"Yes," I said. There was a drop of sweat beading on the end of Mr. Gupta's nose. Our shadows were thrown fourteen feet high by the flickering candlelight. "Have you received more of the manuscript from Mr. Das?"
"Not as of yet," said Mr. Gupta. His dark eyes were moist and heavy-lidded. Wax from the candles dripped onto the baize. "This committee is to make the final decision as to the disposition of the English-language version of this epic work."
"I would like to meet with Mr. Das," I said. The people around the table exchanged glances.
"That will not be possible." It was the woman who spoke. Her voice was as high and shrill as a saw moving on metal. The irritable, nasal tones clashed with her dignified appearance.
"Why is that?"
"M. Das has not been available for many years," said Gupta smoothly. "For some time we all believed that he had died. We mourned the loss of a national treasure."
"And how do you know that he is alive now? Has anyone here seen him?"
There was another silence. The candles were already half-consumed and sputtering wildly, although no breeze stirred. I felt terribly hot and a little sick. It seemed for a mad second that the candles would burn out and we would continue talking in the humid darkness, bodiless spirits haunting a decaying building in the belly of a dead city.
"We have correspondence," said Michael Leonard Chatterjee. He removed half a dozen crackling envelopes from his briefcase. "They establish beyond a doubt that our friend is still alive and living in our midst." Chatterjee wet his fingers and flipped through the tightly folded pages of flimsy stationery. In the dim light the lines of Indian script looked like magical runes, ominous incantations.
Mr. Chatterjee read aloud several passages to prove his point. Relatives were inquired about, common friends mentioned. A discussion from twenty years earlier was recalled in detail. There was an inquiry to Mr. Gupta about a short poem of Das's that had been paid for years before but never published.
"All right," I said. "But it's important for my article that I see Mr. Das personally so that I can —"
"Please," said Mr. Chatterjee and held up his hand. His glasses reflected twin flames where eyes should have been. "This may explain why it is impossible." He folded a page, cleared' his throat, and began reading.
". . . and so you see, my friend, things change but people do not. I remember the day in July of 1969. It was during the Festival of Shiva. The Times told us that men had left footprints on the moon. I was returning from my father's village: a place where men left footprints in the soil behind their laboring bullocks just as they have for five thousand years. In the villages our train passed by, the peasants labored to drag their heavy godcarts through the mud.
"All during that loud and crowded voyage back to our beloved city, I was struck by how empty and futile my life had been. My father had lived a long and useful life. Every man in his village, Brahman to Harijan, wished to attend his cremation. I had walked through fields which my father had flooded and tilled and recaptured from the vagaries of nature long before I was born. After his funeral, I left my brothers and went to visit in the shade of a great banyan which my father had planted as a youth. All around me were the evidences of my father's toils. The very land seemed to mourn his passing.
"And what, I asked myself, had I done? I would be fifty-four years old in a few weeks, and to what purpose had I spent my life? I had written some verse, amused my colleagues, and annoyed some critics. I had woven a web of illusion that I was carrying on the tradition of our great Tagore. Then I had enmeshed myself in my own web of deceit.
"By the time we reached Howrah Station, I had seen the shallowness of my life and art. For over thirty years I had lived and worked in our beloved city — the heart and bloodstone of Bengal — and never once had the essence of that city been recreated, nay, nor hinted at, in my feeble art. I had tried to define the soul of Bengal by describing its shallowest exterior, its foreign intruders, and its least honest face. It was as if I had tried to describe the soul of a beautiful and complex woman by listing the details of her borrowed garments.
"Gandhiji once said, 'A man cannot fully live unless he has died at least once.' By the time I had disembarked from my first-class coach at Howrah Station, I had acknowledged the imperative of that great truth. To live — in my soul, in my art — I would have to cast off the appurtenances of my old life.
"I gave my two suitcases to the first beggar who approached me. His look of surprise is still a source of some pleasure to me. What he later did with my fine linen shirts, my Parisian ties, and the many books I had packed, I have no idea.
"I crossed the Howrah Bridge into the city knowing only one thing — I was dead to my old life, dead to my old home and habits, and necessarily dead to the people I loved. Only by entering Calcutta afresh, as I had some thirty-three years earlier as a hopeful, stammering student from a small village — only then could I see with the clear eyes I would need for my final work.
"And it is that work . . . my first true attempt to tell the story of the city which nurtures us . . . to which I have devoted my life. Since that day many years ago, my new life has led me to places I had never heard of in my beloved city — a city which I had foolishly thought to have known intimately.
"It has led me to seek my way among the lost, to own only what has been cast off by the dispossessed, to labor with the Scheduled Classes, to seek wisdom from the fools of Curzon Park, and to seek virtue from the whores of Sudder Street. In so doing I have had to acknowledge the presence of those dark gods who held this place in their palms before even the gods themselves were born. In finding them I have found myself.
"Please do not seek me. You would not find me if you searched. You would not know me if you found me.
"My friends, I leave it to you to carry out my instructions in relation to this new work. The poem is incomplete. Much more work must be done. But time grows short. I wish to have the existing fragments disseminated as widely as possible. Critical response means nothing. Credits and copyrights are unimportant. It must be published.
"Respond via usual channels.
— Das"
Chatterjee quit reading, and in the silence the distant carnival of street sounds became faintly audible. Mr. Gupta cleared his throat and asked a question about American copyrights. I explained as best I could — about both the Harper's offer and the more modest proposal from Other Voices. More discussion and questions followed. The candles burned low.
Finally Gupta turned to the others and said something in rapid-fire Bengali. I again wished that Amrita had come with me. It was Michael Leonard Chatterjee who said, "If you will wait outside in the hall for just a moment, Mr. Luczak, the Council will vote on the disposition of M. Das's manuscript."
I rose on pin-cushion legs and followed a servant with a candle out into the hallway. There was a chair on the landing and a small round table upon which the candle was placed. Some pale light came up the stairwell from frosted windows facing Dalhousie Square, but the dim glow only made the darkness in the corners of the landing and the branching corridors seem more absolute.
I had been sitting there for about ten minutes and was on the point of dozing when I noticed movement in the shadows. Something was moving stealthily just out of the circle of light. I lifted the candle and watched as a rat the size of a small terrier froze into immobility. Pausing at the edge of the landing, its long tail flicked wetly back and forth across the boards. Feral eyes gleamed at me from the borders of the light. It advanced half a step, and a chill of revulsion rippled through me. The thing's movement reminded me of nothing so much as a cat stalking its prey. I half rose and gripped the flimsy chair, ready to hurl it.