‘I could be the son of a prostitute, or the lost scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families.’
‘Wouldn’t wealthy parents have gone looking for you?’ Eleanor had wondered. Prabir had hinted at revelatory dreams of scheming evil uncles and fake kidnappings gone wrong.
Rajendra had survived as a beggar for almost five years when he first encountered the Indian Rationalists Association. (Outside the family—Prabir had had this drummed into him from an early age—the organisation was never to be referred to by its initials, unless they were swiftly followed by some suitable clarifying remark.) They couldn’t grant him the protection of an orphanage—their resources were stretched too thin—but they’d offered him two free meals a day, and a seat in one of their classrooms. This had been enough to keep him from starvation, and to save him from the clutches of the Mad Albanian, whose servants prowled the city hunting down children and lepers. Prabir had had nightmares about the Mad Albanian—far too disturbing to share with Eleanor—in which a stooped, wrinkled creature pursued him down alleys and into open sewers, trying to wash his feet with a cloth drenched in lamb’s blood.
The IRA’s avowed purpose was to rid the country of its mind-addling legacy of superstition, along with the barriers of caste and gender that the same gibberish helped prop up. Even before they’d begun their social programmes—feeding and educating street children, teaching women business skills and self-defence—the Calcutta Rationalists had taken on the gurus and the God-men, the mystical healers and miracle workers who plagued the city, and exposed them as frauds. At the age of twelve, Rajendra had witnessed one of the movement’s founders, Prabir Ghosh, challenge a local holy man who made his living curing snake bites to save the life of a dog who’d been thrust into a cage with a cobra. In front of an audience of a thousand enthusiastic believers, the holy man had waved his hands over the poor convulsing animal for fifteen minutes, muttering ever more desperate prayers and incantations, before finally confessing that he had no magical powers at all, and that anyone bitten by a snake should seek help from the nearest hospital without delay.
Rajendra was impressed by the man’s honesty, however belated; some charlatans kept bluffing and blustering long after they’d lost all credibility. But the power of the demonstration impressed him even more. It was common knowledge that many snakes were not poisonous, and that a shallow enough bite or a strong enough constitution could enable some people to survive an encounter with a truly venomous species. The holy man’s reputation must have flourished on the basis that he’d ‘cured’ people who would have survived anyway—each success a joyous miracle worth trumpeting loudly, to be retold with embellishments a hundred times, as opposed to each sad and unsurprising death. But this simple trial had cleared away all the confounding issues: the snake was poisonous, the bites were deep and numerous… and the victim had died in front of a thousand witnesses.
In the minute’s silence for the dog that followed, Rajendra had chosen his vocation. Life and death were mysteries to him, but no mystery was impenetrable. The earliest attempts to understand these things, he reasoned, must have foundered against obstacles that seemed insurmountable, leaving behind failed systems of knowledge to ossify or degenerate. That was the source of religion. But someone, somewhere had always carried on the search in good faith; someone had always found the strength to keep on asking: Are the things I believe true? That was the legacy he’d claim. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and Christians, from the most sincere self- deluding mystics to the most cynical frauds, could never do more than parody the search for truth. He would put the truth above every faith, and hunt down the secrets of life and death.
He would become a biologist.
Four years later, Rajendra was working as a book-keeper in a warehouse, studying in the evenings and helping out at the IRA school on Sundays, when Radha Desai took over the women’s self-defence class. Each week he’d see her arriving, dressed in a plain white karate uniform, chauffeured by a man in his early thirties who was clearly not a servant. It took Rajendra a month to discover that she was neither married nor engaged; the chauffeur was her elder brother, and the only reason she wasn’t driving herself was fear of the car being vandalised.
Prabir had trouble keeping a straight face when he described his parents’ courtship, but he knew it was the kind of thing Eleanor would want to hear about, even if he was short of authentic details and had to improvise. In Prabir’s version, Rajendra would synchronise the chants of his class of beggars reciting their multiplication tables with the shouts of Radha from the courtyard as she counted out push-ups and sit-ups, allowing him to hang on her every word without neglecting his students. And then just before lunch time she’d walk right past his classroom window, and he’d stare at the floor, or feign a migraine and cover his eyes, lest their gazes meet accidentally and his face betray everything to the worldly children.
