Take, for example, Balaram’s theory about Dantu.
Dantu, their friend and ally through all their most difficult times in college, had vanished soon after his final examinations (in fact he had had very little to do with Balaram after the Accident, but that’s another story). A year after college they heard that he had found a good job with a tea company. But soon after he vanished again. They often wondered what had happened to him, but this time he really hadn’t left a trace. But then, one day, more than twenty years afterwards, with the help of his new-found theories Balaram declared confidently that Dantu had become a sadhu; that he had abandoned worldly life and was wandering around the country with a begging-bowl. Why? Simple. Because of his sharply domed head, of course, and his thin, hollow face and those two long, peeping front teeth from which he took his name. It’s his bregma, said Balaram. I can see now that it was Veneration that had pushed his skull up so sharply. Besides, he always had the look of a saint.
Nonsense, said Gopal, but only to himself, for he knew how touchy Balaram was about his theories. Nonsense; politics interested Dantu much more than religion — it’s just that your theory doesn’t allow for a Political organ.
And, sure enough, a year or so later he came upon an article in a newspaper about a Shri Hem Narain Mathur (which was only Dantu under his real name) who had been arrested somewhere in north Bihar for organizing the landless labourers of the area to agitate for fair wages. He snipped the article out and showed it to Balaram later, but he didn’t say, as he had planned to: Veneration is a long way from leading strikes. What about your theory now?
That was just it, the reason why phrenology was rubbish — all theory and no facts. He had said so, as he never tired of repeating, since the very first time Balaram had shown him the copy of Practical Phrenology that he had discovered in a secondhand bookshop in College Street.
As it happens, we know exactly when that happened. It happened on 11 January 1950 at 4.30 in the afternoon. We know the date because that was the day Madame Irène Joliot-Curie, Nobel Laureate in physics and daughter of the discoverers of radium, Pierre and Marie Curie, arrived in Calcutta ablaze with glory.
Balaram was thirty-six at the time. He was working as a sub-editor on the Amrita Bazar Patrika, which was still, at that time, Calcutta’s best English newspaper. He had been working there for close on fourteen years, ever since he left college, so he was fairly well known in the office then. That was probably why he was allowed to go to the airport with the staff reporter that day.
Of course, Balaram had planned for the day ever since the papers had announced the date of the Joliot-Curies’ arrival in Calcutta on their way back from the Science Congress in Delhi. There were other scientific stars scheduled to arrive on the same day: Frédéric Joliot, Irène Joliot-Curie’s husband, with whom she had shared her Nobel; J. D. Bernal, the English physicist later to win the Nobel himself; Sir Robert Robinson, distinguished chemist and president of the Royal Society.
But in that whole gathering of luminaries there was only one person Balaram wanted to see and that was Madame Irène Joliot-Curie. He had read about the Curies since he was thirteen. Radium had powered the fantasies of his adolescence; he had celebrated Marie Curie’s second Nobel with fireworks. For him Irène Curie was a legend come alive, a part of the secret world of his boyhood, an embodiment of the living tradition of science. He would have gladly given up his job only to see her.
On 9 January, two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Balaram went to the news editor and asked permission to go to the airport with the staff reporter. It’ll help, he said in explanation, with the subbing of the story and the headlines. The news editor, always busy, hardly looked up: Yes, of course, do what you like. But on the tenth Balaram went to him again, just to make sure. Yes, yes, the news editor snapped, didn’t I say so?
The eleventh was bitterly cold by Calcutta’s sultry standards; the coldest day the city had had in years. Balaram wrapped himself up carefully in two sweaters, an overcoat and a new muffler. At Dum-Dum airport two of his childhood heroes were pointed out to him in the waiting crowd, the physicists Meghnad Saha and Satyen Bose. But Balaram, busy scanning the skies, hardly noticed them. When he spotted the silvery Dakota with the Star Lines emblem painted on its wings, he hopped about flapping his overcoat, almost beside himself. The staff reporter, long accustomed to the famous, said quite sharply: Can’t you stand still for a moment?
Madame Joliot-Curie climbed out first, wrapped in a grey overcoat, with a cloth bag in one hand. She was taller than he had expected, with clearly drawn jowls, grizzled hair and bright, sharp eyes. Her husband came out next, smiling, his tie tucked into his crumpled trousers. And then came J. D. Bernal, dapper, elegant, hat in hand, exuding ease and grace. Balaram tried not to look at him. But of course it wasn’t his fault. The difference between him and Irène Joliot-Curie was not the difference between two individuals. It lay outside either of them; it was a geographical difference, a spatial difference, the difference of two opposed traditions — one which produced Louis Pasteur, battling himself into paralysis, and Marie Curie’s revolutionary fervour, and another which turned out these clever, passionless, elegant sleepwalkers. (He was wrong about J. D. Bernal, of course, but he didn’t know it then.)
Balaram pressed forward with the reporters, towards the three figures standing by the plane on the runway. Faintly he heard one of the reporters remark to Professor Joliot that they looked tired.
We flew over high altitudes, Professor Joliot said in answer, over 9000 feet, and this has somewhat told on us. He turned to his wife and smiled. She nodded, running the back of her hand across her forehead. With an electric thrill of excitement Balaram saw that she was looking straight at him.
Balaram knew that he had to say something. He knew Professor Joliot was wrong; 9000 feet wouldn’t tire a Curie. The Curies lived in the highest reaches of the imagination.
Balaram strained eagerly forward, brushing a shock of his springy black hair off his eyes. But, sir, he said loudly, hardly aware of what he was saying, are you not accustomed to keeping high altitudes?
It was only a silly impulse; he knew that the moment he said it. It meant nothing. But it was too late. There was a moment’s awkward silence and then everyone, led by Professor Joliot, burst into laughter. Even Madame Joliot-Curie smiled.
For Balaram each peal of that laughter carried the sting of a whiplash. He turned, humiliation smarting in his eyes. They were all the same, all the same, those scientists. It was something to do with their science. Nothing mattered to them — people, sentiments, humanity. He pushed his way through the crowd and ran and ran till he reached Dum-Dum village.
Back in Calcutta he wandered down the roaring traffic of Dharmotolla, away from the buses and trams of the Esplanade. He could not bear the thought of compounding his humiliation by going back to the office or facing Toru-debi at home. He went where his feet led him, and inevitably they took him to College Street. Soon, chewing acidly on his humiliation, he was back among the familiar crumbling plaster façades and the tinkling bells of trams; the students pushing their way to bus-stops and the rows of stalls piled high with secondhand books. A little way from the wrought-iron gates of Presidency College he absent-mindedly picked up and paid for a tattered old book. It was called Practical Phrenology.