by Anthology
“Sorry, I don’t see anything.”
She says: “You could interpret the image as a crystal of unusual structure, or a city skyline with tall towers. Who knows? Considering that I’m studying biochemistry and my father really wants me to be an architect with his firm, it isn’t surprising that I see those things in it. Amusing, really.”
She laughs. He makes what he hopes is a polite noise.
“I don’t know. I think the charming and foolish Om Prakash is a bit of a fraud. And you were wrong about me, by the way. I wasn’t trying to . . . to kill myself that day.”
She’s sounding defensive now. He knows he was not mistaken about what he saw in her eyes. If it wasn’t then, it would have been some other time—and she knows this.
“Still, I came here on an impulse,” she says in a rush, “and I’ve been staring at this thing and thinking about my life. I’ve already made a few decisions about my future.”
A bus comes lurching to a stop. She looks at it, and then at him, hesitates. He knows she wants to talk, but he keeps scratching away in his notebook. At the last moment before the bus pulls away she swings her bag over her shoulder, waves at him and climbs aboard. The look he had first noticed in her eyes has gone, for the moment. Today she’s a different person.
He finishes writing in his notebook, and with a sense of inevitability that feels strangely right, he catches a bus that will take him across one of the bridges that span the Yamuna.
At the bridge he leans against the concrete wall looking into the dark water. This is one of his familiar haunts; how many people has he saved on this bridge? The pipal tree sapling is still growing in a crack in the cement—the municipality keeps uprooting it but it is buried too deep to die completely. Behind him there are cars and lights and the sound of horns, the jangle of bicycle bells. He sets his notebook down on top of the wall, wishing he had given it to someone, like that girl at the bus stop. He can’t make himself throw it away. A peculiar lassitude, a detachment, has taken hold of him and he can think and act only in slow motion.
He’s preparing to climb on to the wall of the bridge, his hands clammy and slipping on the concrete, when he hears somebody behind him say “wait!” He turns. It is like looking into a distorting mirror. The man is hollow-cheeked, with a few days’ stubble on his chin, and the untidy thatch of hair has thinned and is streaked with silver. He’s holding a bunch of cards in his hand. A welt mars one cheek, and the left sleeve is torn and stained with something rust-colored. The eyes are leopard’s eyes, burning with a dreadful urgency. “Aseem,” says the stranger who is not a stranger, panting as though he has been running, his voice breaking a little. “Don’t . . .” He is already starting to fade. Aseem reaches out a hand and meets nothing but air. A million questions rise in his head but before he can speak the image is gone.
Aseem’s first impulse is a defiant one. What if he were to jump into the river now—what would that do to the future, to causality? It would be his way of bowing out of the game that the city’s been playing with him, of saying: I’ve had enough of your tricks. But the impulse dies. He thinks, instead, about Om Prakash’s second-order causal loops, of sunset over the Red Fort, and the twisting alleyways of the old city, and death sleeping under the eyelids of the citizenry. He sits down slowly on the dusty sidewalk. He covers his face with his hands; his shoulders shake.
After a long while he stands up. The road before him can take him anywhere, to the faded colonnades and bright bustle of Connaught Place, to the hush of public parks, with their abandoned cricket balls and silent swings, to old government housing settlements where, amid sleeping bungalows, ancient trees hold court before somnolent congresses of cows. The dusty by-lanes and broad avenues and crumbling monuments of Delhi lie before him, the noisy, lurid marketplaces, the high-tech glass towers, the glitzy enclaves with their citadels of the rich, the boot-boys and beggars at street corners . . . He has just to take a step and the city will swallow him up, receive him the way a river receives the dead. He is a corpuscle in its veins, blessed or cursed to live and die within it, seeing his purpose now and then, but never fully.
