Seen as a whole, it wasn’t altogether encouraging, but still Balaram could not but be grateful that the lump so neatly avoided Destructiveness and Secretiveness and Acquisitiveness and all the other moral quicksands which lie around the ear. It was only much later, when Alu was older, that Balaram noticed Amativeness or, to put it bluntly, the Organ of Sex blossoming tumescently just above the hair-line. He jotted it down in his notebook with horrified embarrassment; no doubt it had something to do with Self-Abuse. Ever after he did his best not to look at it.
As for the rest of Alu’s head, it took Balaram years before he could even begin to make sense of certain protuberances, and some were to remain puzzling for ever. But in a general way he was more or less sure that there were distinct depressions over the organs of Self-Esteem, Vanity and Cautiousness. On the other hand, there was a pleasing undulation over Benevolence, just below the crown. To Balaram’s great relief the crown itself with its collection of religious organs was absolutely flat. And the two pronounced horn-like protuberances on both sides of the crown probably held Firmness, Hope and Wonder, while the depressions at the temples almost certainly spelt the lack of Poesy and Wit (over neither of which was Balaram likely to shed any tears). But the strangest part of that strange head was the forehead, for it was enigmatically flat exactly where all the higher Perceptive and Reflective faculties ought to have been, except for a mysterious bump in the centre, where the hair began. That bump could be anything — Language, Eventuality, Cause …
Many, many years were to pass before Balaram discovered its function.
Balaram often wished there was something to be learnt from Alu’s physiognomy, but the boy’s face gave very little away. It was a compact face, of what Kretschmer called the shield-shaped type: that is, straight at the sides with a rounded jaw and chin — with large eyes and generous lips. The nose was of the kind which the Barbarini manuscript names Lunar — short, with a rounded end. But those were mere classifications; there was nothing to be learnt from them. Looking at his face, nobody could have called the boy handsome or ugly. If there was a word for it, it was ordinary. In fact, with his stocky build and being as he was, neither tall nor short nor dark nor fair, Alu would have been nothing other than ordinary to look at if it were not for his head.
When Alu was much older and had to sit on the floor because he had grown too heavy for the arms of the easy chair, Balaram often used to wonder aloud, patting him gently on Benevolence, at how the two of them came to be so unlike each other. After all, they were blood relatives and there ought to have been something to show for it, something in the skull. There could no longer be any doubt, he used to say, that the skull and therefore the character are to some degree hereditary. Wasn’t that why Lombroso was so celebrated — for demonstrating the hereditary nature of character? Wasn’t that why the American laws of 1915 prescribing sterilization for confirmed criminals were enacted?
But, laws or not, there was no discernible resemblance between Alu and Balaram. Balaram’s head was long, narrow and finely modelled. It was almost flat at the back and sides, and, except for two barely perceptible undulations over Vanity, it betrayed not the slightest trace of a Lower Sentiment or Propensity. But it had not always been so. When Balaram first began to read about phrenology, he had discovered a few signs of liveliness on his Amatory Organ. Balaram was, and always had been, extremely prudish. Such was his embarrassment at his discovery that in a few weeks he managed to rub a fair-sized depression into the back of his neck.
Balaram’s physiognomy reflected his cranium perfectly. He had a thin, ascetic face, with clean lines, a sharp ridge of a nose and wide, dreamy eyes. His high, broad forehead rose to a majestic dome, crowned with a thick, unruly pile of silver hair. It was an astonishing forehead: it shone; it glowed; it was like a lampshade for his bulging Higher Faculties — Language, Form, Number, the lot. It was a striking face even in repose. Sometimes, when he was animated, it was lit with such a bright, pointed intensity that it imprinted itself on the minds of everyone who saw him in those moments.
After he began thinking about heredity and character seriously, Balaram often wondered what a child of his would look like. Once, on one of his frequent visits to Calcutta, he put the question to Gopal Dey, his oldest and dearest friend. They were walking in the ornamental gardens of the National Library at the time (it was a beautiful garden in those days when B. S. Kesavan was the director of the Library, not an overgrown, bureaucratized swamp as it is now). Gopal was tired. He had spent a long hard day at the High Court, and after hours of ploughing through briefs he was in no mood to speculate about the children Balaram might have had. In any case, it was a difficult question. If Balaram had had children, they would in all likelihood have been Toru-debi’s children as well, and, in contrast to the lean ascetic Balaram, Toru-debi, with her soft woolly cheeks and dimpled face, was a bundle of pleasantly unruly plumpness, even though her eyes, somewhat at odds with the rest of her face, had been honed into pinpoints of concentration by her years at her sewing machine.
Toru-debi had never permitted Balaram to examine her skull, and never would, but for years Balaram had carefully observed her head in the mornings when her hair clung to her head after her bath, and as far as he was concerned he knew it as intimately as one of his plastic demonstration skulls. It was a large head, with a not inconsiderable cranial capacity; more or less evenly rounded, except for well-marked protuberances on the median over the bregma, on the religious organs, and another on the occipital bone. That was an odd one: once upon a time he would have had no hesitation in entering it under Philoprogenitiveness, or a remarkably well-developed Love of Children. But over the years he had watched it slip sideways, towards the asterion, until it became something else altogether. Sometimes he interpreted it as Constancy, but the suspicion always lurked somewhere in his mind that actually it was the yet unclassified organ of Tenacity (or, not to mince words, plain bloody Obstinacy). As for the rest, he could guess at a luxuriant growth on Constructiveness or the Mechanical Sense (for even sewing needed a mechanical sense of a kind), but he had never been very sure about the exact location of that organ. And then, of course, there was that swollen lump above the ear meatus, which he had no alternative but to interpret as Destructiveness. It was certainly true that her face, usually so tranquil (mainly because she hardly seemed to recognize the existence of a world outside her sewing room), was quite transformed when she was angry. In a rage she was capable of doing anything at all.
If you and Toru had a child, Gopal said sharply, it would probably be quite ordinary.
Oh? said Balaram, disappointed, and turned away to look at the extravagant stucco façade of the National Library.
Gopal had not really believed in phrenology or physiognomy or Balaram’s theories of heredity ever. And over the years he had developed a positive hostility to them. That may have been because in one of their earliest arguments on the subject Balaram had said to him, in a long-regretted flash of temper: You ought to be preserved in methylated spirit. You’re a discovery. You’re the only person alive with a Phlegmatic organ.
Gopal had little vanity. Even in those days, well before middle age, he knew himself to be short and paunchy. He knew his broad face with its childishly rounded cheeks to be pleasant, but nothing more. But he was not phlegmatic; anybody who cared to look at his eyes, shining behind his gold-rimmed glasses, would know that at once. But the trouble with people like Balaram was that theories came first and the truth afterwards.