by Samit Basu
The door to the Scientist’s room is ajar behind Tia, and a bright green light comes out of the room, making Tia’s head glow a vaguely sinister green. Uzma flinches a bit when Tia beams at her and her teeth shine fluorescent.
“No, you’re not interrupting anything,” Tia says with a giggle. “I just like being here and watching him work sometimes. Come in. Make as much noise as you like, you won’t disturb him.”
Uzma wants to point out that Tia had said, just a while ago, that the Scientist hated being disturbed. Instead, she tiptoes in and observes the Scientist’s room with a mixture of awe and incredulity.
The wall between two bedrooms has been knocked down, forming one large hall. The sizeable windows have been shut and covered; a gigantic split air-conditioner hums away on a wall. To Uzma’s left is a ceiling-high pile of assorted objects and apparatus: metal sheets, wooden planks, boxes full of screws and bolts and other little thingummies that Uzma cannot name, naked computer motherboards, containers of an incredible variety of shapes, materials and sizes, dozens of tools for cutting, welding and shaping, miscellaneous toys and gadgets, vehicle spare parts, gas cylinders, evil-looking liquids bubbling in flasks that sit on stands, rising out of the debris like lighthouses. A lot of these have been wired, soldered or otherwise melded into nameless machines, each of which is performing its own assigned mysterious task.
The sheer variety of objects is stunning. It would not be surprising if the entire mass rose and formed a bizarre sentient golem-like creature, the love-child of a laboratory, a witch’s cauldron and the bedroom of Leonardo da Vinci as a child. From this mountain of scrap, hundreds of wires trail out across the room, at first in amorously intertwined clusters, but then forming independent streams and tributaries, flowing across an ocean of grease stains, spilt paint and burn smudges, dotted with islands of more clustered junk.
In the centre of the room stands what appears to be a metal statue of a man, with green-glowing wires coiled around it like veins. Beside this stands a thin, short man in his fifties, clad in a frayed white shirt, pyjamas that were white once and big, bug-eye goggles. His head is exceptionally large, and bald except for a few wisps of hair drooping from above his ears in a defeated sort of way.
“Uzma, this is Sundar Narayan. The Scientist,” Tia says.
Uzma is surprised when the Scientist does nothing to acknowledge her presence. She’s even more surprised when he moves and she sees that his face is completely slack, his mouth hanging open. He’s drooling slightly, and his movements, for all their speed and dexterity, are somewhat odd, puppet-like.
Narayan hovers around his growing creation like a moth, prodding, poking, adding wires and circuitry, fingers almost blurring. It’s as if he’s a sculptor, or a musician playing the most complicated piano in the world. Whatever it is he’s building, it’s something that’s already perfectly designed in his head. Occasionally he darts off to another part of the room, plunges his arm into a heap of assorted junk and emerges holding something shiny, which he then runs to add to his strange masterpiece.
Uzma is irresistibly reminded of a video she’d seen on National Geographic years ago in Oxford, when a visiting uncle from Pakistan had insisted that she stop watching Friends and learn something instead — she’d switched channels unwillingly but had soon found herself engrossed in a show about a weaverbird building its nest, creating an elaborate colonial home with just its beak, its incredible skill rendered eerie by the madness of fast-forward TV. Narayan looks more like a token Indian extra in a zombie movie than a bird, but he, too, is constructing something solid and curvy and beautiful out of little bits of detritus the world has no further use for, another wondrous device that seems to follow scientific principles its maker should not be aware of.
“You’re taking all of this in very well,” Tia says. “The first time I saw him do his thing, I was completely freaked out.”
Uzma stares at Narayan in bewilderment, still waiting for some indication that all of this is an elaborate prank, some kind of bizarre household initiation ceremony involving balloons and streamers. As if in response to her searching stare, he turns away from his machines and towards her, his goggles making it impossible to see if he’s looking at her. She almost screams when he snores loudly, and his head lolls to one side. Then he swings and sways, a flesh scarecrow, and returns to his tinkering, leaving Uzma breathing in great gulps and shuddering at Tia’s reassuring pats.
“Is he… asleep?” Uzma asks, resisting the urge to run.
