The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [32]
Then he gave the news his full attention. It seemed that a man from Trincomalee had been stopped because he had failed to give way in his old van to a police car with its siren going. (Actually the police in the car had been heading toward a place to eat lunch.) When they pulled him over, the police naturally looked around the van. That was when they caught him with a load of toasters, blenders, and other small domestic appliances, and no good explanation for how they came to be in his possession.
Ranjit had stopped with his spoonful of rice halfway to his mouth, just as the news reader mentioned the suspect’s name. Kirthis Kanakaratnam.
That left Ranjit worse off than before. He couldn’t place the name. It did sound vaguely familiar, but from where? School? His father’s temple? It could have been from almost anywhere, and try as he might, Ranjit could not fit a face to the name. A later news story, long after lunch, after Ranjit had nearly given up, said the suspect had left a wife and four small children behind him.
It really was not his business, Ranjit told himself. He wasn’t successful in convincing himself, though, because if he didn’t know for sure just who this Kirthis Kanakaratnam was, how could he know it wasn’t someone who had in some context been a friend?
That was why Ranjit called the police. He called their central headquarters number, and he did it from a phone in a part of the campus he rarely visited. The voice was a woman, not young, and not in the habit of giving information away. A prisoner named Kirthis Kanakaratnam? Yes, perhaps so. They had a good many persons held in one Colombo jail or another, and they didn’t always give their right names. Could the caller give more information about this person? The names of some of his associates, for example? And was the caller himself related to him? Or perhaps associated with him in some enterprise? Or—
Ranjit quietly hung the phone up and departed that area. He didn’t really think that a squad of Colombo police was likely to come racing down the hallway any minute. But he was also far from positive that they weren’t, and saw no reason to wait around to find out.
When Ranjit got back to his rooms that night, there was the next best thing to Gamini’s actual presence waiting for him, namely, an e-letter from London. (There was also a message that Ranjit’s father had called and wished to be called back—very good news, Ranjit thought, because at least the old man seemed willing to speak to him again…but, all the same, it was the e-letter from Gamini that he looked at first.)
Gamini was showing every sign of having a wonderful time in London. Just yesterday (he wrote) he had walked over to the campus of University College London because Madge had told him that there was something she wanted him to see. Well, it was interesting, all right, assuming you liked looking at dead—even long-dead—bodies, because what was there to see was the waxed and mummified corpse of the two-hundred-years-ago English utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. He was always there, Gamini said, but usually locked away in the wooden cabinet he called his “Auto-Icon.” As a special favor to Madge it had been unlocked for her by a smitten junior faculty member. This Bentham, Gamini went on to explain, had been a really ahead-of-his-time early-nineteenth-century thinker, had even once written a carefully thought out argument for extending tolerance—well, some tolerance, anyway—to homosexuals. Bentham was revolutionary, Gamini added, but he was also somewhat cautious. He didn’t publish the argument. He locked it away, and so it stayed for a century and a half, until someone finally put it into print in 1978.
By then Ranjit was getting tired of Jeremy Bentham, and a little curious about why Gamini was telling him so much. Could it be because Bentham had been one of the first significant figures to write with some sympathy about homosexuals? And if so, what was it that Gamini wanted Ranjit to understand about that subject? It certainly wasn’t that either of