by Hari Kunzru
When, like Guy, you put yourself ahead of the curve, you live in the future. Literally. How else are you to understand it? It is as if you have become subject to a freak physical effect, a blurring which stretches you out beyond the trivial temporality of the unpersonalized masses of the earth. Unlike the package tourists, the high-street shoppers and all the other yearners and strivers, your existence is extreme. The thrills are tremendous, but they come at a price. When Guy slept, he dreamed of tall buildings. He knew that the tiniest lapse of concentration, the smallest failure of response, could send him tumbling down towards the place of discount clothing outlets, woodchip wallpaper and economy chicken pieces. Sometimes at night his twitching took on a regular myoclonic rhythm, a constant cycle of fall and recovery. Boom and bust.
Over the years Arjun had given a lot of thought to Silicon Valley. As a prime daydream-location, it had gradually been elaborated into a lost world, a hidden ravine lined with fibre optics and RadioShacks, where surfer girls accompanied you to films viewable on day of international release and the number of available flavours N was always n+1, where n was the total when you last looked at the menu. The Valley: so exciting that, like Lara Croft, you had to rappel down a cliff-face to get in. One up. Player Mehta, proceed.
The first obstacle was the visa application process. He spent days gathering supporting documentation, days sitting for portrait photos and filling in forms, then more days at the American Embassy, submitting the whole bundle in a formal-looking brown envelope. At the embassy he stood in line, part of a jostling crowd of applicants kept in order by a pair of uniformed guards. In every eye there was the same determined blankness, a thousand-yard stare directed at HIB migrant status, at a dollar-denominated future.
Next he had to face the wrath of Khan. Since graduation, Arjun had been employed on a part-time basis by Indus Fancy Products Pvt, a firm owned by the brother of one of his college professors. To Mr Khan, the discovery that his employee preferred America to the export of a wide range of marble and onyx handicrafts was a frank betrayal. ‘There is the matter,’ he growled, wagging a bony finger in Arjun’s face, ‘of loyalty. And the matter of patriotism. Who has trained you to do this work? India! Who has provided the schools? What do you think it means for you to take yourself abroad, instead of using your talents for the good of the nation?’
Arjun replied (silently) that if India had wanted him for something it would probably have asked. Aloud he mumbled that he wanted to earn more money. Mr Khan’s pockmarked face turned an unnerving purple, and he embarked on a speech which commenced as a taxonomy of those who rejected the nurturing breast of Mother India (the ingrate, the coward, etc.), then broadened to touch on Pandit Nehru, hydroelectric power, the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the insemination by one another of apes, pigs and dogs. When he began to shout, Arjun beat a retreat, watched by a startled group of clerks.
His mother was behaving erratically. She was (according to Priti) attempting to stave off anxiety by shopping. Whatever the cause, she insisted Arjun trail round after her as she bought the sweaters, scarves, hats and ayurvedic medications that would be necessary if her boy’s delicate constitution were to withstand the American climate. Occasionally, in the face of some violently patterned piece of knitwear, he would try to introduce the possibility that his baggage allowance would be very small, or suggest that California might not be as cold as she thought. She dismissed such notions out of hand.
In the evenings Mrs Mehta’s twin preoccupations were sewing on name tags and the problem of Priti. As she sat with her work-box, she fretted that paid employment would expose her daughter to undesirable influences and dent her marriage prospects. Mr Mehta was inclined to agree, until he realized how much Priti would be earning. Abruptly he started to incorporate the notion of a call centre into his image of himself as a modern man. ‘My dear,’ he told his wife, ‘it is all a question of the presently booming service sector. What training could be more appropriate for a girl?’ In this way the matter was settled. Quietly, without fanfare, Priti started to make the daily commute to DilliTel.
As the day of his departure approached, Arjun spent an increasing amount of time in the bathroom, the only room in the house with a lockable door. Its white-tiled dampness had a soothing and womb-like quality One day he was in there, sitting on the toilet reading a paper on genetic algorithms, when there was a commotion in the living room. He emerged to find that his brand-new passport had been returned, with its American-eagle visa stamp on the clean first page. ‘Sweet as!’ said Priti, in her new servicing-Australians accent. Then, a little wistfully, ‘Nice one, Bro.’
