Who knows what new horrors lie in store?
It is a gory history in parts; a story of greed and destruction. Every scrap of cloth is stained by a bloody past. But it is the only history we have and history is hope as well as despair.
And so weaving, too, is hope; a living belief that having once made the world one and blessed it with its diversity it must do so again. Weaving is hope because it has no country, no continent.
Weaving is Reason, which makes the world mad and makes it human.
Chapter Three. War
Wars keep people busy. As a rule the spectators are the busiest of all. Some keep busy helping armies with their business of murder and massacre, loot and rapine. Others are left with blood trickling their way and no choice but to join the flow or mop it up.
The people of Lalpukur could not help knowing that a war was brewing across the border; their relatives on the other side never let them forget it. Often they were drummed to bed by the rattle of distant gunfire. But on the whole the fighting was to pass Lalpukur by. And, unlike some of their neighbours, no one in Lalpukur had the energy to join in of their own will. The reason was that the people of Lalpukur were too melancholy. Vomited out of their native soil years ago in another carnage, and dumped hundreds of miles away, they had no anger left. Their only passion was memory; a longing for a land where the green was greener, the rice whiter, the fish bigger than boats; where the rivers’ names sang like Megh Malhar on a rainy day — the Meghna, the Dholeshshori, the Kirtinosha, the Shitolokhkha, the majestic Arialkha, wider than the horizon. Rivers which bore the wealth of a continent to their land, from Tibet, from the Himalayas. Rivers overflowing with bounty, as wide as seas, their banks invisible from one another.
Lalpukur could fight no war because it was damned to a hell of longing.
The vocation of the melancholy is not anger but mourning. When in need they charge by the hour and sell a bitter sort of consolation. And all that Lalpukur had to offer was consolation of a sort — refuge. It could never be a battlefield; nothing but a dumping-ground for the refuse from tyrants’ frenzies.
Long before the world had sniffed genocide in Bangladesh, Lalpukur began to swell. It grew and grew. First, it was brothers with burnt backs and balls cut off at the roots. Then it was cousins and cousins of cousins. Then it did not matter; borders dissolved under the weight of millions of people in panic-stricken flight from an army of animals.
Bamboo shanties soon luxuriated around the village. The great banyan tree at its centre became a leaky shelter for dozens of families and their bundled belongings. Lalpukur burst its boundaries and poured out, jostling with the district road a furlong away. Bhudeb Roy’s rice fields sprouted shacks of packing wood and corrugated iron. He didn’t mind. On the contrary, he was very helpful and even hired a few tough young men to organize the shacks properly. He had discovered that rents from refugee shacks yielded a better harvest than rice. The tea-shop under the banyan tree diversified into selling rice and vegetables, and Bolai-da began to stock corrugated iron and sheets of tin beaten out of discarded kerosene-containers. Soon cycle-repairing was the smallest of his concerns.
Everyone was busy, and Balaram, though he did not know it and would not have cared if he had, had good reason to be grateful for it. Had people had time on their hands he may have had to face a good deal of criticism and even straightforward opposition over his decision to apprentice Alu to a weaver. And despite everything people did find time to talk: what business had a schoolmaster to take his nephew out of school and apprentice him to a weaver (and that, too, when schoolmasters didn’t have to pay school fees)? What could it mean?
A few rumours took root under the banyan tree: Alu had been thrown out of school for failing once too often; Balaram was going to start a cloth factory in Calcutta with Alu as foreman. It was something deep; that was for certain.
But then Lalpukur would be convulsed with growing pains once more and people would be busy again.
As for Balaram, the only person he was really worried about was Toru-debi. But Toru-debi was busy, too: she had perfected her seamless petticoat and was hard at work on a scheme for a buttonless blouse. Weeks passed before she heard of Alu’s apprenticeship. When she did she talked of it only once to Balaram. The books weren’t enough, she said resignedly. There’s nothing I can do about your head. But it doesn’t matter — you’ll put an end to it yourself.
Balaram could hardly believe that he had got off so lightly. He sighed with relief; at last he was free to give his whole energies to the new problem that had so suddenly confronted him.
The fact is that, because of the extraordinary developments in the village, Balaram had almost forgotten about Alu. Soon after the refugees began flooding into Lalpukur, Balaram had gone to take a look at their shacks and shanties. He was appalled: he saw people eating surrounded by their children’s shit; the tin roofs were black with flies; in the lanes rats wouldn’t yield to human feet; there were no drains and no clean water, and the air was stagnant with germs, pregnant with every known disease.
Balaram could think of only one answer: carbolic acid. Nothing else would be remotely as appropriate. There was a kind of historical legitimacy about carbolic acid. The only alternative Balaram could think of were mercury-based disinfectants, and somehow he could not bring himself to use those. Weren’t they created by the Great Adversary, Robert Koch, who had so tenaciously and falsely opposed Pasteur until he could no longer deny the truth? And weren’t they invalid in a way, since Koch had come upon them almost by accident, believing their effects to be other than they actually were? Besides, they’d probably be too expensive anyway. No, it had to be carbolic acid, that masterly brainchild of Lister’s, Pasteur’s friend and Great Disciple.
So Balaram started a campaign. He went around the shanties, warning people of the swift death they were calling on themselves. He called meetings and urged them to contribute what they could to buy carbolic acid. People listened to him, for they knew he was a schoolmaster, but they hesitated. It was not till he started a fund with a bit of his own money that they threw in a few annas and paisas. Soon they had enough to buy a fair quantity of disinfectant. Then, very systematically, with the help of a few volunteers, Balaram began to disinfect every exposed inch of the new settlements.
Bolai-da said one day, watching him: This is a new Balaram-babu. It was true: Balaram, antiseptic and pungent with disinfectant, had never been so happy.
Bhudeb Roy, as he told ASP Jyoti Das later, did nothing to stop Balaram, because at the time he was one of the busiest people in the village. But he watched suspiciously because it was clear to him at once that Balaram was up to something. It had to be more than mere coincidence that he had started the business with disinfectants and apprenticed his nephew to Shombhu Debnath at the same time.