by Amitav Gosh
Then she caught a glimpse of the taxi driver, craning his neck over the back of the seat, grinning salaciously.
'And you keep your eyes on the road,' she snapped. 'This has nothing to do with you.'
Chapter 45
'GUESS YOU DON'T remember me, huh?' the Head said to Antar. 'Your old pal from the Thai restaurant?'
'Murugan!' Antar cried.
'You said it,' said Murugan. 'It's me.'
'Is that really you?' said Antar.
'Sure is,' said Murugan. 'I've waited a long time to get in touch with you. I figured nothing would be quite as quick as that ID card.'
'But people have been looking for you for years,' said Antar. 'Where have you been?'
'I've asked you this before,' said Murugan. 'And I'll ask again. Are you sure you want to know?'
'Yes,' said Antar.
'OK, Ant,' Murugan said with a laugh. 'It's your funeral. All you've got to do to find out is pick up that gadget over there.'
The disembodied chin wagged in the direction of Antar' s Simultaneous Visualization headgear.
'You mean it's in there?' Antar gasped. 'But it can't be: nobody has access… '
'Guess we got in while the going was good,' said Murugan. 'Anyway it's all in there, waiting for you to hit the button.'
Slowly and deliberately, Antar reached for the headgear, slipped it on and clicked the visor into place, in front of his eyes. He tapped a key and suddenly a man appeared, walking down a wide road, beside a grey cathedral. He was wearing khaki trousers and a green baseball cap. It was Murugan. He stopped to look over his shoulder: dark threatening clouds were approaching across a wide green expanse. A minibus shot by, sending a plume of water shooting up from a puddle. Murugan began to run.
Antar shot a quick glance at the 'Time of Conversion' prompt, at the bottom of the three-dimensional wraparound image. It said 5.25 p.m. Antar gasped: that could only mean that someone had started loading the Sim Vis system at about the time that Ava stumbled upon Murugan's ID card.
Now Murugan was standing in the lobby of a large auditorium and two women were running up the stairs. They came closer and suddenly Antar recognized Tara except that she was in a sari. She was talking to Maria who was wearing a sari too.
He felt a cool soft touch upon his shoulder and his hand flew up to take off the Sim Vis headgear. But now there was a restraining hand upon his wrist, and a voice in his ear, Tara 's voice, whispering: 'Keep watching; we're here; we're all with you.'
There were voices everywhere now, in his room, in his head, in his ears, it was as though a crowd of people were in the room with him. They were saying: 'We're with you; you're not alone; we'll help you across.'
He sat back and sighed like he hadn't sighed in years.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful to Raj Kumar Rajendran of the Department of Computer Sciences, Columbia University for his advice on certain details. I am especially indebted to Alka Mansukhani of the Department of Microbiology, New York University Medical Center: her ideas and support were essential to the writing of this book.
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh is one of India ’s best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, and The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986. The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France 's top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award & the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.
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