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The words ‘The Pandit & The Englishman’, in white, elongated, appear on a black screen, followed by the squat, flattened words ‘A Schoken Motion-Pictures Presentation’. A few seconds later, with the screen still bouncing off darkness, except for the intermittent white of words, the line ‘A Tale of Desire, History & Longing from India’ appears, then disappears to be replaced by ‘Directed by Fritz Lang’.

From the illuminated rectangle of blackness a room shapes out. It’s a wall in the room; a plain wall, pockmarked in certain areas, with a framed picture hanging on it. Next to the picture is a rack on which there are a few piles of paper curled up into rolls. The room, the wall, is lit up by a light whose source isn’t visible immediately. A few seconds later, the light is seen to be an ironed-out flicker coming from a nearby oil lamp set on the floor.

The wall comes closer. The pockmarks reveal a smoothness of their own. The framed picture is no longer an indistinct rectangle. It is a standard picture of Kali, tongue out with a smile and a garland of mini-heads bearing moustaches. She is marching on an oblivious but wide awake Shiv. The picture of Kali remains in view for a few seconds longer. The first title comes on:

‘1783, Krishnagar, a town near Calcutta. Pandit Ramlochan Sharma is a physician whose practice has been suffering because of his obsession with teaching the ancient Hindu language of Sanskrit. His dream is to teach the language to the English. For the purpose, he has, over the years, learnt the language of power: English.’

The text vanishes. A lizard crawls across the wall, stopping only when it reaches the picture of Kali and blocks the goddess’s face with one of its webbed paws. The flame of the oil lamp comes into view.

The next title:

‘To earn a livelihood, Ramlochan teaches local boys Sanskrit. He despises everyone—except for one person …’

A girl, not more than ten years old, approaches. Her face is lit up by the lamp light. She sits on the floor. After a brief exchange of looks with someone in the room, she starts reading out from a manuscript that had been lying open before her.

For the first time, Pandit Ramlochan Sharma is visible. He is a gaunt man of fair complexion. His eyes are like those of a bull, liquidy and exuding tenderness and self-pity. The girl sways back and forth, throwing her moving shadow on the wall beyond. The Pandit occasionally looks at her, in between patches of looking at the manuscript she is reading out aloud. He also keeps rubbing his bare back and chest with a wet cloth.

Ramlochan’s face fills up the screen. His eyes, calm and moist, are surrounded by a face, the central point of which is a thin-lipped mouth that bends and stretches. The whole room comes into view—Ramlochan, the girl, the wall with its picture of Kali and the just about visible Shiv. Ramlochan stands up and gets a hand fan from the rack next to the wall. He fans, gently enough not to create a wind that will disturb the pile of manuscripts in front of the girl. One page, however, does fly away. The girl gets up to rescue it.

She is wearing a white piece of cloth that is struggling to look like a sari. The girl is too young to have any soft, rounded edges. Her arms, her left shoulder, a considerable part of her legs are visible. Every part of skin on her that is visible gleams like dark rock-edges. While she recovers the page, Ramlochan stops fanning and wiping his body. He gazes at her with great intensity. This gaze turns into a brief second of muted terror when she turns to return to her assigned spot next to him. Ramlochan resumes his calm posture. But his chest is still rising and falling too fast.

The lizard now fills the screen. It slowly clambers away from the picture of Kali and flatfoots its way towards the rack. It disappears behind a pile of clothes.

The girl suddenly looks up at Ramlochan with a concerned look. Her face is oval and angelic. The lamp is flickering harder than before. The turbulence of the flame is reflected on the girl’s face, especially on her black hair that is unnaturally long for a child her age.

Ramlochan stops fanning.

Another title card:

‘Kuli, you didn’t forgot the oil in the lamp again, did you?’

Ramlochan frowns. It is an exaggerated and therefore false frown. The girl looks ready to break into tears, when the lamp light splutters on their faces. Everything turns black.

He heard the news of William’s death and leaned forward. It was his way of registering the death of an old ally. Unfortunately, to the bearer of the news, Panchanan Karmakar, Ramlochan’s movement was yet another confirmation of the Krishnagar scholar’s rejection of social graces.

Six months ago, William had collapsed in his Garden Reach house with a fever. The doctors had detected rheumatism and then a tumour. That news too had come to Ramlochan, as he sat on the porch, courtesy the voluble Panchanan. But it had been winter, the dreary month of Aghran when the days end fast and thoughts slow down, and Ramlochan was beset with his own troubles.

‘So you’ve lost your last pupils, eh?’ Panchanan had asked, taking an elongated puff from Ramlochan’s gargara, the hot bubbles fighting for space deep inside the pipe. The Pandit, wrapped in the safety of his old shawl, hadn’t responded to his monthly friend from the city.

‘Well, I can’t really blame the parents,’ Panchanan continued, waving away a diving, drunken mosquito. ‘To be honest, I was surprised that you managed to carry on like this for so long. Your reputation hasn’t been pure as ghee, you know.’

No, it hadn’t, not in Aghran, and not now in the new year either. In the last six months, his precious reputation had evaporated. Living in Krishnagar was no longer an option. And with the death of William Jones, neither was moving to Calcutta. Being a Baidya teaching Sanskrit in a town bristling with Brahman scholars was bad enough. But somehow he had managed to keep those sanctimonious maggots at bay.

The sun was going down and the mosquitoes were coming out like an army of ghouls. Panchanan knew that with Jones’s death, any hope that Ramlochan may still have had of being recognized and fêted had died. He had been buckling under frustration, the perpetually gnawing frustration of a talent being squashed.

