The Lives of Others (32 page)

The pond where we bathed and washed our clothes was full to the brim. That afternoon, during a small interval in the pelting rain, while we splashed about in the pond and beat our clothes vigorously against a stone ledge, Samir and Dhiren entertained me with their experiences of sowing that morning.

– They do a little ceremony before the sowing, did you know? Dhiren said.

– The usual stuff with new grass and blowing a conch-shell? I asked.

Samir said – No, different. The farmers’ wives do it. They put on new clothes, it looked like. They carry a little quilt with germinated seeds on it, and a small plate with oil, and salt and sindoor. The farmers stand back, each holding little sacks of seeds. But the women have to consecrate the whole business first. They bend down, pick up a tiny bit of soil, touch it to forehead and then to tongue. Then they walk over the aal, along the full perimeter of the seedbed, singing a song and throwing a small handful of the seed grain mixed with oil and salt and sindoor at each corner. Do you remember the song, Dhiren?

– Not all of it, only snatches here and there.

– Sing it, I said.

– It’s very elementary, there’s no complicated melody or anything to it, it’s more like a children’s rhyme or a panchali, he said, and sang in a monotone:

Where are you, Mother Lakshmi?

Rise and show your face.

Our men are cultivating paddy

But there’s no rice in the store-room.

What are we going to live on?

How are we going to get through the year?

I smiled, but a bracing thought went through my head: these lives had never been easy. From the very beginning, their core had consisted of a constant wrestling with dearth and want and, above all, hunger. All the so-called reforms brought in by the government in the twenty-one years of Independence, the Zamindari Abolition Act, the Land Ceiling Act, the Bargadar Act, they had not improved the condition of the munish one whit. The actors had changed; the play remained the same. That great magnetism was still at work: power spoke to and connected only with power; the government and its laws were for the benefit of the landlords, the powerful and the wealthy. Their interests were aligned: they looked out for each other, therefore they would always be looking after each other. That great circularity again.

It started raining, big, fat drops, slowly first, then faster, bigger drops, then a proper downpour. Samir raised his voice above the din of the water and said – Have you ever been underwater when it’s raining? It’s a beautiful thing.

He submerged his whole body, including his head, under the rain-strafed skin of the pond. I followed him. It was strange and unearthly. In the grey-green watery light just under the surface the sound was neither the ‘tip-tip-tip’ of raindrops hitting water nor the usual downpour sound that was like a large collection of little, dry seeds shaken inside a hollow rattle. This came muffled, and so changed by the intervening membrane of water that it sounded like the kind of percussion angels would use in their music, distant and dreamy.

I stayed under as long as I could, then I gasped out of the surface for air.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1969

BECAUSE HE IS
so lost in imagining the intervals between primes, and visualising their distribution to the extent of the furthest number that his mind, using a rough-and-ready kind of modular arithmetic, will allow him, his heart nearly leaps out of his mouth when his wrist is grabbed by a grasping hand, accompanied by the words, ‘There, caught you!’

He looks up to see the crazed smile of the neighbourhood’s resident madman, nicknamed ‘Mad Ashu’, who lives somewhere on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane and is supposed to roam the streets at dusk, Sona had been told when he was little, and to catch hold of little boys and girls who were not safely inside their homes by then. What he did with those children after he put them in his sack was left to the imagination. At nearly thirteen, Sona is not quite a child, but he feels some of the residual thrill of fear from the stories that had so stubbornly rooted themselves in some cobwebbed corner of his mind all those years ago. Besides, the man, whose real name is Ashish Roy, does look menacing – staring eyes magnified to distortion by thick lenses, the earpiece of the spectacles broken and held together by filthy loops of red string; unshaven face, bristling with silver hairs halfway between stubble and short quill; drool at the corners of his slack, mobile mouth, now grinning, now grimacing; grubby, frayed fatua that comes down to just below his waist, and even dirtier pyjama, enormous, almost ballooning, with the drawstring hanging down the front, drawing attention to the unmistakable stain of dribbled piss on the area around the crotch. Sona shudders inwardly and notices the veined hand still clutching his arm; the nails of the man’s hand are hard and have a yellowish tinge.

