turned on his heel and set off down a path that was bustling with uniformed hospital staff.

'Look over there,' he said, pointing ahead at a complex of boxy new buildings all painted a drab, municipal yellow. 'None of those was here when Ronnie was doing his malaria research in Calcutta. It was just trees and bamboo and greenery around here – except for a couple of labs and outhouses where the servants and attendants lived.'

He held a handkerchief to his nose as they walked past an open rubbish dump where crows, dogs and vultures were fighting over scraps of food and blood-soaked bandages. Nearby, a row of men stood lined up against a wall, unheeding of a notice that pleaded: 'Please do not urine here.'

Murugan came to a halt in an open space, between two wards, one of which bore a sign, 'Ross Memorial Ward'. He pointed to an old-fashioned red-brick bungalow that had been incorporated into one of the hospital's newly added wings. 'Look over there,' he said. 'That was Ross's lab.'

He went over to the bungalow and drew her attention to a marble tablet, set high in the wall. The tablet bore a stylized image of a mosquito, and under it an inscription.

'It's too far up to read,' Urmila said. 'Doesn't it say that it was in this laboratory that Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross made the momentous discovery that malaria is conveyed by the bite of a mosquito?'

'Something like that,' said Murugan.

Urmila pulled a quizzical face. 'What a strange little building,' she said. 'It looks so shut in on itself. It's hard to believe that anybody could discover anything in there.'

'What's even harder to believe,' said Murugan, 'is that this was once one of the best-equipped research laboratories in the whole of the Indian subcontinent.'

'Was it?' she said, in surprise.

He nodded: 'That's right. And you know who set it up?'

'How would I know about that?' she snapped.

'But you do know,' said Murugan, 'as a matter of fact, you've got his name right there.' He pointed at the piece of paper that she had tucked into her blouse.

Turning her back to him, she took the ball of paper out of her blouse. 'Here it is,' she said. 'Show me.'

He pointed to one of the lines that had been marked in ink. 'That's him. Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham.

'That's the guy who set up this place,' said Murugan. 'Like Ronnie Ross he was a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, which was a unit of the British Indian Army. But Cunningham was more or less a senior citizen, years older than Ross. And he was a research scientist too – a pathologist. In fact he was a Fellow of the Royal Society; he had an FRS tagged to his name, which was one of the fanciest tags you could get those days. Cunningham did a lot of his work in Calcutta right here in this lab. He made it into the best equipped research centre in this part of the world. It was Ron who made it famous, but he couldn't have done it without old D. D. '

'I'll take your word for it,' said Urmila. 'But I still don't see how this makes those papers so special.'

'Patience, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'I'm just getting started. Come on.'

He headed back the way they had come and led her through a passageway to the narrow dirt-filled space that separated the Ross Memorial Ward from the hospital's boundary wall. The memorial arch was now a few yards to their left, and over the top of the wall they could just see the clogged traffic on Lower Circular Road.

Murugan pointed to a couple of low, ramshackle tinroofed structures, nestling in the mounds of earth and debris that were piled up against the wall. 'You see those outhouses over there?' he said. 'That's where Ronnie Ross's servants lived. One of them, a guy called Lutchman, was Ross's right-hand man. He used to breed the pigeons that Ross used for his research right over there.'

'Pigeons?' said Urmila distractedly, casting a distasteful glance at the little heaps of excrement that lay half-hidden in the debris. 'I thought you said he was working with mosquitoes and malaria.'

'Well, let me put it like this,' said Murugan. 'Ronnie Ross didn't always work with your usual plain-vanilla kinds of malaria. In Calcutta he began working with a related avian species, halteridium – you could call it a bird version of malaria.'

'Really?' Urmila looked up warily at the trees around them.

'Yes,' he said. 'And to keep him supplied with material for his experiments, his assistants, Lutchman and his crew, kept a large flock of infected birds – right over there. And they released their entire flock here, in September 1898, just days after Ross finished his final series of experiments.'

He picked a stone off the ground. 'Let me show you something,' he said. He tossed the stone in the direction of the outhouse. It landed in the debris, and moments later, a flock of pigeons took to the air with clucks of alarm and a frantic beating of wings. Murugan stood back and watched the birds circling above.

'I wouldn't be at all surprised,' he said, 'if there were a couple of descendants of Lutchman' s flock up there.'

Chapter 30

STANDING ON tiptoe Urmila peeped over the boundary wall at the office-going traffic, streaming down Lower Circular Road, past the hospital. She was surprised by how sheltered and self-contained the bungalow was, how far removed from both the bustle of the hospital and the noise of the nearby traffic.

'How quiet it seems here,' she said, glancing from the outhouse to the Ross memorial. 'It's hard to believe that I go past this place twice every day, at rush hour.'

'Exactly what Ronnie Ross thought,' said Murugan. 'Thought he'd found the lab of his dreams when he first got here.'

Urmila stepped back from the wall. 'So how was it that Ross came to be here?' she said. She ran her eyes over the smoothed-out sheets of paper in her hands. 'Was it this man D. D. Cunningham who invited him here?'

'No,' said Murugan. 'Exactly the opposite. Cunningham did everything he could to make sure that Ross wouldn't get here. Ronnie wrote him begging letters every couple of months, and Cunningham's answers were always the same, short and simple: no dice.'

'But still,' said Urmila, 'Ronald Ross did come here, didn't he?'

'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham stonewalled Ross for more than a year. And then one day, in January 1898, right out of the blue, Cunningham caved. In fact he handed in his resignation and left for England in such a hurry he forgot to pack his boxer shorts. On January 30 the Government of India finally approved Ronnie Ross's transfer to Calcutta.

'The official story is that all this was just coincidence: old Cunningham was aching for the honeysuckled cottages of Ye Olde England. Well, where he ended up was in a boarding house in Surrey with a view of the municipal gasworks. You're going to tell me he left his cosy little setup out here for that just because he was homesick for English muffins? Well, let me tell you: I don't buy it.'

'So what are you saying then?' said Urmila. 'Why do you think he left?'

'I don't have the answer to that,' said Murugan. 'But it's clear that something happened round the middle of January 1898 that made Cunningham change his mind. And it was no accident either: somebody worked pretty hard to set it up.'

Urmila examined her papers again. 'Here, look at this,' she said, pointing at a line. 'It says here that D. D. Cunningham was granted six days' leave in the middle of January – from the 10th to the 15th of February. That's when it must have happened.'

'Right,' said Murugan. 'And look at the date on that railway reservation chart: on the 10th of January 1898 somebody called C. C. Dunn took a train to Madras.'

'And who was that?'

'No one,' said Murugan. 'That's just it. I think someone is trying to get the message across that D. D. Cunningham travelled to Madras under a false name on that day.'

' Madras?' said Urmila scowling at the papers. 'Why Madras? What could have happened there? I suppose there's no way of finding out since it happened so long ago?'

'So you'd think,' said Murugan, 'I mean it's not like you can look up something that happened in Madras in 1898 in the back issues of Time, right? But the fact is that I do happen to know about a guy called C. C. Dunn who was in Madras about that time. Only I'd never connected him with D. D. Cunningham. Not until this morning, when I took those papers out of your hands. They were the missing link, you see; they tie it all together.'

'And how did you learn about this C. C… whoever he was?'

'Because someone wanted me to,' said Murugan. 'It's a long story. Are you sure you're up for it?'

Urmila nodded emphatically.

'A few years ago,' Murugan began, 'I was trying to update the malaria archive at the outfit where I work. I was three months into the North Africa and Middle East files when I came upon a weird report of a small, extremely localized epidemic in northern Egypt, about thirty miles south of Alexandria. The population of a tiny hamlet was wiped out in a period of a few days. There were no recurrences, no further outbreaks. This hamlet was settled by a family of migrants from the south – Coptic Christians. They didn't have much to do with their neighbours and they were a long way from the nearest village. When their bodies were discovered they were already in an advanced state of decomposition.'

'What sort of epidemic was it?' said Urmila.

'No one's sure,' said Murugan. 'There were no autopsies. In fact the only reason we know about it at all is because a British health officer wrote a short report on it. This was in 1950, soon after the war, and the British were basically still running the place. This health officer was a competent, nononsense guy, from the sound of it: he'd spent his whole career in Egypt. By the time he visited the hamlet the bodies had been disposed of. But he reported two kinds of anecdotal evidence about the symptoms of the deceased: swollen neck glands and large numbers of tiny skin perforations, like insect bites. He thought it might be an exceptionally virulent strain of malaria but he had no way of confirming his hunch. People from the surrounding villages said that there might be a survivor: the body count left one fourteen-year-old boy unaccounted for. He was reported to have been seen at the railway station in a nearby town at about the time of the outbreak. The health officer thought he might be a carrier, and he tried to find him. He thought an examination of the boy might yield a clue to what had happened. But he was never found.'

'So they had no idea what happened?'

'Basically, no. The health officer admitted he didn't know what the fuck had happened. He added that the only time he'd heard of similar symptoms was some twenty or more years before, down south, in Luxor. Someone had told him that the archaeology buff Lord Carnarvon had died of a mosquito bite that had led to a fever and swollen neck glands. He even quoted from a letter written by his lordship's daughter, just before he bit the dust. "You know the mosquito bite on his [Papa's] cheek that was worrying him at Luxor, well yesterday quite suddenly all the glands in his neck started swelling and last night he had a high temperature and still has today.'"

'I don't follow,' said Urmila. 'We were talking about something that is supposed to have happened in Madras in 1898. How did we end up in Egypt fifty years later?'

'That's exactly what I'm trying to explain,' said Murugan. 'That's what comes next. What happened was this: after I found the health officer's report, I began asking around to see if anyone had any leads on this. I even posted some queries on a couple of chat groups on the Web. One day I logged on and there was this long message waiting for me: pages and pages long. There was no address or anything on it: it had been sent anonymously. I soon discovered that whoever sent it went to a lot of trouble to make sure that I wouldn't find out who they were: it had been routed and re-routed so many different ways I couldn't even begin to trace it.'

'And what did the message say?' Urmila asked.

'It was an excerpt from a book written by a Czech psycho-linguist. The excerpt was about a Hungarian highsociety type, who became a distinguished amateur archaeologist and professional eccentric – one Countess Pongracz. Towards the end of her life she moved to Egypt. The last time she was seen was in 1950: she was on her way to do a dig somewhere near this hamlet where the outbreak happened. No one knows what happened to her.'

'I still don't see the connection with Madras in January 1898,' said Urmila.

'I was just getting to that,' said Murugan. 'In her youth La Pongracz was a kind of prototype of a sixties jet-setter, travelling around the world, picking up gurus and stuff. And in January 1898 she was nineteen years old, just starting on her long career. And where do you think she was?'

'Where?' said Urmila.

'In India,' said Murugan. ' Madras to be exact. Now you'd reckon that if a guru-groupie was down in that part of the world at that time they'd home in on Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society like a heat-seeking missile seeks heat. But you'd be wrong. This Countess Pongracz was a real guru-gourmet and she didn't go in for any of that heat-and-serve stuff. The guru she settled on was Madame Blavatsky's arch-rival – a Finnish number called Madame Liisa Salminen, who ran her own little outfit called the Society of Spiritualists. The Countess was Madame Salminen's leading disciple, and she noted down everything that happened to her guru.'

Chapter 31

ON THE NIGHT of January 12 1898, records the Grofne Pongracz, a select few Spiritualists gathered, as was their custom, at a house rented by the Society for their weekly seance with Mme Salminen. Several independent sources attest that these seances were generally stately, highly regulated affairs. They usually began with a small reception, with Mme Salminen holding court and handing out cups of China tea. On this occasion however the solemnity of the tea-party was rudely interrupted by an unlikely and unexpected intruder. There were many in Madras who coveted invitations to join Mme Salminen's circle of intimates. Some had been known to go to considerable lengths to infiltrate the group. Thus it was not the mere fact of the arrival of an uninvited guest that took the assembled Spiritualists by surprise: rather it was because the man in question did not seem to be even remotely the kind of person who might wish to be associated with such a group. Quite the contrary. It ought to be noted that in general the Spiritualists, Theosophists and their fellowtravellers looked upon British civilian and military officialdom with undisguised loathing – a sentiment that was reciprocated in more than ample measure. Such was their mutual revulsion that in the barrack-rooms of Madras 's Fort St George, the phrase 'I would rather be a Spiritualist', when uttered by a cavalryman, was generally regarded as the equivalent, in connotative association, to such statements as 'I would rather be dead'.

Conversely, the sentence 'I would rather be a Lieutenant-Colonel' might be held to constitute a similarly firm statement of preferences amongst Spiritualists and their kin. Yet it would appear from the Countess's brief but vivid description that the intruder in question was precisely a man of military affiliations. She describes him, in her inimitable Magyar way, as a portly, ruddy-faced Englishman in his late fifties, with sparse hair and a Hussar's moustache. The man was clearly in a state of extreme emotional distress, for he was observed to be wringing his hands and tugging his moustache, while his eyes were bloodshot and inflamed, as though he had not slept for several days. Yet something in his bearing belied his overwrought state: the Countess, for one, immediately took him to be an officer of high to middle rank, possibly in an infantry regiment. Imagine her surprise, then, when the intruder made no mention of a rank or regiment while introducing himself. She took it as a rebuff, as a slight on her powers of observation: and it is worth remembering that the Countess Pongracz claimed descent from no less a soldier than the great Attila himself, and moreover was as accustomed to a place of honour in the courtly circles of Imperial Buda as she was to the taverns Of soldierly Pest. She was unlikely to be mistaken in recognizing the attributes of a military man.

The Spiritualists' suspicions were further aroused when the intruder appeared to have some trouble remembering his own name, introducing himself finally (and not without some hesitation) as C. C. Dunn. No sooner had this cursory introduction been effected, however, than the self-styled Mr Dunn leant over towards the imposing head of Mme Salminen and began to whisper. The countess happened to be close at hand at the time and now, without appearing to pay the slightest attention, she contrived to direct her hearing in this direction. But adept though she undoubtedly was at this rare aristocratic art, she managed to catch no more than a few disjointed syllables: 'Great distance… see you… dreams… visions… death… implore you… madness… annihilation.'

The countess, like many others in the room, fully expected Mme Salminen to give the stranger short shrift, as she had so many others before him. But here they underestimated the formidable Finn. Mme Salminen took a particular interest in people who exhibited signs of extreme emotion: it was her belief that violent passion, when efficiently channelled, can create the conditions for what she called 'psychic breakthroughs'. Thus, far from turning away the distraught Mr Dunn, she extended him a warm welcome and invited him to join the assembled company when they withdrew to the seance table.

It is worth emphasizing here that Countess Pongracz's accounts of seances were not always entirely coherent. She would often jot down her impressions immediately after the session when she was herself in a state of considerable excitation. Often in these situations, the impeccable High German in which her accounts were composed would begin to show signs of strain; sometimes her beleaguered sense of syntax would yield altogether, and instead of complete sentences she would jot down strings of apparently disconnected syllables. Intensive computer analysis has demonstrated that these phonemic clusters were drawn from a melange of Central European dialects such as Slovenian and certain unusual Carpathian variants of Finno-Ugrian (all learned, no doubt, below stairs from the vast staff of the Kastely Pongracz).

The point, of course, is that we cannot pretend that the Countess was a reliable witness or that an accurate narrative can be constructed from the skeletal word-associations of her diary. However, her accounts can frequently be corroborated with what is known of the protocols and procedures of Mme Salminen's seances, and these facts are not in general dispute. As a rule Mme Salminen and her little flock would withdraw after tea to a room that was lit with only one candle. Sitting around a heavy wooden table, the assembled company would join hands' and attempt to bring their powers of concentration into focus, with Mme Salminen acting as a lens, so to speak, for the dispersed energy of their minds. To be counted as a success a session such as this would have to produce some of the 'manifestations' of psychic energy that were so dear to the Spiritualists – such phenomena as table-tapping, automatic writing, incorporeal voices and so on. On certain special occasions the lucky few were even rewarded with the most highly valued of psychic prizes, so to speak, that is to say a kind of light that was termed an 'ectoplasmic glow'. That 'manifestations' of this kind can very easily be manufactured in circumstances of collective hysteria has of course been repeatedly demonstrated and needs no comment here.

It must be noted however that the 'glow' phenomenon was a rare and unusual occurrence. It was usually produced only towards the end of a session, and was invariably preceded by other manifestations such as table-tapping, etc.

On the occasion with which we are currently concerned, it so happened that the Countess Pongracz was chosen to sit beside Mme Salminen and opposite the uninvited guest – the self-styled Mr C. C. Dunn. Now it appears that, despite Mme Salminen's explicit instructions to the contrary, the Countess was in the habit of casting occasional glances around the table at these sessions. It was thus she noticed that after twenty minutes or so Mme Salminen and Mr Dunn appeared to have fallen into a kind of trance, with their heads slumped forward, almost touching the table. When this condition persisted for a considerable length of time, the Countess began to consider the otherwise unthinkable step of interrupting the proceedings (unthinkable because it was the current belief that an interruption would cause a 'spirit' to be trapped in inter-plasmic limbo).

