Transmission

by Hari Kunzru

  And now he was on foot. He counted his paces in hundreds, tried to concentrate on the discrete, the knowable, instead of spiralling out into the dark. Off among the trees there was water. He left the road and picked his way towards it: a pond, half evaporated, muddy and brackish, clogged with blue plastic and rusting iron siding. He took off his shirt, dipped it in the dirty water and used it to clean his face and hands. Then he bunched it up and threw it out into the middle, where it spread out its arms as if imploring him not to abandon it in such a place.

  Three thousand two hundred.

  Three thousand three hundred

  Three thousand four hundred…

  There was an exit. Near the off-ramp was a gas station, located in the middle of a little retail strip between a fast-food franchise and a place selling wooden patio furniture. As casually as he could he walked across the parking lot into the store, where he bought a bag of chips, a bottle of Sprite and some Band-Aids, and asked the clerk for the key to the bathroom. No gas? He shook his head. She looked uneasily at him, then out of the window for his car. Finally she gave him the key, sliding the enormous wooden fob over the counter very slowly, as if he might steal it or use it to assault her.

  He changed clothes, brushed his teeth and cleaned himself up properly, removing streaks of mud from his face and pulling a comb through his hair, careful to avoid the big gash on his crown. There was nothing he could do about the bruise on his cheek, or the cuts above his left eye. Feeling dizzy he sat down on the toilet, leaning his head against the dirty plaster wall. He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew the clerk was banging on the door. Hurriedly he zipped up his bag and made his escape. As he walked purposefully out on to the highway, he was all too aware of the scowling woman watching him through the window, clutching the key in her hand.

  Then he was in the passenger seat of a battered pick-up. He was not sure how he came to be there. The driver was a stone-faced man dressed in work clothes, overalls and a checked shirt. They passed between tall trees, the sunlight falling in irregular bright strips across their faces. By the roadside giant billboards advertised a reservation casino. Blackjack. Roulette. Fortune Pai Gow Poker. Keno. 21. Then the trees gave way to strip malls and rows of single-storey houses. The man said nothing, and Arjun could think of nothing to say back to him that was not muddled by the pain in his head. Where are. Who are. Why is. Though the road surface was smooth, the vibration was enough to make him feel nauseous. He closed his eyes.

  ‘There you go,’ said the driver. They were in a town, parked on a main street of plate-glass storefronts and parading traffic.

  ‘Is this Canada?’ asked Arjun. The man looked at him strangely, then reached across him to open the passenger door.

  ‘Bus-station s right there,’ he said. ‘You take care now. You don’t look so hot.’

  The man in the pick-up pulled away into the traffic and left him swaying there beside his bag in this town whose name he did not know. He crossed the road to the Greyhound Station, where there was a bus about to depart, and he stood in line with the other passengers until he reached the door and the driver asked where his ticket was. He stood in line again at the booking office, his head throbbing. At the counter there was more confusion. The woman rolled her eyes and clattered her long fingernails on the rim of her keyboard, and he pleaded with her just to give him a ticket for the bus, but she kept saying which bus which bus, and he said the one outside, and finally she sold it to him, making a face at her monitor as if to confide in it that this was the craziest yet in all the day’s long line of crazies.

  He took a seat at the back near the rest room. Felt the roar deep in his body as the driver started the engine, then drifted away to an air-conditioned place which became gradually colder, until it seemed to him that he was pierced by slivers of ice, slender arrows which became a forest and eluded every solution except the physical one of shivering them off, which he did, a cascade of ice-needles falling around him like a shedding Christmas tree.

  He opened his eyes into stark country, bare prehistoric hills whose yellow backs were cracked open in places by dark ravines. Giant pylons walked away to the horizon, the only human sign in the bleakness. Sitting beside him was an elderly man in a white shirt buttoned up to the neck. He was reading a religious tract, scrutinizing the pamphlet with great care through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘Where are we?’ Arjun asked.

  ‘Almost there,’ said the man.