Ramlochan had been feeling the burden of being hounded by those brain-dead Nadia Brahmans even before the scandal involving Kuli and himself forced his school to be closed. If there was one thing that had given him hope, it was his friendship with William Jones. But even that had frayed like a never-changed sacred thread.

It was Ramlochan who had been teaching Jones the finer points of the Sanskrit language for the last ten years. It was he who had made the Englishman learn Bengali after the latter wanted to do away with the translating middle-men in the courtrooms. And it was he who had pointed out to William the striking similarity between the river Hiranyabahu in a passage by Somdev and the river Erranaboas mentioned by Megasthenes, and that Sandrocottus and Samudragupta—and not Chandragupta, as the overexcited Jones had announced at the Society—were one and the same.

Ramlochan had asked little in return. The salary that the Englishman provided was good, but it wasn’t money that he was after. It was something else—something that the Krishnagar Brahmans could only see as hollow pride and a shameful hankering for firingi applause. But he had brushed aside such mumblings and headshakings because he had hoped Jones would repay him properly one day.

He may not have told William his wish in so many words, but he had wanted to go to England and show his knowledge and expertise to an eager and appreciative people. He had hinted at this desire quite early on in their longstanding partnership by inquiring about life in London, its weather, its people and its scholars.

He had gained his own bits and pieces of information about England through his old friend I’tisam al-Din, who had, with his manservant and Captain Archibald Swindon, the representative of King George III in Bengal, sailed to England twenty-eight years ago. Like Ramlochan, I’tisam had also known all along that Nadia, with all its pitiful projections as the leading centre of culture and scholarship in the province, was a regurgitating cesspool, where the noise of constantly escaping gaseous bubbles was mistaken to be the chant of knowledge. He had trained as a scholar-official in the courts of the Nawab, rising to become Emperor Shah Alam’s official liaison with the British monarch. It was from I’tisam that Ramlochan first got to know about courtly life in Allahabad, including the Emperor’s wish to seek King George’s help to return to his capital in Shahjahanabad. It was also while listening to his old friend during one of his visits to Krishnagar that Ramlochan realized that there was little point in seeking the favour of the Nawab’s court. Instead, his future—and that of real scholarship in the country—lay with the firingis.

I’tisam returned to the country after spending three years in London. He was still wearing the same turban and shawl and robe and sticking to the same routine of daily Persian scholarship and nocturnal visits to his favourite ladies’ quarters in Calcutta. But there was a new spring to his step. During his first meeting with Ramlochan after his return from England, he spoke enthusiastically about the hunger of the firingi to know more about Hindustan. He had been fêted several times in London as a Persian scholar of great renown, taking part in debates with Christian scholars, and the star of more than a couple of soireés in the university town of Oxford. It was from I’tisam that Ramlochan had first heard the name of William Jones—‘his Persian grammar is weak, he has no clue of the phonetic structure of the language but he is a hungry learner’.

But what Ramlochan had tucked away in his head, not even daring to bring up the subject with himself except in moments of complete privacy and partial weakness, was his friend’s detailed description of women in England.

‘They are sexually depraved,’ I’tisam had snorted out while sitting on the same porch that Ramlochan and Panchanan were now sitting on. ‘Some of them don’t even bother to cover their breasts while they’re selling vegetables and meat. And they make kissing sounds and lewd gestures in their markets!’

Ramlochan remembered thinking that even Shabitri, Paramesh Brahman’s daughter-in-law, would billow her breasts out each time she stretched to unfurl and rinse her hair while bathing in the Amrapara pond. Also, the middle-aged Tori, the physician Gangaram’s wife, never bothered to cover herself properly each time her sari got hitched up, exposing her shuddering thighs as she husked the rice on their courtyard. But it was unthinkable for firingi women to behave this way. The Pandit knew that they danced with men in the halls and houses in Calcutta and even in the mansion parties thrown by the Bengali babus and zamindars. But that was different, it wasn’t showcasing flesh. However, now, from what I’tisam had told him, about men and women kissing and groping each other in the open in England, it did sound like an invitation of flesh.

It was with I’tisam that Ramlochan had picked up the English language. While it was necessary for him, as the Nawab’s emissary to the firingis and then as an employee of the firingis, to have a firm knowledge of the tongue, he saw it also as a window to escape from the mousetrap world of Krishnagar.

‘So where did you learn English?’ William had asked him during one of their first meetings. ‘I have learnt English from my friends in Calcutta who know Englishmen at Fort William,’ Ramlochan had answered in William’s tongue. He had decided against mentioning I’tisam’s name, considering that his opinion of William in Oxford had not been too kind. He also hadn’t mentioned the written material—some printed, some copied—that he had collected over the years to help him learn the firingi’s language. These were mostly translations, made by Englishmen before William, of Sanskrit slokas and poems.

One item in Ramlochan’s collection stood apart from all the rest. It was an almanac that he had gathered from I’tisam. It was stuck inside a thick pile of notes about I’tisam’s stay in England that would much later be used for his Shigrif-namah-i Wilayat, or The Wonder Book of Europe, which he had wanted the Pandit to translate into Bengali. (Ramlochan never did translate it, partly because it was tedious, and partly because he had hoped to write such a work himself one day.)