However, even as she was considering this possibility, Mme Salminen's head was flung back against the chair, suddenly and violently, so that she was staring up at the ceiling, her hair flowing loose, her mouth slack and open. Then Mr Dunn was hurled backwards bodily from the table and flattened against the wall, his feet several inches off the ground. The next instant the single candle was extinguished and the room was suddenly plunged into an impenetrable velvety darkness. The heavy table was upended with a violent crash, and Mr Dunn fell to the floor, screaming in what appeared to be Hindustani: 'Save me… from her… pursuit… beg mercy… '

The strangest aspect of these hallucinations, the Countess records, was that even in that darkness which was not merely the absence of light but rather its opposite, an antithesis that could only be conceived in the inner eye of the mind: even in this blank darkness they could see C. C. Dunn absolutely clearly, although not with the kind of vision that depends on light; they could see him struggling; the agonies that passed over his face; they watched his futile attempts to fight off whatever it was that had tied him upon this rack of torment – all this they could see, but never once did they glimpse or even imagine the agent of his anguish, what arm or instrument, or whatever means it was through which these hideous agonies were effected. His face was livid with fear, and they saw him flailing his arms, fighting something off, a hand, or possibly an instrument. They saw him cowering on the floor, prostrate but not unconscious, but then just as suddenly the nature of his struggle changed, and he seemed instead to be grappling with an animal, fighting to keep its fangs from closing around his throat; shouting a repetitive string of invocations.

Then abruptly the noise ceased and the candle flared up again so that they were no longer in darkness. Opening their eyes they saw that the table was exactly where it had been, and that they were all sitting in their places, except the unannounced guest, who was cowering in a corner, stark naked.

And then Mme Salminen spoke her first words, in a whisper so soft as to be audible to none other than the countess, who was seated beside her. All this while Mme Salminen had been sprawled in her chair, her head thrown back, her eyes blank and unseeing. When she spoke it was without properly regaining consciousness. The sentence that escaped her lips was: 'There is nothing I can do: the Silence has come to claim him.'

Having said these few words she collapsed on the table.

Her alarmed acolytes removed her immediately to her bedroom, where she remained until well into the next day. On gaining consciousness her first act was to send for the countess. The two women remained closeted together for several hours.

Unfortunately the Countess never provided a written account of their conversation of that day, but she is known to have described it later as the turning point of her life.

However the actual influence of Mme Salminen on her disciple's subsequent career remains disputed. For instance, when she attributed her pioneering archaeological work in excavating early Manichaean and Nestorian sites in Central Asia, Nepal and Bengal to the influence of Mme Salminen, her friends assumed that this was merely a manner of speaking – a grateful acolyte's rendering of homage. But in her advocacy of the teachings of Valentinus, the Alexandrian philosopher of the early Christian era, they were more inclined to take her assertions at face value. When she asserted that it was Mme Salminen who had revealed to her the truth of the Valentinian cosmology, in which the ultimate deities are the Abyss and the Silence, the one being male and the other female, the one representing mind and the other truth, few disputed her account of the matter, for these beliefs clearly did not merit a prosaic explanation.

Yet, accustomed as her friends were to her eccentricities, they became seriously concerned when she moved to Egypt in the late 1940s, to search for the most sacred site of the ancient Valentinian cult: the lost shrine of Silence. Some of them were to recall later, after her disappearance, that she had often spoken of a description that Mme Salminen had given her: of a small hamlet on the edge of the desert; of date palms and mud huts and creaking waterwheels.

Chapter 32

URMILA SHIVERED, despite the clammy heat.

'So do you think it's all connected?' she said. 'The message that was sent to you, and these bits of paper that the fish were wrapped in… '

'Are you kidding?' Murugan said. 'You bet they're connected. Your fish wrappings pull it all together. Look at it this way: Cunningham had the only lab on the continent where Ron had a snowflake's chance of making a breakthrough; Ron knew this and by late 1896 he was desperate to get his ass to Calcutta. But Cunningham just wasn't buying it: he'd set this lab up like his own backyard barbecue and he wasn't going to let some punk kid break up his party. Ergo: if Cunningham was the principal obstacle to Ron's moving to Calcutta, it follows that at this point in time – late 1897 – he was the single greatest obstacle to the solution of the malaria puzzle. If someone was looking over Ron's shoulder at this stage, it wouldn't take them long to figure this out. So what do they do? They call a timeout and go into a huddle and when they go back on the floor they've got a new gameplan: Cunningham's got to go. And sure enough, that's exactly what happens: suddenly in January 1898, Cunningham changes his mind; he throws the game and takes his tail off to England. In between he makes a pit-stop in Madras where he goes through some kind of psychotic episode. Those papers, that message on my screen – someone is trying to get me to make connections: they want me to know I was on the right track'

'But wait a minute,' said Urmila. 'What do you mean "want you to know"? It wasn't you who found the papers. It was me – and I met you by accident – because you happened to be at Romen Haldar's house when I… when I fainted.'

'Is that right?' said Murugan. 'OK, now you tell me exactly how you happened to "find" those papers and we'll try and see if your accident theory holds up.'

Urmila began to tell him about the events of that morning, and the night before – the phone-call to her family, her promise to cook fish, and the providential ring of the doorbell at seven fifteen. And slowly, as she told the story, her account grew more and more uncertain, so that when she got to the unknown fish-seller, her voice faded into a barely audible murmur.

'But why would anyone set about the whole thing in such a roundabout way?' she said. 'If they want you to know something why wouldn't they just tell you – why involve me and Romen Haldar and…?'

Murugan paused to scratch his beard. 'The truth is,' he said, 'that I don't know. But a couple of things are clear enough. Someone's trying to get us to make some connections; they're trying to tell us something; something they don't want to put together themselves, so that when we get to the end we'll have a whole new story.'

'Why?' said Urmila. 'What purpose does it serve? What good will it do them if we get to the end or not?'

'I'm not absolutely sure,' said Murugan, 'but I guess I could sketch one possible scenario.'

'Go on,' said Urmila.

'All right,' said Murugan. 'Now suppose, just suppose you had this belief – don't ask me why or anything, this is strictly a let's pretend game – just suppose you believed that to know something is to change it, it would follow, wouldn't it, that to make something known would be one way of effecting a change? Or creating a mutation, if you like.'

Urmila made a doubtful noise.

'Now let's take this one step further. If you did believe this, it would follow that if you wanted to create a specific kind of change, or mutation, one of the ways in which you could get there is by allowing certain things to be known. You'd have to be very careful in how you did it, because the experiment wouldn't work until it led to a genuine discovery of some kind. It wouldn't work, for instance, if you picked someone out of a crowd and said: "Yo, here's a two and here's another; add them up and what do you get?" That wouldn't be a real discovery because the answer would be known already. So what you would have to do is to push your guinea pigs in the right direction and wait for them to get there on their own.'

'So what you're saying,' Urmila said, 'is that someone is telling you something, through me, in this very roundabout way, as a kind of experiment; because they're trying to change something?'

'I couldn't have said it better myself.'

'To change what?' cried Urmila. 'And why? What do they want to do with us?'

'We don't know,' said Murugan. 'We don't know what; we don't know why.'

'So you mean to say,' said Urrnila, 'you and I are trapped in an experiment, and we don't know what it's for or why?'

'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Fact is we're dealing with a crowd for whom silence is a religion. We don't even know what we don't know. We don't know who's in this and who's not; we don't know how much of the spin they've got under control. We don't know how many of the threads they want us to pull together and how many they want to keep hanging for whoever comes next.'

'You mean,' said Urrnila, 'they may keep the rest for someone else to put together – some time in the future?'

'I'd guess that's the case, yes,' Murugan said. 'These guys aren't going anywhere in a hurry. They've been planting carefully selected clues for the last century or so, and every once in a while, for reasons of their own, they choose to draw them to the attention of a couple of chosen people. Just because you and I happen to have been included doesn't mean they've closed the list.'

'So where is it all going?' said Urmila. 'Where will it end?'

'It won't,' said Murugan. 'Let me tell you how this works: they have to be very careful to pick the right time to turn the last page. See, for them, writing "The End" to this story is the way they hope to trigger the quantum leap into the next. But for that to happen two things have to coincide precisely: the end credits have to come up at exactly the same instant that the story is revealed to whoever they're keeping it for.'

'So what are they waiting for?' said Urmila.

'Could be any number of things,' said Murugan. 'Maybe they're waiting to find some previously unreported strain of malaria. Or maybe they're waiting on a technology that'll make it easier and quicker to deliver their story to whoever they're keeping it for: a technology that'll be a lot more efficient in mounting it than anything that's available right now. Or maybe they're waiting for both. Who's to say?'

He was cut short by a roll of thunder. Looking quickly around, Urmila noticed a sheltered spot under the overhanging roof of the derelict outhouse. She squeezed under it and seated herself on the ground, pulling her knees up against her chin. Murugan followed, crawling in beside her and creakily crossing his legs. Within minutes the rain was pouring down before them, off the edge of the overhang.

Urmila stared into the glassy wall of rain, hugging her knees. It was all so unclear now: the call from the Club, the fish-seller in the morning, Romen Haldar, Sonali Das. It was so hard now to know what was a part of it and what wasn't: the kitchen window which looked out over the Haldar house, was that a part of it? Her parents? Her brothers? Her sister-in-law? (No, not her.) Was it a part of it that she was dressed in this horrible, dirty sari, spattered with turmeric stains and fish-blood; was it a part of it that she'd knocked on the Gangopadhyayas' door and woken them up this morning? And so strange to think that all this had happened when the only thing she was thinking of was how she had to cook shorshe-ilish as soon as possible, so she would be able to catch the BBD Bagh minibus and get to the Great Eastern Hotel on time for the Minister of Communications' press conference. Now, thinking of it, it seemed so long ago; she could hardly remember why the Minister of Communications and his press conference were so important, why she had been in such a hurry to get there, why the news editor had been so insistent: what would the Minister have said anyway? That communications were good? That ministering to them was his life's mission? How odd it would have been to sit at a keyboard, trying to think of a good sentence to lead with: Today the Minister of Communications announced at a press conference that he believed strongly that communications were the key to India 's future. In a way it seemed less odd to be here, almost, sitting on this leaky veranda, with the smell of shit everywhere, than to listen to some fat old man from Delhi talking into a screeching microphone; it was easier to understand why she was here, crouching in this damp corner of this decrepit outhouse than it was to know why she had been trying to cook a fish so that her brother could get into a First Division football team; it made more sense to be listening to Murugan going on about Ronald Ross than it did to be worrying about whether she would be able to fight her way into a BBD Bagh minibus so she wouldn't be late for a press conference at the Great Eastern. This even though she had never heard of Ronald Ross before, never met this man before, this man sitting pushed up against her now, his leg against hers. He wasn't like anyone she knew, but there was nothing wrong with that, of course, it was nice to meet someone new, and his beard was nice too, sort of like a stiff brush. What would it be like to touch it – his beard – she began to wonder, and then to her surprise, she realized, why yes, she was touching him, but not his beard – his thigh was against hers, pleasantly warm, not clammy. Out on the road the buses were still roaring by, in the rain; she could see people huddling behind the misted windows, hurrying along down the pavement, under their umbrellas, rushing into the Nandan cinema complex and the Academy of Fine Arts. How odd to think that all that separated them from her and Murugan was a paltry little wall, just one little wall, yet it did the job just as well as if it was the Great Wall of China, for they couldn't see her or him. In a way it was like being in a test tube: that was probably what it felt like, to know that something was going to happen on this side of the glass but not on the other; that there was a wall between you and everyone else, all those people in the buses and the minibuses, hurrying to work from Kankurgachi and Beleghata and Bansdroni, after their morning rice, with the smell of dhal still buried deep in their fingernails; they were so far away, even though they were just on the other side of the wall; they wouldn't know even if he had his shirt off and she was running her nails down his chest to his belly; they wouldn't know if he had his trousers down, around his ankles, and her hand was in his lap instead of her own, her forefinger picking through the curly hair of his groin; they wouldn't know if her blouse was off and his arm was around her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast and his thumbnail rubbing on her nipple; they wouldn't know, they wouldn't have the faintest idea, rushing past on their way to work, and actually, it wasn't so hard to imagine, his arm around her shoulder and his hand upon her breast. It would be like an experiment too; that was exactly what it would be like, the feel of him between her legs, his lips on her neck the sense of something animated deep inside her. What other word could there be for it, but 'experiment', something new, something which she knew was going to change her even if it lasted only a few minutes, or even seconds; something that was happening in ways that were entirely beyond her own imagining, and which she was powerless to affect in anyway.

Chapter 33

AFTER MAKING SURE his message to Tara had gone through, Antar went to the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water. Tara 's apartment was still dark but her white lace curtains were billowing spectrally in the gentle evening breeze. She had left her windows open again, an inch or two at the bottom. Antar bit his lip: it was odd that he hadn't noticed before. He always worried when she did that. He still hadn't grown used to the idea that there was someone else living here now; opening her own windows, closing her own doors.

Another time when she left the windows open, a storm hit unexpectedly, in the afternoon. Ava warned Antar early, interrupting one of her interminable inventories to let him know that bad weather was on the way.

He went around his apartment, shutting the windows. It was when he got to the kitchen that he noticed Tara had left her windows open – not all the way, but a good four or five inches. The white lace curtains in her living room were flapping in the gale.

He checked again half an hour later, and the curtains were gone: the wind had torn them off the rails. The rain was pouring in, driven by the wind. Over the next couple of hours Antar found himself drawn to the kitchen window again and again. He felt somehow responsible; as though he was to blame.

It was too dark to see what the wind and the rain were doing to the interior of the apartment. But he could imagine it all too well: the water streaming over the bare wood floor, collecting in puddles around the rush mats she had laid out, so carefully and precisely.

Tara 's friends, Lucky and Maria, had helped carry her things up the stairs when she first moved in, a few months ago. Antar had marvelled at how few things she had: a futon, some sheets and mats and a couple of tables and chairs that looked like they'd come off the street. The only things on the walls were a few calligraphed scrolls. And now the scrolls were ruined: he could see them flapping on the walls of her living room in ragged flurries of white, torn to ribbons by the wind.

What was worse was that he had no way of letting her know. This was before her beeper: she was still working at her other job then and he didn't have her phone number. All he could do was wait.

The storm was over by the time the lights came on in her apartment. Antar hurried into the kitchen to tell her what had happened and discovered that it wasn't Tara who'd come in. It was Lucky, and he'd already got busy cleaning up. Antar kept a discreet eye on him over the next hour or so: he didn't seem to know that he could be seen. He took off his T-shirt and his trousers and wrapped a dishtowel around his groin, like a loincloth. Then he got down on his knees and mopped the floor, not once but twice. Antar watched worriedly, wondering whether he'd do any damage. Lucky was notoriously clumsy, always dropping trays and spilling tea: 'all thumbs', as Tara often said.

Shortly afterwards Antar heard Tara 's door banging shut.

He went into the kitchen to see if she'd come home at last.

He was in time to see her tiredly unslinging her handbag and dropping it to the floor. Then Lucky came hurrying out of another room – to greet her, as Antar thought. But instead he did something that amazed Antar. He flung himself down on the floor in front of Tara and touched his forehead to her feet.

Tara 's first, instinctive response was to look up, across the apartment, in the direction of Antar's kitchen window. She was very embarrassed when she saw Antar standing there. She gave him an awkward wave and then muttered something to Lucky, who pulled himself up, looking sheepish.

Antar was embarrassed too, but he managed a smile and a wave. He had always assumed that they were just friends; he'd even wondered if they were lovers – though Lucky did seem a bit young for her. But Tara explained later that they were related in some complicated way: thus the greeting.

And now she'd done it again: left her window open. Antar shrugged: well, at least it wasn't raining today. He lowered his sweating face to the sink and sluiced water over it.

He was on his way to his bedroom when the phone rang. He took the call in his living room, dropping into the chair that faced Ava's screen.

It was Tara, sounding a little breathless. 'You got my message?' Antar said.

'I did indeed,' she answered. 'You sounded so mysterious; I had to find out what you were up to.'

'Oh, nothing important,' said Antar. 'Just some routine stuff that's going to take longer than it should. '

'Oh, really?' she said. 'Sounds frightfully important.'

'Also I don't feel well.'

'Can I help?' Her voice was immediately full of concern. 'Is there anything I can do?'

'I'll be all right; I've been through this before.'

'I could come by,' she said. 'Just say the word.'

'No. Thank you.' He decided to change the subject. 'Where are you calling from?' he said.

'The playground at 97th and Riverside,' she said. 'My little monster's trying to climb a fibreglass dinosaur.'

'You're at the playground?' Antar said in surprise. 'But I don't hear any children.'

She laughed. 'No. Most of them are down with the sprinklers, getting soaked to the skin.'

Antar paused, in puzzlement. Something didn't seem quite right. 'Do they have public phones at the playground?' he asked.

'No,' she said. 'Or at least I'm not using one if they do. One of the sitters lent me her – what do you call them? those portable thingummyjigs. I suppose I'd better let you go now. Let me know if you change your mind about dinner. I can be over in a couple of minutes.'

