Tokyo Cancelled

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‘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.