“Yeah. He does all this stuff in his sleep, and when he wakes up he spends all day in here trying to understand his inventions. I don’t think he’s got anywhere yet,” Tia replies.
“Makes stuff from his dreams? How is that even possible?”
“Well, poets do the same thing, don’t they? He says it’s something to do with his subconscious working out the engineering problems his everyday mind can’t. Id-Design, he calls it.”
“So what has he invented so far?”
Tia gestures to Uzma’s right and she sees, in the far corner of the Scientist’s den, a strange assortment of objects in glass cases on little stands, a small exhibition of the insanity she feels snickering and gurgling in the air around her. There’s what looks like a lava lamp, amoeba-like green globules floating in a viscous orange gel, with a sign in front of it that proclaims XONTRIUM EGO SUSPENSION in a child’s shaky handwriting. The next case contains what looks like a toy gun, the sort of thing aliens in science-fiction B-movies use when asking you to take them to your leader, it’s labelled TACHYON DISLOCATOR. A few other cases contain more devices Uzma cannot understand. Their labels are of no help either, the names written in Sundar’s sleep-hand all gibberish, a child’s attempt at science-fiction names for the future-tech doodles in his school diary, names as meaningless to Uzma as “iPod” or “Twitter” would have been to her mother in the seventies.
The final case, in the corner of the room, is large and empty. This is clearly where Sundar’s statue-with-wires-and-things will go once it is finished. None of this makes any sense. Uzma is suddenly reminded, again, of television, of Adam West Batman reruns, of villains with colourful lines and even more colourful costumes, building doomsday devices considerately labelled DOOMSDAY DEVICE so Batman and Robin knew exactly where to go CRASH! when dismantling the villain of the week’s secret underground lair.
“What is this stuff?”
Tia shrugs. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know what to call these things until he labels them in his sleep.”
“I don’t know the first thing about science,” Uzma admits, “but this is very Doctor Who, yeah? Do a lot of Indian scientists do this?”
“Invent stuff in their sleep that no one understands? Maybe they all do. Maybe Id-Design is really popular among scientists. Who knows?” Tia says.
“I don’t know if I can live here. It’s not safe.”
“Well, if he did something naughty, I’m sure he would marry you afterwards. He’s a gentleman.”
“Be serious, Tia. How can you share a house with this guy?”
“He’s a complete sweetie when he’s awake,” Tia says. “And you’ll barely see him if you don’t come up here. The only time Aman ever meets Sundar is in the dining room, when Sundar’s eating tomato rice.”
Narayan, possibly hearing the magic words in his sleep, lurches towards Tia, and Uzma feels a lot better as she sees her new friend recoil sharply.
“Aman said it was a bad idea for you to meet him for a while,” Tia says, regaining her composure. “But listen, don’t get scared by all this. It’s kind of cool to have a mad inventor living upstairs, no? And he totally looks the part.”
Before Uzma can reply, there’s a loud banging on the door. Tia opens it.
“Okay, something very strange is happening on TV, and I think you need to see it,” Aman says. He’s dishevelled, wide-eyed, clearly very excited.
“Stranger than this?” Uzma asks in a voice of ice, gesturing dramatical
ly towards Sundar and his statue.
Aman opens his mouth to speak, chokes on his first word and looks around the room thoughtfully. He registers Tia’s amusement, Uzma’s indignation, and the intrepid Sundar, currently engaged in pulling a large length of glowing green wire out from under a stuffed one-eyed emperor penguin. Sundar chooses this moment to trip and crash into his pile of raw materials. When he stands up, there’s a clothespin attached to his nose.
Aman meets Uzma’s gaze squarely and grins.
“Much stranger than this,” he says.
Uzma races into the living room just behind Aman. They fling themselves on a sofa, the TV is turned on to DNNTV, India’s most trusted, most popular and least modest English news channel.
A very pretty reporter — standard issue, fair, well-ironed hair, early twenties, terrible fake American accent, wearing a blazer in the channel’s colours — stands with a heavy DNNTV microphone in front of a large white building that seems to have done something to annoy a mob of about a hundred people, who are all productively occupied hurling bricks, bottles and other handy projectiles at its windows. The red bar on the screen underneath the reporter’s face announces that her name is Namrata, and she is in front of the NH Sukumar Hospital in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. A scrolling ticker under the bar also announces that a sweet-shop owner from Amritsar has set a new Guinness World Record for eating sweets, and a former Indian test cricket captain has announced his return to the sport.
