Chapter 7

SUMMONING a dedicated Dakala-class courier signal Antar sent off a message to the Council's headquarters to let them know he had found the ID card of a LifeWatch employee missing since August 21 1995. Then he settled back in his chair and began to browse through the file that Ava had fetched from the Council archives. They'd want it back in an hour or so, and he knew he ought to go through it, just in case headquarters wanted him to do any followup work. From the look of it he estimated it would take him twenty minutes or so – leaving him just enough time for a walk to Penn Station before his dinner appointment with Tara.

In a few minutes he discovered that the file consisted largely of notices and newspaper clippings that had appeared at the time of L. Murugan's 'disappearance'. For the most part they merely reproduced the gossip that had circulated in the office. At the time, Antar remembered, everyone had assumed that 'disappearance' was just a euphemism for suicide.

Some of the clippings referred to the obviously desultory search that had been launched by the Indian police immediately after the 'disappearance': it wasn't hard to see that they, no less than Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch, had decided on a euphemistic use of the word.

It was the last item in the file that gave Antar pause. It was an article from an unexpected source, LifeWatch's internal newsletter. The piece had the reminiscent, quietly respectful tone of an obituary although the writer was careful to describe Murugan as 'missing' rather than 'dead'. It began on the customary anecdotal note, referring to him as 'Morgan' – 'the name by which his friends knew him'. It described him as a 'cocky little rooster of a man'; it talked, not without fondness, of his combativeness, of how he could never resist an argument, of his apparently unstoppable fluency; of the many contributions he had made as LifeWatch's principal archivist. It touched on his 'global' childhood spent wandering between the world's capitals with his technocrat father and spoke briefly of his love of Hollywood B-movies and old American TV serials – 'the only constant, as for so many, in a peripatetic, internationalized coming-of-age'.

It was as a graduate student at Syracuse, the article said, that 'Morgan' first discovered the great love of his life: the medical history of malaria. He spent several years teaching in a small college in upstate New York, and during this time he came to be increasingly interested in one highly specialized aspect of this subject: the early history of malaria research. Later, even while working for LifeWatch, he had seized every spare moment to pursue this avenue of research – often to the detriment of his own career. He had published little or nothing in those years, but he had often claimed, in his flippant way, that he enjoyed the happy situation of being pre-eminent in his field by virtue of having it all to himself.

This subject was the research career of the British poet, novelist and scientist, Ronald Ross. Born in India in 1857, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his work on the life cycle of the malaria parasite. At the time it had been widely assumed that this epochal discovery would lead to the eradication of what was possibly the world's oldest and most widespread disease: an expectation, alas, that had been sadly belied, as Life Watch had discovered to its cost. In occasional moments of seriousness, Murugan had been known to admit that his interest in this rather obscure subject had initially had a biographical origin. The last crucial phase of Ronald Ross's work was done in Calcutta, in the summer of 1898. Murugan was himself born in that city, although he left it at an early age.

Possibly this biographical connection had something to do with the obsessive nature of Murugan's interest in this subject. In 1987 he let some of his friends know that he had finally written a summary of his research in an article entitled 'Certain Systematic Discrepancies in Ronald Ross's account of Plasmodium B'. Although some of his colleagues expressed interest, none of them ever got to see this article. It received such negative preliminary reports at all the journals to which it was submitted that Murugan decided to revise it before putting it in circulation.

As it turned out, however, the revised article fared no better than the original. The new piece bore the unfortunate title 'An Alternative Interpretation of Late Nineteenth-Century Malaria Research: is there a Secret History?'. It met with an even more hostile reception than the earlier version, and it only served to brand Murugan as a crank and an eccentric.

In 1989 Murugan wrote to the History of Science Society proposing a panel on early malaria research for the Society's next convention. When the proposal was rejected he sent pages-long E-mail messages to members of the review committee, jamming their mailboxes. A year later the Society took the unprecedented step of revoking his membership. He was warned that he would face legal action if he tried to attend any further meetings. It was then that Murugan finally gave up trying to argue his case in public.

Generally speaking, Murugan's colleagues at LifeWatch treated his 'research' as a harmless if time-consuming hobby: no one thought the worse of him for it, except when it detracted from his regular work. But it was soon apparent to those who knew him well that he had taken his ostracism from the scholarly community very hard. Indeed, this may well have been the proximate cause of his increasingly erratic and obsessional behaviour. It was at about this time for instance, that he began to speak openly about his notion of the so-called 'Other Mind': a theory that some person or persons had systematically interfered with Ronald Ross's experiments to push malaria research in certain directions while leading it away from others. His advocacy of this bizarre hypothesis gradually led to his estrangement from several of his friends and associates.

Murugan believed that the developments in malaria research that occurred in the early 1990s – such as Patarroyo's immunological work, and the breakthroughs in research on antigenic variations in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite – were the most important advances in the subject since Ross's work almost a century before. Murugan persuaded himself (and tried to persuade others) that these developments would have the effect of vindicating his life's work. The turning point came in 1995 when he began to lobby to be sent to Calcutta, the site of Ross's discoveries: he was particularly intent on getting there before August 20, the day that Ross had designated 'World Mosquito Day', to commemorate one of his findings.

Unfortunately LifeWatch had no office in Calcutta: nor would it have been possible to justify the expense of opening one purely for Murugan's sake. However, when it became clear that Murugan was determined to go even if it cost him his job, various people within the organization put their heads together and manufactured a small research project that would allow him to spend some time in Calcutta, although on a greatly reduced salary. To Murugan's great delight, the paperwork was concluded just in time to allow him to reach Calcutta on August 20 1995.

Later, after Murugan's 'disappearance', there were those who sought to blame Life Watch for allowing him to go at all. However, the fact was that the organization had done everything in its power to dissuade him. Representatives of the Personnel Department, for example, held several meetings with him in July 1995, shortly before his departure, trying to argue him out of pursuing this project. But by this time the plan had become such an idee fixe that in all likelihood nobody could have dissuaded Murugan from following the course he had decided upon.