'Did you say a couple of minutes?' Antar said. 'But surely it'll take you at least half an hour to get here from 97th street. Even by taxi… '

'Justa manner of speaking…' she said quickly.

At exactly that moment Ava emitted a ping, to warn him that she was about to go into standby mode. An instant later Antar heard the same sound relayed down the telephone line.

'I'd better get off,' Tara said.

Antar started. 'Wait a minute…' he cried into the telephone. But the line had gone dead.

Antar stared at the receiver not quite sure of what had happened. For a moment it had sounded as though Tara were in the room with him and her mouthpiece had picked up Ava's ping.

He put the back of his hand against his forehead and wasn't surprised to find it very hot. He knew he was really feverish now.

He decided it was time to lie down.

Chapter 34

WITH HIS POCKET DIARY resting on his knee, shielded from the splashing rain by a protective arm, Murugan began to draw on an empty page with a ballpoint pen. When he had finished, he tore the page out of the diary and passed it to Urmila. It was a sketch of a figurine, a semicircular mound with two painted eyes. On one side of the mound was a tiny pigeon, and on the other a small semicircular instrument…

'Ever seen anything like this before?' he said.

Urmila examined the drawing minutely, frowning in concentration. 'I probably wouldn't have noticed if I had,' she said. 'It's like so many temple images – except for that thing over there. What is it?' She pointed at the instrument.

'My guess is that it's a version of an old-fashioned microscope,' Murugan said.

'So who or what is it an image of?'

'If I had to take a guess, I'd say that that was the demiurge of Ron's discovery,' he said. 'My guess is that she's the one behind this whole experiment.'

'You think it was a woman?' said Urmila.

Murugan nodded.

'Where did you find it?' Urmila asked.

'Over there,' said Murugan, pointing his pencil at the wall: it was raining so hard now that the alcove was barely visible, even though it was no more than a few yards away. He began to explain how he had found the little figurine there the night before. Urmila listened intently, and when he had finished, she gave a little nod, as though confirming something to herself.

'It's strange,' said Urmila. 'Just the other day, I was reading a book of Phulboni's essays – you know, the writer who was given the award at Rabindra Sadan yesterday? What you were saying reminded me of something he wrote a long time ago. I remember the passage almost by heart. "I have never known", it begins, "whether life lies in words or in images, in speech or sight. Does a story come to be in the words that I conjure out of my mind or does it live already, somewhere, enshrined in mud and clay – in an image, that is, in the crafted mimicry of life?"

'Apparently,' Urmila continued, 'Phulboni wrote a story many years ago: about a woman, bathing…' Her voice deepened in tone, in imitation of the writer's: "'… A woman no different from the hundreds of women you see every day, from the windows of your cars and buses, a woman washing off the day's dirt in the dank, weed-rich water of a pond, in a park – a pond like so many in our city, like Minto Park, or Poddopukur, or anyone of a dozen others. The woman kneels, in the soft, glutinous mud, the water rises in a dark curtain to her throat, allowing her to momentarily slip the top of her mud-browned sari off her shoulders, and run the tips of her fingers over her breasts, scrape a sliver of soap across the hardened skin of childbitten nipples, then run her hand down, below, past the folds of a wasted belly, and even further, down, down, scraping that foaming sliver past the parted lips that have vomited a dozen children into her husband's bed, and further still into the velvet dampness of the mud, the soap clinging to her fingers, and then, without warning her foot slips, and she finds herself, for one panic-stricken moment, clutching at the mud which is suddenly as soft, as pliant and yielding as death itself, her hands clawing at that depthless murk, and then, when the face of extinction seems to be looking unsmiling into her eyes, the edge of a fingernail scrapes suddenly upon something solid, something abrasive, something with redeeming, saving, lifegiving edges, something blessedly hard, something that can give her the moment's handhold she needs to claw her way back to the surface and seize a breath of our city's dankly sustaining humours.

'''And when her torso rises above the water, her breasts bared, her hair hanging black to her knees, her arms fling an arc of water high into the air, and she screams: 'She saved me; she saved me,' and at once all the other bathers plunge in, their feet churning the silky brown water into a frothing bog, and taking her by the arms, they drag her ashore, while she goes on screaming, through mouthfuls of water: 'She saved me, saved me.'

'''When she is lying on the grass, they pry open her fist and see that it has fastened upon an object, a polished grey stone with a whirl of white staring out of its centre like an all-seeing eye. She screams, spluttering through jets of swallowed mud and water; she will not part from that tiny shape that gave her the handhold she needed to keep from drowning, but the others tear it from her, for they know that the rock that saved her, that the small, life-giving lump of stone was none other than a miraculous manifestation of… of what? They do not know; believing only in the reality of the miracle… '"

Pausing to catch her breath, Urmila turned to Murugan. 'And then,' she said, 'one day, many years later, Phulboni was going past a park and what did he see but a little shrine, decorated with flowers and offerings. He stopped to enquire, but no one could tell him whose shrine it was and how it had come to be there. Determined to find out he went to Kalighat, to one of the lanes where these images are made. And there he found someone who told him a story that was very much like his own, yet the man had never heard of Phulboni and had never read anything he had ever written, and by the time he had finished, it was Phulboni who was no longer sure which had happened first or whether they were all aspects of the coming of that image into the world: its presence in the mud, the writing of his story, that bather's discovery or the tale he had just heard, in Kalighat.'

Murugan ran a fingernail through his goatee. 'I don't get it,' he said.

Urmila put out a hand to test the rain. It had thinned to a light drizzle now. She gave Murugan a sharp prod in the ribs. 'Come on,' she said, 'let's go.'

'Go where?' said Murugan.

'To Kalighat,' she said. 'Let's go and see if we can learn anything about that image you saw.'

Chapter 35

ON THE WAY to Kalighat, watching the rain-slicked streets through the misted glass of the taxi's window, Urmila had a vivid recollection of the lane they were going to: she remembered a narrow alley, winding through low, tin-roofed sheds, pavements that were lined with rows of grey-brown clay figures, some just torsos, full-breasted but headless, with tufts of straw blossoming out of their necks, some legless, some without hands, some with their arms curved in phantom gestures around invisible objects weapons, sitars, skulls.

She had an aunt who lived nearby, in a big, old-fashioned house that towered above the lanes around it. As a child she had often walked through the lane, to visit her aunt. She had watched in amazement as breasts and bellies took shape under the craftsmen's kneading fingers, wondering at the intimacy of their knowledge of those spectral bodies. At her aunt's house she would go to the balcony and look down on the lane and its rows of clay images, watching the image-makers at their work; noting details of the different ways in which they modelled heads and hands; observing how the images changed with the seasons; how phalanxes of Ma Shoroshshotis appeared in January, each embellished with the goddess's swan and sitar; Ma Durgas in autumn, with the entire pantheon of her family ranged around her and Mahishashur writhing at her feet.

The taxi came to a halt at the corner of the lane, and they stepped out into the fine foglike drizzle. Murugan paid and then Urmila led him quickly towards the low, bamboowalled workshops at the end of the lane. Hundreds of beatifically smiling faces floated by them as they hurried past, some draped in tarpaulin, their eyes unpupilled, their arms outstretched in immobile benediction.

Urmila laughed.

'What's up?' said Murugan.

'I often had a dream when I was a child,' Urmila said, with a laugh in her throat. 'I dreamt I would open the front door of our flat one day and find a small group of gods and goddesses outside, ringing the bell with the tips of their clay fingers. I would open the door and welcome them, hands folded, and they would float in on their swans and rats and lions and owls, and my mother would lead them to the little Formica-topped table where we ate. They would seat themselves on our chairs while my mother ran in and out of the kitchen, making tea and frying luchis and shingaras, while we watched in awe, our hands joined in prayer. We would offer sweets to the swan and the owl, and Ma Kali would smile at us with her burning eyes, and Ma Shoroshshoti would play a note or two on her sitar and Ma Lokhkhi would sit crosslegged on her lotus, holding up her hand, looking just as she does on the labels of ghee tins.'

She paused at the open door of a workshop. 'Let's try this one,' she said, leading him in. They stepped through the open doorway, into the workshop's dimly lit interior, and found themselves staring into a teeming crowd of smiling, flesh-coloured faces.

Urmila spotted a moving figure somewhere among the stationary images. 'Is somebody there?' she called out.

'Who is it?'

The figure vanished as quickly as it had appeared, behind a six-foot dancing Ganesh.

'We just wanted to talk to you,' Urmila said.

An elderly man materialized suddenly in front of her, detaching himself from a pantheon on a plinth. He was wearing a dhoti and a string vest and his thin, ill-tempered face was screwed into a scowl. Stepping away, Urmila very nearly impaled herself on a spear, upraised in the hands of a serene Ma Durga.

'Careful,' the man snapped. He looked her over suspiciously as she straightened her damp, dirt-streaked sari. 'What do you want?' he said. 'We're very busy right now; no time to talk.'

Urmila stiffened, falling immediately into her professional manner. 'I am a reporter for Calcutta,' she said, in a crisp, firm voice. 'And I'd like to ask you a question.'

The man's frown deepened. 'What question?' he said. 'Why? I don't know anything. We're not involved in politics.'

'It's not about politics.' Urmila thrust Murugan's drawing into his hands. 'Can you tell me what kind of image this is?'

The man narrowed his eyes, directing a sharp glance at Murugan. 'I've never seen anything like this in my life,' he said, handing the drawing back. 'I know every divine image there is and I've never seen one like this.'

Urmila turned to Murugan to translate, but he cut her short.

'I got that,' he whispered. 'But something tells me he's in denial mode.'

'You don't know anything about this image, then?' Urmila said to the man in the dhoti. 'Are you sure?'

'What did I tell you?' the man said, his voice rising. 'Haven't I said "no" already? How many times do I have to say it?'

A couple of younger men had gathered around them now. Urmila held the drawing out to them but the older man cut her short.

'What can they tell you?' he said. 'They're just boys.' He herded Urmila and Murugan quickly towards the door, muttering under his breath. He saw them to the door and shooed them impatiently off: 'Go on, go on, there's nothing for you here.' He watched them leave and then disappeared into the interior of the workshop.

'Well,' said Murugan, dusting his hands. 'I guess that's as much as we're going to get from him.'

Urmila was about to walk away when Murugan pulled her to an abrupt halt. 'Look!' he said, with a sudden intake of breath. 'Over there.' His finger was pointing at a child, a six- or seven-year-old girl, who was sitting by the roadside playing with a doll.

'At what?' said Urmila.

'Look at what she just put into her doll's hands,' Murugan whispered into her ear.

Now, looking closely, Urmila noticed that the girl was trying to push a tiny semicircular object into the unyielding grasp of her sightless plastic doll. 'What is it?' she said. 'I can't tell.'

'Don't you see?' said Murugan. 'It's a little stylized microscope, just like the one I saw.' He gave her a nudge: 'Go on, ask her, ask her where she got it.'

Urmila took a step forward, and as her shadow approached, the girl glanced up, her eyes widening warily. Urmila gave her a reassuring smile and sank slowly down to her knees, beside her.

'Why, how beautiful,' she said, speaking softly, in a child's Bengali, pointing at the tiny microscope, now firmly lodged in the dolls hands.

'It's mine,' the girl said defensively, closing her fist upon the doll's hand.

'Yes, of course it's yours,' said Urmila. 'Your father gave it to you, didn't he?'

The girl nodded, moving her head slowly up and down.

She cocked her head at the workshop. 'My father is in there,' she said. 'He's made a lot of them.'

'Oh?' said Urmila, nodding encouragement.

'He made them for the big puja tonight,' the girl offered. 'Really?' Urmila smiled. 'I didn't know there's a puja tonight.'

'There is,' the girl nodded vigorously. 'Today is the last day of the puja of Mangala-bibi. Baba says that tonight Mangala-bibi is going to enter a new body.'

'And whose is that?' Urmila said.

'The body she's chosen, of course,' the girl said. 'No one knows whose it is.'

Murugan hissed into Urmila's ear: 'Ask her about Lutchman.' But before Urmila could say another word a man burst out of the workshop. Picking up the girl, he took her inside. Then the elderly man in the dhoti appeared again, carrying a stick.

'Why are you still here?' he shouted at Urmila. 'Why were you talking to that child? Are you kidnappers? I'm going to call the police, right now.'

'Don't bother,' said Urmila, rising to her feet. 'We're going.' She tapped Murugan on the arm and set off briskly down the lane.

Chapter 36

ANTAR WAS DRIFTING OFF to sleep when Ava began to emit an urgent summons. It wasn't very loud and Antar felt it before he heard it, in his belly, reverberating through the floor.

Antar made his way gingerly into the living room, and spotted the outer nimbus of a package, deep inside Ava's delivery slot. It was a folder from the personal terminus of the Council's Assistant-Secretary General for Human Resources. It began by thanking him for the time and effort he had already invested in the L. Murugan case. Then, in polite but uncompromising language, it informed him that since he was already 'cognizant of the details' it had been decided that he should proceed with a further investigation of the matter. He was thus given authority to open up a direct line to the Council's representative in Calcutta, in order to conduct whatever interrogations were necessary (there followed a lengthy sequence of codes and clearances).

Antar spent a few minutes lashing together a raft of commands to take Ava through to Calcutta. When he was ready he went into the kitchen and splashed water over his face.

Tara's apartment was still dark, except for a light in the living room, which she always left on, night and day. As Antar was patting his face dry something shot up out of the air-shaft and began to knock furiously on the glass window pane. Antar recoiled, throwing his arms up: it was a pigeon, flapping against the glass. Its beady red eyes fixed on him for an instant, and then it was gone.

Antar poured himself a glass of water and carried it into his living room. Then he began the process of arming the raft.

It took exactly 5.65 seconds before the raft came to a stop at the personal terminus of the Director of the Council's office in Calcutta. It ran up against a barrier and began to thrash about, like a fish at a lock, sending back frantic signals: there was no one in the office and the only person who was directly connected was the Director himself. And the Director was at his residence, with the privacy controls in his surveillance system activated. Ava wouldn't be able to get through without a Shatter Command.

Antar looked up the code in his list of clearances and fed the command in. It took Ava just an instant to break through and a moment later a holographic projection of the Director appeared in Antar's living room, half-size. He was standing under a shower, a tall paunchy Peruvian. His eyes were closed and he was crooning to himself and scratching his balls.

Resisting the temptation to say 'Boo!' Antar cleared his throat with a gentle cough.

The Director opened one eye very slowly, looking around in disbelief. When he saw what was happening, his hands flew down to cup his genitals. He began to scream, his voice rising from a soundless wheeze into a high-pitched shriek. He dropped to all fours and began crawling furiously, dripping soap and water on the floor. Antar guessed he was heading for a towel, but he couldn't see the rest of the bathroom: to him, the director looked frantically stationary, in the middle of his living room, as though he were crawling on a conveyor belt.

The Director jumped to his feet, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his middle. 'You fucking son-of-a-bitch,' Ava translated, into gleefully demotic Arabic, as the Director began to scream at Antar. 'You can't do this! I'll have you brought to book I'll see you pay for this! You'll go to jail, you wait… '

Antar tried to explain but he wouldn't listen. So Antar hit the bathroom with the Alert signal until he quieted down and went to look for his clothes.

He went on grumbling while he dressed. 'You don't know what it's like here,' he muttered, pulling on his trousers. 'I have to run the whole office myself.'

'Is it hard work?' Antar said, trying to sound sympathetic.

'Hard work!' cried the Director laughing sarcastically. 'That's the problem; there's no work at all, now that the river doesn't flow through the city any more. I have to make work for the office. I keep recommending projects but the people here won't let the Council touch a thing: I've never seen anything like it. In the last year they've only let us start one project. And you know what that is?'

'What?' said Antar.

'A shelter!' said the Director, throwing up his hands. 'A shelter for the needy is how we describe it. They have a big fort here, called Fort William. It was built by the British in the eighteenth century. The Council requisitioned it, but then couldn't figure out what to do with it. The only thing everyone could agree on was the shelter idea. So that's what I do now, I run a shelter.'

He had finished dressing and was sitting at his terminus, looking through his files. 'All right, what was it you were asking about?' he said, looking over his shoulder. 'An ID card in an inventory? That's easy -there's only one place it could have come from.'

He made a couple of short-sighted jabs at his keyboard. 'Yes,' he said. 'I thought so. It was in an inventory that came from the Fort William Shelter.'

'Go on,' said Antar.

'Well,' said the Director, 'it seems to have been found in the Department of Alternative Inner States… '

He gave Antar a wink, over his shoulder. 'What we oldtimers used to call asylums,' he said. 'It says here it was entered into the system this morning. They found it while registering an inmate. They always do a strip search when they bring someone in.'

Peering into the panel, he gave Antar a sly grin. 'From what I can see here,' he said, 'I would say the guy you're looking for is experiencing an inner state that is about as alternative as it can be.'

'Who was he?' asked Antar.

'He wouldn't give a name,' said the Director.

'Where was he found?'

The Director peered at his panel again. 'It says here,' he said, 'that he turned himself in at a railway station – a place called Sealdah.'