Prabir’s mother described her parents as ‘upper-middle-class pseudo-socialist hypocrites’. For their daughter to teach karate to Scheduled Caste women and brush shoulders with infamous atheists could be considered progressive and daring. To say that she’d married a book-keeper three years younger than herself who’d fought his way up to live in the slums wouldn’t have had quite the same value as a throw-away line at parties. His father was milder, merely saying that ‘Given their background, what could you expect?’
Radha was studying genetics at the University of Calcutta. They’d meet secretly in parks and cafes early in the morning, before Rajendra started work—long before Radha’s first lecture, but she always had the excuse of karate training. Rajendra was still struggling with high-school biology, but Radha tutored him, and they set their sights on a distant goal: they’d work together as researchers. Somewhere, somehow. Prabir was confident that it had been love at first sight—though neither of them had ever said as much—but it was biology that kept them together, in more than the usual way. Prabir snorted with laughter as he described clandestine meetings on park benches, hands fumbling with the pages of textbooks, recitations of the phases in the life cycle of a cell. But for all that it amused and embarrassed him, and nagged at his conscience now and then, he never really felt like a thief and a traitor as he gave away secrets that weren’t his to give. Though all of this was supposedly for Eleanor’s benefit, imagining his parents’ lives became, for Prabir, something akin to staring into Madhusree’s eyes and trying to make sense of what he saw. In this case, though, he had no memories to guide him, just books and films, instinct and guesswork, and his parents’ own guarded confessions.
Rajendra won a scholarship to attend the university. With so many more opportunities to be together, they became less discreet. Their affair was discovered, and Radha left home, severing all ties with her family. She was still not qualified for an academic job, but she was able to support herself as a lab assistant. Four men ambushed Rajendra on the campus one night and put him in hospital; there was never any proof of who sent them. When he’d recovered, Radha tried to teach him to defend himself, but Rajendra turned out to be her worst student ever, strong but intractably clumsy, possibly as a result of early malnutrition.
Lest Eleanor think less of his father for this—the whole question of exactly whose honour was at stake was somewhat blurred in Prabir’s mind by now—he sent her a picture of Rajendra in an IRA parade, dragging a truck through the centre of Calcutta with a rope attached to his body by two metal hooks through the skin of his back. Not quite single-handed; a friend marched beside him, sharing the load. The visible tension in the ropes and the pyramids of skin raised by the hooks made it look as if both men were on the verge of being flayed alive, but they were smiling. (Smiling over gritted teeth, but anyone pushing a truck through the heat of Calcutta would have clenched their jaws as much from sheer exertion.)
A similar feat was performed as part of certain religious festivals, in which devotees would whip themselves into a frenzy of body piercing, hot-coal walking, and other supposedly miraculous acts of potential self-harm— protected by purification rituals, the blessing of a holy man, and the intensity of their faith. But Rajendra and his fellow human bullock had received no blessing from anyone, and loudly professed their complete lack of faith in everything but the toughness and elasticity of ordinary human skin. Positioned correctly, the hooks drew little blood, and a thick fold of skin could take the load easily, even if the tugging sensation was disturbing to the uninitiated. There was no need for ‘trance states’ or ‘self-hypnosis’—let alone supernatural intervention—to block out the pain or stop the bleeding, and the greatest risk of actual harm could be eliminated by carefully sterilising the hooks. It still required considerable courage to participate in such a gruesome-looking act, but knowing the relevant anatomical facts was as good an antidote to fear as any amount of religious hysteria.
Prabir spared Eleanor the picture of his mother with cheeks and tongue skewered, though like the hooks it was safe and painless enough if you knew how to avoid the larger nerves and blood vessels. The sight of his mother performing this exacting feat made Prabir intensely proud, but it also induced more complicated feelings. You couldn’t tell from the picture, and she hadn’t known it at the time, but on the day of the parade she was already carrying him. It added a certain something to his cosy images of amniotic bliss to see steel spikes embedded in the same sheltering flesh.
Rajendra had learnt of the butterfly as he was completing his doctorate in entomology. A Swedish collector, in the country on a buying expedition, had come to the university seeking help in identifying a mounted specimen
