The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,164

Bengali hickness: when his brothers sat down to lunch, they would pile their rice in mounds and punch volcanic holes in it for gravy, as if marking the insatiable, perpetual hunger of their village days in the form of craters on their plates. Bulu’s marriage seemed a vastly safer prospect by comparison. In 1966, she was engaged to a young lawyer, the eldest son of a well-established clan in Calcutta. In 1967, Bulu married him and moved to his family’s sprawling, decrepit mansion in South Calcutta, with a garden already choked by weeds.

By the time I was born, in 1970, the sisters’ fortunes had started to move in unexpected directions. In the late 1960s, Calcutta began its steady descent into hell. Its economy was fraying, its tenuous infrastructure heaving under the weight of waves of immigration. Internecine political movements broke out frequently, shuttering the streets and businesses for weeks. As the city convulsed between cycles of violence and apathy, Bulu’s new family hemorrhaged its savings to keep itself afloat. Her husband kept up the pretense of a job, leaving home every morning with the requisite briefcase and tiffin box—but who needed a lawyer in a city without laws? Eventually, the family sold the mildewing house, with its grand veranda and inner courtyard, and moved into a modest two-room flat—just a few miles from the house that had sheltered my grandmother on her first night in Calcutta.

My father’s fate, in contrast, mirrored that of his adoptive city. Delhi, the capital, was India’s overnourished child. Bolstered by the nation’s aspirations to build a mega-metropolis, fattened by subsidies and grants, its roads widened and its economy expanded. My father rose through the ranks of a Japanese multinational firm, clambering swiftly from lower-to upper-middle class. Our neighborhood, once girded by forests of thornbushes overrun with wild dogs and goats, was soon transformed into one of the most affluent pockets of real estate in the city. We vacationed in Europe. We learned to eat with chopsticks and swam in hotel pools in the summer. When the monsoons hit Calcutta, the mounds of garbage on the streets clogged the drains and turned the city into a vast infested swamp. One such stagnant pond, festering with mosquitoes, was deposited yearly outside Bulu’s house. She called it her own “swimming pool.”

There is something in that comment—a lightness—that was symptomatic. You might imagine that the sharp vicissitudes of fortune had reshaped Tulu and Bulu in drastically different ways. On the contrary: over the years, their physical resemblance had dwindled to the point of vanishing, but something ineffable about them—an approach, a temperament—remained remarkably similar and even amplified in its convergence. Despite the growing economic rift between the two sisters, they shared an optimism about the world, a curiosity, a sense of humor, an equanimity that borders on nobility but comes with no pride. When we traveled abroad, my mother would bring home a collection of souvenirs for Bulu—a wooden toy from Belgium, fruit-flavored chewing gum from America that smelled of no earthly fruit, or a glass trinket from Switzerland. My aunt would read travel guides of the countries that we had visited. “I’ve been there too,” she would say, arranging the souvenirs in a glass case, with no trace of bitterness in her voice.

There is no word, or phrase, in the English language for that moment in a son’s consciousness when he begins to understand his mother—not just superficially, but with the immersive clarity with which he understands himself. My experience of this moment, somewhere in the depths of my childhood, was perfectly dual: as I understood my mother, I also learned to understand her twin. I knew, with luminous certainty, when she would laugh, what made her feel slighted, what would animate her, or where her sympathies or affinities might lie. To see the world through the eyes of my mother was to also see it through the eyes of her twin, except, perhaps, with lenses tinted in slightly different colors.

What had converged between my mother and her sister, I began to realize, was not personality but its tendency—its first derivative, to borrow a mathematical term. In calculus, the first derivative of a point is not its position in space, but its propensity to change its position; not where an object is, but how it moves in space and time. This shared quality, unfathomable to some, and yet self-evident to a four-year-old, was the lasting link between my mother and her twin. Tulu and Bulu were no longer