Tokyo Cancelled
Tokyo Cancelled
Rana Dasgupta
A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style to an energetically modern worldscape.Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories.Robert De Niro’s child, conceived in a Laundromat, masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people’s memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men’s hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of German cartographer.Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities – New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires – that grow in to a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.Dasgupta’s writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.
RANA DASGUPTA
Tokyo Cancelled
For my parents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Arrivals (#ulink_defcc5ce-d7da-54b7-b725-f344e640a658)
Chapter 2 - The Tailor: The First Story (#ulink_ea7075ee-5c29-5f50-a0b9-267b906dc444)
Chapter 3 - The Memory Editor: The Second Story (#ulink_a2be8fe3-4ad8-58e1-a6bf-259c84c31eca)
Chapter 4 - The Billionaire’s Sleep: The Third Story (#ulink_bbf83952-c20c-5364-bce7-aa4cd0b388ef)
Chapter 5 - The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker: The Fourth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 - The Store on Madison Avenue: The Fifth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 - The Flyover: The Sixth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 - The Speed Bump: The Seventh Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 - The Doll: The Eighth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 - The Rendezvous in Istanbul: The Ninth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 - The Changeling: The Tenth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 - The Bargain in the Dungeon: The Eleventh Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 - The Lucky Ear Cleaner: The Twelfth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 - The Recycler of Dreams: The Thirteenth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 - Departures (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ARRIVALS (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
THERE WAS CHAOS.
Will someone please explain why we are here?–What are we going to eat? Who has thought of that?–Who is in charge here? Let me speak to him!
A 747 had disgorged its 323 passengers into the middle of a vacant, snow-brushed tarmac expanse, left them to trudge across it through the cold and the floodlit glare to a terminus whose neon name was only illuminated in patches and anyway was in a language most of them could not read; had abandoned them, in short, in the Middle of Nowhere, in a place that was Free of Duty but also, much more importantly, devoid of any obvious egress, like a back corridor between two worlds, two somewheres, where people only alighted when something was seriously kaput with the normal eschatological machinery.
Do you realize I have a vital meeting tomorrow morning? I haven’t got time to be here!
Sir: we have already explained it to you several times. This snowstorm breaks all of Tokyo’s records. The city is blanketed, completely inaccessible. Do you understand? Absolutely no possibility of landing there. Everywhere in this hemisphere planes are lurching as we speak, U-turning, overnighting where they can. We cannot argue with the weather. These things happen.
Three hundred and twenty-three people clamoured for a hearing for their unique Woes. My husband is waiting for me at the airport. I’m only going to get one honeymoon. I have to be back in New York on Friday: my vacation is Over. Over. This cannot be happening. Heads in hands, bloodshot eyes towards heaven.
A queue formed, of sorts, at the one open desk where a man tried to hold off the snaking, spitting vitriol long enough to find a solution. We understand Madam it’s very late yes the little one looks quite unhappy please bear with us.
People checked for passports, money. Do Americans need a visa to be here?–What are the hotels like? Where can we sleep?–
What is the problem here?
The man stood on his chair. Hands raised to beat down the voices, you had to give it to him he wasn’t going to let himself get intimidated, Can you please listen?
I don’t know if any of you has read the newspapers recently but if you have you will know you’ve just landed up in the wrong place at the wrong time–latecomers to the world fair, no room at the inn. Everyone is in town right now and there isn’t a hotel room in the entire city. Well what were you expecting? Every world leader is here and ten thousand journalists and forty thousand demonstrators. Don’t you people watch the news? We’ve had water cannon and barbed wire and rubber bullets and all kinds of other frolics. In our streets! What I Am Trying To Say ladies and gentlemen is that the city is full to overflowing, getting proper accommodation is going to be a problem for you and there’s no point getting hysterical about it. We should be able to get you on a flight in the morning–the worst possible scenario is that you have to spend a few hours here and that, I am confident enough, is not going to kill you–but don’t worry, calm down! we are going to do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen.
The crowd detested him already and as he abused them in this manner a wave of foul language gushed from their several mouths, shivered and swelled and crashed over him full of lonely feelings and terrible thoughts. He was undeterred:
I would like you all to know that my wife is a travel agent and I have already informed her you are here and that you’d all like a place to stay for the night. She’s at home as we speak calling round all the hotels for you and trying to sort you out. We’ll do it first-come, first-served and we’ll try to get you in bed as soon as possible.
The place felt like an emergency ward. Captions on the departure board rustled frantically–TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED–and the packed baggage carousel squeaked like an anxious heartbeat monitor under the weight of hundreds of suitcases it had not been expecting.
You don’t understand. I need to get out of here right now. I was never supposed to be here. I’m presenting at a conference in eight hours.
No–excuse me all of you–excuse me!–sorry sir you’d better make your phone calls now. I don’t think it’s likely you’ll be anywhere but here in eight hours. Can you all try and remain calm please! Thank you!
Somebody made the discovery that mobile phones worked. Even here! The tumult diminuendoed into urgent private consultations and intimate reassurances: No I may not be there tonight, they’re telling us tomorrow now, Of course I’m safe no this place stinks but the people look OK. Yes tomorrow I promise I think you ought to warn Bob that he may be doing the presentation–yes get him out of bed for God’s sake!–the file is on my computer. My Documents. I love you too. Sir would you mind if I made a really quick call from your phone? It’s just that it’s really important.
OK good news ladies and gentlemen! We have ten double rooms in a hotel downtown. Yes Madam I think that’s a good idea there’s no point your little one staying up please go this way. Three star. Nine more people please! Sorry that’s the best we can do for now. We will call you all in the morning. By 8 a.m.
People filed out into the cold, foreign night, got into a minivan, were gone. ‘At least he looks as if he’s in control’ spread between people, maybe it’s best to just wait like he says. Wry smiles passed between strangers sharing their Why does it always happen to me!
If the company had sent me here I’d be in the Hilton…
It only happened when it was absolutely crucial that everything go smoothly, on the one day: that constant small-minded cattiness of the cosmos, the incompetence of people with insufficient awareness of the importance of Things who are unfortunately indispensable in the system, you have no choice but to depend on so many people who don’t know and don’t care.
We’ve just found a hotel out of town that can take eighty of you! This way! Quickly. Thank you. Fifty. You’re together? Seventy. Seventy-eight. Thank you. No I’m sorry Sir they told us strictly no more you’ll have to wait for the next place.
The crowd diminished slowly, the noise separated out from its hubbub into discrete conversations and exclamations. Ruminations. People were Taking Stock. Tokyo tomorrow night that means I miss the connection the next one is Thursday which means I have to spend a couple of days there God I’ve always wanted to see Tokyo! The snowstorm was like a wall across a highway that brought cruise control to a whiplash standstill: but as you thought about it there were ways around it, through it even, and the other possibilities started to seem more, well, felt. Fists and tempers were still shaken at the blatant injustice of it all, but around the airport hall the mutant seed of force majeure was already sprouting up through the edifices of cherished Plans, cracking the walls and floors until they crumbled in a cloud of dust which, as it cleared, revealed something new. Well anyway what can you do?–I think the insurance covered this.–We’ve just got to see what time we get out of here in the morning.
Buses and taxis bustled outside, headlights clipping the snow, and the man on the desk, phone cocked between shoulder and ear, hands busy on the keyboard, produced regular triumphant announcements: guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts and undocumented hotels that the global visitors had missed. It was late: lights went off in the Duty Free stores and the snack bar closed. Someone summarily extinguished CNN’s airport news service, and grandiose light boxes advertising American Express and The Economist flickered, and became dull. Middle-aged women with headscarves and mops started to trace epic shiny corridors from one end of the floor to the other, shaking themselves free of detritus–plastic cups, newspapers, baggage tags–each time they turned around. An assortment of almost unnoticeable people–who were those people?–settled down in various shadowy corners to sleep on vinyl chairs.
Thirteen people were left, muted by fatigue, able only to stand and try to follow the curlicue meanderings of the phone conversation that contained their future. Full too? OK. And no dice with the Sunshine Hotel. Yes, I remember. What other options do we have? Really. Yes I know what time it is. No I think you’re right. You’re sure there’s nothing else? OK. Thank you so much. Thank you. I’ll see you later. He put down the phone slowly, tenderly.
Ladies and gentlemen I apologize for the time you’ve had to wait here, you’ve been very patient. Now I’m afraid that there doesn’t seem to be a single place left for you people to stay. We really have tried everywhere but as I said to you earlier it’s not a good time to be looking right now. I haven’t got anything left to suggest. I’d invite you all to spend the night at my place but unfortunately my wife and I have only a one-room apartment and I’m not sure that you’d be very comfortable there. So I think that–I’m really sorry about this–you’re going to just have to do the best you can right here. Now the good news is–I’ve just got the schedule confirmed–your flight is leaving at 09.55. The snowstorm has already subsided in Tokyo. Check-in time is 7.30. So it’s really just a few hours. I’m really sorry.
It wasn’t his fault. No point making a fuss. This place was depressing and dead but what could you do? He’d tried his best. Just a few hours, as he said. He picked up his jacket and left. Good night. Good night. Night.
The baggage carousels were still and silent, and in the half-light there stood security people with guns and military uniforms. The great windows of the building revealed nothing but blackened copies of the hall where they stood, with a huddle of thirteen in each one. They felt an inexplicable need to stay close, as if during the reconstitution of themselves around this new Situation a sort of kinship had emerged. They moved towards the chairs like atoms in a molecule, no closer but also no further away than their relationship dictated.
They sat. Wearied smiles were exchanged. An American woman spoke. I’m going to see what the little girls’ room has to offer. Another woman joined her. Everyone faced each other on rows of chairs, three sides of a square.–I was supposed to be on my way to Sydney by now. My brother’s wedding. Maybe I’ll still make it.–Everyone had a story.
(One man watched in fascination as, in the distance, an astounding, prehistoric kind of thing, a land mollusc, a half-evolved arthropod, all claws and wing cases, limped slowly from one side of the hall to the other. An insect, surely, but from here it looked the size of a rat. No one else seemed to notice.)
The two women returned with water bottles and packets of snack food. The guards got us these. It’s something, anyway. Toilets are OK if anyone was wondering.
You know this is the first night I have spent away from my wife in fifteen years of marriage. Can you imagine? (A Japanese man with his tie loosened.) Every night for fifteen years I have slept next to her. It feels strange to think of her lying alone on one side of the bed right now. Lop-sided. If she only knew I am spending the night with so many new friends–and so many pretty ladies!–boy what would she think! Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy! The first night I ever spend away and here I am staying up through the whole night! This is wild.
I haven’t done this for years.
There was little to say, but an undeniable warmth. People passed round peanuts. A large middle-aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face accepted the last cigarette of the backpacker girl next to him and they smoked slowly, occasionally dropping ash into the empty Marlboro box she cupped in her hand. No one spoke. The guards dozed with rifles sticking up between their legs.
You know friends I don’t think we know each other well enough to sit in silence. Have to go through a lot before you can do that. But we shouldn’t ignore each other. Don’t you agree? Let me make a humble suggestion–maybe you don’t agree–but I was thinking just wondering to myself: Does anyone know any stories?
When I was a student we used to tell stories in the evenings. No money for anything else! I’d love to hear some stories again. It calms you down, you think of other worlds. And before long we’ll all be ready to check in for our flight. What do you say?
I don’t know any stories. I’m not very good at that kind of thing.
But everyone felt it was good there was talking.
Look sir you’re not going to tell me that! Everyone knows stories! I just told you I slept in the same bed as my wife every night for the last fifteen years in the same bedroom of the same flat in the same suburb of Tokyo–and look at all you different people! You just have to tell me how you travel to work every morning in the place where you live and for me it’s a fable! it’s a legend! Sorry I am tired and a little stressed and this is not how I usually talk but I think when you are together like this then stories are what is required.
Someone spoke: I have a story I can tell.
Simple, just like that.
THE TAILOR The First Story (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
NOT SO LONG ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim.
One summer, the usual round of private parties and prostitutes became too tedious for Ibrahim and he decided to go on a voyage around the provinces of the kingdom, ‘to see how those villagers spend all their damned time’. So he packed clothes and American one-dollar bills (for letting fly from the windows of his jeep) and set off with his young courtier friends in a jostling pack of father-paid cars, whooping and racing.
Despite themselves, the young men fell silent when the ramshackle streets of the outskirts of the city finally gave way to open countryside. The smooth, proud highways built under the reign of Ibrahim’s grandfather began to loop up into the hills and, as the morning mists cleared, the city boys looked out on spectacular scenes of mountains and forests. For several hours they drove.
By early afternoon they had travelled a great distance without a single halt, and as they approached a small town Ibrahim pulled off the road and stopped. The scene was all polo shirts and designer jeans amid the slamming of car doors, the stretching of limbs, the pissing behind bushes–and the townsfolk quickly assembled to find out who these visitors were. ‘Certainly they are film stars come to make videos like on MTV,’ they said to each other as the band of young men strode onto the main square of the town, sun glaring from oversized belt buckles and Italian sunglasses. Goats and chickens whined and clucked their retreats, as if to clear the set.
On the minds of the young men was food; and very soon orders had been placed, chairs brought from front rooms and the local inn, and they were sitting sipping coconut juice in the shade of a wall. Around the square, the whole town stood and watched. Children stared, shop owners came out onto the streets to see what was going on–and a number of youths who were no younger or older than these visitors stood wondering who the heroes could be, and committing to memory every gesture, accoutrement, and comb-stroke.
The food was brought and Ibrahim and his companions began to eat vigorously. The boldest of the villagers stepped forward and addressed them,
‘Please, kind Sirs, tell us: Who are you?’
None of the courtiers knew what to say. Which was more sophisticated: to tell the truth, or to remain silent?
Ibrahim himself spoke.
‘We have come from far away, and we are very grateful for your kindnesses.’
What a fine answer that was! The local people felt their civic pride swell, and the prince’s companions thought once again to themselves, ‘That is why I am me and he is a prince.’ As women brought more and more food, the sun’s rays seemed to glow more yellow with the harmony that could exist between these two groups who seemed to have so little in common.
The meal was over; and with much wiping of hands and mouths the party left their plates and large piles of dollars behind and began to explore the narrow streets of the town, followed by a crowd of excited townsfolk.
They saw small houses with children playing and women sweeping, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables, and shops of shoemakers, butchers, and carpenters. Finally, at the end of an alleyway, they came to a little store hung out front with robes and dresses: the tailor.
‘Let’s see what this fellow has to offer,’ said Ibrahim. A bell rang as they opened the door, and they pushed past it into a gloomy room overflowing with clothes. The tailor rushed forward to greet them.
‘Come in, come in gentlemen, plenty of room, please!’ He hastily pushed things out of the way to make space for them to stand. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘What is your name, tailor?’ asked Ibrahim.
‘Mustafa, at your service, Sir.’
‘You live here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you make?’
‘I make anything and everything that can be worn. The people here are poor, so mostly it is simple work. Cotton dresses for the ladies. Shirts for the men. But I can see you are grand visitors. I will show you something special.’
He went to the back of his store and took out a large packet wrapped in brown paper. The young men drew around as he reverentially laid it out on the workbench and untied the string. He slowly unwrapped it, and there, inside, glowing with pent-up light, was the most magnificent silk robe any of them had ever seen. Cut in the traditional style, it was intricately patterned, delicately pleated, and slashed on the sleeves and flared skirts to reveal exquisite gold brocade beneath. The web of stitches that covered the whole robe, holding it in its perfect shape, was entirely invisible, and all the sections fitted together without a single break in the pattern.
The men stared, taken aback at this unexpected splendour.
‘This is a fine piece of work, tailor. There are too few people in our country who have respect for these old traditions,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Thank you, Sir. This is the achievement of my lifetime. It has taken me years to save the money to make this. It was my own little dream.’
Ibrahim gently felt the textures of the shimmering robe.
‘Tailor, I would like you to make me a robe even more magnificent than this.’
Ibrahim’s companions were amazed. Was he in earnest? They had never seen this seriousness in him.
More amazed still was the tailor himself.
‘I am deeply honoured, Sir, at your request. But may I ask first–please do not misunderstand me–who you are and whether you are sure you can afford what you ask for. These materials come from far away and are now very rare. I will need to travel to meet with merchants. They will have to send out orders far and wide. It will take six months, and–’
‘Do not worry. I am Ibrahim, eldest son of King Saïd. I will see that your expenses are covered and you yourself are handsomely paid for your pains. Please embroider the robe with the royal stag and crescent moon, and deliver it to the royal palace when it is finished.’
The tailor was moved.
‘Your Highness, I will do what you ask. You will not be disappointed. I will make the most splendid robe you have ever seen, and I will bring it myself to your palace.’
‘I thank you, tailor. I have every confidence in you.’
And with that, they left.
For several weeks the tailor did not sleep as he made the arrangements for the new robe. First of all he needed a bank loan to cover the enormous costs of the materials he was to buy. Luckily, news of the fabulous order had immediately spread across the town and the quiet tailor had acquired a new fame. Within a few days he had managed to find funds and take on an assistant to help with the work. He set off immediately on a tour of the surrounding towns to look at the finest fabrics, and when nothing was satisfactory he sent the incredulous merchants away to find better. Normally a thrifty and reclusive man, the tailor suddenly became bold and extravagant in the accomplishment of this fantastic project. He bought books of old artworks to ensure he had understood every nuance of the traditional styles. The usually silent alleyway outside his shop became crowded with the vans and cars of merchants bringing samples and deliveries. The racks inside were packed away to make space for the accumulating piles of luxurious silks and brocades.
He meditated on the antique familiarity of the royal crest until it came to life in his head as a magnificent design: while the stars circled at the edges and a grand city twinkled in the distance, the whole chain of animal life arranged itself among the trees to gaze upon the stag who stood alone in a clearing, silvery in the silken light of the crescent moon.
For days at a time the tailor would not move from his workbench as he drew and cut, pinned and sewed. New lamps were brought in to allow him to carry out the intricate work at night, and with astonishing rapidity the flimsy panels of silk assembled themselves into a robe as had not been seen since the days of the old court. After four months the job was finished, and the robe was carefully laid out in the workshop, complete with its own shirt, pantaloons, and matching slippers. The tailor rented a small van, loaded up his precious cargo, and set out for the capital city.
The skies were full of the radiant expectation of morning when the tailor made his approach to the royal palace. In the busy streets trestle tables were juddered and clacked into readiness, and a procession of vans spilled forth the goods that would festoon their surfaces: sparkling brassware, colourful fabrics, beeping alarm clocks, and novelties for tourists. People were everywhere. Men smoked and talked by the side of the road, waiting to see how the day would progress, village women found patches of ground to arrange displays of woven bedspreads and wicker baskets, and boys hawked newspapers full of morning conversation.
As he drove through the unfamiliar streets the tailor felt elated by the crowds. ‘What wonders can be achieved here!’ he thought to himself. ‘Everywhere there are great buildings housing unheard-of forms of human pursuit, new things being made and bought and sold, and people from all over the world, each with their own chosen destination. Even the poor know they are treading on a grander stage: they look far into the future and walk with purpose. What clothes might I have made had I spent my life here!’
The road leading to the royal residence was generous and pristine, with lines of trees and fountains converging in the distance on the domed palace that already quivered in the heat of the morning. The tailor stared at the big cars with diplomatic license plates, marvelled at the number of people that worked just to keep this street beautiful and clean. He arrived at the palace.
At the entrance, two guards signalled to him to stop. Their uniforms were tight-fitting, made of fabrics the tailor had never seen, and packed with a fascinating array of weapons and communications devices. ‘What is your purpose?’ The tailor explained.
‘Do you have any paperwork? A purchase order from the palace?’ ‘No.’ The tailor hesitated. ‘It wasn’t like that, you see–’ ‘Every delivery must have a signed purchase order from the appropriate department. Go away and obtain the necessary documentation.’ The tailor explained his story again. ‘Please inform Prince Ibrahim that I am here. He is expecting me. My name is Mustafa the tailor. He has ordered a silk robe from me.’
‘Please leave at once and do not come peddling to the king’s palace.’ ‘Will you speak to the prince? He will remember me…’ But the guards would listen no more. The tailor had no option but to get back in his van and drive away.
He camped in the van and came every day to the palace to wait outside the gates. The guards proving intransigent, he scanned the windows for signs of the prince’s presence, looked in every arriving car for any of the faces that had come to his shop that day, tried to imagine how he would get a message into the palace. All to no avail.
Where could he go? He owed more money than he had seen in his whole life, and it was unlikely that anyone except the prince would buy such an extravagant, outmoded robe. All he could do was to wait until someone vindicated his story.
He ate less every day in order to save his last remaining coins, and he became dirty and unkempt. By day he sat and tracked every coming and going with eyes that grew hollow with waiting. By night he had nightmares in which the prince and his band of laughing noblemen walked right by him as he lay oblivious with sleep.
The van became an expense he could not support. He drove into the desert to hide the robe, which he wrapped carefully in paper, placed in an old trunk, and buried in a spot by some trees. And he sent the vehicle back.
He became a fixture by the palace gates. The guards knew him and tolerated his presence as a deluded, but harmless, fool. Passers-by threw him coins, and some stopped to listen to his story of when the royal prince had once come to visit him and how he would one day come again. He became used to every indignity of his life happening in the full view of tourists and officials.
At night when the streets were free he wandered the skein of the city. His face shadowed by a blanket, he trudged under spasmodic street lights, and gazed into shadowy shop windows where mannequins stood like ghosts in their urban chic. Everything seemed to be one enormous backstage, long abandoned by players and lights, where dusty costumes and angular stage sets lay scattered amid a dim and eerie silence. There danced in his head the memory of a search, a saviour, but it too was like the plot of a play whose applause had long ago become silence.
Years passed. He knew not how many.
One night, as he walked past a cheap restaurant where taxi drivers and other workers of the night sat under a fluorescent glow shot through with the black orbits of flies, he saw that there were some unaccustomed guests eating there. A crowd of men sat eating and drinking and laughing with beautiful women, all of them in clothes not from this part of town. And with a shock that roused him from years of wearied semi-consciousness, he realized that one of them was Prince Ibrahim.
‘Your Highness!’ cried the tailor, rushing into the restaurant and flinging himself to the floor. Everyone looked up at the bedraggled newcomer, and bodyguards immediately seized him to throw him out. But the prince interjected, looking round at his friends and laughing, ‘Wait! Let us see what this fellow wants!’
Everyone fell silent and looked at the tailor as he stood in the centre of the room, fluorescent lights catching the wispy hair on the top of his head.
‘Your Highness, many years ago you came to my tailor’s shop in a small town far from here and ordered a silk robe with your royal insignia of the stag and crescent moon. I spent four months making the finest robe for you, but when I came to your palace no one believed my story or allowed me to make my delivery. I wrote you letters and waited for you day and night, but all to no avail. I have spent all the years since then living in the gutter and waiting for the day I would find you again. And now I appeal to your mercy: please help me.’
Everyone looked at Ibrahim. ‘Is he speaking the truth?’ one of the men asked.
The prince looked irately at the tailor, saying nothing. Another man spoke up.
‘I was with you that day, Prince. The tailor’s story is true. Do you not remember?’
The prince did not look at him. Slowly he said: ‘Of course I remember.’
He continued to stare at the insignificant figure in the centre of the room. ‘But this is not the man. He is an impostor. The tailor I saw that day never brought what I ordered. Get this cheat out of here.’
And the bodyguards threw the tailor into the street.
But the prince’s companion, whose name was Suleiman, felt sorry for him. As the party of men and women heated up behind steamed-up windows and its separate elements began to coalesce, he sneaked out to catch up with him.
‘Sir! Stop!’ The tailor turned round, and Suleiman ran up to meet him.
‘Allow me to present myself. My name is Suleiman, and I was present when the prince came to your shop several years ago. I feel partially responsible that you are in this situation. Tell me your story.’
Standing in the dark of the street, the tailor told him everything. Suleiman was much moved. Overhead, the night sky glistened with stars like sequins.
‘Listen Mustafa, I would like to buy this robe from you myself. I know it will be an exquisite object, and I feel unhappy at the idea that you will continue to suffer as you are now. Take my car, fetch the robe, bring it to my house, and I will pay you for it.’
In the splendid steel surrounds of a black Mercedes the tailor flew along the smooth tarmac of the national highway as it cut into the rippling desert and its lanes reduced from six to four, to two. He watched the prudently designed cars of the national automobile company flash past each other in 180-degree rectitude, and, fighting off the drowsiness of the heat and the hypnotic landscape in order to concentrate on the road, he looked out for the lone group of trees under which he had deposited the trunk.
When at last the Mercedes came to rest at the spot, he was surprised to see that there was a crowd of people there. It looked as if some sort of major construction was going on. Muddy jeeps were parked around the area, and under the blinding glare of the sun a team of men painstakingly measured out the land with poles and ropes while local people stood around and watched. Terror wrung the tailor’s organs as he approached one of the spectators to ask what was happening.
‘You don’t know? A great discovery has been made here! A poor villager found a trunk containing a magnificent silk robe right in this spot. He took it to the city where an antique specialist identified it as royal ceremonial wear from the eighteenth century. He sold it to a French museum, who paid seven million dollars! Now everyone is looking for the rest of the treasure!’
What could the tailor say? Which of these people who laboured all around him in pursuit of some ancient hoard would believe his unlikely story? All he could do was to climb slowly back into the Mercedes and return to the city.
Eventually the car returned to the leafy streets it knew well, all iron railings and columns, and the tailor found himself climbing the stone steps to the mighty front door of Suleiman’s residence. He was greeted by his would-be patron’s wife, who welcomed him warmly, sat him down and surrounded him with a plush arrangement of mint tea and sweetmeats. Finally Suleiman himself entered.
‘You return empty-handed, tailor! How could this be?’
The tailor told him what he had found. Suleiman, looked at him with some uncertainty.
‘How do I know that there ever was a robe?’
The tailor had no answer.
The three of them sat in a tense silence that was flecked only with the occasional sound of cup on saucer. Finally the tailor got up to leave. Suleiman took him aside.
‘My good fellow. You do seem honest enough, but given the circumstances, I don’t know if I can really help you. Here’s some money for your board and food. I hope your lot improves.’
Once a year in that land there was a festival whose name roughly translates as the ‘Day of Renewal’. This was an ancient custom, a day of merrymaking and of peace between all citizens. Gifts were given to children, prisoners were set free, and there were public feasts. All the royal residences were opened up to the general public, who could enjoy food and music in the gardens. Everyone was happy on that day: there was handshaking in the streets between strangers, flags fluttered gaily from every rooftop, and the sky became thick with kites. Of late, foreign corporations wishing to show their commitment to the nation had become particularly extravagant in their support for this festival. Pepsi gave out free drink in all public places, Ford selected ‘a worthy poor family’ to receive the gift of its latest model, and Citibank surprised its ATM customers with cash prizes given out at random throughout the day. And, in the afternoon, the king would hear the cases of those who were in need of redress.
The tailor came to the palace early, but there was already a row of aggrieved citizens waiting. As each one arrived, a kindly attendant noted down the details of the case. Then a bailiff called them, one by one. At length, it was the tailor’s turn.
At the far end of the vast marble room, the king sat on a throne surmounted by a canopy of silk and jewels. Down either side sat rows of learned men. To the right of the king was Prince Ibrahim. His blue pinstriped suit contrasted elegantly with his sandstone face, on which a shapely beard was etched like the shadow of butterfly wings.
‘Approach, tailor,’ said the king patiently. ‘Tell us your matter.’
Pairs of bespectacled eyes followed the tailor as he walked across the echoing expanse towards the throne in the new shoes he had bought for the occasion. He stood for a moment trying to collect himself. And then, once again, he told his story.
As the king listened, he became grave.
King Saïd believed that the simple goodness and wisdom of village people was the best guarantee of the future prosperity and moral standing of the country. The possibility that his own son might have taken it upon himself to tread down this small-town tailor was therefore distressing. The prince’s lack of constancy was a continual source of disquiet for the king, and the tailor’s narrative unfortunately possessed some degree of verisimilitude. On the other hand, he received many claims of injustice every day and most turned out, on inspection, to be false.
As the tailor finished, he spoke thus:
‘This is a case of some difficulty, tailor. There is much here that it is impossible for me to verify. What say you, my son?’
‘As you know, my Lord and Father, I have the greatest sympathy with the needy of our land. But his story is preposterous.’
‘Is it possible that you could have failed to recall the events of which the tailor speaks?’
‘Of course not.’
King Saïd pondered.
‘Tailor, our decision in this case will hinge on your moral character. It will not be possible today for us to verify the details of what happened so long ago, the fate of the clothes you say were made, or your financial situation. I am therefore going to ask you to demonstrate your moral worth by telling us a story. According to our traditions.’
Utter silence descended on the room, and all watched the tailor, expectantly.
‘Your Highness, I have now been in this capital city for some time. And I recently met another tailor who told me the following tale.
‘There once came to his shop a wealthy man who was about to be married. This man ordered a luxurious set of wedding clothes. The tailor was honoured and overjoyed and went out to celebrate with his family.
‘It so happened that the bridegroom had a lover, a married woman from the city. Each visit she made to him he vowed would be the last. But he never seemed to be able to broach the subject of their rupture before their clothes and their words had dissolved between them and they were left only with their lovemaking.
‘Ignorant of this, the tailor began to order the finest fabrics for the wedding clothes. But as he set to work on the new garments, the cloth simply melted away as he cut it. Again and again he chalked out designs–but each time the same thing happened, until all of the valuable cloth had disappeared.
‘When the bridegroom came to collect the clothes he was furious to discover they were not ready, and demanded an explanation.
‘“I think the explanation lies with you,” replied the tailor. “Since your wedding clothes refused to be made, I can only suppose you are not ready to wear them. Tell me this: what colour are the eyes of your bride-to-be?”
‘The bridegroom thought hard, but the image of his lover stood resolutely between him and the eyes of his betrothed, and he was unable to answer.
‘“Next time you come to me for clothes,” said the tailor, “make sure you are prepared to wear them.”
‘With that, the young man left the tailor, called off his marriage, and left the city.’
The tale hung in the air for a while, and dispersed.
‘What do you say, scholars, to the tailor’s story?’ asked the king.
‘Sire, it is a fine story, constructed according to our traditions, and possessing all the thirteen levels of meaning prized in the greatest of our writings.’
‘My son, what do you think?’
‘There is no doubt,’ replied the prince, ‘that this fellow is accomplished in the realm of fantasy.’
The king looked pained.
‘I myself feel that the tailor has proved himself to be a man of the greatest integrity and probity. Such a man will never seek to advance himself through untruth. Tailor, I can see there has been a series of culpable misunderstandings as a result of which you have suffered greatly. Tell me what you would like from us.’
‘Sire, I am sunk so low that all I can ask for is money.’
‘Consider it done. We shall settle all your debts. Please go with this man, my accountant Salim. He will tell you what papers you need to provide and will give you all the necessary forms to fill in. We are heartily sorry for the difficulties you have had to encounter. Go back to your village and resume your life.’ Mustafa the tailor was anxious to leave the city, whose streets had by now become poisoned with his memories. But he did not wish to return to his village. It seemed too small to contain the thoughts he now had in his head.
He took up residence in a distant seaside town where he made a living sewing clothes and uniforms for sailors. In the afternoons, when his work was done, he would sit by the shore looking into the distance, and tell stories to the masts of boats that passed each other on the horizon.
