The first notes of a wail escaped her mother's lips. 'Urmi, what are you saying?' she sobbed. 'Are you saying your job is more important than your brother's life? Are you telling me that some umbrella-head minister from Delhi is more important than us?'

She sobbed on while Urmila sat silent on the edge of the bed. Finally she put her plate down and asked, in exasperation: 'Has someone bought the fish?'

'No,' her mother said. 'There wasn't time and none of us had the money. You'll have to get it tomorrow morning from Gariahat.'

'I can't go to Gariahat in the morning,' Urmila cried in protest. But she gave up the moment the words were out of her mouth. It was futile to argue; in the end, she knew, she would have to go herself. Her father wouldn't go because it would interfere with his early-morning breathing exercises; her brothers wouldn't go because they would be asleep; her sister-in-law wouldn't go because no one would dare ask her. And as for her mother, she wouldn't go either, and if she, Urmila, were to ask, she would burst into tears and say: 'How could you say this to me? Don't you know the homoeopath told me never to go out early in the morning because of my asthma?'

Then Urmila would want to point out that her asthma didn't stop her going to see her guru in Dhakuria every other day when he did his special dawn appearance to show himself to his followers in early-morning sunlight. But she knew she wouldn't say it, no matter how much she might want to. Instead of saying it to her mother, she would say it to herself, as she went hurtling towards Dalhousie in a minibus, with elbows digging into her back and her nose stuck in somebody's armpit. She would keep mouthing the words to herself over and over again – but you go to your guru every other morning, Ma – and she would get angrier and angrier until finally she did something terrible, as she did the other day, when her mother had made her run down to the ironing-man's stall to fetch her brother's football shorts before catching the minibus: she'd worked herself into such a fury, standing on the bus, mouthing her unsaid protests, that in the end she picked up her foot and jammed it down on someone's instep. She didn't even know why she'd done that; she just wanted to feel the crunch as the heel of her shoe dug into flesh and bone. And she had enjoyed herself too, exchanging insults with the fat little man whose foot she'd stepped on; they shouted at each other all the way from Lansdowne to Lord Sinha Road, until she finally reduced him to browbeaten silence.

. She felt her mother's hands gripping her shoulder. 'Don't fall asleep yet, Urmi,' she said. 'Tell me first: will you get the fish and cook it?'

'Maybe I won't have to,' she said sleepily. 'Maybe one of the fish-sellers will come around.'

'But will you do it anyway?' her mother insisted.

'All right,' Urmila said, in resignation. 'I will – now let me go to sleep.'

Her mother gave her shoulder a pat. 'I knew you would,' she said. 'My sweet little Urmi. Oh, your brother will be so happy. You should have seen how excited he was when I told him that Romen Haldar was coming to our house… '

It took a moment for the name to filter through and then Urmila sat up, abruptly.

'Who?' she said, in surprise.

'Romen Haldar,' said her mother again. 'He's the one who's coming to visit us, from the Club. You know who he is don't you?'

'Yes,' Urmila said sleepily. 'Yes, I know who he is. It's just a coincidence, that's all.'

Chapter 21

ELIJAH MONROE FARLEY left for India in October 1893, Ava began, two years after his departure from the research laboratories of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Several friends and acquaintances travelled up to New York to send him off, including his mentor, the venerable malaria specialist W. S. Thayer, and the two other members of his erstwhile team, W. G. MacCallum and Eugene L. Opie. By the summer of 1894 the young Reverend Farley was installed in a small charitable clinic in the remote township of Barich, in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas. The clinic was run by the American Ecumenical Mission and its staff were the only trained medical personnel in the district.

Farley was twenty-six, a tall, lanky man, with ginger hair and moss-green eyes. Austere and contemplative by nature, he adapted easily to the rigours of his new calling. If at all he missed his earlier vocation as scientist, he let no one know: his every waking hour was consumed by the clinic.

Farley had been at the clinic five months before he had his first letter. It was from his old friend and colleague, Eugene Opie in Baltimore. The letter consisted for the most part of trivialities concerning the weather and the marital and professional circumstances of common acquaintances. But Opie also referred, though only in passing, to a research project that he and MacCallum had recently embarked upon. Writing in the careless shorthand of a busy research student, Opie did not take the time to spell out the theoretical implications of this work. But it was immediately clear to Farley that Opie and MacCallum were building on the findings of the Frenchman, Alphonse Laveran.

This unexpected piece of news plunged Farley into a state of perplexity. As a student he had paid little attention to Laveran's work, assuming it to be generally discredited. In this he had taken his lead from no less a person than William Osler, the guiding spirit of Johns Hopkins, who had publicly declared his scepticism of 'Laveranity'. Farley had left for India fully confident that Laveran's theory was headed for medicine's vast graveyard of discredited speculations: his astonishment at the news of its disinterment could not have been greater.

Once introduced, these apprehensions of Laveranity revivified gradually insinuated themselves into the young missionary's mind, creating doubt and disbelief where certainty had reigned before. As the days passed these doubts began to work on him in subtle and unexpected ways, evoking once again the life he had forsaken, giving rise to an overwhelming nostalgia for the half-forgotten habits and routines of the laboratory. He began to bitterly regret the impulse that had caused him to leave his own microscope behind, at his family's New England home, or else it would have been all too easy to set up an improvised laboratory right where he was.

Then, by chance rather than design, he discovered, sandwiched within the pages of a prayerbook, the card of an English doctor, one Surgeon-Colonel Lawrie, of the Indian Medical Service. Farley had met Lawrie on one of his occasional visits to the Mission 's headquarters in Cal-

cutta. In the course of their brief meeting, the SurgeonColonel had informed him that he was on his way to Hyderabad, to take up an appointment as Professor in the Medical School recently founded by the prince of that state, the nizam. Fortunately, he had scribbled his new address on the back of his card and Farley lost no time in addressing a letter to him, enquiring into the present state of opinion regarding Laveran's theories.

He had not long to wait: to his great relief Colonel Lawrie wrote back within the month. But the letter, when he read it, only deepened his puzzlement: the Colonel still appeared to hold to the belief that Laveranity was without foundation.

Despite the efforts of certain acolytes, wrote the Colonel, it remained true, so far as rational opinion could discern, that Laveran's speculations were wholly without empirical foundation. He himself had recently been witness to a spectacle that had produced forcible proof of this in a manner that would have been comic had it not so dramatically shamed its protagonist.

A self-important and opinionated young army doctor, Ronald Ross had just been posted to the army hospital at Begumpett, not far from Hyderabad. Having more time on his hands than was good for him, Ross had taken it upon himself to begin an investigation into malaria – a disease of which he had no practical knowledge whatever. The young man had been overheard, not once but several times, at the Secunderabad Club, boasting of his familiarity with Laveran's chimera. Nor had he hesitated to accept an invitation to demonstrate the existence of this creature to the assembled faculty of the Nizam's School of Medicine. To this end, he had actually loaded some poor shivering unfortunate into a bullock cart and brought him rattling over to the School, eleven miles away. But of course when the time came, with everybody gathered in the lecture theatre, there was absolutely nothing to be found in the poor man's blood: not a trace of Laveran's fantastical creature. When asked for an explanation he had come up with some stuttering tale of how the creature had gone into temporary withdrawal: as though the parasite were a sleepy Latin in need of a daily siesta.