The Lives of Others (78 page)

He comes out onto the confluence of Anwar Shah Road and Gariahat Road. Although it is past dusk, the residue of daylight in the sky and air hurts his eyes for a few seconds. Instinctively he crosses over to Gariahat Road and starts walking north. The missing watch silently nags at him until he thinks about how he came by it – it was his wedding present from Charubala nearly forty years ago; it was the most precious thing he possessed, a Citizen watch – and that little pleat of history transforms his minor irritation into something else. He sits down on the lowest of the three steps leading to the hardware shop just before Selimpur crossing because he suddenly feels weightless, a thing about to be blown away by a breeze; perching on the edge of concrete may moor him for a while.

There is a new branch of Carmel High School opposite him, right beside the petrol station. Didn’t Arunima go to that school? At that thought he presses both his fists against his cheeks so that the roaring inside cannot escape his mouth, but they are already wet. He gets up and resumes his empty walking northwards because he does not want people to take him as a blubbing drunken fool. There is nowhere to go. He had heard Shej’-da once explaining to his children, when they were little, how birds made their way home to their nests at sundown: apparently, a small but very powerful magnet at the bottom of their nests navigated them back surely. At which point Arunima, after a moment’s thought, had asked, ‘If each nest has a magnet pulling birds to them, why don’t they end up in each other’s homes?’

A similar invisible thread of attraction is leading him, almost unawares, towards Bhabanipur; but that story had been Shej’-da’s usual high nonsense. To Madan, home has always meant Basanta Bose Road, not his village, Amlapali, in Orissa.

Everything had seemed so small, so bare, when he had first returned, on his two weeks off, to the village, five years after he joined Baba and Ma in Calcutta. People had come from every single hut – everyone, men, women, children, old people – to see, even touch, ‘our city boy’, expecting whatever transformation they had imagined to touch their lives, too. Some of them had hung around for days, expecting something of him: a rupee or two, a shiny coin, a used shirt, a rubber ball, marbles, anything. On future visits he had remembered to bring little things – baubles, really – to distribute. Yet another feature that had remained unchanged for long was his parents’ home (his mind had, unknown to his conscious self, already begun the process of stopping to think of it involuntarily as his own): one small room that housed anywhere between six and eight people; the needs of Nature answered in the open air in the fields around them. All these things that he had never noticed, or thought of as anything particular to be taken note of, had gradually become marks of difference. There was his father’s back-breaking work growing onions on his tiny plot; his increasingly despairing complaints about how he made no money selling them to the middlemen and merchants who made all the profit; his wish to go and sell his crop on the open market himself. But how could he go to the nearest market in Tarbod with his sacks of onions without a cart? There was his mother, a silent, dark woman, thin as the kindling she collected from the forest. He wanted his parents’ lives, and his two brothers’ and sister’s, to aspire to the conditions of his own in the city. He sent them money so that they could move up from one meal a day to two. He sent them shawls; the after-effects of malaria, contracted when they were children, made them shiver even during the summer months. Two of his brothers had died of the disease when he was little.

Over time, the dream of building a part-concrete room or two for his family had begun to be realised. He had paid the dowry for his sister’s marriage, and for a bicycle for one of his brothers so that he could migrate across the border to Madhya Pradesh for short-term jobs, which brought in more money than scratching the arid land would ever do.

But that feeling of contraction never left him: every year that he visited, life in the village where he had been born and raised felt smaller, the people stunted, the country empty, sleepy and abandoned. There had been quite a competition among parents to bag him as a son-in-law, for his city job made him a good catch. He had picked Banita, the daughter of a local shop-owner.