Faces were in shadow. The ceiling lights were far above their heads, and not all of them still worked. You could not really tell what people were thinking. Perhaps the game was slightly outlandish, perhaps it was not for everyone. Some would surely fall asleep–or pretend to do so. There would be a loner who would stroll off, unnoticed, to the gloomy recesses of the arrivals hall only to discover there a listless and yet thoroughly absorbing interest in the health warnings posted on the wall, the rows of leaflets outlining visa requirements, tobacco and alcohol allowances, and the lists of objects prohibited in hand luggage. Surely!–for in everyone’s head there were still so many Issues of purely private concern that twitched distractingly, that flickered behind the glass of vacant stares.
She spoke with authority:
Next!
She was broad and tall, she sat back in her seat with some abandon, hands on the back of her head, elbows wide. The kind of person who liked groups, not afraid to rally people she had only just met. There was an ease about her: she had already taken off her high heels. There were smiles all around but she did not give up.
Who will be next?
THE MEMORY EDITOR The Second Story (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
IN THE CITY of London there was once a wealthy stockbroker who had three sons. Even when they were all still young, everyone could see that while the first two sons were able and hardworking, the youngest, Thomas, had his head in the clouds.
Thomas liked nothing better than to bury himself in history books and read of how the world was before. He thrilled at the struggles of Romanovs and Socialists and put his face close to black-and-white photographs of firebrand Lenin and little haemophiliac Alexei, trying to envisage the lives that hid behind the scratched surfaces and foreign-seeming faces. He read of places that were now summer holiday destinations where millions were killed just a few decades ago, and wondered at how death had in that short time become so exotic. He could never quite become accustomed to the idea that people were growing old long ago when the world was so much younger; so he knew he had not truly understood the scale of time.
One day Thomas sat in his customary reading seat in the Islington Public Library, not two minutes from the monumental black front door of his father’s Georgian townhouse that sat in a serene row of precisely similar houses on Canonbury Square. He read of the slow rot in the Ottoman Empire, of schemes hatched in Berlin, London, and St Petersburg to divide the imperial carrion, and of Bulgarian and Romanian revolutionaries studying poetry and explosives in Paris. The library was still save for a few occasional page-turners and the strenuous silence of the librarian who wheeled a cart of books and re-shelved them under Crime and Local Interest. Thomas thought of Thrace and Thessaly.
An old woman entered the library and sat down next to him. She lowered herself slowly into her seat and began to lay out things: a raincoat (on the back of her chair), a handbag, an umbrella in a nylon sleeve, a stick, a set of keys, a Tupperware lunchbox. The ritual was so deliberate that Thomas could not shut it out of his head, and he wished she had not chosen that particular place.
He tried to concentrate on sensational insurgencies and brutal massacres but now she had unwrapped the tin foil from her egg sandwiches and the smell was banishing the past. NO EATING said the big bright sign with the green logo of the Borough of Islington: Thomas looked hopefully around for someone who might enforce the rule, but suddenly there was no one else there. The old woman began to mash her bread noisily with toothless gums and he stole at her what was calculated to be an intimidating glance. He saw that she was blind.
‘I can see’–she hesitated, as if playing with his thoughts–‘you don’t like me being here.’ She spoke loudly, oblivious to the silence of the library. Thomas felt ashamed. She was fragile and tiny.
‘No it’s not that. It’s just–’
‘You don’t think I should eat egg sandwiches in a library. Luckily there’s no one here to catch me!’ She shot him a conspiratorial grin. ‘And anyway, a blind woman is not likely to drop her mayonnaise on the pages of a book, is she?’ Her eyes were like marble.
‘You are reading about the past. Making mental notes of dates and names, fitting together all the little things you know about a place and a time. Trying to remember what happened long ago. But here’s a question. Can you remember what will happen? In the future?’
She seemed to expect an answer.
‘Clearly not,’ Thomas ventured. ‘Remembering is by definition about the past.’
‘Why so? Is to remember not simply to make present in the mind that which happens at another time? Past or future?’
‘But no one can make present that which hasn’t happened yet.’
‘How do you know the future hasn’t happened yet?’
‘That’s the definition of the future!’ Thomas’s voice betrayed frustration. ‘The past has happened. It is recorded. We all remember what happened yesterday. The future has not happened. It is not recorded anywhere and we cannot know it.’
‘Isn’t that tautology? Remembering is the recollection of the past. The past is that which can be recollected. Well let me tell you that I am unusual among people in being able to remember what has not happened yet. And the distinction between past and future seems less important than you might imagine.’
Thomas stared at her. He assumed madness.
‘For you, the present is easy to discern because it is simply where memory stops. Memories hurtle out of the past and come to a halt in the now. The present is the rockface at the end of the tunnel where you gouge away at the future.’
There was still no one else in the library. They talked naturally, loudly.
‘I, on the other hand, was born with all my memories, rather as a woman is born with all her eggs. I often forget where the present is because it is not, as it is for you, the gateway to the future. My future is already here.’
‘So tell me, if I am to believe you, what I am going to do tonight, when I leave this library.’
‘You make a common mistake. I didn’t say that I know everything that will ever happen. I said only that I already possess all my memories. (And they run out in so short a time! I have lived through nearly all of them, and now there remain just a few crumbs in the bottom of the bag.) Still, I do have more memories of you.
You will spend your life in the realm of the past You will fail entirely to keep up with the times But your wealth will make your father seem poor A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines.’
Thomas thought over the words.
‘What does all that mean? Can you explain?’
The old woman gave a flabby chuckle.
‘Surely you can’t expect me to tell you more than that? Isn’t it already encouraging enough?’
She put the lid on her lunch box.
‘Anyway. It is time for me to take my leave.’ Her possessions found their way back into her bag and she stood up, slowly and uncertainly. ‘But I have just remembered what will happen to you tonight. My mind is more blurred than it once was. You are going to have an encounter with Death. Don’t worry–you will survive.’ She smiled at him–almost affectionately–and departed.
Thomas could not return to his books. He sat for a long time reciting the woman’s words to himself and wondering about his future. He left the library in a daydream and wandered home. Full of his thoughts he rang at the wrong bell. A hooded figure answered the door, black robes billowing around its knees and only shadows where its face should have been. The figure carried a scythe. Made of plastic. Thomas remembered it was Halloween.
Not long afterwards, Thomas’s father received a big promotion. He worked for a small but thriving investment firm in the City that had made a name for itself in private financial services. He had joined the firm twelve years ago from Goldman Sachs and had from the outset consistently delivered better returns to his clients than any of his peers. Tall and attractive, with an entirely unselfconscious sense of humour, he also had a talent for entertaining the high net-worth individuals that were the firm’s clients. Now the board had asked him to take the place of the retiring managing director. He had agreed unhesitatingly.
In celebration of this advancement, Thomas’s father took the entire family to the Oxo Tower for dinner. They drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate palaces that lined the other side of the Thames. Thomas thought his father looked somehow more imposing even than before. His mother had put on a new sequined dress and talked about the differences in the dream lives of modern and ancient Man as described in the book she was reading about Australian Aborigines. Champagne was poured. They all clinked glasses.
‘So here’s to the new boss,’ proclaimed Thomas’s father.
‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said his wife, kissing him on the cheek.
‘I can tell you boys: investing is a great business. A great discipline. It forces you to become exceptional. Most people are just interested with what’s going on now. Getting a little more, perhaps. But basically turning the wheels. When you’re in investment you have to be completely sceptical about the present, aware that there is nothing that cannot change, no future scenario that can be discounted. You exist on a different plane, predicting the future, making your living by working out how other people will be making their living tomorrow. And not only that, but making that future materialize by investing in it. There’s no sphere of knowledge that’s not relevant to this job. It might be water, it might be toys; it could be guns or new kinds of gene. The whole universe is there.’
His wife looked lovingly at him through mascara-thick lashes. Sculpted starters were brought that sat in the middle of expansive plates and seemed inadequate to the three brothers.
‘So tell me, boys–you’re all becoming men now–what is it you’d like to do with your lives? What is your ambition?’
The eldest spoke first.
‘Father, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I think after I’ve finished at the LSE I’d like to get a couple of years’ experience in one of the big management consulting firms. I think that would give me a broad exposure to a lot of different industries. Then I can do an MBA–maybe in the US. At that point I’d be in a really good position to know what direction to move in. But what I’d really like to do–I say this now without much experience–is to run my own business.’
‘Sounds good, son. Make sure you don’t get too programmatic about things. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come at really inconvenient times. If you’ve planned your life out for the next twenty years you may not be able to make yourself available for them. Next!’
The second son spoke.
‘Father, I want to work for one of the big banks. The money industry is never going to be out of fashion. I can’t see the point of working in some shoe-string business for just enough to live on. The only respectable option to me seems to be to work damn hard and earn serious money–and retire when you’re forty.’
‘Well I’m forty-nine and I haven’t retired yet! Remember that it’s not enough simply to desire money very much. You have to be good at earning it. But I’m sure you will be. So finally to young Tom. What about you?’
Thomas looked around at his whole family, his eyes glinting with champagne.
‘I will surpass you all,’ he said. ‘I will make you all look like paupers.’
The paterfamilias smile vanished.
‘Oh really, Thomas. And how are you going to do that?’
‘You will see. One day you will see my mountain of jewels.’
His father’s voice became unpleasant.
‘Thomas, I’m just about sick of your stupid talk and your irresponsible, lazy behaviour. How dare you talk to me like that when you haven’t got the first idea of the world–especially on a night like this!’
His mother continued.
‘Your father and I never stop condoning what you do, tolerating your insolence and absent-mindedness. But sometimes I think we go too far. Do you realize who your father is? He is not just some average man who can be talked to like that. I don’t know how a member of your father’s and my family came to act like you. Think like you.’
Thomas’s brothers looked under the table. Waiters glided around in practised obliviousness. ‘Sometimes the future is not just an extension of the past according to rules we all know,’ said Thomas. ‘Look at revolutions, the collapse of empires. I think that something will happen to all of you that you have not even thought about. And you will not have devoted one minute of your lives to preparing yourselves for it. I don’t even know what it will be. But I know it will happen.’
The silence that followed was the silence of Thomas’s father’s rage. When he spoke it was with a self-restraint that burned white.
‘Thomas, when we go back home tonight I want you to pack your things and get out of our house. I will not have some mutant element in our home. Our family will not be abused by someone who is ungrateful, someone who likes thinking about the destruction of his brothers and parents. You will get out. Do you understand?’
Thomas nodded slowly, amazed and aghast that things had gone this far.
His father left the table and did not come back for half an hour. No one spoke as they drove home.
The family went to bed with raw feelings and empty stomachs. Thomas’s mother whispered to him that they would discuss all this in the morning. But Thomas could not bear the idea of waiting for such a discussion. He lay still until he could hear no movement and then silently got up, packed some clothes by torchlight into a school sports bag, and crept downstairs. He took two antique silver picture frames he had once helped his father choose for his mother’s birthday in a gallery on Ladbroke Grove, a gold pocket watch that was on display in the drawing room, and his father’s state-of-the-art SLR camera that had lain untouched in its wrappings for the last year. He disabled the burglar alarm, undid the locks on the heavy oak front door, eased it open, and stepped out.
The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes. Thomas wandered aimlessly, up to the point where gentility broke and the streets opened up around King’s Cross station. He bought a bag of greasy chips in an all-night kebab shop and sat in his coat on a bar stool at a narrow strip of tabletop looking out through his own reflection at the sparse traffic of taxis and night shelter regulars. He studied a much-faded poster of Istanbul hanging on the wall next to him, the skies above the Hagia Sofia unnaturally turquoise and the cars on the streets forty years old.
He left and wandered aimlessly around the station. It was late November, and morning came before the sun. Timetables took hold again as commuters arrived in waves and departed in buses and taxis. Eventually it grew light, and the shops opened.
Thomas went to a pawn shop. He removed the photographs from the frames and placed his items on the counter. The shop owner offered him £2,000. At the last minute he decided to keep the camera, and took £1,750.
Next to the pawn shop was an advertisement for a room for rent. Thomas called the number from a phone box; a woman came downstairs in her slippers and showed him up to a single room overlooking the station. He paid her £600 for the deposit and first month’s rent and closed the door behind her. He sat on the bed and looked at his photographs. One was of the wedding of his mother’s parents, both of whom had died before Thomas was born. The other was a studio portrait of the same couple with a baby–his mother–in a long white christening robe. Between the two photographs the man had developed a long scar on his right cheek that Thomas had never noticed when he had looked at them before.
For several days Thomas walked everywhere in the city taking photographs of his own. He went to the sparkling grove of banking towers that sat on the former dockyards among the eastern coils of the Thames and took pictures that were rather desolate. He took photographs of pre-Christmas sales in Covent Garden. He photographed Trafalgar Square at 4 a.m.
He called his mother to say ‘Hello’. She was frantic with fear and pleaded with him to come home. He said he would at some point.
One day he was sitting having lunch in a cheap sandwich shop in Hackney. A woman sitting at the table next to him asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ He looked at her. She gestured towards the camera.
‘Not really. I take pictures for fun.’
‘What do you take pictures of?’
She wore lithe urban gear that looked as if it had been born in a wind tunnel.
‘I don’t really know.’ He had not talked to anyone for several days and felt awkward. He thought for a moment. ‘I am trying to live entirely in the realm of the past. Trying to take pictures of what there was before.’ He looked at her to see if she was listening. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to find it. Sometimes it’s not there anymore. And sometimes when it is there, I can’t see it.’
She looked at him inquisitively.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Do you need a job?’
‘Actually I do. I have no money.’
‘Can you keep secrets?’
‘I don’t know anyone to tell secrets to.’
‘Come with me.’
She led him to an old, dilapidated brick building with a big front door of reinforced glass that buzzed open to her combination. They stepped into a tiny, filthy lift and she pressed ‘6’. They were standing very close to each other.
‘I’m Jo, by the way.’ She held out her hand. He shook it.
‘I’m Thomas. Pleased to meet you.’
The lift stopped inexplicably at the fourth floor. The doors opened to a bright display of Chinese dragons and calendars. Chinese men and women worked at sewing machines to the sound of zappy FM radio. The doors closed again.
On the sixth floor they stepped out into a vestibule with steel walls and a thick steel door. There were no signs to indicate what might lie inside.
‘Turn away please,’ said Jo.
He turned back to face the closing lift door as she entered another combination. He heard the sound of keys and a lock shifted weightily.
‘OK. Come on.’
He turned round and followed her inside. Computer lights blinked in the darkness for a moment; Jo pulled a big handle on the wall and, with a thud that echoed far away, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on irregularly down the length of a huge, empty expanse. The floor was concrete, speckled near the edges with recent whitewash whose smell still hung in the air. The large, uneven windows that lined one wall had recently been covered with thick steel grills. Near the door stood three desks with computers on them and a table with a printer and a coffee maker.
‘Have a seat, Thomas. Coffee?’
‘Yes please.’
She poured two mugs.
‘We are setting up probably the most extraordinary business you will ever encounter. I’d like your help and I think you’ll find it exciting. Your interests will qualify you very well for the task and I’ll pay you enough that you’ll be satisfied. I will need from you a great amount of effort and imagination–and, of course, your utter secrecy. OK?’
He nodded.
‘Right. About twelve years ago there was a round of secret meetings between the British and American intelligence agencies. They convened a panel of visionary military experts, sociologists, psychologists, and businesspeople to look at new roles that the agencies could play in the future–particularly commercial roles. It was felt that organizations like the CIA were spending vast amounts of money on technology and personnel and that it should be possible to make some return on that investment–in addition to their main security function.
‘The most radical idea to come out of this concerned the vast intelligence databases possessed by the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and a number of other police and military organizations and private companies. As you know, most of this information is collected so that security forces have some idea of who is doing what and antisocial or terrorist activities can be thwarted. One of the social psychologists suggested, however, that there might be a very different use for it. He pointed out that average memory horizons–that is, the amount of time that a person can clearly remember–had been shrinking for some time: people were forgetting the past more and more quickly. He predicted that memory horizons would shrink close to zero in about twelve years–i.e. now.
‘I won’t go over all the research and speculation about what kind of impact this mass amnesia would have on the individual, society, and the economy. But one thing became clear: the loss of personal memories would be experienced as a vague and debilitating anxiety that many people would spend money to alleviate. Our databases of conversations, events, photographs, letters, et cetera, could be repackaged and sold back to those individuals to replace their own memories. This would possibly be a huge market opportunity for us. It would also serve a valuable social and economic function in helping to reduce the impact of a problem that was likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in psychiatric treatment and several billions in lost labour.’
Jo took a sip of coffee. ‘Is this making sense?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘We started with a small group of people and started to record everything they did. We looked at what systems we had available and invented new ones. We put cameras absolutely everywhere. We developed technologies that recognized an individual’s voice, face, handwriting and everything so that the minimum human intervention was required to link one person’s memories to each other in a single narrative. Gradually these systems were expanded to cover more and more people. We finally reached 100 per cent coverage of the populations of the US and UK around nine years ago, and we have been working with partners in other countries to gather similar data there too. This is the largest collection of data ever to exist. We will be able to give our future customers CD-ROMs with photographs of them getting on a plane to go on holiday, recordings of phone conversations with their mother, videos of them playing with their son in a park or sitting at their desk at work…It will really be a phenomenal product.
‘Now we’re ready for all that work to pay off. We have the stuff to sell. We’re working with an advertising agency on a campaign to launch it in the next few months. We just need to work out a few final details. That’s where you come in.
‘You see there is one issue we didn’t think about very carefully when we started this project. Some memories, of course, are not pleasant. We are making all kinds of disclaimers about the memories we are selling, but we would still like to minimize the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by the rediscovery of painful memories that had been lost. There’s no point selling bad memories when we know what kind of an impact they will have on individuals’ ability to perform well in the home and the workplace. So we want to take them out.
‘This is going to be a massive job that calls for someone with your unusual empathy with the past. What we need you to do is to go through the memories manually and produce a large sample of the kind we’re talking about–the most traumatic memories. We will analyse that sample and find all the parameters that have a perfect correlation with memories of this sort. Then we can simply run a search on all our databases for memories matching those parameters and delete them. But we need to go through a lot of memories to get there. The statisticians tell us we need a sample of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’
Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.
‘Do you have any questions?’
He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.
‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’
‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’
He could find only platitudes.
‘What is the company called?’
‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’
A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?
‘So are you going to do it?’
‘I think so. At least–Yes.’
Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.
‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’
Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.
In other cases, Thomas was not so sure. He found a sequence in which a man in a business suit met up with a young girl–fourteen or fifteen–in a car park by night. He seemed anxious, but she pulled him to her and they began to kiss against a concrete pillar. Her fingers made furrows in his hair; he tried to stop her as she undid his trousers but she seized him still harder. ‘Fuck me!’ she said as she lifted her skirt to reveal her full nudity. They made love greedily. Thomas watched to the end.
‘I don’t know what to do with this,’ he announced to Jo, his voice breaking the silence in the room. She remained absorbed in her computer screen for a few seconds before getting up to look at his. He started the scene again and watched with some embarrassment as Jo leaned fixedly over his shoulder, scentless.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said. ‘This girl is blatantly under age! Get rid of it!’
‘But don’t you think–I just thought–it might be a very important memory for her. I mean–she looks as if she really loves this man.’
‘Thomas. This is a criminal act! We don’t get mixed up in this kind of thing. Delete it.’
Thomas became fascinated by his power to watch lives unfold. For two days he followed the experiences of a young aristocrat named William who worked for The Times as an obituary writer. He would go to spend lengthy afternoons with ageing baronets and senile Nobel Prize winners, interviewing them about their past, and filing the review of their life in anticipation of its imminent end. Memory Mine had purchased the rights to much of The Times’ archive so that Thomas could listen to the actual recordings of these conversations. He witnessed the young man’s respectful grace as he sipped tea with old men and women, the feeble voices with which memories of past greatness were hesitantly recounted, the antiseptic interiors of old people’s homes, the soothing effect of the distant past on a young man who was not very comfortably contemporary. He listened to William in phone calls and read his emails, followed the course of a love affair that ended painfully. Thomas explored every document, every conversation, every relationship, and became absorbed completely in the largeness of so many lives and so much time.
He worked till late and spent his evenings thinking about the memories he had examined during the day. His own past merged with those of so many others; he began to have startling dreams. He dreamed that he was looking for his room but could not remember where it was. He had lost his arms and legs and could only wriggle on his stomach. He squirmed on the ground, unable to lift his head to see where he was going. He realized he was wriggling on glass–thin glass that bowed and cracked with his movement, and through which he could see only an endless nothingness. He sweated with the terror of falling through, could already see his limbless body spinning like a raw steak through the darkness. And then he reached a green tarpaulin that covered the glass and he could stand again and walk. He entered a corridor of many doors. Every door looked the same: which was his? He tried to open doors at random but all were locked. As he was becoming mad with apprehension, one door loomed in front of him, more significant than the rest. He turned the handle and entered. Lying in his bed was a man with a bandaged arm. Thomas realized he was dreaming not his own dream but that of the man in his bed. The dream of a man whose memories he had been scanning that day: a construction worker who had walked across a roof covered in a tarpaulin, stepped unknowingly on a skylight, and plunged through the glass to fall three storeys and lose a hand.
One day Thomas asked Jo a question that had been preoccupying him for some time.
‘Are we going to lose our memories too?’
Jo was eating a sandwich at her desk. She looked at him and smiled.
‘I don’t think you are. That’s why I chose you. The past is tangible for you in a way that is quite exceptional. You seem to have an effortless grasp of it. I don’t just mean dates and facts. It’s as if memories seek you out and stick to you intuitively.’
‘So what about you?’
‘This was of course one of the things we were all most concerned about. How could we run this project if we all forgot everything? So we tried to understand exactly why this was happening to see if we could avoid it in ourselves. The fact is that no one really knows. Some say it’s to do with the widespread availability of electronic recording formats that are much more effective than human memory, which have gradually removed the need for human beings to remember. Others find the causes in the future-fixation of consumer culture. People cite causes as diverse as the education system, the death of religion, diet, and the structure of the family. There’s not just one theory.
‘But they put together a lifestyle programme for all of us to try and ensure we would escape the worst of the effects. No television, weekly counselling sessions. We all have to keep a journal. We are all assessed every three months to monitor any memory decline. Et cetera.’
A strange image was fluttering in Thomas’s head while Jo was talking. All the memories of the world were stranded and terrified, like animals fleeing a forest fire. With nowhere to go, they huddled in groups and wept, and the noise of their weeping was a cacophony of the centuries that filled the skies but could not be heard. And the earth became saturated with their tears, which welled up and dissolved them all, and they seeped away into nothingness.
Not long after, the office had a visitor.
‘Good morning Jo. How are you?’ The man wore an impressive three-piece suit and his bright greeting sounded mass-produced.
‘I’m well, thank you. Larry–meet Thomas. Thomas–Larry runs Memory Mine in the US. He’s our boss.’ She shot a playful smile that Thomas had not seen before.
Larry gave a handshake that felt like a personality test. ‘Good to meet you, Thomas. Jo–can we talk?’
They moved over to the window and talked quietly. Thomas could hear them perfectly but pretended to work.
‘How’s this one doing?’
‘Well. A bit slow.’
‘Look, Jo–the whole thing is waiting for him now. Everything is in place. We just need that sample of twelve thousand grade D memories so we can clean up the whole database and launch. How many has he done?’
‘I think about six hundred.’
‘Six hundred! At this rate it will take him a couple of years. Let’s get someone else.’
‘No, let’s keep him. I think he’s the best person for this. We’ll just speak to him about the urgency and get him to work faster.’
‘Are you sure? We don’t have much time.’
‘Yes. I’ll talk to him.’
From then on Thomas did not have time to explore the lives of people like the obituary writer or the construction worker. He rushed through as fast as he could, working later and later in the office to keep up with his deadlines. He found so many memories of terrible things: deaths, betrayals, injustices, accidents, rape, ruthlessness, ruin, disappointments, lies, wars. He saw mothers losing their infants, suicides of loved ones, devastating financial losses, children beaten and brutalized by parents, countless violent and senseless murders. Every minute was a new horror, a new nightmare that forced its way inside him and unfurled unexpected lobes of dank emotions that grew in among his organs. At night he left the office bloated and dazed with hundreds of new memories that leapt in alarm at their new confines, beating against the sides of his mind, flying madly like winged cockroaches in a cupboard. He could not separate himself from the memories: they lodged in him and burst open like over-ripe fruit, their poison sprayed from them and seeped through his tissues. He wanted to vomit with the sickness of the thoughts, to purge himself. But there was no escape: the memories seethed and grew in his mind during the day and erupted into startling, terrifying dreams at night. Thomas arrived at work each day pale and wide-eyed, ready to sit again and absorb more of this acid from the past.
At last, after one month, it was over. Larry came to the office and sat at Thomas’s machine. Twelve thousand memories exactly sat in his folder.
‘Jo–are you confident this is 100 per cent accurate?’
‘Sure. We’ve checked it very carefully. I’m confident.’
‘OK. Now we should be able to calculate the parameters.’ He logged in to the administration section of the system and activated some functions. ‘There. And now we can run a search on the entire database and locate all grade D memories.’ He hit Run query. Numbers started mounting on the screen.
He unbuttoned his jacket. ‘So: many thanks to you, Thomas. You got there in the end. What now?’
‘Er–no plans really.’
‘I see.’
‘Maybe we can find something,’ said Jo.
Larry looked at her. ‘Your budget is already blown. I hardly think you’re in a position to make suggestions like that. Please get real.’
The search ended. ‘2,799,256,014 results found.’
‘Christ–that’s nearly ten per cent of our database,’ said Larry. ‘That’s a lot of trauma. And this is just in the US and UK where life is pretty good. Imagine how many we’ll get in all those places where life sucks. My God. Let’s just check some of these before we delete them.’
He opened the first memory. A daughter found her tycoon mother dead in a running car full of carbon monoxide after a major feature in the Daily Telegraph detailing her illegal business ventures. The second was a man being beaten by the police in prison and threatened with razor blades.
‘OK, this looks good. This is the kind of stuff we really do not need. Good job, Thomas. So I’m going ahead and deleting these.’
Jo and Thomas looked at him and said nothing. He pressed Delete all. ‘2,799,256,014 records deleted.’
‘Excellent. Now let’s start selling the hell out of this thing.’
That night Thomas had a vivid dream. He dreamt he was back at his parents’ house in Islington. The house was empty. Sun poured in through the windows and he sat in his bedroom reading books rich with tales and characters from history. Suddenly he looked up; and through the window he saw a beautiful thing floating slowly down to the ground. It was magical and rare and he felt a deep desire to own it. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden, and there it was floating above him: a delicate thing, spiralling exquisitely and glinting in the sun. He stood under it and reached out his hands. Spinning like a slow-motion sycamore seed, it fell softly and weightlessly into his palms. It looked as if it was of silver, beaten till it was a few atoms thick and sculpted into the most intricate form: a kind of never-ending staircase that wound round on itself into a snail shell of coils within coils. He looked at it in rapture. How could such a beautiful object have fallen from the sky! He was full of joy at this thing that had chosen him and fallen so tamely into his hand.
And then he understood that the thing was a memory. It was a wonderful memory: of music first heard by a young woman–a big concert hall–a piano that produced sounds so astonishing that the woman was lifted up on their flight. And Thomas was exhilarated: he laughed out loud with the memory of those passages that seemed like they would burst the limits of loveliness.
But as the memory entered him and took root in his heart he realized there were many more falling from the sky. He looked up and saw there were memories of all kinds and colours dropping not only around him but as far as he could see. He went out into the street, where memories had already begun to cover the ground. Each gust of wind would send them skating across the tarmac to collect in the gutters. They fell everywhere: some wispy, some like multicoloured feathers, some fashioned out of a substance that collapsed and became like tar when it hit the ground.
All day and night the memories fell. They floated on puddles like a layer of multicoloured leaves, and stuck in trees, giving them new and unnatural hues of cyan and mustard yellow and metallic grey. They accumulated in clumps on the roofs and window sills and porticoes of Georgian houses, softening right angles and making a kind of pageant of the street.
The next morning the skies were low and dense and the memories fell harder than ever. The roads had become impassable and people had to clear paths to their front doors.
He left the house and wandered until he reached King’s Cross Station. The memories fell on his head and shoulders. Everywhere they lay flattened and dead on the ground, as if there had been a massacre of insects.
Sometimes Thomas saw people picking up the mysterious new objects to examine them; but the experience always seemed to induce some kind of nausea, and they flung them hastily away. After a few such experiences everyone tried not to notice what was happening. They swept the memories away, they drove their cars more and more slowly through the accumulation, they were inconvenienced everywhere they went–but they asked no questions. The more the memories fell, the more blank their faces looked. Their eyes became hollow, their skin yellow and desiccated. They seemed to move differently, shiftily, darting from spot to spot.
For days Thomas wandered around London, sleeping on car roofs and other raised surfaces while the downpour continued. He watched people leave their houses and become wild. They began to build camps on high ground and on flat roofs. They squatted naked around fires on the steps to the buildings around Trafalgar Square while the entire piazza was filled, only the column protruding from a writhing, harlequinesque sea of baubles and crystals.
Weeks passed. For five whole days only memories of war fell from the skies. No daylight could penetrate the clouds of terrifying leaden forms that rained down on London, and only streaks of fire gave any illumination. It was now rare to see any people at all. They hid, clung like babies to anything that seemed familiar.
Thomas’s wanderings led him to the Thames. Rains had carried streams of memories down into the river until they filled the riverbed entirely, rising above the water to enormous mounds of multicoloured sludge. Its course was completely blocked; the water flooded out, rising above the bridges and submerging the quays. Tourist boats lay wrecked on the terraces outside the Festival Hall and everywhere was the stench of rotting fish. Dogs chewed at carcasses at the edge of the water; flocks of gulls perched on the huge misshapen islands that looked like waste from a sweet factory.
As he looked out over the river he realized that all these millions of memories had begun to whisper to him. He heard voices from every place and time talking in every language about terrible and wonderful and everyday things. He had the impression that all the memories had been cast out, that they burned with the ferocity of a dying parasite searching for a host. They stalked him, would not leave him alone, seemed to be speaking right up against his ear, called him by name. He tried to flee, but more and more of them billowed up, following him in a quivering line. Memories flowed out of everywhere until the trail was like a canopy over the city. And then, with a shriek from the depths of time, they rose up in one vast motion, descended on him, and buried themselves in his soul. It was like a gigantic explosion converging on its centre in a film run backwards. At that point, he passed out.
The predictions of Memory Mine executives turned out to be correct. There came a point in time when people lost their memories on a mass scale. They were unable to remember even the most basic outlines of the past–their own or anyone else’s–and could therefore not engage in normal human interactions. They began to be withdrawn and suspicious, and the public spaces of the city became empty and eerie. This phenomenon was accompanied by–or caused–a major economic recession; and the two blights swept entire continents hand in hand.
Memory Mine was well prepared. Under its new name, MyPast
, its advertisements suddenly flooded the media and the city. An elderly couple hugged each other affectionately as they played their MyPast
CD-ROM and remembered more youthful times. A grumpy businessman played the CD at work, saw himself as a young man laughing in a group at college, and was driven to make phone calls to friends he had not seen in years–bringing the smile back to his face. Despite the economic slowdown, the product was an instant hit. People sensed great relief at seeing evidence of their own past, and though for many this ‘quick fix’ actually worsened their psychiatric condition, nothing could prevent people rushing to buy editions for everyone in their household in order to try and re-experience the familial bond that was supposed to link them.