Right from the moment he had extricated the dog-eared pamphlet from the other papers, Ramlochan knew that it was special. On the cover was an illustration of a woman in a flowing European dress, not unlike the Hindustani ghagras worn by dancing girls but much more expansive. She was carrying a parasol and next to her there stood an Englishman, smiling at her. She was smiling back. Ramlochan would learn, by his own diligence, what the printed words on the cover said. It was the title of the pamphlet: Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, 1767.

There were other illustrations inside. His eagerness to unlock the secrets that accompanied these pictures made his progress in mastering the firingi’s language much swifter. It was less than six months after Harris’s List came his way that he hungrily read:

‘Miss Smith, of Duke’s Court in Bow Street … A well made lass, something under the middle-size, with dark, brown hair and a good complexion.’

Pages later:

‘Mrs Hamblin, No. 1 Naked-Boy Court in the Strand … The young lady in question is not above 56. We know she must be particularly helpful to elderly gentlemen who are very nice in having their linen got up.’

That was when Ramlochan Pandit of Krishnagar had realized that he simply had to go to England one day. But now, with the news that Panchanan had brought from Calcutta, it had finally become impossible.

Anna Maria Jones looked out to the shoreline and then at her husband’s placid, classical face. Standing next to her on the deck of the Crocodile, her husband of less than six months, William, was closer to her than ever before. And yet, he was already far away; much closer to the riverbank that the ship was now passing, than to the rustle of silk and the flutter of fans and the banter that had broken out on the deck all around them. He was already far from the courts of London, the corridors of Westminster, the halls of Oxford, and the long evening dinner discussions with other scholar gentlemen like Mr Gibbon and Mr Halhed. Even as the Crocodile entered the port of Calcutta, William Jones had the look of a man returning home.

‘So this is it,’ William said silently to himself. He clutched on to Anna’s hand, careful to shift his precious book of Hindoo law into the other. ‘This is the city that Mr Clive described as “one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond concepcion”.’

He couldn’t quite make out what those brown bodies swathed in white were doing on the riverbank. But he sensed a charge of excitation, not unlike the tingling photovoltaic exhibitions that had become the rage in fashionable circles in Manchester and London.

This excitation had its roots not so much in the leap he was about to make in his professional life, as in the blind, exhilarating jump that he was going to make elsewhere. Let there be no doubt that it was his appointment as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William that enabled him to cross the seas and come here. And his subsequent knighthood did open up many doors that would have been shut otherwise. But it was the prospect of uncovering, peeling off a civilization, one layer at a time with the blunt knife of language that made the pacific Sir William betray his excitement and squeeze his wife’s hand a little tighter than he would have done on ending any other sea journey.

The moment a stretch of white, flat-roofed mansions plotted by lines of tall trees came into view, the entire group of passengers out on the deck broke out in a loud hurrah and applause. No one, however, dared to throw his hat into the air. Who would retrieve it if it fell outside the ship?

‘Sir William, your residence should be somewhere out there,’ said Mr Rowland, the Company man with a bent smile. ‘Welcome to Calcutta.’

William smiled back, patiently interrupting his thoughts to engage with the world of pointless Englishmen just for a moment. Rowland, returning to his job after his vacation in England, thankfully clipped back to join the boisterous others. All that the future founder of the Asiatic Society and unlocker of history’s treasures could think of were lines from something he had committed to memory at the age of eleven:

‘Now does my project gather to a head;

My charms crack not, my spirits obey; and time

Goes upright with his carriage.’

With the Crocodile’s crew now cranking into activity and a few catamarans with people appearing near the ship, Anna said over the noise, ‘William, this is our new home then.’

Her husband looked at her lovingly. ‘Now does my project gather to a head,’ he said to himself silently not forgetting to squeeze Anna Maria’s hand lovingly again.

Five months ago, they had set sail from Portsmouth and while she loved William with all her heart and put on a good show about their departure, Anna Maria was wracked with unease at the prospect of not only leaving England, but leaving England for such distant shores. Were there enough people there whom she would be able to speak to? But how many people even among those who could speak English would there be not from the merchant class or worse? There was William, of course.

When she was fourteen, her parents had taken her along with her sister to Siena. After a few days, she had started to react badly to the climate and the people. Calcutta was even farther away from London than Siena. And as during that terrible return journey from Italy years ago, this time too she forcibly tamed her nerves that were making her think a hundred thoughts all at the same time.

When the Crocodile had landed in the southern port of Madras a few days earlier, Anna had successfully pretended that this new land was what everybody back home had always been dreaming of. The mastery over a continent, the lavish comforts of such a mastery, the thrill of tearing away from the grey skies and the white chill of London. And yet, she wasn’t always so confident about pulling off this game of self-deception.

After a fine evening of Drury Lane performance, William and she had been invited for dinner at Mr Jeremy Costwald’s residence. Costwald, a man in his late fifties, had been an India man, and his heavy tan and loud manners showed for his years in Calcutta and Madras. Most importantly though, he was a proud survivor of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.

‘Holwell’s a blighter! He was there to be sure and he should know better than to make us who came out of it believe what he’s written in the Register. Well of course we were all confined inside the Nabob’s prison. And of course some of us didn’t make it—twelve, to give you the exact number. But that was because of the musket injuries they suffered. The hakim—that’s Hindustani for the court physician—actually tended to the injured, and there were three wounded Englishmen who recovered. But Holwell, total blighter that he is, wrote his thundering account. And who’s going to say anything otherwise? Even the Crown has now taken his account seriously, some of His Majesty’s insiders are even talking about setting up an imperial India policy. And all because of Holwell’s rumbling prose!’

