‘W

                 hat is that smell?’ Sherry said, crinkling her nose, to no one in particular.

I looked up from my crossword to find her standing in front of the mirror in the dining room, doing up her hair, a wooden clutcher clasped between her teeth. Older married couples told me that there would come a time when a spouse’s oddities would become annoying. Eight months into our marriage, I hoped that point was far off in the future for us. 

‘What smell?’ I sniffed around, smelling nothing but her Lady Diana, a customary gift from our wedding that she had taken an inexplicable liking to.

‘Forget it. I’m getting late. Do you want a lift to the library?’

‘No, I’ll work in the study, then go over to Professor Shukla’s. He has called me for lunch.’

‘Am I invited?’

‘Of course. I thought you had a lecture.’

‘I do, but I have a couple of hours free. I’ll stop by.’

Sherry gave me a cursory kiss and walked out to her car. I watched her leave, tugging at my ring, which still felt alien on my finger.

Sherry had finally moved to Mumbai a few weeks after we got married. She found a job at the university teaching maths to postgrads while I worked on my manuscript on sabbatical. I let go of my faculty flat and moved in with her to her apartment with a garden out front and two very big rooms by Mumbai standards. It made things simpler. She lived on campus, and I had access to the university library for my research.

Sherry and I had settled into a comfortable rhythm of things. She was a late riser, pushing for afternoon classes possibly even more strongly than her students. She would wake up after hitting snooze five times, her hair sticking at odd angles, dragging her feet like a zombie. Her first alarm would be my signal to put on the coffee, which, on occasion, she managed to gulp down before it had grown completely cold. She would then rush for her classes, dropping me off at the library on the way, where I would do research for my book. On my lazier days, I would pull out one of the nice, leather-bound Harvard Classics editions of a Goethe or Milton and settle down at a sunlit table. She would stop by the library during lunch, we would grab a bite to eat at the faculty mess, and then I would go back to writing. I would walk back home in the evening, arrive an hour before her, watch some TV, and put on the coffee when I heard her car come in.

I worked till about noon and then made my way over to Professor Shukla’s house. All the faculty residences were identical, but his looked lived in, with potted lemon and ficus trees on the balcony and a small metal swing-set in the garden. One of the perks of Sherry’s job was the faculty residence, a two-bedroom house with high ceilings and a small garden out in the front where we would drink our evening coffee, a luxury in Mumbai. It was built in the sixties, back before air conditioning, or even electricity, was widely available, and so people resorted to architectural solutions to the sticky Mumbai heat. Professor Shukla, with his bald head and glorious Santa Claus beard, lived in the house next to ours. Both his children had emigrated to America, as had his wife, for her cancer treatment. The professor was going to follow the next year, after he retired. He would stop by most weekends with a bottle of whiskey and tell us stories of the city as he remembered it. I humoured him, even though his stories were long-winded monologues that took forever to get to the point. I suppose the man was just lonely, drowning out the silence in his life with his own voice.

I reached his house and found him reading on a rocking chair. He was in the Maths department like Sherry but did a lot more research, which meant his teaching hours were minimal.

‘Come on in! I was just about to call you. I was feeling hungry’ Professor rose and shook my hand warmly—‘I got the maid to cook a nice kadhi and rice. I thought you would like it.’

‘Yum!’ I responded politely, and we sat down at the dining table. He served me despite my protests, heaping on more food than I would be able to finish.

‘Did you see the announcement about the dean’s new pet project?’

‘I think so. The conference on science in religion, right?’

‘Yup! That’s the one. Now they have issued a request for papers that prove the Harappan civilisation knew about quantum mechanics, and who knows what else, four thousand years ago.’

‘I hope they did. They could have taught the undergraduate courses. Would have saved me a lot of grief last year.’

‘I find it rather interesting, actually,’ Professor Shukla laughed. ‘It is a brilliant exercise in doublethink.’

‘Doublethink? As in Orwell?’

‘Yes. Of course, Orwell’s impression of Doublethink was pejorative. He was disgusted by the masses who could hold two contradictory thoughts in their heads at the same time, accepting both to be true. But the Dean seems to think it is a skill, somehow. He wants to create new knowledge by borrowing it from the past, the existence of said knowledge be damned.’