While most people were suffering from total amnesia, Thomas seemed to bear the burden of an excess of memory. He appeared haunted, and wandered the streets slowly and gingerly, as if afraid of upsetting an intricate balance in his head. His mind was crammed full like the hold of a cargo ship, containers packed in to every inch of space, every one roasting in the airless heat below deck, and heavy with a million whispers that each tried to rise above all the others. He could take in no more thought or experience of any kind and avoided all human contact.
He was aware, of course, of what was happening to the people around him. He tried to call his parents on a couple of occasions to see if they were all right–but there was no answer. He could not face the flood of memories that might be released if he went home, so he did not.
He ended up one day back at the office in Hackney. He had nothing to do there, but it was a place to go that had a connection, however strange, to this thing that had overtaken everyone and it exerted a pull over him.
It was very different now. The huge empty space of the office had been entirely filled with lines of desks, where incessantly ringing phones were answered by clean young people with their efficient ‘Good morning, MyPast
, how can I help you?’ People ordered memories for themselves and their friends and families; they were located immediately on the database and burned straight onto CDs; the printer spat out attractive labels and pockets with pictures of happy families and a personalized message. The CDs were stacked in big plastic bins and dispatched twice a day.
Thomas sat in a corner, preoccupied and detached. He went there every day, and Jo did not try to stop him. She may have felt slightly responsible for his state of mind. People got used to him being there. Sometimes he lay down and spent the night under a desk. The murmurings in his head kept him haggard and silent.
Those forgetful times, while they remained, were terrible, even if few could remember them afterwards. But they did not last.
One day Thomas awoke and felt that his mind was lighter. It was as if a thick splinter that had been lying buried in his brain for months was now removed. The voices diminished. He could look outwards again at the world without feeling that the incoming information would make him explode.
The memories were departing.
Very slowly, the city started to be populated again. People’s faces regained their depth, and they started to talk to each other. They could remember more and more.
Frantic phone calls raced between the MyPast
offices in London and Washington. They had assumed that their graphs of diminishing memory horizons only moved in one direction and had never accounted for this sudden upswing. Very soon sales had dropped alomost to zero; the workforce was sacked en masse. The office in Hackney became almost deserted again. Even Jo did not bother to turn up. Thomas spent days there without seeing anyone.
One evening the phone rang. Thomas picked it up.
‘Is this MyPast
?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need memories. Everyone else’s memories seem to be returning. But my mind is still empty. I can’t do anything. Can’t work, can’t sleep. I need my memories.’
Thomas realized with a shock that it was his father on the phone.
‘I think I can help you, sir.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘I can send them out to you tomorrow. You should get them on Monday morning.’
‘Where are you? Can I come over myself and pick them up?’
‘You could. We are in Hackney.’
‘OK. What’s the address?’
Thomas told him.
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Thomas logged in to the MyPast
database. He entered his father’s name and searched. There were nearly a thousand memories. He saved them onto a CD and printed out a label. He decided to go down to the street to wait.
His father came with his two brothers. Thomas watched them approach from a distance. They all looked strangely diminished. His father had lost his poise and sophistication and walked wild-eyed and hunted, and his brothers scuttled close to him for safety. They drew close without any sign of recognition.
‘MyPast
?’ asked his father aggressively.
‘Yes,’ replied Thomas.
‘Where are they? My memories?’
Thomas led them inside and they crammed into the tiny lift. His father breathed heavily and he twitched with impatience, but somehow it felt good to Thomas to touch him again. They arrived at the sixth floor. Brightly coloured MyPast
signs announced their arrival.
‘I need this quickly. Right now. Where is it?’
Thomas picked up the CD from the desk. ‘Here it is. You can see it has your name on it here and today’s date. I’ll need to ask you for a cheque for £999.’
‘Don’t waste my time. Just show it to me.’
Thomas grew nervous.
‘Perhaps it would be best if you took it home. There’s a lot of stuff here and that way you can share it with–with your wife and sit in comfort. In your own home. In fact I’m just locking the office up.’
‘I’m losing my mind here. I haven’t got time for your–just put this damn thing on for me. I won’t pay you a penny till you show me.’
‘I’ll tell you what–just take it. I don’t need the money. I can see you’re in need. Take it as a gift.’
‘I need it now.’
Thomas saw a menacing look in his father’s eye that brought back old fears. He took the CD from his hand and fed it into the computer. It started up on its own, a 20-second promotional jingle that talked in a comforting voice about MyPast
. Then it gave a menu of memories. Thomas selected one. It showed his father addressing a banking summit organized by the Confederation of British Industry three or four years before. He was confident and funny and people responded loudly, applauded.
‘Is that me?’ asked Thomas’ father, incredulous. ‘Is that me?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Is that who I was?’ The speech ended to camera flashes and applause. The video faded. The boys looked on mutely.
‘Show me more. More.’
‘Really, sir, I must close the office now.’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit. Get out of my way.’
Thomas’s father seized the mouse from him and pushed him out of the seat. He stared impatiently at the screen and selected another memory.
He saw himself sipping wine with his wife in the bar at the Barbican in the interval of some concert. They were both dressed up. Thomas’s mother spoke passionately about something that could not be heard.
‘That’s my wife. How strong she used to be. How attractive. I wonder where she is now.’
‘What do you mean, Where is she now?’ asked Thomas, alarmed.
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember where she is.’
He clicked on something else. The whole family was on holiday in Florida, several years ago. Thomas was still a young child. The three boys were sunburnt and carried fishing nets. Their mother wore a wrap-around skirt and expensive sunglasses.
‘Look–there are three boys. Who’s the other one?’ He watched them playing in the sand, building mounds taller than they were.
He carried on clicking avidly. The family was wandering round the Natural History Museum–just a year or so before. Thomas was clearly visible.
‘Isn’t that you?’ asked his father looking round at Thomas. ‘Isn’t that you there–in the museum at the same time as us? What a bloody coincidence. Do we know each other?’
‘Not really know. No.’
Another scene opened up. Thomas froze with fear. It was a recording of their evening in the Oxo Tower. The lights of the Thames spread out behind them; the waiters served champagne, and Thomas’s father talked about investment to his family.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ he said. He turned to Thomas, his face hungry and furious. ‘Can you please explain what the hell is going on? Is this some kind of disgusting joke that you people play? You put yourselves into our memories? You sit yourself down at dinner with us, at our most intimate moments? You insert yourselves into our thoughts, our families, our past? Is that what happens? Just as I was coming to believe in my past I see you sitting there grinning out of it like some monster–and realize all of it is fake. What the hell is your game?’
The video continued quietly. Thomas saw out the corner of his eye the moment at which his father had told him to leave the house.
‘Sir, please understand. This is no falsehood. I am your son. My name is Thomas. These are my brothers. I am part of your family.’
Thomas’s father looked at him, looked deep into his pupils. He seemed to see something that he had been looking for, and the emptiness of his eyes was filled with a question. But something washed over the surface again and Thomas could peer in no more.
‘You bastard!’ His father hit him so hard around the head that he fell to the ground, dazed and astonished. ‘Think you can betray people like this and get away with it?’ He kicked him in the groin. ‘You bastard!’ He became wild, kicking him again and again in the groin and stomach.
His brothers joined in, kicking his head and face and back with all their strength. ‘You bastard!’ they chanted viciously, imitating their father. Thomas blacked out, became bloody and limp–but they did not stop beating him until they were too exhausted to continue.
Reality returned only half-way. He saw himself lying in an emergency ward. Jo had brought him there when she had discovered him lying in a kidney-shaped arc of congealed blood in the morning. He could not make things out, but his mind felt lighter. He realized that nearly all the memories had left him and soon he would be alone again.
He had the impression that he knew the person in the next bed. It was an old woman he had seen before. Gradually he remembered. She had given him a prophecy long ago. So long. She looked very sick.
‘Hello.’ His voice reached out to her, but she did not seem to be aware. ‘It’s Thomas. Do you remember me?’
She turned painfully towards him, her eyes like albumen. ‘Of course I remember you.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘It’s not easy being blind and old. I fell. Fell down the stairs. Broken my pelvis. I don’t feel well. I’m at the end.’
‘Everything happened as you said. My father became poor and I became rich. But it wasn’t how I imagined.’
‘It rarely is.’
The various sounds of the hospital seemed to become ordered and intended, like a fugue. Thomas listened for a moment.
‘As soon as she said “Memory Mine” I remembered what you said. I knew this was it! It was a good job. There was a nice woman. Her name was Jo.’ Thomas felt weightless, the memories breaking away like spores and floating back to where they came from.
‘A packhorse was needed. To get the memories through this ravine. This time. You happened to be the one. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. I’m sure you’ve worked that out.’
‘Yes. I think I understand things now. Things seem so much clearer.’
The old lady did not seem to be listening any more. Doctors whirled urgently around him, nurses came running, but he was content inside his mind. All that now remained was his own past; and it was good.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S SLEEP The Third Story (#ulink_dd830e08-6f96-58aa-bf2e-f8c82a1efb05)
IN THE CITY of Delhi there once lived a man who had never been able to sleep.
In appearance he had everything he wanted–more, in fact, than one person could ever want, for he was the owner of a vast industrial group and one of India’s richest men. Rajiv Malhotra lived in an elegant colonial mansion on Prithviraj Road with a garden full of gulmohar trees and parakeets; he was attended by servants and cooks and chauffeurs; he ran households in Jakarta, New York, and London; and he was married to a beautiful former film star. But it was as if fate, in bestowing so many blessings, had sought to ensure he would not be ignorant of suffering, and sleep was something he could not achieve.
‘To sleep is as to breathe!’ he would think to himself as he sat alone in the back of his tinted Mercedes on his way to work every morning. ‘Just look at all the people who have nothing, but to whom sleep’s treasures come every day, like a lifelong, unbidden friend. People sleep on the highways and in the train station, they sleep as people step over them and dogs bark around them–young boys, old women–all are able to sleep. But I, who have so much, have not this thing that the poorest beggar is able to enjoy.’
He led a double life. By day he would lead the life of people: working, eating, attending social functions, chatting to family and friends. Of course fatigue gnawed at him like a cancer: his organs felt as if they were of lead and ready to drag him down into a void, his eyes were like boulders in his head. But there was light and there were people, and he felt a part of the world. He worked endlessly, slowly transforming his father’s steel company into a global industrial empire that made him feel involved, significant.
But his nights were another life altogether. A life of black solitude when everyone around him demonstrated a loyalty more primal–happily, eagerly, gratefully, and so simply!–leaving him behind for the arms of sleep, abandoning him to wish away the hours of night, to experience time as something he had somehow to get through, and thus to become submerged in pointlessness.
While his wife slept upstairs he would wander through their many rooms, like a ghost condemned to revisit a castle every night for eternity, slinking tediously through the same corridors centuries after the life he once knew has given way to silence and dereliction. He would rifle the house aimlessly for new soporifics–books to draw him out of his boredom and panic enough that sleep might steal up on him unnoticed; videos or TV shows for him to surrender his mind to for a while. He wandered in the deep shadows of the garden smoking unaccustomed cigarettes, read the day’s news again, finished off bowls of peanuts that had been put out hours ago for evening guests; finally, he went drowsily to bed to lie next to his wife only to find in his horizontality some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution. At length, the windows would lighten, the azan would sound from distant mosques, and he would start to change from yesterday’s clothes into today’s, simultaneously relieved to be no longer alone and tortured that his strange impotence had been confirmed once more.
Of course he had consulted doctors. He had tried sleeping pills, relaxants, anti-anxiety drugs, meditation and hypnosis. He had diligently read the publications of the Sleep Disorder Society of America and the scientific publications of all the leading somnologists. He had tried every kind of therapeutic bed, pillow, earplug, and eyemask. He had followed the suggestions of friends to play Mozart or classical ragas very softly in his room, had even given a chance to the Sounds of Nature CD collection someone had sent him, lying in bed to the surround sound of cicadas in the rainforest or underwater whale recitatives, and trying to detect signs of somnolence inside himself. None appeared. No therapy, from folk to pharmacological, had managed to prise open for him the gates of the kingdom of slumber, and after some years he stopped looking for help. He did not sleep, and that was that.
It was doctors who confirmed to him, however, what he had himself long suspected: that a lifetime without sleep was almost certainly responsible for the fact that, after ten years of marriage, he and his wife had never conceived a child.
When Rajiv Malhotra had married the Bollywood superstar Mira Sardari, the newspapers had been apoplectic with idolizing, goggling glee. The romance had every element of legend: the society man of the 70s who was jilted by the beautiful–and older–mother and waited twenty years to marry the daughter; the helicopter accident that orphaned the teenage Mira and made her the child of India herself, with doting parents in all the leading families; the secret wedding in a Himalayan resort while Mira was at the height of her fame and in the middle of her classic Exile (no one was there, but everyone was an eyewitness); the ending of her film career ‘so I can devote myself to helping those less fortunate than myself’; his sophistication and massive commerical power. But children, which they both saw as the fulfilment of their lives, did not come. Doctors advised the couple that Rajiv’s sleepless body, incapable of rejuvenating itself, would never produce seed. His private thoughts, that had dwelt single-mindedly on iron and tin for so long, became more and more obsessed by flesh and blood. There was a quietness between him and his wife. And after a while, the editors of newspapers, obsessed with dynasties even more than with money, themselves turned quiet.
One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.
As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.
He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.
He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.
The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.
‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’
‘How is everything?’
‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.
From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.
‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.
‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’
At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.
‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’
‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’
‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’
‘Not now.’
‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’
‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’
‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’
‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’
‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’
‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’
‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’
‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them to wait. Listen to me for one minute. You’ll be as excited as I am.’
‘OK, I’m listening–Why is this guy letting her talk on like that? Who cares about her damned dinner? Just give her what she wants and let’s move on–Go on Mira.’
‘SCIENTISTS PRODUCE VIABLE GORILLA CLONE: Claim Human Cloning now Possible.’
‘Madam, can we start from the beginning? Name and the date of travel?’
‘It’s datelined Cambridge, England. I’ll start from the beginning. A group of scientists at Bios Laboratories Ltd today announced they had produced an eight-cell gorilla foetus that would, had it been implanted in a mother gorilla, have given rise to a normal pregnancy and infant. The scientists destroyed the foetus, saying that their objectives were simply to confirm a number of theoretical and technical hypotheses, not to create quote public curiosities–blah blah blah…’
‘Last Thursday. Flight 162. Name is Laurie Kurt.’
‘OK, this is the bit: Dr Stephen Hall, the Technical Director at Bios Laboratories, said that the experiment showed how far the science had come.’
‘Let me just find that on the system for you. Hope you made it to the dinner in the end, after they’d come so far?’
‘In the end. Thank God. They were venture capitalists from France who were looking to put money into my company. It was the only time in four months we all had spare diary time. Can you believe that?’
‘I’m going crazy listening to this small talk. If this guy wants to chat he can do it in his spare time. He’s supposed to do one call every two minutes. What’s his average? Check it.’
Somewhere in California a police siren swelled, Dopplered, and faded.
‘Rajiv? Are you listening? “A few years ago these eight cells would have been on the cover of Time magazine and people would have been saying that this has turned our idea of nature on its head.”’
‘We’ve got this amazing technology, it’s going to turn the lives of three hundred million Americans literally upside-down–and I’m sitting stuck in St Louis–of all places!–missing the only time I could get with these VCs in four months.’
‘“Now we have well-established techniques for doing this kind of thing, and can achieve our objectives with a high degree of predictability–and no one is really surprised anymore.”’
‘He’s making eighteen calls an hour, sir.’
‘Then why is he still here?–Mira, hang on a minute–That’s not how you were briefed. If he’s not doing his job, fire him. That’s what you’re here for!’
‘You can imagine how I felt–’
‘Otherwise I’ll fire you.’
‘When asked what this meant for the future of human cloning, Hall was unequivocal. “It’s going to happen. We could do it now. And someone will do it. One thing that history has taught us is that human curiosity never sleeps, no matter what obstacles the doomsayers try to put in its way.”’
‘Mira, please!’
‘–this was possibly the most important moment of my life–’
‘Oh, Rajiv–you’re on television! Can you hear?’
Rajiv’s microphoned voice crackled through his mobile phone.
‘India’s new wealth will come not from any natural resource but from an entirely fortuitous fact: its one billion people slap bang on the opposite side of the world from America.’
‘–they told me I would change the future–’
‘A billion people awake while America’s three hundred million sleep. Awake in their droves, ten and a half time zones from New York, thirteen and a half from San Francisco.’
‘He’s been on this call for four and a half minutes already.’
‘You look so nice. Nice smile. And people are applauding.’
‘In the electronic age it doesn’t matter where anyone is anymore.’
‘Is anyone apart from me remotely conscious of the value of time, for God’s sake?’
‘And Indians can fit in a whole day of work between the time that Americans swipe out in the evening and the time they set their double mocha down on their desk the next morning. It’s an unbeatable formula.’
‘Kurt, Laurie–I have it.’
‘Thanks to us, the sun need never set on the American working day.’
‘OK, I have that delayed flight on my screen here. And the other ticket you purchased. American Airlines. Paid for at 2.24 p.m. Central Time last Thursday. We’re very sorry for the delay and the inconvenience.’
‘India’s new asset is its time zone. Indian Standard Time is its new pepper, its new steel!’
‘We’ll credit one thousand eight hundred fifteen dollars and forty-seven cents to the American Express card you paid with.’
‘That’s the end of that news item. But you did look nice.’
‘Thank you very much. You have an accent. Where are you from?’
‘He’s out of here.’
‘I’m from India.’
‘Now listen. Protesters–cloning–undermining society–yes: “These technologies mean dramatic new possibilities for medical therapy and for bringing children to infertile couples, and when people realize that their world view can continue unthreatened by what people like me do–and that previously incurable conditions can now be treated–they’ll stop making all this fuss.”’
Mira’s voice began to quiver with the massage. Rajiv could hear the smack of palms on oily skin.
‘India! I would so love to go to India. I believe Americans have so much to learn from India. What do you think of the US?’
‘It goes on: Chief Executive Robert Mills confirmed that human cloning was not on the company’s agenda. “It’s illegal in this country anyway,” he said. “But the mandate we have been given by our investors is very precise: to develop a patent portfolio of world-class sheep and cattle genetic material, and the techniques to exploit that material in the global agricultural marketplace.”’
‘America is–fine! Great!’
‘Time!’
‘“The gorilla experiment was part of our investigation into these techniques, but Bios Laboratories will not be pursuing its work in primate production.”’
‘Where are you based?’
‘Madam, I’m getting another call. I really ought to go.’
‘OK. Thanks for your help.’
‘Time’s up? What do you mean time’s up?’
‘You have to make sure these people understand that there is only one thing that is important here and that’s efficiency.’
‘My massage is over. Can’t believe an hour is up already.’
‘You have to make sure they know how to avoid this kind of chitchat. And deal with that guy. This isn’t a chat line we’re running.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘I’m sorry, Mira, I’m doing something here.’
‘Were you listening to the article?’
‘Yes. In fact I know Stephen Hall. He was at Cambridge with me. We played squash.’
‘Don’t you see? This is our chance! We can have a child! Why don’t you go and see him?’
‘OK, Mira. I will.’
A few days later, Dr Stephen Hall showed Rajiv into the living room of a large old house whose Victorian lattice windows filtered out most of the scant light of the Cambridge afternoon. They sat down on armchairs that were crowded into the tiny space left by the grand piano and outsized television that dominated the room.
‘Now. Tell me what can I do for you?’
Stephen poured cream into his coffee and stirred intently.
‘I need you to make my wife and I a child. We will pay, of course.’ Rajiv narrated the history of his ill-fated attempts at reproduction.
Dr Hall considered deeply. He looked anxious.
‘Have you thought of adopting?’
‘I haven’t come here for your bloodless European solutions. I don’t need to visit one of the world’s leading biotechnology experts to get advice on adoption. I want a child whose flesh and blood is my wife’s and my own. That is why I am here.’
‘How much would you pay?’
‘Five million pounds.’
‘I see.’ He took a gulp from his coffee cup with just-perceptible agitation.
‘You realize that we’d need to do the work outside the country. It’s illegal here. I’d probably set up a lab in the Bahamas. We’d need to ship a lot of equipment and people. It could–’
‘I know how much money you’ll need to spend and it’s nowhere near five million pounds. I’d already included a healthy profit for you. But if it’s an issue, let’s say seven million. No more negotiation.’
‘And if I were to say yes, what would you want?’
‘I want you to make me a son. A perfect son. A son who will be handsome and charming. Brilliant and hardworking. Who can take over my business. Who will never disappoint or shame me. Who will be happy. A son, above all, who can sleep.’
‘In a probabilistic science like genetics it is dangerous to try and optimize every parameter. You start stretching chance until it snaps and you end up getting nothing.’
‘Nevertheless. Those are my demands.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than ‘Isn’t it only two hours since breakfast?’ High-alcohol wine, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anaesthesia completed the gentle high-altitude lullaby.
No matter how many times he flew, Rajiv, naturally, never succumbed to these sedatives. As time slowed down all around him, his heartbeat accelerated with the raging speed on the other side of the titanium membrane, the whole screaming, blinking 300-litres-a-second combustion of it, the 800-kilometre-an-hour gale in which Karachi-Tehran-Moscow-Prague-Frankfurt-Amsterdam each stuck for a second on the windscreen like a sheet of old newspaper and then swooped into the past. As the plane cut its fibre-optic jet stream through the sky, Rajiv’s insomniac sorrow at living in a different time from everyone else became panic as the movement of the day tilted and buckled, the unwavering sun, always just ahead, holding time still for hours and hours and burning his dim, sleepless pupils. Used to carrying the leaden darkness of the night through the day with him, he now carried Indian Standard Time in his guts into far-flung places, and there was an ear-splitting tectonic scraping within him as it went where it should never have been. Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities–until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like jet lag.
It was the same, every time.
Stephen worked quickly. Working in the Bahamas from blood and tissue samples sent from Delhi he managed to mimic the processes by which the DNA of two adults is combined at the moment of fertilization. He took human egg cells from the ovaries of aborted embryos, blasted the nucleus from them, and replaced it with the new genetic combination. He created a battery of two hundred eggs, and waited.
At length he identified one healthy and viable zygote, splitting happily into two every few hours. He called Mira, who flew out that day, and implanted it in her womb.
She returned to Delhi via London, where she had some shopping to do in Bond Street. Neither customs nor security detected the microscopic contraband she carried within her.
After nine months, Mira was rosy and rotund, and Rajiv an exuberant and solicitous father-to-be. No one could remember seeing him so glad or so animated. Even the black crescents that seemed branded under his eyes started to fade. He called Mira several times a day to enquire after her temperature and the condition of her stomach. He brought her flowers and sweets in the evening and hosted small parties in his home where she would dazzle the guests with her happiness and even replay Bollywood routines from the old days. At length, her labour began.
The obstetrician and nurses came to the house to attend her in her bedroom while Rajiv sat in his study with the door closed, fiddling with a pencil. He sweated with suspense, but would not allow himself to venture out. Finally, a nurse came to the door.
‘The labour is over, sir. And you have twins. A boy and a girl. Both are healthy. You had better come.’
Rajiv ran past her to his wife’s bedroom. There she lay, exhausted and pale, and beside her on the bed were two sleeping babies. One was a radiant, beautiful girl. The other was a boy, a shrunken, misshapen boy with an outsized head that had the pointed shape of a cow’s.
‘What is this?’ he cried in horror. ‘That is not my son! That is some–creature!’
The nurses susurrated, trying to bring calm and allow the new mother to rest, reassuring the father, telling him that new babies often look a bit–funny?–this was quite normal and not to worry, and anyway we all learn to love our children in the end, even if they have some adorable little quirk that makes them different–isn’t that what also makes them unique?
Rajiv was not listening. ‘I want that child out of my house this day!’ He stormed out and summoned his lifelong companion and servant, Kaloo.
‘A terrible thing has happened, Kaloo. My wife has given birth to two children: a girl, and a boy who is a deviant. I cannot allow the boy to stay here a moment longer. I want you to take him away. Give him to a family where he’ll be cared for. Promise them a yearly stipend–whatever they need–as long as they look after him. But I don’t want to know where he is or what happens to him, and I don’t want him to know about me. Take him away, Kaloo! Away from Delhi–somewhere else. And as long as we are all alive this secret stays between you and me.’
In a very few hours the matter was taken care of. Telling no one, not even Rajiv, where he was going, Kaloo wrapped the baby up and set out with a wet nurse for the airport. He took Rajiv’s private plane and flew to Bombay. While the nurse looked after the baby in a hotel room, Kaloo wandered the streets looking for a family who would care for the child. His gaze was attracted by the kindly face of a Muslim bookseller. He approached him and told him the story.
‘Sir–my wife and I would be so happy! We have no children and have always wanted a son!’
‘I will deliver the boy to you this very evening. And every year on this day I will visit you with money. You cannot contact me, nor should you make any attempt to discover the origins of the boy. I hope you will be loving parents to him.’
He and the wet nurse took the baby to the bookseller’s home that evening and delivered him into his new mother’s arms. She wept with joy.
‘We will call him Imran,’ she said reverentially. ‘He will be a man like a god.’
Rajiv and Mira named their daughter Sapna, and from the first day of her life everyone who saw her was enchanted by her. She was so beautiful that jaded politicians and wrinkled businessmen rediscovered the meaning of the word ‘breathtaking’ when they looked into her cot. As Rajiv forgot his rage of her birthday, and Mira allowed her resentment of her husband’s peremptory behaviour to subside, both of them lapsed into a deep love affair with their daughter.
Everyone agreed there was something marvellous about her sleep. People would stop at Rajiv’s house just to see the baby sleeping, for the air she exuded with her slow breathing smelled better than anything they had ever smelt. It made one feel young and vital, it made you feel–though none of them would ever say it aloud–like reproducing!
Eternally ignorant himself of the pleasure of sleep, Rajiv’s body and mind were calmed and rejuvenated by the voluptuous sleep of his daughter.
She was only four or five years old when she sat at the family piano and picked out, with unaccustomed fingers but rapidly increasing harmonic complexity, a Hindi film song she had heard on the radio that morning. Rajiv immediately installed an English piano teacher who quickly found herself involved in conversations of the greatest philosophical complexity with her young pupil, who was interested in understanding why the emotions responded so readily to certain melodic or harmonic combinations.
One morning, when Rajiv entered Sapna’s bedroom to kiss her goodbye, he noticed something he had not seen before. The wooden headboard of her bed seemed to have sprouted a green shoot that in one night had grown leaves and a little white flower. He summoned his wife.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, mystified.
‘That may be so–but what is it doing there? If it grows so much in one night, one morning we will come and find it has strangled our daughter. Get someone to cut it off today and seal the spot with varnish. This bed has been here for–what?–ten years? I can’t understand how this has happened after all this time.’
That day a carpenter was brought who carefully cut off the new stem, sanded down the surface and varnished it until no sign of the growth remained. But the next morning there were two such shoots, each larger than the first and with flowers that filled the room with delightful, dizzying scent.
Rajiv was furious.
‘Change this bed immediately. Get her one with a steel frame. This is–this is–ridiculous!’
A steel bed was installed in the place of the wooden one, and for a time things returned to normal. But it was not so long before another morning visit was met by a room full of white seeds that drifted lazily on the air currents from floor to ceiling, spores emitted by the geometric rows of spiralling grasses that had sprung overnight from the antique Persian rug on the floor of Sapna’s room. Genuinely frightened this time, Rajiv called for tests and diagnoses on both grass and Sapna herself. Nothing could be determined, and Sapna had no explanation. They moved her into another bedroom, where a wicker laundry basket burst overnight into a clump of bamboo-like spears that grew through the ceiling and erupted into the room above. Wherever Sapna slept, things burst into life: sheets, clothes, newspapers, antique wardrobes–all rediscovered their ability to grow.
Each encounter with this nocturnal hypertrophy enraged Rajiv. He would stare at the upstart plant matter that invaded his daughter’s room with the purest hatred he had ever felt. It began to take him over. He could not work for his visions of galloping, coiling roots and shoots. It sickened him. He ordered all organic matter to be removed from Sapna’s bedroom. This controlled things, and for many months their lives were unaffected by this strange phenomenon. But he had been filled with a terror of vegetation, and wherever he went he kept imagining loathsome green shoots sprouting out of car seats and boardroom tables.
One morning, as he arrived at her door, he could hear her sobbing quietly inside. Terrified of what he might find, he opened the door slowly. The room was empty and calm, and Sapna lay twisted up in bed.
‘I’m bleeding, papa. Between my legs.’
Rajiv’s stomach corkscrewed inside him and he ran out of the room. Sweating inside his suit he landed heavily on Mira’s bed.
‘It’s Sapna. She needs you.’
That night, though Sapna’s room had received the customary clearing of all organic traces, and though no one heard anything, not even the sleepless Rajiv, a huge neem tree sprang from the dining room, grew up through the ceiling into the room where Sapna slept, branched out through all four walls, filled the floor above her, and broke through the roof of the house. Vines and creepers snaked up the tree during the night, locking it in a sensuous, miscegenetic embrace and disgorging provocative red flowers bursting with seed. By the time everyone awoke in the morning a crowd had already gathered outside the house to look at this extraordinary sight, and photographers were taking pictures for the city papers.
The Malhotra household stared at the tree in the way that people stare at something that cannot be part of the world they inhabit. They kept touching it, touching the places where it had burst through the walls. Rajiv became grim.
‘Get this cut down today. Get the walls mended. And then we have to find more of a solution to this.’
The tree was not the only miracle of growth to happen that night, though the other one was only discovered afterwards. Amid the furore of fertility, Mira had fallen pregnant.
Rajiv received a telephone call that day from the Defence Minister.
‘Rajiv–would you mind terribly coming in to see me this afternoon? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.’
When Rajiv arrived, a number of senior government officials had gathered to receive him.
‘Rajiv, you know how much we admire and value the contribution you make to the nation. That’s why we’re calling you in like this–informally–so we can avoid any kind of public scandal. It’s come to our notice that there have been certain–goings-on–in your household that are both untoward and unusual. Far be it from us to step into the sanctum of your private affairs, of course–but given what has happened this morning, they may not remain private for very long. We need some kind of explanation from you as to what is happening. And we need to work out a solution with you. So that there is no danger to the public. You understand how it is. Yesterday a bud, today a neem tree–tomorrow perhaps we will wake up and see only a forest where our capital city now stands.’
Rajiv was taken aback.
‘Yes. Of course. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms.’
‘Now tell us–because we are here to hear your views–what exactly is happening?’
‘ To be very honest, I don’t have a clue. It seems you probably know as much as I do.’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
‘Well, I thought I could prevent it by simply taking certain precautions in the household. But as of this morning I’m not so sure.’
‘Rajiv, permit us to throw a few ideas in your direction. We have been putting our heads together on this issue for the last few minutes. One of my honourable friends here thought that your daughter–Sapna, is it?–could be of great service to the nation. Suggested we might use her to recultivate some of the desert regions. An elegant suggestion, but perhaps a little fanciful. From what I can gather, the peculiarities of your daughter’s sleep do not obey any obvious scientific principles, and it might be very dangerous to unleash her on the land. No, we gravitated more towards a solution that would involve some sort of–how shall I put it?–confinement. So she can do no harm to anyone–including, we are most anxious to stress, herself.
‘From the very beginning all of us, with one voice, dismissed the idea of jail. For what is your daughter guilty of? And how could a young lady with her upbringing be expected to survive alongside all the despicable souls we have in our jails? On the other hand, I am afraid to say we did not feel there would be a place for her in any of our hospitals. Too much in the public eye. Too much risk.
