The Calcutta Chromosome
Amitav Ghosh
Contributed by Jama Rearick
Chapter 7
Summary

New York: sometime in the future. Antar is ill and knows he will have to cancel dinner with Tara. She will be at work now caring for the 4-year-old child of a stockbroker. The mother, though, insisted that Tara carry a beeper with her in case Tara needs to contact her. Antar sends a message to Tara via the beeper, saying he regrets having to cancel their dinner.

Tara was always grateful for the help that Antar gave her in finding a new job after she had been let go because she did not have the right papers. He hadn’t really done anything; he had just lent her an old laptop and had run a cable from his apartment to hers so she could go online, where the best jobs were posted. Though the International Water Council would disapprove, Antar thought he’d be able to rig it without them knowing. He also offered to help her with a few lessons on how to use a laptop, but Tara declined, telling Antar she would have Lucky, the young man from the Penn Station newsstand, help her. Lucky’s help apparently paid off, as Tara got a new job within days. It was also the reason Tara was coming over for dinner tonight; she wanted to thank Antar, and to make sure he eats properly.

Calcutta: August 1995. Urmila and Murugan are in a taxi idling in traffic. They are on their way to the P. G. Hospital. Suddenly furious at getting into a taxi with this stranger, Urmila asks Murugan, “What does the P. G. Hospital have to do with my pieces of paper?” (196). Murugan replies that she wanted an explanation, and that it will begin when they arrive at the hospital.

Urmila is still furious and lashes out at the taxi driver, who has been watching them in the mirror. She then turns on Murugan and demands to know who he really is. She is becoming suspicious of his intentions. To allay her concerns, Murugan hands her his ID card. He then tells the driver to stop further down from the entrance to the hospital, as there’s something there that he wants to show Urmila. As they leave the taxi, Murugan points out the Ronald Ross Memorial. Urmila reads the inscription and is surprised that she never noticed it before.

Murugan beckons her to follow him to a gate a little down the road, because there is something else he wants to show her. They head towards a graceful red-brick building sitting on the grounds of the hospital. Murugan tells Urmila the building used to be the P. G. Hospital, where Ronald Ross worked. He then points to a red- brick bungalow that has recently been incorporated into the hospital’s newly- added wings. “That was Ross’s lab” (198), he tells her.

They enter the lab and Murugan explains to Urmila that this was once one of the best-equipped labs in India, a lab that had been set up by D. D. Cunningham, the same Cunningham listed on her Xerox papers. Urmila, however, still does not see how this makes the papers so important. Murugan explains that he’s just getting started. He then takes Urmila back outside and shows her a flock of pigeons, likely descended from the malaria-infected pigeons that Ronald Ross’s assistant bred to help Ross with his malaria experiments.

Urmila and Murugan near the Ross Memorial. Urmila notes how quiet it is here, despite the nearby traffic. Urmila then asks Murugan if Cunningham had invited Ross to the lab. Murugan tells her that Cunningham did the opposite, and did everything he could to prevent Ross from coming here, stonewalling him for more than a year. Then, out of the blue, in January of 1898, Cunningham caved, handed in his resignation, and left for England. It was at that point that the government of India finally approved Ronald Ross’s transfer to Calcutta.

This is too coincidental for Murugan, and though he can’t prove it yet, Murugan tells Urmila that he believes that something happened around January of that year that made Cunningham change his mind.

Urmila looks at her papers again: “Here, look at this [...] It says here that D.D. Cunningham was granted six days’ leave in the middle of January” (203-04). Perhaps it happened then, Urmila surmises. In turn, Murugan points to the announcement of a C. C. Dunn taking a train to Madras on 10 January of the same year and suggests that someone wants to get the message out that Cunningham went to Madras under a false name. The odd thing, according to Murugan, is that he knows about a Dunn who was in Madras at the time; he just hadn’t connected it to Cunningham.

Urmila asks Murugan how he learned about Cunningham. He replies, “Because someone wanted me to” (204). Murugan then begins to tell Urmila the story: he had been perusing through the North Africa and Middle East files, trying to update the malaria archives where he worked, when he came across a weird report of a localized outbreak in Egypt. An entire hamlet of Coptic Christians had been wiped out in a period of a few days. Yet there were no further outbreaks, and no one knows what type of epidemic it was. There was only a short report on the epidemic by a British health officer, dated from 1950. The bodies had already been disposed of by the time the officer reached a hamlet, so the report only provided anecdotal evidence about the symptoms of the deceased: swollen neck glands and large numbers of tiny skin perforations, like insect bites. The officer thought it might be a virulent strain of malaria, but couldn’t confirm it. There was also thought to be a survivor, a 14-year-old boy who was reported to have been seen at a railway station. The officer searched for the boy but never found him.