'When can I talk to him?' said Antar.

'You want to talk to him?' groaned the Director. 'You realize I'll have to bring him here? This is the Council's only secured communications facility here – right in my home. What if he experiences an alternative inner state while he's here? What if he wrecks the place? What if he wrecks the terminus?'

'I'll make sure you're insured,' said Antar. 'Just have him here: as soon as you can.' He cut the Director off before he could protest.

Then he stumbled back to bed.

Chapter 37

WALKING PAST the pavement stalls on Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road, Urmila caught a whiff of the irresistible smell of fish cutlets and dhakai parotha wafting through the doors of the Dilkhusha Cabin.

'I'll die if I don't eat soon,' she remarked to Murugan.

She lost no time in propelling him into the eatery. Leading him to a curtained booth, she slid on to a bench and signalled to Murugan to seat himself opposite her. A waiter appeared almost immediately, with two limp menu cards in his hand. Urmila ordered for them both, and as soon as the waiter left, she pulled the curtain shut.

'Tell me,' she said, leaning across the table. 'Who is this Lachman you keep talking about?'

'You mean Lutchman,' Murugan corrected her. 'That's how Ronnie Ross would have said it; that's how he spelt it, anyhow.'

'But the name must have been Lachman,' said Urmila. 'Ross probably just spelt it in a British kind of way.'

'Same difference,' said Murugan. 'Who knows what his mother called him? We weren't there. Anyways, Lutchman was this young guy who walked into Ronnie Ross's life on May 25 1895 at 8 p.m., offering himself as a guinea pig. He ended up spending the next three years doing everything for Ron, from slicing his breakfast bagels to counting his slides. Every time Ron went running off in the wrong direction, Lutchman was waiting to head him off and show

him the way to go. He claimed to be a "dhooley-bearer" by trade, but my guess is that he was leading Ronnie by the nose.'

'But,' said Urmila, 'how would he have known about where to lead Ronald Ross?'

'It's a long story,' he said. 'I'll cut it short for you: a few years ago I found a letter that was written in Calcutta, by an American missionary doctor called Elijah Farley. Before he got religion Farley was doing medical research back in the States, at Johns Hopkins. As a student he'd worked with some of the biggest names in malaria research.

'Well, the last thing he ever wrote was this letter in which he described a visit to Cunningham's laboratory in Calcutta. He saw some stuff there that was – oh, maybe three or four years ahead of the state of play in the international scientific community. None of it made any sense to him, of course, because it didn't fit with anything he'd ever been taught.'

'Don't talk so fast,' said Urmila. 'I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to tell me. Are you talking about Cunningham's own research?'

Murugan laughed: 'No. Cunningham didn't have a clue.'

'So who was doing this work, then?'

'The way Farley saw it,' said Murugan, 'it was the people in the lab, Cunningham's servants and assistants.'

'But surely,' said Urmila, 'Cunningham's assistants would have told him what they were doing.'

'It's like this,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham's assistants were a pretty wild mix. You see, he didn't want educated college kids from Calcutta messing around in his lab, and asking questions and stuff. So what he did instead was he'd train his own assistants.'

'Who were they?' Urmila asked. 'And where did he find them?'

'In the last place anyone would think of looking,' said Murugan. 'At Sealdah railway station. The station hadn't been around that long, but if you wanted to find people who were pretty much on their own, down and out with nowhere to go, that was the place to look. Cunningham used to check out the whole station every once in a while and when he saw a likely looking kid he'd offer them room and board in exchange for work – nothing fancy, just a minimum-wage kind of job around the lab, sweeper, "dhooley-bearer", that sort of shit. They'd jump at it, of course: what did they have to lose? They'd live in those outhouses near the hospital wall, and help around the lab. It was a nice, cosy little set-up.'

'So he taught them?' said Urmila. 'And trained them and so on?'

'Not really,' said Murugan. 'He may have taught them how to read a little English and he probably showed them a couple of things – but just monkey-see, monkey-do kind of stuff. They probably didn't give a shit anyway. But there was this one person, a woman, who took to the lab like a duck to water. My guess is that within a few years she was way ahead of Cunningham in her intuitive understanding of the fundamentals of the malaria problem.'

'But who was this woman?' said Urmila. 'And what was she called?'

Murugan smiled: 'The way Farley tells it,' he said, drawing his sleeve across his damp forehead, 'her name was Mangala.'

Urmila gasped. 'Mangala?' she cried. 'You mean like Mangal-bibi -like the name the girl said?'

'I guess you could call her a prototype,' said Murugan. 'And as for who she was – who knows? The only indication we have that she even existed was in this letter written by Elijah Farley. And even that letter isn't around any more: at least it's untraceable in the catalogues.'

'What did Elijah Farley say about her?'

'Not much,' said Murugan. 'All he knew was what Cunningham told him – which was that he found her at Sealdah Station, that she was dirt poor and that she probably had hereditary syphilis. But then the big question is: did Cunningham find her or did she find him? Anyway, Farley saw things happening in the lab that left him in no doubt that she knew a whole lot more about malaria than Cunningham could ever have taught her.'

'Really?' said Urmila, her forehead wrinkling in disbelief. 'Is it possible that she could have taught herself something as technical as that?'

Murugan shrugged. 'Similar things have been known to happen,' he said. 'Think of Ramanujan, the mathematician, down in Madras. He went ahead and reinvented a fair hunk of modern mathematics just because nobody had told him that it had already been done. And with Mangala we're not talking about mathematics: we're talking about microscopy, which was still an artisanal kind of skill at that time. Real talent could take you a long way in it – Ronnie Ross's career is living proof of that. With this woman we're talking about a whole lot more than just talent; we may be talking genius here. You also have to remember that she wasn't hampered by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone who was conventionally trained: she wasn't carrying a shit-load of theory in her head, she didn't have to write papers or construct proofs. Unlike Ross she didn't need to read a zoological study to see that there was a difference between culex and anopheles: she'd have seen it like you or I can see the difference between a dachshund and a Dobermann. She didn't care about formal classifications. In fact she didn't even really care about malaria. That's probably why she got behind Ronnie Ross and started pushing him towards the finish line. She was working towards something altogether different, and she'd begun to believe that the only way she was going to make her final breakthrough was by getting Ronnie Ross to make his. She had bigger things in mind than the malaria bug.'

'Like what?' said Urmila.

'The Calcutta chromosome.'

With a discreet cough, the waiter parted their curtain, and placed their orders on the table.

Urmila waited till he had left. 'What was that you just said?'

'The Calcutta chromosome,' said Murugan. 'That's my name for what she was working towards.'

'Now I'm really lost,' said Urmila. 'I've lived here all my life and I've never heard of this thing you're talking about.'

'And who knows if you ever will?' said Murugan. 'Or whether I will. Or whether it exists or has ever existed. At this point in time it's still all guesswork on my part.'

'But you must have something to found your guesses on,' said Urmila.

Murugan made no answer. 'Go on,' Urmila prompted, almost pleading. 'We're caught in this together, after all. I have a right to know.'

Murugan hesitated. 'Are you really sure you want to know?'

She nodded.

'OK, I'll tell you what started me off,' said Murugan reluctantly. 'It seemed to me from Farley's letter that Mangala was actually using the malaria bug as a treatment in another disease.'

'What disease?'

'Syphilis,' said Murugan. 'Or to put it more precisely, syphilitic paresis – the final paralytic stage of syphilis. From Farley's account it seems there was an underground network of people who believed that she possessed a cure. Remember that we're talking about the 1890s – long before the discovery of penicillin. Syphilis was untreatable and incurable: it killed millions of people every year, all around the world. These people who came to see Mangala may have believed that she was a witch or a magician or a god or whatever: it doesn't matter – the conventional medical treatments for syphilis at that time weren't much more than hocus-pocus either. Let's just stick with that old saying about no smoke without a fire. If a whole crowd of people believed that Mangala had a cure, or a halfway effective treatment, it must have been because she had a certain rate of success. People aren't crazy: if they travelled long distances to see her they must have thought she offered some kind of hope.'

'What do you think that treatment was?' said Urmila.

'I'm just guessing wildly here, OK? But if you twisted my arm, I'd say that she'd stumbled upon some variant of a process that got a guy called Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel in 1927. Guess what that treatment was?'

Urmila looked up from her plate. 'You know perfectly well I have no idea,' she said. 'What was it?'

Murugan poked a finger into the crisp, rounded top of his dhakai parotha, releasing a puff of steam. 'All right, I'll tell you,' he said. 'What Wagner-Jauregg showed was that artificially induced malaria often cured, or at least mitigated, syphilitic paresis. What he'd do is, he'd actually inject malarial blood into the patient by making a little incision. It was a pretty crude process, but the weird thing is that it worked. In fact, until antibiotics, the WagnerJauregg process was pretty much a standard treatment: every major VD hospital had its little incubating room where it grew a flock of anopheles. Think about it: hospitals cultivating disease! But on the other hand, what could be more natural than fighting fire with fire? You could say vaccines work on the same sort of principle really, but what they do is to prime your immune system against themselves. This is the only instance known to medicine of using one disease to fight another.

'To this day no one really knows how the WagnerJauregg treatment worked. Not that anyone's losing any sleep over it. It was a scientific scandal and medicine was almost grateful to turn its back on it once antibiotics came along. Old Julius didn't worry too much about how it worked either. He was no biologist, remember: he was a clinician and a psychologist. He thought the process worked by raising the patient's body temperature. It didn't seem to bother him that no other fever had the same effect.

'But it's quite possible that malaria worked on paresis through a different route: the brain, for example. One of the things that syphilis does is that it muddies up the blood! brain barrier. Malaria works on the brain too, in different ways: that's why falciparum malaria is also called cerebral malaria. But other kinds of malaria have weird neural effects too. A lot of people who've had malaria know that: it can be more hallucinogenic than any mind-bending drug. That's why primitive people sometimes thought of malaria as a kind of spirit-possession.

'Enter Mangala: it looks like she hit upon this treatment too, at about the same time as the Herr Doktor. But she added a little twist to it. From what we know of her technique, it sounds like she was working with some weird strain of malaria – that is, by some kind of primitive horsebreeding method she had developed a strain that could actually be cultivated in pigeons. My hunch is that she found some way of making the bug cross over, so that the bird could be used like a test tube, or an agar plate.

'Now here's the really wacky stuff. I'll just stick my neck out and say it: I think what happened was that somewhere down the line Mangala began to notice that her treatment often produced weird side effects – what looked like strange personality disorders. Except that they weren't really disorders but transpositions. She began to put two and two together and found that in fact what she had on her hands was a crossover of randomly assorted personality traits, from the malaria donor to the recipient – via the bird of course. And once she saw this she became more and more invested in isolating this aspect of the treatment, so that she could control the ways in which these crossovers worked.'

'I'm not sure I follow,' said Urmila. 'What exactly are you trying to say?'

'What am I saying? Well, what I'm saying is this: I think Mangala stumbled on something that neither she nor Ronnie Ross nor any scientist of that time would have had a name for. For the sake of argument let's call it a chromosome: though the whole point of this is that if it is really a chromosome, it's only so by extension, so to speak – by analogy. Because what we're talking about here is an item that is to the standard Mendelian pantheon of twenty-three chromosomes what Ganesh is to the gods; that is, different, non-standard, unique – which is exactly why it eludes standard techniques of research. And which is why I call it the Calcutta chromosome.

'One of the reasons why the Calcutta chromosome can't be found by normal methods is because unlike the standard chromosomes it isn't present in every cell. Or if it is, it's so deeply encrypted that our current techniques can't isolate it. And the reason why it isn't present in every cell is because unlike the other chromosomes it's not symmetrically paired. And the reason why it's not paired is because it doesn't split into eggs and sperm. And guess why that is? I'll tell you: it's because this is a chromosome that is not transmitted from generation to generation by sexual reproduction. It develops out of a process of recombination and is particular to every individual. That's why it's only found in certain kinds of cells: it simply isn't present in regenerative tissue. It only exists in non-regenerating tissue: in other words, the brain.

'Let me put it like this: if there really is such a thing as the Calcutta chromosome only a person like Mangala, someone who's completely out of the loop, scientifically speaking, would be able to find it – even if she didn't know what it was and didn't even have a name for it. For what we have here is a biological expression of human traits that is neither inherited from the immediate gene pool nor transmitted into it. It's exactly the kind of entity that would be hardest for a conventional scientist to accept. Biologists are under so much pressure to bring their findings into line with politics: right-wing politicians sit on them to find genes for everything, from poverty to terrorism, so they'll have an alibi for castrating the poor or nuking the Middle East. The left goes ballistic if they say anything at all about the biological expression of human traits: it's all consciousness and soul at that end of the spectrum.

'But if you think about it, it figures that certain kinds of traits would have a biological correlate. But who said they have to be determined by biology? Maybe it even works the other way around – that they leave their imprint on biology. Who knows?

'And just because those biological correlates aren't transmitted by sexual reproduction, it doesn't mean that they can't be transferred between individuals by other methods. And that's where Mangala comes up to bat. Remember that she started at the deep end, by stumbling upon the process of transmission, rather than the chromosome itself – after all she didn't know what a chromosome was. No one did back then. Remember that it was malaria that led her to it. Remember that one of the extraordinary things about the malaria bug is that it has the capacity to 'cut and paste' its DNA – unlike any creature we know of except the trypanosome. Remember that's one of the reasons why it's been so hard to develop a malaria vaccine. Because what's special about the malaria bug is that as it goes through its life cycle it keeps altering its coat-proteins. So by the time the body's immune system learns to recognize the threat, the bug's already had time to do a little costumechange before the next act.

'Perhaps what Mangala chanced upon was just this: that the malaria bug, because of its recombinatory powers, can actually digest this bit of DNA by splitting it up and redistributing it. Then, when it's reintroduced in a patient whose bloodlbrain barrier's been made spongy, perhaps it can carry the information back and make some tiny little rewirings in the host's wetware.

'I reckon that once she stumbled on the process she dropped everything else and began to concentrate on refining it – in two directions. One was in trying to figure out some way of side-stepping the syphilis step. And the other was in trying to stabilize the chromosome during the process of transference. Because what was happening till then was that the bug was breaking it up in the weirdest ways and she wanted to be able to control the kinds of traits that were being transmitted.

'It's my guess that by about 1897 Mangala had run into a dead end, and she'd come to the conclusion that the existent strains of malaria wouldn't let her go any further. That's why she was so desperate to have Ronnie figure the whole thing out and publish it. Because she actually believed that the link between the bug and the human mind was so close that once its life cycle had been figured out it would spontaneously mutate in directions that would take her work to the next step. That was what she believed, I think: that every time she reached a dead end, the way ahead was by provoking another mutation.'

Pushing away her empty plate, Urmila said: 'How?'

'By trying to make certain things known.'

'So did she succeed?' she asked.

Murugan smiled. 'I think we're going to find out.'

'How?'

'My guess is that that's what this experiment is about.'

'But why in this way? Why not…?'

'Don't you get it?' said Murugan. 'She's not in this because she wants to be a scientist. She's in this because she thinks she's a god. And what that means is that she wants to be the mind that sets things in motion. The way she sees it, we can't ever know her, or her motives, or anything else about her: the experiment won't work unless the reasons for it are utterly inscrutable to us, as unknowable as a disease. But at the same time, she's got to try and tell us about her own history: that's part of the experiment too.'

'Why are you talking about her as if she was still alive?' said Urmila. 'Are you really trying to say that she is? That she somehow managed to…?'

Murugan smiled. 'Well,' he said. 'What do you think?'

Crossing her arms, Urmila hugged herself, suddenly cold. 'I don't know what to think,' she said. She took hold of the booth's curtain and tweaked it back.

The moment she looked into the cabin, everything seemed to stop; it was as though everyone in the room had turned to stare – the other customers, the waiters, the dishevelled college students at the next table – as though they had been waiting all along to see her face.

She pushed the curtain quickly shut.

'But what about Lutchman?' she said. 'Nothing you've told me proves any connection between Mangala and Lutchman. For that matter who was Lutchman? What was his past?'

'You've got me there, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'That's where I keep coming up short. All I have is bits and pieces – no beginning, no middle and definitely no end.'

'Give me examples,' said Urmila. 'What are these bits and pieces you're talking about?'

'Farley's letter is the main source,' said Murugan. 'Farley says there was another guy working with Mangala at Cunningham's lab. He seems to have been about the same age as Lutchman and he fits the same general profile.'

'That's not much to go on,' said Urmila.

'That's true,' Murugan acknowledged, 'except that a couple of references in the letter seem to suggest that this assistant was the same guy who turned up at Ross's door on May 25 1895.'

'Like what?' said Urmila.

'Well, one thing we know about Lutchman, from another source, is that he was digitally challenged – that is, his left hand was missing a thumb. It doesn't seem to have made any difference to his manual skills. He was probably born that way, because his index finger seems to have retrained itself to do the thumb's job… '

Something stirred in Urmila's mind, a distant memory.

'What's up?' said Murugan. 'Why're you frowning?'

She bit her lip: 'I thought I'd remembered something, but I can't place it. Anyway, go on. Does Farley say anything about the assistant's hand?'