  Then the ice-forest of his dream was replaced by a real one, trees pressing in towards the road like a green mob coming down from the hills. Above them stood a mountain with a smear of snow on its peak, and the road ran on towards it, and the engine roared, and the old man said, ‘Even in these last days it is not too late to dedicate your life to the Lord.’

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Arjun.

  ‘The time of apostasy, young man. The Tribulation is on its way. You may be nothing but a hell-bound sinner, but if you dedicate your life to Jesus Christ and get born again, even now it is not too late.’

  ‘This must be Canada,’ said Arjun, and the old man became an abstraction of an old man, a landscape graph of energies and potentials which could be flattened into silence. Then it was evening and there were lights and behind him someone had a transistor playing country music and the old man had turned into a fat black woman in pink stretch pants who spoke to him in a language he did not understand. The streetlights slowed down and finally came to a halt. As the hydraulic brakes gave a last gasp and the bus settled, she stared at him with an evil stare, then pushed past him into the aisle.

  ‘You asshole,’ she muttered. ‘What is your problem?’

  He saw that his bag was open and started to panic about money, about all the cash he had withdrawn from his checking account since you have to have cash because they can trace you with a card. But it was still there and the driver told him to get off the bus now and he walked down the steps to find himself in Bend, Oregon. He had gone the wrong way.

  In London, Leela had taken away the power. She corrupted data at the New Cross and Littlebrook substations, seducing the control software, whispering you are overloaded, trip the circuit-breakers, shut down the lines. Across the city trains slowed to a halt, traffic lights dimmed, and household appliances failed to respond to their angry owners. As night fell, the street lighting did not come on. Opportunities were seized. Bricks went through windows. Padlocks were forced and back fences climbed. From the highest penthouse of the In Vitro building, the West End looked like a chessboard, alternating squares of light and dark. The estate agent and her client looked out from the balcony and were afraid.

  They checked their messages. When they turned to go, they found the lifts were dead. Reluctantly they began the twenty-flight walk downstairs, feeling their way by holding on to the banisters. After four flights the estate agent took off her shoes. After seven the client called out to her, asking was she still there, could they stop for a while to rest. Somewhere below their feet, firemen in reflective clothing led dehydrated commuters through a darkened underground tunnel, towards the orange glow of platform emergency lighting.

  Eddies ran through the national grid, echoes of Leela’s voice. In parts of East Anglia, Wales and western Scotland, there were momentary breaks in transmission. For a second, no more, the Clansman’s Lodge went dark. Then the power came back. Digital timers started to flash. A burglar alarm began to ring in the office. Gaby glanced at the bedside lamp and lay back on the bed, watching Rajiv Rana’s naked back. While she was talking to Guy, someone had called Rajiv too, and now he was speaking rapid Hindi into his mobile, one hand fiercely scrunching up a pair of her knickers.

  He stood up and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. She could hear him raising his voice, arguing with the person at the other end. She slid a hand between her legs and turned on to her stomach, trying to decide what she felt. There were red fingermarks on her arms where he had held her down. She smel
led of spermicide and aftershave.

  It had been inevitable, she supposed. That morning the crew had appeared tired and agitated, muttering about the bland food, the rain. There had been a lot of activity in the corridors during the night, and at breakfast people were saying that one of the dancers was on a train home to Birmingham, upset at something that had happened. Rob D. had an unexplained black eye, the waiting staff were rattling the plates and on her way back up to her room she noticed a handyman taking a bedroom door off its hinges. Someone had kicked a hole through one of its lower panels.

  Leela was still claiming illness, and the doctor had again been summoned to pronounce that he could find nothing physically wrong. At the morning production meeting Iqbal announced that Mrs Zahir was flying out from Mumbai but had been held up by an air-traffic control shutdown. When the mother arrived, he said darkly, she would soon settle the girl’s problems. Rocky Prasad and the unit were told to make the best of the break in the weather and drive out to shoot scenery.

  Prasad, in the first display of directorial personality Gaby had witnessed from him, shouted that he had had enough. ‘Are you going to let her do this to me? One call to your friends in Karachi, one call and you could make it stop!’ Iqbal slammed his fist down on the table. There was an ugly silence. He turned to Gaby and gestured for her to leave the room.