Staring unseeingly into the bright clamor of the highway, he has a wild idea that, he realizes, has been bubbling under the surface of his consciousness for a while. He recalls a picture he saw once in a book when he was a boy: a satellite image of Asia at night. On the dark bulge of the globe there were knots of light; like luminous fungi, he had thought at the time, stretching tentacles into the dark. He wonders whether complexity and vastness are sufficient conditions for a slow awakening, a coming-to-consciousness. He thinks about Om Prakash, his foolish grin and waggling head, and his strange intimacy with the bees. Will Om Prakash tell him who Pandit Vidyanath really is, and what it means to “work for the city?” He thinks not. What he must do, he sees at last, is what he has been doing all along: looking out for his own kind, the poor and the desperate, and those who walk with death in their eyes. The city’s needs are alien, unfathomable. It is an entity in its own right, expanding every day, swallowing the surrounding countryside, crossing the Yamuna which was once its boundary, spawning satellite children, infant towns that it will ultimately devour. Now it is burrowing into the earth, and even later it will reach long fingers towards the stars.
What he needs most at this time is someone he can talk to about all this, someone who will take his crazy ideas seriously. There was the girl at the bus stop, the one he had rescued in Nai Sarak. Om Prakash will have her address. She wanted to talk; perhaps she will listen as well. He remembers the printout she had shown him and wonders if her future has something to do with the Delhi-to-come, the city that intrigues and terrifies him: the Delhi of udan-khatolas, the “ships that fly between worlds”, of starved and forgotten people in the catacombs underneath. He wishes he could have asked his future self more questions. He is afraid because it is likely (but not certain, it is never that simple) that some kind of violence awaits him, not just the violence of privation, but a struggle that looms indistinctly ahead, that will cut his cheek and injure his arm, and do untold things to his soul. But for now there is nothing he can do, caught as he is in his own time-stream. He picks up his notebook. It feels strangely heavy in his hands. Rubbing sticky tears out of his eyes, he staggers slowly into the night.
DOMINE
Rjurik Davidson
I’m off the monorail and through streets littered with cigarette packets and strips of last month’s posters, peeled from the yellow and grey chipped walls. The air smells of rubbish and urine. A breeze would only blow the odour away for a moment; I’m in the City.
Genie and I moved into the place temporarily, with the hope of shifting farther out a few months later, where there might be a park for Max to play in, neighbours to help out, a house with a separate dining room and kitchen. Genie remained after I moved out, so every now and then I’m back in the old neighbourhood, with light rain misting through the little inner-city streets, trying not to look past the pavement in front of me in case I see one of the real things that happen here.
A shuttle slashes the sky overhead, taking someone rich to meet other rich people somewhere else. They don’t bother with travelling by land—easier to skip over the city like a stone over water. The deep red of the shuttle’s burners gives the illusion of warmth.
“Hey Mister, hey!”
One of the boys; there are a million around here.
“Hey Mister, bliss, bliss?”
I shake my head and keep my eyes on the stained pavement. No need to encourage them.
“Hey Mister, you come back.”
I’m there, at the old five-storey yellow apartment building. Bars on every window, so people don’t get in and others don’t throw themselves out. It’s a fair balance.
The city is still all stairs and four, five, six-storey buildings. Everything new or important happens out in the Towers, little islands of commerce in the suburbs, where things are clean and fresh and everyone’s teeth are white and gleaming and the girls in a
ll the shops remind you of your hopes when you were young.
I’m into the stairwell and up. Three sets of stairs, four doors along the walkway. I knock.
I hear scrabbling from behind the door and wait for a while, noticing that my hands seem wrinkled. I am only thirty-eight but I’m getting old.
“Don’t you ever call?” I can see one side of Genie’s face through the partly opened door, her lank, colourless hair falling across her forehead. She has that look of exhaustion as usual, as if the world has worn her out and everything now is an effort.
“Hi Genie.”
“Look, it’s not a good time.”
“I brought something for Max.”
The door opens and I’m inside. The place is tiny: one bedroom, a one-room lounge and kitchen, a bathroom and toilet.
“He doesn’t even know who you are.” Genie starts picking up odd bits and pieces of junk from the lounge room floor: some socks, a fluffy toy bird, opened envelopes with their contents still inside. She always starts cleaning when I arrive. Max is playing by a water-filled bucket in the corner. The smell of something rotten floats from the bin in the kitchen.