'Nothing explicit,' said Murugan. 'But there's a sentence where he says: "he was surprisingly deft given the circumstances". Something like that, anyway. My guess is that the "circumstances" he's referring to had something to do with the guy's hand.'

'Is that all?' Urmila said in disappointment.

'There's just one other thing. At the end of the letter Farley said that the assistant had been using an assumed name.'

'So what was his real name then?'

'I wish I knew,' said Murugan. 'But I don't. Farley didn't mention it in his letter. He left Calcutta the same day he posted the letter. He was seen boarding a train at Sealdah Station and a young man who fits the assistant's description was carrying his luggage. They were also seen getting off the train together later, at a deserted little station. Farley was never seen again. A few months later, in May 1895, "Lutchman" walked into Ronald Ross's lab in Secunderabad.'

'That could just be a coincidence,' said Urmila.

'Could be,' said Murugan. 'But there's another coincidence left to account for.'

'Yes?'

'It's just this,' said Murugan. 'I've established from a different source that Lutchman's name wasn't a real name either.'

'What was it?' said Urmila. 'Laakhan.' said Murugan.

Urmila's hands flew to her mouth. 'Tell me,' she said. 'Quick: what was the name of the station where Farley and the assistant were last seen?'

'Renupur,' said Murugan.

She stared at him soundlessly.

Murugan took hold of her hand and shook it. 'Hey, wake up,' he said. 'What's up?'

'It's just that I think I may be able to fill in a part of the picture,' Urmila said.

'How come?'

'Last night I went home with Sonali-di and she told me something: a story she'd heard from her mother, about something that happened to Phulboni many years ago.'

Chapter 38

IN 1933, SOON AFTER he got his first and only job, Phulboni was sent on a trip to the remote provincial town of Renupur.

Phulboni was working for a well-known British firm, Palmer Brothers, which made soaps and oils and other household goods. The company was famous for its extensive distribution network, which reached into the smallest towns and villages. Every new recruit to the company had to spend a couple of years travelling within a region, visiting village shops, getting to know the local merchants, sitting in tea-stalls, visiting fairs and fairgrounds.

Being new to the job, Phulboni had never heard of Renupur. Upon making enquiries he was pleasantly surprised to discover that, tiny though it was, the town boasted a railway station. A train that connected Calcutta to the cotton market of Barich passed through it every other day.

As the crow flies, Renupur was no more than three hundred miles from Calcutta but the journey was a slow and rather tedious one, meandering as it did through Darbhanga and a wide swath of the great Maithil plain. But far from being dismayed at the thought of spending two days on a train, Phulboni was delighted: he loved everything to do with the railways – stations, engines, Bradshaws, the acrid creosote smell of teakwood sleepers. There was nothing he liked better than to daydream by an open window with the wind in his face. He was particularly enthusiastic on this occasion because he had been told that the forests near Renupur offered good hunting. Typically, he had spent his first month's salary on a new.303 rifle. Now he was looking forward to the prospect of putting the gun to use.

It was mid-July. The monsoons had set in and the whole of eastern India was awash in rain. Several of the famously restless rivers of the region had burst their banks and swept across the broad, flat plains. Those waters, so full of menace to those they nourished, presented an entirely different aspect to a casual spectator in a train, watching from the safety of a tall embankment. The still waters, lying in great silver sheets under the lowering monsoon skies, presented an enchanting, bewitching spectacle. Phulboni, raised amidst the hills and forests of Orissa, had never seen anything like this before: this majestic, endless plain mirroring the turbulent heavens.

Before leaving Darbhanga Phulboni had asked the guard on the train to let him know before they arrived in Renupur. The journey took eight hours, but to the young writer it seemed to pass in a matter of minutes. Long before he had slaked his appetite for the landscape, the guard appeared to tell him that they were almost at Renupur.

Phulboni was astonished: looking out of the window all he could see were flooded fields, the still waters broken only by the careful geometry of bunds and embankments. An occasional distant curl of wood smoke, spiralling out of a thicket of trees, suggested a village or a hamlet but he could see no sign whatever of habitation on a scale that might earn entitlement to a railway station.

On expressing his surprise to the guard Phulboni learnt, to his alarm, that the town (or rather village) of Renupur was some three miles distant from the station that bore its name. Renupur was by no means large or important enough to merit a deviation in the tracks that linked Darbhanga to Barich. Those of Renupur's villagers who wished to avail themselves of this facility were expected instead to make the journey to the station in a bullock cart. Indeed, the station of Renupur owed its existence more to the demands of engineering than to the requirements of the local population. Railway regulations decreed that single-track lines such as this were required to have sidings at regular intervals, so that oncoming trains could pass each other in safety. It was thus that Renupur came to boast of a station: it was really little more than a signboard and a platform attached to a siding.

It was all just red tape and regulations of course, the guard said. There was no real need for a siding on this line. This was the only train that ever used this length of track. It went chugging along, stopping wherever the slightest pretext offered itself, until it came to the end of the line. And then it simply turned around and headed back. It never encountered other trains until it reached Darbhanga.

The guard was an odd-looking man. He had a grotesquely twisted face: his lower jaw was so much out of alignment with the upper that his mouth was perpetually open in a crooked, leering grimace. Now he began to laugh, in his dry, rustling voice. Leaning out of the window he pointed to a length of track that ran alongside the main line for a couple of hundred yards before rejoining it. The tracks were so rusted and overgrown as to be barely visible.

'And there you see the Renupur siding,' he said, thrusting his face close to Phulboni's and showering him with blood-red pan-spittle. 'As you can tell, it's not used. They say it's only ever been used once, and that was many, many years ago.'

Phulboni paid no attention: he was too busy wiping the pan-stains off his face.

The train ground to a halt and the guard flung a door open and scurried down carrying Phulboni's gun-bag and portmanteau. Before Phulboni could tip him, he was back on the train waving his green flag.

'Wait a minute,' Phulboni cried, taken aback.

With a blast of its whistle the train pulled slowly away.

Phulboni looked around him and saw, to his considerable surprise, that he was the only person who had disembarked at Renupur. He cast a last, lingering glance at the train and saw the guard watching him from a window, his mouth hanging maniacally open. Then the train gave another blast of its whistle and the strange twisted face vanished into a cloud of smoke.

Phulboni shrugged and bent down to pick up his luggage. He was impatient to be on his way to the village and instinctively he held up a hand, to summon a coolie. It was not till then that he noticed that there were no coolies anywhere in sight.

The station was the smallest Phulboni had ever seen, smaller even than those tiny village stations that sometimes loom unexpectedly into view as one drowses in a speeding train, only to disappear again, just as quickly. For even the smallest stations usually have at least a platform, and often a few wooden benches too. But the platform at Renupur was a length of beaten earth, its surface covered in weeds and a few cracked paving stones. Two creaking signboards hung beside the track, separated by a hundred yards, each bearing the barely legible legend: 'Renupur'. Halfway between them, serving as a signal-room-cum-station-house, was a ramshackle tin-roofed brick structure, painted the usual railway red. There were no houses or huts anywhere in sight, no villagers, no railway guards, no staring rustics, no urchins, no food-vendors, no beggars, no sleeping travellers, not even the inevitable barking dog.

Phulboni realized, looking around him, that the station was empty – absolutely empty. There was nobody, not a single human being anywhere in sight. The spectacle was so startling as literally to provoke disbelief. Stations, in the young writer's experience, were either crowded or less crowded. They were less crowded when you could walk through them unimpeded, without having to push people aside. On the rare occasions when that happened you said, in surprise: 'Why, the station's empty today!', using the term metaphorically, conjuring away the coolies and the vendors and the dozing passengers and the waiting relatives and so on who, without actually impeding your progress, were still undeniably present. That, as far as the young writer knew, was what the word empty meant when applied to a station. But this? Phulboni, for all his gifts, was at a loss to think of a word to describe a station that was literally uninhabited and unpeopled.

The young man's heart sank as he contemplated that desolate spot. He had no idea where to go next or how. There was no road or pathway in sight. The station, perched on the railway embankment, was a little island in a sea of shimmering floodwater.

Phulboni had been led to believe that someone would meet him at the station: a shopkeeper or stall-owner or some other person who dealt in Palmer's products. But here he was, in Renupur, and so far as he could see, he was the sole occupant of the station. Picking up his beddingroll, he slung his gun over his shoulder, and set off for the signal-room to see if he could find the stationmaster. No sooner had he taken his first few steps than he heard a voice behind him, calling out, 'Sahib, sahib.' Turning around, Phulboni saw a tiny, bandy-legged man, scrambling up the embankment. He was dressed in a mud-stained dhoti and a railwayman's coat and he was holding a brass pitcher by its lip.

Phulboni was so relieved to see another human being that he would gladly have embraced him. But mindful of his status as a representative of Palmer Brothers he stiffened his back and raised his chin.

The man caught up with Phulboni and took the beddingroll out of his hands.

'Arrey, sahib,' he said, panting. 'What to do? Every time the rains start it's like this with me: back and forth, out to the fields and in again. If I eat so much as one banana it goes shooting right through and out again like a cannonball. It's an affliction. The-one-who-is-at-home always says to me, she says, "Arrey, Budhhu Dubey, if you were a cow instead of a stationmaster at least I would be able to do all my cooking with your dung." And I say to her, "Woman, think a little before you speak. Just ask yourself, if I was a cow instead of a stationmaster why would you need to cook for me?"

Phulboni's mouth twitched, but being new at the job he was not quite sure of the tone that was expected of a representative of Palmer Brothers in situations like these. Sensing his hesitation, Budhhu Dubey was already the picture of contrition.

'Oh, sahib,' he said. 'Budhhu Dubey is a fool, telling a big sahib like you about his dung. Forgive me, forgive me… '

He threw himself at Phulboni's feet. Now it was all the writer could do to keep him from buffing his shoes with his forehead.

Phulboni pulled him up, brusquely. 'Enough of that,' he said. 'Tell me, how can I get to Renupur?'

'That's the thing,' the stationmaster said, apologetically. 'Even if you had a boat you would not be able to get to Renupur today.'

Phulboni was aghast. 'But where will I stay?' he said. 'What will I do?'

'Nothing to worry about, sahib,' said the stationmaster. He gave Phulboni a wide grin. 'You will stay with me.' He explained that a shopkeeper had sent word from Renupur asking him to look after Phulboni.

Phulboni pondered this proposition at some length. 'Where do you live?' he asked finally.

'Right there,' said the stationmaster, 'behind those trees.' He pointed at a distant mango grove, perched upon a gentle rise. To Phulboni the spot seemed to be separated from the station by some two or three miles of waterlogged plain.

'It won't take a moment to get there,' said the stationmaster. 'We'll leave your bags in the signal room and then we'll start walking. You'll see, by the time we get there, the-one-who-is-at-home will have something special ready for you.'

He picked up Phulboni's bedding-roll and started towards the signal-room, swaying on his bandy legs. Phulboni followed close behind, carrying his canvas gun-bag. Pushing the door gingerly open the stationmaster ushered Phulboni in. As they stepped in a gust of wind blew the door shut. Suddenly they were enveloped in cobwebbed gloom.

The room was very small with only the one door and a single shuttered window. In one corner, there stood a dusty desk. Otherwise the room seemed abandoned and unused.

It was only when Phulboni's eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness that he spotted a string bed, pushed up against the far wall. It was on old charpoy, covered with torn matting. Phulboni went over and gave the mat a slap, raising a cloud of swirling dust. 'Whose is this?' he asked the stationmaster.

'Oh that's been here for ever,' said the stationmaster' dismissively. 'It belongs to the snakes and rats.' He pushed the door quickly open and stepped out. 'Let us go now, sahib: it will soon be dark.'

Phulboni cast another glance around the room. This time his eyes fell upon a small alcove in the wall. Standing inside it was a signal lantern. Phulboni went over to take a closer look and was pleasantly surprised to see that the lantern had been recently cleaned and polished. The tin body was gleaming clean and the circle of red glass in the lantern's window shone bright red in the reflected sunlight. Phulboni put out a finger to tap on the glass, but the stationmaster stopped him, hurtling across the room and pushing his hand away.

'No, no!' he cried. 'Don't do that.'

Phulboni jumped in surprise, and the stationmaster said vehemently: 'No, no, it's not to be touched.'

'But don't you touch it?' said Phulboni, even more surprised now. 'Then who cleans it? Who polishes it?'

The stationmaster dismissed the question with a wave of his hand, muttering something about railway property. 'We should set off now, sahib,' he said trying to steer Phulboni to the door. 'It's getting dark; we have to be quick now.' The writer shrugged and bent down to pick up his bedding-roll. 'No,' he said, throwing it on the charpoy. 'No. I am going to stay here tonight.'

The stationmaster's mouth fell open and a look of alarm descended on his jovial, slightly doltish face. 'No, no sahib,' he said, his voice rising. 'You can't do that – that cannot happen. It cannot be done.'

'Why not?' he asked. Dilapidated though it was, the prospect of a night in that room seemed vastly preferable to that of wading through two miles of floodwater.

'No, no,' the stationmaster cried. 'No: put it out of your mind.' There was a note of panic in his voice and his forehead was beaded with sweat.

'But I'll be fine here,' said Phulboni.

'No, sahib, you mustn't stay here,' the stationmaster implored him. 'Come home with me; I won't let you stay here all by yourself.'

This made up Phulboni's mind. 'I'll be very comfortable here,' he said. 'Don't worry about me.' He set about unstrapping his hold-all before the stationmaster could answer.

Like all train travellers of the time, Phulboni was wholly prepared for an eventuality such as this: packed in his bedding-roll were a thin mattress, a pillow and several sheets and towels. When he unstrapped it, the bag fell open like a ready-made bed.

'Look,' he said with a triumphant gesture. 'I'll sleep very well here.'

'No,' the stationmaster said, tugging ineffectually at his hold-all. 'You can't: it's not safe.'

'Not safe?' said Phulboni. 'Why? What could happen to me here?'

'Anything,' said the stationmaster. 'This is not the city, after all. All sorts of things happen in lonely places like this: there are thieves and brigands and dacoits… '

Phulboni burst out laughing. 'With so much water around,' he said, 'dacoits will need boats to get here. And if they did, this is what they'd have to face.' He tapped his canvas gun-bag.

'And snakes?' said the stationmaster.

'I'm not afraid of snakes,' said Phulboni with a smile. 'Where I grew up people used pythons as pillows.'

The stationmaster cast a despairing glance around the room, at the grimy, belittered desk and the massed cobwebs hanging from the ceiling in sooty honeycombs. 'But what will you eat, sahib?' he said.

'Since your house is so close,' Phulboni said equably, 'I hope it will not be too much trouble for you to bring me something from your kitchen.'

The stationmaster sighed. 'All right, sahib,' he said reluctantly. 'Do what you like; but just one thing: don't blame Budhhu Dubey later.'

'Don't worry,' said Phulboni. He prided himself on his knowledge of village folk, and knew that rural people often had set ideas about certain things. 'If I'm attacked by snakes or dacoits,' he said with a smile, 'I'll be the one to take the blame.'

The stationmaster left and Phulboni busied himself unpacking his things and settling in. He forced open the shuttered window and left the door swinging wide. Soon, with a little dusting and cleaning, the room began to look much more cheerful.

Encouraged, Phulboni decided to dust and clean the charpoy too. He pulled the hold-all off the bed and carried the frayed old mat outside and gave it a vigorous shake. A cloud of dust rose out of it, and once it had cleared Phulboni spotted a strangely shaped mark upon the mat; a fading, rust-red stain. He laid the mat on the ground and took a closer look.

It was an imprint of two large hands, placed next to each other. But there was something puzzling about them, something that did not quite fit. Phulboni had to turn his head this way and that before he worked out what it was: the imprint of the left hand showed four fingers and no thumb.

There was something just a little eerie and menacing about that strange outline, imprinted on the yellowing rush. He rolled the mat up and put it away, out of sight. He went back in, heaved the hold-all up to the bare strings of the charpoy and made a comfortable bed for himself. Then he put out his nightclothes and laid his shaving things in a neat row on the alcove, beside the signal lantern, in preparation for the morning. Standing back he looked around the room: everything was in order now, but somehow he still had a bad taste in his mouth. He decided to go for a walk.

It was late afternoon now. The clouds had parted and the sun was shining brightly through the rain-washed skies, touching everything in sight with an iridescent brilliance. Phulboni walked along the tracks, hopping from sleeper to sleeper, watching the parallel rails shoot away towards the horizon, slicing through the flooded, shimmering fields that flanked the tall embankment.

When he came to the point where the tracks separated he turned to look at the overgrown siding. He noticed fleetingly that the steel point-tongues that joined the siding to the main tracks were stiff and rusty with disuse. Then his eyes fell on a family of egrets that were using the weedcovered rails of the siding as a perch, to hunt from. Captivated, he walked stealthily towards the birds and seated himself on a rail, at a safe distance. A mound of raised earth – possibly once a platform – ran between the parallel rail tracks. The writer sat lounging, with his back against the mound, and spent the better part of an hour watching the egrets as they foraged amongst the frogs that were skimming the surface of the flooded fields below.