‘But there is something between a prison and a hospital that might suit everyone concerned. We have a number of excellent institutions for those of our citizens who are not entirely–ahem–compos mentis. Run by true professionals, out of the public eye, nice grounds where the inmates can walk–you know the sort of thing. We thought your daughter might be very happy in a place like that. She could continue her music there, we could conduct the kind of tests that might lead to her eventual recovery and reintegration, and we could ensure she had secure quarters where her own remarkable traits could cause neither upset nor disturbance. What would you say to that?’
None of them was quite prepared for Rajiv’s reaction. One must suppose that, even if you are the defence minister of the world’s second most populous nation, it is an unnerving sight to see the world’s twenty-seventh richest man on his knees before you, weeping.
‘Sir, please don’t take my daughter from me! She is everything I have, and I love her far, far more than my own wretched life. I will do anything, anything–but do not take her from me. Leave it with me, sir–I promise I will find a way out of this–I have money, resources, friends–we will sort this out, don’t worry, we will understand the problem–we will work out how it can be solved in everyone’s interest–have faith in me, sir and I will not disappoint you. Only I beg you this–please let me keep my daughter!’
The government officials were silent, and it was some time before the Minister could summon his voice again.
‘Very well, Rajiv. Perhaps we have been both unfeeling and insensitive. Please go away and think about this, and let us know what you decide–by Wednesday evening?’
After a very few days, construction began of a large tower just outside Delhi. It was to be built with techniques drawn from the design of semiconductor manufacturing plants: there would be no organic materials, no dust or impurity of any kind, and it would be cleaned twice a day by costly machines. After some consideration it was thought better not to put windows in the building lest influences from outside upset the calm equilibrium of the interior. Rajiv went every day to supervise construction, to ensure that the vast confinement he was building for his daughter was designed and constructed with as much love as possible. A leading architect was commissioned to create a fantastic interior for Sapna that included a library of three thousand books, all specially printed on polyester film, and a music room in which was placed a customized piano built entirely of steel. The drawing room contained a television with the best channels from all over the world. But no light came in from outside, and only Rajiv would keep the key to the door. The outer walls were made entirely of steel, as thick as a man’s head. Soon Sapna was transferred there.
She spent her days writing and playing the piano. She only played the western classical repertoire, but she embarked upon a new categorization of it inspired by Hindustani classical music. Her scheme disregarded entirely the biographical accidents that had placed Liszt in Paris or made Beethoven deaf, and paid scant attention to the historical circumstances from which a work sprang or the attendant generic distinctions: ‘Baroque’, ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Modern’, etc. Instead, Sapna was interested in developing rules for understanding the resonances between a particular arrangement of musical sound and the natural universe, especially as apprehended by the human emotions.
She chose the expanse of the 24-hour clock face as the map on which the results of her enquiry would be plotted. Every one of its 1,440-minute gradations was held to represent a certain configuration of emotions and natural truths (after a while she found the need to analyse down to the level of the individual second) and these in turn corresponded to the different combinations of the musical ‘essences’ (her term) that could be found in individual pieces of music. She developed a set of diagrams rather like astrological charts to facilitate the complex series of judgements that had to be made in order to uncover the essences of every piece of music and thus allocate it to the correct second of the day.
After she had spent much time correcting the flaws in her system and writing out her treatise, she devoted herself to applying it to the entire piano repertoire, playing a particular piece of music slightly earlier or slightly later each day until she was satisfied that she had hit upon the exact moment at which it achieved that special resonance, rather like a dim room in the thick of a city that is ignited with sunlight for two glorious minutes every day. Most of Bach’s suites (and, contrary to their name, a couple of Chopin’s Nocturnes) came in the morning, although many of the preludes and fugues belonged to the dead of night. The more she perfected her system, the more it seemed that time was the lost secret of European classical music. When she sat, eyes closed before her piano, waiting for the precise instant of the day (about 6.02 in the evening) for which the opening bars of Beethoven’s last piano sonata were intended, when she struck out, astonishingly, into its angular chords, it made everything anyone had heard before sound like the indistinct irritation of hotel lobby soundtracks. When restored–for that is how it felt–to its correct relationship with time, the music seemed to draw itself in the sky, to stride across the constellations and fill people’s hearts with an elation they had imagined but never felt. Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02 ness as they never had before.
Sapna’s father visited her every evening. Every day she would have discovered new things through her reading or from the television that she wanted to discuss with him. He loved her more and more; and as his wife’s pregnancy advanced and she gave birth to a healthy and perfect baby boy, he also felt himself to be in her debt. ‘It is Sapna who restored my fertility to me, even at this late stage in my life,’ he thought. ‘She it is who has finally brought me the son I requested from Dr Hall, so many years ago.’ The fact that his wife had turned her back on Sapna and decided that the whole business of her first pregnancy–illegitimately obtained, she now felt–was a curse she should have nothing more to do with; the fact that Rajiv’s new and otherwise ideal son hated the idea of Sapna from the moment he became conscious of her, would fly into a fury whenever his father unheedingly referred to her as his ‘sister’, and despised him for the care and time he lavished upon the ‘freak in the tower’–all this only increased for Rajiv the poignancy of his daughter’s situation. He never ceased to feel the pain of her incarceration. ‘She deserves so much more.’ It broke his heart every evening to leave her there, and lock the door. Every night he stayed slightly longer, listening to her music or discussing literature or history.
One thing she never discussed with him was the fact that she had fallen in love with a television star. A television star with a bull-shaped head.
The shrunken baby Imran had grown up under the loving care of his parents who lived in the ramshackle bookshop his father ran in a backstreet near to where the tides of the Arabian Sea are broken by the minareted island of Haji Ali’s tomb. The tiny shop had everything: not only guidebooks, innumerable editions of the Koran and stacks of poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, but also perfumes, potions, and pendants with prayers engraved upon them. Pilgrims from small towns would come for souvenirs: plastic wall clocks that showed, behind the inconstant wavering hands, the steadfastness of the marble tomb whose domes were topped with flashing red and yellow lights for effect (‘Keeps perfect time! Will last for years.’); calendars that showed the Ka’aba surrounded by majestic whizzing planets and crescent moons in magentas and emerald greens; novelty prayer mats on which the arch of a mihrab framed a spectacular paradise of golden domes and minarets and silver palm trees. Sleeping on the shop counter, baby Imran would stay awake watching the Turkic elegance of the Muslim wonders waxing and waning in the night sky by the intermittent illumination of hundreds of gaily-coloured LEDs.
He grew slowly and unevenly. His shoulders became broad and sinewy while his legs remained thin and short. His arms were too long for his dwarfish body and from an early age he walked with a simian gait that inspired scorn and hatred among his classmates. They taunted him above all for the size and shape of his enormous head that became more and more solid with the years and whose protruding nose and jaw gave it an undeniable taurine air. Neighbourhood graffiti speculated gleefully about the various kinds of unnatural coupling that could have given rise to such a strange creature: monkeys took their cackling pleasure at the backsides of oblivious-seeming sheep, and bulls threatened to split open the bulbous behinds of curvaceous maidens. One cartoon, hastily erased by the authorities, showed an entire narrative in which a woman, anxious for a child, ate the raw testes of a bull, a meal that resulted not in her own pregnancy but that of her cow. It was an artist of some skill who had drawn the final scene in which the woman stole out by night to seize the bloody baby from the vulva of the cow and put it carefully into bed between her husband and herself. The entire story was narrated by a pointing, moralizing goat.
Imran’s parents were naturally upset by the indignities suffered by their son, and eventually gave in to his insistence that he should not attend school. He spent his days in the bookshop instead, and consumed volumes of poetry that he would recite aloud for the entertainment of customers. In time, word of his remarkable performances spread, and the bookshop would be surrounded during the day by crowds of eager listeners who could not find room inside. The very oddness of his body seemed to lend an expressivity to his interpretations that captivated everyone who heard him, and his outsized chest and neck produced a voice that gave the impression of being drawn from a vast well of emotion. Through him, his audience was able to bypass the difficulties of the Farsi or the archaisms of the Urdu and understand the true meaning of the poet. ‘It is amazing’, one said, ‘that such a young boy should be able to overpower us with his expression of such adult emotions: the yearnings of a lover for his beloved, and of a believer for the Almighty. We have yearned for many things, but never have we seen such yearning as this.’ Another replied, ‘When he talks about the pain of being trapped in time while longing for the eternal we can all finally understand how truly burdensome it is to be temporal creatures, and how glorious eternity must be!’ Imran’s body, its hulking shoulders and massive head supported by a withered frame, seemed to symbolize in flesh the poets’ theme of manly, religious passion trapped in woefully insignificant human form, and no one who heard him could again imagine those poems except on his lips.
When not in his father’s shop, Imran wandered. Since his appearance provoked fear and dismay among the city’s clean and well-to-do, he gravitated towards out-of-the-way places where people were less easily repulsed. He learned the art of appearing utterly insignificant, and thus of passing unnoticed through public places; he slipped completely unseen through the bustling centres of the city only to reappear suddenly at a dhaba or a paan shop where he would exchange handshakes and quiet greetings with five different people. His friendships were forged with marginal characters who made their money from small-time illegal businesses, and they all loved him: for he told jokes with extravagant grimaces that made them roar with laughter, and he always knew ten people who could solve any problem. They came to him with questions: where the best tea could be found, who sold car parts the most cheaply, where you could find a safe abortion, who would be able to get rid of five hundred mobile phones quickly.
One afternoon he found himself in a tiny bar in Juhu where his friends often congregated to play cards and talk business. There was no illumination except for the strips of pure light around the blinds, and the hubbub of heat and taxis and street sellers outside was reduced to a distant murmur. As they drank under the languorous fans, one of them announced:
‘Now Imran will recite us a poem!’
Imran declined, but there was much clapping and encouragement, an empty beer glass was banged rousingly on the table, the bartender came over and made his insistences–and finally he assented. He began to recite a ballad, beginning in such a low voice that they all had to lean towards him to hear.
His ballad told of a princess, long ago, who had been the pride and joy of the king and queen and her brother the prince. She was beautiful and could sing songs that made all of nature sit down and listen. And she had hair of pure gold.
One day the princess was carried off by an ugly monster who was shrunken and evil looking and coveted the gold from her head. He shaved off all her hair and made himself rich, and imprisoned her in a tall tower to wait for the hair to grow back. But it grew back so slowly he realized he would have to wait years before there would be such a quantity again. He devoted himself to devising potions to make her hair grow more quickly. Imran’s voice rose: how evil was this monster! and how absolutely comic at the same time! As he told the story, the creature became real for them all; they listened in fascination, they cried with laughter as Imran screwed up his face and recited lists of foul extracts and hideous amputations that the monster would rub into the princess’s delicate scalp or mix with her tea.
Her brother was grief-stricken at her disappearance and left the palace to go and find her. He wandered endlessly; his body became scratched by thorns and eaten by fleas, but still he did not give up. Eventually he heard a wonderful voice singing in the distance, and as he came closer he recognized it as his sister’s; yes indeed, he could glimpse her face through a tiny window at the top of a tall tower. But, though she saw him too, and was happy he had come, he was unable to rescue her, for there was no way into the tower except through a door that was always locked and the tiny window that was at a great height from the ground.
So the prince planted a tree that would grow tall and strong and allow him to climb up and rescue his sister. He would tend the tree lovingly every night, but it grew very slowly, and every day he would mourn the days that she was losing in the tower. His love was so strong and so selfless! and the tough souls who listened to Imran were moved to silence, for they had never heard such a pure expression of yearning as this.
One day the monster found the formula that would make the princess’s hair grow. As soon as he applied his ointment it began to sprout quickly from her head, and in a few minutes was thick and dazzling and hung down to her knees. He let out a scream of inhuman triumph, cut it all off at once and went away to sell it.
As soon as he had gone, the princess took his stinking cauldron and tipped it out of the window. Immediately, the infant tree began to climb towards the sky. In a few minutes it was halfway to the window, branches and twigs and leaves appearing in dazzling patterns, growing around the tower in an arboreal embrace, and bathing its bone-white stone in shade. As it grew, the prince started to climb and was borne upwards on the swelling trunk. Soon it reached all the way to the window, and the princess leapt into her brother’s arms and kissed him joyfully.
But the tree did not stop growing. No matter how fast they tried to climb downwards the tree continued to carry them higher and higher into the air. Frantically, they tried to descend, but now the tower was far below them and they were in the very heavens.
At that point the monster returned, and realized at once what had happened. Furious, he took a great axe and began to chop at the tree. With powerful blows he cut away at the trunk until it finally began to sway. With a mighty crash it fell to the ground, crushing the tower to powder. And the prince and princess were no more.
The men were quiet.
‘Why did they have to die?’
‘Well, what did you expect?’ replied Imran, amused that his audience had become so affected. ‘They were brother and sister. Were they going to get married and live happily ever after?’
‘I suppose not.’
But they were glum.
Then, from the shadowy corner of the bar, a solitary figure began to applaud. None of them had noticed him before.
‘Wonderful! Wonderful! It is years since I have seen a performance like that. You have a fine talent, sir! I would like to see more of what you can do. Allow me to introduce myself. I am a senior executive with an advertising company–as my business card will show. I would like very much to introduce you to some highly influential people I happen to know here in Bombay. I think you may be just what they are looking for. With your permission, of course. Your monster was quite extraordinary. So terrifying, and yet so humorously delivered! I can see a glittering career, sir! There are so few true actors these days.’
And so it was, after a dizzying succession of meetings and auditions, that Imran became the ‘Plaque Devil’ for Colgate toothpaste, in one of the most successful advertising campaigns that India had ever seen. A loathsome, misshapen figure that forced an entry into happy, brightly-lit households, and caused merry dental chaos through his evil schemes until finally repulsed by a laser-filled tube of Colgate, he became a cultural phenomenon such as advertising companies dream of. Children imitated him in the schoolyard, and magazines gave away free Plaque Devil stickers that would adorn the very walls where once graffiti had made shameful innuendos about Imran’s birth. Youngsters found in the character a welcome focus for rebellious feelings, while parents approved of its pedagogic potential and felt that at least their offspring’s unseemly roars and menacing ape-like walk might result in healthier teeth.
This was only the beginning for Imran. Every company wanted him in their advertisements, and soon his much-prized deformity had become the embodiment of every kind of threat to middle-class life: germs, crime, poverty, unwise consumer decisions. Within an astonishingly short time he had become one of the most recognizable faces in India, rivalling Bollywood stars and cricket players for space on cereal packets and soft-drink displays. He was an anti-hero who seemed to complete at a profound level the otherwise beautiful and perfect media pantheon.
But the true extent of his stardom was confirmed when he was cast as the demon Ravana in Star TV’s eight-hour epic, The Ramayana. Screened in its entirety from morning to evening on Independence Day, this was billed as the biggest media event the country had ever seen, with stunning digital effects and a cast of megastars bringing the ancient myths to life in ways never before imagined. The digital manipulation that placed an additional nine heads on Imran’s shoulders (whose unnatural broadness seemed built to receive them) was lifelike and spellbinding, and everyone agreed that it was this character more than any other that turned the show into the immense hit it became. He was an incomparable demon–and a strangely magnetic one. Though women across the country shuddered as the grotesque character abducted Sita from her beautiful royal husband, as he tried to seduce her into betraying Ram and accepting the queenship of his own demon kingdom, they could not help but feel in his entreaties a depth of longing that they had never encountered in their own lives; and in spite of their disgust, despite the fact they knew it could never happen, they were fascinated by the idea that the unwavering Sita might relent and they would see what a passionate and generous lover he might be. When Hanuman and his computer-generated monkey hordes swept down on Lanka and finally defeated the demon, it was not without feelings of confusion that they accepted the restoration of Sita to her rightful husband.
Imran’s life had changed. He had become wealthy and famous, and his cellphone rang constantly with new offers of work and money. But he was not invited to the soirées of the beautiful people, and he remained an outsider to the constant spectacle of Bombay social life. He spent his evenings at the same backstreet bars and dhabas, and avoided the thoroughfares of the city even more assiduously than before. But former friends became distrustful of his sudden wealth and institutionalization, and new ones seemed to have motives he did not like. And in his increasing isolation he began to reflect more and more on the deep yearning that had filled him for as long as he could remember. For some reason, he had a strong feeling that it had something to do with the mysterious figure who came every year on his birthday to give money to his parents.
When Imran’s next birthday came around he positioned himself across the street from the bookshop to wait for the immaculately dressed man who came every year to hand over a packet of money and exchange a few whispered words in the back before hurriedly departing. Though Imran had asked his parents many times who this man was they had never told him the secret.
The man arrived at the end of the morning as expected, and as he bid his surreptitious farewells Imran began to follow him. He walked quickly, conspicuous in his suit, turned two corners, and slid into the back of a black Mercedes that sped off northwards on Marine Drive. Imran stopped a taxi: ‘Follow that car!’
They passed the dilapidated British frontages, manoeuvred through the jam of other taxis, drove over the massive concrete flyovers near Bandra from where you could see a forest of giant movie star hoardings sprouting from the rubble, in whose shade families sought cooler stones to make their life on, passed undulating townships of corrugated iron and tarpaulin reflected in the blind mirror exteriors of the corporate towers, and finally reached the airport.
The man checked in for a business-class seat to Delhi, and Imran bought an economy-class ticket on the same plane. He had put on loose clothes, walked taller, tried to look inconspicuous. No one seemed to notice that Star TV’s Ravana was treading the earth among them.
The sun had almost set by the time Imran’s quarry drew up before the Malhotra mansion on Prithviraj Road. Imran began to ask people, ‘Who lives in that house?’ No one could tell him anything to explain the yearly visits to his family in Bombay.
‘He is a very rich man,’ said a beggar with wild grey hair. ‘And a very cruel one. The rumour says that he keeps his daughter locked up in a tower. She plays wonderful music, but he never lets her out.’
‘Where is the tower?’ asked Imran.
‘It is far from here. I could take you there.’
‘Yes. Please do.’
As Imran took one last look at the house it seemed to him that it must have suffered some kind of catastrophe in the past. Ill-matching materials had been used to repair what looked like giant holes in the roof and walls. He wondered what could have caused such a violent thing in such a genteel street.
Only the entrance of the tower was lit, and it was difficult to see how large it was by night. Imran struck it with his fist. The steel was very thick. He looked at the strange structure in disbelief.
‘He keeps his daughter in here?’
‘Yes. Everyone around here knows about her.’
‘Is she grown-up?’
‘She must be a woman now. No one has seen her for years.’
‘Why did he put her here?’
‘I cannot tell you.’
Just then, their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a piano. It was a sound so astonishing that Imran fell involuntarily to his knees. It was as if ten hands played simultaneously, every hand that of a celestial being, filled with knowledge that humans could not imagine, confident of an eternal beauty that was siphoned from another world into every musical note, causing it to swell beyond itself until it was no longer just music; until scales and trills became glorious light that struck Imran behind the retina, until melodies created holes in the sky that shifted over each other until, as the logic of the music became clear, and for a brief instant only, all the holes lined up in a perfect tunnel that led up into the heavens and ended in that thing that Imran had been longing for all his life–and then the gaps in the sky drifted apart again and disappeared, and the music resolved into its finale.
Imran was left winded and limp. For a time he could not talk, but knelt on the ground supporting his heavy head in his hands. At length he looked up at the tower.
‘I have to meet her.’
‘I can’t see how you would do that. No one ever meets her.’
‘I will find a way.’
Imran spent the next few days exploring the out-of-the-way places of this city he did not know, looking for people who could help him plan his break-in. He struck up conversations with shopkeepers and restaurant owners, followed connections until he found dead ends, stood by night among sleeping bodies and campfires in dormant office complexes for rendezvous that did not happen, called lists of mobile phone numbers only for suspicious men to hang up on him. But in the end his work paid off, and he had assembled explosives and firearms and a small team to prepare the blast and guard their operation.
Dressed in black, they met at the tower in the early hours of the morning on a night when the moon was just a nick in the sky. The drowsy security guard was deftly disarmed and gagged, and they set about putting their explosives in place. Imran’s new-found expert slapped the steel as if it were a boisterous friend.
‘I would say it’s about eight inches thick. No way we can blast through it. We’d make a very big noise and this baby would still be sitting here smiling back at us. But you can see it’s made of eight-foot panels welded together and we can blast at the joins. Don’t worry. We can pop one of these big ladies easy as putting your eye out.’
With that he and his companion began to drill into the joins with the unabashed scream of steel on steel.
‘Quiet, for God’s sake!’ hissed Imran.
‘Do you want to get in here or not?’ He fixed Imran with the glare of a master workman who needs no counsel, and Imran gestured his submission. Drills fired up once more, puncturing the smooth exterior and ejecting fine spirals of silver, while Imran winced at this racket in the night and looked around for the security people who would certainly descend on them. But no one came; and soon the panel was framed by twelve even holes, and the men were filling them with a paste like halwa.
‘Let’s talk it through one more time. The blast will pop her outwards. No one stands in the way. You’ll be disorientated–think through your actions now. You three are going in with torches. Remember your way back. Once you get out you turn right–look at where the van is waiting. Are you ready?’
Imran looked up at the gloomy tower, and could not get rid of the thought, ‘Did I dream this once before?’ His heart was hammering in his throat.
The massive steel panel burst cleanly out of the wall and landed in the dust in an explosion so loud that everything in its wake was just a numb rumble. He staggered from the force of the blast, took hold of his thoughts, reached for his flashlight, and plunged into the swirling dust that filled the neat square hole in the wall. He ran into the room–and stopped short.
The lights were on, and Sapna stood shivering before him, clasping herself in a shawl, her eyes wide. He stood motionless, looking. She was beautiful to him, and her eyes answered his own in many mysterious ways; her very reality seemed astonishing, as if suddenly the afterimage that rippled briefly on corneal waters whenever he looked away from the sun, the presence that had for so long shimmered just beyond his senses, had at last become solid–this was true; but why was it that, as he looked, as he wished for all the clocks of the world to stop for the moment of his looking, his head was distracted, filled with other kinds of ticks and tocks that were not to do with time, that were the sound of a mechanism falling into place, the dials of a mighty safe lining up and opening, not just an eight-foot-square steel entrance but a channel between worlds that brought things unaccustomedly close and in an instant made the yearning of the poets of his childhood seem quaint and unnecessary; and as confusion raced like police sirens through the exhilarating night of his encounter, even as the men began to shout from behind and, in that other dimension, time was still galloping onwards, even as somewhere he was aware of how he must look, bursting in from the night at the head of a band of men with guns and a job to do, he knew now that all the reservoir of his desire, which had jangled inside him all his life, which filled his very chromosomes and made them yell out in the darkness, had not been enough to prepare him for this domino-like unfolding of everything he thought was solid around the trembling form of the woman who now stood before him.
‘What is happening? Get him out of there! Let’s go!’
Sapna continued to look at him.
‘Am I dreaming this again?’ she said, as if puzzled. ‘Or is it really you this time?’
Imran stood stupidly; but anyway he was not given time to respond as the men grabbed him and Sapna and dragged them both outside. His mind whirled and he followed them in a daze, lights flashed all around him, and there was a shift in reality; he tried to wake himself up to it, it seemed urgent…
They were surrounded. A ring of policemen shone bright lights at them, pointed guns.
‘You fucking idiot,’ the explosives chief shouted at Imran. ‘I thought you had it in you. You froze. Now we’re all fucked.’
They dropped their weapons and were grouped together and handcuffed. The night seemed strangely big, and the red and blue lights of the police vans hurt the eyes. One of the policemen was on the phone.
‘Six men. One of them’s deformed. Reminds me of someone, actually. The girl’s here too…The Defence Minister? Why? It’s three in the morning…Oh. I see…I’ll wait for you to call me back.’
They were all made to lie down on the ground. It began to rain. The phone rang.
‘Yes? Hello, Sir…Yes…A sort of dwarf…You’re exactly right. Just like a bull…Rajiv Malhotra? I see…No, we’ll make very sure. We’ll be very discreet…Yes, I know the place…The girl too? I don’t think the girl is an accomplice in this, sir…She doesn’t look dangerous…Of course. Very good.’
Thus it was that slightly before dawn, Imran and Sapna were locked into adjacent rooms in a high-security mental asylum that sat in the middle of large grounds in an unobtrusive location on the outskirts of the city.
For three days, high-ranking government officials thought of nothing but the Malhotra Issue. Rajiv Malhotra had asked for three days to conduct his own investigation into what had happened, during which time his daughter would remain in the asylum along with the ugly creature who was, it now turned out, none other than the star of The Ramayana and of so many memorable advertisements whose makers would be horrified when they found out that the deviant creature they had taken pity on, sponsored, and enriched was in real life a far more sinister kind of interloper than the antisocial influences he had been asked to portray on television. A low-class loner with sick thoughts whom even wealth and fame had not been able to civilize, who still kept the company of illegal elements, a criminal of the worst sort who destroyed private property by night in the throes, no doubt, of a monstrous sexual hunger for whose gratification he could not avail himself of the standard amenities but conceived instead an intricate plot to assault the decency of a daughter of the city’s leading family. No one could understand why it was that Rajiv Malhotra extended his three days’ protection to such a despicable character, but the connections of businessmen as prominent as he always extended into murky places and it was best not to ask. For three days phone calls passed between the Defence Minister, the director of the asylum, the Chief of Police, and Rajiv Malhotra himself. The officials were stern with the businessman: he had failed in his guarantee to manage his daughter’s Situation without the assistance of the State, and no concessions beyond the three days were allowed him. He was not permitted to visit the asylum or to speak to either of its new inmates.
For three days, Sapna did not sleep. Day and night she stood at her fifth-floor window looking out. The grounds were well kept, and the gardeners had recently planted infant trees around the foot of the building. Keeping watch with the police was her brother, Rajiv’s model son whom Sapna had only seen in photographs and who was now a tall, handsome teenager. He had taken it upon himself to ensure, as his clammy-hearted father did not seem to be able to, that no security breaches happened this time, and surveyed the window where she stood with a self-confident hatred that chilled her heart.
For three days she looked out, thinking again of those moments in the television epic when the ten-headed Ravana had attempted to seduce the woefully chaste Sita, with what words! and what yearning! How she had treasured the voice of a man who could desire like that, and how many times had she imagined that her own incarceration might be ended with such a magnificent abduction. What course of events, what impossible, impenetrable strangeness, could have brought that man to her and propelled him through the walls of her cage? What spirit could have caused her dream to be recreated so precisely in reality?
For three days she thought continually on these things. And then she slept.
Imran awoke to find himself in a room with no floor, hanging onto the bars of his window with bloodless fingers.
Buds of bulging paintwork were appearing all over the walls; green shoots burst from them, wavered for a second as if waiting for a distant vegetal communication, suddenly found direction, and streaked up through the ceiling, swelling into vast boughs of furrowed wood and splitting the room apart. He looked down through the bars where he hung: the circle of saplings had grown into giants, their tops soaring into the sky, branches spreading out inside the building as if reaching for a prey, fusing with the bricks and–yes! even as he watched!–lifting the entire asylum clean off the ground and carrying it aloft. The room tipped and Imran was standing upright on the wall, the window bars popped out and fell to the grass that was already far below, the bricks that separated him from his sister collapsed in a cascade: and there was Sapna, still asleep in her bed.
He shook her awake; and already she was running with him, leaping the crevasses that were opening under their feet, fighting through corridors that were quickly becoming impassable from rubble and dust and people. Everywhere there were people in white, inmates who giggled uncontrollably as unseen hands flung wide their cell doors, who shuffled into the hallways, who clucked and ticked and screamed as the floors buckled and sent them sliding on their backsides down the inclines, genitals waving in the air. They instinctively crowded together, drained from the building’s extremities towards its heart, packed the stairwell, told stories to the sky as they plunged also through the solid floors of their madness into the gulfs and gardens that lay below. The stairs thronged with figures in white; and, as Imran and Sapna clutched hands and watched from above, the ring of trees wrenched the building in all directions; it opened like a flower, and its centre fell out and crashed to the ground. There was sky above them and ground below, and all around them, in amphitheatrical cutaway, were the stacked worlds of the hospital, from whose truncated edges hung screaming people who eventually had to loose their grip and fall one by one through the open well of the building onto the pile of stone and steel below.
From his sentry post where he had made up for the shameful laxity of the police observers with his own unsleeping surveillance, Rajiv’s model son watched in horror as the asylum broke open like a wasp’s nest, as white-robed pupae began to rain from it and wriggle away who knew where, ready to infiltrate the city and lay new eggs of their own in its fissures and sewers. It was not thus that his father’s girl child and her accomplice creature would find their escape. He seized a rifle from one of the still sleeping policemen and began to climb one of the trees.
Imran and Sapna teetered on the edge of their gaping concrete tree house as shots began to strike the people around them. He dragged Sapna down, ‘Quick, we have to jump for it’, but already she was struck and was lying breathless over his knee, blood welling from above her hip onto the floor. Bullets still flew, stopping the shrieks of women in their throats, lodging in the plaster. A red stain fanned out from Sapna’s side across the ground, the racing trees slowed down, grew in weaker and weaker bursts that seemed to keep time with Sapna’s fading heartbeat, and finally stopped. The raging bedlam of exploding cellulose and masonry ceased, and there was quiet. The wind sighed through the branches, and the azan sounded far away. Sapna lay white and motionless.
With a roar, Imran flew at the gunman who was his brother. He scrambled across the still branches and hanging lintels, spread wide his enormous arms, ran with a fury that was too mad and too fast for fingers to find their grip or bullets to be loaded, and alighted on the branch where the killer leant before he could clamber off it. He struck the rifle from his grasp and, with trembling mouth still searching for a curse terrible enough, seized him by the throat, squeezed his skull with his outsized sinews, and snapped his neck with a single flourish of rage. He held him for a moment to let the poison of his anger seep in and dispatch him still further, clasped the brother he did not know he had, supported his body until the force had gone entirely, and let him drop to the ground below, limbs outstretched and head waggling uselessly.
With a sense that all the world had ended, Imran clambered back to where Sapna lay. He crossed the tangle of branches in despair, neared the circle of white people that knelt around her, that parted as he approached, knelt down among them himself–and saw something miraculous.
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Rana Dasgupta
A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style to an energetically modern worldscape.Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories.Robert De Niro’s child, conceived in a Laundromat, masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people’s memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men’s hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of German cartographer.Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities – New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires – that grow in to a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.Dasgupta’s writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.
RANA DASGUPTA
Tokyo Cancelled
For my parents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Arrivals (#ulink_defcc5ce-d7da-54b7-b725-f344e640a658)
Chapter 2 - The Tailor: The First Story (#ulink_ea7075ee-5c29-5f50-a0b9-267b906dc444)
Chapter 3 - The Memory Editor: The Second Story (#ulink_a2be8fe3-4ad8-58e1-a6bf-259c84c31eca)
Chapter 4 - The Billionaire’s Sleep: The Third Story (#ulink_bbf83952-c20c-5364-bce7-aa4cd0b388ef)
Chapter 5 - The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker: The Fourth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 - The Store on Madison Avenue: The Fifth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 - The Flyover: The Sixth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 - The Speed Bump: The Seventh Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 - The Doll: The Eighth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 - The Rendezvous in Istanbul: The Ninth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 - The Changeling: The Tenth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 - The Bargain in the Dungeon: The Eleventh Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 - The Lucky Ear Cleaner: The Twelfth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 - The Recycler of Dreams: The Thirteenth Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 - Departures (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ARRIVALS (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
THERE WAS CHAOS.