‘There, caught you, where will you escape now, eh?’ Mad Ashu says again, but the threatening tone is so exaggerated that it seems to be a broad-brushstroke performance aimed at gullible children. Before Sona can compose a suitable reply Mad Ashu says, ‘Can you tell me which prime numbers can be expressed as the sum of two squares?’

Something opens up in the boy. The sound of rickshaw horns and the ‘ting’ of the tram bell that punctuates its groaning trundle as it makes its way up Russa Road and the sound of water from a burst standpipe and of evening puja from a house nearby all disappear in an instant, as if all this were happening in a dream. At discrete moments in his future Sona will invariably picture this instant as a differentiable point in a smooth curve, the point, that exact point, where the tangent grazes it; it is that one point of contact that will, in a long concatenation of events, change his entire life. The origin of it is this moment when Mad Ashu asks him a question about prime numbers.

When the sound floods back, Sona hears himself answer, ‘All primes above 2 that leave the remainder 1 when divided by 4. So 4n + 1.’ He has known this from the age of seven: that all primes above 2 are odd; that they consequently fall into two categories – those that leave the remainder 1 when divided by 4, and those that leave the remainder 3; that only (4n + 1) primes can be expressed as the sum of two squares, not the (4n + 3) numbers. This had emerged as a branch-line while he was pursuing, at the age of six, a way of determining which numbers between 1 and 1,000 were primes. He wrote them down on pages and pages, then began to strike off 2 and every second number after 2, since they were all divisible by 2. Then he put a line through 3 and deleted every third number after 3. Then 5 and every fifth number after 5. And so on until all the remaining numbers were indubitably primes. He has favourites among them: 37 is one; 3 + 7 gives 10, 1 + 0 gives 1, which is yet another favourite number. (And also
interesting
; he has read the story of G.H. Hardy telling Ramanujan how 1,729, the number of the taxi in which he arrived to visit the ailing Indian genius, was a rather dull one, whereupon Ramanujan instantly replied that, on the contrary, it was very interesting for it was the smallest number that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways: 1,729 = 1
³
+ 12
³
= 9
³
+ 10
³
. To which Sona found added glamour in the fact that the sum of all its numerals yielded 1, his favourite number.) These numbers come to him clothed in a beauty that surpasses everything in his dim, crumpled, shabby life. They are luminous, they speak to him in a way that gives him something precious, protected from the rest of his hours and days. They belong to a world that consists only of him and the numbers, nothing else, a world of absolute and utter perfection that cannot be expressed, and therefore debased already, by words.

The effect of his answer is equally unprecedented. Mad Ashu gives out a high, hiccuping giggle, poised somewhere between the gurgling of a baby, giddy with laughter, and a series of barks emitted by an imaginary animal. The lenses of industrial thickness flash, or are they his eyes?

‘Bah, bah, grand! Grand. Now, can you prove it?’ the madman asks.

Sona shakes his head. ‘No, I’ve been trying, but I keep running into walls.’

‘The proof is not easy. Do you know the Brahmagupta identity?’

Sona shakes his head again, but this time there is excitement and curiosity mixed with the admission of failure. He has got over the slurring way of talking that Mad Ashu has, as if his sleepy tongue is having trouble waking up to alertness.

‘Proof is everything in mathematics. You know that, right?’ Mad Ashu asks and peers at him as he would at an insect in his food.

Sona nods his assent.

‘Listen, you come with me, I’ll show you, show you the proof. I live right here, look, there’s my house,’ he says, pointing, and at that exact moment there is a power outage. A collective sigh from the whole neighbourhood goes up.

‘Jaaaah, load-shedding. Load-shedding, do you see? Again,’ the man says. ‘But no problem, we’ll work in the light of a hurricane lamp, we’ll ask them to send one to the room. Come, come.’

