Balaram turned, lean and erect, his cloud of white hair lifting in the breeze, and walked away while Bhudeb Roy sank to the dust with a punctured cry.
Next morning Toru-debi woke to find that six of their coconut palms had been axed and all their lemon trees uprooted during the night. Nonder-ma, who always knew, told her the whole story.
When she had heard her through, Toru-debi went to the middle of the courtyard. She stood, legs apart, holding a huge stone pestle above her head, and shouted: Listen, you. If I ever hear again that you’ve gone out of this house with those instruments, there’ll be nothing left in your study. Those books have cursed you, and now you’re trying to drag me down with you. But I won’t go.
Balaram did not leave his study or even acknowledge that he had heard her. There were times, he knew, when Combativeness ruled her so completely that argument was futile. Those were the times when it was best to do as she said.
After that Balaram’s evening walks around the village with his Claws and his bag of instruments ceased. The notebooks of observations of over three hundred of the village’s living heads that he had so carefully compiled in a decade’s painstaking work were frozen. Balaram’s study became a prison and his evenings would not pass.
On those long evenings, Balaram tried to see the matter rationally, but he could not find it in himself to forgive Bhudeb Roy. But there was little he could do: reason is not a good weapon with which to wreak revenge.
What Bhudeb Roy made of the incident was a mystery. When Toru-debi made Balaram go with her to his house a month later to offer condolences after his baby son had died of double pneumonia, he was as courteous to Balaram as he ever was. But Balaram was not deceived. He saw Combativeness growing on the back of Bhudeb Roy’s head like a new potato, and secretly he was afraid.
About a year later Alu arrived in Lalpukur.
So, in an odd way, Bhudeb Roy was partly responsible for the surge of enthusiasm with which Balaram greeted Alu. The moment he saw him Balaram knew his evenings would never be empty again.
Though a long time passed before the boy would let Balaram examine him, once they started he grew to enjoy his sessions with Balaram almost as much as Balaram did himself. To eliminate all taint of the haphazard, Balaram worked out a timetable for the examinations. Since Alu was in the fourth class of the Lalpukur school then, Balaram scheduled his examinations early in the morning, before school, three times a week, and after school another three times a week, with holidays on Sundays. The timetable, with the days shuffled around for variety every week, was pinned up on the door of Balaram’s study late every Sunday evening. But neither he nor Alu paid it much attention. Alu was always somewhere in Balaram’s study in those days — rummaging around in the bookshelves, leafing through books in some dusty corner, or often just dozing, leaning against the easy chair’s clawed legs.
Balaram could not have hoped for a better subject. But still something worried him.
It may be his bregma, he told Gopal. He’s so completely impassive. Nothing, nothing at all, seems to make an impression on him.
They were sitting at a grimy marble-topped table in Nizam’s Restaurant, behind the New Market in Calcutta. The waiters in their lungis were making so much noise running between the tables and the kitchen outside that Gopal had to lean forward to hear Balaram clearly.
He’s still just a boy, Balaram, he said, prodding a kebab with his forefinger. You can’t expect him to be as enthusiastic about phrenology as you are.
But Balaram was still worried. It wasn’t natural for a boy of ten to be quite so impassive. Alu betrayed no emotion about anything at all. It was obvious, for instance, that in his impassive way he hated school — if there could be such a thing as an impassive hatred. He never opened a schoolbook, never wrote so much as a word in his hard-bound exercise-book. He went off to school obediently enough, but always hanging back, as though waiting for a miracle to strike the school off the fields of Lalpukur.
It was already a matter of deep embarrassment to Balaram, and it would be worse if his own nephew, studying in the very school he was teaching in, were to fail in the examinations. Bhudeb Roy, whose sons somehow always won all the prizes the school offered, never let Balaram forget it. Not very bright, that boy Alu, he would say, is he, Balaram-babu? Perhaps you should beat him a bit?
Balaram would look straight at him until his opaque little eyes shifted.
The trouble was that he was bright, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent. There could be no doubt about it. He had to have some intelligence to read as much as he did.
How much he read! Far too much, in fact, for a boy of ten. He would read almost anything he happened to come across in Balaram’s study: history, geography, geology, natural history, biology … Anything at all. And not just in Bengali. It had taken him amazingly little time to learn English. And then Balaram had tried to teach him a little French the same way he had learnt it himself, from a grammar and a pocket dictionary. Alu had proved so quick in learning that Balaram had decided not to teach him any more for fear of confusing him. But then one day he had found him reading a French primer on his own, with the help of the pocket dictionary.
He had learnt to speak a number of languages, too. Cycle-shop Bolai, who had once served in the Army somewhere in the north, had taught him Hindi. And he was fluent in the villagers’ dialect, which Balaram, after sixteen years in Lalpukur, could barely understand.
Most of the people of Lalpukur belonged originally to the remote district of Noakhali, in the far east of Bengal close to Burma. They had emigrated to India in a slow steady trickle in the years after East Bengal became East Pakistan. Most of them had left everything but their dialect behind. It was a nasal sing-song Bengali, with who knew what mixed in of Burmese and the languages of the hills to the east. Many of them had learnt the speech of West Bengal, but it had only made their own dialect more dear to them — as a mark of common belonging and as a secret weapon to confuse strangers with. It was their claim that it was impossible for anyone born outside Noakhali to understand their speech when they spoke fast. And yet after only two years Alu spoke it so fluently that the whole village had learnt to be careful not to talk about Balaram when he passed by.
But always impassive, never betraying so much as a trace of emotion. Perhaps, said Balaram, ruminating, I could try massaging him on the occipital bone where the emotions and sentiments are.
Balaram! Gopal exclaimed. You leave his occipital bone or whatever alone. You’re imagining things. Toru told me herself when we were last in Lalpukur that he’s had trouble in school because of his devotion to you. That’s an emotion. Gopal put his glass of water down and looked accusingly at Balaram. Balaram nodded reluctantly.
Once, on his way out of the school in the afternoon, Balaram heard shouts and wild laughter in a classroom. He stopped, for the school was meant to be empty at that time of the afternoon. It was soon apparent that the noise was coming from his own classroom. As he was walking back, it grew from scattered shouts into a high-pitched schoolboy chant: Balaram’s dog, Balaram’s dog …
The boys in the classroom scattered as soon as he entered. He saw four of Bhudeb Roy’s sons tumbling out of the windows. But the fifth, a squat, paunchy boy with a sprouting moustache, stood his ground in the middle of a pile of overturned benches and looked straight at him, with a curling smile. Then he turned and sauntered out of the room, whistling. Balaram saw that he had a deep gash across his cheek.