Nor, in Bhudeb Roy’s youth, were those bits of his skull immediately over and outside the obelion as distended and hideous as they were to become later.
But wait, Gopal would interrupt Balaram. You only noticed Vanity and Self-Esteem after he began hanging up his portraits all over the school.
But it wasn’t easy to interrupt Balaram once he had started on the subject. Just look at the skin around his squamous suture, he would say. It’s a monument to Acquisitiveness and Secretiveness. There Gopal would stop him firmly. He knew for certain that Balaram had begun to talk of Bhudeb Roy’s Acquisitive organ, on the upper edge of the front half of the squamous suture, only after he discovered that Bhudeb Roy was taking fifty rupees for himself from the parents of each child he admitted to the school. And as for Secretiveness, on the posterior part of the squamous suture, he had no doubt that Balaram had noticed that long after he heard that Bhudeb Roy had another steady trickle of money flowing in from the police station in the next village, in exchange for secret monthly reports on almost everybody in Lalpukur. It’s only natural, Balaram explained to him once. Lalpukur is a border town and the police are given money from their headquarters to get information. If they didn’t spend it somehow, the funds would lapse and they’d have to go without their own cuts. Besides, it has to be said of them that they’ve proceeded on sound phrenological principles in choosing Bhudeb Roy to be their informer: his cranial capacity is enormous — there can’t be any doubt that he’s as clever as a fox — and he has exactly the right kind of squamous suture.
But, Gopal objected, you only noticed his squamous suture after you heard about his links with the police. What comes first, then, the act or the organ?
Balaram did not give him a proper answer. Instead he said: But tell me, is any of it untrue?
And then Gopal was reduced to silence. He had met Bhudeb Roy on his first visit to Lalpukur, soon after Balaram had moved there. He had looked like a fairly ordinary young man then, with thinning hair and a large pleasant face. He was stout even then but far from fat, and in his starched white dhoti and kurta he had even possessed a certain kind of grace.
When Gopal saw him years later he had flinched, as anybody would on seeing for the first time that huge slab-like face nodding upon the rolls of flesh of a massively swollen neck. The sockets of his eyes had bulged forward as though to startle a hangman, but curiously the eyes themselves had shrunk into tiny, opaque, red-flecked circles. His mouth had grown into a yawning, swallowing, spittle-encrusted chasm, stretching across the entire width of his huge jaw. His upper lip had shrunk away altogether, while his lower lip had looped upward almost to the tip of his nose. His head was bare and shiny, except for a few limp hairs which he combed vainly over the gnarled swellings on the sides of his head. His ears stuck out of his head at right angles and waved occasionally like banana leaves in a breeze. His body had changed, too — his legs had become two dimpled pillars of flesh and his arms had shot forward till they dangled at his knees. And above it all, for Bhudeb Roy was usually prone, rose his stomach, surging turbulently above him in an engorged, hairy mass, straining at the thin cotton of his kurta.
It was not till he discovered criminology, Balaram claimed, that he found a science adequate to Bhudeb Roy. And even Gopal had to admit that there was a remarkable resemblance between Lombroso’s photographs of voluminous jaws and peaked zygomatic arches, of razor-like upper lips and sadly delinquent beetle eyes, and parts of Bhudeb Roy’s physiognomy. No wonder, Balaram said, the police chose him.
But Balaram’s discovery was to become a dilemma. Soon after he showed those photographs to Gopal, Bhudeb Roy arrived in his house one evening to ask a favour of him. There was nothing unusual in that. Balaram had always been polite to Bhudeb Roy for the sake of the school. And Bhudeb Roy, for his part, had always had a great respect for Balaram’s learning, a respect he never lost. At that time he even had what Gopal, for one, took to be a deep affection for Balaram. But Balaram himself thought otherwise. No, he told Gopal once, all his attempts at kindness, all those little things he always does for me, have nothing to do with me. They’re just a part of his regret for his own lost youth.
Bhudeb Roy came to Balaram’s house because a sixth son had recently been born to him. The astrologers had already seen the boy, he confided to Balaram swaying his gnarled head forward, but their prognostications were not good, and he was worried. The palmists would be no use until the boy’s hands grew a bit. In the meantime, he said, drawing his rubbery lower lip back in a smile, I may as well have phrenology. After all, it’s scientific, and I’m a man of the future. Let it not be said that Bhudeb Roy hung back when the opportunity to have the first phrenologized baby in Bengal, perhaps in Asia, was at hand.
Balaram answered him with vague mumbles. His first instinct, knowing what he did about the hereditary nature of the criminal physiology, was to refuse. What would he say to Bhudeb if his son was exactly like him?
And just then Bhudeb smiled again and said reassuringly: You’ll like the little swine — he’s just like me.
But at the same time Balaram was flattered. It was the first time he had been consulted like a doctor or a surgeon. In a way it was more than a triumph for his science — it was a personal victory. Besides, Bhudeb would be terribly offended if he refused.
So he agreed (later he was to hit himself so hard on his troublesome Vanity that his scalp bled).
The next day, without telling Toru-debi, Balaram packed his instruments in a bag, along with a copy of Combe for reference, and walked over to Bhudeb Roy’s house, a little way down the path which ran past his own house. Bhudeb Roy was lying flat on his back on a mat under a mango tree in his garden. His stomach billowed above him like a sail in a high wind, while he fanned it gently with a palm leaf. He struggled to his feet when he saw Balaram. Followed by his five sons he led Balaram into his newly built, peacock-green house.
Balaram knew the worst as soon as he saw the child in its cradle, shrieking with rage at being woken from its evening sleep. Somehow he found the heart to go through the motions of a perfunctory examination. It was difficult, for the child, thoroughly resentful at being handled by a stranger, screamed and clawed at him with an ominous strength. Finally he wetted Balaram’s shirt, and Balaram almost dropped him. He stopped then and washed his hands and put away his instruments. He had seen enough.
Well? said Bhudeb Roy as he led him out, smiling indulgently. What do you think? Then he saw Balaram’s grim face and stopped short.
What’s the matter? he cried. Balaram-babu, tell me quickly, what’s the matter? Balaram walked straight on, without a word. Wait, Bhudeb Roy shouted after him, Balaram-babu, wait. Have some tea, biscuits, fish, dinner, anything …
Balaram walked straight on, down the garden, towards the dirt path, frowning. Bhudeb Roy hurried behind him waddling, pulling up the folds of his dhoti. His five sons ran out behind him. Wait, he cried again plaintively. Tell me, Balaram-babu, what is it?
Balaram stopped only when he was halfway to his own house. When Bhudeb Roy caught up with him, panting in great shuddering sighs, Balaram said: Bhudeb-babu, I don’t know how to tell you this. I beg that you will not misunderstand. The exhibit, that is to say your son, has distinct protuberances above the asterion and over the temporal muscles above its ears. Furthermore, his mandible and zygomatic arches are already developed to so extraordinary a degree that I can only tell you, with the utmost regret, that he reproduces almost exactly the structure of the Typical Homicidal. With careful nurture you may perhaps be able to hold him down to mere felony, but no further, I fear, no further. Pray, Bhudeb-babu, for I know you believe in prayer, pray that you may not be his first victim.