by Ian McDonald
‘Tranh.’
Yt did not look up from yts intent conversation with yts friends, all huddled over the low table, deep in shared memory.
‘Tranh.’ This time, yt was heard. Tranh looked up. The first thing Tal read on yts face was blank incomprehension. I do not know who you are. Then, recognition, then remembrance, then surprise, shock, displeasure. Last: embarrassment.
‘Sorry,’ Tal said, stepping back from the alcove. All the faces were looking at yt. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake . . .’ Yt turned and fled, discreetly. A need to cry pumped through Tal’s skull. The shy man still stood in the greenery. Feeling enemy eyes still on yt, Tal took the banana from his soft fist, peeled it, bit deep. Then the pharm piled in and Tal felt the dimensions of the courtyard inflate to infinity around yt. Yt offered the strange fruit to the man.
‘No, thank you,’ he stammered but Tal had him by the arm and was marching him to a vacant sofa dock. Yt could still feel those eyes hot on the back of yts skull.
‘So,’ Tal said, sitting sideways on the low sofa and draping yts thin hands over yts folded knees. ‘You want to talk to me, so let’s talk.’ A glance back. They were still looking. Yt finished the banana and the fluttering lanterns opened up and yt fell into their gravity and yts next clearly focused thought was of the facade of a Kurdish restaurant. A waiter whisked yt past tables of startled customers to a small booth at the back partitioned by a fragrant carved cedar screen.
The blind woman’s bananas, like good guests, came promptly and departed early. Tal felt the carved geometric patterns on the wooden screens rush in from celestial distance to claustrophobia. The restaurant was hot and every customer voice, kitchen noise and street sound was intolerably sharp and close.
‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing you here, but I don’t like it back there,’ the man was saying. ‘It’s no place to talk, really talk. But it’s discreet here; the owner is in my debt.’ Mezze were brought, and a bottle of clear liquor with a jug of water. ‘Arak,’ the man said, pouring a measure. ‘I don’t drink myself, but I’m told it is a great instiller of courage.’ He added water. Tal marvelled as the clear liquid turned to luminous milk. Tal took a sip, recoiled at the alien aniseed, then had a slower, more considered measure.
‘Yt’s a chuutya,’ Tal declared. ‘Tranh. Yt’s a chuutya. Yt wouldn’t even look at me; just sat mooning all over yts friends. I wish I’d never come now.’
‘It’s so hard to find someone to listen to,’ the man said. ‘Someone who doesn’t have an agenda, who isn’t asking me for something or trying to sell me something. In my work everyone wants to hear what I have to say, what my ideas are, every word I say is treated like gold. Before I met you, I was at a durbar in the Cantonment. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say, everyone wanted something from me, except this one man. He was a strange man and he said a strange thing; he said that we are a deformed society. I listened to that man.’
Tal sipped yts arak.
‘Cho chweet, we nutes have always known that.’
‘So tell me the secrets you know. Tell me what you are. I’d like to hear how you came to be.’
‘Well,’ Tal said, conscious of every scar and implant under the man’s attentive gaze, ‘my name’s Tal, and I was born in Mumbai in 2019 and I work in Indiapendent on the metasoap design team for Town and Country.’
‘And in Mumbai,’ the man said, ‘in 2019 when you were born, what . . .’
Tal laid a finger to his lips.
‘Never,’ yt whispered. ‘Never ask, never tell. Before I Stepped Away, I was another incarnation. I am only alive now, do you understand? Before was another life, and I am dead and reborn.’
‘But how . . .’ the man asked. Again, Tal laid its soft, pale finger against the man’s lips. Yt could feel them trembling, the flutter of warm, sweet breath.
‘You said you wanted to listen,’ Tal said and gathered yts shawl around yt.
‘My father was a choreographer in Bollywood, one of the top. Did you ever see Rishta? The number where they’re dancing across the roofs of the cars in the traffic jam? That was him.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t much care for films,’ the man says.
