The Lives of Others (33 page)

Sona lets out an exultant cry, part one-note laugh, part shout – his magic number, his old friend, his saviour on the winged horse: one. Here too, in the proof, as in the geography of his mind, it is the key that will unlock, the hand that will guide him safely through the path in the dense, jumbly woods. His joy is at recognising his unfailing friend again. Yes, he knows how the proof will advance.

Ashish Roy has not been interrupted by Sona’s ejaculation; if anything, it has spurred him on, because he has now received a sign that the boy’s mind is flying along the beautiful arc of the proof, the mind at one with the path, indivisible. ‘It is obvious that Y is not divisible by any of the numbers in the set A because it leaves the remainder’ – in his excitement, not only at the elegant parsimony of the proof, but also at his certainty of the boy’s innate understanding of the steps to come, he trips over his words – ‘onewhendividedbyanynumberbelongingtothesetAbutifitisnotaprimeitmustbedivisiblebysomeprimeandthereforethereisaprimenumbergreater-thananyofthenumbers . . .’

Sona cannot sit still. He leaps up and shouts, ‘That contradicts our hypothesis.’

Ashish Roy gives out his signature cackle, then the boy and man sing out in inseparable unison, ‘So the hypothesis is false and so there are an infinity of primes.’

Then both of them simultaneously fall to a delighted laughing. It is the laughter, one imagines, of child-angels; the purest distillate of joy while contemplating some kind of immanent perfection. The shadows in the room, nearly totally in the dark, are tremulous. The hurricane-light flame, one side markedly higher than the other, is turning the glass blacker by the minute.

Ashish Roy says, ‘Do you know what kind of a proof this is? It’s a
reductio ad absurdum
, Latin, meaning, literally, to reduce to the point of absurdity, to the point of absurdity. Euclid loved this method. It is one of the finest weapons in the mathematician’s drawer, one of the finest, the finest.’

Sona sees the glint of a thread of drool at the corner of the man’s mouth catching the yellow light of the lamp and turning briefly golden.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? What do you say, eh?’ Mad Ashu asks.

Sona, still enmeshed in magic, can only nod.

‘“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”,’ the man says, losing Sona for a moment by this sudden switch to non-mathematical English. ‘Have you heard this? “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Keats, John Keats. English poet, great English poet. Now do you understand how right he was?’

Because these are not numbers but words instead, with a fractious and slippery attachment to the meanings behind them, unlike numbers, Sona takes a while to work out the relation between the words of the great English poet and the reality they describe. He nods hesitantly, late with his reaction.

It is far too early to get hopeful, but Ashish Roy, after what seems like an entire geological era in which he has been crushed and atomised and obliterated, after that oblivion and erasure, feels an unforgettable tug, an imprisoned tiger glimpsing, for the briefest dart of thought, a chink showing the wide open, before it closes again. Or rather, he sees himself as the tiger that has a flash of its freedom; it comes to him with shocking visualness, the black-streaked yellow, the white between the nose and mouth, even the suffocating odour of the big cat. Then it is gone. The dust settles, a heavier patina than before. He does not know how to feel after this – what was it? unexpected vision? intimation? of what could be potential renewal? Pain that it could be a teasing, lying illusion? Hope that it may be real and true? Dread that it could be, as so many times before, true for a while, then turn out to be a cul-de-sac? That pendulum-swing between the two extremities had ruined him. So why is he being tortured with it again? He is finished, he has nothing to give, nothing can be extracted from him any more. But this lanky, underfed, big-eyed boy . . .

‘You come here when you can, and talk mathematics with me. How does that sound?’ he offers with utmost tentativeness, his voice disappearing as it progresses.

Sona nods avidly again.

Encouraged, Ashish Roy continues, ‘Nowadays I have no one to talk to. There were many in the past, many. My world was full of talk of mathematics, was full of it, loud with it. Now . . . all gone. All finished. There was a time when I was even forbidden to talk or think about numbers.’

A long pause. Sona is mystified, but does not ask any questions. He has been trained not to ask anything unless it is in a mathematics lesson, only to listen and watch. Listen, watch and keep oneself invisible, absent. Pagla Ashu, mad Ashu, is rambling.