“Hey, Maxy,” I say, and my one-year-old son looks up at me, his face round with splotchy, rosy cheeks, and his mouth open. A line of dribble runs from his mouth to his chest.
I walk over to him and squat next to him. “Hey Maxy.” Should I reach out to him? I’m not sure. It’s hard with children: they’re strange things. He looks at me and I’m scared he’ll start crying. At the moment he’s just frowning.
“So what did you bring him?”
I have no present so I change the subject. “Dany’s coming back you know.” I say. “Really soon. August thirtieth.”
“I know the date, Marek, but I don’t care. It’s too late for me to care,” Genie says. “You should concentrate on your own stuff. Think about Max for once.”
“But what am I going to do?” I reach forward and touch Max on the arm. But he senses my tension and tries to pull away, still frowning at me as if I’m an impostor.
A key rattles in the door and a big brawny man, his body too big for his legs, wanders in. He wears baggy khaki work-shorts and a blue singlet over a too-tanned body.
“I told you this was a bad time,” Genie says to me. “Oh well, this is Rick. Rick, this is Marek.”
“Oh, hi,” Rick says and walks over to Genie, gives her a kiss, walks over to Max, ruffles his thin blonde hair.
I’m out of the door and on the landing, but Genie follows me. “I love him,” she says, “and he treats me well. Better than you ever did.”
“Yeah,” I say, still walking, my teeth clenched like a vice.
“What did you come back for?” Her voice is suddenly shrill. “Did you come back to fuck me?”
Another shuttle burns overhead, and I wonder where it’s going. The Towers no doubt.
“Come back and visit Max, though,” she says suddenly, hopefully, “He needs his father. You of all people should know that.”
Later that evening I’m in the small unit I can afford, out in the vast expanse of houses and apartments that encircle the Towers. The suburbs are like a sea surrounding a chain of islands, running all the way to the City. It’s a nothing space, each section interchangeable with another. The view from a shuttle would be of one infinitely repeating series of buildings and roads. It’s how I like it. You can get lost here; you can feel hidden and safe. It allows me to write my music in peace, away from all the demands of the world: partners and children and work. Still, I don’t compose much. All my creativity gets drained by the soundscapes I’m forced to design for the Towers. All my originality is sucked away into those.
Tonight, for some reason, I’m agitated, disturbed even. It’s August twenty-eighth.
The phone buzzes. I press the button and my older sister Leila appears on the screen. Though she doesn’t really like me, we keep in touch. Even now her hair is sculpted, like a blonde helmet. Not a hair out of place.
“I can’t sleep,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to see Dany.”
“Right.”
“I don’t want anything to do with him.” Leila clenches her jaw (we both inherited that from mum) and crosses her arms emphatically.
“Do you think that Mum was happy in her last years?”
“Christ, Marek, you’ve always been introspective. That’s your problem.”
“I think she was. I think finally, after everything, she found some happiness.”
Leila brushes her hair back with her hand, but it bounces back to its perfect shape. “So if you talk to him, tell him I don’t want to see him.”
“Someone’s got to be there when he comes back.”
“Well it’s not going to be me. And Marek, what good is it going to do if you show up? Huh?”
“She wanted to hold on, didn’t she? Just another year, just one more year. But she couldn’t.”
Someone is crying behind Leila. Must be her kid, whose name I can’t, for the life of me, remember. Leila turns from the phone to look over her shoulder, then back. “Look Marek, I gotta go.”
“It’s been all over the news,” I say, but she’s gone.
August thirtieth arrives and I’m in McArthur Tower: the procession has finished, the speeches are over; there have been medals and descriptions and hologram footage and everything else. I saw him on stage with the others, in their uniforms, but I could barely make it out from up the back. Now I’m sitting at the exit to the conference centre and people in suits are milling about being official and I wonder if I should go in and look around for him, but no, I stay put. Secretly I don’t want to see him. I think of leaving, eyeing the lifts far away down the corridor, but something makes me stay. It must have been a hell of a thing, after all, out there in space. The government made a fuss of Dany and the rest of the crew, that’s for sure.