‘It got too camp in the end. Too self-referential, too knowing. It always gets like that, things become super-exaggerated, then they die. He met my mother on the set of Lawyers in Love. She’s Italian, she was a hovercam trainee - at the time, Mumbai was the best, even the Americans were sending people out here to learn technique. They met, they married, six months later, me. And before you ask, no. An only. They were the toast of Chow-patty Beach, my parents. I got to all the parties; I was a real accessory. I was a gorgeous kid, baba. We were never out of the filmi mags and the gossip rags; Sunny and Costanza Vadher, with their beautiful child, shopping on Linking Road, on the set of Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage, at the Chelliah’s barbecue. They were the most incredibly selfish people I think I have ever met - but they were totally unselfconscious about it. That’s what Costanza accused me of when I Stepped Away; how incredibly selfish I was. Can you believe it? Where did she think I learned it?
‘They weren’t stupid. They might have been selfish, but they weren’t stupid, they must have known what was going to happen when they started to bring in the aeais. It was the actors first - one day Chati and Bollywood Masala and Namaste! are full of Vishal Das and Shruti Rai at an opening at Club 28, next Filmfare’s running centre page triple pullouts without a single cubic centimetre of living flesh. It really was that quick.’
The man murmurs polite amazement.
‘Sunny could have a hundred people dancing on a giant laptop, but now it was one touch and you’d have them dancing from here to the horizon, all in perfect synch. They could get a million people dancing on clouds, just with one click. It hit him hardest first. He got bad, he got ratty, he would take it out on people around him. He was mean when it turned against him. I think that’s maybe why I wanted to get into soapi; to show him there was something he could have done, if he’d tried, if he hadn’t been so strung up by his own image and status. Then again, maybe I just don’t care enough. But it hit Costanza soon after, too; you don’t need actors or dancers, you don’t need cameras either. It’s all in the box. They would fight: I must have been ten, eleven, I could hear them screaming so loud the neighbours would come banging on the door. Two of them in that apartment all day, both of them needing work, but jealous as hell in case the other actually got something. In the evenings they’d go to the same old parties and durbars to schmooze. Please, a job. Costanza coped better. She adjusted, she got a different job in the industry in script development. Sunny, he couldn’t. Walked right out. Fuck him. Fuck him. He was a waste anyway.’
Tal snatched up the arak, took a bitter draft.
‘It all ended. I’d say it was like a film, the credits roll, the lights came up and we were back in the real again, but it wasn’t. It didn’t have a third act. It didn’t have an against-all-the-odds-happy-ever-after. It just got worse and worse and then it just ended. It stopped, like the film snapped and I wasn’t living in a Manori Beach apartment and I wasn’t at the John Connon School and I wasn’t going round the parties with all the stars saying, oh look, isn’t it sweet and look how big it’s getting? I was in a two-room apartment in Thane with Costanza, going to the Bom Jesus Catholic School, and I hated it. I hated it. I wanted it all back again, all the magic and the dancing and the fun and the parties and this time I wanted it to go on after the credits rolled. I just wanted everyone look at me and say, wow. Just that. Wow.’
Tal sat back, inviting admiration but the man looked afraid, and something more Tal could not identify. He said, ‘You are an extraordinary creature. Do you ever feel that you’re living in two worlds, and that neither of them is real?’
‘Two worlds? Honey, there are thousands of worlds. And they’re as real as you want them to be. I should know; I’ve lived all my life between them. None of them are real, but when you get into them, they’re all
the same.’
The man nodded, not in agreement with anything Tal had said, but at some inner dialogue. He summoned the bill, left a pile of notes on the little silver tray.
‘It’s getting late, and I do have affairs to attend to in the morning.’
‘What sort of affairs?’
The man smiled to himself.
‘You are the second person to ask me that tonight. I work in information management. Thank you for coming with me here and the pleasure of your company; you really are an extraordinary human, Tal.’
‘You didn’t give me your name.’
