You don’t understand, Bhudeb Roy said. You don’t understand, Superintendent-shaheb (Assistant, Assistant, Jyoti Das protested). There was little I could do. By then he was part of the village. He’d been here sixteen years, and as a schoolmaster, too. He had a house here. What could I do? Who knows what the villagers would have done if I’d tried to push him out of Lalpukur? You know how they are — simple …
Jyoti Das looked at that vast, bloated face with its little squinting eyes and clamp-like jaws and he flinched inwardly. He had had no alternative but to accept Bhudeb Roy’s ‘co-operation’ and hospitality, but he could not bring himself to like the man.
Jyoti Das heard of the burning of Balaram’s books quite by chance from Gopal Dey a few months later, in a small south Calcutta police station. He liked Gopal the moment he was led into the interrogation room. Gopal was very indignant at first and full of bluster. He quoted laws and sections and sub-clauses for a good five minutes after he was brought in. But once Jyoti Das shook his hand and offered him a cup of tea Gopal sat down quietly on a straight-backed wooden chair across the desk from him. Soon he began to talk. In a few minutes Jyoti Das knew he had nothing important to say, but he listened anyway, for he liked his flustered avuncular manner. And in any case there was nothing else to do but to go back to his grimy office and listen to his boss the Deputy Inspector-General, who was something of a horticulturist, talk of carrots and cauliflowers.
So he half-listened as Gopal’s distraught mind wandered to the day Balaram had told him of his burnt books. It was 1967, and Alu was eleven then. Eleven. Jyoti Das had turned eleven in January 1964. On his birthday he was taken to the Alipore Zoo in Calcutta. His father, who was a minor revenue official, took leave from his office for the expedition (using up his last casual leave, he complained later to Jyoti’s mother).
All morning they wandered listlessly from cage to cage, staring at grimacing baboons and mangy hyenas. Jyoti’s father kept up a constant drone of complaint: about the jostling crowds and gangs of young thugs with their blaring transistors; about crawling beggars let in probably because they gave a share of their pickings to the gatemen; about the boys prodding the monkeys with sticks; about mismanagement and white tigers that had gone grey, and other miserable beasts whose increasing miscegenation was marked by names like those of ascending generations of computer chips — tigon, litigon … litiligon, titilitigon … Where would it lead? Where would it all end?
Leaving the white tigers behind, they wandered towards an area of relative peace on the far side of the lake which lay in the centre of the zoo. Jyoti’s father spotted a snack-bar near cages of wattled cassowaries and Chinese silver pheasants, with tables and chairs laid out in the shade. He seated himself at a table and motioned to Jyoti’s mother to sit. A moment later they were hit by a blast from a transistor and a group of young men danced past, holding hands and doing something between a twist and a bhangra. Two of them were fighting over a bottle of rum wrapped in a handkerchief. Inevitably, they tripped, howling with laughter, and the bottle exploded on the pavement.
Jyoti’s father, glaring, nervously wiping his forehead, muttered: Chaos; that’s all that’s left. Chaos, chaos. The note of unease in his voice caught in Jyoti’s mind, as it always did, churning up a drifting cloud of fears. He got up and ran down to the railing by the lake. There, with the chaotic surging of human life invisible behind him, he saw a shimmering, velvety carpet of ducks and cormorants and storks covering the lake. Somewhere in that mass of birds his eyes picked out a pair of purple herons with their long bills raised to the sky and their brilliantly coloured wings outstretched. He had been told that every year they flew across the continent to winter in that lake; in that lake and no other. Looking at them in the flesh he was struck with wonder, and as he watched them he gloried in the peace, the order, the serenity granted by a law on such a vast and immutable scale. He could have stayed there for hours, but soon his father’s voice was behind him: Always day-dreaming, worthless boy. Never works. He’ll never pass his examinations … And he was led away by the collar of his birthday T-shirt.
They went home and Jyoti was sent to his desk to study as usual. But that day, while he was doodling with his pencil to pass the time, he saw the lines take a new, sinuous, muscular shape. He covered one sheet, threw it away, tried another, and another until he saw quite clearly a purple heron wheeling in the sky, its neck outstretched. Then his father was back again to check: Never studies. He’ll never pass. Shame, shame for the family … But Jyoti’s drawing was already hidden away under an exercise-book. He knew it to be ordained for him to redeem his father’s failures, to do even better than all his successful uncles, the engineer in Düsseldorf, the Secretary in Delhi, and to do it by sitting for the Civil Service examinations and becoming a Class I officer — of whatever kind, in the administration, in the police, in the railways, it didn’t matter — but with his name in the Civil Service gazette and a genuine officer’s dearness allowance to guard against inflation. But he knew, too, that acquiescence could buy safety for his own, real world — for neither his father nor the Civil Service could wage war against a clear winter morning’s vision of purple herons.
Do you want the exact date? Gopal asked, for the young officer in plain clothes had straightened up suddenly. I could try to remember.
No, no, Jyoti Das said quickly. He smiled. I’m just writing a report, not a biography.
A biography?
Even Gopal, with all his love for his friend, would never have thought of writing Balaram’s biography. Once, as a joke, he had suggested it to him: Balaram, so many odd things happen to you, someone should write your biography. Maybe I will.
Balaram had thought about it quite seriously. He had pushed his hair back, and for a whole minute he sat absolutely still, with his eyes shut. Then he had said, with absolute finality: You’re wrong. Nobody could write my biography, because nothing important ever happens to me. There wouldn’t be any events to write about.
Gopal, half-offended because Balaram had taken his joke seriously, had retorted: That doesn’t matter at all. Think of Dr Johnson — nothing ever happened to him.
Balaram had smiled with total certainty, like a gifted child, and said: How could anyone write a biography of the discovery of Reason?
Gopal had said no more, but of course Balaram was wrong, and he knew it. Even Reason discovers itself through events and people.
Balaram’s birthday, for example. Nobody knew exactly when it was. His parents had never told anyone because of something their family astrologer had said after working out the newly born infant’s horoscope. All that Balaram knew was that he was born in 1914.
It was a difficult year to choose from, for Reason was embattled that year. Balaram could have chosen a date as many of his friends in college would have, to mark one of the many terrorist strikes against the British in Bengal. In distant Europe there was always the declaration of the First World War, and its assortment of massacres and butchery. Or there was the day in early August when an American judge in San Francisco, arbitrating on the second-ever application by a Hindu for citizenship in the United States, took refuge in prehistory and decided that high-caste Hindus were Aryans and therefore free and white. And, equally, there was another day in August when the colonial government in Canada rewrote a different prehistory when it turned the eight thousand Indians on board Kamagatamaru back from Vancouver, after deciding that the ancient racial purity of Canada could not be endangered by Asiatic immigration. Or, at much the same time, there was the date of the launching of a drive by the imperial government to recruit Indians for an expeditionary force to join Algerians and Vietnamese and Senegalese in defending the freedom of the Western world from itself.