My Brother

I had argued the point with them, insisting that I would do much better to hire an interpreter when I needed one. Verbal persuasion by Chandra during the day, and more powerful arguments by Ameera at night, had beaten me. I sat and looked at her, at the gorgeous dusky skin and midnight hair, and wondered how I had held out for so long. The odds against me had been overwhelming.

My original plan, to head for Cuttack the day I learned of its existence, had fallen apart as soon as I tried to act. I had made no allowance for the Indian sense of pace. Even the train tickets took twenty-four hours to arrive at the house.

While Chandra and Chatterji made arrangements for our trip I spent long impatient hours in the little pantry, pitting my wits against the vagaries of the Indian telephone system.

The telephone number that I was asking about for someone in Cuttack ? No, sir. It did not exist. A difficult operator insisted that it could not exist, had never existed — perhaps I was reading it wrongly to him? An hour of argument and re-calling to Cuttack revealed the existence of a second exchange, in the same province but not within the town.

I called the new exchange.

Triumph! The number had been listed for a Mr. Belur. But it had been taken out of use four months ago, and there was no new listing for that Belur. Computer companies in the same area where Mr. Belur had lived? Of course, sir, they would try to check it for me, but I had to remember that this was not the way that the directory was organized… the chance of success was small… the difficulty was very great…

I longed for an outstretched hand into which I could drop a little silver, but that time-tested method would have to wait until we got to Cuttack . All I could do from a distance was establish the names of half a dozen candidate companies that might possibly be co

Patience, Chandra told me. Patience is all in India .

Patience. I had to learn my own limitations. When we finally reached Cuttack and could begin our search, I was forced to revise my ideas about Ameera’s usefulness. She could wheedle cooperation and information out of the least obliging public servants. I could get nothing from them at all.

Cuttack was one of the Indian government’s new development areas. In the past ten years there had been a huge effort to set up advanced technology there — fiber optics, microprocessors, vapor deposition methods, and hyper-bubble memories. The plants were scattered like white rectangular play-blocks over the brown and green hillocks that lay west of the main city.

Taxis were hard to come by. Ameera snagged one at the railway station while a horde of noisy travellers shouted at the porters and each other, and we set off on our search. Since we looked at Leo’s notes together I had been through every emotion, but now that we had reached Cuttack my spirits had plummeted. The chances of tracking down Belur had to be low. Only Ameera’s bubbling enthusiasm kept me going.

Computek was our first stop (all the companies we visited had shu

Nothing there — not even evidence of technology development. The staff were suspicious. Were we perhaps inspectors from the Government over in New Delhi ? Ameera soothed their fears, but we gained no useful information. The pattern was repeated at Info-systems Design, Electro-mesh, 4-D Systems, Compu-controls, and Autodyne. I was ready to give up when we came to the shabby grey building on top of a hill eight miles outside the town, and I read the frayed wooden sign that a

“Belur?” said the man. He was all white teeth and cuffs, center-part hair, and oleaginous voice; the very model of a modern manager. “Rustum Belur?”

Ameera squeezed my arm — she knew how despondent I had been getting. I nodded. “I think that would be him. But as I understand it, he is no longer with your company?”

The man across the polished desk smiled and offered me an Indian cigarette. I had learned to refuse those on my first day in Calcutta . I shook my head.

“No longer with us?"’ He blew out a cloud of poisonous smoke. “That is certainly one way to put it, I suppose. He is not with anyone, eh? Not with anyone we can talk to.”

“Did he leave the area?”

“I should jolly well say so.” He coughed. “Jolly well say so. He is dead, you see — Rustum Belur was killed, four months ago. Most sad.” He smiled cheerfully. “Most sad indeed. A nice man.”

I sat there gaping, unable to think of anything at all to say. There goes another one! would not have been a socially acceptable utterance. Ameera helped out.

“Mr. Belur — how was he killed?”

Mr. Srinivasa stood up from his seat and went across to the window. “You see that building down the hill, where the cables run from over to our left? That is one of our laboratories. One night, Rustum Belur must have taken a short cut to his home — under the cable. Most irregular, of course, and we have told our employees not to do it.” He shrugged. “They will not listen — not my fault, you understand? He must have slipped and fallen across the high-voltage line. Srritt.” He rippled his hand through the air. “Twenty thousand volts. A deadly charge.

“We found him the following morning.” There was a cheerful gusto to his voice. “Fried like a maro fish. Jolly bad luck, eh?”

“Did he leave a family?” That seemed the only avenue left to us.

“Alas, no,” said Srinivasa happily. “He was not a person to mix well — not like you or me, eh?” He gave a knowing nod towards Ameera. “Mind you, he was a very intelligent man, and his visitors came from many places. But it was all work — nothing for a social life. You knew his work, eh?”

“A little.” I was ready to leave, but as I started to straighten up in my chair my body twisted to one side and dropped me heavily back to a sitting position. Srinivasa looked at me oddly.

“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Salkind?”

“Yes.” I played for time to regain control. “I was wondering just what work Mr. Belur was doing when he died. I had lost touch with him in the past year or two.”

“More of the same.” Srinivasa shrugged, but I detected in his ma

“The Belur Package?”

“He called it that to you?” He stubbed out his half-inch-long cigarette butt and happily accepted a new one from my packet, bought especially for our interviews. “Always the same talk, eh, always about the introsomatic chips? Jolly hard worker, but not too practical.”

I looked around us, at the evidence of past success and recent failure. It was a fair bet that Belur — “jolly hard worker” and much-visited scientist — had been the sparkplug for Bio-Electronic Systems. When he died, the operation had begun to run downhill. And Srinivasa found it hard to face that fact, like any manager who imagined the success of an organization was really his success.

“Do you have notes regarding the Belur Package?” It was my last hope, and a slim one.

“He did not keep good notes.” Srinivasa shook his head disapprovingly. “A good worker, but his habits were strange. Here late at night, then away all the next morning — jolly hard to run a lab efficiently, eh, when people will not keep regular work hours? He insisted that most of his work was better done at home.”

“He kept a lab there?”

“Not a real lab. It was in his house, equipped like a lab, but not you understand a real lab.” The expansive gesture around him at the clutter of dusty equipment suggested that Belur’s humble home efforts could not compare with the magnificence of our present surroundings. “Even though he was very rich,” he added after a second or two.