Sitting opposite Costwald, Anna Maria had tried to give her full attention to the splendid fowl she was enjoying. It was improper for the man to bring up a dark topic like the Black Hole at the dinner table. But Costwald, more than a few sherries down, was a horse that had burst through the stable gate.

‘But dear sir, surely, you and the fortunate others can expose his untruth and paint a truer picture?’ asked William, looking up from his plate.

‘And contradict the official account of the East India Company as well as the second most powerful man in Bengal? No thank you, sir. I’d rather be telling my own stories.’

That night in London after the dinner, Anna was still brooding about all those tales about Calcutta that she had heard at the table. After closing the pages of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents, or The Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, she had turned the lamp out and gone to the bedroom to sleep. William had, as was the case whenever he consumed even the smallest amount of alcohol, foregone his after-dinner hour in the library and was already asleep. All Anna could think of as she shut her eyes was the cruel brightness of a tropical sun suddenly blinking off in an overcrowded, swarmy prison cell.

The branches of the elm tree that cast striated shadows on the overlooking wall must have vanished at some point. Instead, there was a wild face wearing an enormous turban, exactly as described in a passage in Tavernier’s book of travel, staring maliciously at her. He was speaking in some low, long-vowelled language that she could, remarkably, understand.

‘Ah, Missus Jones, at last you can get what your heart desires, which is not too different from what your pretty, pale, smooth, blood-hiding body desires. Anna Poorna, you are not in London any more,’ the face cackled, with lines breaking out on either side of its mouth, seamlessly changing into the ruddy countenance of Jeremy Costwald in full Company Army red-and-white regalia.

This uneasy dream—and variations of it—had revisited her throughout the Crocodile’s sojourn as it approached and entered the Indian Ocean. But not once had Anna mentioned anything about these confounding night images that were projected in her head to her husband. And why would she? William was embarking upon what could be the finest period in any man’s life. In any case, the nightmares couldn’t have been that terrible. William had not noticed anything in his wife to worry or upset him.

So when the Crocodile churned foam at its base as it anchored in the waters of the Hugli, she smiled to herself, hoping that William would notice her smile.

‘So this is it,’ said William Jones to the woman who would be sharing his life in Bengal as they both unblushingly strapped their hands around a shiny, hard, dog’s-hair-brown torso. They were ferried across the shallows to the shore.

The light bathing the surroundings was very different from any other place William had ever been to. It wasn’t blatantly bright and eager to turn to colour as it was in Morocco where the reds and yellows were embarrassingly exhibitionist. Neither was it as proudly clear as it was in many of the seaports in Europe. And it was definitely not washed in a veil of grey as it was in London, screening objects in the distance with a faint blue sheen that was the true colour of shadows.

In the Calcutta before him, the colours were domesticated, with only hints of its wild, junglee ancestry in the green around. For Anna Maria, however, the brown of the ground beneath her white summer shoes, the green of the trees and dense shrubberies lining it, and the dark blue-green of the waters she had just left behind didn’t seem to be tame at all. Bengal lay there before them, a creature that was lazy and bearing some non-malignant, non-fatal disease. Both of them sensed it—one with hidden trepidation, the other with muffled excitement.

As they walked towards the carriage that was waiting for them—another had come only for their luggage—William couldn’t help but think how their sense of belonging was now no longer in the hands of the loud-mouthed Captain Kershaw and his crew, or that of any of the philistine passengers.

William had been careful to carry two of his most precious possessions on his body. Just before he had clasped his hands around a stranger’s neck, he had decided to move the two books by his friend Nathaniel Brassey Halhed—Bodhaprakasám sabdasastram … A Grammar of the Bengal Language and A Code of Gentoo Laws, or Ordinations of the Pundits—out of his spacious pockets into the safety of his own hands. He didn’t think that this manoeuvre would make his carrier’s task easier. But it was too great a risk to have either of the books fall out of his pockets and be damaged. Once inside the carriage, and after helping his wife into it, William placed the books on his lap and leant forward to quickly kiss Anna Maria on her cheek. When Mr Barker, the man who had come to receive the Joneses, joined them in the carriage, Anna was still emitting a blush. Mr Barker recognized it as the first effects of the Bengal heat on a just arrived English lady. He wasn’t too wide of the mark.

Jones had gone stark, raving mad listening to the man sitting on his right. He had been jabbering away from the very minute he had arrived and showed no signs of quietening down. And yet, sitting in their hastily whitewashed bungalow overlooking the Jalangi river in Krishnagar, Jones did not regret travelling here for some respite. And he had found respite from the monkey life of Calcutta. It was one thing to be a Judge at the Fort, and quite another to be in contact with bearable company, the sort that not only froths on about financial scams but woodpecks constantly about the latest sexual scandal.

Jones had started his job on a sure enough footing. In his first ruling, he had cleared the long-pending dispositions of the amount of 23,00,000 rupees that the Company had seized from Chait Singh, the former raja of Benares, who had framed a serious charge of looting against Warren Hastings. His colleagues on the bench had not been helpful. Robert Chambers, good man that he was, had ruled that the East India Company should have the prize money. John Hyde, whose grasp of the law was impeccable, had said that this transfer was not lawful. Which is when Jones had stepped in and decreed that the ‘plunder taken on the capitulation of besieged towns, belong to those who possess the power of making war and peace’.

