The Calcutta Chromosome

'I'll die if I don't eat soon,' she remarked to Murugan.

She lost no time in propelling him into the eatery. Leading him to a curtained booth, she slid on to a bench and signalled to Murugan to seat himself opposite her. A waiter appeared almost immediately, with two limp menu cards in his hand. Urmila ordered for them both, and as soon as the waiter left, she pulled the curtain shut.

'Tell me,' she said, leaning across the table. 'Who is this Lachman you keep talking about?'

'You mean Lutchman,' Murugan corrected her. 'That's how Ronnie Ross would have said it; that's how he spelt it, anyhow.'

'But the name must have been Lachman,' said Urmila. 'Ross probably just spelt it in a British kind of way.'

'Same difference,' said Murugan. 'Who knows what his mother called him? We weren't there. Anyways, Lutchman was this young guy who walked into Ronnie Ross's life on May 25 1895 at 8 p.m., offering himself as a guinea pig. He ended up spending the next three years doing everything for Ron, from slicing his breakfast bagels to counting his slides. Every time Ron went running off in the wrong direction, Lutchman was waiting to head him off and show

him the way to go. He claimed to be a "dhooley-bearer" by trade, but my guess is that he was leading Ronnie by the nose.'

'But,' said Urmila, 'how would he have known about where to lead Ronald Ross?'

'It's a long story,' he said. 'I'll cut it short for you: a few years ago I found a letter that was written in Calcutta, by an American missionary doctor called Elijah Farley. Before he got religion Farley was doing medical research back in the States, at Johns Hopkins. As a student he'd worked with some of the biggest names in malaria research.

'Well, the last thing he ever wrote was this letter in which he described a visit to Cunningham's laboratory in Calcutta. He saw some stuff there that was – oh, maybe three or four years ahead of the state of play in the international scientific community. None of it made any sense to him, of course, because it didn't fit with anything he'd ever been taught.'

'Don't talk so fast,' said Urmila. 'I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to tell me. Are you talking about Cunningham's own research?'

Murugan laughed: 'No. Cunningham didn't have a clue.'

'So who was doing this work, then?'

'The way Farley saw it,' said Murugan, 'it was the people in the lab, Cunningham's servants and assistants.'

'But surely,' said Urmila, 'Cunningham's assistants would have told him what they were doing.'

'It's like this,' said Murugan. 'Cunningham's assistants were a pretty wild mix. You see, he didn't want educated college kids from Calcutta messing around in his lab, and asking questions and stuff. So what he did instead was he'd train his own assistants.'

'Who were they?' Urmila asked. 'And where did he find them?'

'In the last place anyone would think of looking,' said Murugan. 'At Sealdah railway station. The station hadn't been around that long, but if you wanted to find people who were pretty much on their own, down and out with nowhere to go, that was the place to look. Cunningham used to check out the whole station every once in a while and when he saw a likely looking kid he'd offer them room and board in exchange for work – nothing fancy, just a minimum-wage kind of job around the lab, sweeper, "dhooley-bearer", that sort of shit. They'd jump at it, of course: what did they have to lose? They'd live in those outhouses near the hospital wall, and help around the lab. It was a nice, cosy little set-up.'

'So he taught them?' said Urmila. 'And trained them and so on?'

'Not really,' said Murugan. 'He may have taught them how to read a little English and he probably showed them a couple of things – but just monkey-see, monkey-do kind of stuff. They probably didn't give a shit anyway. But there was this one person, a woman, who took to the lab like a duck to water. My guess is that within a few years she was way ahead of Cunningham in her intuitive understanding of the fundamentals of the malaria problem.'

'But who was this woman?' said Urmila. 'And what was she called?'

Murugan smiled: 'The way Farley tells it,' he said, drawing his sleeve across his damp forehead, 'her name was Mangala.'

Urmila gasped. 'Mangala?' she cried. 'You mean like Mangal-bibi -like the name the girl said?'

'I guess you could call her a prototype,' said Murugan. 'And as for who she was – who knows? The only indication we have that she even existed was in this letter written by Elijah Farley. And even that letter isn't around any more: at least it's untraceable in the catalogues.'

'What did Elijah Farley say about her?'

'Not much,' said Murugan. 'All he knew was what Cunningham told him – which was that he found her at Sealdah Station, that she was dirt poor and that she probably had hereditary syphilis. But then the big question is: did Cunningham find her or did she find him? Anyway, Farley saw things happening in the lab that left him in no doubt that she knew a whole lot more about malaria than Cunningham could ever have taught her.'

'Really?' said Urmila, her forehead wrinkling in disbelief. 'Is it possible that she could have taught herself something as technical as that?'

Murugan shrugged. 'Similar things have been known to happen,' he said. 'Think of Ramanujan, the mathematician, down in Madras. He went ahead and reinvented a fair hunk of modern mathematics just because nobody had told him that it had already been done. And with Mangala we're not talking about mathematics: we're talking about microscopy, which was still an artisanal kind of skill at that time. Real talent could take you a long way in it – Ronnie Ross's career is living proof of that. With this woman we're talking about a whole lot more than just talent; we may be talking genius here. You also have to remember that she wasn't hampered by the sort of stuff that might slow down someone who was conventionally trained: she wasn't carrying a shit-load of theory in her head, she didn't have to write papers or construct proofs. Unlike Ross she didn't need to read a zoological study to see that there was a difference between culex and anopheles: she'd have seen it like you or I can see the difference between a dachshund and a Dobermann. She didn't care about formal classifications. In fact she didn't even really care about malaria. That's probably why she got behind Ronnie Ross and started pushing him towards the finish line. She was working towards something altogether different, and she'd begun to believe that the only way she was going to make her final breakthrough was by getting Ronnie Ross to make his. She had bigger things in mind than the malaria bug.'

'Like what?' said Urmila.

'The Calcutta chromosome.'

With a discreet cough, the waiter parted their curtain, and placed their orders on the table.

Urmila waited till he had left. 'What was that you just said?'

'The Calcutta chromosome,' said Murugan. 'That's my name for what she was working towards.'

'Now I'm really lost,' said Urmila. 'I've lived here all my life and I've never heard of this thing you're talking about.'

'And who knows if you ever will?' said Murugan. 'Or whether I will. Or whether it exists or has ever existed. At this point in time it's still all guesswork on my part.'

'But you must have something to found your guesses on,' said Urmila.

Murugan made no answer. 'Go on,' Urmila prompted, almost pleading. 'We're caught in this together, after all. I have a right to know.'

Murugan hesitated. 'Are you really sure you want to know?'

She nodded.

'OK, I'll tell you what started me off,' said Murugan reluctantly. 'It seemed to me from Farley's letter that Mangala was actually using the malaria bug as a treatment in another disease.'

'What disease?'

'Syphilis,' said Murugan. 'Or to put it more precisely, syphilitic paresis – the final paralytic stage of syphilis. From Farley's account it seems there was an underground network of people who believed that she possessed a cure. Remember that we're talking about the 1890s – long before the discovery of penicillin. Syphilis was untreatable and incurable: it killed millions of people every year, all around the world. These people who came to see Mangala may have believed that she was a witch or a magician or a god or whatever: it doesn't matter – the conventional medical treatments for syphilis at that time weren't much more than hocus-pocus either. Let's just stick with that old saying about no smoke without a fire. If a whole crowd of people believed that Mangala had a cure, or a halfway effective treatment, it must have been because she had a certain rate of success. People aren't crazy: if they travelled long distances to see her they must have thought she offered some kind of hope.'