  She wondered how she was supposed to work. More journalists than ever were camped at the gate. The local police had arrested several ‘rowdy Asian youths’, and one or two of the tabloids had picked up the story of Leela’s illness, running reclusive-star stories on the inside pages as part of their coverage of the global cyber-terror alert.

  Threat level was up. Markets were down. Rajiv Rana rang her room to ask if she would like to have lunch with him on Skye.

  She agreed, on condition he first came with her to meet the press. When the Testarossa roared down the drive, there was a minor commotion, and she realized uncomfortably that, at least for the Indian media, she had just committed the cardinal public-relations sin of making herself part of the story. Rajiv charmed people and signed autographs. She dodged cameras and struggled to maintain the pretence that there were no production problems. Again and again journalists tried to make a link between the virus and the girl. Could Gaby categorically confirm that it wasn’t a publicity stunt gone wrong? Were they really expected to believe that Ms Zahir and her backers were in no way connected with the dissemination of her image around the globe?

  She promised more later and told Rajiv that lunch was off. With things as they were, she would need to spend the afternoon on the phone. Would he drive her back up to the Lodge? Sure, he said. She got into the Ferrari’s passenger seat. He grinned, gunned the engine, screeched through the crowd and turned on to the main road.

  She told him to turn the car around. He reached across her into the glove compartment and put on his shades. She shouted at him, called him irresponsible. He switched on Simply Red and sang along. She insulted his music taste in English, Italian and Parisian verlan, and then, having run out of options, sulked. Above them the wind rolled balls of cumulus cloud across the sky, rotating light and shadow over the water around the Skye Bridge. The wind whipped at her hair and soon she was smiling through her irritation, enjoying the sights: black-faced sheep grazing on the island’s rough moorland, shaggy incurious cattle penned at the side of double-glazed stone cottages.

  They cut away from the main road and walked across a field strewn with plastic bottles and pieces of fishing net to look at the view from a line of sea cliffs. He took hold of her hand and shot her a smouldering look. ‘You’re not at work now,’ she told him. He laughed and said he was just practising. Then he drove her across the island to a restaurant in an old croft where all the tables were full of people with English accents and apart from the sky and the hills outside the window she could have been in London. He talked constantly, and, though he was preening and self-obsessed, it was refreshing to be with him. He made her feel far away from herself, from the mud dragging at her heels.

  He drove her back in time for dinner at the hotel, and the crew pretended not to watch as India’s former number-one action hero followed the foreign woman up to her room.

  Sex funnelled up between them with sudden violence. He ground his face against hers, his stubble raking her lips and cheeks as they struggled towards the bed. She sank her nails into his neck, and he tugged her skirt up around her waist, digging between her legs with a hand. Every action was forceful, angry. As he threw her down she caught sight of his face and she could tell he wanted to hit her; and at that moment part of her wanted him to do it too, to confirm her insubstantiality, her potential for vanishing. She came almost immediately. Five minutes later Guy phoned.

  ‘Sweetie?’

  For Rajiv Rana, sex these days was primarily about relieving tension. If you are famous for your calm under pressure (when being attacked by a gang of lathi-wielding thugs, for example, or hanging from your fingernails beneath a collapsing suspension bridge), it may be important for your public persona to mirror your on-screen one. The emotional vocabulary of the action hero is limited. No tantrums. No weeping. You must face adversity with a witty one-liner and a left hook.

  INSPECTOR KHANNA

  (smiling ironically)

  You know you shouldn’ t smoke… It’s bad for

  the health.

  ZEBISCO’s car explodes in a ball of fire.

  For almost fifteen years Rajiv Rana had played himself to the hilt, at parties and shows, at openings and premières and charity auctions and political rallies. He was a professional. He was smooth. He was pent-up.

  He was scared.

  A crowd shouting his catch-phrase.

  You… shouldn’t… smoke!…

  His voice echoing in a hotel bathroom, cornered and hollow.

  ‘Baba, how good to hear you. All the way from Dubai. I am honoured. And your health?’

