Out of Order

by Charles Benoit

  It’ll be simple, he told himself as he thought about the questions they’d ask. I’ll just tell them what they want to hear.

  The phone was ringing when he stepped out of the shower.

  “There is a gentleman here at the front desk who wishes to speak to you,” said the high-pitched, sing-song female voice. “A Mr. Piyush Ojha from the Hindustani First National Bank.”

  ***

  As the elevator doors opened at the hotel lobby, Jason realized he should have taken the stairs. If there were armed bank guards or a special detachment from the police department waiting for him at least he had the chance to ease the stairwell door shut and creep back up the stairs, sneaking out a side exit or hiding under his bed. But other than the hotel staff and the gray-suited, gray-haired Piyush Ojha, the lobby was empty. When he saw Jason exiting the elevator, Piyush Ojha stood and held out his hand, letting Jason know before he crossed the lobby that this meeting would not be like the one at the bank.

  “I am so glad you have agreed to meet me,” the man said as he shook Jason’s hand, setting his left hand on Jason’s wrist, a sign of sincerity that Jason knew was heartfelt. “I can not apologize enough for how I treated you yesterday. The moment you left my office I felt ashamed. I am ashamed that I blamed you for my own lack of judgment years before our paths crossed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jason said, touching the older man’s shoulder. “If I were you, I think I would have acted the same way.”

  Piyush Ojha smiled a tight-lipped, embarrassed smile and gave Jason’s hand a final squeeze. “I know that you Americans are partial to your coffee,” he said, tilting his head towards the hotel’s café.

  “Actually, I could go for a masala chai,” Jason said, and led the way across the polished faux marble floor.

  Ten minutes later, the awkward silence and talk of the weather fading away, Piyush Ojha stirred two lumps of sugar into his teacup. “When you left my office yesterday I was so angry. At you, yes, and at Sriram, but mostly at my own stupidity. I have carried around this anger for years and it is only of late I realize the toll that it has taken on my soul.”

  “I think it was Krishnamurti who said that anger was based on fear and to overcome that fear you had to forget the past and live in the moment.”

  Piyush stopped stirring and looked up at Jason. “You are a well-read man, Mr. Talley. Yes, that is true. Anger has consumed far too much of my energy and each day is a struggle against my own negativity. It is a struggle that, as yesterday shows, I can easily lose. You had mentioned some questions about Bangalore World Systems?” His smile seemed hesitant and unnatural, but he stayed with it anyway.

  Jason blew the steam off his milky chai. “What can you tell me about Sriram and the others behind the company?”

  “If you are talking to me then you must have talked to some of the others as well, Manoj Plakal for instance.”

  “Manny.”

  “Yes, Manny,” he said in a way that let Jason know that he preferred Manoj. “Also, I believe that Ketan Jani still lives in Bangalore.”

  “We did lunch.”

  Piyush nodded a quick, jerky nod. “I am sure that both men had less than kind things to say about me.”

  “They just said that you took the whole BWS thing a bit hard.”

  “You are being too kind, Mr. Talley. I know what they say…what is the American term?…Is it nerd? Yes, well, I was the nerd of the group.”

  Given that anyone associated with BWS was, by definition, a computer geek, Jason understood that it was a harsh admission. And he knew enough to respect his honesty. “From what I understand, Sriram was also a bit of a nerd.”

  Piyush looked down at his tea as he spoke. “People use the word genius all of the time with no real concept of its meaning. A genius cricketer, a genius businessman, a genius actor, a genius game-show contestant.” He paused and stirred his tea again. “When you are in the presence of a true genius it is something you never forget. There is an aura, a glow. You may smile but I tell you it is real. You feel it engulf you, pass right through you. The talent, the energy—the magic. It is overwhelming. And you know that, no matter how hard you work, how intently you struggle, the thoughts that pass through that mind will never pass through yours.” He looked up at Jason, his eyes puffy and wet, and whispered, “It is a horrible feeling.”