‘Dear Lord. I swear it feels like we’re going backwards.’

‘Funny you should mention that. I was just thinking about a story earlier today, which proves this point so poignantly, I couldn’t make it up even if I tried.’

‘What happened?’

‘Do you know the story of how these faculty residences were built?’ 

‘I don’t think so.’ I spooned some more kadhi onto my rice.

‘So, all this that you see, the entire faculty residence block, was a jungle till about the late 50s. The government had allotted land to the college, but not enough funds to build everything we needed, not even a fence. No one was very bothered with it anyway. Back then, mathematics was a tiny department. Law was the most popular course back then, so all the money went there. It was right on the heels of the Independence movement. None of the noise you see around engineers today. The heroes were all lawyers, Nehru, Gandhi, Patel.’

He paused to take a bite and went on theatrically.

‘Back then, a small community of fishermen used to live around here, just outside the campus boundary. Because there was no fence, they would often come within the grounds to pick firewood from the forest. It didn’t hurt anyone. Sometimes they would gift the guards some fish. Everything was going on fine until the day Karmakar showed up.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Karmakar, to this day, holds the record for being the shortest serving HoD for Maths. Just over three weeks. His is the only name on the list that you will see painted in the same tint of white as the next person because both their names were added on the same day. Anyway, so Karmakar showed up on the first day of his job and said that he wanted to take a round of the grounds. A guard snapped to attention and took him around on foot, showing him the major landmarks. The pond, the ridge, the small Shiv shrine inside the forest.’

I nodded politely, as my attention wandered to the forest. I did not know there was a Shiv shrine on the campus grounds. Was it still there? Probably. People are very touchy about demolishing shrines.

‘As they were going around,’ he continued. ‘One fisherman came out of the forest holding some firewood. He saw the guard and greeted him, and thrust a freshly caught pomfret into his hands. The guard tried to refuse, but the fisherman was drunk. He handed the fish to the guard and left, whistling merrily. Karmakar saw all this and was livid. Sure, he said it was the corruption and misuse of government resources, but everyone knew it was because the guard had been gifted the fish while he, the HoD of Maths, had been ignored. Within a week, funds were cleared to erect a fence around the campus boundary.’

It was difficult for me to even imagine it, a forest in the middle of Mumbai. Fishermen bartering firewood with freshly caught pomfret. The past truly was a distant place.

‘When the fishermen tried to get into the forest, they were greeted by a fence and a new guard standing there with a stick. They tried to sneak in, but the guard had strict instructions not to let anyone in. The fishermen, dependent on the forest for firewood, more out of laziness than compulsion, beat up the guard and tore open a hole in the fence. News reached Karmakar, and he insisted on accompanying the guard the next day.’

‘When do the houses come into the story?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to it. So, Karmakar gets to the spot and watches over as the fence is repaired. As the repair is happening, a young boy emerges from the forest with a load of firewood on his head. Karmakar charges at him with his cane and manages to land a few blows before the kid escapes, throwing the firewood at his feet. Satisfied with his victory tribute paid in dead firewood, Karmakar stands there, proudly stroking his moustache. Then, reinforcements arrive. The kid was the sole scion of the leader of the fishermen. So now there were fifteen livid fishermen standing in front of Karmakar. But Karmakar was determined to stand his ground and made a major tactical error, choosing to fight fire with fire. The fishermen broke through the fence somewhere around Karmakar’s fourth or fifth casteist slur. The guard later testified he tried to stop it but most people agree he just ran away as Karmakar got mobbed. After Karmakar, the university administration decided to get rid of the problem entirely and levelled the forest. In the next budget cycle, funds were approved, and the quarters were built.’

‘These quarters?’ I asked gently, just realising that I had forgotten to take a bite for a while now and the kadhi was starting to crust over the rice.