‘No, I don’t believe I did.’
‘That’s so male,’ Tal said, sweeping along behind the man on to the street where he was already waving down a taxi.
‘You could call me Khan.’
Something has changed, Tal thought as yt slid in to the back seat of the Maruti. The man Khan had been nervous, shy, guilty at the Banana Club. Even in the restaurant he had not been at ease. Something in yts story had worked on his mind and mood.
‘I don’t go to White Fort after midnight,’ the driver said.
‘I will pay you treble,’ Khan said.
‘I’ll get as close as I can.’
Khan leaned his head against the greasy rest.
‘You know, it really is an excellent little restaurant. The owner came here about ten years ago in the last wave of the Kurdish diaspora. I . . . helped him. He set the place up, he’s doing well. I suppose he’s a man trapped between two worlds as well.’
Tal was only half listening, curling up in the arak glow. Yt leaned against Khan, for warmth, for solidity. Yt let yts inner arm roll into the space between them. The row of buds were puckered like bitch-nipples in the street glow. Tal saw the man start at the sight. Then a hand was stabbing down the front of yts lounging pants, a face loomed over yt, a mouth clamped over yts. A tongue pressed entrance to yts body. Tal gave a muffled scream, Khan recoiled in shock, which gave Tal space to push and shout. The phatphat bounced to a halt in the middle of the highway. Tal had the door open and was out, shawl flapping behind yt, before yt was full conscious of what yt was doing.
Tal ran.
Tal stops running. Yt stands, hands on thighs, panting. Khan is still there, peering through the headlight blur, calling out futilely into the traffic roar. Tal stifles a sob. Yt can still smell the aftershave on yts skin, taste tongue in yts mouth. Shaking, yt waits a safe few minutes before flagging in a cruising phatphat. DJ Aeai plays MIX FOR A NIGHT TURNED SCARY.
VISHRAM
New day, new array. Everyone from cleaners to Centre Director has turned out under the canopy of the Ranjit Ray Research Centre They look nervous. Not nearly as nervous as your unexpected and unprepared CEO, Vishram Ray thinks as the car crunches sensuously up the raked gravel drive. Vishram checks cuffs, tugs collar.
‘You should have worn a tie,’ says Marianna Fusco. She is cool, immaculate, creases all geometrical.
‘I’ve done my tie-wearing for this lifetime,’ Vishram says, lick-slicking down hair in the vanity mirror in the chauffeur’s headrest. ‘Anyway, as any historian of costume will tell you, the sole purpose of the tie is to point to your dick. That’s not very Hindu business, that.’
‘Vishram, everything points to your dick.’
Vishram thinks he hears the driver snigger as he opens the door.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you,’ Marianna Fusco whispers in Vishram’s ear as he walks purposefully up the steps. His ’hoek comes to life in his head. A moment’s visual blur as the aeai deletes the junk and filters the ads, then he is striding forwards to meet the Director, hand held out in greeting. GANDHINAGAR SURJEET say the blue words hovering in front of him. D.O.B 21/02/2009. WIFE SANJUAY, CHILDREN: RUPESH (7); NAGESH (9). JOINED RAY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT 2043 FROM UNIVERSITY OF BANGALORE RENEWABLE RESOURCES RESEARCH DEPARTMENT. FIRST DOCTORATE . . . Vishram blinks off the supplementary information.
‘Mr Ray, you are very welcome to our division.’
‘It’s a pleasure to be here, Dr Surjeet.’
It’s all playing a role, really.
‘You do find us in something of a state of unreadiness,’ he says.
‘Not half as unready as me.’ The joke seems to go down well. But then they would laugh, wouldn’t they? Dr Surjeet moves to his department heads.
INDERPAL GAUR, says the relentless palmer. 15/08/2011, CHANDIGARH. RESEARCH SUBDIVISION: BIOMASS. MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE. EMPLOYMENT HISTORY AT RAY POWER: JOINED R&D 2034 FROM UNIVERSITY OF THE PANJAB, CHANDIGARH CAMPUS.