Any other time this business of following a stranger, and not quite a normal stranger, home would have given Sona pause, not least by the promptings of his own shyness and solitary, reserved nature. But the lure of numbers has overruled everything; Sona is not even conscious of any such caution or deliberation. Maybe the bits of half-truths about Ashish Roy, those not to do with his apparent unordinariness, submerged under the more colourful gossip of insanity, played a part in this. Sona seems to remember, in shreds and patches, that Ashish Roy had been a much-respected professor in Presidency College; people used to call him interchangeably ‘genius’ and ‘mad’; the terms, after all, could very well be transferable. Then something had happened – an illness, a stroke, an accident, a grieving? – something that Sona does not know, never knew; Ashish Roy had stopped being a regular commuter across the divide between ‘genius’ and ‘madman’ and had remained stuck on one side, unable to cross over to the other again. He had taken early retirement and was often seen walking along the streets of Patuapara or just north of Hazra Road with rheumy eyes, muttering to himself, sometimes laughing out loud, sometimes sighing, dressed in outsized, filthy hand-me-downs, a handy bugbear for mothers of the area to scare their children with. And yet, through all this open ridiculing, something of the awe at his former glory, something remembered, perhaps only through anecdotes at several removes, bubbles to the surface and mitigates what could easily have turned into naked cruelty.

Sona follows Ashish Roy to his dingy quarters on the ground floor of a decrepit house on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane. The falling dark and the power outage have not been dented in the slightest by the few hurricane lamps that are being lit; most of their glass chimneys are black with soot. A transistor radio is playing, in a room somewhere, a popular Hemanta Mukherjee song. An elderly woman’s voice calls out, ‘Who goes there?’ No one replies. Ashish Roy mutters, ‘So dark, can’t see a thing, wait, don’t move, you may trip over something’, then gives a shout, ‘Orre, bring some light here’, which tapers to a thin cry towards the end of the call. No answer.

‘Follow me, we’ll get there,’ he advises the boy, then begins his ill man’s shuffle. Sona cannot see him very well, but does as he is told. A servant is complaining in shrill tones, ‘The water’s gone. If the pump had been turned on this afternoon, there would be water. How will I do the washing-up now?’ There follows the clatter of stainless-steel plates and metal pots and pans.

When they reach what Sona assumes to be Ashish Roy’s room, he notices that a hurricane lamp has been placed already on a wooden stool. It casts more shadows than it illuminates. The extreme shabbiness of the room is familiar to Sona – a wooden four-poster bed with greasy sheets and pillows, a large glass-fronted showcase containing scores of books, a wooden almirah, a cane stool, a diptych of framed photographs of perhaps his dead parents above the doorframe, a wall calendar from ‘Basak Stores’ with a picture of Kali.

The man plunges in straight away. ‘Proof, proof, no proof, nothing. Have you heard of Euclid? The Greeks laid the foundations of mathematics. Can you tell me how many prime numbers there are? Can you tell me?’

Sona knows this. ‘Infinite,’ he answers.

Ashish Roy cackles again, ‘Correct, correct. Now, can you prove it? See here, see here.’

He limps to the bookcase, opens one of its doors, picks out a thick, battered volume, all the while muttering to himself, ‘Nine twenty, nine twenty, nine twenty, infinity of primes’. He bends down towards the smoky light and locates what he is searching for. ‘Here it is, here it is, look, look here: nine twenty, book nine, proposition twenty,
Elements
, Euclid’s
Elements
, have you heard of it, the foundation stone of mathematics; here, look, the proof of the infinity of primes. Shall I explain it to you? It’s very simple, you can see it in front of you as I speak, they’ll appear in front of your eyes, the logical steps, shall I? Shall I?’

Before Sona has had a chance to leaf through the pages of this legendary book – his hands are a-quiver at the touch of Euclid – Ashish Roy has begun, falling over himself in his enthusiasm and child-like excitement.

‘Let us assume that there is
not
an infinity of primes. So the series A, let’s say, of primes goes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and ends with X. Are you following me?’ he asks, then, without waiting for an answer, not because he does not care, but because something in the boy’s wide-open eyes and half-open mouth, something approaching a trance-like state, tells him, this man who once upon a time made a living teaching and could work out by taking one brief look at a student’s face whether he was with him or not, that the boy intuitively knows from this point on, from the finite set of A = {2, 3, 5, 7, . . . X} he has posited, that he will be able to construct the proof himself, so without waiting for a response to his rhetorical question, he continues, ‘Now let us suppose, on the basis of our hypothesis, that there is a number Y, which is defined by the formula Y = {2, 3, 5, 7, . . . X} + 1.’