Chapter 5

WALKING PAST St Paul 's Cathedral, on his first day in Calcutta, August 20 1995, Murugan was caught unawares by a monsoon downpour. He was on his way to the Presidency General Hospital, on Lower Circular Road, to look for the memorial to the British scientist Ronald Ross.

He had seen pictures of it and knew exactly what to look for. It was an arch, built into the hospital's perimeter wall, near the site of Ross's old laboratory. It had a medallion with a portrait and an inscription that said: In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes.

He hadn't far to go when the rain caught up with him. He felt the first drops on his green baseball cap and turned to see an opaque wall of rain moving towards him, across the green expanse of the Maidan. He quickened his pace, swearing at himself for having left his umbrella behind at the guest house. The snack vendors at the Fine Arts gallery, racing to cover their baskets with tarpaulin, stopped to stare as he trotted past, in his khaki suit and green baseball cap.

He had packed an umbrella of course, a Cadillac of an umbrella, which opened at the touch of a button: he knew perfectly well what Calcutta was like at this time of year. But the umbrella was still in his suitcase, in the guest house on Robinson Street. He had been so eager to make his pilgrimage to Ross's memorial that he had forgotten to unpack it.

The rain was hard on his heels now. He spotted the gates of the Rabindra Sadan auditorium standing open, a short distance away, and began to run. A honking minibus sent a jet of water shooting up from a puddle as it roared past, drenching his khaki Prado trousers. Still running, Murugan made a forefinger gesture at the conductor, who was hanging out of the door of the bus, watching him. There was a shout of laughter and the bus sped away, spitting parasols of grey-green exhaust.

Murugan turned into Rabindra Sadan just ahead of the rain, and went leaping up the stairs. The outer gallery of the auditorium was brightly lit and hung with posters: he could hear a microphone scratching and humming inside. He could tell that a big event was under way: people were pressing in around the door of the auditorium, trying to push through. A television crew went rushing past, as he watched, carrying cables and cameras. Then the light; dimmed and he was alone in the gallery.

Turning away, he looked out through a window, at the walls of P. G. Hospital, in the distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the memorial to Ross. But just then the auditorium's loudspeakers came alive and a thin, rasping voice began to declaim. It forced itself on his attention, insistent in its amplified gravity.

'Every city has its secrets,' the voice began, 'but Calcutta, whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere, by the workings of paradox, secrets live in the telling: they whisper life into humdrum street corners and dreary alleyways; into the rubbish-strewn rears of windowless tenements and the blackened floors of oil-bathed workshops. But here in our city where all law, natural and human, is held in capricious suspension, that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life; like any creature that lives in a perverse element, it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld – in this case, in silence.'

Taken by surprise, Murugan looked up and down the glass-fronted hall. It was still empty. Then he noticed two women running up the stairs. They came pelting into the hall and stood by the door, wiping the rain from their hair and shaking it off their saris. One of them was in her midtwenties, a thin aquiline woman with a fine-boned face, dressed in a limp, rather bedraggled sari. The other was taller and older, in the beginnings of a youthful middle age, darkly handsome and quietly elegant, in a black cotton sari. She had a broad streak of white running all the way down her shoulder-length hair.

As he made his way across the hall, Murugan noticed that both women had press tags pinned to their shoulders, over their saris. When he was a few paces away he recognized a familiar logo: both their tags bore the name of Calcutta magazine.

It gave Murugan a twinge to see the magazine's Gothic masthead again: his parents had been faithful Calcutta subscribers. The sight of that familiar lettering, reproduced in miniature, created an instant sense of connection with the two women.

Craning his neck he saw that the younger woman was called Urmila Roy; the tall, elegant one was Sonali Das.

Murugan stepped up and cleared his throat.

Chapter 6

URMILA WAS just about to ask Sonali a question when she was interrupted. She spun around, in annoyance, and discovered a short, odd-looking man standing at her elbow, clearing his throat. Her eyes widened as she took in his green cap, his little goatee and his mud-spattered khaki trousers. Then he said something, very fast. It took her a while to work out that he was speaking English: the accent was like none she had ever heard before.

She cast a quizzical, raised-eyebrow glance at her friend, Sonali, but failed to catch her eye. Sonali did not seem in the least bit put out by the man. In fact she was smiling at' him. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I didn't follow.'

The man flipped his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the auditorium. 'What the hell is going on in there?' he said, a little slower this time.

Urmila answered before Sonali could, in the hope that he would go away. 'It is an award ceremony,' she said. 'For Phulboni, the writer – to mark his eighty-fifth birthday.'

Instead of going away, the man now started to introduce himself – muttering a name that sounded like Morgan. Sonali gave him a smile that could easily be mistaken for a sign of encouragement. You could hardly blame him for lingering.

'Phulboni?' said Murugan, scratching his beard. 'The writer?'

'Yes,' Sonali said softly. 'Our greatest living writer.'

Urmila gave Sonali a nudge. 'Sonali-di,' she said. 'There's something I wanted to ask you… '

The man went on, without missing a breath, as though he hadn't heard her. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I think I've heard of him.'

Sonali reached into her handbag, took out a cigarette and began to fumble with a lighter. Urmila was mildly shocked: she knew Sonali smoked of course, she had seen her light up in her office. But here, in public?

'Sonali-di!' she said in an undertone. 'Everyone in Calcutta is here; what if someone sees…?'

'It's all right, Urmila,' Sonali said wearily, gesturing at the empty hallway. 'No one's looking this way.' She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke into the air, throwing her head back.

'I remember,' Murugan said suddenly. "Phulboni" is the guy's pen-name, right?'

'That is right,' Sonali nodded. 'His real name is Saiyad Murad Husain. He began writing under a pen-name because his father threatened to disown him if he became a writer.'

'That's just a legend,' said Urmila.

'Phulboni would be the first to tell you,' Sonali said with a laugh, 'that legends aren't always untrue.'

Suddenly the writer's voice rose, booming out of a loudspeaker. 'Mistaken are those who imagine that silence is without life; that it is inanimate, without either spirit or voice. It is not: indeed the Word is to this silence what the shadow is to the foreshadowed, what the veil is to the eyes, what the mind is to truth, what language is to life.'

Sonali blew out a cloud of smoke. 'Just listen to him!' she said, cocking her head to catch his voice. 'He's really worked himself up today. He often gets like this nowadays, especially when he's speaking English. You should have heard him the other day at the Alliance Francaise.'