He saw his wife, and subsequently his children, once every year, during his month off from Basanta Bose Road. Perhaps it was the short time that he spent with his biological family, perhaps it was something else, but he had never felt properly and tightly sewn into that life. His real life was elsewhere, in Calcutta, with the Ghosh family. The feeling of elsewhereness began to haunt him about one week into his month’s holiday in Amlapali every time. Playing with his children; maintaining healthy conjugal relations with Banita; taking Dulal to the dissari, the local healer-man, when he had a particularly long-lasting case of stomach upset at the age of five; watching his children’s faces light up as he brought them marbles and the Ghosh children’s discarded toys and cast-offs – all these seemed like the intermittent illustrations in a children’s book from which the words had disappeared, so that the pictures alone didn’t cohere into a story. Those illustrations were strays and strangers in the book, as he was in Amlapali for a month, longing to be united with the thing that provided his life with the spine of meaning. That word ‘holiday’, for his time in his village, summed it all up: he was a tourist passing through the place inaccurately called home.

The terms ‘people you call your own’ and ‘family’ always conjured up for him, instantly, as they do right now, the faces of Ma and Baba and Didi-moni and Bor’-da and Mej’-da and Shej’-da . . . not the faces of his wife or Dulal or his two girls, Kanak and Prabha. Is this a mistake, like birds ending up in the wrong nests because each one has a magnet pulling the birds in the sky indiscriminately? Now that he remembers something trivial he didn’t know he had stored away inside his head, it is like the discovery of something hidden long after the hiding place, and even the act of secretion, have been forgotten. Then he wonders if shame and humiliation are curdling his brain, making him go mad. He knows when it all went wrong: when that son of his turned ingrate dog and started biting the hand that fed him. Another question bubbles up in his murky soul – could Baba and Bor’-da and Mej’-da have silently orchestrated his arrest as a way of punishing him for Dulal’s role in Baba’s second heart attack, the one that broke him?

At the highest point on Dhakuria Bridge, he looks down and sees the railway tracks. He turns back a few metres and uses the staircase along the side of the bridge to descend to road level. Rickshaw stand; sweet shops; puffed-rice seller; narrow, dense lanes; people, hundreds of people, going about their lives, lives with a destination, a nest with a magnet pulling them. A young beggar is working his way through the crowds slowly, singing that song, ‘
Roop tera mastaana
’, from the hit Rajesh Khanna film last year. He’s not doing a bad job, but the present appreciation brings to mind his bemusement at recently finding that the regular beggars on Basanta Bose Road, a blind man and his daughter who appeared early in the morning, had switched from their devotional ‘Let my soul blossom like the hibiscus at the feet of my mother-goddess’ to this very Hindi film song, ‘
Roop tera mastaana
’, a number touched somehow by vulgarity. He remembers, too, complaining about it to Charubala, that there was nothing reliable – everything derogated, and all change was slanted downwards. And here he’s at it again: how all thoughts and memories lead back to that unchanging centre of Basanta Bose Road, of Charubala. Home.

On one side towards the end of Dhakuria Station Lane the evening market is setting up. Gas lights, tapers and kerosene lights are being lit and set beside mounds of vegetables, sacks of rice and lentils and dried red chillies, precarious piles of ripe limes, hillocks of glistening green chillies. There is even a short row of fish-sellers, baskets at their side, the plastic spread out in front of them containing small piles of minuscule shrimps; thick, red cross-sections of steaks of katla, two big fish-heads on one side; a tin bucket of something kept alive in soapy water. He did not know that there was an evening fish market in Dhakuria and the knowledge fills him with a tiny thread of excitement. He wants to check out how fresh the fish here is, compare rates with his regular fishmonger in Bhabanipur; Ma would be curious to know about it too. Then that weightlessness seizes him again as he laughs at this old mental habit of wanting to report everything to Charubala, because this time, this last time, there will be nothing to tell her.

When he hears the wailing sound of the level-crossing coming down to bar people and traffic on either side of the tracks, at the imminent arrival of a train, he stops loitering around in the market and quickly heads towards the end of Station Lane. A huge, solid mass of people waiting on this side; he has to jostle and push to get himself right to the front so that there is nothing between him and the tracks, right to the narrow opening between two metal posts, one of them part of the gate that has bent down and stopped at a right-angle to the post to form the barrier. Even now one or two swift daredevils are leaking out from either side and crossing the tracks hurriedly. A magnet is pulling them; they have to get to their nests quickly.