‘I couldn’t do it myself. I thought I came close, several times came close, but the next morning, or the next week, I’d discover a mistake, a mistake, a mistake. Everything would come crashing down. Jah, all over, all over!’

Another long silence. A cockroach flies from the space between the almirah and the bookcase and lands whirringly next to the calendar. Sona flinches. The pervasive slippage in the professor’s speech, mannerisms, physical demeanour, as if all were sliding away between intention and its correct manifestation, may be the effects of some illness, but it is not madness, Sona decides. Maybe the higher reaches of mathematics have curdled his mind. The dividing line between genius and madman is hair-thin, he has always been told. Turned mad while walking around in the world of numbers – Sona cannot imagine a greater pleasure. With the fingers of his mind he caresses the
reductio ad absurdum
proof again and again.

A middle-aged woman enters the room. Dishrag of a block-printed sari, burdened looks as if she were a pack animal not a long way off from the knackers’ yard. She adds to the shadows in the room.

In a tight voice that people adopt when they do not want their words to be overheard she says, ‘Again? Again? You’ve brought someone back again? How many times have you been asked not to do it? How many times?’ The fury in her words belies the partially hushed delivery. Sona fears that she is going to explode any minute, but the low hiss continues. ‘You clearly haven’t learned your lesson. How much lower do you want to pull us? You may not have any shame, any repentance, but you could think of us. Or is that too much to ask? To replace some numbers with humans? Mathematics has eaten not just you, but is devouring us alive too.’

Ashish Roy sits through the tirade blinking and drooling like an idiot. He does not look particularly embarrassed or mortified. What is going on in the prickly thickets of his unknowable mind, Sona has no idea. Sona himself wants to become inanimate, like the Basak Stores calendar, something outside the horizons of human address.

She turns to him and spits out, barely bothering to change her tone, ‘And you. You go home now. Don’t come here again.’

This Sona understands – it is plain, unclothed rejection. Scampering off through the gap between the scolding woman and the door, he cannot turn back to answer Mad Ashu’s desperately slurred shout directed at his fleeing figure: ‘Ei, wait, stop, where do you live?’

Running back home in the dark, with a thudding heart and flaming ears, past Pandey’s cowshed and its attendant smell-cloud of cow-dung and hay, then the corner shop with its one weak taper and strings of peanut brittle hanging from an open shutter, Sona sees old Panchanan, with his cheeks sunk in on his toothless gums, sitting behind the grubby glass jars of sweets and savouries. In the daytime he would perhaps have called out to Sona, ‘Ei je, mathematics-moshai, where are you headed?’ but it is pitch-dark now. Sona is often sent to Panchanan’s tiny shop to buy four-annas’ worth of puffed rice or a candle or a box of matches or a plastic bottle of kerosene for the small stove that his mother had lately started using to cook on. He runs faster, knowing his mother is going to be worried.

At home, the usual rusty clockwork of festering days. Mejo-kaki is shouting at a maidservant because the stairwell and the inner verandahs, the courtyard, are all utterly dark and the servant has failed to dispel it quickly enough. From their room Sona can see the weakest illumination of candlelight. Madan-da can be heard muttering to himself as he emerges from his room near the back garden and goes upstairs; from his tone it seems that he is none too pleased with something or the other.

Purba asks, ‘Why are you so late?’

Her son lies, ‘I had to do some extra work with Sougata.’ In that moment of involuntary lying he understands that he is going to find ways to circumvent the stricture forbidding him to visit the professor.

Purba asks, ‘Did they give you anything to eat?’

Kalyani, sitting on the floor, doing nothing at all, turns to him, all attention.

‘Yes, rice pudding,’ he says.

‘Rice pudding?’ mother and daughter ask together. ‘What was the occasion?’

Sona, face averted from them, mumbles, ‘I think it was Sougata’s birthday a couple of days ago.’

Here too Sona has something to hide, but it belongs to a different order of privacy. This afternoon, while he was doing his usual three-times-a-week English tuition, Mala-mashi had brought in, halfway through the tutorial, three bowls of chilled rice pudding, one each for the two boys and one for Sanjay Banerjee, the new English tutor. (Dibyendu-da had left after six months, to become a Naxalite, it was rumoured.)

‘It was Bumba’s birthday on Wednesday,’ she announced coyly while handing out the bowls.

