He walked down to the Dilkhusha Cabin in Harrison Street, found a quiet table and ordered a cup of tea. After a while he opened the book and desultorily skimmed over a few pages. Then, with gathering excitement, he began to read.
At four o’clock he took a tram to the High Court. Gopal was busy in his chambers, but Balaram dragged him out to a roadside tea-stall run by a Bihari, in the Strand. Look, he said, handing him the book. Look what I’ve found.
Gopal was not particularly pleased at being pulled out of his chambers at a quarter past four in the afternoon, especially since he had an important tax suit coming up the next day. He fingered through the book, looked at the photographs of typical criminal types with distaste and handed it back to Balaram.
Balaram, he said warily, you’ve never studied science. You know nothing of anatomy. People like you and me just don’t know enough about these things. We should leave them alone.
How does that matter? said Balaram. There are ideas in science like anything else. Do you ever tell me to stop reading history? Do I ever tell you to stop reading novels?
Gopal looked at his watch. It was four-thirty and he was late. To me, he said, this looks like rubbish.
Don’t you see? said Balaram, stuttering with excitement, eyes blazing. Haven’t I always told you? What’s wrong with all those scientists and their sciences is that there’s no connection between the outside and the inside, between what people think and how they are. Don’t you see? This is different. In this science the inside and the outside, the mind and the body, what people do and what they are, are one. Don’t you see how important it is?
I think, said Gopal stolidly, that if you must keep on with this science business you’d better go to hear Madame Curie this evening when she opens the Institute of Nuclear Physics. And now I have to go.
Balaram did go to hear her, and so did Gopal. They stood far back in the crowd, behind cheering groups of schoolchildren and college students, and watched her cut the tape. She looked incongruous, surrounded by ministers and governors and petty pomp — a simple housewifely figure in a plain dress. Balaram listened intently as she began to speak of the importance of nuclear physics and the new chapter in the prosperity of mankind it had opened.
But then Gopal dug him in the ribs and winked, unkindly reminding him of a little defeat. Once, about three and a half years ago, a harassed chief sub had asked Balaram to compose a banner headline. After a good deal of hard thought he came up with: Nuclear bomb dropped — Hiroshima disappears. The chief sub had not thought it fit to print. ‘A-bomb’, he said, was better than ‘nuclear’ (it was some years before the paper worked out a house style on the matter). And anyway Balaram had chosen the wrong type-case. It rankled absurdly for years.
Balaram looked hard at Madame Curie and, soon after, he left without a word to Gopal. Next morning, he was on his way up to the newsroom when a man stopped him. He was a youngish man, not past his late twenties, Balaram judged, dressed in grey trousers and a blue sweater. Could you tell me where the advertising department is? he asked nervously. His Bengali had a slight but distinct rural slur.
Why? Balaram said, and smiled.
Reassured by his friendliness the young man invited him out for a cup of tea. Balaram went, glad of an excuse to put off his entry into the newsroom. When they were sitting at the tea-stall the young man showed Balaram his advertisement. He wanted a teacher for a primary school in a village called Lalpukur, about a hundred miles north of Calcutta, near the border.
It was a very new settlement, the young man explained. Most of the villagers were refugees from the east. His was the only family which owned land in the area.
And where are you from, sir? he asked Balaram.
I’m from East Bengal, too, Balaram said. From Dhaka.
I see, he said. A few of the villagers are from there as well.
Anyway, he went on, after finishing with his bachelor’s degree in science he had trained as a schoolteacher. Now that the time had come to find a job, he had decided to start a school of his own instead — in Lalpukur where it was really needed and where he could keep an eye on his land. It would be both an income and something worthwhile. Besides, why work for someone else when you could work for yourself?
But he needed another teacher — he wouldn’t be able to handle it all on his own. He looked at Balaram, his eyes shining with enthusiasm: You’ll never believe how eager those children are to learn.
When Balaram left the young man and went up to the newsroom, he was greeted with slow handclaps and broad smiles. He discovered that a number of that morning’s papers had carried his question to Frédéric Joliot — and the answering laughter — in their reports.
He applied for a day’s leave at once and walked out of the office. He walked down to the Hooghly, hugging his sweaters around him, and watched the boats sailing languidly down the river. He stood there all afternoon and then went down to the High Court.
Gopal was patient with him that day, for Balaram’s terrible distress was stamped large on him. They went for a long walk across the green expanse of the Maidan. Halfway across Balaram stopped and waved a hand at the tall buildings and snarling traffic of Chowringhee. In a place like this, he said, people can’t think about the difference between what they are and what they ought to be. Nothing can change people here. Not science, or history, or reason. Nothing. Nothing could ever be taught here. Not really; not so that it changed anything.
But what makes you think, said Gopal, that you could teach?
I’ve been reading the book I showed you, Balaram answered. Look — he ran his hands over the upper parts of his temples and the sides of his head — look: Hope, Wonder, Ideality and Firmness. What could make a better teacher?
He went back home and for ten days he battled with Toru-debi. A week later they were in Lalpukur. He only learnt the young man’s name when they reached the village. It was Bhudeb Roy.
How different Bhudeb Roy was then! His squama occipitus, even though not quite flat, was certainly not the knobbly tribute to Progeniture it became after the birth of his fifth son. Nor did he then possess those distinctive egg-like growths on Combativeness and Destructiveness above the asterion and the ear meatus.
Balaram often admitted that a good deal of his reconstruction of the young Bhudeb was mere conjecture. A long time had passed after all, and he had only just discovered phrenology when he first met Bhudeb Roy. But he had a good memory and, thinking about it later, the reason why he had taken such an immediate liking to the shy young man was obvious to him: their heads were remarkably alike at the time; almost mirror images of each other. It would have been impossible to distinguish their parietal regions, with Conscience and Hope, from each other without instruments. And he was absolutely certain that on that first day, in the tea-shop outside the Amrita Bazar Patrika office, he had seen distinct signs of a swelling on the middle of Bhudeb Roy’s frontal bone, in front of the coronal suture, right over Benevolence, and another striking growth over Ideality at the temples.
But, then, as Balaram used to say to Gopal later, a science can only tell you about things as they are; not about what they might become.
Ideality withered on Bhudeb Roy’s temples because he never really believed in anything. Even afterwards, when the organ of Order under his eyebrows bloated and grew into a bent for straight lines, he never had real passion. Balaram would have forgiven him anything if he had. But he hadn’t. Those obscene little swellings, Balaram claimed, were just funguses feeding on the dead matter of his head.