It was Chambers who met Jones that very afternoon at the court and suggested they meet and discuss the formation of a club of sorts whose purpose would be to discuss, explore and understand the language and culture and tradition of the Hindus. Jones was always suspicious of clubs. But there was, this time, a strong reason for a group of like-minded Englishmen to meet regularly and do something that would benefit civilization and society. It was a shame that people like Alexander Dow had been the only providers of accounts of life in India. Jones had read Dow’s abominable Drury House publication Zingis, a poetic tragedy that provided ample fodder for Dr Johnson’s literary club. Zingis was astoundingly wrong in its description of life here, peppering only some basic pages with anything remotely looking or smelling like a fact. Somebody had to correct this picture of India for people back in England.

In any case, there was also a desperate need to understand the country for professional reasons.

‘How should Hindus be examined in court? Can Brahmans give absolution for perjury? Should Hindus swear by the Ganges or any other holy thing or word? Chambers,’ Jones had said while stirring his cup of tea, ‘these are the questions we should resolve sooner rather than later.’

And then, there was the whole business of knowing this country. And such knowledge was certainly not going to be found in the deplorable chitter-chatter about Emma Wrangham and Madame Grand and the sooty bibis who seemed to be running the social life of the town. Knowing did not mean fanning fans more furiously to catch the latest news of the ‘shocking case of William Hunter and three mutilated maidens’, or any other scandalous gossip peddled by the papers. Jones had let out a violent spurt of air through his nostrils when he came across the following item of news in the Bengal Gazette:

On Monday night, Rajah Nobkissen gave a nautch and magnificent entertainment to several persons of distinction in commemoration of Miss Wrangham’s birthday. As the ladies arrived, they were conducted by the Rajah through a grand suite of apartments into the zenana, where they were amused until the singing began, which was so mellifluous as to give every face a smile of approbation. The surprising agility of one of the male dancers occasioned loud acclamations of applause.

‘After supper there was a ball which was opened by Mr Livius and Miss Wrangham, who were dressed in the characters of Apollo and Daphne. When the minuets were ended, country dances struck up and continued till past three in the morning, when the company departed highly pleased with the elegant festival. And when the Rajah was attending Miss Wrangham to her carriage, he thanked her in very polite terms for having illuminated his house with her bright appearance.

Jones had thrown the Gazette on the floor, almost barking at the servant when he came to put it back in its rightful place. And to think that this was the place that he had desperately wanted to come to! It was the same Raja Nabakrishna Deb, the howling fool of Calcutta, who had donated land to build the new St John’s Church. No one seemed to mind that the land had been used earlier for Christian burials, thus exposing the fact that the Raja’s gesture was hardly the great act of charity that it was being made out to be. Jones knew that Calcutta needed a church. St Anne’s had been destroyed by the mutineers and the city had been left practically churchless for the last thirty years. But to build a sacred house on a spot where till recently there was a gunpowder magazine yard and a burial ground was sacrilegious.

It seemed that the city was devoid of a single Christian soul. The moment Jones had heard about Nabakrishna’s gesture, he had made his decision known: he was not going to contribute an anna to the St John’s building fund. If he had any influence in the courtroom, he would see to it that no money was donated by any of his fellow Supreme Court Judges!

So, leaving the painted circus of Calcutta behind, if only for a few weeks at a time, meant a lot to Jones. Retreating to Krishnagar had also done a lot of good to Anna Maria’s health, which hadn’t been too good since she landed in the blood-boiling city nearly a year ago.

But as he sat here, waiting for Anna Maria to return from the garden where she was still drawing pictures of the various plants she had discovered, Jones couldn’t help but think that there were monkeys even here, in Krishnagar. He was now in the company of Brahmans, hoping that one of the many scholars here would agree to give him lessons in Sanskrit grammar.

It had been Wilkins’s idea that he seek out someone in this scholarly town in Nadia. Wilkins was one of the few people in Calcutta that Jones could actually talk to. He had also managed to get Jones a copy of the legal code of Manu, the starting point for any Englishman planning to understand Hindu law. But poor Wilkins was not suited for the wet heat of Bengal and had had to move northwards to Benares. The two of them continued to correspond with each other, but Jones sorely missed his fellow scholar’s company. Wilkins was especially missed after the Asiatic Society was up and running. His contributions at the seven o’clock Thursday meetings in the Grand Jury Room would have been valued.

Even as he was thinking about all this, the man sitting on his right had not stopped talking. In fact, he hadn’t even slowed down. His name, Jones had barely been able to make out in the clutter of the other introductions, was Pandit Gangaram. It had been obvious from the moment the Brahmans had arrived that this Gangaram was keen on making his point of view very clear: Sanskrit was not a language for firingis. He hadn’t, of course, used the word ‘firingi’; he had said ‘Ingrej’. But the tone was very clear. For the last half-hour–or was it more?–Gangaram had been arguing how every language is specific to a people, ‘like death rites and marriage ceremonies’. One could pick up ‘the skin’ of a language, but it would only rot when placed on the ‘blood and bones of a different people’.

Jones had invited a dozen or so local scholars to his house. He had made his request plain. He would pay a handsome amount for his tuition. All he wanted was to learn the grammar and the literature in enough detail so he could make do without secondary material written by Europeans who clearly knew Sanskrit only very superficially. At one level, he didn’t blame the Nadia scholars for believing that an Englishman learning Sanskrit was a hopeless task. But at another level, he was sure that, with the right help, he could correct that notion and unlock some secrets that remained hidden even to the Brahmans of this country.

Wilkins had mentioned the name of one Ramlochan Sharma. But upon gentle inquiry, Jones was told by the scholars that Ramlochan Sharma was not a Pandit, but a physician. In other words, he was a Baidya, a non-Brahman and therefore a non-scholar. And yet, Wilkins had brought up the name because the physician-Pandit had a reputation of being an outstanding, although unorthodox, interpreter of Sanskrit texts.