  Jason thought back to the late nights at the Sundarams’, Vidya lounging on the couch, Bindi on her lap, her purr louder than the stereo, Sriram, tossing back another Odenbach lager, running down the batting order for his fantasy baseball team or an imagined set list for a Beatles reunion. He didn’t remember seeing a beatific glow or feeling engulfed in a shimmering aura of energy, recalling instead a sense of contentment and a warm buzz from the cold beer. Whenever Sriram got talking—lecturing, really—about the next big thing in computers or how science fiction led to science fact, Jason had tuned him out, unable to follow his friend’s train of thought, happy just to see him so excited. Maybe Sriram was a genius—Ravi had seemed to think so and so did everyone involved with BWS. For the thousandth time since his trip started, Jason wished he had paid more attention to his friend.

  “I am sure you know what happened with BWS,” Piyush continued. “I will not bore you with my story—suffice it to say that it took me several years to reestablish myself financially.”

  “Do you think Sriram really did it? That he stole the program you were working on?”

  Piyush drew in a deep breath and held it as he thought, his jaw tightening, and Jason braced for a gale-force tirade. But Piyush exhaled slowly, the tension slipping from his face. “There was only one way to get at the information on our computers and that was through Sriram’s security protocols, something I’m certain that only the person who designed them could do. I’m sorry, Mr. Talley,” Piyush said. “Sriram stole that program and sabotaged our computers.”

  The men sat in silence as the waiter refilled their teacups, Piyush dropping in a pair of sugar cubes as the man poured, Jason thinking about computer security and theft.

  “So what do you do at the bank?” Jason said, steering the conversation back to small talk and towards a close. He was surprised when Piyush seemed to perk up, edging forward on his seat and squaring his shoulders.

  “It is most fascinating work,” he said. “Quite fulfilling. Thankfully nothing to do with computers. Essentially it is the sorting and organization of forms and documents. It requires a close attention to detail and a constant vigilance. You see, unlike so many people, I like to have things planned out. I have found that it makes life much easier if you are aware of what is to come. If I am not properly organized, one step could be missed, nullifying the entire process. Large and important deals hinge on my ability to keep things organized.”

  “I see,” Jason said, a cold chill cutting through his body, the ghost echo of words he was sure he had heard before.

  “Yes, it is most fascinating and I must say that I have earned quite a reputation within the loans division of Hindustani First National Bank. Thrice named Employee of the Quarter. And,” he said, smiling his first real smile of the morning, “I believe I will be nominated for a promotion soon.”

  “I bet your family is quite proud,” Jason said, not bothering to shake the monotone from his voice.

  “Oh, I had no time to start a family—my work requires far too much of my time. One could say I am married to my profession. Happily married, I might add.”

  “You don’t live with your parents, do you?” Jason said, his own fears rising to the surface.

  Piyush shook his head. “No, sadly they have both passed away. I live alone, a studio flat nearer the airport.” He sighed as he raised his teacup to his lips. “This was one of the few things I shared with Sriram.”

  “You shared a studio apartment with Sriram?” Jason said, remembering his tall friend. “That must have been crowded.”

  “I am sorry,” Piyush said, setting his cup back down. “I was not clear. I did
not share an apartment with Sriram. What I meant was that we shared a similar background.”

  “Studio apartments?”

  “No. We both lost our parents at an early age.”

  The teacup and saucer rattled in Jason’s hands. “What?”

  “My father died in an auto accident when I was sixteen. Five years later my mother was diagnosed with cancer and passed away later that year.”

  “Wow. That’s rough,” Jason said, rushing through the words. “What about Sriram?”

  “It was his mother who died first, I don’t know the cause. His father passed away during his last year at university. A heart attack, I believe.”

  Jason set down his teacup and collapsed back in his chair. “Are you sure? I mean about Sriram’s mother being dead.”

  “Coincidentally we both lost our mothers in the same year. I was twenty-one at the time, so Sriram would have been in primary school. Fourth, fifth grade perhaps. It came up quite accidentally one afternoon. Someone at BWS had recalled a football championship or some nonsense and Sriram mentioned that it was the same date his mother had died. Later that day we shared a pot of tea and told sons’ stories.” Piyush smiled again, a melancholy smile that seemed to fit.

