The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,41

larger apartments divided into tenements, as if driven by some furious biological process—one room splitting into two, two becoming four, and four, eight. The streets reticulated and the sky vanished. There was the clank of cooking, and the mineral smell of coal smoke. At a pharmacist’s shop, we turned into the inlet of Hayat Khan Lane and walked toward the house that my father and his family had occupied. The rubbish heap was still there, breeding its multigenerational population of feral dogs. The front door of the house opened into a small courtyard. A woman was in the kitchen downstairs, about to behead a coconut with a scythe.

“Are you Bibhuti’s daughter?” my father asked in Bengali, out of the blue. Bibhuti Mukhopadhyay had owned the house and rented it to my grandmother. He was no longer alive, but my father recalled two children—a son and a daughter.

The woman looked at my father warily. He had already stepped past the threshold and climbed onto the raised veranda, a few feet from the kitchen. “Does Bibhuti’s family still live here?” The questions were launched without any formal introduction. I noted a deliberate change in his accent—the softened hiss of the consonants in his words, the dental chh of West Bengali softening into the sibilant ss of the East. In Calcutta, I knew, every accent is a surgical probe. Bengalis send out their vowels and consonants like survey drones—to test the identities of their listeners, to sniff out their sympathies, to confirm their allegiances.

“No, I’m his brother’s daughter-in-law,” the woman said. “We have lived here since Bibhuti’s son died.”

It is difficult to describe what happened next—except to say that it is a moment that occurs uniquely in the histories of refugees. A tiny bolt of understanding passed between them. The woman recognized my father—not the actual man, whom she had never met, but the form of the man: a boy returning home. In Calcutta—in Berlin, Peshawar, Delhi, Dhaka—men like this seem to turn up every day, appearing out of nowhere off the streets and walking unannounced into houses, stepping casually over thresholds into their past.

Her manner warmed visibly. “Were you the family that lived here once? Weren’t there many brothers?” She asked all this matter-of-factly, as if this visit had been long overdue.

Her son, about twelve years old, peeked out from the window upstairs with a textbook in his hand. I knew that window. Jagu had parked himself there for days on end, staring into the courtyard.

“It’s all right,” she said to her son, motioning with her hands. He fled inside. She turned to my father. “Go upstairs if you’d like. Look around, but leave the shoes on the stairwell.”

I removed my sneakers, and the ground felt instantly intimate on my soles, as if I had always lived here.

My father walked around the house with me. It was smaller than I had expected—as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are—but also duller and dustier. Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. We climbed a narrow gullet of stairs to a small pair of rooms. The four younger brothers, Rajesh, Nakul, Jagu, and my father, had shared one of the rooms. The eldest boy, Ratan—Moni’s father—and my grandmother had shared the adjacent room, but as Jagu’s mind had involuted into madness, she had moved Ratan out with his brothers and taken Jagu in. Jagu would never again leave her room.

We climbed up to the balcony on the roof. The sky dilated at last. Dusk was falling so quickly that it seemed you could almost sense the curvature of the earth arching away from the sun. My father looked out toward the lights of the station. A train whistled in the distance like a desolate bird. He knew I was writing about heredity.

“Genes,” he said, frowning.

“Is there a Bengali word?” I asked.

He searched his inner lexicon. There was no word—but perhaps he could find a substitute.

“Abhed,” he offered. I had never heard him use the term. It means “indivisible” or “impenetrable,” but it is also used loosely to denote “identity.” I marveled at the choice; it was an echo chamber of a word. Mendel or Bateson might have relished its many resonances: indivisible; impenetrable; inseparable; identity.

I asked my father what he thought about Moni, Rajesh, and Jagu.

“Abheder dosh,” he said.

A flaw in identity; a genetic illness; a blemish that cannot be separated from the self—the same phrase served all meanings. He had made peace with its indivisibility.

For all the talk in the late