Despite repeated phone calls, Databodies was unable to tell him where he would be working, or where exactly they had arranged for him to stay during his first weeks in America. One morning they simply sent a peon to his home with a plane ticket: one-way to San Francisco, travelling via Singapore. A note explained that he would be met at SFO by a company representative.
‘Sfo?’ murmured Mrs Mehta suspiciously. ‘This sounds more Russian than American.’
On his last evening Arjun went to the underground bazaar near his home, to make some final travel preparations. Even late at night the bazaar was a bustling place, where tape decks blared movie songs and hard white light washed out the colours from stalls selling polythene-wrapped shirts, cooking utensils, office supplies and electronics. On the lower level, next door to a wedding emporium, was Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack, a room with peeling walls and half a dozen PCs crammed on to a pair of trestle tables. Its only decoration was a poster of Amjad Khan, leering down threateningly against a background of leaping flames. The manager, Aamir, a skinny Muslim boy a couple of years older than Arjun, was proud of the gangster style of his establishment, which he fostered by leaning intimidatingly against the wall outside, smoking bidis and wearing dark glasses. There was usually a free terminal.
That night Gabbar Singh’s was completely empty. Seeing Arjun, Aamir put down his new ‘torso tiger’ chest exerciser and gave his usual greeting, cocking his fingers into fake pistols and firing a volley of imaginary shots. Then, formalities over, he slapped his friend on the back and slipped smoothly into a sales pitch for his latest CD-ROM production.
‘So what are you calling it this time?’ Arjun asked, sitting down on one of Aamir’s wobbly chairs and opening up a terminal window on the screen in front of him.
‘Too Too Sexy 2.’
‘So it’s a sequel to Too Too Sexy?’
‘Achcha! Hot as hell, I’m telling you. The theme is blondes.’
‘The theme is always blondes, Aamir.’
‘Thank God for full creative control. So, bhai, you will take a copy?’
‘Talk to me later, OK? I have things to do.’
Aamir looked disgruntled. ‘Whatever you say, boss. Just remember, eight hundred plus lovely ladies on single disk is once-only-in-lifetime opportunity. Don’t turn up your nose.’
Arjun nodded and started to type commands at the prompt. He used to wonder how Gabbar Singh’s stayed in business, until Aamir revealed his sidelines. The disks, compilations of downloaded pornographic JPEGs, were only one of several revenue streams. He also pirated software, retailed second-hand hardware, and hired himself out as an occasional web designer, computer tutor, wedding videographer and (so his business card claimed) ‘superstar movie hero/villain’. Rebuffed for now, he dragged a chair into the store doorway and sat reading the film gossip in Cinéblitz, singing along tunelessly to the Hindu religious songs pumping out of the wedding store.
Meanwhile, using a password he should not have known and a user name assigned to someone else, Arjun logged on to the network of NOIT, an institution which mistakenly believed it rescinded all access to students when they graduated. The discovery that Arjun had an active account would surprise the network administrator, Dr Sethi, who was under the impression he was very careful about such things. Tell the doctor that an ex-student possessed full root privileges, the power to alter or del
ete data and the ability (among other things) to monitor every other user’s activity, and he would have dismissed you as a fantasist.
Yet Arjun could do all this and more. He had enjoyed unimpeded access to Dr Sethi’s beloved system since his very first term at NOIT.
No one had ever noticed Arjun’s unauthorized presence, since he had always taken care to conceal it, especially when making his own alterations to the configuration of the network. If so inclined, he could have wreaked havoc at any time, but havoc had never been on his agenda. Why destroy something so interesting when you could be creative instead? That night, as usual, he bypassed the directories containing the college accounts, the Principal’s private correspondence, the staff payroll information, next term’s examination papers and Dr Sethi’s private archive of bodybuilding pictures. Instead he accessed an innocuous-looking subdirectory, one that the doctor had probably never noticed or, if he had, no doubt believed was full of old log files or other uninteresting artefacts of his system software. Arjun chose a small executable from this subdirectory and ran it. The little program generated a second log-in screen at which he typed a second password, thus gaining entry to his own private area of the network, a zone which over the years he had gradually partitioned off and screened from other eyes.