  “Did he have a sister? An aunt he was close to?”

  “Here again we were alike. We were both only children, but where I had many aunties, Sriram often joked of a plague of bachelor uncles. He did have a wry sense of humor.”

  “There has to be somebody. Sriram told me he was planning a trip to India for that holiday that’s coming up, the one with the saris.”

  Piyush tilted his head and gave a slight frown. “Which holiday is this?”

  “The one where sons give their mothers new saris. It’s coming up soon.”

  “Sons give their mothers saris all the time, there is no set holiday for the gifting of saris.”

  “So, as far as you know, there was no reason for Sriram to bring a sari to India?”

  “Bringing a sari to India,” Piyush said, his slight smile returning, “would be like bringing coals to Newcastle.”

  “But it could happen, right?”

  Piyush shrugged his narrow shoulders. “There is no law forbidding it. But I must say it would be a rare sari indeed that would deserve such treatment.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “Behold!” Manny said, pulling his Ambassador to the side of the road. “The international headquarters of Bangalore World Systems.”

  Jason looked out the passenger window at the building and waited for the punch line, Manny slapping his leg, laughing, saying he was only kidding, driving on as he made more cracks at the poor building’s expense.

  When he heard the engine cut off and then the ratcheting clicks of the parking brake, Jason realized it wasn’t meant to be a joke.

  Dropped down on the edge of a sprouting farm field and surrounded by bent poles that should have supported a missing chain-link fence, the slate-gray concrete and cinder block building sat—with a slight lean to the right—in the chunky red earth.

  It was hard not to stare and Jason felt himself first lean out of the passenger window, as if drawn in by curiosity, then pulling back, an instinctual response he obeyed without fighting. Squinting, he tried to envision the architect’s original concept.

  He seemed to have started with a simple cube but, midway up the building’s façade, the architect veered from his original plan, adding half-moon balconies and bay windows, tentatively at first, then with a reckless passion that mocked the petty dictates of aesthetics and physics. The main entrance—once a grand two-story portal, now a gaping black cave—was not as far off center as the odd-sized windows made it appear, with those on the bottom two floors either broken or hacked out of the wall, the windows on the top stories still in place but crusted over with a protective layer of grime, a few propped open with a piece of wood or busted bits of plastic pipe. On the flat-tish roof, stubby cement pillars, bristling with rusting lengths of steel rebar, hinted at a still bolder, never-to-be-realized dream, one that, given the ambitious start, might have included flying buttresses and pointed spires.

  “That’s a building,” Jason said without conviction. “It must have been rather….”

  “Hideous?” Manny said. “Repugnant? An eyesore? An abomination?”

  “I was going to say big,” Jason said, stepping out of the car, “but those are good, too.”

  “Ah, but you should have seen the plans,” Manny said, his voice breathy and wistful. “They were far worse.”

  Although Manny had driven most of the way with the gas pedal pressed to the frayed carpet, the ride from Bangalore had taken almost two hours, half the time spent in complex flanking maneuvers and back-tracking shortcuts that Manny insisted were the only way to avoid rush-hour gridlock. “It was not always like this,” Manny had said as he clipped the bumper of an auto-rickshaw during an illegal u-turn. “When I was a child, Bangalore was still a sleepy little place—we played cricket in the streets and on Sunday you could hear the bells of the Catholic church across town. Then the computer boom came and suddenly it seemed that the whole world was moving in. My father has not driven in years and has stopped going to the temple because the walk is too dangerous for a pedestrian.” He checked his rearview mirror as he crossed four lanes, his directional still blinking from two turns back. “Then there is the pollution and the crime and beggars…I suppose there is a price to pay for progress.”

  Twenty minutes outside the city limits, the price went up.