Urmila doesn’t understand the connection to Madras. Murugan points out that he had been sent a message, anonymously, about a distinguished amateur archaeologist, Countess Pongra?cz, who was last seen in Egypt, heading to a dig near the outbreak. The connection is that when she was 19 years old, she had traveled to Madras and joined the Society of Spiritualists, becoming Mme. Salminem’s leading disciple.

On January 12, 1898, a few spiritualists gathered for their weekly se?ance with Mme. Salminen. Though officials and military personnel loathed the various spiritual movements, an intruder of military bearing interrupted Mme. Salminen’s reception that usually marked the beginning of the spiritualists’ weekly gathering. As the Countess Pongra?cz, writes, “The man was clearly in a state of extreme emotional distress” (209). At first, he couldn’t remember his name, and then told them his name was C. C. Dunn. Dunn whispered something to Mme. Salminen, and though Pongra?cz wasn’t able to hear fully what Dunn was saying, she did manage to capture a few syllables: “Great distance...see you...dreams...visions...death...implore you...madness...annihilation” (208).

Mme. Salminen invited Dunn to participate in a se?ance, and after twenty minutes, the two were seen to be in a trance by the Countess. Concerned, the Countess thought to interrupt the se?ance, when suddenly she saw Mme. Salminen’s head flung violently back against the chair and Mr. Dunn hurled against the wall, suspended in the air. Then everything went dark, the table was upended, and Mr. Dunn fell to the floor, uttering these words in Hindustani: “Save me...from her... pursuit...beg mercy” (212). Dunn was struggling on the floor, fighting with whatever tormented him, when suddenly it all stopped, the candle flared up, and the table was where it had been before. Everyone was sitting in their places, with the exception of Mr. Dunn, who was sitting in the corner, naked and cowering. Mme. Salminen then spoke: “There is nothing I can do: the Silence has come to claim him” (213).

This was a turning point for the Countess, who asserted that Mme. Salminen had revealed the “truth of the Valentinian cosmology, in which the ultimate deities are the Abyss and the Silence” (214). Eventually, according to her friends, she moved to Egypt in the late 1940s to search for the “sacred site of the ancient Valentinian cult: the lost shrine of Silence” (214). Later, after her disappearance, her friends remembered her talking about a small hamlet near the desert.

Analysis

These chapters begin in New York, sometime in the future, in Antar’s apartment. Antar is sending a message to Tara, canceling dinner, because he is not feeling well. The reason she was coming over to dinner, is because Antar had helped her set up a computer, so she could find a new job. The dinner was to be her thank you to Antar.

The narrative then returns to August 1995. Urmila and Murugan are on their way P.G. Hospital, the location where Ronald Ross once did his research. Murugan is taking Urmila there to show her why the colonial newspapers that she found wrapped around the fish are so important to him. They arrive and Murugan immediately begins to explain how Ross was being blocked by Cunningham from using Cunningham’s lab for his research. Then Cunningham caves, retires, and leaves for England, leaving Ross in charge. Murugan believes something happened to Cunningham, and the newspaper announcements provide possible evidence. He points to the announcement of a C.C. Dunn going to Madras at the same time that Cunningham takes his leave. Someone wants Murugan to know, to put the pieces together. And it is clear, that he alone can do this, because he had previously received an anonymous message about Cunningham, and about what happened at a se?ance in Madras to C.C. Dunn. Murugan quickly realized that Cunningham’s sudden departure coincided with the mental breakdown experience by Dunn after the se?ance.

What is curious is how Murugan comes about his information. The anonymous message points to a malaria epidemic that occurred in Egypt just after World War II. The epidemic wiped out a whole hamlet, save for a 14-year-old boy who was seen near a railway station at a nearby town. The boy was never found, but Murugan found a reference to an archaeologist who had visited the hamlet, and who in her youth had participated in the se?ance that C.C. Dunn had attended, and had also once been Mme. Salminem’s leading disciple. It remains unknown if this is the same archaeologist that Antar had met, though there is now the possibility that Antar is the 14-year-old boy who escaped the epidemic and was seen near the railway station.

Through the copious notes apparently left by Countess Pongra?cz (and, later, the archaeologists in Egypt) a full account of that se?ance was made available for Murugan to find. Her notes depict how Dunn was forcibly thrown back from the table and suspended in midair, before crashing to the floor. Mme. Salminem would later say he had been claimed by “the Silence.” Pongra?cz eventually went to Egypt to search for the Silence’s lost shrine but disappeared at around the time of the epidemic.

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