But Balaram chose none of those dates. Even reading about them he suffered, for he saw them as abysses tearing apart the path of Man’s ascent to Reason. Instead, he vacillated between any one of several dozen days in May and June when Jagadish Chandra Bose, in a laboratory in south London, demonstrated to stunned audiences of scientists and poets and politicians, all half-deafened by the ringing of sabres in Europe, that even a vegetable so unfeeling as a carrot can suffer agonies of fear and pain.
But, as Gopal said to him once, if it were not for an astrologer’s accidental remark, you wouldn’t have been able to choose your birthday.
Balaram was surprised at that. Astrology isn’t chance, he answered. It’s quite the opposite.
Again Gopal let it pass. He knew Balaram to be dissimulating: if it were not for a chance whim of his father’s, Balaram would not have discovered science at all.
Balaram was born in Dhaka, then the capital of East Bengal, now of Bangladesh. His father, who had moved to Dhaka from the little village of Medini-mandol in the nearby district of Bikrompur, was a prosperous timber merchant. He owed his prosperity to obliging relatives in Burma, who provided him with a connection with the rich Burmese teak forests. He was also very conservative. Long after their neighbours in the old Kayet-tuli quarter of Dhaka had acquired electric lights, their house was still lit by kerosene-lamps. Then suddenly, in 1927, when Balaram was thirteen, his father changed his mind and festooned their house with bulbs.
That was the turning-point, and in a way it was an accident. Had Balaram been accustomed to those bulbs with their spiral filaments from his childhood, had they arrived a year before or after he reached the enchanted age of thirteen when the whole world comes alive for the first time, they would probably never have been touched with magic. His brother, for instance, who was ten at the time, hardly gave them a moment’s thought. Not so Balaram. He was bewitched from the very first time he used one of those large, unwieldy switches. After that he couldn’t find enough to read about electricity. He read about the Chinese and Benjamin Franklin, and Edison became one of his first heroes. In school he pursued the physics teachers with questions.
But it was already too late. His teachers had decided that he had a gift for history, and this new enthusiasm for science would pass. Balaram did everything he could, but his teachers — in those days in Bengal teachers knew everything — would not let him change his subject to the sciences. So instead Balaram read.
When, at sixteen, he matriculated quite by chance with a sheaf of distinctions, his teachers decided that he must go to Presidency College in Calcutta to study history. They told him of the legend of Suniti Chatterji, the Professor of Philology, and his mastery of several dozen languages, and of a brilliant young philosopher called Radhakrishnan, only recently appointed professor (and still decades away from becoming President of the Republic).
Balaram listened to them quietly, and they took his silence for acquiescence. But Balaram was not thinking of their Calcutta at all, with its philology and philosophy and history. He had his own vision of Calcutta. For him it was the city in which Ronald Ross discovered the origin of malaria, and Robert Koch, after years of effort, finally isolated the bacillus which causes typhoid. It was the Calcutta in which Jagadish Bose first demonstrated the extraordinarily life-like patterns of stress responses in metals; where he first proved to a disbelieving world that plants are no less burdened with feeling than man.
Balaram knew of Presidency College, too: it was there that Jagadish Bose had taught two young men — Satyen Bose, who was to appropriate half the universe of elementary particles with the publication of the Bose — Einstein statistics; and Meghnad Saha, whose formulation of the likeness between a star and an atom had laid the foundation of a whole branch of astrophysics.
And of course there was the gigantic figure of C. V. Raman, whose quiet researches in the ramshackle laboratories of the Society for the Advancement of Science, in Calcutta, had led to the discovery of the effect in the molecular scattering of light which eventually came to be named after him. In 1930, when Balaram was ready to go to college, the newspapers were already talking of Raman’s candidature for the Nobel.
Long before his teachers spoke to him about it, Balaram knew that he would go to Calcutta and to Presidency College.
But his father would not hear of it. He had been brought up on tales of the wickedness of the city; and, besides, there was the expense. Dhaka, he said, had a perfectly good university and, if it was good enough for the whole of Dhaka, there was no reason why it should not be good enough for his son (and it was true that Satyen Bose was teaching there then). He didn’t understand Balaram at all. He could never have understood that Balaram was launching on a pilgrimage, a quest to retrace the steps of Jagadish Bose and Meghnad Saha from their native district of Bikrampur to Calcutta and Presidency College.
Balaram’s father would not budge, not even when one of Balaram’s teachers threatened to bombard the local and national newspapers with letters denouncing rich men who wanted to deprive young India of talent. Then chance intervened again. Riots broke out in Dhaka University that year. A lecturer’s house in their own neighbourhood was attacked by a mob.
Balaram’s father gave in at last, just in time. The day Balaram arrived in Calcutta accompanied by an uncle, the newspapers announced that C. V. Raman had won the Nobel Prize.
Balaram’s uncle took him as far as the two gatehouses outside the Eden Hindu Hostel, just off College Street, where he was to live. He looked up at the heavy ornamental brickwork of the façade, at the imperial baroque pilasters and the long rows of shuttered windows, and with a hasty blessing he abandoned Balaram.
Balaram was left to cope with his new world alone. His one consolation was that Professor C. V. Raman could not have been more than a few hundred yards away.
The interior of the Eden Hindu Hostel was even more imposing than the façade. There was an immense quadrangle in the centre with cascades of columns rising three storeys high on all sides of it. Balaram made his way round the quadrangle through a high, echoing corridor. It was terrifying after the cheerful chaos of Dhaka’s Kayet-tuli.
After wandering through the corridors for half an hour, he found his room and unpacked his luggage. He arranged the few books he had brought with him on the bookshelf and set out the jars of pickles and sweetmeats his mother had sent with him in a neat row on a windowsill. Then, pulling his dhoti up to his knees, he tiptoed to the door and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. He stepped out and walked quickly down the corridor, trying to keep to the shadows. He slipped down the staircase and came to a corner. He hesitated for a moment, and then, making up his mind, he stiffened his back resolutely and went on. It was only after he had turned the corner, when it was already too late, that he noticed a group of students standing in the corridor. Two of them wore European clothes — baggy trousers and collarless shirts. The others were dressed as he was, in dhotis and long kurtas, but somehow their kurtas were different, smarter.
He hesitated for a moment, but they had already noticed him and he decided not to draw attention to himself by turning back. As he walked on he saw there wasn’t enough room in the corridor to slip around them. He saw that they had stopped talking and were looking at him with pointed interest. He could feel his stomach churning with nervousness.