Apart from Wilkins’ recommendation, Jones had heard the non-Brahman Pandit’s name in the context of jurisprudence. It was Ramlochan Sharma who had created a ruckus some years ago when he, according to sources, helped the ‘illiterate’ widow of the Raja of Bardhaman take over her late husband’s zamindari. It had reached Jones’s ear even in London that the Permanent Settlement Act had been hurriedly passed so as to protect the Company and its native sympathizers from ‘clever Hindu minds’ like ‘a Pundit Ramalocan’. It was even said at the Serjeants’ that Warren Hastings had personally made a deal with this Krishnagar scholar.

But Ramlochan Sharma had not responded to his invitation. Instead, there were the Gangarams of the world, their nominal representative having proceeded at some point to read out one of his own works, a long poem he had written about the Maratha raids forty years ago. Jones vaguely caught the last line of the aural torture: ‘So Bhaskar was killed at Monkora camp, and Gangaram has fulfilled his wish and told his story.’

He took a short bow and sat back on his low stool.

‘I was there in Pandua when the Bargis raided Bardhaman. So everything I’ve written here is a historical account of what happened,’ he said with his eyebrows arched.

Jones nodded.

‘That’s rubbish, Gangaram. That poem of yours is based on as much truth as a Mussalman bases his prayer on pork fat.’

The whole room looked up at the doorway from where the voice came. It was a voice that was not used to loudness and its edges were clearly strained. From where he was, Jones could only see a silhouette, a slight figure bordered and inked in with black. But as his eyes adjusted, he could see a small face suited to its small frame, frowning and smiling at the same time.

‘And how do you know that, Ramlochan?’ Gangaram responded, barely able to cover up the fact that his body was shaking like a leaf in a kalbaishakhi storm.

‘You never set your foot anywhere near Bardhaman when the Bargis came, Gangaram, if people are to believe Raja Tilakchand. And your limping verse actually says that the Bargi raids were divine punishment for immorality and licentiousness becoming the norm among the people? Bah! And you’ve clearly stolen lines from Vidyalankara’s Chitracampu. And if you could read Persian, I’m sure you wouldn’t have hesitated to lift chunks from Ghulam Hussain Khan’s Siyar-ul-Mutakherin.’

Jones’s grasp of Bengali was weak, but he could understand the nature of the taunt being made. The whole room was now bursting with angry shouts and had become combustible.

‘Now gentlemen,’ Jones stood up and addressed the crowd in broken Bengali. ‘I must remind you why I had invited all of you here. There is no need to lose …’ he searched the word, he searched the Bengali word … ‘control.’

A hush descended, but Jones knew that it was no use after this to sit down and hope for a civilized encounter. He waited for everyone to face him before he could make an announcement. Even the newcomer looked at him. He had no choice but to end the disastrous meeting. But Gangaram pre-empted his announcement.

‘Thank you, William-saheb, for your hospitality. But I think my colleagues and I would rather go now. We have Durga pujo arrangements to attend to, unlike someone here. Shall we go, Chandi-pandit?’

They all namaskared Jones and filed out of the house one by one. Jones was slightly taken aback at the suddenness with which the proceedings had screeched to a halt. He didn’t want to offend the learned men and saw them to the door. When he returned to the room, ready to put his feet up and gauge the damages, he heard the straggler speak.

‘I apologize for driving your guests away. But it was a waste of time, truly,’ he said in self-conscious English.

‘Pandit Ramlochan Sharma, I presume? You don’t get along too well with the folks in town, I see,’ Jones said, not able to repress a small, tired smile.

‘I’m willing to teach you. But will you learn here or will I have to be in Calcutta?’

‘Here in Krishnagar. My wife and I plan to spend four months of the year here. I hope that suits you.’

‘That would be better for me. I teach a few youngsters Sanskrit, Bengali and English here.’

The conversation meandered into matters at hand, the texts that the student would need to master as well as the schedule that suited both teacher and student. Jones sensed that there was more that the Pandit had in mind. But he restricted himself to recounting his scholastic background, his methods of teaching and the need to stay away from the works of the other scholars, ‘to avoid the risks of becoming wrapped in empty theology’. That suited Jones. In fact, the man suited him more than he had bargained for.

It turned out that the Pandit had learnt his English from a John Andrews, who was known to the Bengali print-maker Panchanan Karmakar, who in turn was well acquainted with Charles Wilkins. It was with Panchanan’s help that Wilkins had printed Halhed’s Bengali Grammar, the first book using the Bengali typeface. Surely, this was a sign that Pandit Ramlochan was the right man for the job. And what was the job that Jones had in mind? To go down into the very heart of the beast and peer into its soul by using the rope of language. The sinewy, strong rope that was Sanskrit.

Anna Maria had just walked into the house.

‘Anna, I want you to meet Pandit Ramlochan Sharma. He will be my Sanskrit tutor.’

Neither Anna Maria nor her husband would have known what went through the Pandit’s head as she set down her drawing book and dipped her head in acknowledgement of the guest’s presence.

Bakulakalikâlalâlamani kalakanthîkalakalâkule kâle |
Kalayâ kalâvato ’pi hi kalayati kalitâstratâm madanah ||

If he had been able to hear the words darting inside the Pandit’s head in one unbroken loop, Jones would have recognized the lines a few weeks later, when he learnt from Ramlochan the old grammarian’s memory tool. Jones himself would go on to translate the lines a year later as:

Madan, the god of love, uses even the spots of the moon as his beautiful weapon when the bakul plant shines with new buds and the cuckoos and women with melodious voices fill the air with their enchanting sounds.

