Then Balaram saw Alu, sprawled on the floor, tied to an upturned bench. His chin had split open and his nose was dripping blood. Balaram had to cut him free with a blade. As they came out of the school, Balaram heard a shout: Balaram’s dog — follow him home. He turned, but all he saw was a flash of feet disappearing into the bamboo.
But, said Balaram, the strange thing was that even then he didn’t say a word. He didn’t cry or even complain. The whole thing seemed to have no effect on him at all.
Maybe, said Gopal meditatively, maybe he’s still trying to get over the shock of losing his parents.
Balaram dropped his kebab in astonishment. He stared at Gopal. I hadn’t thought of that, he said at last.
No, said Gopal. You wouldn’t.
When Balaram got back to Lalpukur that evening, Alu was sitting in a corner of his study reading. Once he was comfortably settled in his easy chair, Balaram called out to him. Alu came up to him and proffered his skull. He was a little puzzled because it was Sunday, and a holiday.
No, said Balaram, not today. He patted the arm of his chair, and Alu jumped on to it.
Alu, said Balaram shyly, one mustn’t brood on the past. One ought to think of the future. The future is what is important. The past doesn’t matter. One can do anything with the future. One can change the world.
He scanned the boy’s face. Alu, he said, don’t you want to change the world? The boy looked at him steadily, his eyes larger than ever, saying nothing.
How can one change the world, Balaram said, if one has no passion?
The boy did not respond. Suddenly Balaram felt himself strangely touched by the boy’s wide-eyed silence. He felt his throat constrict, and in embarrassment he reached for the copy of Vallery-Radot’s Life of Pasteur which always lay beside his chair, and began to read him the chapter about that turning-point in the history of the world — 6 July 1885 — when Louis Pasteur took his courage in his hands and at the risk of his reputation and his whole professional life (for he had never lacked for enemies) filled a Pravoz syringe and inoculated poor, hopeless ten-year-old Joseph Meister, only that day savaged by a rabid dog, with his still untested vaccine.
When he stopped and put the book down he saw tears in Alu’s eyes.
Perhaps I was wrong, Balaram said to Gopal a week later. Perhaps his occipital bone is all right. Still, I must make sure.
He never did make sure. He forgot for a few days, and after that he couldn’t have even if he had remembered. But by then he would probably not have thought it necessary anyway.
That was the week of the autumn harvest. Bhudeb Roy, who had planted a new high-yielding seed, had a magnificent harvest that year. It was a very cheap harvest, too, for three classes of schoolboys did most of his harvesting, on pain of being failed in their examinations. There was a good reason for it, he explained, when Balaram protested feebly. It was a part of the botany practicals — the Lalpukur school had always believed in a judicious mixture of practical and theoretical knowledge.
Otherwise, too, it was a good year for Bhudeb Roy. He didn’t have to spend any money on the school’s annual prizegiving because his five sons shared the prizes between them. He had had another son, and this time the astrologers were quite encouraging.
So good was his fortune that a twinge of superstition led him to announce to the school that in thanksgiving he — in other words, the school — would hold an exceptionally lavish Saraswati Puja that year. What could be a more appropriate festival for a school than that of the Goddess of Learning?
But, Balaram discovered, Bhudeb Roy’s motives were not wholly spiritual. He also intended to invite and suitably impress the district’s Inspector of Schools. If he was successful, anything was possible — a grant, an appointment …
And so Bhudeb Roy set about organizing his triumphal feast. A six-foot image of Ma Saraswati, with spinning electric lights behind the eyes and a silver-foil halo, was commissioned in Naboganj, the nearest large town. Bolai-da, who had once been on a kitchen detail in the Army, closed down his cycle-shop and took charge of the cooking. Two goats and a pondful of fish were fattened for the feast. A large multi-coloured tent, with a low platform for the image, was erected in the schoolyard, and the most learned pandit in Naboganj was hired to preside over the ceremony.
So splendid were the preparations that Bhudeb Roy did not have the heart to restrict his special invitations to the Inspector of Schools. Eventually he sent invitations to all the important officials in the district: the District Magistrate, the Superintendent of Police, and even the Block Development Officer. He had a vision of a sparkling row of official jeeps parked outside the school.
Of course, he had to invite Balaram, too, for the sake of propriety (and the Inspector of Schools was bound to ask to meet the other teachers in the school).
Bhudeb Roy was a little disappointed when the day came. Only the Inspector of Schools arrived, and that, too, by bus and covered with dust. But by then he was enjoying himself too much to let a minor reverse upset him unduly. He showed the Inspector of Schools to a special chair and busied himself herding cowering groups of scrubbed schoolboys into the tent. His five sons, who had been armed with bamboo poles for the occasion, were equally busy outside, keeping the villagers — all but an approved few — out.
When the lights were switched on, a few people noticed that Ma Saraswati, usually so serenely beautiful, seated on her white swan, with her eight-stringed veena in one hand and a book in the other, looked a little pained. But no one dared say anything and, in any case, in all that bustle no one had time to give it much thought.
Balaram left his house late. Toru-debi was busy with a new design for seamless petticoats, and she had flatly refused to go. Balaram had no wish to go, either, or so he said, but duty prodded and he had had no alternative but to respond.
The ceremony had started when he arrived at the school. Standing outside the tent, he could hear the pandit droning inside. He took a deep breath and stepped in.
For a breathless moment he stood frozen, his eyes riveted to the image. Then he raised his hand and shouted: Wait!
The startled pandit stopped in mid-mantra, his mouth open. In the crackling silence everybody turned and followed his pointing fingers to Ma Saraswati’s head, brightly lit from the inside. There was no denying that she looked distinctly migrained. (It was simple really: Bhudeb Roy, unable to resist the temptation to save a few paise, had refused to pay for special insulation for the lights inside the image’s head, and as a result the clay had buckled when the lights were switched on.)
But everybody’s eyes were on Balaram now. He shouted again: Wait! Then he ran across the tent and, with dirty, defiling sandals still on his feet, he leapt on to the platform. The pandit fainted away from shock.
Balaram paused for a moment, his hand poised over the image’s head. Then he ripped the dyed cotton hair off the head and laid the clay skull bare. He pointed to the peeled head with the light still bravely flickering inside and turned around. This, he said to the electrified crowd, is not Saraswati.
This is not Learning, he said, knocking the clay with his knuckles. This is Vanity.
The scraping of the Inspector of Schools’ chair tore through the silence. He stalked out without so much as a glance at Bhudeb Roy. Bhudeb Roy called off the ceremony, and people said that he didn’t swallow a morsel at the feast afterwards.
You were taking revenge, Gopal accused Balaram later. So you deserved what happened next.