But the antiseptic?
Extremists have money, said the Deputy Inspector-General, chewing cryptically. It comes across the border. That’s why they’re extremists.
Jyoti Das was not wholly satisfied. He put the matter to Bhudeb Roy, not without a note of accusation, for the only reference to Balaram in Bhudeb Roy’s reports of that period was a short note which claimed that Balaram had wilfully and maliciously destroyed his best cabbage patch by drenching it with disinfectant.
How is it, Bhudeb-babu, said Jyoti Das, that your reports mentioned nothing of this business of fighting disease and all that?
I was busy then, Bhudeb Roy smiled blandly, with political matters.
Jyoti Das persisted: But tell me, Bhudeb-babu, where did he find the money for the antiseptic?
Who knows? Bhudeb Roy said with a vague wave. There was so much chaos then, the war seemed to be right in the village.
Yes? Jyoti Das prompted.
But he never had an answer. Bhudeb Roy didn’t wish to speak of it. The war was right on us then, he said abruptly. It fell on us.
It did. It fell after a day of fearful silence, when a mist hung about the village till midday, and a gathering expectancy snaked through the huts and houses and hung in the air, as real and prickly as knotted hessian.
It was a day when people huddled into their houses and shacks. Nobody wanted to let themselves out into the fingers of the fog, though nobody could have said why. Perhaps it was the silence; the sudden muffling of the usual far-away bursts of shooting.
It grew worse as the day wore on. Early in the evening the fog crawled out of the ponds again, and a still, fetid dampness clamped itself on the village. It reached everywhere. It crept into Alu’s loom and dampened the warp yarn and made it stick. Alu had to work slowly, painfully prising the yarn apart. He would have stopped, but a consignment had been promised to a hungry merchant in Naboganj and the work had to be done.
As the murky twilight was fading away, Maya brought him a kerosene-lamp, and hung it from a nail in the loom-shed. Where’s Rakhal? Alu asked.
In Naboganj, she answered.
And your father?
She jerked her head at his hut. He’s in there, I think, she said. Sleeping.
She went to the kitchen and put a match to a lamp’s wick. It would not light. She shook it and tried again. At that moment the roar of a plane overhead broke clammily through the fog, shaking the courtyard. The lamp fell from her hands and smashed on the earth. The flames leapt up for a moment, on the spilt kerosene, and died away. Maya stood transfixed for a moment, looking down at the blackened oil. Then she hitched up her sari and ran across the courtyard to the loom-shed.
What’s the matter? said Alu, looking up from the loom.
I’m afraid. She reached forward and put a hand on his shoulder. She stood there for a while, watching him. Then she slipped down to the bench and Alu felt her thighs beside his and smelt her smoky warmth. He put out his hand and touched her cheek. She turned all at once, and threw her legs across his, and sat straddling him, her face on his, bouncing with the rhythm of his legs as they pushed the pedals of the loom. Don’t stop, she whispered urgently into his ear, he’ll wake up if you do.
Alu jerked on the shuttle-cord again, and the shuttle shot across, while she tore at the buttons of his trousers, ripped them off and thrust her hands inside. Don’t stop, she hissed again. Then, with a heave of her hips, she threw her thin sari up, past her waist. She flung her arms around his neck, pressed her knees to his ribs, and sank upon him.
Don’t stop, she cried into his ear, faster, and the shuttle pounded through the parted, twitching limbs of the warp, and the cloth poured out, tangled and damp; gushed forth, in a surge of joyful abundance, till the sky burst, with an explosion which sent a gale tearing through the bamboos and seared the tips of the mango trees, and the fog flared scarlet over the village while hundreds of glowing sparks fell out of the sky.
The whole village was running, stumbling through the fog, before Alu and Maya were out of the courtyard. They picked their way through the murky darkness of the bamboo thickets, tripping on shoots and stumps, helping each other along. Then at the edge of the thickets they heard someone crashing through the bamboo. The noise grew louder and they stopped, holding each other’s hand, and peered into the grey fog. They could see nothing but the swaying outlines of bamboo. Then the footsteps were upon them, and Maya screamed.
It’s only me, Shombhu Debnath gasped, panting for breath.
Maya, stupefied: But weren’t you at home, sleeping?
No, no, he said. He smiled crookedly. I’m going home now. Now, go. Run. Go and see. It’s a plane, fallen out of the sky, on the school.
He stumbled off in the darkness, and they ran out of the bamboos, into the lanes, and with the rest of the village they poured down into the school, and craned over the shoulders of the crowd which had got there before them and caught a glimpse of a flaming fuselage, driven into the earth like a broken stake.
Beside it, sitting quite still, legs crossed, her face brilliantly lit by the flames, was Parboti-debi. She was staring up into the sky, oblivious of the crowd, all her haggardness vanished, smiling serenely, gratefully.
Chapter Four. Signs of New Times
The plane was like an exclamation mark fallen on Lalpukur from the sky. The war ended a few days after the crash, and not long after some of the refugees flowed back to the new country across the border, and the others wandered off to the cities or spread out over the country. Soon they were half-forgotten.
But nobody in Lalpukur forgot the crash.
The professional interpreters of portents split immediately: a proper fight had long been in the offing anyway, ever since the numerologists had ganged up with the astrologers against the palmists and sabotaged a move for a licensing system and a union to guarantee uniform rates for predictions irrespective of methods used. After the crash things took a new turn. The numerologists assumed the leadership of the End of the World Signalled camp and heaped scorn on the palmists and their theory of Signs of New Times. Whose palm do you read an aircrash on? they sneered. God’s? The astrologers, warily neutral for once, took the conservative view that it meant nothing at alclass="underline" crashes and tempests and earthquakes were normal in Kaliyug. What else could you expect in the Age of Evil?
But they’re wrong, said Balaram, telling Gopal the story on his veranda in Calcutta. If it has no meaning, why would it happen? Of course it has a meaning, but the meaning must be read rationally — not with the hocus-pocus of these Stone Age magicians.
Balaram stopped and looked at Gopal with a hint of a challenge glinting in his eyes. Of course, he said, some people think it rational to believe that events don’t have a meaning.
Gopal looked away and blew wearily into his cup of tea. With Balaram forty years weren’t enough to forget an argument.
Balaram was lying in a chaotic, noisy general ward in the Medical College Hospital, his legs encased in plaster, like gigantic boiled eggs. He could have had a private room had he wished. Dantu and the others who had rushed down from the first-floor balcony to the flower-bed where Balaram lay writhing in agony had tried to persuade him to take one. They knew his father could afford it. But even then, between screams of pain, Balaram had managed to sob: No, my father mustn’t know. So Balaram had gone into the general ward and Dantu had decided not to write to his father about the accident.
Accident, he called it. There were others at that fateful meeting at the top of the stairs on the first floor of the Presidency College building (led by Middle Parting and his unremorseful friends) who called it the Fool’s Fall.