A secret garden. A laboratory.
He allowed himself a quick peek at one of his projects, then got down to the tedious business of backing up, selecting files and copying them to his local drive, a process which, over Gabbar Singh’s patchy connection, took the best part of an hour. While the blue bar inched across the screen he wandered upstairs and drank a sweet milky coffee at a dhaba facing the main road. It was raining. The traffic, as usual, was relentless, the low rumble of public carriers blending with the clatter of taxis and the angry buzz of auto rickshaws into a full-spectrum roar that never diminished, even this late at night. Small boys ran after the buses, selling corn and peanuts. Soaked cyclists pedalled past with plastic sheeting over their heads. For a while he joined the crowd participating in the aftermath of a traffic accident. A two-wheeler lay on its side, and various people were arguing with the driver of the white minivan which had knocked it over. The shaken scooter driver sat on the kerb a little way off, pressing a handkerchief to his head and staring blankly at an opportunistic stallholder who was trying to sell him a helmet.
Arjun headed back underground to Gabbar Singh’s, where he used Aamir’s cherished rewriter to burn a couple of CDs. All his best toys were now etched on to the little silvered disks, ready to travel in solid state to America. Next he cleaned up: he deleted his data from Aamir’s machine and before exiting the NOIT system ran a script that erased all traces of his session from the school’s logs. Behind the walls of his secret garden, which existed not so much apart from as in between the legitimate areas of the college network, his various experiments were still running their course, stealing spare processor cycles from idle machines, storing themselves in tiny splinters on dozens of different hard disks. Together these fragments formed an interstitial world, a discreet virtuality that could efficiently mask its existence from the students and teachers doing their online business round about it. It was a world which could look after itself for a while, until its creator had time to check on it properly. Until he was successfully installed in California.
Arjun packed the disks into his old purple backpack. He was about to walk out of the door when he remembered something.
‘By the way, Aamir, I won’t see you for a time.’
‘Bhai?’
‘I’m going to America.’
‘No, you don’t say! For holiday?’
‘No, for work. I’m going to be an engineer in Silicon Valley.’ Aamir shook his head in disbelief. ‘So you’re going to do it?’
‘I am.’
‘Just like you said.’ Aamir looked impressed, but, as he thought through the matter, his face clouded. ‘I am happy,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘Yes, I am happy. But what I am saying is that really you should go to Hollywood. That’s where the action is.’
‘Not any more, Aamir.’
‘Arré, not in Hollywood? Pagal! What will you rather run your fingers over, computer keyboard or Cameron Diaz? Bhai, you are hundred per cent sure you don’t need some hot pictures? Loneliness is a terrible burden.’
‘No, Aamir. They have real girls there, remember.’
‘Achcha…’
Leaving Aamir shaking his head at all the out-of-reach blonde-ness in the world, Arjun hurried out of the bazaar into the rain.
The next day Mrs Mehta woke early, and after a light breakfast spent her morning squeezing name-tagged woollens into a pair of new vinyl suitcases, already bursting with packages of sweets, nuts, homoeopathic remedies and soft fruit. Arjun stayed in bed for as long as possible, then fiddled around desultorily with batteries and toothbrushes. Finally, unable to bear his mother’s frenetic preparations, he locked himself in the bathroom. Only when it got too dark to see without switching on the light did he come out again.
The last supper was an ordeal. Various relatives were present, all in a state of high excitement, but Arjun was so nervous he could barely bring himself to eat. This upset his mother, who took it out on Priti, telling her off for toying with her food and for saying it would taste better on-the-barbie, an Australian style of tandoori cooking. Only Mr Mehta was straightforwardly happy, marshalling helpings of rice and dal into his mouth with the air of a man for whom mealtimes had recently revealed themselves in a very positive light: as a celebration of family life, an expression of the joy of producing and managing successful and in-their-turn-productive children, not worthless after all, who would soon be providing for one during a prosperous old age.
