Author - Amitav Ghosh

This is definitely a 21st century science fiction novel. The science is not about quarks or quasars, but about genes and chromosomes. The location isn’t a hostile planet orbiting a remote star, but the bylanes of our very own Calcutta.

The story starts off in New York and ends in Calcutta, although time itself is somewhat relative. Murugan, a person whose interest in Malaria takes him beyond research into the lives of the researchers, knows everything there is to know about the studies that led to the discovery of what actually causes the disease. But things don’t tie in neatly and there are a lot of loose ends that baffle Murugan. Finally he decides he has to go to Calcutta and find out for himself what happened all those years back. Who was really responsible for cracking the malaria code? Was it really Sir Ronald Ross?

In Calcutta, ‘the city that has more secrets than any other,’ Murugan meets Urmila and Sonali, two young women associated with the press and working for the magazine ‘Calcutta’. Drawn by forces beyond her control, Urmila gets dragged deeper and deeper into Murugan’s endeavor to solve a puzzle that occurred more than a century back. In short order, Urmila learns about all the pieces of the puzzle from Murugan: about the uneducated woman Mangala who was a lab assistant at a Calcutta lab, and the boy Laakhen who had only four fingers on his left hand, and the shivering pigeons that Mangala beheaded and took blood from, and the chanting and smoke that surrounded Mangala when she cured an entire group of syphilis victims. Added to these seemingly related pieces was the story of the disappearance of several people – all last seen at a remote railway station in the village of Renupur.

Amitav gives the reader the pieces of the puzzle and it is quite a challenge to keep all the pieces in your mind while you are trying to figure out the mystery of the elusive Calcutta Chromosome. Whatever impression the book leaves on the reader, there is no denying that this thriller cannot be compared to any written before, because by combining medicine, technology, mysticism and suspense this novel is all by itself in a unique spot shared by none.

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