5 - Subaltern Agency as Fiction or Science: The Calcutta Chromosome

Summary

I think it's a pity that science fiction always seeks to project into the future: it's just as interesting to project into the past.

(Ghosh, in an interview with Kincaid)

The Story

This book begins with a poem by Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932), who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902 for his discovery of the mosquito as a vector for malaria.The poem reads as follows:

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At His Command,

Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

It sets the book's ominous tone early on – the need to search, the religious realm impinging on the secular, the “seeds” of death that are secretly planted. We return to Ross later on, but the action of the book begins in New York in sometime not too far into the future, on August 20 – identified simply as “Mosquito Day.” We later learn that this was the day, in 1897, that Ross made his momentous discovery of the malaria parasite in the blood of an Indian named Husein Khan. Meanwhile, however, we are in New York in the twenty-first century, and in the apartment of Antar, a programmer and systems analyst at the International Water Council (formerly LifeWatch) who generally works from home. His retirement is just a year away, and then he plans to return to his native Egypt. He works, therefore, at some leisure at home with the help of his snazzy computer system, named the AVA/IIe, or simply Ava.