Finally it was time to leave for the airport. Uncle Bharat took photos and Cousin Ramesh panned a video camera across the scene as Mrs Mehta performed aarti to bless the traveller, placing a lamp on a brass tray and circling it high and low in front of Arjun as if he were a statue of God. Saying a prayer for his safety and swift return, she fed him sugar and placed a red tilak mark on his forehead with her thumb. Then, sniffling a little, she slipped a garland of marigolds round his neck. Arjun dipped down impatiently to touch her feet, then those of his father.
‘Can we go now, Ma?’ he pleaded.
‘Beta, the plane will not fly off without you.’
‘Ma, actually it will.’
‘Don’t be so silly.’
Though his flight was not scheduled to depart until three in the morning, a total of eleven people were staying up to see him off. After a delay which he experienced as several millennia in duration, a convoy was finally assembled, engines running, outside the gates of the enclave. Mr Mehta settled himself in the driver’s seat of the family Ambassador. The suspension groaned with the weight of people and luggage, the chowkidar saluted, and he swung the car imperiously into the road, forcing a cycle rickshaw to swerve and a bus-driver to stamp hard on his vehicle’s worn brakes. Two other cars followed behind.
The convoy sailed through the unlit Noida streets and Arjun rested his cheek against the cool glass of the window. On the other side the night was damp and broken, an underworld strafed by truck headlights and mottled by the orange glow of bustee cooking fires. The traffic was heavy, and it took an hour to reach the airport. With their billboards promising denim and sports shoes, the clothing outlets on the approach road beckoned like a premonition of the American future. The Mehta party shouldered its way through the crush of touts and drivers outside the terminal, and all eleven relatives joined a long queue. At the check-in desks airline employees handed out customs forms as red-uniformed porters manhandled luggage on to the conveyor belt and wildly overladen Indian families pushed trolleys against the ankles of disoriented foreigners, all dressed in the same characteristic mélange of factory-made handicrafts, religious paraphernalia and hiking gear.
Little by little the line inched forward. As they neared the front, Mrs Mehta started to sob in earnest,
comforted by her next-door neighbour and digitally recorded by Ramesh for posterity. Arjun handed over his documents, explaining that despite appearances he was travelling alone. He felt proud that in the eyes of his family he was finally doing something worth while. In a film the scene would be accompanied by music, and he would lead a crowd of long-haul passengers in a dance routine.
His father put his hands on his shoulders. ‘Son, we know you are going to be a great success. Don’t disappoint us.’
‘I’ll do my best, Babaji.’
Priti tugged at his sleeve. ‘Come back a millionaire, Bro!’ Relatives clustered round to add their good wishes. Mrs Mehta’s wailing rose in pitch. ‘God bless you, Beta!’ she cried. ‘God bless you!’ Consumed with impatience, Arjun hardly took in what they were saying. Quickly, he took his boarding pass and hurried towards passport control. As soon as he was out of sight, he headed for the toilet, where he stuffed the garland into his bag and washed the paste from his forehead.
The engines roared like a distant sports crowd as the damp polymer smell of microwaved food slowly permeated the fug of the cabin. It was Arjun’s first time on a plane, and from the moment he sensed his body being lifted clear of the ground, he had been in the throes of a near-religious rapture. First there were the city lights, spread out like wedding decorations below the line of the wing. Then came the more intimate satisfactions of a refreshing towelette and a wrapper containing a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste and a black nylon sleeping mask. As soon as the seatbelt signs were switched off, he made a pilgrimage to the toilet, where he discovered the existence of paper seat-covers and spent a considerable period of time examining the sanitary-towel disposal unit and the automated vacuum flush. Eventually there was a knock on the door and a mellifluous stewardess voice asked if he was all right. He confirmed that he was fine, thank you, and carried on with his researches. When he finally emerged, he was surprised to find a cluster of jaded-looking people gathered in the corridor.
