That was how it was to be with Toru-debi and Alu. After he arrived her courtship with her machine was to be forever punctuated by bouts of concern for the boy. Had he eaten? Had he bathed? Where was he?
But actually the daily chores of bathing him (for it was clear that he had never seen a well before) and feeding him fell to Nonder-ma. She complained, of course; but, then, Nonder-ma had always complained, ever since the day Nondo, her first-born and only son, left her tyranny behind him and ran off to Calcutta with all that she possessed (which was very little), leaving her only the lifelong curse of his name.
Everything in this house, Nonder-ma often muttered, falls to me — the cooking, sweeping, washing, everything, and now the boy, too. And all for what? A few rupees, hardly enough for a sari a year.
Lying, ungrateful woman, Toru-debi would rail. I do nothing but give you money all day long, do everything for you, and still you go on and on. D’you think I’ve got a money tree?
And in any case it was little Maya Debnath, no bigger than Alu, who actually did most of the washing and sweeping, walking over every day from her father’s huts beyond the bamboo forest. Besides, Toru-debi would say, what do you have to do for the boy anyway? But that she would say a little uncertainly, for her idea of what had to be done for the boy was by no means clear.
The truth was that Nonder-ma did not really have to do very much for Alu even in his first year in Lalpukur, for when he was not at school he was busy exploring the house.
It took him a long, long time, for the house brimmed over with rooms. The plan was simple (Balaram had designed it himself): there was a large square courtyard in the centre, shaded by the overhanging branches of a huge mango tree. There were rooms all around the courtyard, built on a high foundation a few feet off the ground. A cool open veranda ringed the courtyard, joining the rooms. A red tile roof, held up by bamboo struts, sloped low over the veranda, so that the sun never reached the rooms. It was always cool inside, and green, for the light was filtered through the innumerable lemon and banana trees and coconut palms which grew around the house.
The kitchen and the store-rooms fell on the far side of the courtyard, opposite the front door. A path snaked out from a small door next to the kitchen and led to a well and, beyond it, a pond surrounded by thickets of bright yellow bamboo. One side of the courtyard was Toru-debi’s and the other Balaram’s, each with four rooms. The fourth side, which faced out towards the dusty red lane, was kept for receiving visitors. That was the only part of the house which had two floors: there was one small room directly above the front door, joined to the courtyard by a ramshackle wooden staircase.
In those early days nobody could be sure where Alu disappeared. Sometimes he would be found in Toru-debi’s room with its perpetually burning electric lights, its heavy mosquito-netted bed, its hillocks of trunks and discarded cloth, its sewing machine, and its incense-blackened images of Ma Kali, Ma Durga and Ma Saraswati piled high on the trunks (you had to be an athlete to pray in that room, Balaram used to say); and sometimes they would find him in the huge room which faced out, with its clutter of dust-laden furniture, carefully laid out for guests who never came; or in rooms pungent with pickles in stone jars, or rooms piled high with old newspapers and English magazines and cut-out sewing patterns, or others stacked with grain and alive with rats’ squeaks and the quick slithering of snakes, or others half-full of firewood and coal, or others still, empty of everything but dust, built in who knew what unspoken hope?
And of course there was Balaram’s study in one corner of the courtyard.
For a long time Balaram could not persuade Alu to come near his study, and he bitterly regretted the rash impulse which had sent him looking for his instruments the day the boy first arrived. It was little less than a torment to him to have to watch that extraordinary skull at a tantalizing distance, just beyond examining range.
Balaram did not know that when he was away, or when he had to work late at the school, Alu would often slip into the dim, dusty room and perch on Balaram’s immense easy chair and arrange its folding arms at right angles like the wings of a plane. And when he tired of that he would prowl around the room breathing in the smell of yellowing paper and staring at the rows of books in the tall, glass-fronted bookcases.
It was not till many months had passed that Alu would enter the room while Balaram was in it, and even then he would only stand at the door and look in, often for hours, while Balaram read reclining in his easy chair. Balaram kept his patience, and it was well worth it, for when at last the boy trusted him enough to let him run his fingers over his skull for the first time he knew at once that it held material enough for a lifetime’s study.
At first, as Balaram admitted to himself, he was baffled. The boy’s head confused him utterly and for entirely unfamiliar reasons. Most heads were puzzling because they were so even. Often there was nothing, not the slightest undulation or bump to mark the major faculties and organs. Most heads, in a word, were dull, even boring.
With Alu it was another matter altogether; it was like sitting down to a wedding feast after years of stewed rice. His head abounded with a profusion of bumps and knots and troughs, each more aggressively pronounced than the next and scattered about with an absolute disregard for the discoveries of phrenology. The array of bumps and protuberances grew cheerfully all over his head and showed no signs at all of dividing into distinct and recognizable organs. It was all very confusing and very exciting — a wealth of new stimulating material. In time it prompted Balaram’s paper on the Indistinctness of the Organs of the Brain (he sent it to the Bombay Natural History Society and to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, but unaccountably it was never acknowledged).
Later, when Alu was old enough to understand, Balaram often said to him: You’d have to change your head if you read Spurzheim or Gall — wouldn’t be able to live with the confusion.
Take, for instance, that big spectacle-shaped lump which covered a large part of the back and sides of Alu’s head. Starting a little above the hair-line, it stretched across the skull, but stopped short of the ears. To put it more precisely, it covered the squama occipitus and grew over the lateral areas of the lambdoidal suture, covering symmetrical parts over the asterion. It looked harmless enough, though hardly pleasing, but for Balaram it meant a fair number of sleepless nights. It was large enough to contain a multitude of organs and yet its boundaries were too shadowy to say which. And the worst part was that it was right on the trickiest part of the skull, for the founders of the science of phrenology were all agreed that the organs which govern the lowest and least desirable propensities all grow on the back and sides of the head. For all Balaram knew, a witch’s brew could be bubbling in that lump — Destructiveness perhaps, mixed with Amativeness or Secrecy and peppered with Combativeness or Acquisitiveness. And if he could find no way of identifying and combating those organs it would be just a matter of time before they drove the poor boy to some hideous crime.
But eventually it all turned out well, for Balaram discovered that the lump cloaked nothing more serious than the organs of Philoprogenitiveness or the Love of Children, Adhesiveness or Friendship and, regrettably, Combativeness. There was even a possibility of Vitality at the base of the skull but, on the whole, Balaram was one of those who argued against rather than for the existence of the Organ of Vitativeness.