‘No, sir! That is the funny part. Not these quarters. They are the second iteration, but I am getting ahead of myself,’ the professor waggled a finger at me, grinning cheekily. ‘Once the quarters were built, the university couldn’t find anyone willing to live here. The houses remained empty for years. So, during one of the audits, someone finally got around to figuring out why no one wanted to live here. Turns out, all the professors—mathematicians, mind you, scholars of the purest of the pure sciences, those who make a living on logic—were convinced that this place was haunted because this was where Karmakar had been killed.’

‘What? Are you serious?’

‘Absolutely! People would rather live off-campus, in vacant research scholar housing, and spend an hour on the commute than live in the faculty residences. Some admin staff tried, tempted by free housing, but none of them stuck around for even a month. Someone’s father passed away. Someone fell and broke a leg. All sorts of unfortunate incidents. That just fanned the rumours, and the quarters remained vacant for almost a decade.’

‘How did they convince them to move here then?’

‘They knocked down the whole thing and rebuilt it after praying to the spirit of Karmakar. Professors! Mathematicians at that!’

‘You’re being a bit harsh,’ I put up a half-hearted defence. ‘Aren’t people a function of the times they live in? Like Newton, he is one of your demigods, but he was also a believer in alchemy.’

‘Okay, first of all, we are mostly Team Leibniz in this department. And it is not a one-to-one comparison. Think about it like this. Where do superstitions come from?’

‘I feel like the question is strictly rhetorical so I will let you get on with it,’ I replied, rising to put my now empty plate in the sink.

‘Fair enough,’ he laughed. ‘Here is my proposition. Myths—and superstitions are a subset—were created to explain things we could not. But as time progressed, we as a species figured out more and more things. Like we figured out that the earth goes around the sun and causes the day and night, not Apollo and Athena taking turns in their chariots. The same thing applies to superstitions like these. Curses, jinxes, what have you. A few hundred years ago, you did not know germs caused diseases, so you hung a ring of roses on your door to ward off the plague. But this whole situation with the houses, this was sixty odd years ago. What was the excuse here? Just because there was an accident here, did not mean a building was cursed. And yet…’

‘Fear? It is a primal emotion. Superstitions are always caused by fear. Black cats, ladders against walls, the number thirteen. I think as long as we have fear, we can never truly rid ourselves of superstitions either. Reminds me of something my Dadima used to say. It was a limerick of sorts. Bhay se bhay bhi bhaybheet hota hai.’

‘‘Fear itself is afraid of fear. Smart woman, your grandmother. I would have granted it if the houses were plagued by snakes, or wild animals roamed into the gardens in the middle of the night. But fear of what? Nothing happened. Someone died a violent death, sure, but no harm to anyone else’s person or property. And think about the people refusing to live here. Mathematicians. People formally trained to think logically. Practitioners of the purest of all sciences. Yet, they fell prey to superstitions, caught up in this sort of mass hysteria. You would expect them to know better.’

‘But we like to think there are things we can do to make things go our way. Superstitions are just our way of pretending we have control, that we can fight against our fears, that we can do something to push harm out of our way. Even if we know it is pointless, having that illusion of control is comforting,’ I offered weakly, slowly tiring of playing the devil’s advocate. Of course, the professor was right. It was ridiculous. They were academicians. Rational. Cold. Above all the superstition that was the domain of lesser mortals. Had I been around back in those times, I would have slapped some sense into them. Yet, that very night, my lived experiences would stand in defiance of all that I had trained myself to believe. What does one do, with the knowledge that the impossible exists, not in some far-off land of “allegedly” and “possibly”, but around you, snaking its way into your nostrils, pouring itself down your ears?

‘What are you two talking about?’ Sherry’s voice rang out from the living room. The door was open; she had let herself in.

‘Nothing. Professor Shukla has some very interesting stories about the house we live in.’

‘What would that be?’

‘Nothing. Did you know they knocked down the houses that were here before these, because someone died on the grounds and no one wanted to live there?’

‘Someone died here?’

‘Oh! You don’t know the story either?’ Professor Shukla piped in, grinning, and launched into another rendition of the story. As I heard him speak, I realised that the story was a carefully curated performance. He had perhaps told this hundreds of times. Perhaps this was one of the stories he told in his classes on days he had forgotten to take his lesson plan along, or when he was too tired and there were still ten more minutes to go in the class.