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‘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.