William Jones was now dead, and there was no escape from the open hostility unleashed on Ramlochan by the Brahmans of Krishnagar. Before leaving, Panchanan had suggested that he move with him to Calcutta. There would be something he could manage—if not in the service of the Company then in the household of some knowledge-seeking babu. Ramlochan knew, of course, that things no longer allowed even that.

It had all started coming apart six months ago, when there had been a loud rap on his door accompanied by a louder string of abuse. It was Kuli’s forever intoxicated father. Ramlochan, a late riser, took his time unhinging the bar from the door. Jadab, incredibly, wasn’t tottering or letting off his characteristic fumes. Five or six people were standing behind him.

‘What is it? I don’t do visits any more. Go to another physician … is it an emergency?’ Ramlochan was still bloated with sleep.

He should have recognized that there was something wrong in the faces of his early morning visitors. The air between him and the men outside was swirling, dancing about just that bit for an alert man to notice the violence building up in it. Not being the alert man he should have been, Ramlochan explained the shimmer in the air as a product of his gummy, clenched vision.

‘Ramlochan, you better come out!’

Now that was an odd request—considering that Ramlochan had unbolted the door and was facing the irate Jadab-led mob. Perhaps they were referring to his position of having one foot inside and one foot outside the raised line of patted earth that was the threshold of his functional house. He crossed over sluggishly.

‘Yes, what is it?’

Jadab, with his hay-munching face, was taken aback. He and the others had met in the courtyard of the Krishna temple just as the sun was dissolving the night, practising what they would say. Ishwar and Bhabani, two young strapping lads, had been chosen to drag Ramlochan out of the house in case he resisted.

‘Well … I, we …’ Kuli’s father muttered. He then turned his head towards the others standing behind him.

Chandiprasad Gupta, one of the town’s Brahmans who had always found Ramlochan teaching the sacred language outrageous, stepped forward. He touched one of Jadab’s moderately broad farmer shoulders, giving the signal that he would do the talking. Chandi had the ability of conjuring up a pool of darkness around him when required. In the weak light of that morning, he had stepped out of the group, brought his bird nose within inches of Ramlochan’s face and covered the immediate vicinity where both of them stood with his portable shadow.

‘Ramlochan. What Kuli’s father is trying to tell you is that you have been conducting the most shameful activities with his daughter. I had told Jadab not to send Kuli to your house. But this drunkard never did listen. Your filth has no place in this town. Leave us and conduct your firingi habits in the big city.’

‘We Pandits,’ Chandi continued, clenching his teeth to emphasize that the word meant different things to different people, ‘had warned you, not once, not twice, but thrice about not making a fool of yourself by setting up a school here in Krishnagar. Don’t think we didn’t know why you had all those children come over to your school. Your sickness will not be tolerated, Ramlochan. Not after you’ve been caught preying on an innocent child. You have till the end of this month to get out of this town. Show your face in Krishnagar again and we’ll use scriptural laws that judges in Calcutta have no inkling of.’

By now, Ramlochan was wide awake.

‘There is nothing I have done to Kuli. What do you think I’ve done with her?’

He took a few steps forward as he spoke, careful to close the door shut as he faced Chandi Pandit.

Pandit Chandiprasad Gupta was an intelligent man. Unlike most of his fellow scholars in Krishnagar, he knew an intelligent man when he saw one. If he answered Ramlochan’s challenging query and actually uttered the unspeakable crime that he was guilty of, he would be sinning himself. To describe, or even give a name to Ramlochan’s lascivious activities before non-Brahmans was as shameful as the activities themselves. Also, describing his crime in Sanskrit—as was prescribed in situations like this, to keep smut out of untrained ears—would amount to acknowledging that the Baidya Ramlochan was indeed a Pandit.

So there he stood, phalanxed by a group of philistines that included Kuli’s father. He narrowed his eyes to a pair of slits and hissed out words in high Bengali—a communicational compromise—that did the necessary job of hurling insults at Ramlochan, the purveyor of unspeakable crimes committed against a girl not more than ten years old.

‘That is ridiculous! That is so ridiculous! Has the girl said that I have fucked her?’ Ramlochan shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Jadab, you actually heard your girl tell you that I fucked her?’

The single word had been unleashed from Ramlochan’s quivering lips and there was nothing anyone, not even Chandi Pandit, could do about it except wince and mutter the Lord’s name as an insulating device.

‘You sick man! You think I’ll make up stories about my own daughter?’

It was now Jadab’s turn to let go. The hard, flat word that Ramlochan had used, and twice, had clearly scratched on the scab that Chandi Pandit had first allowed to fester in him. Visions of his little girl being ravished by the monster in front of him started to streak past him. Horribly, these recreated images were soon slowing down, giving him less time to escape them. They were a parody of all those pictures that flickered in his head every time he drank and reacted with guffaws to those bawdy songs sung by Pagla Gafoor about women stuck to their pitchers.

Jadab had to be held back by Ishwar and Bhabani, the two youngsters still training to be lathials, straining on each side of the man gone insane in the middle. It was Chandi Pandit who took the lead in turning around and leaving Ramlochan to himself. With the mob gone, he was suddenly a stranger on his own doorstep. He stood there blankly, until he simply sat down on the threshold like a bulging clothful of rice that had just been sickled.

