Whenever a book was demanded by Ritwik, it arrived. His father went and ordered it in ‘Study’, the tiny bookshop in Jadavpur Central Market, paid in advance, and the book appeared, wrapped in crisp brown paper, in a week or two. Baba, I’d like to join the school quiz team I need General Knowledge books the four volumes of the Bournvita Quiz Book. Or, Baba, volumes five to seven of the Bournvita Book are out now can I have them soon. This was at a time when the landlord, Khokababu, visited the house weekly to demand the back payments on arrears and his father pretended to be too ill to go to work so that Khokababu could extend the deadline on sympathetic grounds. The household subsisted on rice and boiled potatoes for an entire week but there was no stinting with Ritwik’s books, no complaints about how expensive they were. His mother said, ‘You’re spoilt, you know. Before the words fall from your lips, your father goes out and does your bidding.’ He never understood whether she said this with disapproval or pride.
The Bournvita books were hardbound, the size of coffee-table books, with gold lettering on the spines. He guarded them with his life while his uncles looked at them with silent recrimination. On one occasion he heard Pratim saying to his mother, ‘All this talk of no money, no money, no money, rents unpaid, electricity bills unpaid, we’re constantly under fire from Jamaibabu, where’s all the money for these swish books coming from?’ Ritwik promptly hid them and only took them out when his uncles were out and when he was sure he could hide from the prying eyes of Dida.
And then one day the Collins Concise Encyclopaedia arrived, stout, big and substantial, in its bright red dust jacket, twelve hundred-odd pages of close, compact type on thin, tissue-like paper. It had black and white pictures as welclass="underline" the bearded Louis Pasteur and Johannes Brahms; a severe yet benign Marie Curie; Keats reading an octavo volume with one hand on his forehead; a Chardin still-life with a vase of flowers; winged seeds that are dispersed by the wind; Byron in Greek headgear. It cost forty rupees and he had gone out with his father to get it from ‘Study’. He had beamed all the way there and back while his father cautioned him, ‘Don’t let anyone find out, especially Dida and your uncles. Keep it in a safe place, it costs a lot of money. .’ Ritwik plunged into it like a fish released from captivity into the waters again.
The excitement of the book never wore off; instead it surprised him with its myriad forms. First, there was the excitement of discovering an entry that was familiar to him. It gave him a little shiver of joy to see on the certainty of the printed page little areas of his mind précised into three or four close-knit lines. He looked up Tagore, Rabindranath; photosynthesis; mycology; Beethoven, Ludwig van; electrocardiogram with the thrill of seeing known things in unfamiliar and new settings, in the prestige of print. It endorsed his knowledge in some kind of way at the same time as it opened up new avenues in a proliferative dance. So gene led to DNA, DNA led to double-helix, from there to Watson and Crick through meiosis and mitosis, cell division to McClintock, Barbara. It was like the picture of nerve dendrons in his biology book, a web of paths and sub-paths, a familiar road suddenly leading him down unknown ones till he ended up himself as a wide-open space from the initial little cluster he had started off as.
At other times it was a different joy of finding out totally unknown things. There was curiosity, bafflement and, once again, that intense chasing dance, the moves of some of which he could not master for a long time. Someone had mentioned Bach in school so he came home and looked it up. There seemed to be a lot of them, and he didn’t know the first names, but he assumed it must be Bach, Johann Sebastian, because he had the maximum number of lines to his name. It led him on separate enquiries: a slowly enclosing one from counterpoint, to canon, to fugue, to suite; the other, a widening dance: Bach, Johann Sebastian; Rameau, Jean-Philippe; Albinoni, Tomasso; Vivaldi, Antonio; Couperin, Louis… It reminded him of those funny chapters in the Old Testament which went on and on and on about how Shem begat Arphaxad begat Salah begat Eber begat Peleg, theoretically stretching to the here and now, but this one was different: each name, each term was a new world, not a dead proper noun on the page.
There was a lot he didn’t understand. When this happened, he committed the thing to memory or read it over and over again, ten times, fourteen times, repeating counterpoint The term comes from the idea of note-againstnote, or point-against-point, the Latin for which is punctus contra punctum. It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are woven together so that their individual notes harmonize. In this sense Counterpoint is the same as Polyphony, repeating it in his head as a rapid chant, as though manipulating this stubborn thing and chasing its strewn spores across other pages with such white-hot doggedness would suddenly make it give up its resilient secret. When he shut the book at last and looked around him, at the bare whitewashed walls, the cobwebby mosquito nets in the windows, the gathering dust everywhere, he saw them differently, as though the whole world had been newly named. Was this what Brother Matthew meant when he talked about new heaven, new earth?
Outside, another conflict had erupted. Pratim had been hiding for three days because Mr Malvya from across the street had told Ritwik’s mother that he had lent Pratim some money which he said he would return in a week. ‘He wanted about three hundred rupees; he said you haven’t been able to pay the boys’ school fees for over two months now. I didn’t have three hundred with me, I gave him a hundred and seventy-five,’ he said. He had been clearly embarrassed confronting her with their inability to pay for their children’s education. Ritwik’s mother had been furious at this unashamed lie; she didn’t know which was worse — telling Mr Malvya that Pratim had lied or letting him continue to think that it was she who had sent her brother out to beg for some money. Each was equally humiliating.
As always, it was Dida who had informed Pratim that everyone knew what he had done. So he had lain low for a few days, but it was a small, enclosed world, and as Dida frequently said, ‘The world is round, remember; things have a habit of coming back full circle.’ Pratim too reached the completion of this particular circle a bit too quickly for his comfort and faced the wrath of his sister and Jamaibabu.
‘We won’t be able to show our faces to our neighbours any more,’ Ritwik’s mother shouted. ‘The shame, the shame!’ Pratim decided to keep quiet and ride it out; all this was so much bluster and wind, it would blow over soon. After all, everyone knew he couldn’t repay the money and, because he had used the boys’ school fees as an excuse, Jamaibabu was going to be shamed into paying it back to save his face, never mind what the truth was. Besides, he didn’t care. It was embarrassing for them, not for him; he was going to keep himself in the shadows for a few more weeks and everything would be buried under the weight of a new crisis.
Ritwik listened to the shouting outside with horror. His mother had begun crying, deep, wretched sobs of frustration and anger. There was going to be more of this when his father returned home. She would have to tell him; another round of recriminations, bitterness, tension would ensue. That heave and slow rattle behind his ribs was starting again. He didn’t want to hear any more, he just wanted the draining thudding inside to stop, stop now. He squeezed his eyes shut, tight tight tight, till there were exploding colours inside his eyeballs, and let his voice articulate the words he had memorized from the page in front of him, to drown out the squabble: sonata form:. . regular sonata form movement falls into 3 main sections: 1. EXPOSITION (usually containing two subjects, the first subject is in tonic key, the second subject. .