Will someone please explain why we are here?–What are we going to eat? Who has thought of that?–Who is in charge here? Let me speak to him!
A 747 had disgorged its 323 passengers into the middle of a vacant, snow-brushed tarmac expanse, left them to trudge across it through the cold and the floodlit glare to a terminus whose neon name was only illuminated in patches and anyway was in a language most of them could not read; had abandoned them, in short, in the Middle of Nowhere, in a place that was Free of Duty but also, much more importantly, devoid of any obvious egress, like a back corridor between two worlds, two somewheres, where people only alighted when something was seriously kaput with the normal eschatological machinery.
Do you realize I have a vital meeting tomorrow morning? I haven’t got time to be here!
Sir: we have already explained it to you several times. This snowstorm breaks all of Tokyo’s records. The city is blanketed, completely inaccessible. Do you understand? Absolutely no possibility of landing there. Everywhere in this hemisphere planes are lurching as we speak, U-turning, overnighting where they can. We cannot argue with the weather. These things happen.
Three hundred and twenty-three people clamoured for a hearing for their unique Woes. My husband is waiting for me at the airport. I’m only going to get one honeymoon. I have to be back in New York on Friday: my vacation is Over. Over. This cannot be happening. Heads in hands, bloodshot eyes towards heaven.
A queue formed, of sorts, at the one open desk where a man tried to hold off the snaking, spitting vitriol long enough to find a solution. We understand Madam it’s very late yes the little one looks quite unhappy please bear with us.
People checked for passports, money. Do Americans need a visa to be here?–What are the hotels like? Where can we sleep?–
What is the problem here?
The man stood on his chair. Hands raised to beat down the voices, you had to give it to him he wasn’t going to let himself get intimidated, Can you please listen?
I don’t know if any of you has read the newspapers recently but if you have you will know you’ve just landed up in the wrong place at the wrong time–latecomers to the world fair, no room at the inn. Everyone is in town right now and there isn’t a hotel room in the entire city. Well what were you expecting? Every world leader is here and ten thousand journalists and forty thousand demonstrators. Don’t you people watch the news? We’ve had water cannon and barbed wire and rubber bullets and all kinds of other frolics. In our streets! What I Am Trying To Say ladies and gentlemen is that the city is full to overflowing, getting proper accommodation is going to be a problem for you and there’s no point getting hysterical about it. We should be able to get you on a flight in the morning–the worst possible scenario is that you have to spend a few hours here and that, I am confident enough, is not going to kill you–but don’t worry, calm down! we are going to do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen.
The crowd detested him already and as he abused them in this manner a wave of foul language gushed from their several mouths, shivered and swelled and crashed over him full of lonely feelings and terrible thoughts. He was undeterred:
I would like you all to know that my wife is a travel agent and I have already informed her you are here and that you’d all like a place to stay for the night. She’s at home as we speak calling round all the hotels for you and trying to sort you out. We’ll do it first-come, first-served and we’ll try to get you in bed as soon as possible.
The place felt like an emergency ward. Captions on the departure board rustled frantically–TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED–and the packed baggage carousel squeaked like an anxious heartbeat monitor under the weight of hundreds of suitcases it had not been expecting.
You don’t understand. I need to get out of here right now. I was never supposed to be here. I’m presenting at a conference in eight hours.
No–excuse me all of you–excuse me!–sorry sir you’d better make your phone calls now. I don’t think it’s likely you’ll be anywhere but here in eight hours. Can you all try and remain calm please! Thank you!
Somebody made the discovery that mobile phones worked. Even here! The tumult diminuendoed into urgent private consultations and intimate reassurances: No I may not be there tonight, they’re telling us tomorrow now, Of course I’m safe no this place stinks but the people look OK. Yes tomorrow I promise I think you ought to warn Bob that he may be doing the presentation–yes get him out of bed for God’s sake!–the file is on my computer. My Documents. I love you too. Sir would you mind if I made a really quick call from your phone? It’s just that it’s really important.
OK good news ladies and gentlemen! We have ten double rooms in a hotel downtown. Yes Madam I think that’s a good idea there’s no point your little one staying up please go this way. Three star. Nine more people please! Sorry that’s the best we can do for now. We will call you all in the morning. By 8 a.m.
People filed out into the cold, foreign night, got into a minivan, were gone. ‘At least he looks as if he’s in control’ spread between people, maybe it’s best to just wait like he says. Wry smiles passed between strangers sharing their Why does it always happen to me!
If the company had sent me here I’d be in the Hilton…
It only happened when it was absolutely crucial that everything go smoothly, on the one day: that constant small-minded cattiness of the cosmos, the incompetence of people with insufficient awareness of the importance of Things who are unfortunately indispensable in the system, you have no choice but to depend on so many people who don’t know and don’t care.
We’ve just found a hotel out of town that can take eighty of you! This way! Quickly. Thank you. Fifty. You’re together? Seventy. Seventy-eight. Thank you. No I’m sorry Sir they told us strictly no more you’ll have to wait for the next place.
The crowd diminished slowly, the noise separated out from its hubbub into discrete conversations and exclamations. Ruminations. People were Taking Stock. Tokyo tomorrow night that means I miss the connection the next one is Thursday which means I have to spend a couple of days there God I’ve always wanted to see Tokyo! The snowstorm was like a wall across a highway that brought cruise control to a whiplash standstill: but as you thought about it there were ways around it, through it even, and the other possibilities started to seem more, well, felt. Fists and tempers were still shaken at the blatant injustice of it all, but around the airport hall the mutant seed of force majeure was already sprouting up through the edifices of cherished Plans, cracking the walls and floors until they crumbled in a cloud of dust which, as it cleared, revealed something new. Well anyway what can you do?–I think the insurance covered this.–We’ve just got to see what time we get out of here in the morning.
Buses and taxis bustled outside, headlights clipping the snow, and the man on the desk, phone cocked between shoulder and ear, hands busy on the keyboard, produced regular triumphant announcements: guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts and undocumented hotels that the global visitors had missed. It was late: lights went off in the Duty Free stores and the snack bar closed. Someone summarily extinguished CNN’s airport news service, and grandiose light boxes advertising American Express and The Economist flickered, and became dull. Middle-aged women with headscarves and mops started to trace epic shiny corridors from one end of the floor to the other, shaking themselves free of detritus–plastic cups, newspapers, baggage tags–each time they turned around. An assortment of almost unnoticeable people–who were those people?–settled down in various shadowy corners to sleep on vinyl chairs.
Thirteen people were left, muted by fatigue, able only to stand and try to follow the curlicue meanderings of the phone conversation that contained their future. Full too? OK. And no dice with the Sunshine Hotel. Yes, I remember. What other options do we have? Really. Yes I know what time it is. No I think you’re right. You’re sure there’s nothing else? OK. Thank you so much. Thank you. I’ll see you later. He put down the phone slowly, tenderly.
Ladies and gentlemen I apologize for the time you’ve had to wait here, you’ve been very patient. Now I’m afraid that there doesn’t seem to be a single place left for you people to stay. We really have tried everywhere but as I said to you earlier it’s not a good time to be looking right now. I haven’t got anything left to suggest. I’d invite you all to spend the night at my place but unfortunately my wife and I have only a one-room apartment and I’m not sure that you’d be very comfortable there. So I think that–I’m really sorry about this–you’re going to just have to do the best you can right here. Now the good news is–I’ve just got the schedule confirmed–your flight is leaving at 09.55. The snowstorm has already subsided in Tokyo. Check-in time is 7.30. So it’s really just a few hours. I’m really sorry.
It wasn’t his fault. No point making a fuss. This place was depressing and dead but what could you do? He’d tried his best. Just a few hours, as he said. He picked up his jacket and left. Good night. Good night. Night.
The baggage carousels were still and silent, and in the half-light there stood security people with guns and military uniforms. The great windows of the building revealed nothing but blackened copies of the hall where they stood, with a huddle of thirteen in each one. They felt an inexplicable need to stay close, as if during the reconstitution of themselves around this new Situation a sort of kinship had emerged. They moved towards the chairs like atoms in a molecule, no closer but also no further away than their relationship dictated.
They sat. Wearied smiles were exchanged. An American woman spoke. I’m going to see what the little girls’ room has to offer. Another woman joined her. Everyone faced each other on rows of chairs, three sides of a square.–I was supposed to be on my way to Sydney by now. My brother’s wedding. Maybe I’ll still make it.–Everyone had a story.
(One man watched in fascination as, in the distance, an astounding, prehistoric kind of thing, a land mollusc, a half-evolved arthropod, all claws and wing cases, limped slowly from one side of the hall to the other. An insect, surely, but from here it looked the size of a rat. No one else seemed to notice.)
The two women returned with water bottles and packets of snack food. The guards got us these. It’s something, anyway. Toilets are OK if anyone was wondering.
You know this is the first night I have spent away from my wife in fifteen years of marriage. Can you imagine? (A Japanese man with his tie loosened.) Every night for fifteen years I have slept next to her. It feels strange to think of her lying alone on one side of the bed right now. Lop-sided. If she only knew I am spending the night with so many new friends–and so many pretty ladies!–boy what would she think! Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy! The first night I ever spend away and here I am staying up through the whole night! This is wild.
I haven’t done this for years.
There was little to say, but an undeniable warmth. People passed round peanuts. A large middle-aged man with remarkable crevasses across his face accepted the last cigarette of the backpacker girl next to him and they smoked slowly, occasionally dropping ash into the empty Marlboro box she cupped in her hand. No one spoke. The guards dozed with rifles sticking up between their legs.
You know friends I don’t think we know each other well enough to sit in silence. Have to go through a lot before you can do that. But we shouldn’t ignore each other. Don’t you agree? Let me make a humble suggestion–maybe you don’t agree–but I was thinking just wondering to myself: Does anyone know any stories?
When I was a student we used to tell stories in the evenings. No money for anything else! I’d love to hear some stories again. It calms you down, you think of other worlds. And before long we’ll all be ready to check in for our flight. What do you say?
I don’t know any stories. I’m not very good at that kind of thing.
But everyone felt it was good there was talking.
Look sir you’re not going to tell me that! Everyone knows stories! I just told you I slept in the same bed as my wife every night for the last fifteen years in the same bedroom of the same flat in the same suburb of Tokyo–and look at all you different people! You just have to tell me how you travel to work every morning in the place where you live and for me it’s a fable! it’s a legend! Sorry I am tired and a little stressed and this is not how I usually talk but I think when you are together like this then stories are what is required.
Someone spoke: I have a story I can tell.
Simple, just like that.
THE TAILOR The First Story (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
NOT SO LONG ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim.
One summer, the usual round of private parties and prostitutes became too tedious for Ibrahim and he decided to go on a voyage around the provinces of the kingdom, ‘to see how those villagers spend all their damned time’. So he packed clothes and American one-dollar bills (for letting fly from the windows of his jeep) and set off with his young courtier friends in a jostling pack of father-paid cars, whooping and racing.
Despite themselves, the young men fell silent when the ramshackle streets of the outskirts of the city finally gave way to open countryside. The smooth, proud highways built under the reign of Ibrahim’s grandfather began to loop up into the hills and, as the morning mists cleared, the city boys looked out on spectacular scenes of mountains and forests. For several hours they drove.
By early afternoon they had travelled a great distance without a single halt, and as they approached a small town Ibrahim pulled off the road and stopped. The scene was all polo shirts and designer jeans amid the slamming of car doors, the stretching of limbs, the pissing behind bushes–and the townsfolk quickly assembled to find out who these visitors were. ‘Certainly they are film stars come to make videos like on MTV,’ they said to each other as the band of young men strode onto the main square of the town, sun glaring from oversized belt buckles and Italian sunglasses. Goats and chickens whined and clucked their retreats, as if to clear the set.
On the minds of the young men was food; and very soon orders had been placed, chairs brought from front rooms and the local inn, and they were sitting sipping coconut juice in the shade of a wall. Around the square, the whole town stood and watched. Children stared, shop owners came out onto the streets to see what was going on–and a number of youths who were no younger or older than these visitors stood wondering who the heroes could be, and committing to memory every gesture, accoutrement, and comb-stroke.
The food was brought and Ibrahim and his companions began to eat vigorously. The boldest of the villagers stepped forward and addressed them,
‘Please, kind Sirs, tell us: Who are you?’
None of the courtiers knew what to say. Which was more sophisticated: to tell the truth, or to remain silent?
Ibrahim himself spoke.
‘We have come from far away, and we are very grateful for your kindnesses.’
What a fine answer that was! The local people felt their civic pride swell, and the prince’s companions thought once again to themselves, ‘That is why I am me and he is a prince.’ As women brought more and more food, the sun’s rays seemed to glow more yellow with the harmony that could exist between these two groups who seemed to have so little in common.
The meal was over; and with much wiping of hands and mouths the party left their plates and large piles of dollars behind and began to explore the narrow streets of the town, followed by a crowd of excited townsfolk.
They saw small houses with children playing and women sweeping, stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables, and shops of shoemakers, butchers, and carpenters. Finally, at the end of an alleyway, they came to a little store hung out front with robes and dresses: the tailor.
‘Let’s see what this fellow has to offer,’ said Ibrahim. A bell rang as they opened the door, and they pushed past it into a gloomy room overflowing with clothes. The tailor rushed forward to greet them.
‘Come in, come in gentlemen, plenty of room, please!’ He hastily pushed things out of the way to make space for them to stand. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘What is your name, tailor?’ asked Ibrahim.
‘Mustafa, at your service, Sir.’
‘You live here alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you make?’
‘I make anything and everything that can be worn. The people here are poor, so mostly it is simple work. Cotton dresses for the ladies. Shirts for the men. But I can see you are grand visitors. I will show you something special.’
He went to the back of his store and took out a large packet wrapped in brown paper. The young men drew around as he reverentially laid it out on the workbench and untied the string. He slowly unwrapped it, and there, inside, glowing with pent-up light, was the most magnificent silk robe any of them had ever seen. Cut in the traditional style, it was intricately patterned, delicately pleated, and slashed on the sleeves and flared skirts to reveal exquisite gold brocade beneath. The web of stitches that covered the whole robe, holding it in its perfect shape, was entirely invisible, and all the sections fitted together without a single break in the pattern.
The men stared, taken aback at this unexpected splendour.
‘This is a fine piece of work, tailor. There are too few people in our country who have respect for these old traditions,’ said Ibrahim.
‘Thank you, Sir. This is the achievement of my lifetime. It has taken me years to save the money to make this. It was my own little dream.’
Ibrahim gently felt the textures of the shimmering robe.
‘Tailor, I would like you to make me a robe even more magnificent than this.’
Ibrahim’s companions were amazed. Was he in earnest? They had never seen this seriousness in him.
More amazed still was the tailor himself.
‘I am deeply honoured, Sir, at your request. But may I ask first–please do not misunderstand me–who you are and whether you are sure you can afford what you ask for. These materials come from far away and are now very rare. I will need to travel to meet with merchants. They will have to send out orders far and wide. It will take six months, and–’
‘Do not worry. I am Ibrahim, eldest son of King Saïd. I will see that your expenses are covered and you yourself are handsomely paid for your pains. Please embroider the robe with the royal stag and crescent moon, and deliver it to the royal palace when it is finished.’
The tailor was moved.
‘Your Highness, I will do what you ask. You will not be disappointed. I will make the most splendid robe you have ever seen, and I will bring it myself to your palace.’
‘I thank you, tailor. I have every confidence in you.’
And with that, they left.
For several weeks the tailor did not sleep as he made the arrangements for the new robe. First of all he needed a bank loan to cover the enormous costs of the materials he was to buy. Luckily, news of the fabulous order had immediately spread across the town and the quiet tailor had acquired a new fame. Within a few days he had managed to find funds and take on an assistant to help with the work. He set off immediately on a tour of the surrounding towns to look at the finest fabrics, and when nothing was satisfactory he sent the incredulous merchants away to find better. Normally a thrifty and reclusive man, the tailor suddenly became bold and extravagant in the accomplishment of this fantastic project. He bought books of old artworks to ensure he had understood every nuance of the traditional styles. The usually silent alleyway outside his shop became crowded with the vans and cars of merchants bringing samples and deliveries. The racks inside were packed away to make space for the accumulating piles of luxurious silks and brocades.
He meditated on the antique familiarity of the royal crest until it came to life in his head as a magnificent design: while the stars circled at the edges and a grand city twinkled in the distance, the whole chain of animal life arranged itself among the trees to gaze upon the stag who stood alone in a clearing, silvery in the silken light of the crescent moon.
For days at a time the tailor would not move from his workbench as he drew and cut, pinned and sewed. New lamps were brought in to allow him to carry out the intricate work at night, and with astonishing rapidity the flimsy panels of silk assembled themselves into a robe as had not been seen since the days of the old court. After four months the job was finished, and the robe was carefully laid out in the workshop, complete with its own shirt, pantaloons, and matching slippers. The tailor rented a small van, loaded up his precious cargo, and set out for the capital city.
The skies were full of the radiant expectation of morning when the tailor made his approach to the royal palace. In the busy streets trestle tables were juddered and clacked into readiness, and a procession of vans spilled forth the goods that would festoon their surfaces: sparkling brassware, colourful fabrics, beeping alarm clocks, and novelties for tourists. People were everywhere. Men smoked and talked by the side of the road, waiting to see how the day would progress, village women found patches of ground to arrange displays of woven bedspreads and wicker baskets, and boys hawked newspapers full of morning conversation.
As he drove through the unfamiliar streets the tailor felt elated by the crowds. ‘What wonders can be achieved here!’ he thought to himself. ‘Everywhere there are great buildings housing unheard-of forms of human pursuit, new things being made and bought and sold, and people from all over the world, each with their own chosen destination. Even the poor know they are treading on a grander stage: they look far into the future and walk with purpose. What clothes might I have made had I spent my life here!’
The road leading to the royal residence was generous and pristine, with lines of trees and fountains converging in the distance on the domed palace that already quivered in the heat of the morning. The tailor stared at the big cars with diplomatic license plates, marvelled at the number of people that worked just to keep this street beautiful and clean. He arrived at the palace.
At the entrance, two guards signalled to him to stop. Their uniforms were tight-fitting, made of fabrics the tailor had never seen, and packed with a fascinating array of weapons and communications devices. ‘What is your purpose?’ The tailor explained.
‘Do you have any paperwork? A purchase order from the palace?’ ‘No.’ The tailor hesitated. ‘It wasn’t like that, you see–’ ‘Every delivery must have a signed purchase order from the appropriate department. Go away and obtain the necessary documentation.’ The tailor explained his story again. ‘Please inform Prince Ibrahim that I am here. He is expecting me. My name is Mustafa the tailor. He has ordered a silk robe from me.’
‘Please leave at once and do not come peddling to the king’s palace.’ ‘Will you speak to the prince? He will remember me…’ But the guards would listen no more. The tailor had no option but to get back in his van and drive away.
He camped in the van and came every day to the palace to wait outside the gates. The guards proving intransigent, he scanned the windows for signs of the prince’s presence, looked in every arriving car for any of the faces that had come to his shop that day, tried to imagine how he would get a message into the palace. All to no avail.
Where could he go? He owed more money than he had seen in his whole life, and it was unlikely that anyone except the prince would buy such an extravagant, outmoded robe. All he could do was to wait until someone vindicated his story.
He ate less every day in order to save his last remaining coins, and he became dirty and unkempt. By day he sat and tracked every coming and going with eyes that grew hollow with waiting. By night he had nightmares in which the prince and his band of laughing noblemen walked right by him as he lay oblivious with sleep.
The van became an expense he could not support. He drove into the desert to hide the robe, which he wrapped carefully in paper, placed in an old trunk, and buried in a spot by some trees. And he sent the vehicle back.
He became a fixture by the palace gates. The guards knew him and tolerated his presence as a deluded, but harmless, fool. Passers-by threw him coins, and some stopped to listen to his story of when the royal prince had once come to visit him and how he would one day come again. He became used to every indignity of his life happening in the full view of tourists and officials.
At night when the streets were free he wandered the skein of the city. His face shadowed by a blanket, he trudged under spasmodic street lights, and gazed into shadowy shop windows where mannequins stood like ghosts in their urban chic. Everything seemed to be one enormous backstage, long abandoned by players and lights, where dusty costumes and angular stage sets lay scattered amid a dim and eerie silence. There danced in his head the memory of a search, a saviour, but it too was like the plot of a play whose applause had long ago become silence.
Years passed. He knew not how many.
One night, as he walked past a cheap restaurant where taxi drivers and other workers of the night sat under a fluorescent glow shot through with the black orbits of flies, he saw that there were some unaccustomed guests eating there. A crowd of men sat eating and drinking and laughing with beautiful women, all of them in clothes not from this part of town. And with a shock that roused him from years of wearied semi-consciousness, he realized that one of them was Prince Ibrahim.
‘Your Highness!’ cried the tailor, rushing into the restaurant and flinging himself to the floor. Everyone looked up at the bedraggled newcomer, and bodyguards immediately seized him to throw him out. But the prince interjected, looking round at his friends and laughing, ‘Wait! Let us see what this fellow wants!’
Everyone fell silent and looked at the tailor as he stood in the centre of the room, fluorescent lights catching the wispy hair on the top of his head.
‘Your Highness, many years ago you came to my tailor’s shop in a small town far from here and ordered a silk robe with your royal insignia of the stag and crescent moon. I spent four months making the finest robe for you, but when I came to your palace no one believed my story or allowed me to make my delivery. I wrote you letters and waited for you day and night, but all to no avail. I have spent all the years since then living in the gutter and waiting for the day I would find you again. And now I appeal to your mercy: please help me.’
Everyone looked at Ibrahim. ‘Is he speaking the truth?’ one of the men asked.
The prince looked irately at the tailor, saying nothing. Another man spoke up.
‘I was with you that day, Prince. The tailor’s story is true. Do you not remember?’
The prince did not look at him. Slowly he said: ‘Of course I remember.’
He continued to stare at the insignificant figure in the centre of the room. ‘But this is not the man. He is an impostor. The tailor I saw that day never brought what I ordered. Get this cheat out of here.’
And the bodyguards threw the tailor into the street.
But the prince’s companion, whose name was Suleiman, felt sorry for him. As the party of men and women heated up behind steamed-up windows and its separate elements began to coalesce, he sneaked out to catch up with him.
‘Sir! Stop!’ The tailor turned round, and Suleiman ran up to meet him.
‘Allow me to present myself. My name is Suleiman, and I was present when the prince came to your shop several years ago. I feel partially responsible that you are in this situation. Tell me your story.’
Standing in the dark of the street, the tailor told him everything. Suleiman was much moved. Overhead, the night sky glistened with stars like sequins.
‘Listen Mustafa, I would like to buy this robe from you myself. I know it will be an exquisite object, and I feel unhappy at the idea that you will continue to suffer as you are now. Take my car, fetch the robe, bring it to my house, and I will pay you for it.’
In the splendid steel surrounds of a black Mercedes the tailor flew along the smooth tarmac of the national highway as it cut into the rippling desert and its lanes reduced from six to four, to two. He watched the prudently designed cars of the national automobile company flash past each other in 180-degree rectitude, and, fighting off the drowsiness of the heat and the hypnotic landscape in order to concentrate on the road, he looked out for the lone group of trees under which he had deposited the trunk.
When at last the Mercedes came to rest at the spot, he was surprised to see that there was a crowd of people there. It looked as if some sort of major construction was going on. Muddy jeeps were parked around the area, and under the blinding glare of the sun a team of men painstakingly measured out the land with poles and ropes while local people stood around and watched. Terror wrung the tailor’s organs as he approached one of the spectators to ask what was happening.
‘You don’t know? A great discovery has been made here! A poor villager found a trunk containing a magnificent silk robe right in this spot. He took it to the city where an antique specialist identified it as royal ceremonial wear from the eighteenth century. He sold it to a French museum, who paid seven million dollars! Now everyone is looking for the rest of the treasure!’
What could the tailor say? Which of these people who laboured all around him in pursuit of some ancient hoard would believe his unlikely story? All he could do was to climb slowly back into the Mercedes and return to the city.
Eventually the car returned to the leafy streets it knew well, all iron railings and columns, and the tailor found himself climbing the stone steps to the mighty front door of Suleiman’s residence. He was greeted by his would-be patron’s wife, who welcomed him warmly, sat him down and surrounded him with a plush arrangement of mint tea and sweetmeats. Finally Suleiman himself entered.
‘You return empty-handed, tailor! How could this be?’
The tailor told him what he had found. Suleiman, looked at him with some uncertainty.
‘How do I know that there ever was a robe?’
The tailor had no answer.
The three of them sat in a tense silence that was flecked only with the occasional sound of cup on saucer. Finally the tailor got up to leave. Suleiman took him aside.
‘My good fellow. You do seem honest enough, but given the circumstances, I don’t know if I can really help you. Here’s some money for your board and food. I hope your lot improves.’
Once a year in that land there was a festival whose name roughly translates as the ‘Day of Renewal’. This was an ancient custom, a day of merrymaking and of peace between all citizens. Gifts were given to children, prisoners were set free, and there were public feasts. All the royal residences were opened up to the general public, who could enjoy food and music in the gardens. Everyone was happy on that day: there was handshaking in the streets between strangers, flags fluttered gaily from every rooftop, and the sky became thick with kites. Of late, foreign corporations wishing to show their commitment to the nation had become particularly extravagant in their support for this festival. Pepsi gave out free drink in all public places, Ford selected ‘a worthy poor family’ to receive the gift of its latest model, and Citibank surprised its ATM customers with cash prizes given out at random throughout the day. And, in the afternoon, the king would hear the cases of those who were in need of redress.
The tailor came to the palace early, but there was already a row of aggrieved citizens waiting. As each one arrived, a kindly attendant noted down the details of the case. Then a bailiff called them, one by one. At length, it was the tailor’s turn.
At the far end of the vast marble room, the king sat on a throne surmounted by a canopy of silk and jewels. Down either side sat rows of learned men. To the right of the king was Prince Ibrahim. His blue pinstriped suit contrasted elegantly with his sandstone face, on which a shapely beard was etched like the shadow of butterfly wings.
‘Approach, tailor,’ said the king patiently. ‘Tell us your matter.’
Pairs of bespectacled eyes followed the tailor as he walked across the echoing expanse towards the throne in the new shoes he had bought for the occasion. He stood for a moment trying to collect himself. And then, once again, he told his story.
As the king listened, he became grave.
King Saïd believed that the simple goodness and wisdom of village people was the best guarantee of the future prosperity and moral standing of the country. The possibility that his own son might have taken it upon himself to tread down this small-town tailor was therefore distressing. The prince’s lack of constancy was a continual source of disquiet for the king, and the tailor’s narrative unfortunately possessed some degree of verisimilitude. On the other hand, he received many claims of injustice every day and most turned out, on inspection, to be false.
As the tailor finished, he spoke thus:
‘This is a case of some difficulty, tailor. There is much here that it is impossible for me to verify. What say you, my son?’
‘As you know, my Lord and Father, I have the greatest sympathy with the needy of our land. But his story is preposterous.’
‘Is it possible that you could have failed to recall the events of which the tailor speaks?’
‘Of course not.’
King Saïd pondered.
‘Tailor, our decision in this case will hinge on your moral character. It will not be possible today for us to verify the details of what happened so long ago, the fate of the clothes you say were made, or your financial situation. I am therefore going to ask you to demonstrate your moral worth by telling us a story. According to our traditions.’
Utter silence descended on the room, and all watched the tailor, expectantly.
‘Your Highness, I have now been in this capital city for some time. And I recently met another tailor who told me the following tale.
‘There once came to his shop a wealthy man who was about to be married. This man ordered a luxurious set of wedding clothes. The tailor was honoured and overjoyed and went out to celebrate with his family.
‘It so happened that the bridegroom had a lover, a married woman from the city. Each visit she made to him he vowed would be the last. But he never seemed to be able to broach the subject of their rupture before their clothes and their words had dissolved between them and they were left only with their lovemaking.
‘Ignorant of this, the tailor began to order the finest fabrics for the wedding clothes. But as he set to work on the new garments, the cloth simply melted away as he cut it. Again and again he chalked out designs–but each time the same thing happened, until all of the valuable cloth had disappeared.
‘When the bridegroom came to collect the clothes he was furious to discover they were not ready, and demanded an explanation.
‘“I think the explanation lies with you,” replied the tailor. “Since your wedding clothes refused to be made, I can only suppose you are not ready to wear them. Tell me this: what colour are the eyes of your bride-to-be?”
‘The bridegroom thought hard, but the image of his lover stood resolutely between him and the eyes of his betrothed, and he was unable to answer.
‘“Next time you come to me for clothes,” said the tailor, “make sure you are prepared to wear them.”
‘With that, the young man left the tailor, called off his marriage, and left the city.’
The tale hung in the air for a while, and dispersed.
‘What do you say, scholars, to the tailor’s story?’ asked the king.
‘Sire, it is a fine story, constructed according to our traditions, and possessing all the thirteen levels of meaning prized in the greatest of our writings.’
‘My son, what do you think?’
‘There is no doubt,’ replied the prince, ‘that this fellow is accomplished in the realm of fantasy.’
The king looked pained.
‘I myself feel that the tailor has proved himself to be a man of the greatest integrity and probity. Such a man will never seek to advance himself through untruth. Tailor, I can see there has been a series of culpable misunderstandings as a result of which you have suffered greatly. Tell me what you would like from us.’
‘Sire, I am sunk so low that all I can ask for is money.’
‘Consider it done. We shall settle all your debts. Please go with this man, my accountant Salim. He will tell you what papers you need to provide and will give you all the necessary forms to fill in. We are heartily sorry for the difficulties you have had to encounter. Go back to your village and resume your life.’ Mustafa the tailor was anxious to leave the city, whose streets had by now become poisoned with his memories. But he did not wish to return to his village. It seemed too small to contain the thoughts he now had in his head.
He took up residence in a distant seaside town where he made a living sewing clothes and uniforms for sailors. In the afternoons, when his work was done, he would sit by the shore looking into the distance, and tell stories to the masts of boats that passed each other on the horizon.
Faces were in shadow. The ceiling lights were far above their heads, and not all of them still worked. You could not really tell what people were thinking. Perhaps the game was slightly outlandish, perhaps it was not for everyone. Some would surely fall asleep–or pretend to do so. There would be a loner who would stroll off, unnoticed, to the gloomy recesses of the arrivals hall only to discover there a listless and yet thoroughly absorbing interest in the health warnings posted on the wall, the rows of leaflets outlining visa requirements, tobacco and alcohol allowances, and the lists of objects prohibited in hand luggage. Surely!–for in everyone’s head there were still so many Issues of purely private concern that twitched distractingly, that flickered behind the glass of vacant stares.
She spoke with authority:
Next!
She was broad and tall, she sat back in her seat with some abandon, hands on the back of her head, elbows wide. The kind of person who liked groups, not afraid to rally people she had only just met. There was an ease about her: she had already taken off her high heels. There were smiles all around but she did not give up.
Who will be next?
THE MEMORY EDITOR The Second Story (#ud98b70ee-d5f5-5e54-a637-bc1b9a088093)
IN THE CITY of London there was once a wealthy stockbroker who had three sons. Even when they were all still young, everyone could see that while the first two sons were able and hardworking, the youngest, Thomas, had his head in the clouds.