That was half a year ago. With Panchanan on his way back to Calcutta, Ramlochan looked at the spot where he had crumpled. It seemed like years ago, weeks ago, days ago, moments ago, all in jumbling succession.

What had he done with Kuli? Nothing. What had he done to any child in the whole of Krishnagar? Nothing. It was true that along with Panini’s, Katyayana’s and Patanjali’s grammar, the usual texts from Astadhyayi, Vartikas and Mahabhasya, and verses from Kumarasambhava and Meghadutam, he had also taught the basics of the English language to his students. The writings he taught these boys—and Kuli—were those that he had obtained during his trips to Calcutta. Towards the latter part of his tutorship, he had taken up William’s offer of visiting him for three weeks in his residence at Garden Reach every three months. There were a few printed books that he had picked up during these sojourns from a circulating library in the Badamtala area. These were as instructive as they were delightful—Ossian’s Temora, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Augustus Toplady’s Book of Hymns and various collections of poetry, prose and drama.

Kuli was a bright girl and Ramlochan had spotted the spark in her very early on. So it was only natural that he ventured to teach her what he didn’t teach the others—verses of his favourite firingi poet, the Earl of Rochester. He was so proud when Kuli was able to read out faultlessly for the first time one of his favourite verses, Rochester’s Song:

By all love’s soft, yet mighty powers
It is a thing unfit
That men should fuck in time of flowers
Or when the smock’s beshit.
Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind
And all my joys restore
By using paper still behind
And sponges for before.
My spotless flames can ne’er decay
If after every close
My smoking prick escape the fray
Without a bloody nose.

As Kuli would sway back and forth reading the delightful words in the lamplight, he would bathe in the sweet, light voice that would utter those rhyming, rocking words. She did not understand the meaning of the words she read, following only the letters and stringing them into sound. But he had told her meaningfully that he would teach her the meanings of firingi words later, once she had mastered their reading and their utterances. She not only became adept at reading out passages in English but was also able to write out Bengali words and whole passages in the Latin script, managing to even transpose the numbers of one language to the other. Confusion, however, would arise each time the number eight cropped up. She would unthinkingly change it to the English ‘four’.

But had he even touched her once in all these years that she was seven, eight and nine? Never. Not even the time when she had spilled water on to his precious pile of notes on Joydeb. It had taken hours for them to dry on that monsoon day.

Ramlochan had been walking all this while and he found himself in front of William’s bungalow. He had been unaware as he walked through the streets of Krishnagar, passing the shops and the houses, that people were no longer willing to let the eccentric Baidya Pandit go about his business of educating their children. Now inside the deserted growth of what was once a tidy garden under the charge of Anna Maria Jones, he walked through the tangle of green and soft ground right up to the muddy banks of the Jalangi.

Panchanan had told him that Anna Maria had left Calcutta for London weeks before William’s death. It seemed apt that everyone was returning to their rightful places. Was it so long ago that Anna Maria, a broad hat on her head, had stood on this exact spot, looking into the horizon that was broken by boats gliding slowly? Ramlochan remembered being inside the house, facing the wigless William as he struggled with the various shades of ‘ahamkara’. He had looked out, watching the whitest figure in all the green and brown, watching her hold down her hat in the warm river breeze.

How he had wanted to impress Anna Maria by speaking to her in English, perhaps quoting something meaningful from all those words that he had read and loved. But there had been far too few moments alone—two, to be exact: once when William had been caught up in the rain and he had to wait for less than ten minutes for his pupil to arrive, and the second time when she had rushed into the room holding a clay Krishna, and not finding her husband departed with a silent smile.

I’tisam al-Din had told him how he was advised, during his stay in England, to take up an English wife.

‘But they were only thinking of someone from the lower classes. Now, why would I even consider one of those vulgar ladies as a wife, tell me?’ he had said patting his beard down …

There was no point in thinking about all that any more. William Jones had died in Calcutta. He had already been fêted as ‘the unlocker of the secrets of India’ and had omitted any mention of Ramlochan Sharma. Never mind London, even the Asiatic Society in Calcutta had never thought it fit to invite Ramlochan for his discourse on the parallels between Sanskrit nouns and English root nouns, let alone on his study on the use of ‘anustubh’ and ‘tristubh’ in the Bhagvat Gita.

From the corner of his eye he could see a small group of girls playing on the banks of the river. None of them was Kuli. The brown waters of the Jalangi looked up to him and he returned the gaze. He vaguely heard the girls titter loudly to accompanying splashes. How he would have liked to hear right there and right then his dear old Ramprasad. The singer’s voice would have dissolved easily in the waters below.

Tell me, brother, so what’s after death?
The whole world is arguing about it
Some say you become a ghost
Others that you go to heaven
And some that you get close to God.
The Vedas insist that you’re a bit of sky
Reflected in a jar
Fated to shatter.

Ramlochan held himself tightly just to know how real he was. Edging closer to the water, he could see the contours of a face looking at him, but with its form blurring, breaking and rippling into pieces. His grip around himself now hurt. But it was a confirmation that he was still there when Ramprasad’s voice came back to answer a question that he had never bothered to ask.

Prasad says: you end, brother,
Where you began, a reflection
Rising in water, mixing with water
Finally one with water.

But it wasn’t the singer’s words that he last heard standing beside the Jalangi. It was his own voice, carefully, incorruptibly saying,

Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight
Greensleeves was my heart of gold
And who but my Ladie Greensleeves.