At last, filled with a sense of peace and well-being, he stood up and stretched. He was doubly glad now that he had decided to stay in the signal-room instead of going to the stationmaster's house: this was the kind of place in which solitude was its own reward.

He got up and walked on, balancing on a rail. It was almost sunset now, and the scudding flat-bottomed clouds above were shot through with streaks of scarlet and magenta. When he came to the points switch that joined the siding and the main line into a single track, Phulboni decided to turn back. He stopped to cast one last glance over the spectacular sight of the flooded fields glowing in the sunset. Inadvertently his eyes fell upon the red handle of the switching lever. He noticed, to his surprise, that the mechanism looked well cared for. There was no trace of rust on the lever and nor were the wires that connected it to the point-rails at all overgrown, even though they ran very close to the ground. On the contrary, the deep grooves in the grass under them suggested regular maintenance and use.

Phulboni had an instinctive interest in machinery. He liked the feel of cold metal, took pleasure in a good, wellcrafted piece of iron or steel. He crossed the rails and went over to cast an appreciative eye at the gleaming iron lever: it gave him an obscure sense of satisfaction to see a wellcared for piece of machinery in these unlikely surroundings.

As he leaned over, arm extended, he heard a shout. Straightening up, he saw the stationmaster struggling up the embankment. He was waving frantically, making signs to Phulboni to step back from the switching lever. He had a cloth bundle in one hand and an earthen pitcher in the other. Phulboni realized suddenly that he was ravenously hungry. He waved and went hurrying back along the tracks.

The stationmaster was waiting for him a hundred yards down the track. He had an angry frown on his forehead. 'Look,' he said to the writer. 'You may be a big sahib and all that but if you know what's good for you, you won't meddle with anything around here.'

He added, as an afterthought: 'This is government property, it belongs to the railways.'

Phulboni had been intending to compliment the stationmaster on his maintenance of the station's switching gear. He listened now in abashed silence, unable to think of an appropriate response.

The stationmaster thrust the cloth bundle and the earthen pitcher into his hands. 'Just put them in a corner after you've finished,' he said abruptly. 'I'll take care of them in the morning.' He shuffled quickly to the embankment and went scrambling down the side, towards the water-logged field below.

Recovering himself, Phulboni shouted: 'Why don't you stay a minute? Eat something with me before you go.'

'I'll be back in the morning,' the stationmaster answered, over his shoulder.

There was something about this hurried departure that disquieted Phulboni. Going to the edge of the embankment, he called out: 'Masterji, is there something you have not told me?'

'Tomorrow,' called back the stationmaster. 'Tomorrow… everything… it's getting dark… ' Hurried splashes drowned out the sound of his voice.

Phulboni felt oddly forlorn now, standing by the deserted rail tracks in the dying daylight. He made his way slowly back to the signal-room and pushed the door open. It was dark inside, but a metallic glint led his eyes to the floor. It was the curved blade of his razor: lying beside it were the pot of shaving soap, the brush and the lump of clear alum that he had placed in the alcove before leaving for his walk.

Phulboni placed the food and water on the desk and looked around to see if the window had blown open to let a draught or a gust of wind into the room. But the window was still firmly shut. For want of a better explanation, he decided that the objects must have been blown off when he opened the door. He picked them off the floor and arranged them neatly in the alcove once again, next to the signal lantern.

He decided to eat outside while there was still some light. Carrying the food and water to the door, he sat crosslegged on the ground and opened the cloth bundle. He found a stack of parathas, a generous helping of mango achar and a heap of golden-yellow potatoes thickly encrusted in masala. The food smelt better than anything he could ever remember and he fell upon it with gusto.

He was halfway through his third paratha when he heard something fall in the room behind him. He looked over his shoulder, startled. Through the open door, he spotted his razor and shaving things lying on the floor. Nothing had gone into the room and the wind had died down. He had a moment of unease but then his hunger reclaimed him and he went on with his meal.

After he had eaten he washed his hands, drank a copious draught of water and sat back, picking his teeth contentedly with a twig. His sense of well-being returned now, as he sat in the gentle breeze, listening to the chorus of frogs and crickets that came welling up from the flooded fields below. It was so restful, so tranquil, that something special was called for, he decided: it was an occasion that demanded one of his rare cheroots.

Phulboni was not much of a smoker, but once or twice a week after a good meal he took pleasure in lighting up a good cheroot or cigar. He remembered packing some for the trip, but he wasn't sure exactly where he had put them.

The signal-room was pitch dark now, but he had kept a matchbox handy. He struck a match and at once his eyes fell on the signal lantern, gleaming in its alcove. An idea flashed into his mind. He picked up the lantern and shook it. The sound of sloshing oil told him that the tank was full. He flipped back the glass window and fumbled for the screw that operated the wick. Giving it a couple of turns, he raised the wick an inch or so and lit it. When he snapped the window back into place a bright red light filled the room.

Pleased with himself, he went over to his hold-all and began to rifle through its pockets, looking for his tin of cheroots. He had just found it when there was a metallic snap behind him and the light went out. Phulboni clicked his tongue, irritated with himself for not having shut the door before lighting the lantern. He made his way over to the desk and lit another match. But then he took a closer look and discovered that he had been mistaken: the flame had not been extinguished by a gust of wind. Rather, the wick had been lowered back into its socket with a turn of the screw. He fiddled with the screw, frowning, wondering whether it had come loose. It was hard to be sure, and in the end he just turned the wick up and lit it again. This time he made sure to put it in a corner that was well sheltered from the wind.

Then he lit his cheroot, sitting crosslegged in the doorway, listening to the myriad insects of the monsoon. Halfway through the cheroot, he heard the screw in the lantern turning once again. Casting a glance over his shoulder he saw that the light had gone out. Phulboni froze; a chill ran down his spine. Then he remembered his gun and settled back reassured. There was nothing he knew of that was proof against a.303. He went on puffing at his cheroot.

He smoked the cheroot right down to the stub and then rose to his feet. It was something of an effort to go back into the signal-room, but now he had no option. He knew he would not be able to find his way to the stationmaster's house on his own, in the dark.

Phulboni set about preparing for the night very calmly and deliberately. He changed into his night-time pyjamas in the dark, rationing his matches. Then he pulled his stout leather belt off his trousers and used it to fasten the door. He took the gun out of its bag and placed it on the floor beside his bed, within easy reach. Then he lay down on the bed, facing the door. He had half-expected that he would find himself lying awake a long time. But it had been a long day and he was very tired: within a few minutes he was fast asleep.

He was awoken by the touch of rain upon his face. He sat up, startled, and reached instinctively for his gun. The door was open, flapping in the wind, and the rain was blowing into the room in great billowing gusts.

He struggled out of bed, cursing himself under his breath for not having made sure of the door. The belt was lying by the entrance, still buckled. He picked it up, pulled the door shut and tied the belt around the doorpost again, as tightly as he could. Stepping back he lit a match to see if the belt would hold.

That was when he noticed that the signal lantern was no longer in the corner where he had last placed it. He looked around at the desk and then at the alcove: the lantern was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished.

Phulboni was groggy with sleep and the first thought that came into his mind was that the stationmaster must have come in and taken the lantern while he was asleep; maybe there was an emergency somewhere down the track. He undid the door and looked out into the driving rain. Sure enough, there it was: a little circle of red light, bobbing up and down, some fifty yards down the track.

'Masterji, masterji!' Phulboni called out after him, shouting at the top of his voice, through cupped hands. But the light went on its way, and little wonder: the wind was howling, driving the rain before it.

Phulboni gave himself no time to think. He pulled his shoes on, wrapped a heavy towel around his body, and ran out. For an instant he toyed with the idea of taking his gun. But then, thinking of what the rain and mud might do to it, he changed his mind. Squaring his shoulders he walked out on to the track, narrowing his eyes against the buffeting wind. It was not till he was halfway to the siding that he began wondering how the stationmaster had let himself into the signal-room when the door was fastened from inside.

Phulboni stumbled on, lengthening his stride to match the gap between the sleepers. The wood was slippery with rain, and he had to struggle to keep his footing. He had trouble keeping the red light in sight, but he had the feeling that he was gaining on it. Every time he caught a glimpse of it the light seemed to be just a little closer than it was before.

Then, between two furious gusts of rain, he saw the light change course and veer off towards the right. He wasn't sure of his bearings any more, but he guessed that the stationmaster had reached the point where the tracks forked off towards the siding. He was amazed: whatever the emergency, it was hard to imagine why the stationmaster would come all this way in a storm to go to the siding.

Now he lost sight of the light and slowed down a little.

Dark as it was, he fixed his eyes on the track, trying to make sure that he didn't miss the turn to the siding. when it came. But in the end he found the turn only because he happened to stumble upon the curved point-rails. He began to feel his way ahead with his feet, following the tracks as they veered off to the right.

After a few steps he stopped and looked ahead, shading his eyes. Somewhere within a swirl of pouring rain he spotted the bobbing red light. It seemed much closer now and it seemed to be almost stationary.

After a few more steps he was certain. The light had stopped moving: it was on the ground, beside the track probably very near the spot where he had been sitting earlier that day, watching the egrets as they fished in the water below. He was sure the stationmaster had seen him and was waiting for him to catch up. Cupping his hands around his mouth he shouted once again, at the top of his voice: 'Masterji, masterji.'

The light seemed to bob in encouragement and he began to run faster, as fast as he could, eager to catch up. Then suddenly, when the light was no more than twenty feet away, he tripped. He fell face forward but managed to throw his hands out in time to save his forehead from smashing into the cold steel.

He paused, in relief, to catch his breath, holding himself up with stiffened arms, his hands clutching the rails. And then, just as his breath was beginning to return, he felt a tremor in the rail. He placed both hands on the rail. There could be no doubt of it: the rail was shaking, vibrating under an approaching train.

Phulboni was stunned: the chances of there being a train anywhere nearby were close to nil. The train he had taken was not due back from Barich until dawn, and there were no other trains running on that line. And even if there were, why would they be diverted to that siding – and who would switch the tracks? He had been following the stationmaster for the last several minutes, and he knew that he had been nowhere near the switching mechanism.

And yet there was no denying the evidence of his senses: the rails were shaking under his hands, and the vibrations were getting steadily stronger. He laid his ear upon the rail and listened carefully. He heard the unmistakable rumble of an approaching train. It was thundering towards him, very close at hand. At the last minute he flung himself sideways, over the embankment and went tumbling down towards the water.

Phulboni was still falling when the lights of the train flashed across the flooded fields. Clutching wildly at a bush, he managed to bring himself to a stop, his head inches from the water. At that very moment he heard a scream, a raging, inhuman howl that tore through the stormy night. It hurled a single word into the wind – 'Laakhan' – and then it was silenced by the thunder of the speeding train.

Phulboni was clinging to the embankment, head downwards, facing the water. He could not see the siding from that position, but he saw the train's lights, very clearly, skimming across the floodwater, he felt its weight shaking the embankment, he heard the anguished pant of its engine and smelt the coal in its boiler. But all the while the only thing he could think of was how narrowly he had escaped death.

He lay there for a few minutes shaking in fear and relief.

It was still pitch dark but the storm had let up a little. Once his hands had steadied he pushed himself to his feet and began to scramble up the embankment.

When he felt the ground levelling out under him, he called out: 'Anyone there?' just in case whoever it was that had screamed was still within earshot. There was no answer, so he sank to his knees and began to pat the earth around him, trying to find the rails. He knew he would not be able to find his way back to the signal-room without the tracks to guide him. After several minutes he felt a cold glancing touch on one of his hands. Breathing a sigh of relief, he fastened both hands upon the rail.

Disoriented as he was, it took a few minutes before

Phulboni realized that the rail, which had come so vividly alive under his hands a short while ago, was now absolutely still, motionless. He knew that rail tracks carry the sound of trains for miles, in either direction. It was only a short while since the train had passed over the siding: it could not be more than a mile away. He put his ear to the rail and listened carefully. The only sound he heard was the pattering of raindrops falling on metal. Then one of his hands touched some weeds growing over the tracks. He began to run his hands frantically along the rail in both directions. He discovered that the undergrowth that he had seen earlier that day, growing over the tracks, showed no signs of having been disturbed by the passage of a train.

Phulboni was frightened now, more than he had ever been in his life, frightened in a way that left his brain numb, his vision blurred. He was standing on the rail, looking around in a daze, when he saw the red light again. It was about a hundred yards away and it was coming slowly towards him.

Phulboni greeted it with a shout of relief: 'Masterji, masterji, I'm right here…'

The shout went unacknowledged but the lantern began to move a little faster. As he stood there watching the light Phulboni's head cleared a little; he peered at the lantern, trying to catch a glimpse of the face behind it. He could see nothing; the face remained wrapped in darkness.

Phulboni turned and ran. He ran faster than he had ever run, gasping for breath, fighting to keep his footing on the slippery tracks. He glanced over his shoulder once and saw the lantern running after him, closing the gap. He ran still faster, pushing himself on, moaning in terror.

Then he saw the signal-room taking shape in front of him, looming out of the darkness. He flung one last glance over his shoulder. The lantern was no more than a few paces behind him now; a hand clearly visible upon the steel handle.

With one final, desperate effort Phulboni flung himself at the signal-room and stumbled through the doorway. The gun was where he had left it, beside the bed. He snatched it up and turned, aiming the barrel at the door.

He was fumbling with the safety catch when the lantern appeared in the doorway. It stepped in and began to approach him; a hand appeared, bathed in the red light of the lantern. The face was still in darkness but suddenly that inhuman voice rang through the room again. It said just that one word, 'Laakhan'.

And then Phulboni fired, point-blank, into the window of the lantern. The report of the gun filled the room like dynamite exploding in a cave: the recoil of the barrel caught the writer on the chin and knocked him hard against the bed.

Chapter 39

THE NEXT THING Phulboni knew, it was dawn and he was staring into the stationmaster's grinning face. He was no longer in the signal-room: it was dawn and he was outside, lying on his back on something soft.

'I told the-one-who-is-at-home,' said the stationmaster. 'I told her, "You'll see there's no need to worry, he'll be all right.'"

Phulboni closed his eyes. Such was his relief at finding himself unharmed and safe that his whole body went limp.

'I had such a time pulling you out of there, sahib,' the stationmaster said. 'You would think that huge frame of yours is made of brass. I had to pull and pull and pull: all on my own too. But I said to myself, "Budhhu Dubey, whatever happens you have to get him out of this terrible place; even if you hurt your own back. As long as he's inside here; there's no hope for him. You have to get him out.'"

'What happened?' asked Phulboni. 'Where was I when you found me?'

'I came as early as I could,' the stationmaster said. 'The-one-who-is-at-home woke me while it was still dark and said, "Go now, and see if the poor man is all right." I came hurrying as quickly as I could. I found you lying on the floor with your gun across your body. At first I thought you were dead: but then I found you breathing so I pulled you out.'

'And the lantern?' said Phulboni. 'I fired at it: did you see any glass in the signal-room?'

The stationmaster frowned: 'Which lantern?'

'The signal lantern, ' said Phulboni. 'The one that was in the room yesterday.'

'It was in the same place,' said the stationmaster. 'All polished and clean: no one ever touches it. It's always like that, always in the same place: always clean, never any dust on it.'

The stationmaster fanned Phulboni's face vigorously with a banana leaf. 'This station is a terrible place,' he said. 'No one in any of the villages around here comes within a mile of this station after dark. You couldn't make them come if you gave them all the gold that is hoarded in the heavens. I tried to tell you but you wouldn't listen.'

'I'll listen now,' said Phulboni. 'I want to know what happened.'

The stationmaster sighed. 'I don't know what to tell you,' he said. 'A big sahib like yourself. I can only tell you what people say in these parts: simple village people like myself… '

Phulboni, listening with his eyes closed, ran his hand over his forehead. 'What is it that people say?' he said. 'I want to know.'

And then as luck would have it, one of his hands, reaching back brushed against a rail, a length of cold, vibrating steel. He opened his eyes, and found himself gazing at an uninterrupted view of leaves and trees, outlined against a rosy dawn sky. There was no sign of the stationmaster or anybody else. He looked around and discovered that he was lying on the siding, across the tracks, on a mattress. Hesitantly'he stretched out his arm and touched the rail.

And then once again Phulboni threw himself off the tracks. But this time he managed to halt his fall so that he was just inches away when the train went hurtling over the siding, over the mattress that he had just been lying on, tearing it to shreds. This time the train was all too real: he saw the horrified faces of the stokers and engineers as the train thundered past; he heard the screech of its brakes and the shriek of its whistle.

He scrambled up the siding and began to run. He caught up with the train a mile or so away where it had finally ground to a halt.

The stokers and engineers were examining the points and switches, trying to work out how the tracks had been switched. Incomprehensible, said the Anglo-Indian chief engineer; that siding hadn't been used in decades, the mechanism had been dismantled years ago. The train had almost been derailed, it was a miracle that it hadn't, with all the debris on those rusty, overgrown tracks.

So Phulboni said to the chief engineer: 'Maybe the stationmaster pulled the switch by mistake?'