Sanjay-da had wished Sougata happy birthday while the boys concentrated furiously on the bowls in their hands, hoping to avoid any excruciating social small talk.

Ever since Sona had moved to St Lawrence School last year, his status in the Saha house had changed, but not entirely for the better. On the one hand Mala-mashi was clearly impressed, expressing a hooded admiration: ‘Now that your skill in mathematics has taken you to a better school,’ she said, ‘you must make sure that some of your cleverness rubs off on Bumba.’ Sometimes she operated through coiled locutions where occluded envy and a calculating expectation fought a tug-of-war: ‘A tiny bit of credit for moving up must be given to all the help Sona has had with English, his weakest subject, in the tutorials at our home,’ she said to the neighbours, ‘let’s hope he remembers that’; obligation can loop more complicated knots around the giver than the receiver. Occasionally something boiled over in her and she said to Sona, ‘You’ve reduced coming here to three days a week instead of the usual five, now that you’re in a better school. So be it. But you’re not the type to become arrogant. We, on our part, are happy to do the little that will help you along, regardless of five days or three.’

She stretched to identical cups and bowls for tutor and both students now – previously Sona had been given stainless steel while Sougata and the tutor got china – but took away with the other hand: she exited the room with a comment that left no one in any doubt that she grudged the little good she had done this neighbour’s boy. Couched, of course, as caring affection.

Today it was a different variation. Today the rice pudding was laced with: ‘Just because you’ve now moved to a big school, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have some of the rice pudding I made for your not-very-clever friend’s birthday.’

Sona, cocooned for the most part against this kind of poison, stayed silent and ran his spoon through the rice: it was a luxurious version with sultanas and cashews. He put a spoonful in his mouth. It was so delicious, coating every millimetre inside his mouth with its silky richness, that he closed his eyes. On his birthdays, his mother struggled to make him the obligatory rice pudding; she had to make do with broken rice, rather than the expensive gobinda-bhog, while raisins and nuts were beyond her imagining. He felt almost physically swayed by a wave of pity for his mother. His eyes prickled and the rice pudding, now bitter in his mouth, refused to move down his obstructed throat. In fierce defiance he thought that his mother’s rice pudding was the best in the world; this one in his wretched hand could not even begin to compare with it.

Now to be asked a direct question, albeit in all innocence, about something that had nearly unseated him from his studied indifference seems like the resurgence of a newly anaesthetised pain. So he treads with the utmost caution while answering, refusing to give out any signal of weakness. Besides, he is itching to have another go at trying to prove p = x
²
+ y
²
if (and only if) p = 1 (mod 4). That Brahmagupta identity, so teasingly dangled in front of him, could well be the key to unlock it, but it is unattainable, at least for the moment, from Pagla Ashu, so he will have to figure out a way of finding it.

Sona knows who he can ask. The mathematics teacher in the senior school of St Lawrence, Swapan Adhikari, is a legend. He has a reputation for being fierce and bad-tempered. It is said that he pulls up lazy boys from their seats by their sideburns and is the acknowledged master of the ‘double slap’, a strike to the face so forceful that it flings aside the first boy to be hit and lands resoundingly on the cheek of the boy sitting next to him, taking care, with great efficiency, of two boys sitting on the same bench and talking, or not paying attention, in class. He is impatient with, and frankly not interested in, those who have no aptitude, instead choosing to concentrate on the one or two who are gifted. Given that he neglects nearly all his students and can’t be bothered to follow the rules set by the syllabus, it is surprising that he has been kept on as senior (and only) mathematics teacher. And this despite a growing clamour from parents that Mr Adhikari is responsible for their sons’ underwhelming performance in mathematics, their being ‘unripe in maths’.

Mr Adhikari has a degree in pure mathematics; that alone sets him apart from most school teachers. He thinks differently and discourages all his students from the learning by rote that is the basic, dominant and only model of education. Ingest and vomit – that is the order of things; you learn by heart reams and reams, and then regurgitate it all during examinations. Everything – History, Geography, Bengali, English, Science – is dealt with in this one unchanging way. It develops only one faculty, memory, and atrophies everything, most of all thinking. You can see the results of this in the teachers themselves; there is a blankness, something of a ruminant’s absence of thought about them.