LET HIM DO THE INTRODUCTIONS, Marianna warns in lilac over Director Surjeet’s head. Dr Gaur is a toothy, plump woman in traditional dress, through there is nothing old-fashioned about the anodised aluminium ’hoek curled against the side of her pigtail. He wonders: what is her ’hoek graffiting about him? VISHRAM RAY: WASTER SON. FAILED LAWYER. ASPIRANT STAND-UP. THINKS HE’S PRETTY DAMN FUNNY.
‘It’s a great honour,’ she says, namasteing.
‘All mine, I assure you,’ Vishram says.
And on, down the row of department heads and senior researchers and team leaders and those who have had important papers published.
‘I am Khaleda Husainy,’ says a small, intense woman in a western style suit and a headscarf chador. ‘It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Ray.’ Her discipline is micro-generation. Parasitic power.
‘What, people generate power just walking up and down?’
‘Pumps in the pavement, yes!’ she enthuses. ‘There is immense energy being wasted out there, waiting for us to capture it. Everything you do and say is a source of power.’
‘You should hook it up to our legal department.’
It gets a laugh.
‘And what do you do to help make Ray Power A-Number One?’ Vishram says, to a young, almost-good-looking woman whose lapel badge identifies her as Sonia Yadav. ‘Nothing,’ she says with a smile.
‘Ah,’ Vishram says, moving on. Hands to shake. Faces to remember. She calls after him.
‘When I said nothing, I meant, energy from nothing. Endless free power.’
‘You’ve got my attention now.’
‘I’m taking you to the zero-point lab,’ Sonia Yadav explains as she leads Vishram and entourage to her research unit. She looks at him closely.
‘Your eyeballs are moving. Is someone messaging you?’
Vishram shuts off Marianna Fusco’s silent commentary with a twist of a finger.
His father’s engineers have designed a building more furniture than architecture. All is wood and fabric, curved into bows and arches, translucent and airy. The place smells of sap and resin and sandalwood. The floors are strip maple inlaid with marquetry panels of scenes from the Ramayana. Sonia Yadav looks pointedly at Marianna’s heels. She slips them off and closes them in her bag. It feels right to Vishram to be barefoot here. It’s a holy place.
At first sight the zero-point lab disappoints Vishram. There are no humming machines or looping power conduits, just desks and glass partitions, paper piled unsteadily on the floor, whiteboards on the walls. The white boards are full of scrawls. They continue onto the walls. Every square centimetre of surface is crammed with symbols and letters wedged at crazy angles to each other, lassoed in loops of black felt marker, harpooned by long lines and arrows in black and blue to some theorem on the other side of the board. The brawling equations spread over desks, benches, any flat surface that will take felt marker. The mathematics is as unintelligible to Vishram as Sanskrit, but the cocoon of thought and theory and vision comforts him, like being inside a prayer.
‘It may not look much but the research team at EnGen would pay a lot of money to get in here,’ Sonia Yadav says. ‘We do most of the hot stuff over on the University collider, or at the LHC in Europe, but this is where the real work gets done. The headwork.’
‘Hot stuff?’
‘We’re following two approaches, hot and cold, we call them. I won’t bore you with the theory but it’s to do with
energy levels and quantum foam. Two ways of looking at nothing.’
‘And you’re hot?’ Vishram asks, studying the hieratic glyphs on the wall.
‘Absolutely,’ Sonia Yadav says.
‘And can you do what you say; generate power from nothing?’
She stands firm with a light of belief in her eyes.
‘Yes, I can.’
‘Mr Ray, we really should be moving on,’ Director Surjeet urges.
As his party leaves, Vishram picks up a felt marker and quickly writes on the desktop: DNNR, 2NITE?
Sonia Yadav reads the invite upside down.
‘Strictly professional,’ Vishram whispers. ‘Tell me what’s hot and what’s not.’
OK she writes in red.