“Unparalleled scenes of public frenzy shatter the placid peace of Chennai in this path-breaking global exclusive brought to you exclusively by DesiNow News,” the reporter Namrata gushes. “The brutal murder of a young and innocent couple sparked off a fire last night. Tonight, will this fire burn Chennai’s heart? We bring you uninterrupted live coverage — after these messages.”
“Why are we watching this?” Uzma asks.
“Wait,” Aman says, his eyes fixed on the TV.
After a few minutes of educational lingerie advertisements, Namrata returns, and, accompanied by lots of flashy visuals, narrates the tragic story of the Iyers, a young couple, software professionals, who had been savagely attacked by an unknown miscreant while driving towards the NH Sukumar hospital the previous night. Their car had pulled into the hospital driveway with Mr Iyer dead and Mrs Iyer clearly dying — and in labour. She had clung on to life long enough to deliver her baby, and then passed on. Following the birth the hospital had shut its doors to all patients within an hour and turned out most of its staff by dawn. Given the normal length of time Chennai hospitals take to do anything, there was clearly something very strange going on involving the baby Iyer.
“All through today, an unusual collection of politicians and public figures have been gathering inside the hospital behind me,” Namrata chirps, making sure to indicate that the massive building behind her, with NH Sukumar Hospital written on it in shining letters, is, in fact, the mysterious hospital to which she alludes. The cameraman zooms in close on Namrata to make sure other reporters wandering around delivering pieces to camera don’t mess up the frame. “While other media channels have missed this breaking story, focusing instead on the first match of the new Indian Giga-League Gully Cricket Tournament — watch it live on DesiNow Sports, or online at DesiNowGigaLeague.com — we at DNNTV are here with you because we have confidential sources on the inside and, soon, exclusive footage that will show you what happened inside this hospital today.”
“Her accent is slipping,” Tia observes.
“That doesn’t matter. Look, this is the same girl. She covered the riots in Hyderabad the other day,” Aman says.
“What riots?” Uzma asks.
“Bunch of attention-seekers, crackpot Hindus against crackpot Muslims fighting one another to a draw over some non-issue.”
“But doesn’t that sort of thing happen all the time?” Uzma says.
“Sure. Filler news, but this looked like it was getting bigger. Same girl also did the story that happened ten days ago in Calcutta — bunch of people burning effigies of all four thousand employees of the Cricket Board of India. I think there’s a connection.”
“You think this reporter’s causing these riots, somehow?” Tia asks, languidly stretching out on the sofa.
“No, you do hear about the media setting up stories, but that’s not what I think this is. These were all big stories — I don’t know what this hospital thing is, but, look, she’s a junior reporter, she shouldn’t be beating her seniors to scenes of actual violence. She’s going to get lots of promotions very soon, or get kicked out on her butt. I think she might know something. Maybe she has an unusually strong nose for news.”
“I don’t understand,” Uzma says. “You think this girl knows beforehand where important news is going to be?”
“Aman, was she on the plane?” Tia asks, sitting up.
Aman nods. “Later,” he says, as Uzma turns to him, eyes blazing.
“What plane?” Uzma asks.
“I sat next to her on a flight, not long ago,” Aman says. “Look.”
Namrata has slipped into the hospital through a back door held open by an exclusive secret inside source.
“I’m the only person inside this hospital — this place of healing now under siege — who isn’t a part of the conspiracy that surrounds this mysterious baby Iyer like a fog,” she says, blithely ignoring the existence of her cameraman and all the patients and remaining staff in the hospital. “But soon we will find out, together, exactly what is going on. Live and exclusive on DNNTV.”
By one of those strange coincidences that often happen on TV news, the people Namrata needs to interview are miraculously waiting around together in a well-lit room, all miked up and ready to be surprised. In swift succession, Namrata names a series of slightly eccentric politicians, mostly small-time guardians of the nation’s morals, famous for such things as vandalising stores on such Western Imperialist occasions as Valentine’s Day, or beating up girls in pubs or wearing jeans, or random acts of violence towards gay people, Muslims or celebrities who refused to dance at the weddings of party leaders. There are four fat men and a woman named Rosy. It is she who steps forward, possibly not by consensus, because the men wobble angrily in the background.
