'You mean you?' she said.
'You said it.' He turned on his heel and set off down a path that was bustling with uniformed hospital staff.
'Look over there,' he said, pointing ahead at a complex of boxy new buildings all painted a drab, municipal yellow. 'None of those was here when Ronnie was doing his malaria research in Calcutta. It was just trees and bamboo and greenery around here – except for a couple of labs and outhouses where the servants and attendants lived.'
He held a handkerchief to his nose as they walked past an open rubbish dump where crows, dogs and vultures were fighting over scraps of food and blood-soaked bandages. Nearby, a row of men stood lined up against a wall, unheeding of a notice that pleaded: 'Please do not urine here.'
Murugan came to a halt in an open space, between two wards, one of which bore a sign, 'Ross Memorial Ward'. He pointed to an old-fashioned red-brick bungalow that had been incorporated into one of the hospital's newly added wings. 'Look over there,' he said. 'That was Ross's lab.'
He went over to the bungalow and drew her attention to a marble tablet, set high in the wall. The tablet bore a stylized image of a mosquito, and under it an inscription.
'It's too far up to read,' Urmila said. 'Doesn't it say that it was in this laboratory that Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross made the momentous discovery that malaria is conveyed by the bite of a mosquito?'
'Something like that,' said Murugan.
Urmila pulled a quizzical face. 'What a strange little building,' she said. 'It looks so shut in on itself. It's hard to believe that anybody could discover anything in there.'
'What's even harder to believe,' said Murugan, 'is that this was once one of the best-equipped research laboratories in the whole of the Indian subcontinent.'
'Was it?' she said, in surprise.
He nodded: 'That's right. And you know who set it up?'
'How would I know about that?' she snapped.
'But you do know,' said Murugan, 'as a matter of fact, you've got his name right there.' He pointed at the piece of paper that she had tucked into her blouse.
Turning her back to him, she took the ball of paper out of her blouse. 'Here it is,' she said. 'Show me.'
He pointed to one of the lines that had been marked in ink. 'That's him. Surgeon-Colonel D. D. Cunningham.
'That's the guy who set up this place,' said Murugan. 'Like Ronnie Ross he was a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, which was a unit of the British Indian Army. But Cunningham was more or less a senior citizen, years older than Ross. And he was a research scientist too – a pathologist. In fact he was a Fellow of the Royal Society; he had an FRS tagged to his name, which was one of the fanciest tags you could get those days. Cunningham did a lot of his work in Calcutta right here in this lab. He made it into the best equipped research centre in this part of the world. It was Ron who made it famous, but he couldn't have done it without old D. D. '
'I'll take your word for it,' said Urmila. 'But I still don't see how this makes those papers so special.'
'Patience, Calcutta,' Murugan said. 'I'm just getting started. Come on.'
He headed back the way they had come and led her through a passageway to the narrow dirt-filled space that separated the Ross Memorial Ward from the hospital's boundary wall. The memorial arch was now a few yards to their left, and over the top of the wall they could just see the clogged traffic on Lower Circular Road.
Murugan pointed to a couple of low, ramshackle tinroofed structures, nestling in the mounds of earth and debris that were piled up against the wall. 'You see those outhouses over there?' he said. 'That's where Ronnie Ross's servants lived. One of them, a guy called Lutchman, was Ross's right-hand man. He used to breed the pigeons that Ross used for his research right over there.'
'Pigeons?' said Urmila distractedly, casting a distasteful glance at the little heaps of excrement that lay half-hidden in the debris. 'I thought you said he was working with mosquitoes and malaria.'
'Well, let me put it like this,' said Murugan. 'Ronnie Ross didn't always work with your usual plain-vanilla kinds of malaria. In Calcutta he began working with a related avian species, halteridium – you could call it a bird version of malaria.'
'Really?' Urmila looked up warily at the trees around them.
'Yes,' he said. 'And to keep him supplied with material for his experiments, his assistants, Lutchman and his crew, kept a large flock of infected birds – right over there. And they released their entire flock here, in September 1898, just days after Ross finished his final series of experiments.'
He picked a stone off the ground. 'Let me show you something,' he said. He tossed the stone in the direction of the outhouse. It landed in the debris, and moments later, a flock of pigeons took to the air with clucks of alarm and a frantic beating of wings. Murugan stood back and watched the birds circling above.
'I wouldn't be at all surprised,' he said, 'if there were a couple of descendants of Lutchman' s flock up there.'
Chapter 30
STANDING ON tiptoe Urmila peeped over the boundary wall at the office-going traffic, streaming down Lower Circular Road, past the hospital. She was surprised by how sheltered and self-contained the bungalow was, how far removed from both the bustle of the hospital and the noise of the nearby traffic.
'How quiet it seems here,' she said, glancing from the outhouse to the Ross memorial. 'It's hard to believe that I go past this place twice every day, at rush hour.'
'Exactly what Ronnie Ross thought,' said Murugan. 'Thought he'd found the lab of his dreams when he first got here.'
Urmila stepped back from the wall. 'So how was it that Ross came to be here?' she said. She ran her eyes over the smoothed-out sheets of paper in her hands. 'Was it this man D. D. Cunningham who invited him here?'
'No,' said Murugan. 'Exactly the opposite. Cunningham did everything he could to make sure that Ross wouldn't get here. Ronnie wrote him begging letters every couple of months, and Cunningham's answers were always the same, short and simple: no dice.'
'But still,' said Urmila, 'Ronald Ross did come here, didn't he?'
'That's right,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham stonewalled Ross for more than a year. And then one day, in January 1898, right out of the blue, Cunningham caved. In fact he handed in his resignation and left for England in such a hurry he forgot to pack his boxer shorts. On January 30 the Government of India finally approved Ronnie Ross's transfer to Calcutta.
'The official story is that all this was just coincidence: old Cunningham was aching for the honeysuckled cottages of Ye Olde England. Well, where he ended up was in a boarding house in Surrey with a view of the municipal gasworks. You're going to tell me he left his cosy little setup out here for that just because he was homesick for English muffins? Well, let me tell you: I don't buy it.'
'So what are you saying then?' said Urmila. 'Why do you think he left?'
'I don't have the answer to that,' said Murugan. 'But it's clear that something happened round the middle of January 1898 that made Cunningham change his mind. And it was no accident either: somebody worked pretty hard to set it up.'
Urmila examined her papers again. 'Here, look at this,' she said, pointing at a line. 'It says here that D. D. Cunningham was granted six days' leave in the middle of January – from the 10th to the 15th of February. That's when it must have happened.'
'Right,' said Murugan. 'And look at the date on that railway reservation chart: on the 10th of January 1898 somebody called C. C. Dunn took a train to Madras.'
'And who was that?'
'No one,' said Murugan. 'That's just it. I think someone is trying to get the message across that D. D. Cunningham travelled to Madras under a false name on that day.'
' Madras?' said Urmila scowling at the papers. 'Why Madras? What could have happened there? I suppose there's no way of finding out since it happened so long ago?'