Thomas liked nothing better than to bury himself in history books and read of how the world was before. He thrilled at the struggles of Romanovs and Socialists and put his face close to black-and-white photographs of firebrand Lenin and little haemophiliac Alexei, trying to envisage the lives that hid behind the scratched surfaces and foreign-seeming faces. He read of places that were now summer holiday destinations where millions were killed just a few decades ago, and wondered at how death had in that short time become so exotic. He could never quite become accustomed to the idea that people were growing old long ago when the world was so much younger; so he knew he had not truly understood the scale of time.
One day Thomas sat in his customary reading seat in the Islington Public Library, not two minutes from the monumental black front door of his father’s Georgian townhouse that sat in a serene row of precisely similar houses on Canonbury Square. He read of the slow rot in the Ottoman Empire, of schemes hatched in Berlin, London, and St Petersburg to divide the imperial carrion, and of Bulgarian and Romanian revolutionaries studying poetry and explosives in Paris. The library was still save for a few occasional page-turners and the strenuous silence of the librarian who wheeled a cart of books and re-shelved them under Crime and Local Interest. Thomas thought of Thrace and Thessaly.
An old woman entered the library and sat down next to him. She lowered herself slowly into her seat and began to lay out things: a raincoat (on the back of her chair), a handbag, an umbrella in a nylon sleeve, a stick, a set of keys, a Tupperware lunchbox. The ritual was so deliberate that Thomas could not shut it out of his head, and he wished she had not chosen that particular place.
He tried to concentrate on sensational insurgencies and brutal massacres but now she had unwrapped the tin foil from her egg sandwiches and the smell was banishing the past. NO EATING said the big bright sign with the green logo of the Borough of Islington: Thomas looked hopefully around for someone who might enforce the rule, but suddenly there was no one else there. The old woman began to mash her bread noisily with toothless gums and he stole at her what was calculated to be an intimidating glance. He saw that she was blind.
‘I can see’–she hesitated, as if playing with his thoughts–‘you don’t like me being here.’ She spoke loudly, oblivious to the silence of the library. Thomas felt ashamed. She was fragile and tiny.
‘No it’s not that. It’s just–’
‘You don’t think I should eat egg sandwiches in a library. Luckily there’s no one here to catch me!’ She shot him a conspiratorial grin. ‘And anyway, a blind woman is not likely to drop her mayonnaise on the pages of a book, is she?’ Her eyes were like marble.
‘You are reading about the past. Making mental notes of dates and names, fitting together all the little things you know about a place and a time. Trying to remember what happened long ago. But here’s a question. Can you remember what will happen? In the future?’
She seemed to expect an answer.
‘Clearly not,’ Thomas ventured. ‘Remembering is by definition about the past.’
‘Why so? Is to remember not simply to make present in the mind that which happens at another time? Past or future?’
‘But no one can make present that which hasn’t happened yet.’
‘How do you know the future hasn’t happened yet?’
‘That’s the definition of the future!’ Thomas’s voice betrayed frustration. ‘The past has happened. It is recorded. We all remember what happened yesterday. The future has not happened. It is not recorded anywhere and we cannot know it.’
‘Isn’t that tautology? Remembering is the recollection of the past. The past is that which can be recollected. Well let me tell you that I am unusual among people in being able to remember what has not happened yet. And the distinction between past and future seems less important than you might imagine.’
Thomas stared at her. He assumed madness.
‘For you, the present is easy to discern because it is simply where memory stops. Memories hurtle out of the past and come to a halt in the now. The present is the rockface at the end of the tunnel where you gouge away at the future.’
There was still no one else in the library. They talked naturally, loudly.
‘I, on the other hand, was born with all my memories, rather as a woman is born with all her eggs. I often forget where the present is because it is not, as it is for you, the gateway to the future. My future is already here.’
‘So tell me, if I am to believe you, what I am going to do tonight, when I leave this library.’
‘You make a common mistake. I didn’t say that I know everything that will ever happen. I said only that I already possess all my memories. (And they run out in so short a time! I have lived through nearly all of them, and now there remain just a few crumbs in the bottom of the bag.) Still, I do have more memories of you.
You will spend your life in the realm of the past You will fail entirely to keep up with the times But your wealth will make your father seem poor A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines.’
Thomas thought over the words.
‘What does all that mean? Can you explain?’
The old woman gave a flabby chuckle.
‘Surely you can’t expect me to tell you more than that? Isn’t it already encouraging enough?’
She put the lid on her lunch box.
‘Anyway. It is time for me to take my leave.’ Her possessions found their way back into her bag and she stood up, slowly and uncertainly. ‘But I have just remembered what will happen to you tonight. My mind is more blurred than it once was. You are going to have an encounter with Death. Don’t worry–you will survive.’ She smiled at him–almost affectionately–and departed.
Thomas could not return to his books. He sat for a long time reciting the woman’s words to himself and wondering about his future. He left the library in a daydream and wandered home. Full of his thoughts he rang at the wrong bell. A hooded figure answered the door, black robes billowing around its knees and only shadows where its face should have been. The figure carried a scythe. Made of plastic. Thomas remembered it was Halloween.
Not long afterwards, Thomas’s father received a big promotion. He worked for a small but thriving investment firm in the City that had made a name for itself in private financial services. He had joined the firm twelve years ago from Goldman Sachs and had from the outset consistently delivered better returns to his clients than any of his peers. Tall and attractive, with an entirely unselfconscious sense of humour, he also had a talent for entertaining the high net-worth individuals that were the firm’s clients. Now the board had asked him to take the place of the retiring managing director. He had agreed unhesitatingly.
In celebration of this advancement, Thomas’s father took the entire family to the Oxo Tower for dinner. They drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate palaces that lined the other side of the Thames. Thomas thought his father looked somehow more imposing even than before. His mother had put on a new sequined dress and talked about the differences in the dream lives of modern and ancient Man as described in the book she was reading about Australian Aborigines. Champagne was poured. They all clinked glasses.
‘So here’s to the new boss,’ proclaimed Thomas’s father.
‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said his wife, kissing him on the cheek.
‘I can tell you boys: investing is a great business. A great discipline. It forces you to become exceptional. Most people are just interested with what’s going on now. Getting a little more, perhaps. But basically turning the wheels. When you’re in investment you have to be completely sceptical about the present, aware that there is nothing that cannot change, no future scenario that can be discounted. You exist on a different plane, predicting the future, making your living by working out how other people will be making their living tomorrow. And not only that, but making that future materialize by investing in it. There’s no sphere of knowledge that’s not relevant to this job. It might be water, it might be toys; it could be guns or new kinds of gene. The whole universe is there.’
His wife looked lovingly at him through mascara-thick lashes. Sculpted starters were brought that sat in the middle of expansive plates and seemed inadequate to the three brothers.
‘So tell me, boys–you’re all becoming men now–what is it you’d like to do with your lives? What is your ambition?’
The eldest spoke first.
‘Father, I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I think after I’ve finished at the LSE I’d like to get a couple of years’ experience in one of the big management consulting firms. I think that would give me a broad exposure to a lot of different industries. Then I can do an MBA–maybe in the US. At that point I’d be in a really good position to know what direction to move in. But what I’d really like to do–I say this now without much experience–is to run my own business.’
‘Sounds good, son. Make sure you don’t get too programmatic about things. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come at really inconvenient times. If you’ve planned your life out for the next twenty years you may not be able to make yourself available for them. Next!’
The second son spoke.
‘Father, I want to work for one of the big banks. The money industry is never going to be out of fashion. I can’t see the point of working in some shoe-string business for just enough to live on. The only respectable option to me seems to be to work damn hard and earn serious money–and retire when you’re forty.’
‘Well I’m forty-nine and I haven’t retired yet! Remember that it’s not enough simply to desire money very much. You have to be good at earning it. But I’m sure you will be. So finally to young Tom. What about you?’
Thomas looked around at his whole family, his eyes glinting with champagne.
‘I will surpass you all,’ he said. ‘I will make you all look like paupers.’
The paterfamilias smile vanished.
‘Oh really, Thomas. And how are you going to do that?’
‘You will see. One day you will see my mountain of jewels.’
His father’s voice became unpleasant.
‘Thomas, I’m just about sick of your stupid talk and your irresponsible, lazy behaviour. How dare you talk to me like that when you haven’t got the first idea of the world–especially on a night like this!’
His mother continued.
‘Your father and I never stop condoning what you do, tolerating your insolence and absent-mindedness. But sometimes I think we go too far. Do you realize who your father is? He is not just some average man who can be talked to like that. I don’t know how a member of your father’s and my family came to act like you. Think like you.’
Thomas’s brothers looked under the table. Waiters glided around in practised obliviousness. ‘Sometimes the future is not just an extension of the past according to rules we all know,’ said Thomas. ‘Look at revolutions, the collapse of empires. I think that something will happen to all of you that you have not even thought about. And you will not have devoted one minute of your lives to preparing yourselves for it. I don’t even know what it will be. But I know it will happen.’
The silence that followed was the silence of Thomas’s father’s rage. When he spoke it was with a self-restraint that burned white.
‘Thomas, when we go back home tonight I want you to pack your things and get out of our house. I will not have some mutant element in our home. Our family will not be abused by someone who is ungrateful, someone who likes thinking about the destruction of his brothers and parents. You will get out. Do you understand?’
Thomas nodded slowly, amazed and aghast that things had gone this far.
His father left the table and did not come back for half an hour. No one spoke as they drove home.
The family went to bed with raw feelings and empty stomachs. Thomas’s mother whispered to him that they would discuss all this in the morning. But Thomas could not bear the idea of waiting for such a discussion. He lay still until he could hear no movement and then silently got up, packed some clothes by torchlight into a school sports bag, and crept downstairs. He took two antique silver picture frames he had once helped his father choose for his mother’s birthday in a gallery on Ladbroke Grove, a gold pocket watch that was on display in the drawing room, and his father’s state-of-the-art SLR camera that had lain untouched in its wrappings for the last year. He disabled the burglar alarm, undid the locks on the heavy oak front door, eased it open, and stepped out.
The moon was so bright that the streets seemed to be bathed in an eerie kind of underexposed daylight that was even more pellucid for the absolute quiet. Insomniac houses and Range Rovers blinked at each other with red security eyes. Thomas wandered aimlessly, up to the point where gentility broke and the streets opened up around King’s Cross station. He bought a bag of greasy chips in an all-night kebab shop and sat in his coat on a bar stool at a narrow strip of tabletop looking out through his own reflection at the sparse traffic of taxis and night shelter regulars. He studied a much-faded poster of Istanbul hanging on the wall next to him, the skies above the Hagia Sofia unnaturally turquoise and the cars on the streets forty years old.
He left and wandered aimlessly around the station. It was late November, and morning came before the sun. Timetables took hold again as commuters arrived in waves and departed in buses and taxis. Eventually it grew light, and the shops opened.
Thomas went to a pawn shop. He removed the photographs from the frames and placed his items on the counter. The shop owner offered him £2,000. At the last minute he decided to keep the camera, and took £1,750.
Next to the pawn shop was an advertisement for a room for rent. Thomas called the number from a phone box; a woman came downstairs in her slippers and showed him up to a single room overlooking the station. He paid her £600 for the deposit and first month’s rent and closed the door behind her. He sat on the bed and looked at his photographs. One was of the wedding of his mother’s parents, both of whom had died before Thomas was born. The other was a studio portrait of the same couple with a baby–his mother–in a long white christening robe. Between the two photographs the man had developed a long scar on his right cheek that Thomas had never noticed when he had looked at them before.
For several days Thomas walked everywhere in the city taking photographs of his own. He went to the sparkling grove of banking towers that sat on the former dockyards among the eastern coils of the Thames and took pictures that were rather desolate. He took photographs of pre-Christmas sales in Covent Garden. He photographed Trafalgar Square at 4 a.m.
He called his mother to say ‘Hello’. She was frantic with fear and pleaded with him to come home. He said he would at some point.
One day he was sitting having lunch in a cheap sandwich shop in Hackney. A woman sitting at the table next to him asked, ‘Are you a photographer?’ He looked at her. She gestured towards the camera.
‘Not really. I take pictures for fun.’
‘What do you take pictures of?’
She wore lithe urban gear that looked as if it had been born in a wind tunnel.
‘I don’t really know.’ He had not talked to anyone for several days and felt awkward. He thought for a moment. ‘I am trying to live entirely in the realm of the past. Trying to take pictures of what there was before.’ He looked at her to see if she was listening. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to find it. Sometimes it’s not there anymore. And sometimes when it is there, I can’t see it.’
She looked at him inquisitively.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Do you need a job?’
‘Actually I do. I have no money.’
‘Can you keep secrets?’
‘I don’t know anyone to tell secrets to.’
‘Come with me.’
She led him to an old, dilapidated brick building with a big front door of reinforced glass that buzzed open to her combination. They stepped into a tiny, filthy lift and she pressed ‘6’. They were standing very close to each other.
‘I’m Jo, by the way.’ She held out her hand. He shook it.
‘I’m Thomas. Pleased to meet you.’
The lift stopped inexplicably at the fourth floor. The doors opened to a bright display of Chinese dragons and calendars. Chinese men and women worked at sewing machines to the sound of zappy FM radio. The doors closed again.
On the sixth floor they stepped out into a vestibule with steel walls and a thick steel door. There were no signs to indicate what might lie inside.
‘Turn away please,’ said Jo.
He turned back to face the closing lift door as she entered another combination. He heard the sound of keys and a lock shifted weightily.
‘OK. Come on.’
He turned round and followed her inside. Computer lights blinked in the darkness for a moment; Jo pulled a big handle on the wall and, with a thud that echoed far away, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on irregularly down the length of a huge, empty expanse. The floor was concrete, speckled near the edges with recent whitewash whose smell still hung in the air. The large, uneven windows that lined one wall had recently been covered with thick steel grills. Near the door stood three desks with computers on them and a table with a printer and a coffee maker.
‘Have a seat, Thomas. Coffee?’
‘Yes please.’
She poured two mugs.
‘We are setting up probably the most extraordinary business you will ever encounter. I’d like your help and I think you’ll find it exciting. Your interests will qualify you very well for the task and I’ll pay you enough that you’ll be satisfied. I will need from you a great amount of effort and imagination–and, of course, your utter secrecy. OK?’
He nodded.
‘Right. About twelve years ago there was a round of secret meetings between the British and American intelligence agencies. They convened a panel of visionary military experts, sociologists, psychologists, and businesspeople to look at new roles that the agencies could play in the future–particularly commercial roles. It was felt that organizations like the CIA were spending vast amounts of money on technology and personnel and that it should be possible to make some return on that investment–in addition to their main security function.
‘The most radical idea to come out of this concerned the vast intelligence databases possessed by the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and a number of other police and military organizations and private companies. As you know, most of this information is collected so that security forces have some idea of who is doing what and antisocial or terrorist activities can be thwarted. One of the social psychologists suggested, however, that there might be a very different use for it. He pointed out that average memory horizons–that is, the amount of time that a person can clearly remember–had been shrinking for some time: people were forgetting the past more and more quickly. He predicted that memory horizons would shrink close to zero in about twelve years–i.e. now.
‘I won’t go over all the research and speculation about what kind of impact this mass amnesia would have on the individual, society, and the economy. But one thing became clear: the loss of personal memories would be experienced as a vague and debilitating anxiety that many people would spend money to alleviate. Our databases of conversations, events, photographs, letters, et cetera, could be repackaged and sold back to those individuals to replace their own memories. This would possibly be a huge market opportunity for us. It would also serve a valuable social and economic function in helping to reduce the impact of a problem that was likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in psychiatric treatment and several billions in lost labour.’
Jo took a sip of coffee. ‘Is this making sense?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘We started with a small group of people and started to record everything they did. We looked at what systems we had available and invented new ones. We put cameras absolutely everywhere. We developed technologies that recognized an individual’s voice, face, handwriting and everything so that the minimum human intervention was required to link one person’s memories to each other in a single narrative. Gradually these systems were expanded to cover more and more people. We finally reached 100 per cent coverage of the populations of the US and UK around nine years ago, and we have been working with partners in other countries to gather similar data there too. This is the largest collection of data ever to exist. We will be able to give our future customers CD-ROMs with photographs of them getting on a plane to go on holiday, recordings of phone conversations with their mother, videos of them playing with their son in a park or sitting at their desk at work…It will really be a phenomenal product.
‘Now we’re ready for all that work to pay off. We have the stuff to sell. We’re working with an advertising agency on a campaign to launch it in the next few months. We just need to work out a few final details. That’s where you come in.
‘You see there is one issue we didn’t think about very carefully when we started this project. Some memories, of course, are not pleasant. We are making all kinds of disclaimers about the memories we are selling, but we would still like to minimize the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by the rediscovery of painful memories that had been lost. There’s no point selling bad memories when we know what kind of an impact they will have on individuals’ ability to perform well in the home and the workplace. So we want to take them out.
‘This is going to be a massive job that calls for someone with your unusual empathy with the past. What we need you to do is to go through the memories manually and produce a large sample of the kind we’re talking about–the most traumatic memories. We will analyse that sample and find all the parameters that have a perfect correlation with memories of this sort. Then we can simply run a search on all our databases for memories matching those parameters and delete them. But we need to go through a lot of memories to get there. The statisticians tell us we need a sample of not less than twelve thousand traumatic memories in order for the system to be perfect.’
Jo stopped talking. Thomas said nothing. The idea was so far-reaching that he did not have an adequate response.
‘Do you have any questions?’
He searched within himself for the most urgent of his doubts.
‘Assuming that everything you’ve said is true–from the shrinking memory horizons to this massive database of memories–and it still seems rather incredible–I can see why people might want to come to you to retrieve some of the memories they have lost. That makes sense. But isn’t it only fair to them to give them everything? Who are you to edit their memories for them? They are a product of the bad as well as the good, after all.’
‘Thomas: we are not making any promises of completeness. We are providing a unique service and it’s totally up to us how we want to design it. It has been decided that we are not prepared to sell just any memory for fear of the risk to us or our customers. That’s that. Any other questions?’
He could find only platitudes.
‘What is the company called?’
‘Up to now we’ve been working with a codename for the project: Memory Mine. That name will no doubt fade out as the advertising agency comes up with a new identity for us.’
A mountain of jewels dug from mysterious mines went off in Thomas’s head. Was this what the old woman had been talking about? Was this where the prediction was supposed to take him?
‘So are you going to do it?’
‘I think so. At least–Yes.’
Thomas began work the next day. Each morning he would arrive at the office in Hackney and he and Jo would sit in silence at their computers at one end of this huge empty space. He would wear headphones to listen to recorded phone calls and video; the room was entirely still.
‘We have short-listed around a hundred thousand memories that you can work from. They’ve been selected on the basis of a number of parameters–facial grimacing, high decibel level, obscene language–that are likely to be correlated with traumatic memories. It’s a good place to start. Within these you are looking for the very worst: memories of extreme pain or shock, memories of unpleasant or criminal behaviour. Apply the logic of common sense: would someone want to remember this? Think of yourself like a film censor: if the family can’t sit together and watch it, it’s out.’
Some were obvious. A woman watches her husband being run down by a car that mounts the pavement at high speed and drives him through the door of a second-hand record store; two boys stick a machete into the mouth of an old man while they empty his pockets and take his watch–a sign in the video image says Portsmouth City Council; four men go to the house of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to collect a loan–when he can’t pay they shoot him in the knees; the police inform a mother by telephone that her daughter has been violently raped while taking a cigarette break from her job as a supermarket cashier and has almost died from loss of blood.
In other cases, Thomas was not so sure. He found a sequence in which a man in a business suit met up with a young girl–fourteen or fifteen–in a car park by night. He seemed anxious, but she pulled him to her and they began to kiss against a concrete pillar. Her fingers made furrows in his hair; he tried to stop her as she undid his trousers but she seized him still harder. ‘Fuck me!’ she said as she lifted her skirt to reveal her full nudity. They made love greedily. Thomas watched to the end.
‘I don’t know what to do with this,’ he announced to Jo, his voice breaking the silence in the room. She remained absorbed in her computer screen for a few seconds before getting up to look at his. He started the scene again and watched with some embarrassment as Jo leaned fixedly over his shoulder, scentless.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said. ‘This girl is blatantly under age! Get rid of it!’
‘But don’t you think–I just thought–it might be a very important memory for her. I mean–she looks as if she really loves this man.’
‘Thomas. This is a criminal act! We don’t get mixed up in this kind of thing. Delete it.’
Thomas became fascinated by his power to watch lives unfold. For two days he followed the experiences of a young aristocrat named William who worked for The Times as an obituary writer. He would go to spend lengthy afternoons with ageing baronets and senile Nobel Prize winners, interviewing them about their past, and filing the review of their life in anticipation of its imminent end. Memory Mine had purchased the rights to much of The Times’ archive so that Thomas could listen to the actual recordings of these conversations. He witnessed the young man’s respectful grace as he sipped tea with old men and women, the feeble voices with which memories of past greatness were hesitantly recounted, the antiseptic interiors of old people’s homes, the soothing effect of the distant past on a young man who was not very comfortably contemporary. He listened to William in phone calls and read his emails, followed the course of a love affair that ended painfully. Thomas explored every document, every conversation, every relationship, and became absorbed completely in the largeness of so many lives and so much time.
He worked till late and spent his evenings thinking about the memories he had examined during the day. His own past merged with those of so many others; he began to have startling dreams. He dreamed that he was looking for his room but could not remember where it was. He had lost his arms and legs and could only wriggle on his stomach. He squirmed on the ground, unable to lift his head to see where he was going. He realized he was wriggling on glass–thin glass that bowed and cracked with his movement, and through which he could see only an endless nothingness. He sweated with the terror of falling through, could already see his limbless body spinning like a raw steak through the darkness. And then he reached a green tarpaulin that covered the glass and he could stand again and walk. He entered a corridor of many doors. Every door looked the same: which was his? He tried to open doors at random but all were locked. As he was becoming mad with apprehension, one door loomed in front of him, more significant than the rest. He turned the handle and entered. Lying in his bed was a man with a bandaged arm. Thomas realized he was dreaming not his own dream but that of the man in his bed. The dream of a man whose memories he had been scanning that day: a construction worker who had walked across a roof covered in a tarpaulin, stepped unknowingly on a skylight, and plunged through the glass to fall three storeys and lose a hand.
One day Thomas asked Jo a question that had been preoccupying him for some time.
‘Are we going to lose our memories too?’
Jo was eating a sandwich at her desk. She looked at him and smiled.
‘I don’t think you are. That’s why I chose you. The past is tangible for you in a way that is quite exceptional. You seem to have an effortless grasp of it. I don’t just mean dates and facts. It’s as if memories seek you out and stick to you intuitively.’
‘So what about you?’
‘This was of course one of the things we were all most concerned about. How could we run this project if we all forgot everything? So we tried to understand exactly why this was happening to see if we could avoid it in ourselves. The fact is that no one really knows. Some say it’s to do with the widespread availability of electronic recording formats that are much more effective than human memory, which have gradually removed the need for human beings to remember. Others find the causes in the future-fixation of consumer culture. People cite causes as diverse as the education system, the death of religion, diet, and the structure of the family. There’s not just one theory.
‘But they put together a lifestyle programme for all of us to try and ensure we would escape the worst of the effects. No television, weekly counselling sessions. We all have to keep a journal. We are all assessed every three months to monitor any memory decline. Et cetera.’
A strange image was fluttering in Thomas’s head while Jo was talking. All the memories of the world were stranded and terrified, like animals fleeing a forest fire. With nowhere to go, they huddled in groups and wept, and the noise of their weeping was a cacophony of the centuries that filled the skies but could not be heard. And the earth became saturated with their tears, which welled up and dissolved them all, and they seeped away into nothingness.
Not long after, the office had a visitor.
‘Good morning Jo. How are you?’ The man wore an impressive three-piece suit and his bright greeting sounded mass-produced.
‘I’m well, thank you. Larry–meet Thomas. Thomas–Larry runs Memory Mine in the US. He’s our boss.’ She shot a playful smile that Thomas had not seen before.
Larry gave a handshake that felt like a personality test. ‘Good to meet you, Thomas. Jo–can we talk?’
They moved over to the window and talked quietly. Thomas could hear them perfectly but pretended to work.
‘How’s this one doing?’
‘Well. A bit slow.’
‘Look, Jo–the whole thing is waiting for him now. Everything is in place. We just need that sample of twelve thousand grade D memories so we can clean up the whole database and launch. How many has he done?’
‘I think about six hundred.’
‘Six hundred! At this rate it will take him a couple of years. Let’s get someone else.’
‘No, let’s keep him. I think he’s the best person for this. We’ll just speak to him about the urgency and get him to work faster.’
‘Are you sure? We don’t have much time.’
‘Yes. I’ll talk to him.’
From then on Thomas did not have time to explore the lives of people like the obituary writer or the construction worker. He rushed through as fast as he could, working later and later in the office to keep up with his deadlines. He found so many memories of terrible things: deaths, betrayals, injustices, accidents, rape, ruthlessness, ruin, disappointments, lies, wars. He saw mothers losing their infants, suicides of loved ones, devastating financial losses, children beaten and brutalized by parents, countless violent and senseless murders. Every minute was a new horror, a new nightmare that forced its way inside him and unfurled unexpected lobes of dank emotions that grew in among his organs. At night he left the office bloated and dazed with hundreds of new memories that leapt in alarm at their new confines, beating against the sides of his mind, flying madly like winged cockroaches in a cupboard. He could not separate himself from the memories: they lodged in him and burst open like over-ripe fruit, their poison sprayed from them and seeped through his tissues. He wanted to vomit with the sickness of the thoughts, to purge himself. But there was no escape: the memories seethed and grew in his mind during the day and erupted into startling, terrifying dreams at night. Thomas arrived at work each day pale and wide-eyed, ready to sit again and absorb more of this acid from the past.
At last, after one month, it was over. Larry came to the office and sat at Thomas’s machine. Twelve thousand memories exactly sat in his folder.
‘Jo–are you confident this is 100 per cent accurate?’
‘Sure. We’ve checked it very carefully. I’m confident.’
‘OK. Now we should be able to calculate the parameters.’ He logged in to the administration section of the system and activated some functions. ‘There. And now we can run a search on the entire database and locate all grade D memories.’ He hit Run query. Numbers started mounting on the screen.
He unbuttoned his jacket. ‘So: many thanks to you, Thomas. You got there in the end. What now?’
‘Er–no plans really.’
‘I see.’
‘Maybe we can find something,’ said Jo.
Larry looked at her. ‘Your budget is already blown. I hardly think you’re in a position to make suggestions like that. Please get real.’
The search ended. ‘2,799,256,014 results found.’
‘Christ–that’s nearly ten per cent of our database,’ said Larry. ‘That’s a lot of trauma. And this is just in the US and UK where life is pretty good. Imagine how many we’ll get in all those places where life sucks. My God. Let’s just check some of these before we delete them.’
He opened the first memory. A daughter found her tycoon mother dead in a running car full of carbon monoxide after a major feature in the Daily Telegraph detailing her illegal business ventures. The second was a man being beaten by the police in prison and threatened with razor blades.
‘OK, this looks good. This is the kind of stuff we really do not need. Good job, Thomas. So I’m going ahead and deleting these.’
Jo and Thomas looked at him and said nothing. He pressed Delete all. ‘2,799,256,014 records deleted.’
‘Excellent. Now let’s start selling the hell out of this thing.’
That night Thomas had a vivid dream. He dreamt he was back at his parents’ house in Islington. The house was empty. Sun poured in through the windows and he sat in his bedroom reading books rich with tales and characters from history. Suddenly he looked up; and through the window he saw a beautiful thing floating slowly down to the ground. It was magical and rare and he felt a deep desire to own it. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden, and there it was floating above him: a delicate thing, spiralling exquisitely and glinting in the sun. He stood under it and reached out his hands. Spinning like a slow-motion sycamore seed, it fell softly and weightlessly into his palms. It looked as if it was of silver, beaten till it was a few atoms thick and sculpted into the most intricate form: a kind of never-ending staircase that wound round on itself into a snail shell of coils within coils. He looked at it in rapture. How could such a beautiful object have fallen from the sky! He was full of joy at this thing that had chosen him and fallen so tamely into his hand.
And then he understood that the thing was a memory. It was a wonderful memory: of music first heard by a young woman–a big concert hall–a piano that produced sounds so astonishing that the woman was lifted up on their flight. And Thomas was exhilarated: he laughed out loud with the memory of those passages that seemed like they would burst the limits of loveliness.
But as the memory entered him and took root in his heart he realized there were many more falling from the sky. He looked up and saw there were memories of all kinds and colours dropping not only around him but as far as he could see. He went out into the street, where memories had already begun to cover the ground. Each gust of wind would send them skating across the tarmac to collect in the gutters. They fell everywhere: some wispy, some like multicoloured feathers, some fashioned out of a substance that collapsed and became like tar when it hit the ground.
All day and night the memories fell. They floated on puddles like a layer of multicoloured leaves, and stuck in trees, giving them new and unnatural hues of cyan and mustard yellow and metallic grey. They accumulated in clumps on the roofs and window sills and porticoes of Georgian houses, softening right angles and making a kind of pageant of the street.
The next morning the skies were low and dense and the memories fell harder than ever. The roads had become impassable and people had to clear paths to their front doors.
He left the house and wandered until he reached King’s Cross Station. The memories fell on his head and shoulders. Everywhere they lay flattened and dead on the ground, as if there had been a massacre of insects.
Sometimes Thomas saw people picking up the mysterious new objects to examine them; but the experience always seemed to induce some kind of nausea, and they flung them hastily away. After a few such experiences everyone tried not to notice what was happening. They swept the memories away, they drove their cars more and more slowly through the accumulation, they were inconvenienced everywhere they went–but they asked no questions. The more the memories fell, the more blank their faces looked. Their eyes became hollow, their skin yellow and desiccated. They seemed to move differently, shiftily, darting from spot to spot.
For days Thomas wandered around London, sleeping on car roofs and other raised surfaces while the downpour continued. He watched people leave their houses and become wild. They began to build camps on high ground and on flat roofs. They squatted naked around fires on the steps to the buildings around Trafalgar Square while the entire piazza was filled, only the column protruding from a writhing, harlequinesque sea of baubles and crystals.
Weeks passed. For five whole days only memories of war fell from the skies. No daylight could penetrate the clouds of terrifying leaden forms that rained down on London, and only streaks of fire gave any illumination. It was now rare to see any people at all. They hid, clung like babies to anything that seemed familiar.
Thomas’s wanderings led him to the Thames. Rains had carried streams of memories down into the river until they filled the riverbed entirely, rising above the water to enormous mounds of multicoloured sludge. Its course was completely blocked; the water flooded out, rising above the bridges and submerging the quays. Tourist boats lay wrecked on the terraces outside the Festival Hall and everywhere was the stench of rotting fish. Dogs chewed at carcasses at the edge of the water; flocks of gulls perched on the huge misshapen islands that looked like waste from a sweet factory.
As he looked out over the river he realized that all these millions of memories had begun to whisper to him. He heard voices from every place and time talking in every language about terrible and wonderful and everyday things. He had the impression that all the memories had been cast out, that they burned with the ferocity of a dying parasite searching for a host. They stalked him, would not leave him alone, seemed to be speaking right up against his ear, called him by name. He tried to flee, but more and more of them billowed up, following him in a quivering line. Memories flowed out of everywhere until the trail was like a canopy over the city. And then, with a shriek from the depths of time, they rose up in one vast motion, descended on him, and buried themselves in his soul. It was like a gigantic explosion converging on its centre in a film run backwards. At that point, he passed out.