  It started with a few scattered lean-tos—shipping crates roofed in blue plastic sheets, held in place with head-sized rocks and twisted car parts—propped up along both sides of the highway, the lean-tos growing, becoming shacks, the distance between them closing as they drove on until there was no space left at all. Hard-packed dirt roads sloped up to the asphalt highways, creating impromptu intersections that cut a gash into the side of the slum, revealing a hellish maze of shattered plywood, mud bricks, stacked tires and dirt mounds, miles of flapping blue roofs diffusing the thin smoke trails from ten thousand cooking fires.

  Standing in the dark doorways, in small pockets on the side of the road, hunched down in front of dung-fired ovens, poking at the trash heaps with a short stick, or, backs turned to traffic, pissing down the side of the embankment, the citizens of the community found a way to make it through another day.

  Few of the men bothered to look up as the car sped past. Walking, heads down, nowhere to go, going anyway, busy watching the dust rise up as they shuffled along. A group of twenty-year-olds, barefoot, kicked a lopsided soccer ball up and down a back alley, too young and cocksure to know that they were already middle aged. Toothless old men in once-white dhotis and the thin remnants of button-down shirts sat tall in front of their scrap wood homes, the reward for a lifetime of labor.

  Against a backdrop of lifeless browns and greasy shades of gray, the washed-out hues of the worn and patched saris glowed. Unlike the cities, where stylish women wore their ornate pallu tossed over their right shoulders, the tail end draping to mid thigh, the women here used the final yard of fabric as an ever-present veil, protection from the sun and the curious stares of strangers. None of the women wore the two-piece shalwar kamiz, and Jason remembered Laxmi’s sermon, fashion a reflection of tradition and control.

  And there were children everywhere, the youngest ones naked, the others dressed in filthy rags, playing inches from the speeding traffic, matted hair and dirty faces offset by model-bright smiles, laughing at everything, the bliss of ignorance making theirs the best life imaginable.

  From the moment he had ridden off in the auto-rickshaw with Rachel, Jason had been trying to comprehend the poverty he saw everywhere he looked. From the trendy streets of Mumbai, flush with its Bollywood billions, to the manicured parks in Bangalore, to the tourist-heavy resort beaches on the coast, destitution and despair were always there, the beggars and the squalid shacks just part of the landscape. But here, the slum alre
ady two miles long and stretching down the road as far as he could see, the poverty was no longer part of the landscape, it was the landscape, impossible to ignore.

  “Why doesn’t somebody do something about this?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Tear down these shacks for a start,” Jason said. “Build them something decent to live in. Get those kids in school, maybe tell the adults to stop having so many kids.”

  “My god, we never thought of that,” Manny said, slapping his forehead with the base of his palm. “You are a genius. We shall get this cleaned up in no time now.

  “I don’t mean to be sarcastic,” Manny continued, “but if the answers were simple this wouldn’t exist.” He waved his flabby arm to take in both sides of the road. “Not here in India, not anywhere in the world. I know you will find this hard to believe, my friend, but we are trying. India is a young nation with a noble past and, I am certain, a great future. As bad as this is.” He waved his arm a second time. “As awful as it is, it is better than it was. Give us time.”

  They rode on in silence, the densely packed shacks transforming back to a wall of lean-tos, gaps appearing, growing longer until all that was left of the shantytown were isolated camps and lone squatters. And an image that he knew he could never shake. The sun was low on the horizon when the silhouette of the international headquarters of Bangalore World Systems rose into view.

  “The land had belonged to an uncle,” Manny said as they unloaded coolers and cooking supplies from the boxy trunk. “A small parcel, too little to farm, but we had to keep it in the family anyway. It is my name on the lease and now the whole ruinous structure is mine.”

  “Couldn’t you tear it down, build something new here? Maybe lease it to a small-time local farmer?” Jason paused. “I know, I know,” he said when Manny stopped to look at him, his eyes rolling up under his thick brow. “You never thought of it before.”

  Manny smiled. “You are a quick learner. Now let us see how quickly you master Indian cuisine.” He handed Jason an open-topped cardboard box that held a blackened cook stove. “Careful you do not soil your shirt—that contraption leaks kerosene like a sieve but it makes the finest iggaru royya you will ever taste.