  Film heroics mean nothing here. Speak to Baby Aziz on the phone and your mouth goes dry. It’s partly the stories from the old days, the Mumbai street days. A garland of severed fingers. A broken-limbed tycoon left to crawl along the sea wall of Marine Drive. The shootings, the faces burned with acid – all that belongs to the past now. It must be a long time since the man at the other end of the line did anything more physical than lift his portly frame on to a sun-lounger. But memories underwrite the present, guarantee that in these hands-off times of hawala couriers carrying money from the Far East, fixed cricket matches in Durban, apartment complexes in the Gulf and RDX caches in Azad Kashmir, you will hear his wheezy beedi-smoker’s voice and remember that you too, despite your money and your millions of fans, lie within his sphere of influence.

  ‘So a party. Your parties are famous. How many ladies at this one, eh?’

  Aziz laughed a thin perfunctory laugh and, although this was not the question he had been asked, dropped the names of several famous men who were at that moment enjoying his hospitality. A fast bowler. The head of a soft-drinks company. In the next room, getting his cock sucked, was a member of one of the Emirates’ ruling houses. Aziz was pleased. The next room. I could hold the receiver up, eh? This was the kind of thing he enjoyed. He was remarkably indiscreet.

  ‘Speak up,’ he told Rajiv. ‘There’s a strange noise on the line.’

  Then he got down to business.

  Baby Aziz had not always owned Rajiv Rana. A film star can exert muscle of his own when dealing with the underworld. Producers are used to extortion attempts, and, though sometimes it is better to pay a little protection money for a shoot to go smoothly, there are ways of staying clear of Mumbai’s dark side. It is difficult, but possible. At least until you do something wrong. Until you accept a favour.

  Rajiv’s descent began with a little customs trouble, a matter of some undeclared currency and an overzealous commissioner who didn’t have time to go to the movies. With a possible court case looming, Rajiv was looking at a big fine instead of a new jeep, a state of
affairs which left him sulky and prone to tetchiness on the set of Hit Man Hindustani. He complained loudly enough to be heard by a certain Mr Qureishi. His business card described him as a lawyer, but he spent most of his days at a corner table in a Bandra restaurant taking bets on sports fixtures. Qureishi saw a way round Rajiv’s problem, and, sure enough, in return for a donation to a charity helping destitute slum girls, the commissioner’s zeal faded and the star was able to drive around town with the wind in his hair.

  Rajiv was grateful, and more than happy to lend a little glitter to Qureishi’s daughter’s wedding. There he was treated royally and had his picture taken with some other people who turned out to be just as helpful as Qureishi himself. Whether it was accurate stock-market predictions, cheap imported Scotch or introductions to Alitalia stewardesses keen to get to know the real Mumbai, Qureishi’s friends seemed to be able to make Rajiv’s life better in small but meaningful ways. They loved having him around because he was Rajiv Rana, and he accepted that as his due.

  Though it was common knowledge Qureishi was involved with Baby Aziz, Rajiv was unconcerned. Aziz himself had lived in the Gulf since the murder of a policeman in the mid 1980s, and as the city changed in the following years, with Hindu nationalist political gangs, the Pakistani secret service and old-fashioned financially motivated thugs all vying for power, he had made his presence felt indirectly, manipulating events from a distance. He was in some ways a mythical figure, not-quite-real, a bogeyman.

  The next year Rajiv went out to Dubai as one of a group of stars playing ‘The Multimega Millennium Concert’, re-creating great screen moments for a stadium of excited fans. He was invited to a lavish after-party in one of the city’s new luxury hotels. There a rotund man with dead eyes and a smoker’s cough made a gesture of adaab and begged him to do him the favour of taking the microphone and leading the party-goers in a rendition of ‘Pull my trigger, Rant’, the wildly popular love song from his recent hit Big Gun Number One. Rajiv obliged, and Baby Aziz spent much of the evening slapping him on the back and introducing him to industry contacts. Later he provided personal entertainments of a kind even Rajiv, accustomed to pleasure, found exotic and surprising.