The predictions of Memory Mine executives turned out to be correct. There came a point in time when people lost their memories on a mass scale. They were unable to remember even the most basic outlines of the past–their own or anyone else’s–and could therefore not engage in normal human interactions. They began to be withdrawn and suspicious, and the public spaces of the city became empty and eerie. This phenomenon was accompanied by–or caused–a major economic recession; and the two blights swept entire continents hand in hand.
Memory Mine was well prepared. Under its new name, MyPast
, its advertisements suddenly flooded the media and the city. An elderly couple hugged each other affectionately as they played their MyPast
CD-ROM and remembered more youthful times. A grumpy businessman played the CD at work, saw himself as a young man laughing in a group at college, and was driven to make phone calls to friends he had not seen in years–bringing the smile back to his face. Despite the economic slowdown, the product was an instant hit. People sensed great relief at seeing evidence of their own past, and though for many this ‘quick fix’ actually worsened their psychiatric condition, nothing could prevent people rushing to buy editions for everyone in their household in order to try and re-experience the familial bond that was supposed to link them.
While most people were suffering from total amnesia, Thomas seemed to bear the burden of an excess of memory. He appeared haunted, and wandered the streets slowly and gingerly, as if afraid of upsetting an intricate balance in his head. His mind was crammed full like the hold of a cargo ship, containers packed in to every inch of space, every one roasting in the airless heat below deck, and heavy with a million whispers that each tried to rise above all the others. He could take in no more thought or experience of any kind and avoided all human contact.
He was aware, of course, of what was happening to the people around him. He tried to call his parents on a couple of occasions to see if they were all right–but there was no answer. He could not face the flood of memories that might be released if he went home, so he did not.
He ended up one day back at the office in Hackney. He had nothing to do there, but it was a place to go that had a connection, however strange, to this thing that had overtaken everyone and it exerted a pull over him.
It was very different now. The huge empty space of the office had been entirely filled with lines of desks, where incessantly ringing phones were answered by clean young people with their efficient ‘Good morning, MyPast
, how can I help you?’ People ordered memories for themselves and their friends and families; they were located immediately on the database and burned straight onto CDs; the printer spat out attractive labels and pockets with pictures of happy families and a personalized message. The CDs were stacked in big plastic bins and dispatched twice a day.
Thomas sat in a corner, preoccupied and detached. He went there every day, and Jo did not try to stop him. She may have felt slightly responsible for his state of mind. People got used to him being there. Sometimes he lay down and spent the night under a desk. The murmurings in his head kept him haggard and silent.
Those forgetful times, while they remained, were terrible, even if few could remember them afterwards. But they did not last.
One day Thomas awoke and felt that his mind was lighter. It was as if a thick splinter that had been lying buried in his brain for months was now removed. The voices diminished. He could look outwards again at the world without feeling that the incoming information would make him explode.
The memories were departing.
Very slowly, the city started to be populated again. People’s faces regained their depth, and they started to talk to each other. They could remember more and more.
Frantic phone calls raced between the MyPast
offices in London and Washington. They had assumed that their graphs of diminishing memory horizons only moved in one direction and had never accounted for this sudden upswing. Very soon sales had dropped alomost to zero; the workforce was sacked en masse. The office in Hackney became almost deserted again. Even Jo did not bother to turn up. Thomas spent days there without seeing anyone.
One evening the phone rang. Thomas picked it up.
‘Is this MyPast
?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need memories. Everyone else’s memories seem to be returning. But my mind is still empty. I can’t do anything. Can’t work, can’t sleep. I need my memories.’
Thomas realized with a shock that it was his father on the phone.
‘I think I can help you, sir.’
‘How long does it take?’
‘I can send them out to you tomorrow. You should get them on Monday morning.’
‘Where are you? Can I come over myself and pick them up?’
‘You could. We are in Hackney.’
‘OK. What’s the address?’
Thomas told him.
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Thomas logged in to the MyPast
database. He entered his father’s name and searched. There were nearly a thousand memories. He saved them onto a CD and printed out a label. He decided to go down to the street to wait.
His father came with his two brothers. Thomas watched them approach from a distance. They all looked strangely diminished. His father had lost his poise and sophistication and walked wild-eyed and hunted, and his brothers scuttled close to him for safety. They drew close without any sign of recognition.
‘MyPast
?’ asked his father aggressively.
‘Yes,’ replied Thomas.
‘Where are they? My memories?’
Thomas led them inside and they crammed into the tiny lift. His father breathed heavily and he twitched with impatience, but somehow it felt good to Thomas to touch him again. They arrived at the sixth floor. Brightly coloured MyPast
signs announced their arrival.
‘I need this quickly. Right now. Where is it?’
Thomas picked up the CD from the desk. ‘Here it is. You can see it has your name on it here and today’s date. I’ll need to ask you for a cheque for £999.’
‘Don’t waste my time. Just show it to me.’
Thomas grew nervous.
‘Perhaps it would be best if you took it home. There’s a lot of stuff here and that way you can share it with–with your wife and sit in comfort. In your own home. In fact I’m just locking the office up.’
‘I’m losing my mind here. I haven’t got time for your–just put this damn thing on for me. I won’t pay you a penny till you show me.’
‘I’ll tell you what–just take it. I don’t need the money. I can see you’re in need. Take it as a gift.’
‘I need it now.’
Thomas saw a menacing look in his father’s eye that brought back old fears. He took the CD from his hand and fed it into the computer. It started up on its own, a 20-second promotional jingle that talked in a comforting voice about MyPast
. Then it gave a menu of memories. Thomas selected one. It showed his father addressing a banking summit organized by the Confederation of British Industry three or four years before. He was confident and funny and people responded loudly, applauded.
‘Is that me?’ asked Thomas’ father, incredulous. ‘Is that me?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Is that who I was?’ The speech ended to camera flashes and applause. The video faded. The boys looked on mutely.
‘Show me more. More.’
‘Really, sir, I must close the office now.’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit. Get out of my way.’
Thomas’s father seized the mouse from him and pushed him out of the seat. He stared impatiently at the screen and selected another memory.
He saw himself sipping wine with his wife in the bar at the Barbican in the interval of some concert. They were both dressed up. Thomas’s mother spoke passionately about something that could not be heard.
‘That’s my wife. How strong she used to be. How attractive. I wonder where she is now.’
‘What do you mean, Where is she now?’ asked Thomas, alarmed.
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember where she is.’
He clicked on something else. The whole family was on holiday in Florida, several years ago. Thomas was still a young child. The three boys were sunburnt and carried fishing nets. Their mother wore a wrap-around skirt and expensive sunglasses.
‘Look–there are three boys. Who’s the other one?’ He watched them playing in the sand, building mounds taller than they were.
He carried on clicking avidly. The family was wandering round the Natural History Museum–just a year or so before. Thomas was clearly visible.
‘Isn’t that you?’ asked his father looking round at Thomas. ‘Isn’t that you there–in the museum at the same time as us? What a bloody coincidence. Do we know each other?’
‘Not really know. No.’
Another scene opened up. Thomas froze with fear. It was a recording of their evening in the Oxo Tower. The lights of the Thames spread out behind them; the waiters served champagne, and Thomas’s father talked about investment to his family.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ he said. He turned to Thomas, his face hungry and furious. ‘Can you please explain what the hell is going on? Is this some kind of disgusting joke that you people play? You put yourselves into our memories? You sit yourself down at dinner with us, at our most intimate moments? You insert yourselves into our thoughts, our families, our past? Is that what happens? Just as I was coming to believe in my past I see you sitting there grinning out of it like some monster–and realize all of it is fake. What the hell is your game?’
The video continued quietly. Thomas saw out the corner of his eye the moment at which his father had told him to leave the house.
‘Sir, please understand. This is no falsehood. I am your son. My name is Thomas. These are my brothers. I am part of your family.’
Thomas’s father looked at him, looked deep into his pupils. He seemed to see something that he had been looking for, and the emptiness of his eyes was filled with a question. But something washed over the surface again and Thomas could peer in no more.
‘You bastard!’ His father hit him so hard around the head that he fell to the ground, dazed and astonished. ‘Think you can betray people like this and get away with it?’ He kicked him in the groin. ‘You bastard!’ He became wild, kicking him again and again in the groin and stomach.
His brothers joined in, kicking his head and face and back with all their strength. ‘You bastard!’ they chanted viciously, imitating their father. Thomas blacked out, became bloody and limp–but they did not stop beating him until they were too exhausted to continue.
Reality returned only half-way. He saw himself lying in an emergency ward. Jo had brought him there when she had discovered him lying in a kidney-shaped arc of congealed blood in the morning. He could not make things out, but his mind felt lighter. He realized that nearly all the memories had left him and soon he would be alone again.
He had the impression that he knew the person in the next bed. It was an old woman he had seen before. Gradually he remembered. She had given him a prophecy long ago. So long. She looked very sick.
‘Hello.’ His voice reached out to her, but she did not seem to be aware. ‘It’s Thomas. Do you remember me?’
She turned painfully towards him, her eyes like albumen. ‘Of course I remember you.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘It’s not easy being blind and old. I fell. Fell down the stairs. Broken my pelvis. I don’t feel well. I’m at the end.’
‘Everything happened as you said. My father became poor and I became rich. But it wasn’t how I imagined.’
‘It rarely is.’
The various sounds of the hospital seemed to become ordered and intended, like a fugue. Thomas listened for a moment.
‘As soon as she said “Memory Mine” I remembered what you said. I knew this was it! It was a good job. There was a nice woman. Her name was Jo.’ Thomas felt weightless, the memories breaking away like spores and floating back to where they came from.
‘A packhorse was needed. To get the memories through this ravine. This time. You happened to be the one. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. I’m sure you’ve worked that out.’
‘Yes. I think I understand things now. Things seem so much clearer.’
The old lady did not seem to be listening any more. Doctors whirled urgently around him, nurses came running, but he was content inside his mind. All that now remained was his own past; and it was good.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S SLEEP The Third Story (#ulink_dd830e08-6f96-58aa-bf2e-f8c82a1efb05)
IN THE CITY of Delhi there once lived a man who had never been able to sleep.
In appearance he had everything he wanted–more, in fact, than one person could ever want, for he was the owner of a vast industrial group and one of India’s richest men. Rajiv Malhotra lived in an elegant colonial mansion on Prithviraj Road with a garden full of gulmohar trees and parakeets; he was attended by servants and cooks and chauffeurs; he ran households in Jakarta, New York, and London; and he was married to a beautiful former film star. But it was as if fate, in bestowing so many blessings, had sought to ensure he would not be ignorant of suffering, and sleep was something he could not achieve.
‘To sleep is as to breathe!’ he would think to himself as he sat alone in the back of his tinted Mercedes on his way to work every morning. ‘Just look at all the people who have nothing, but to whom sleep’s treasures come every day, like a lifelong, unbidden friend. People sleep on the highways and in the train station, they sleep as people step over them and dogs bark around them–young boys, old women–all are able to sleep. But I, who have so much, have not this thing that the poorest beggar is able to enjoy.’
He led a double life. By day he would lead the life of people: working, eating, attending social functions, chatting to family and friends. Of course fatigue gnawed at him like a cancer: his organs felt as if they were of lead and ready to drag him down into a void, his eyes were like boulders in his head. But there was light and there were people, and he felt a part of the world. He worked endlessly, slowly transforming his father’s steel company into a global industrial empire that made him feel involved, significant.
But his nights were another life altogether. A life of black solitude when everyone around him demonstrated a loyalty more primal–happily, eagerly, gratefully, and so simply!–leaving him behind for the arms of sleep, abandoning him to wish away the hours of night, to experience time as something he had somehow to get through, and thus to become submerged in pointlessness.
While his wife slept upstairs he would wander through their many rooms, like a ghost condemned to revisit a castle every night for eternity, slinking tediously through the same corridors centuries after the life he once knew has given way to silence and dereliction. He would rifle the house aimlessly for new soporifics–books to draw him out of his boredom and panic enough that sleep might steal up on him unnoticed; videos or TV shows for him to surrender his mind to for a while. He wandered in the deep shadows of the garden smoking unaccustomed cigarettes, read the day’s news again, finished off bowls of peanuts that had been put out hours ago for evening guests; finally, he went drowsily to bed to lie next to his wife only to find in his horizontality some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution. At length, the windows would lighten, the azan would sound from distant mosques, and he would start to change from yesterday’s clothes into today’s, simultaneously relieved to be no longer alone and tortured that his strange impotence had been confirmed once more.
Of course he had consulted doctors. He had tried sleeping pills, relaxants, anti-anxiety drugs, meditation and hypnosis. He had diligently read the publications of the Sleep Disorder Society of America and the scientific publications of all the leading somnologists. He had tried every kind of therapeutic bed, pillow, earplug, and eyemask. He had followed the suggestions of friends to play Mozart or classical ragas very softly in his room, had even given a chance to the Sounds of Nature CD collection someone had sent him, lying in bed to the surround sound of cicadas in the rainforest or underwater whale recitatives, and trying to detect signs of somnolence inside himself. None appeared. No therapy, from folk to pharmacological, had managed to prise open for him the gates of the kingdom of slumber, and after some years he stopped looking for help. He did not sleep, and that was that.
It was doctors who confirmed to him, however, what he had himself long suspected: that a lifetime without sleep was almost certainly responsible for the fact that, after ten years of marriage, he and his wife had never conceived a child.
When Rajiv Malhotra had married the Bollywood superstar Mira Sardari, the newspapers had been apoplectic with idolizing, goggling glee. The romance had every element of legend: the society man of the 70s who was jilted by the beautiful–and older–mother and waited twenty years to marry the daughter; the helicopter accident that orphaned the teenage Mira and made her the child of India herself, with doting parents in all the leading families; the secret wedding in a Himalayan resort while Mira was at the height of her fame and in the middle of her classic Exile (no one was there, but everyone was an eyewitness); the ending of her film career ‘so I can devote myself to helping those less fortunate than myself’; his sophistication and massive commerical power. But children, which they both saw as the fulfilment of their lives, did not come. Doctors advised the couple that Rajiv’s sleepless body, incapable of rejuvenating itself, would never produce seed. His private thoughts, that had dwelt single-mindedly on iron and tin for so long, became more and more obsessed by flesh and blood. There was a quietness between him and his wife. And after a while, the editors of newspapers, obsessed with dynasties even more than with money, themselves turned quiet.
One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.
As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.
He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.
He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.
The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.
‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’
‘How is everything?’
‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.
From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.
‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.
‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’
At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.
‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’
‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’
‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’
‘Not now.’
‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’
‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’
‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’
‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’
‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’
‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’
‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’
‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them to wait. Listen to me for one minute. You’ll be as excited as I am.’
‘OK, I’m listening–Why is this guy letting her talk on like that? Who cares about her damned dinner? Just give her what she wants and let’s move on–Go on Mira.’
‘SCIENTISTS PRODUCE VIABLE GORILLA CLONE: Claim Human Cloning now Possible.’
‘Madam, can we start from the beginning? Name and the date of travel?’
‘It’s datelined Cambridge, England. I’ll start from the beginning. A group of scientists at Bios Laboratories Ltd today announced they had produced an eight-cell gorilla foetus that would, had it been implanted in a mother gorilla, have given rise to a normal pregnancy and infant. The scientists destroyed the foetus, saying that their objectives were simply to confirm a number of theoretical and technical hypotheses, not to create quote public curiosities–blah blah blah…’
‘Last Thursday. Flight 162. Name is Laurie Kurt.’
‘OK, this is the bit: Dr Stephen Hall, the Technical Director at Bios Laboratories, said that the experiment showed how far the science had come.’
‘Let me just find that on the system for you. Hope you made it to the dinner in the end, after they’d come so far?’
‘In the end. Thank God. They were venture capitalists from France who were looking to put money into my company. It was the only time in four months we all had spare diary time. Can you believe that?’
‘I’m going crazy listening to this small talk. If this guy wants to chat he can do it in his spare time. He’s supposed to do one call every two minutes. What’s his average? Check it.’
Somewhere in California a police siren swelled, Dopplered, and faded.
‘Rajiv? Are you listening? “A few years ago these eight cells would have been on the cover of Time magazine and people would have been saying that this has turned our idea of nature on its head.”’
‘We’ve got this amazing technology, it’s going to turn the lives of three hundred million Americans literally upside-down–and I’m sitting stuck in St Louis–of all places!–missing the only time I could get with these VCs in four months.’
‘“Now we have well-established techniques for doing this kind of thing, and can achieve our objectives with a high degree of predictability–and no one is really surprised anymore.”’
‘He’s making eighteen calls an hour, sir.’
‘Then why is he still here?–Mira, hang on a minute–That’s not how you were briefed. If he’s not doing his job, fire him. That’s what you’re here for!’
‘You can imagine how I felt–’
‘Otherwise I’ll fire you.’
‘When asked what this meant for the future of human cloning, Hall was unequivocal. “It’s going to happen. We could do it now. And someone will do it. One thing that history has taught us is that human curiosity never sleeps, no matter what obstacles the doomsayers try to put in its way.”’
‘Mira, please!’
‘–this was possibly the most important moment of my life–’
‘Oh, Rajiv–you’re on television! Can you hear?’
Rajiv’s microphoned voice crackled through his mobile phone.
‘India’s new wealth will come not from any natural resource but from an entirely fortuitous fact: its one billion people slap bang on the opposite side of the world from America.’
‘–they told me I would change the future–’
‘A billion people awake while America’s three hundred million sleep. Awake in their droves, ten and a half time zones from New York, thirteen and a half from San Francisco.’
‘He’s been on this call for four and a half minutes already.’
‘You look so nice. Nice smile. And people are applauding.’
‘In the electronic age it doesn’t matter where anyone is anymore.’
‘Is anyone apart from me remotely conscious of the value of time, for God’s sake?’
‘And Indians can fit in a whole day of work between the time that Americans swipe out in the evening and the time they set their double mocha down on their desk the next morning. It’s an unbeatable formula.’
‘Kurt, Laurie–I have it.’
‘Thanks to us, the sun need never set on the American working day.’
‘OK, I have that delayed flight on my screen here. And the other ticket you purchased. American Airlines. Paid for at 2.24 p.m. Central Time last Thursday. We’re very sorry for the delay and the inconvenience.’
‘India’s new asset is its time zone. Indian Standard Time is its new pepper, its new steel!’
‘We’ll credit one thousand eight hundred fifteen dollars and forty-seven cents to the American Express card you paid with.’
‘That’s the end of that news item. But you did look nice.’
‘Thank you very much. You have an accent. Where are you from?’
‘He’s out of here.’
‘I’m from India.’
‘Now listen. Protesters–cloning–undermining society–yes: “These technologies mean dramatic new possibilities for medical therapy and for bringing children to infertile couples, and when people realize that their world view can continue unthreatened by what people like me do–and that previously incurable conditions can now be treated–they’ll stop making all this fuss.”’
Mira’s voice began to quiver with the massage. Rajiv could hear the smack of palms on oily skin.
‘India! I would so love to go to India. I believe Americans have so much to learn from India. What do you think of the US?’
‘It goes on: Chief Executive Robert Mills confirmed that human cloning was not on the company’s agenda. “It’s illegal in this country anyway,” he said. “But the mandate we have been given by our investors is very precise: to develop a patent portfolio of world-class sheep and cattle genetic material, and the techniques to exploit that material in the global agricultural marketplace.”’
‘America is–fine! Great!’
‘Time!’
‘“The gorilla experiment was part of our investigation into these techniques, but Bios Laboratories will not be pursuing its work in primate production.”’
‘Where are you based?’
‘Madam, I’m getting another call. I really ought to go.’
‘OK. Thanks for your help.’
‘Time’s up? What do you mean time’s up?’
‘You have to make sure these people understand that there is only one thing that is important here and that’s efficiency.’
‘My massage is over. Can’t believe an hour is up already.’
‘You have to make sure they know how to avoid this kind of chitchat. And deal with that guy. This isn’t a chat line we’re running.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘I’m sorry, Mira, I’m doing something here.’
‘Were you listening to the article?’
‘Yes. In fact I know Stephen Hall. He was at Cambridge with me. We played squash.’
‘Don’t you see? This is our chance! We can have a child! Why don’t you go and see him?’
‘OK, Mira. I will.’
A few days later, Dr Stephen Hall showed Rajiv into the living room of a large old house whose Victorian lattice windows filtered out most of the scant light of the Cambridge afternoon. They sat down on armchairs that were crowded into the tiny space left by the grand piano and outsized television that dominated the room.
‘Now. Tell me what can I do for you?’
Stephen poured cream into his coffee and stirred intently.
‘I need you to make my wife and I a child. We will pay, of course.’ Rajiv narrated the history of his ill-fated attempts at reproduction.
Dr Hall considered deeply. He looked anxious.
‘Have you thought of adopting?’
‘I haven’t come here for your bloodless European solutions. I don’t need to visit one of the world’s leading biotechnology experts to get advice on adoption. I want a child whose flesh and blood is my wife’s and my own. That is why I am here.’
‘How much would you pay?’
‘Five million pounds.’
‘I see.’ He took a gulp from his coffee cup with just-perceptible agitation.
‘You realize that we’d need to do the work outside the country. It’s illegal here. I’d probably set up a lab in the Bahamas. We’d need to ship a lot of equipment and people. It could–’
‘I know how much money you’ll need to spend and it’s nowhere near five million pounds. I’d already included a healthy profit for you. But if it’s an issue, let’s say seven million. No more negotiation.’
‘And if I were to say yes, what would you want?’
‘I want you to make me a son. A perfect son. A son who will be handsome and charming. Brilliant and hardworking. Who can take over my business. Who will never disappoint or shame me. Who will be happy. A son, above all, who can sleep.’
‘In a probabilistic science like genetics it is dangerous to try and optimize every parameter. You start stretching chance until it snaps and you end up getting nothing.’
‘Nevertheless. Those are my demands.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than ‘Isn’t it only two hours since breakfast?’ High-alcohol wine, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anaesthesia completed the gentle high-altitude lullaby.
No matter how many times he flew, Rajiv, naturally, never succumbed to these sedatives. As time slowed down all around him, his heartbeat accelerated with the raging speed on the other side of the titanium membrane, the whole screaming, blinking 300-litres-a-second combustion of it, the 800-kilometre-an-hour gale in which Karachi-Tehran-Moscow-Prague-Frankfurt-Amsterdam each stuck for a second on the windscreen like a sheet of old newspaper and then swooped into the past. As the plane cut its fibre-optic jet stream through the sky, Rajiv’s insomniac sorrow at living in a different time from everyone else became panic as the movement of the day tilted and buckled, the unwavering sun, always just ahead, holding time still for hours and hours and burning his dim, sleepless pupils. Used to carrying the leaden darkness of the night through the day with him, he now carried Indian Standard Time in his guts into far-flung places, and there was an ear-splitting tectonic scraping within him as it went where it should never have been. Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities–until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like jet lag.
It was the same, every time.
Stephen worked quickly. Working in the Bahamas from blood and tissue samples sent from Delhi he managed to mimic the processes by which the DNA of two adults is combined at the moment of fertilization. He took human egg cells from the ovaries of aborted embryos, blasted the nucleus from them, and replaced it with the new genetic combination. He created a battery of two hundred eggs, and waited.
At length he identified one healthy and viable zygote, splitting happily into two every few hours. He called Mira, who flew out that day, and implanted it in her womb.
She returned to Delhi via London, where she had some shopping to do in Bond Street. Neither customs nor security detected the microscopic contraband she carried within her.
After nine months, Mira was rosy and rotund, and Rajiv an exuberant and solicitous father-to-be. No one could remember seeing him so glad or so animated. Even the black crescents that seemed branded under his eyes started to fade. He called Mira several times a day to enquire after her temperature and the condition of her stomach. He brought her flowers and sweets in the evening and hosted small parties in his home where she would dazzle the guests with her happiness and even replay Bollywood routines from the old days. At length, her labour began.
The obstetrician and nurses came to the house to attend her in her bedroom while Rajiv sat in his study with the door closed, fiddling with a pencil. He sweated with suspense, but would not allow himself to venture out. Finally, a nurse came to the door.
‘The labour is over, sir. And you have twins. A boy and a girl. Both are healthy. You had better come.’
Rajiv ran past her to his wife’s bedroom. There she lay, exhausted and pale, and beside her on the bed were two sleeping babies. One was a radiant, beautiful girl. The other was a boy, a shrunken, misshapen boy with an outsized head that had the pointed shape of a cow’s.
‘What is this?’ he cried in horror. ‘That is not my son! That is some–creature!’
The nurses susurrated, trying to bring calm and allow the new mother to rest, reassuring the father, telling him that new babies often look a bit–funny?–this was quite normal and not to worry, and anyway we all learn to love our children in the end, even if they have some adorable little quirk that makes them different–isn’t that what also makes them unique?
Rajiv was not listening. ‘I want that child out of my house this day!’ He stormed out and summoned his lifelong companion and servant, Kaloo.
‘A terrible thing has happened, Kaloo. My wife has given birth to two children: a girl, and a boy who is a deviant. I cannot allow the boy to stay here a moment longer. I want you to take him away. Give him to a family where he’ll be cared for. Promise them a yearly stipend–whatever they need–as long as they look after him. But I don’t want to know where he is or what happens to him, and I don’t want him to know about me. Take him away, Kaloo! Away from Delhi–somewhere else. And as long as we are all alive this secret stays between you and me.’
In a very few hours the matter was taken care of. Telling no one, not even Rajiv, where he was going, Kaloo wrapped the baby up and set out with a wet nurse for the airport. He took Rajiv’s private plane and flew to Bombay. While the nurse looked after the baby in a hotel room, Kaloo wandered the streets looking for a family who would care for the child. His gaze was attracted by the kindly face of a Muslim bookseller. He approached him and told him the story.
‘Sir–my wife and I would be so happy! We have no children and have always wanted a son!’
‘I will deliver the boy to you this very evening. And every year on this day I will visit you with money. You cannot contact me, nor should you make any attempt to discover the origins of the boy. I hope you will be loving parents to him.’
He and the wet nurse took the baby to the bookseller’s home that evening and delivered him into his new mother’s arms. She wept with joy.
‘We will call him Imran,’ she said reverentially. ‘He will be a man like a god.’
Rajiv and Mira named their daughter Sapna, and from the first day of her life everyone who saw her was enchanted by her. She was so beautiful that jaded politicians and wrinkled businessmen rediscovered the meaning of the word ‘breathtaking’ when they looked into her cot. As Rajiv forgot his rage of her birthday, and Mira allowed her resentment of her husband’s peremptory behaviour to subside, both of them lapsed into a deep love affair with their daughter.
Everyone agreed there was something marvellous about her sleep. People would stop at Rajiv’s house just to see the baby sleeping, for the air she exuded with her slow breathing smelled better than anything they had ever smelt. It made one feel young and vital, it made you feel–though none of them would ever say it aloud–like reproducing!
Eternally ignorant himself of the pleasure of sleep, Rajiv’s body and mind were calmed and rejuvenated by the voluptuous sleep of his daughter.
She was only four or five years old when she sat at the family piano and picked out, with unaccustomed fingers but rapidly increasing harmonic complexity, a Hindi film song she had heard on the radio that morning. Rajiv immediately installed an English piano teacher who quickly found herself involved in conversations of the greatest philosophical complexity with her young pupil, who was interested in understanding why the emotions responded so readily to certain melodic or harmonic combinations.
One morning, when Rajiv entered Sapna’s bedroom to kiss her goodbye, he noticed something he had not seen before. The wooden headboard of her bed seemed to have sprouted a green shoot that in one night had grown leaves and a little white flower. He summoned his wife.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, mystified.
‘That may be so–but what is it doing there? If it grows so much in one night, one morning we will come and find it has strangled our daughter. Get someone to cut it off today and seal the spot with varnish. This bed has been here for–what?–ten years? I can’t understand how this has happened after all this time.’
That day a carpenter was brought who carefully cut off the new stem, sanded down the surface and varnished it until no sign of the growth remained. But the next morning there were two such shoots, each larger than the first and with flowers that filled the room with delightful, dizzying scent.
Rajiv was furious.
‘Change this bed immediately. Get her one with a steel frame. This is–this is–ridiculous!’
A steel bed was installed in the place of the wooden one, and for a time things returned to normal. But it was not so long before another morning visit was met by a room full of white seeds that drifted lazily on the air currents from floor to ceiling, spores emitted by the geometric rows of spiralling grasses that had sprung overnight from the antique Persian rug on the floor of Sapna’s room. Genuinely frightened this time, Rajiv called for tests and diagnoses on both grass and Sapna herself. Nothing could be determined, and Sapna had no explanation. They moved her into another bedroom, where a wicker laundry basket burst overnight into a clump of bamboo-like spears that grew through the ceiling and erupted into the room above. Wherever Sapna slept, things burst into life: sheets, clothes, newspapers, antique wardrobes–all rediscovered their ability to grow.
Each encounter with this nocturnal hypertrophy enraged Rajiv. He would stare at the upstart plant matter that invaded his daughter’s room with the purest hatred he had ever felt. It began to take him over. He could not work for his visions of galloping, coiling roots and shoots. It sickened him. He ordered all organic matter to be removed from Sapna’s bedroom. This controlled things, and for many months their lives were unaffected by this strange phenomenon. But he had been filled with a terror of vegetation, and wherever he went he kept imagining loathsome green shoots sprouting out of car seats and boardroom tables.
One morning, as he arrived at her door, he could hear her sobbing quietly inside. Terrified of what he might find, he opened the door slowly. The room was empty and calm, and Sapna lay twisted up in bed.
‘I’m bleeding, papa. Between my legs.’
Rajiv’s stomach corkscrewed inside him and he ran out of the room. Sweating inside his suit he landed heavily on Mira’s bed.
‘It’s Sapna. She needs you.’
That night, though Sapna’s room had received the customary clearing of all organic traces, and though no one heard anything, not even the sleepless Rajiv, a huge neem tree sprang from the dining room, grew up through the ceiling into the room where Sapna slept, branched out through all four walls, filled the floor above her, and broke through the roof of the house. Vines and creepers snaked up the tree during the night, locking it in a sensuous, miscegenetic embrace and disgorging provocative red flowers bursting with seed. By the time everyone awoke in the morning a crowd had already gathered outside the house to look at this extraordinary sight, and photographers were taking pictures for the city papers.
The Malhotra household stared at the tree in the way that people stare at something that cannot be part of the world they inhabit. They kept touching it, touching the places where it had burst through the walls. Rajiv became grim.
‘Get this cut down today. Get the walls mended. And then we have to find more of a solution to this.’
The tree was not the only miracle of growth to happen that night, though the other one was only discovered afterwards. Amid the furore of fertility, Mira had fallen pregnant.
Rajiv received a telephone call that day from the Defence Minister.
‘Rajiv–would you mind terribly coming in to see me this afternoon? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.’
When Rajiv arrived, a number of senior government officials had gathered to receive him.
‘Rajiv, you know how much we admire and value the contribution you make to the nation. That’s why we’re calling you in like this–informally–so we can avoid any kind of public scandal. It’s come to our notice that there have been certain–goings-on–in your household that are both untoward and unusual. Far be it from us to step into the sanctum of your private affairs, of course–but given what has happened this morning, they may not remain private for very long. We need some kind of explanation from you as to what is happening. And we need to work out a solution with you. So that there is no danger to the public. You understand how it is. Yesterday a bud, today a neem tree–tomorrow perhaps we will wake up and see only a forest where our capital city now stands.’
Rajiv was taken aback.
‘Yes. Of course. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms.’
‘Now tell us–because we are here to hear your views–what exactly is happening?’