The tracks look enormous. He hears the rails, or maybe the wires above them, humming and zinging, then the hum magnifies to a metallic rattle. The world is only sound. He is perfectly weightless now, like air.

Epilogue I

Bay Area Professor Gets “Mathematics Nobel” Prize

A reclusive Indian mathematician, who was a child prodigy, has won the Fields Medal, the highest honor given to a mathematician under the age of 40. Professor Swarnendu Ghosh, a Professor of Pure Mathematics in Stanford University, is 30 this year. He came to the USA when he was 15 years old, before he had finished school in his city of birth, Calcutta, and was awarded a PhD at the age of 19.

The Fields Medal, widely regarded as the “Nobel Prize for Mathematics,” is awarded every year to between two and four mathematicians by the International Mathematics Union at its Congress. Professor Ghosh shares the 1986 prize, given at the International Congress of the International Mathematics Union at Berkeley this year, with Professor Martin Freedman, who holds the Charles Powell Chair of Mathematics at the University of California at San Diego; Professor Simon Donaldson, the Wallis Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford; and the German mathematician Dr Gerd Faltings, Professor at Princeton University. Professor Ghosh did not attend this year’s Congress.

He was offered a teaching job at Stanford University, his alma mater, at the age of 20, thus becoming the youngest-ever faculty member in the history of the university. His work on prime numbers—numbers divisible only by themselves and 1—has garnered him this year’s Fields Medal. He has provided the solution to a 137-year-old problem called the de Polignac’s conjecture, named after the Frenchman who first proposed it in 1849.

This conjecture states that every even number appears as the gap between two consecutive primes, infinitely open. A generalization of the still-open problem of the ‘twin primes conjecture’, which hypothesizes that there may be an infinite pair of ‘twin primes’—pairs of prime numbers which are 2 apart (such as 5 and 7, or 17 and 19)—Professor Ghosh’s proof that there are infinite pairs of consecutive primes which are 4 apart, infinitely many that are 6 apart, and so on, marks a great step toward solving some of the most celebrated unsolved problems in number theory, notably Goldbach’s conjecture.

In a correspondence between Leonhard Euler and Christian Goldbach in 1742, the latter asserted that every even number from 4 onward is the sum of two prime numbers. So 4 = 2+2, 6 = 3+3, 8 = 3+5, and so on. No full proof of this conjecture is known.

Prime numbers are a valuable tool in encryption and are considered by mathematicians and scientists to provide the underlying design of many things in Nature.

Renowned for his shyness, the attention-avoiding professor, who was a child prodigy when he arrived at Stanford University at the age of 15 from his native Calcutta in India, has not returned calls by this newspaper.

His thesis supervisor, Professor Alan Pfeiffer, said, “It is fair to say that the entire math faculty here in Stanford had rarely seen anyone the like of Swarnendu when he arrived here. It is impossible to convey the sense of excitement, the sense of great possibility that we felt, when he started his graduate work. We are thrilled to have those hopes and promises fulfilled. It is a day of great joy, both for him and for us, and, of course, for the University. We feel very, very proud.”

The professor responsible for bringing the 15-year-old over, Ayan Basu, also from Calcutta and now at Caltech, said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes when this boy’s math teacher at school, a childhood friend of mine, sent me some of Swarnendu’s stuff to look at. He was sure this boy was special, that he was onto something. And he was right. When Swarnendu arrived at Stanford, the faculty had only one thing on its collective mind: here was the next Ramanujan.”

Ramanujan was the most famous Indian mathematics prodigy of the twentieth century. But it looks as if his reputation could be eclipsed by Professor Ghosh. While still a graduate student, Professor Ghosh published a paper, at the age of 18, that stunned the mathematics world. It moved the world closer toward a solution of the famous Goldbach conjecture, which, as yet unproven, states that every even number can be written as the sum of two primes. Professor Pfeiffer said that his former student’s proof, running to over twenty-five pages, had to be simplified and the young student cajoled to have it published. “You see, he came to us without any training in the conventions of mathematical language. What he had was an innate understanding of the world of numbers, of abstraction and reasoning and intuition,” said Professor Pfeiffer.