The chief engineer was a grizzled old veteran. He gave Phulboni an odd smile and said: 'There hasn't been a stationmaster at Renupur for more than thirty years.'

Then the guard appeared, obsequious as ever, and led Phulboni to an empty first class carriage. Later, when the train had started off towards Darbhanga, he sidled up and whispered in the writer's ear: 'You were lucky; at least you are still alive.'

'Why?' Phulboni demanded. 'Have there been others who…?'

'The year I first began this job,' the guard said, 'in '94, there was another who was not so fortunate: he died there – in just that way, lying on the rails, at dawn. The corpse was so mangled that they never discovered exactly who it was, but it was rumoured that he was a foreigner.'

He gave Phulboni a melancholy smile. 'No one ever goes near that station at night,' he said.

'Why didn't you tell me this before?' said Phulboni.

'I tried to,' said the guard, with a crooked smile. 'But you would not have believed me. You would have laughed and said, "These villagers, their heads are full of fantasies and superstitions." Everyone knows that for city men like you such warnings always have the opposite effect.'

Acknowledging the truth of this Phulboni apologized and asked the guard to sit and recount everything he knew.

For many years, the guard said, the signal-room had been home to a young lad called Laakhan. The boy had drifted in from somewhere up the line soon after the station was first built. He was a stray, orphaned by famine, with a thin, wasted body and a deformed hand. The signal-room was empty then, because no railway employee would agree to live in such a lonely, isolated place. So Laakhan made it his home. The guards and stokers who passed through taught him how to use a signal lamp and work the switches. He made himself useful to the railways and they let him stay.

The boy was in his teens when a stationmaster was finally found for Renupur. As it turned out this stationmaster was an orthodox, upper-caste man: he took an instant dislike to the lad, looking on him as an affront to himself. He told the villagers that Laakhan was worse than untouchable; that he carried contagion; that he was probably the child of a prostitute; that his misshapen left hand was a mark of hereditary disease. He tried his best to drive the boy away from the station, but Laakhan had nowhere to go. The boy built a bamboo shack on the tracks of the unused siding and tried to keep out of sight.

This drove the stationmaster into an even greater fury. On a moonless Amavasya night, during a storm, the stationmaster tried to kill the boy by switching the points and leading him before a train. But no one knew the station better than Laakhan and he managed to escape. Instead it was the stationmaster who tripped on a rail and fell before the train.

That was the last time that Renupur had a stationmaster.

Phulboni's mind was full of questions: having escaped a similar death he was consumed with curiosity about the boy's fate. 'Tell me more,' he begged the guard. 'What became of Laakhan? I must know; you must tell me.'

'There is not much else to tell,' the guard said. 'What people say is that he hid himself on a train and went to Calcutta. They say he was living at Sealdah Station when a woman found him and gave him a home.'

'Is that all?' Phulboni persisted. 'Who was the woman? What happened to Laakhan?'

The guard pulled an apologetic face. 'That's all I know,' he said. 'Except…'

'Except what?'

'The man who was my predecessor at this job once told me something. He said that he had talked to the foreigner – the one who died at Renupur. He, the foreigner, had come up to him on the platform, just as he was about to flag the train out. He said that he had been travelling with a young man, a native of Renupur. As a sahib, naturally, the foreigner was in first class while this other man was in third. But now he could not find the young man: he had disappeared. My predecessor could not help him; he hadn't noticed anyone else getting off at Renupur. The foreigner was very annoyed and said he would wait at the station. The guard, my predecessor, told him that whatever happened he should not stay the night at the station. He did everything he could to make him leave, but the sahib only laughed, and said, "Oh, you villagers… '"

Chapter 40

'OH MY GOD!' Urmila cried suddenly, tugging at the booth's plastic curtain. 'What?' said Murugan.

'Sonali-di,' Urmila replied. 'I have to find a telephone.' She darted across the restaurant to the manager's desk at the back and picked up the telephone. Murugan waited to pay the bill and then followed her over.

She was staring at the receiver in shock when he caught up with her.

'Sonali-di's disappeared,' she said. 'She's not in her office, and she's not at home. She missed a staff meeting this morning and they've been trying to contact her. She hasn't been seen since last night. No one's answering the phone at her flat. Apparently I was the last person to talk to her.'

'What time was that?'

'About ten thirty, I think,' Urmila said. 'We went to her flat together, and I left about then.'

'I've got news for you, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'I saw her after you did.'

'What?' Urmila cried. 'But you don't even know her.'

'But I still saw her,' said Murugan. 'I went out to my balcony at about one o'clock last night, and I saw her getting out of a taxi: she went into number three Robinson Street… '

With a wail of despair Urmila pushed him aside: 'Why didn't you tell me?' She ran to the road and flagged down a taxi. 'Come on,' she called out to him, over her shoulder. 'We have to hurry.' Murugan climbed in after her and slammed the door shut.

'Robinson Street,' Urmila said to the taxi driver. 'Between Loudon and Rawdon.'

Then she turned to Murugan. 'We have to find Sonali-di,' she said. 'We have to try and warn her.'

'Why her?' said Murugan.

'Don't you see?' Urmila said. 'Because she's in it too: she told me that story.'

The evening rush hour was just beginning and traffic was very heavy once the taxi got to Chowringhee. Urmila sat hunched over the front seat, urging the driver on.

When Murugan spoke to Urmila again it was in a voice that was unaccustomedly quiet. 'Listen, Calcutta,' he said. 'You've been on the move since this morning; maybe you should give yourself a timeout here, just to think things over.'

'Think what over?' said Urmila distractedly. They were on Theatre Road now, beside the Kenilworth Hotel, and the air was fragrant with the smell of kababs.

'About whether you want to get any deeper into this,' said Murugan.

'What else could I do?' she said, in surprise.

'We could stop the taxi right here,' said Murugan. 'And you could get out and go home; go back to whatever you were doing.'

A shadow fell over Urmila's face.

'Go back home?' Urmila said to herself, under her breath, resting her eyes on the neat, bright buildings of the British Council. If she went home she would have to buy fish on the way. Her mother wouldn't believe her if she said Romen Haldar wasn't really going to come to their house in the evening, to offer her brother a First Division contract. She could hear her already; 'Oh, you don't care about us at all: your family means nothing to you; all you care about is yourself and your career; that's why no one will marry you; that's what Mrs Gangopadhyaya said the other day… '

Urmila turned to Murugan with an emphatic shake of her head. 'No,' she said. 'I don't want to go home.'

'It's your life, Calcutta,' Murugan said philosophically. 'You know best.'

A build-up of traffic at the Loudon Road crossing brought the taxi rattling to a halt. Urmila turned away from the Pierre Cardin boutique at the corner. Her eyes were brimming with curiosity as they settled on Murugan.

'What about you?' she said to Murugan. 'Why are you going on with this? What's kept you at it so long?'

'Can't you tell?' Murugan said.

Urmila shook her head: 'No.'

Murugan gave her a grim smile. 'It's not me,' he said. 'It's what's inside me.'

'Do you mean malaria?'

'That too,' said Murugan.

'What else?' said Urmila.

There was a brief pause, and then in an undertone, Murugan said: 'Syphilis.'

Urmila flinched, making an involuntary shrinking movement. Murugan turned on her, eyes narrowed. 'You don't have to worry,' he said. 'It's not contagious: I was officially cured a long time ago.'

'I'm sorry…' Urmila could not trust herself to say any more.

Murugan kept his eyes on the shops, food-stalls and travel agencies that flanked the road. With his face averted, he said: 'I guess it started somewhere over there.' He made a vague gesture at the skyline. 'On Free School Street. I was fifteen: I'd been to see a film at the Globe, after school. I was walking past New Market, on my way home, when a guy came up to me and whispered in my ear. I guessed he was a pimp: I'd been reading a lot of American detective novels. I was in my ink-stained school pants and a sweaty end-of-the-day shirt, with my textbooks and class notes slung over my shoulder. He was wearing a green checked lungi, and he had a thin pencil moustache and tiny bloodshot eyes. He winked before he whispered in my ear and gave me this toothy little grin. I could smell the paan and stale liquor on his breath. It was irresistible. All I had was five rupees but that was enough. He led me down one of those tiny alleys around Free School Street, just around the corner from the Armenian school, where William Thackeray was born. We went up a dark, stinking staircase that looked like it led to the anus of the earth. But then we got to the top and suddenly there was this great sunburst of light and noise and voices and music: it was like walking into a fairground – a huge room, with little curtained cubicles all around it, and vendors selling paan and tea, and all these women sitting on chairs lined up against the wall, with flowers around their wrists. I never looked back; I was hooked. I loved them; I loved everything about them, even the way they laughed behind my back when I was running down the stairs, afterwards, my pants half-unbuttoned.'

He fell silent, smiling to himself.

'And then,' he said, 'the lesions began to appear: scabs and sores and loosening teeth. I changed the way I dressed; I wore a lot of clothes, more and more, even on those June days when the heat is like a jackhammer waiting to hit you in the face. I managed to hide the scabs for, oh, I don't know how long, for months anyway – even though it hurt by then, God, it hurt. And when it was finally caught there was no disguising it. That was why my family had to leave the city: the shame.'

'But syphilis is curable now, isn't it?' Urmila said. 'With antibiotics?'

'Sure,' said Murugan. 'I got cured. They can cure it now – except for what it does to your head.'

Chapter 41

IT WAS THE RAIN, blowing in through the flapping shutters, that roused Sonali. Her eyes were gummy and swollen; she had trouble prying her eyelids open. She was lying on her side, staring at a ribbon of dust that had gathered along the edge of a wooden floor.

She had no idea where she was, the wall could have been any wall, anywhere; she did not know how long she had been there or what she was doing on the floor. Her first instinct was to go rigid, to keep absolutely still, lizardlike, to make herself invisible.

Lying motionless on the floor, she began to listen, concentrating her mind on her hearing. Slowly she began to pick up the sound of cars, on a road nearby; a Vividh-Bharati jingle on a transistor radio; bicycle bells, a backfiring engine, all the usual street noises, but somewhere in the distance. But here in her immediate vicinity, there were no sounds at all; she could hear nothing – nothing that gave her any clues about where she was or whether there was anyone else in the room.

And then she heard something, not so far away as the sounds of the street: a metallic creak, the sound of an unoiled hinge, of a heavy gate swinging slowly open. A moment later she heard footsteps, crunching on gravel: they seemed to be getting closer, coming towards her.

She turned over, slowly, and discovered that she was lying on the floor of a narrow wooden gallery. Pushing herself up she inched to the edge and looked over.

She found herself looking down upon an enormous empty room. A fading, twilight glow was shining through a broken skylight. She spotted a small pile of ashes and halfburnt twigs at the far end of the cavernous room. Now it started to come flooding back: the staircase, the noise, the smoke, the crowd of people, gathered around a body. With a gasp she leaned over again, looking all around her: there was no sign of anyone; the room was empty.

The footsteps were inside the house now; they were downstairs, probably somewhere near the staircase. Sonali drew her head quickly back, and lay still, her breath pumping torpidly in and out of her lungs.

They were climbing up the rotten staircase; she could hear their shoes on the steel scaffolding. She heard the sound of a voice – a man's voice, somewhere outside. Then there was a woman's voice too; still muffled, although their footsteps were somewhere beneath her, very close to the reception room.

She heard the feet entering, pacing back and forth. Then all she could hear was the sound of the blood pounding in her ears. She closed her eyes, biting her lip, trying to summon the courage to look down.

'There's no one here,' a voice said. It was a woman speaking – someone familiar, someone she knew.

She raised her head, very slowly, and inched forward, to the edge. Then a cry burst from her lips: 'Urmila!'

'Sonali-di!' Urmila gasped, spinning around. Simultaneously Murugan shouted: 'She's up there, come on.' Sonali allowed her head to sink to the floor, in relief.

Then they were up beside her, in the gallery, helping her down the ladder, holding her hands, and she was crying, fighting for her breath, and between her sobs she heard herself trying to speak, struggling to say something coherent, but the words came out all wrong, all mixed up, in a meaningless jumble.

'Calm down Sonali-di,' Urmila said. 'It's all right; we're here now. Tell me: why are you here? When did you come?'

Sonali tightened her grip on Urmila's hand.

'I came late last night,' she said. 'I came to look for Romen; somehow I knew he would be here.'

'Did you find him?' Urmila asked.

Sonali began to sob again.

'That's the strange part, Urmila,' she said, 'I don't know.' Sonali began to tell them about the taxi to Robinson Street, climbing the stairs, the smoke, the people, finding the gallery, the boy, the woman in the sari, the fire, the body…

'And then she put out her hands,' said Sonali, 'and touched the body that was lying in front of the fire and called him Laakhan. Just before I passed out I managed to see who it was.'

She choked.

'Who was it?' said Urmila.

'It was Romen.' Sonali began to sob.

'And the woman,' Murugan broke in, 'who was she? Did you know her?'

Sonali shook her head, from side to side, wiping her tear. streaked face on her blouse.

'I'm not sure,' she said. 'She looked so familiar, but I couldn't remember.'

Then Urmila took her hand, elbowing Murugan out of the way. 'Try, Sonali-di,' she said. 'Try and remember. Who was it?'

Sonali's eyes widened as she looked into Urmila's face. 'It was someone you know, Urmila,' she said. 'I'm sure of that: that's why she seemed familiar – someone I've heard you talk about, someone I haven't seen in years.'

Suddenly, Urmila rocked back on her heels, dropping Sonali's hand. 'No,' she whimpered, her hands flying to her mouth. 'No, not Mrs… '

'Yes,' said Sonali. 'That's who it was – Mrs Aratounian.'

Chapter 42

ANTAR WOKE UP to find his bedclothes drenched in sweat and his throat burning. He stumbled to the door, and looked down the corridor: the kitchen seemed to slide away from him, receding into the distance. He felt his knees weakening and had to lean against the wall to keep himself upright. He turned his head to look at the palm of his hand, and saw that it was trembling, shimmering against the flat whiteness of the wall. In rising panic he clapped his hands against his cheeks, his chest, his sides, only to discover that he was shaking all over.

He took one step towards the kitchen, still leaning against the wall. It seemed a little easier now, he was just a couple of feet from the open doorway of his living room, halfway down the corridor, between the kitchen and the bedroom. Leaning forward, he reached for the edge of the doorway, trying to pull himself along.

His fingers found the doorway and took a grip on it. Then a shiver ran through his outstretched arm and he snatched his hand back, recoiling, as though from an unexpected touch. He could feel the hairs bristling on his face as he stood leaning on the wall, biting his knuckles: it was as though something were in that room, a presence that his body had sensed before he knew it was there.

He edged forward, slowly, pushed himself away from the wall and stepped through the door. He stood there transfixed, disbelieving. His knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

Sitting gnomelike in the middle of the living room was a naked man. A blanket of matted, ropy hair hung halfway down a swollen, distended belly; his upper body was encrusted with dead leaves and straw, and his thighs were caked with mud and excrement. His hands were resting in his lap, bound together by a pair of steel handcuffs.

He was staring at Antar with bloodshot, grime-caked eyes; his lips drawn back in a grin, baring yellow, decaying teeth.

'What's the matter?' a voice cried out suddenly, filling the room through Ava's concealed sound outlets. 'You wanted to see me, didn't you? I'm just a little early, that's all.'

Antar picked himself up and made his way slowly towards Ava's control panel. He found himself skirting around the edges of the room, with his back to the walls, keeping as far away from the figure as possible, as though it were a real presence.

'Where have you been?' the figure shouted after him. 'Why have you kept me waiting so long?'

Antar's eyes fell on the mud-caked thighs and he turned away, with an involuntary shudder. Reaching for Ava's keyboard, he rewrote the vectors of the image.

There was a tremor in the image and the man's torso vanished. Now only his head remained, vastly enlarged, much larger than lifesize, blown up to the scale of a piece of monumental statuary.

'Guess you couldn't bear to look at my body any more,' said the man, laughing again.

Now Antar could see the maggots in his hair; the sight was so grotesque that he reached for the control panel and tilted the head away. But then, as the flat cross-section of the neck hove slowly into view, he discovered that Ava had done such a realistic job of severing the head that every artery and vein was clearly visible. He could see the throbbing capillaries; even the directional flow of the blood was reproduced, in motion, so that the neck looked as though it were spouting gore.

Antar choked: the head was startlingly like a vision that often recurred in his worst nightmares; an image from a medieval painting he had once seen in a European museum, a picture of a beheaded saint, holding his own dripping head nonchalantly under his arm, as though it were a fresh-picked cabbage.

The man began to shout as his head tilted further and further back.

'Put me down, you bastard,' he shouted. 'Look me in the eye.'

Antar tilted the image again, with a signal, and the red glaring eyes fastened upon him. 'So you want to know what happened to Murugan?' he said.

'Yes,' said Antar.

The man erupted into another burst of manic laughter. 'Let me ask you again,' he said. 'Are you quite sure?'