‘ To be very honest, I don’t have a clue. It seems you probably know as much as I do.’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
‘Well, I thought I could prevent it by simply taking certain precautions in the household. But as of this morning I’m not so sure.’
‘Rajiv, permit us to throw a few ideas in your direction. We have been putting our heads together on this issue for the last few minutes. One of my honourable friends here thought that your daughter–Sapna, is it?–could be of great service to the nation. Suggested we might use her to recultivate some of the desert regions. An elegant suggestion, but perhaps a little fanciful. From what I can gather, the peculiarities of your daughter’s sleep do not obey any obvious scientific principles, and it might be very dangerous to unleash her on the land. No, we gravitated more towards a solution that would involve some sort of–how shall I put it?–confinement. So she can do no harm to anyone–including, we are most anxious to stress, herself.
‘From the very beginning all of us, with one voice, dismissed the idea of jail. For what is your daughter guilty of? And how could a young lady with her upbringing be expected to survive alongside all the despicable souls we have in our jails? On the other hand, I am afraid to say we did not feel there would be a place for her in any of our hospitals. Too much in the public eye. Too much risk.
‘But there is something between a prison and a hospital that might suit everyone concerned. We have a number of excellent institutions for those of our citizens who are not entirely–ahem–compos mentis. Run by true professionals, out of the public eye, nice grounds where the inmates can walk–you know the sort of thing. We thought your daughter might be very happy in a place like that. She could continue her music there, we could conduct the kind of tests that might lead to her eventual recovery and reintegration, and we could ensure she had secure quarters where her own remarkable traits could cause neither upset nor disturbance. What would you say to that?’
None of them was quite prepared for Rajiv’s reaction. One must suppose that, even if you are the defence minister of the world’s second most populous nation, it is an unnerving sight to see the world’s twenty-seventh richest man on his knees before you, weeping.
‘Sir, please don’t take my daughter from me! She is everything I have, and I love her far, far more than my own wretched life. I will do anything, anything–but do not take her from me. Leave it with me, sir–I promise I will find a way out of this–I have money, resources, friends–we will sort this out, don’t worry, we will understand the problem–we will work out how it can be solved in everyone’s interest–have faith in me, sir and I will not disappoint you. Only I beg you this–please let me keep my daughter!’
The government officials were silent, and it was some time before the Minister could summon his voice again.
‘Very well, Rajiv. Perhaps we have been both unfeeling and insensitive. Please go away and think about this, and let us know what you decide–by Wednesday evening?’
After a very few days, construction began of a large tower just outside Delhi. It was to be built with techniques drawn from the design of semiconductor manufacturing plants: there would be no organic materials, no dust or impurity of any kind, and it would be cleaned twice a day by costly machines. After some consideration it was thought better not to put windows in the building lest influences from outside upset the calm equilibrium of the interior. Rajiv went every day to supervise construction, to ensure that the vast confinement he was building for his daughter was designed and constructed with as much love as possible. A leading architect was commissioned to create a fantastic interior for Sapna that included a library of three thousand books, all specially printed on polyester film, and a music room in which was placed a customized piano built entirely of steel. The drawing room contained a television with the best channels from all over the world. But no light came in from outside, and only Rajiv would keep the key to the door. The outer walls were made entirely of steel, as thick as a man’s head. Soon Sapna was transferred there.
She spent her days writing and playing the piano. She only played the western classical repertoire, but she embarked upon a new categorization of it inspired by Hindustani classical music. Her scheme disregarded entirely the biographical accidents that had placed Liszt in Paris or made Beethoven deaf, and paid scant attention to the historical circumstances from which a work sprang or the attendant generic distinctions: ‘Baroque’, ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Modern’, etc. Instead, Sapna was interested in developing rules for understanding the resonances between a particular arrangement of musical sound and the natural universe, especially as apprehended by the human emotions.
She chose the expanse of the 24-hour clock face as the map on which the results of her enquiry would be plotted. Every one of its 1,440-minute gradations was held to represent a certain configuration of emotions and natural truths (after a while she found the need to analyse down to the level of the individual second) and these in turn corresponded to the different combinations of the musical ‘essences’ (her term) that could be found in individual pieces of music. She developed a set of diagrams rather like astrological charts to facilitate the complex series of judgements that had to be made in order to uncover the essences of every piece of music and thus allocate it to the correct second of the day.
After she had spent much time correcting the flaws in her system and writing out her treatise, she devoted herself to applying it to the entire piano repertoire, playing a particular piece of music slightly earlier or slightly later each day until she was satisfied that she had hit upon the exact moment at which it achieved that special resonance, rather like a dim room in the thick of a city that is ignited with sunlight for two glorious minutes every day. Most of Bach’s suites (and, contrary to their name, a couple of Chopin’s Nocturnes) came in the morning, although many of the preludes and fugues belonged to the dead of night. The more she perfected her system, the more it seemed that time was the lost secret of European classical music. When she sat, eyes closed before her piano, waiting for the precise instant of the day (about 6.02 in the evening) for which the opening bars of Beethoven’s last piano sonata were intended, when she struck out, astonishingly, into its angular chords, it made everything anyone had heard before sound like the indistinct irritation of hotel lobby soundtracks. When restored–for that is how it felt–to its correct relationship with time, the music seemed to draw itself in the sky, to stride across the constellations and fill people’s hearts with an elation they had imagined but never felt. Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02 ness as they never had before.
Sapna’s father visited her every evening. Every day she would have discovered new things through her reading or from the television that she wanted to discuss with him. He loved her more and more; and as his wife’s pregnancy advanced and she gave birth to a healthy and perfect baby boy, he also felt himself to be in her debt. ‘It is Sapna who restored my fertility to me, even at this late stage in my life,’ he thought. ‘She it is who has finally brought me the son I requested from Dr Hall, so many years ago.’ The fact that his wife had turned her back on Sapna and decided that the whole business of her first pregnancy–illegitimately obtained, she now felt–was a curse she should have nothing more to do with; the fact that Rajiv’s new and otherwise ideal son hated the idea of Sapna from the moment he became conscious of her, would fly into a fury whenever his father unheedingly referred to her as his ‘sister’, and despised him for the care and time he lavished upon the ‘freak in the tower’–all this only increased for Rajiv the poignancy of his daughter’s situation. He never ceased to feel the pain of her incarceration. ‘She deserves so much more.’ It broke his heart every evening to leave her there, and lock the door. Every night he stayed slightly longer, listening to her music or discussing literature or history.
One thing she never discussed with him was the fact that she had fallen in love with a television star. A television star with a bull-shaped head.
The shrunken baby Imran had grown up under the loving care of his parents who lived in the ramshackle bookshop his father ran in a backstreet near to where the tides of the Arabian Sea are broken by the minareted island of Haji Ali’s tomb. The tiny shop had everything: not only guidebooks, innumerable editions of the Koran and stacks of poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, but also perfumes, potions, and pendants with prayers engraved upon them. Pilgrims from small towns would come for souvenirs: plastic wall clocks that showed, behind the inconstant wavering hands, the steadfastness of the marble tomb whose domes were topped with flashing red and yellow lights for effect (‘Keeps perfect time! Will last for years.’); calendars that showed the Ka’aba surrounded by majestic whizzing planets and crescent moons in magentas and emerald greens; novelty prayer mats on which the arch of a mihrab framed a spectacular paradise of golden domes and minarets and silver palm trees. Sleeping on the shop counter, baby Imran would stay awake watching the Turkic elegance of the Muslim wonders waxing and waning in the night sky by the intermittent illumination of hundreds of gaily-coloured LEDs.
He grew slowly and unevenly. His shoulders became broad and sinewy while his legs remained thin and short. His arms were too long for his dwarfish body and from an early age he walked with a simian gait that inspired scorn and hatred among his classmates. They taunted him above all for the size and shape of his enormous head that became more and more solid with the years and whose protruding nose and jaw gave it an undeniable taurine air. Neighbourhood graffiti speculated gleefully about the various kinds of unnatural coupling that could have given rise to such a strange creature: monkeys took their cackling pleasure at the backsides of oblivious-seeming sheep, and bulls threatened to split open the bulbous behinds of curvaceous maidens. One cartoon, hastily erased by the authorities, showed an entire narrative in which a woman, anxious for a child, ate the raw testes of a bull, a meal that resulted not in her own pregnancy but that of her cow. It was an artist of some skill who had drawn the final scene in which the woman stole out by night to seize the bloody baby from the vulva of the cow and put it carefully into bed between her husband and herself. The entire story was narrated by a pointing, moralizing goat.
Imran’s parents were naturally upset by the indignities suffered by their son, and eventually gave in to his insistence that he should not attend school. He spent his days in the bookshop instead, and consumed volumes of poetry that he would recite aloud for the entertainment of customers. In time, word of his remarkable performances spread, and the bookshop would be surrounded during the day by crowds of eager listeners who could not find room inside. The very oddness of his body seemed to lend an expressivity to his interpretations that captivated everyone who heard him, and his outsized chest and neck produced a voice that gave the impression of being drawn from a vast well of emotion. Through him, his audience was able to bypass the difficulties of the Farsi or the archaisms of the Urdu and understand the true meaning of the poet. ‘It is amazing’, one said, ‘that such a young boy should be able to overpower us with his expression of such adult emotions: the yearnings of a lover for his beloved, and of a believer for the Almighty. We have yearned for many things, but never have we seen such yearning as this.’ Another replied, ‘When he talks about the pain of being trapped in time while longing for the eternal we can all finally understand how truly burdensome it is to be temporal creatures, and how glorious eternity must be!’ Imran’s body, its hulking shoulders and massive head supported by a withered frame, seemed to symbolize in flesh the poets’ theme of manly, religious passion trapped in woefully insignificant human form, and no one who heard him could again imagine those poems except on his lips.
When not in his father’s shop, Imran wandered. Since his appearance provoked fear and dismay among the city’s clean and well-to-do, he gravitated towards out-of-the-way places where people were less easily repulsed. He learned the art of appearing utterly insignificant, and thus of passing unnoticed through public places; he slipped completely unseen through the bustling centres of the city only to reappear suddenly at a dhaba or a paan shop where he would exchange handshakes and quiet greetings with five different people. His friendships were forged with marginal characters who made their money from small-time illegal businesses, and they all loved him: for he told jokes with extravagant grimaces that made them roar with laughter, and he always knew ten people who could solve any problem. They came to him with questions: where the best tea could be found, who sold car parts the most cheaply, where you could find a safe abortion, who would be able to get rid of five hundred mobile phones quickly.
One afternoon he found himself in a tiny bar in Juhu where his friends often congregated to play cards and talk business. There was no illumination except for the strips of pure light around the blinds, and the hubbub of heat and taxis and street sellers outside was reduced to a distant murmur. As they drank under the languorous fans, one of them announced:
‘Now Imran will recite us a poem!’
Imran declined, but there was much clapping and encouragement, an empty beer glass was banged rousingly on the table, the bartender came over and made his insistences–and finally he assented. He began to recite a ballad, beginning in such a low voice that they all had to lean towards him to hear.
His ballad told of a princess, long ago, who had been the pride and joy of the king and queen and her brother the prince. She was beautiful and could sing songs that made all of nature sit down and listen. And she had hair of pure gold.
One day the princess was carried off by an ugly monster who was shrunken and evil looking and coveted the gold from her head. He shaved off all her hair and made himself rich, and imprisoned her in a tall tower to wait for the hair to grow back. But it grew back so slowly he realized he would have to wait years before there would be such a quantity again. He devoted himself to devising potions to make her hair grow more quickly. Imran’s voice rose: how evil was this monster! and how absolutely comic at the same time! As he told the story, the creature became real for them all; they listened in fascination, they cried with laughter as Imran screwed up his face and recited lists of foul extracts and hideous amputations that the monster would rub into the princess’s delicate scalp or mix with her tea.
Her brother was grief-stricken at her disappearance and left the palace to go and find her. He wandered endlessly; his body became scratched by thorns and eaten by fleas, but still he did not give up. Eventually he heard a wonderful voice singing in the distance, and as he came closer he recognized it as his sister’s; yes indeed, he could glimpse her face through a tiny window at the top of a tall tower. But, though she saw him too, and was happy he had come, he was unable to rescue her, for there was no way into the tower except through a door that was always locked and the tiny window that was at a great height from the ground.
So the prince planted a tree that would grow tall and strong and allow him to climb up and rescue his sister. He would tend the tree lovingly every night, but it grew very slowly, and every day he would mourn the days that she was losing in the tower. His love was so strong and so selfless! and the tough souls who listened to Imran were moved to silence, for they had never heard such a pure expression of yearning as this.
One day the monster found the formula that would make the princess’s hair grow. As soon as he applied his ointment it began to sprout quickly from her head, and in a few minutes was thick and dazzling and hung down to her knees. He let out a scream of inhuman triumph, cut it all off at once and went away to sell it.
As soon as he had gone, the princess took his stinking cauldron and tipped it out of the window. Immediately, the infant tree began to climb towards the sky. In a few minutes it was halfway to the window, branches and twigs and leaves appearing in dazzling patterns, growing around the tower in an arboreal embrace, and bathing its bone-white stone in shade. As it grew, the prince started to climb and was borne upwards on the swelling trunk. Soon it reached all the way to the window, and the princess leapt into her brother’s arms and kissed him joyfully.
But the tree did not stop growing. No matter how fast they tried to climb downwards the tree continued to carry them higher and higher into the air. Frantically, they tried to descend, but now the tower was far below them and they were in the very heavens.
At that point the monster returned, and realized at once what had happened. Furious, he took a great axe and began to chop at the tree. With powerful blows he cut away at the trunk until it finally began to sway. With a mighty crash it fell to the ground, crushing the tower to powder. And the prince and princess were no more.
The men were quiet.
‘Why did they have to die?’
‘Well, what did you expect?’ replied Imran, amused that his audience had become so affected. ‘They were brother and sister. Were they going to get married and live happily ever after?’
‘I suppose not.’
But they were glum.
Then, from the shadowy corner of the bar, a solitary figure began to applaud. None of them had noticed him before.
‘Wonderful! Wonderful! It is years since I have seen a performance like that. You have a fine talent, sir! I would like to see more of what you can do. Allow me to introduce myself. I am a senior executive with an advertising company–as my business card will show. I would like very much to introduce you to some highly influential people I happen to know here in Bombay. I think you may be just what they are looking for. With your permission, of course. Your monster was quite extraordinary. So terrifying, and yet so humorously delivered! I can see a glittering career, sir! There are so few true actors these days.’
And so it was, after a dizzying succession of meetings and auditions, that Imran became the ‘Plaque Devil’ for Colgate toothpaste, in one of the most successful advertising campaigns that India had ever seen. A loathsome, misshapen figure that forced an entry into happy, brightly-lit households, and caused merry dental chaos through his evil schemes until finally repulsed by a laser-filled tube of Colgate, he became a cultural phenomenon such as advertising companies dream of. Children imitated him in the schoolyard, and magazines gave away free Plaque Devil stickers that would adorn the very walls where once graffiti had made shameful innuendos about Imran’s birth. Youngsters found in the character a welcome focus for rebellious feelings, while parents approved of its pedagogic potential and felt that at least their offspring’s unseemly roars and menacing ape-like walk might result in healthier teeth.
This was only the beginning for Imran. Every company wanted him in their advertisements, and soon his much-prized deformity had become the embodiment of every kind of threat to middle-class life: germs, crime, poverty, unwise consumer decisions. Within an astonishingly short time he had become one of the most recognizable faces in India, rivalling Bollywood stars and cricket players for space on cereal packets and soft-drink displays. He was an anti-hero who seemed to complete at a profound level the otherwise beautiful and perfect media pantheon.
But the true extent of his stardom was confirmed when he was cast as the demon Ravana in Star TV’s eight-hour epic, The Ramayana. Screened in its entirety from morning to evening on Independence Day, this was billed as the biggest media event the country had ever seen, with stunning digital effects and a cast of megastars bringing the ancient myths to life in ways never before imagined. The digital manipulation that placed an additional nine heads on Imran’s shoulders (whose unnatural broadness seemed built to receive them) was lifelike and spellbinding, and everyone agreed that it was this character more than any other that turned the show into the immense hit it became. He was an incomparable demon–and a strangely magnetic one. Though women across the country shuddered as the grotesque character abducted Sita from her beautiful royal husband, as he tried to seduce her into betraying Ram and accepting the queenship of his own demon kingdom, they could not help but feel in his entreaties a depth of longing that they had never encountered in their own lives; and in spite of their disgust, despite the fact they knew it could never happen, they were fascinated by the idea that the unwavering Sita might relent and they would see what a passionate and generous lover he might be. When Hanuman and his computer-generated monkey hordes swept down on Lanka and finally defeated the demon, it was not without feelings of confusion that they accepted the restoration of Sita to her rightful husband.
Imran’s life had changed. He had become wealthy and famous, and his cellphone rang constantly with new offers of work and money. But he was not invited to the soirées of the beautiful people, and he remained an outsider to the constant spectacle of Bombay social life. He spent his evenings at the same backstreet bars and dhabas, and avoided the thoroughfares of the city even more assiduously than before. But former friends became distrustful of his sudden wealth and institutionalization, and new ones seemed to have motives he did not like. And in his increasing isolation he began to reflect more and more on the deep yearning that had filled him for as long as he could remember. For some reason, he had a strong feeling that it had something to do with the mysterious figure who came every year on his birthday to give money to his parents.
When Imran’s next birthday came around he positioned himself across the street from the bookshop to wait for the immaculately dressed man who came every year to hand over a packet of money and exchange a few whispered words in the back before hurriedly departing. Though Imran had asked his parents many times who this man was they had never told him the secret.
The man arrived at the end of the morning as expected, and as he bid his surreptitious farewells Imran began to follow him. He walked quickly, conspicuous in his suit, turned two corners, and slid into the back of a black Mercedes that sped off northwards on Marine Drive. Imran stopped a taxi: ‘Follow that car!’
They passed the dilapidated British frontages, manoeuvred through the jam of other taxis, drove over the massive concrete flyovers near Bandra from where you could see a forest of giant movie star hoardings sprouting from the rubble, in whose shade families sought cooler stones to make their life on, passed undulating townships of corrugated iron and tarpaulin reflected in the blind mirror exteriors of the corporate towers, and finally reached the airport.
The man checked in for a business-class seat to Delhi, and Imran bought an economy-class ticket on the same plane. He had put on loose clothes, walked taller, tried to look inconspicuous. No one seemed to notice that Star TV’s Ravana was treading the earth among them.
The sun had almost set by the time Imran’s quarry drew up before the Malhotra mansion on Prithviraj Road. Imran began to ask people, ‘Who lives in that house?’ No one could tell him anything to explain the yearly visits to his family in Bombay.
‘He is a very rich man,’ said a beggar with wild grey hair. ‘And a very cruel one. The rumour says that he keeps his daughter locked up in a tower. She plays wonderful music, but he never lets her out.’
‘Where is the tower?’ asked Imran.
‘It is far from here. I could take you there.’
‘Yes. Please do.’
As Imran took one last look at the house it seemed to him that it must have suffered some kind of catastrophe in the past. Ill-matching materials had been used to repair what looked like giant holes in the roof and walls. He wondered what could have caused such a violent thing in such a genteel street.
Only the entrance of the tower was lit, and it was difficult to see how large it was by night. Imran struck it with his fist. The steel was very thick. He looked at the strange structure in disbelief.
‘He keeps his daughter in here?’
‘Yes. Everyone around here knows about her.’
‘Is she grown-up?’
‘She must be a woman now. No one has seen her for years.’
‘Why did he put her here?’
‘I cannot tell you.’
Just then, their conversation was interrupted by the sound of a piano. It was a sound so astonishing that Imran fell involuntarily to his knees. It was as if ten hands played simultaneously, every hand that of a celestial being, filled with knowledge that humans could not imagine, confident of an eternal beauty that was siphoned from another world into every musical note, causing it to swell beyond itself until it was no longer just music; until scales and trills became glorious light that struck Imran behind the retina, until melodies created holes in the sky that shifted over each other until, as the logic of the music became clear, and for a brief instant only, all the holes lined up in a perfect tunnel that led up into the heavens and ended in that thing that Imran had been longing for all his life–and then the gaps in the sky drifted apart again and disappeared, and the music resolved into its finale.
Imran was left winded and limp. For a time he could not talk, but knelt on the ground supporting his heavy head in his hands. At length he looked up at the tower.
‘I have to meet her.’
‘I can’t see how you would do that. No one ever meets her.’
‘I will find a way.’
Imran spent the next few days exploring the out-of-the-way places of this city he did not know, looking for people who could help him plan his break-in. He struck up conversations with shopkeepers and restaurant owners, followed connections until he found dead ends, stood by night among sleeping bodies and campfires in dormant office complexes for rendezvous that did not happen, called lists of mobile phone numbers only for suspicious men to hang up on him. But in the end his work paid off, and he had assembled explosives and firearms and a small team to prepare the blast and guard their operation.
Dressed in black, they met at the tower in the early hours of the morning on a night when the moon was just a nick in the sky. The drowsy security guard was deftly disarmed and gagged, and they set about putting their explosives in place. Imran’s new-found expert slapped the steel as if it were a boisterous friend.
‘I would say it’s about eight inches thick. No way we can blast through it. We’d make a very big noise and this baby would still be sitting here smiling back at us. But you can see it’s made of eight-foot panels welded together and we can blast at the joins. Don’t worry. We can pop one of these big ladies easy as putting your eye out.’
With that he and his companion began to drill into the joins with the unabashed scream of steel on steel.
‘Quiet, for God’s sake!’ hissed Imran.
‘Do you want to get in here or not?’ He fixed Imran with the glare of a master workman who needs no counsel, and Imran gestured his submission. Drills fired up once more, puncturing the smooth exterior and ejecting fine spirals of silver, while Imran winced at this racket in the night and looked around for the security people who would certainly descend on them. But no one came; and soon the panel was framed by twelve even holes, and the men were filling them with a paste like halwa.
‘Let’s talk it through one more time. The blast will pop her outwards. No one stands in the way. You’ll be disorientated–think through your actions now. You three are going in with torches. Remember your way back. Once you get out you turn right–look at where the van is waiting. Are you ready?’
Imran looked up at the gloomy tower, and could not get rid of the thought, ‘Did I dream this once before?’ His heart was hammering in his throat.
The massive steel panel burst cleanly out of the wall and landed in the dust in an explosion so loud that everything in its wake was just a numb rumble. He staggered from the force of the blast, took hold of his thoughts, reached for his flashlight, and plunged into the swirling dust that filled the neat square hole in the wall. He ran into the room–and stopped short.
The lights were on, and Sapna stood shivering before him, clasping herself in a shawl, her eyes wide. He stood motionless, looking. She was beautiful to him, and her eyes answered his own in many mysterious ways; her very reality seemed astonishing, as if suddenly the afterimage that rippled briefly on corneal waters whenever he looked away from the sun, the presence that had for so long shimmered just beyond his senses, had at last become solid–this was true; but why was it that, as he looked, as he wished for all the clocks of the world to stop for the moment of his looking, his head was distracted, filled with other kinds of ticks and tocks that were not to do with time, that were the sound of a mechanism falling into place, the dials of a mighty safe lining up and opening, not just an eight-foot-square steel entrance but a channel between worlds that brought things unaccustomedly close and in an instant made the yearning of the poets of his childhood seem quaint and unnecessary; and as confusion raced like police sirens through the exhilarating night of his encounter, even as the men began to shout from behind and, in that other dimension, time was still galloping onwards, even as somewhere he was aware of how he must look, bursting in from the night at the head of a band of men with guns and a job to do, he knew now that all the reservoir of his desire, which had jangled inside him all his life, which filled his very chromosomes and made them yell out in the darkness, had not been enough to prepare him for this domino-like unfolding of everything he thought was solid around the trembling form of the woman who now stood before him.
‘What is happening? Get him out of there! Let’s go!’
Sapna continued to look at him.
‘Am I dreaming this again?’ she said, as if puzzled. ‘Or is it really you this time?’
Imran stood stupidly; but anyway he was not given time to respond as the men grabbed him and Sapna and dragged them both outside. His mind whirled and he followed them in a daze, lights flashed all around him, and there was a shift in reality; he tried to wake himself up to it, it seemed urgent…
They were surrounded. A ring of policemen shone bright lights at them, pointed guns.
‘You fucking idiot,’ the explosives chief shouted at Imran. ‘I thought you had it in you. You froze. Now we’re all fucked.’
They dropped their weapons and were grouped together and handcuffed. The night seemed strangely big, and the red and blue lights of the police vans hurt the eyes. One of the policemen was on the phone.
‘Six men. One of them’s deformed. Reminds me of someone, actually. The girl’s here too…The Defence Minister? Why? It’s three in the morning…Oh. I see…I’ll wait for you to call me back.’
They were all made to lie down on the ground. It began to rain. The phone rang.
‘Yes? Hello, Sir…Yes…A sort of dwarf…You’re exactly right. Just like a bull…Rajiv Malhotra? I see…No, we’ll make very sure. We’ll be very discreet…Yes, I know the place…The girl too? I don’t think the girl is an accomplice in this, sir…She doesn’t look dangerous…Of course. Very good.’
Thus it was that slightly before dawn, Imran and Sapna were locked into adjacent rooms in a high-security mental asylum that sat in the middle of large grounds in an unobtrusive location on the outskirts of the city.
For three days, high-ranking government officials thought of nothing but the Malhotra Issue. Rajiv Malhotra had asked for three days to conduct his own investigation into what had happened, during which time his daughter would remain in the asylum along with the ugly creature who was, it now turned out, none other than the star of The Ramayana and of so many memorable advertisements whose makers would be horrified when they found out that the deviant creature they had taken pity on, sponsored, and enriched was in real life a far more sinister kind of interloper than the antisocial influences he had been asked to portray on television. A low-class loner with sick thoughts whom even wealth and fame had not been able to civilize, who still kept the company of illegal elements, a criminal of the worst sort who destroyed private property by night in the throes, no doubt, of a monstrous sexual hunger for whose gratification he could not avail himself of the standard amenities but conceived instead an intricate plot to assault the decency of a daughter of the city’s leading family. No one could understand why it was that Rajiv Malhotra extended his three days’ protection to such a despicable character, but the connections of businessmen as prominent as he always extended into murky places and it was best not to ask. For three days phone calls passed between the Defence Minister, the director of the asylum, the Chief of Police, and Rajiv Malhotra himself. The officials were stern with the businessman: he had failed in his guarantee to manage his daughter’s Situation without the assistance of the State, and no concessions beyond the three days were allowed him. He was not permitted to visit the asylum or to speak to either of its new inmates.
For three days, Sapna did not sleep. Day and night she stood at her fifth-floor window looking out. The grounds were well kept, and the gardeners had recently planted infant trees around the foot of the building. Keeping watch with the police was her brother, Rajiv’s model son whom Sapna had only seen in photographs and who was now a tall, handsome teenager. He had taken it upon himself to ensure, as his clammy-hearted father did not seem to be able to, that no security breaches happened this time, and surveyed the window where she stood with a self-confident hatred that chilled her heart.
For three days she looked out, thinking again of those moments in the television epic when the ten-headed Ravana had attempted to seduce the woefully chaste Sita, with what words! and what yearning! How she had treasured the voice of a man who could desire like that, and how many times had she imagined that her own incarceration might be ended with such a magnificent abduction. What course of events, what impossible, impenetrable strangeness, could have brought that man to her and propelled him through the walls of her cage? What spirit could have caused her dream to be recreated so precisely in reality?
For three days she thought continually on these things. And then she slept.
Imran awoke to find himself in a room with no floor, hanging onto the bars of his window with bloodless fingers.
Buds of bulging paintwork were appearing all over the walls; green shoots burst from them, wavered for a second as if waiting for a distant vegetal communication, suddenly found direction, and streaked up through the ceiling, swelling into vast boughs of furrowed wood and splitting the room apart. He looked down through the bars where he hung: the circle of saplings had grown into giants, their tops soaring into the sky, branches spreading out inside the building as if reaching for a prey, fusing with the bricks and–yes! even as he watched!–lifting the entire asylum clean off the ground and carrying it aloft. The room tipped and Imran was standing upright on the wall, the window bars popped out and fell to the grass that was already far below, the bricks that separated him from his sister collapsed in a cascade: and there was Sapna, still asleep in her bed.
He shook her awake; and already she was running with him, leaping the crevasses that were opening under their feet, fighting through corridors that were quickly becoming impassable from rubble and dust and people. Everywhere there were people in white, inmates who giggled uncontrollably as unseen hands flung wide their cell doors, who shuffled into the hallways, who clucked and ticked and screamed as the floors buckled and sent them sliding on their backsides down the inclines, genitals waving in the air. They instinctively crowded together, drained from the building’s extremities towards its heart, packed the stairwell, told stories to the sky as they plunged also through the solid floors of their madness into the gulfs and gardens that lay below. The stairs thronged with figures in white; and, as Imran and Sapna clutched hands and watched from above, the ring of trees wrenched the building in all directions; it opened like a flower, and its centre fell out and crashed to the ground. There was sky above them and ground below, and all around them, in amphitheatrical cutaway, were the stacked worlds of the hospital, from whose truncated edges hung screaming people who eventually had to loose their grip and fall one by one through the open well of the building onto the pile of stone and steel below.
From his sentry post where he had made up for the shameful laxity of the police observers with his own unsleeping surveillance, Rajiv’s model son watched in horror as the asylum broke open like a wasp’s nest, as white-robed pupae began to rain from it and wriggle away who knew where, ready to infiltrate the city and lay new eggs of their own in its fissures and sewers. It was not thus that his father’s girl child and her accomplice creature would find their escape. He seized a rifle from one of the still sleeping policemen and began to climb one of the trees.
Imran and Sapna teetered on the edge of their gaping concrete tree house as shots began to strike the people around them. He dragged Sapna down, ‘Quick, we have to jump for it’, but already she was struck and was lying breathless over his knee, blood welling from above her hip onto the floor. Bullets still flew, stopping the shrieks of women in their throats, lodging in the plaster. A red stain fanned out from Sapna’s side across the ground, the racing trees slowed down, grew in weaker and weaker bursts that seemed to keep time with Sapna’s fading heartbeat, and finally stopped. The raging bedlam of exploding cellulose and masonry ceased, and there was quiet. The wind sighed through the branches, and the azan sounded far away. Sapna lay white and motionless.
With a roar, Imran flew at the gunman who was his brother. He scrambled across the still branches and hanging lintels, spread wide his enormous arms, ran with a fury that was too mad and too fast for fingers to find their grip or bullets to be loaded, and alighted on the branch where the killer leant before he could clamber off it. He struck the rifle from his grasp and, with trembling mouth still searching for a curse terrible enough, seized him by the throat, squeezed his skull with his outsized sinews, and snapped his neck with a single flourish of rage. He held him for a moment to let the poison of his anger seep in and dispatch him still further, clasped the brother he did not know he had, supported his body until the force had gone entirely, and let him drop to the ground below, limbs outstretched and head waggling uselessly.
With a sense that all the world had ended, Imran clambered back to where Sapna lay. He crossed the tangle of branches in despair, neared the circle of white people that knelt around her, that parted as he approached, knelt down among them himself–and saw something miraculous.
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Rana Dasgupta
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style to an energetically modern worldscape.Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories.Robert De Niro’s child, conceived in a Laundromat, masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people’s memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men’s hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of German cartographer.Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities – New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires – that grow in to a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.Dasgupta’s writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.