A soundscape full of triumphant brass and rolling drums plays in the background.
I notice the captain walk out, officials surrounding him, talking in hushed, respectful tones.
To my right, windows open out to the evening. The vast bulk of another Tower stands opposite, its own windows appearing tiny in the gigantic structure. I struggle to see if I can make out figures, but all I can see is flickering, and that’s probably just my eyes playing up.
I look away and suddenly Dany’s there, with another of the crew, and they’re coming past me. It hits me like a physical blow: he looks in his early twenties. His light hair is short and jagged, his eyes slightly too close together, spoiling his otherwise beautiful looks. It hits me again: he looks just like I once did.
“See you soon then, Dan,” the other one says.
He nods and grins like a little boy, runs his hands through his hair and then says, “Yep.”
He walks towards the lift as the other one turns back.
“Hey,” I say weakly, and then stronger, embarrassed by the strain in my voice, “Dany.”
He turns and looks at me and my breath is suddenly taken away. He cocks his head and frowns for a minute. Then says, “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” I say, and am struck by the banality of it, “Marek.”
He grins uncomfortably, cocks his head to the other side and raises his hands as if to say: well, imagine that.
I stand up from my chair, take a few steps and say again, “It’s me, Marek.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“She died.”
A look of confusion crosses his face and then passes. “Well, come on then,” he says.
I follow him. Neither of us speak as we make our way to the elevator and then wind through one of the prospects: a wide boulevard with ground cars and unicycles zipping along in a chaotic frenzy, the stall holders at the side of the road, with their designer tattoos, calling to us as we pass. Another elevator, spiralling through the Tower in odd directions, takes us up to the Hotel Sector in the fifteen hundreds where Dany has been given a room.
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He has an amazing sense of direction amid the massive structure of the Tower, with its thousands of winding corridors. He finds his penthouse calmly and easily. When he arrives he says to me, the first words in some time, “I’m going to get ready. I have to see some of this.”
He retreats to the bathroom while I sit and wait.
The view from the giant windows is magnificent. Two Towers, one at an oblique angle, and then the lights of the suburbs, flickering like a thousand shining insects. The clarity of it strikes me.
“We don’t wear makeup much anymore,” I say.
“Oh . . . What do you wear?”
“I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not really up with it. But there’s a fashion channel.”
Dany comes out, fully shaven. He looks even younger, though the dark makeup around the eyes makes him look like a thirty-year throwback. “Should I take it off?” He looks suddenly anxious.
“No, don’t worry. Some people still wear it.”
“I’ve got this card.” He says, “They gave me this card. It’ll get me clothes, all sorts of things.”
“Leila called me a couple of days ago.”
He walks across the room, presses a button and the fridge door slides up.
“Drink?” he asks, ignoring me.
“She’s doing well. All settled down: husband, kids, you know.”
Dany takes a big swig of something, throws back his head, and lets out a roar. Turns around, passes me a glass. “C’mon boy, this’ll put a glint back in your eye.” He grins his distinctive grin.
I sip the drink and try to stifle a cough. My throat is on fire, my eyes blurred. I hear a laugh off in the distance. “God,” I say.
Nightville, up in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is a complex of Middle-Eastern and African restaurants, hanging gardens filled with the scent of stone-fruit and dotted with indoor lakes, labyrinthine clubs climbing up through the Tower like ant-colonies so that after a few hours you don’t know what level you’re on. Nightville is a carefully planned planlessness, designed to give the sense of spontaneity, of a vast and sprawling confusion, imitating the red-light districts in the old cities. But nothing in the Towers is unplanned. So there’s always the element of irreality to it, a sense of the manufactured. Shambling through a club one might, lo and behold, stumble upon an Armenian restaurant run by the club’s owners, aimed at the very same patrons, in an expression of monopoly apparent only to those not doped up on rapture or blurred by alcohol. Nightville is one big franchise.