“We wish to announce formation of new political party that will change world,” she says.
“Yes, tell the viewers of DNNTV,” trills a thrilled Namrata.
“AKWWEK,” Rosy continues, clearly not a fan of concise names. “Avatar Kalki Whole World Ethirkaala Katchi.”
“Could you translate that for the viewers of DNNTV?”
“We are forming fully global party of future with benevolent grace of holy tenth Vishnu Avatar Kalki,” Rosy explains to a furiously nodding Namrata.
“Do you know who might be responsible for the gruesome murders last night?” Namrata asks, clearly expecting murder-related political intrigue, not gibberish about ruling the world.
“You are not understanding important significance of what I am saying,” Rosy says, now irate and puffy. “We are presenting to whole world most holy tenth Avatar of Vishnu, preserver god of Hindu trinity. What I am saying is, Baby Iyer is not only Baby Iyer. Baby Iyer is Baby Kalki, same tenth avatar as mentioned.”
“I am knowing — sorry, are you saying this baby is Kalki? How do you know this? Could you show us the baby?” Namrata is gamely fighting both Rosy and growing suspicions of her own insanity.
One of Rosy’s fellow AKWWEK party leaders steps up and shoves her aside, like a rhythm guitarist taking over the band partway through a song.
“Myself Muttiah, General Secretary,” he growls. “Time has come to clean world of sins, and Baby Kalki will soon grow up to be Full-Power Avatar Kalki and destroy all rascals and rowdies while riding white-winged horse Devadutta. No more of decadence of westernised Kali Yuga, all this McDonald’s and IPL cheerleader and reality show promoting sex and obscenity and also vulgarity in tennis and films showing leg and kissing. Time of Satya Yuga is commencing sh
ortly according to Vishnu Purana. AKWWEK will help most divine Avatar Kalki with process of democracy at grass-roots and all-India level, thus allowing Avatar Kalki to become world’s first democratically elected god.”
“Live and exclusive on DNNTV,” Namrata gurgles, eyes almost popping out of her head with excitement, “your first glimpse of the baby that the newly formed AKW — AKWW — Kalki Party claims will one day be the world’s first god to win an election!”
“Who is claiming? Who is making claim?” Muttiah isn’t pleased. “We are providing hundred percent genuine divine avatar! Soon he will be manufacturing weapons of power and destruction of mass to shock and awe all evil societies in the world, making India glorious superpower! According to holy text, Kalki is scheduled to undertake travelling around Earth with great speed, destroying millions of thief dressed as king in provocative clothing, displaying eight kinds of supreme power! He will lead army of superman against all evil. We are having new dawn of age of miracle and Kalki is most biggest miracle!”
Uzma giggles at this and turns to Aman and Tia, and is surprised to find both of them absolutely riveted to the screen. In fact, Tia has huddled up to Aman now, they’re holding hands and completely unaware of it, like two children at a horror movie.
“What’s wrong with you people?” Uzma demands. “Don’t tell me you believe him!”
Aman and Tia disengage, embarrassed.
“No, of course not,” Aman mumbles. “Sorry, every time I ee politicians like this I’m generally afraid for the country. For the world.”
On the screen, Namrata is trying to slip past the cordon of AKWWEK politicians to get a global first exclusive sight of the alleged Baby Kalki, ignoring Rosy’s protests of “But we are showing Baby Kalki to live rally, not to single channel, sorry.”
At a signal from the intrepid reporter, the cameraman ups his game: he’s off, treating his viewers to a video game-like live view of his jerky run through the corridors of the hospital, peppered with the occasional flailing limbs of AKWWEK party members trying to block him, until he barges in through a heavily guarded door, and there’s just a flash, a smudge of blue, a suggestion of a bright blob on a white bed surrounded by kneeling women in white saris, a hasty zoom, a blurry image of more chubby arms than a baby should have and a blue head that’s not human at all, before a burly party member cannons into the cameraman; a wild swing, a patchy white ceiling and then static fills the screen.