Chapter 43

IT WAS RAINING HARD when they got down to the pillared portico of the tumbledown old mansion. The neon lamps on Robinson Street were glowing fuzzily greenish, like aquarium lights. Urmila and Sonali drew their saris over their heads as they stood under the portico, looking into the pouring rain. Murugan started down the gravelled driveway at a run. At the gate he stopped to look back at the two women, who were still waiting uncertainly under the portico.

'Come on,' he shouted, at the top of his voice, urging them on. 'Let's move it, let's go.'

His voice came back to the portico disembodied, buffeted by the wind, and softened by the rain. Urmila gave Sonali's arm a tug and they began to run, hesitantly at first, and then faster, following Murugan as he sprinted down the road, towards the entrance of number eight.

Turning blindly through the gate of Mrs Aratounian's building Murugan ran straight into something that was standing in the narrow driveway. He picked himself up and saw that two bamboo pushcarts were standing in the driveway, blocking the entrance. Tents of translucent tarpaulin rose out of them, stretched tight over jumbled heaps of objects.

He was rubbing his knees, swearing, when Sonali and Urmila caught up. Urmila edged quickly past the carts, made her way to the entrance and started towards the lift. Halfway through the dimly lit hall she noticed two men in lungis and vests, squatting by the staircase, smoking biris. Standing beside them was a large piece of furniture, a heavy mahogany sideboard.

Urmila stopped dead, shifting her gaze from the two men to the sideboard and back again. The men stared back in unruffled calm, the biri-smoke rising above them in widening spirals.

Sonali came to a halt beside her: 'What's the matter?'

'That's Mrs Aratounian's,' said Urmila, pointing at the sideboard. 'She used to have it in her dining room. I remember it.'

'You're right,' said Murugan. 'I saw it there last night.'

Speaking to the two men in Hindi, Urmila said: 'Where did you get that?'

One of the men flicked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing up the staircase. A moment later they heard a loud clatter, followed by shouts and grunts. Three barebodied men came around the bend in the stairs carrying a huge chintz-printed sofa.

'Hey!' said Murugan. 'That's Mrs Aratounian's too; I was sitting on it last night, watching TV.'

Raising her voice, Urmila said: 'What's happening?'

One of the men took aim with the butt of his biri and flicked it away, into a corner. Then he rose unhurriedly to his feet, and stretched. 'Someone's leaving,' he said with a yawn, putting his shoulder to the sideboard. 'And we're carrying away the furniture.'

'Who's leaving?' Urmila said.

The man shrugged and lowered his shoulder to the sideboard. 'How am I to know?'

Urmila went running over to the lift and opened the door, motioning to Murugan and Sonali to follow. They squeezed in beside her and she pressed the button for the fourth floor. None of them said a word as the ancient lift ascended slowly upwards through the hollow centre of the staircase.

The lift came to a halt and Urmila stepped out. Her eyes fell on Mrs Aratounian's door and she froze.

The door was wide open, held in place by a brick. Light was pouring out of the flat, gilding the scarred, dusty planks of the landing. On the wall beside the door where the nameplates had once hung, there were now two discoloured rectangular spots.

Their eyes were drawn irresistibly past the door. The hall beyond was empty; the clutter and the brio-a-brae were gone. The walls were absolutely bare. As they stood there staring, two men came out with jute sacks slung over their shoulders: both were full to bursting.

Murugan was the first to move. Running through the empty drawing room he darted into the room he had slept in the night before. Urmila followed, walking as though in a trance, with Sonali close behind her.

A moment later a howl echoed out of Murugan's room: 'My things are all gone. Everything: my laptop, my clothes, my Vuitton suitcase, everything…' Murugan came running back, wild-eyed: 'Even the bed and the mosquito net are gone – everything…'

Footsteps sounded somewhere behind them, along the corridor that led to the kitchen. All three of them turned in unison and found themselves facing a thin, bespectacled man, in a fraying shirt and trousers. He had a pencil behind his ear, and he was holding a clipboard and a sheaf of stapled papers in one hand. In the other he had a fistful of peanuts.

He glared at them, his eyes hugely enlarged by his spectacles. 'Who are you?' he said, with an uncomprehending blink. 'What are you doing here?'

'Who are you?' snapped Urmila. 'And what are you doing in Mrs Aratounian's flat?'

The man stiffened and a frown appeared on his forehead. His eyes flickered angrily from Urmila's face to Murugan's. Then he looked at Sonali and suddenly his face went slack. His arm rose slowly upwards, trembling, scattering peanuts on the floor. His mouth dropped open and his eyes grew larger, spilling out of the rims of his spectacles.

'Why,' he stammered, stabbing his index finger in her direction. 'Why, but you… you are… you are Sonali Oas.'

Sonali gave him a nod and a distant smile. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam's apple bobbing like a fisherman's float.

'Do you know who she is?' he said to the others, spluttering in excitement, spraying a fine plume of spit in their direction. 'She is Sonali Oas… the great actress… I never dreamed… '

He was hopping on his toes now, his face flushed with pleasure and excitement.

'Oh, madame,' he said to Sonali, 'we see your films at least twice every year at the Bansdroni Film Society. At my insistence, if I may say so – I am treasurer, co-founder and member-secretary. You can ask anyone in Bansdroni and they'll tell you: Bolai-da won't let a year go by without showing each of Sonali Das's films at least twice. Once there was even an impeachment motion on this score, but…'

He paused, at a loss for words, his eyes filling with tears. 'Oh Madame Sonali,' he said, 'for me you are greater than Anna Magnani in Open City, greater than Garbo in Camille, greater even than… '

He swallowed as though gathering his courage. 'Yes/ he said, with an air of recklessness. 'I will say it, why not? Greater even than the incomparable Madhabi in Charulata.'

Sonali gave him an embarrassed smile.

Murugan could contain his impatience no longer. 'Can we leave this fan-club stuff till later?' he exploded, shaking a fist.

The man flinched, and knocked his knuckles on his skull, as though to awaken himself from a dream. 'I am sorry,' he said. 'I should not permit myself to become so excited.' Urmila patted him gently on the shoulder.

'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'You are quite right about Sonali-di. But at the moment we have something else on our minds. We came here to see Mrs Aratounian. Can you tell us where she is?'

'Mrs Aratounian?' the bespectacled man said dreamily, 'his eyes drifting back to Sonali. 'She has gone.'

'Gone where?' said Murugan.

'Just gone.' The man shrugged, losing interest in the conversation. Suddenly a thought struck him and he turned to Sonali, his face brightening. 'Perhaps you will consent to make an appearance at our Society?' he said. 'Is it possible, madame?'

Sonali answered with a practised gesture that indicated neither confirmation nor disavowal.

Murugan took hold of the man's arm and shook it, hard. 'Later!' he shouted. 'You can talk about that later. First tell us, where's Mrs Aratounian? And where's her stuff – her furniture, and plants and everything? And my stuff – my suitcase, laptop and all the rest?'

The man flicked Murugan's fingers off his arm with a fastidious sniff. 'By the way,' he said. 'There is no need to raise your voice.'

'Sorry,' said Murugan. 'I just wanted to get a grip on your attention before it escaped again. As I was saying: where is everything – my things, her things?'

The man gave him a look of puzzled enquiry, spectacles glinting. 'Don't you know?' he said. 'She sold everything. To the New Russell Exchange. That is why I am here: I am the head clerk in charge of collections and evaluations.'

'But it was all here this morning,' Murugan cried breathlessly. 'I mean, I stayed here last night. Everything was here when I went out this morning. She couldn't have sold it all today.'

The clerk gave him a pitying smile. 'Of course not,' he said. 'Such a sale cannot be arranged in a day' The legal formalities alone… there is the registration of sale to consider and the affidavits and the stamp duty.'

He thrust his clipboard in Murugan's direction. 'Here, look,' he said, pointing with his pencil. 'This is the contract.'

Peering over his shoulder, Murugan and Urmila found themselves looking at a carbon copy of a long typewritten document. The letterhead said New Russell Exchange, Auctioneers and Valuers. The margin of each page was covered with a patchwork of legal stamps, initials and signatures.

The clerk hummed as he flipped through the document. He stopped at the end, with a triumphant cry. 'Here,' he said. 'Do you see? The contract was signed and sealed exactly a year ago, to the day. Mrs Aratounian sold everything on these premises on an as-is-where-is basis, subject to the stipulation that collection would occur exactly a year later.'

He flipped the pages back and tapped on the document with the rubberized butt of his pencil.

'Everything is accounted for in this list,' he said. 'Mrs Aratounian personally showed me the location of every item on that list, this morning. Everything in this flat was entered here at the time of evaluation, just before the flat was sold.'

Urmila gave a disbelieving cry: 'The flat was sold!'

'Yes,' said the clerk. 'The new owners will be taking possession today.'

Murugan stared at him, flabbergasted. 'But,' he began, 'but my things can't be on that list: I wasn't even here.'

The clerk directed a glance of enquiry at Murugan. 'Are you attempting to establish a claim to certain articles?' he said. 'I should inform you that according to this contract we have an absolute legal right to remove everything on these premises.'

'I'm not attempting to claim anything,' said Murugan. 'I just want to know what happened to my things.'

'What were they?' said the clerk. 'Can you describe them?'

Murugan nodded: 'A suitcase, a laptop – that kind of stuff.'

The clerk ran his pencil through the list, humming to himself. 'Here!' he said, pointing to a line. 'Suitcase, leather, plus miscellaneous travel articles and imported electronic equipment.'

Murugan fell silent, staring at the clipboard, shaking his head in incomprehension. 'But this is insane,' he said. 'I mean – being here today wasn't even a glimmer in my eye a year ago.'

The clerk handed Murugan the clipboard and wandered off in Sonali's direction. He produced a piece of paper from his trouser pocket and handed it to her. 'Please, madame,' he said, 'if you could just give me your autograph… just to show the society… '

Sonali took the paper and the proffered pencil. She scribbled her name and handed the paper back. He received it with both hands, cupping it reverently between his palms. 'You do not know what this means to me,' he breathed, 'two famous people in one day – it is more than I could ever have imagined.'

Murugan reappeared, thrusting himself between them. 'I have another question for you,' he said. 'Did Mrs Aratounian leave any papers behind? Any Xeroxes, old newspaper cuttings, anything?'

The clerk cocked his head, regarding Murugan with a puzzled frown. 'It is interesting that you ask,' he said. 'Usually when we clear out a flat there's a lot of waste paper lying around. But here there was nothing. No newspapers, old books, nothing. I looked because I wanted to put these in some paper.' Unfurling his fist he showed them his last remaining peanuts. 'But I couldn't find a single bit of paper in the whole house. That is why for Madame's autograph once again I had to use the paper that Mrs Aratounian gave me just before she left.'

'What paper?' said Murugan.

The clerk parted his hands slowly to reveal the slip of paper that Sonali had just autographed.

'When did Mrs Aratounian give you that?' Murugan demanded. 'And why?'

'She said if anyone came here to tell them… '

'Tell them what?'

The clerk squinted at the little slip. 'That she was going to catch a train at eight thirty,' he said. 'To Renupur, from Sealdah.'

'What!' cried Murugan. 'Quick: what time is it now?' Grabbing the clerk's wrist, Urmila looked at his watch. 'Seven forty-five,' she said. 'We might just get there in time, if we find a taxi right away.'

She dropped the clerk's hand and said: 'Why didn't you tell us this before?'

'I didn't know,' he replied, sheepishly. 'I thought she meant someone else.'

'Who?' said Murugan.

'Phulboni,' said the clerk.

'Phulboni!' Sonali cried.

'Yes,' said the clerk. 'Phulboni himself. The great writer; he was here just a short while ago. He said that someone had gone to his house very late last night and left a note telling him to come here. Look…' He flipped the paper over and pointed to another scrawled autograph.

Murugan started for the door. 'Come on,' he said to Urmila. 'Let's move it.'

Urmila and Sonali followed him at a run, leaving the clerk momentarily stunned. They were halfway down when he shouted after them, hanging over the stairwell: 'Madame… my invitation…' There was no answer.

At the bottom of the stairs, Urmila stopped for a moment, to regain her breath. 'Sonali-di,' she said, panting. 'Why are you coming with us? You don't have to come.' Sonali burst into laughter. 'Of course I'm coming with you,' she said.

'But why?' said Urmila. 'You don't know anything about this business.'

'There's something you don't know either,' Sonali said. 'What?'

'That Phulboni is my father,' said Sonali. 'With Phulboni and Romen gone, what will I stay for?'

A startled cry came floating down the stairwell. 'Oh my God!' the clerk's voice breathed. 'Phulboni is your father, madame? Oh my God' What will they say at the Film Society?'

They heard his footsteps pounding down the stairs and went running out to the street.

Murugan had already stopped a taxi. 'Quick,' he said to the driver. 'Sealdah – jaldi, as quick as you can.'

Chapter 44

AS THE TAXI lurched around a corner, on to Park Street, Murugan reached for Urmila's hand and sandwiched it between his.

'I want you to promise me something Calcutta,' he said.

'What?' said Urmila. 'What are you talking about?'

Murugan tugged urgently at her hand. 'Promise me, Calcutta,' he said. 'Promise me that you'll take me across if I don't make it on my own.'

Urmila's eyes widened. 'Make it where?' she said.

'Wherever. '

She laughed out loud, throwing back her head: 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'But promise anyway,' Murugan insisted. 'Promise you'll take me, even if they want you to leave me behind?'

'Why would anyone want to leave you behind?' said Urmila. 'You're the only one who knows what's happened, what's happening. You said yourself that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to help you make connections.'

'That's just the problem,' said Murugan. 'My part in this was to tie some threads together so that they could hand the whole package over in a neat little bundle some time in the future, to whoever it is they're waiting for.'

'And how do you know it's not you they've been waiting for?'

'It can't be me,' said Murugan flatly. 'You see, for them the only way to escape the tyranny of knowledge is to turn it on itself. But for that to work they have to create a single perfect moment of discovery when the person who discovers is also that which is discovered. The problem with me is that I know too much and too little.'

'But who is it, then?' said Urmila.

'I wish I could tell you,' said Murugan. 'But I can't. In fact, I should be asking you that question.'

'What do you mean?' said Urmila.

'You still don't get it?' Murugan asked her, with a rueful half-smile.

'No,' said Urmila. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

Murugan looked her in the eyes. 'Don't you see?' he said. 'You're the one she's chosen.' Urmila gasped. 'For what?'

'For herself.'

Suddenly, taking Urmila by surprise, Murugan fell to his knees, squeezing himself into the narrow leg space of the back seat. Bending low he touched his forehead to her feet. 'Don't forget me,' he begged her. 'If you have it in your power to change the script, write me in. Don't leave me behind. Please.'

Urmila laughed. She put a hand on his head and an arm around Sonali's shoulders. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'I'll take you both with me, wherever I go.'

Then she caught a glimpse of the taxi driver, craning his neck over the back of the seat, grinning salaciously.

'And you keep your eyes on the road,' she snapped. 'This has nothing to do with you.'

Chapter 45

'GUESS YOU DON'T remember me, huh?' the Head said to Antar. 'Your old pal from the Thai restaurant?'

'Murugan!' Antar cried.

'You said it,' said Murugan. 'It's me.'

'Is that really you?' said Antar.

'Sure is,' said Murugan. 'I've waited a long time to get in touch with you. I figured nothing would be quite as quick as that ID card.'

'But people have been looking for you for years,' said Antar. 'Where have you been?'

'I've asked you this before,' said Murugan. 'And I'll ask again. Are you sure you want to know?'

'Yes,' said Antar.

'OK, Ant,' Murugan said with a laugh. 'It's your funeral. All you've got to do to find out is pick up that gadget over there.'

The disembodied chin wagged in the direction of Antar' s Simultaneous Visualization headgear.

'You mean it's in there?' Antar gasped. 'But it can't be: nobody has access… '

'Guess we got in while the going was good,' said Murugan. 'Anyway it's all in there, waiting for you to hit the button.'

Slowly and deliberately, Antar reached for the headgear, slipped it on and clicked the visor into place, in front of his eyes. He tapped a key and suddenly a man appeared, walking down a wide road, beside a grey cathedral. He was wearing khaki trousers and a green baseball cap. It was Murugan. He stopped to look over his shoulder: dark threatening clouds were approaching across a wide green expanse. A minibus shot by, sending a plume of water shooting up from a puddle. Murugan began to run.

Antar shot a quick glance at the 'Time of Conversion' prompt, at the bottom of the three-dimensional wraparound image. It said 5.25 p.m. Antar gasped: that could only mean that someone had started loading the Sim Vis system at about the time that Ava stumbled upon Murugan's ID card.

Now Murugan was standing in the lobby of a large auditorium and two women were running up the stairs. They came closer and suddenly Antar recognized Tara except that she was in a sari. She was talking to Maria who was wearing a sari too.

He felt a cool soft touch upon his shoulder and his hand flew up to take off the Sim Vis headgear. But now there was a restraining hand upon his wrist, and a voice in his ear, Tara 's voice, whispering: 'Keep watching; we're here; we're all with you.'

There were voices everywhere now, in his room, in his head, in his ears, it was as though a crowd of people were in the room with him. They were saying: 'We're with you; you're not alone; we'll help you across.'

He sat back and sighed like he hadn't sighed in years.