Turbulence

by Samit Basu

  Uzma comes up to Aman and puts her hands on his shoulders.

  “Aman, listen to me,” she says. “Sundar’s gone. Bob’s gone. We can’t fix that. We need to go. They’ll be back any second.”

  Aman steps away from her.

  “No. Can’t,” he says. “Anima, can you beat Jai and Sher?”

  “Jai Uncle and I had one fight but he beat me,” Anima says. “Sher is my best friend but I once beat him.”

  Aman hangs his head. Loud crashing sounds echo dully from upstairs.

  “You’re right, you should go,” he tells Uzma. “I’m really sorry I got you into this. Last thing I wanted.”

  “You’re coming with me,” Uzma says. “We can start over. Find other Tias. Save more people like us. Come on.” She starts towards the door, but Aman doesn’t follow.

  “Jai was right, don’t you see. This is my fault. No one asked me to do this. I put you all in danger. I got Bob killed. Almost got you killed. I can’t leave Sundar now,” he says.

  “Aman,” Uzma says, “you’re being an idiot. We don’t have time, so I can’t argue about this now. Just listen to me, okay? Let’s go.”

  She grabs his hand. As if in a daze, Aman allows himself to be led away, but stops at the doorway, shaking his head.

  “Should we take the kid?” he asks. Anima hovers inside the room, watching Bob’s body with her cartoon eyes. Shiny, perfectly teardrop-shaped tears fall from her face and land with perfect sound effects on the burnt floor.

  “She killed Bob,” Uzma says.

  “She’s just a kid.”

  “She freaks me out.”

  “And she’s powerful as hell.”

  “Anima, you want to come with us?” Uzma calls.

  Anima giggles, and a big white smile curves across her face. She drops to the floor, turns human and runs to Uzma.

  “We can’t just leave Bob here,” Aman says.

  “Aman, I’m sorry, I really am, but we’re trying to escape here. We’re this close to getting killed. We can’t take Bob. We can’t pack our toothbrushes. Come.”

  Aman nods. Mukesh groans and rubs his head. The crashing sounds upstairs stop.

  “Okay, we need to move,” Aman says.

  They step outside, feel cold tingling points on their skin, and look up at the sky, at the dark cloud that hovers above the house, thick and black against the city-lit night, and the little white drops that glow like fireflies drifting against the streetlights as they descend, flickering and disappearing before they reach the ground. Bob is cold and dead, and it’s snowing in Mumbai. But even as they stare, too amazed to keep running, a gust of wind comes from the sea and the cloud swirls and melts away. And they remember where they are and why.

  They reach Aman’s SUV and find the tyres have been slashed. Uzma runs out into the street and raises an arm. Perhaps her real power is transport acquisition: auto-rickshaws appear immediately and screech to a halt in front of them. They scramble into the first.

  “Where to?” the driver asks, gazing goggle-eyed at Uzma.

  “Wherever,” she says.

  “Anywhere with you, princess of my heart,” he says, and kick-starts the auto.

  “Sundar’s holding out well,” Aman says, peering back at the house, “maybe they won’t get him. Plus he has that gun - maybe he’ll just make them disappear.”

  “Can you call him?” Uzma asks.

  “I tried when they arrived. He can never find his phone in the middle of all that junk.”

  Aman shuts his eyes and buries his head in his hands, trawling through his much-abused brain for any possible solution.

  “I did set up a webcam in his room,” he says after a while. “He never uses it, but it might be on. But there’s no point just watching, is there?”

  “No, there isn’t.” Uzma leans back, wishing the auto could move at a pace that was in any way faster than a crawl.

  A few seconds later, Aman finds he cannot help himself. He checks, and finds the camera is on and he has a window into the warzone.

  Sundar stands in the middle of his room in his inventor’s trance. He’s still working on the armour he’s been building for the last few days. It seems to be almost complete: only the shoulders of the mannequin underneath remain uncovered, strange pink blobs standing out in the middle of a complex black and silver structure. His movements are calm, unhurried. He swings puppet-like to his heap of equipment, and returns with two curved black metal shoulder-pads, covered on the inside with complex circuitry. These he attaches to the shoulders of the suit of armour. He steps back, his head lolling forward.

  “What’s he doing?” Uzma asks.

  “He’s sleeping,” Aman replies.

  Aman has no idea how Sundar is keeping Jai and Sher out of the room, but there’s a large machine that looks like an ordinary diesel generator wired up in front of the armour, and it intermittently emits pulses of white light. A force-field? Aman can only watch as Sundar opens a panel on the armour’s chest and types in a combination. The armour glows, red lines streaking through its joints, and then the whole body shines silver for a second and disappears altogether.

  Sundar sleepwalks to the pile of equipment again and picks up a can. He takes this to the nearest wall and spray-paints the number 75348, in bright red. Aman looks the number up immediately, hoping it’s the key to some magical crisis-resolver. He finds nothing.

  Sundar tosses the can away, and picks up his ray-gun. He shuffles to the generator, bends and turns it off.

  There’s no sound, so Aman cannot hear the door breaking, but he flinches nevertheless as Sher leaps into the camera’s frame, tiger-headed, a being of pure power, swerving and rolling to avoid Sundar’s rays. But Sundar does not fire at Sher; instead, he points the ray-gun at his own head and presses the trigger. Sher stops his evasive dance and stares open-mouthed as Sundar disappears, along with his gun, in a blaze of white light.

  “Aman, for god’s sake, tell me what’s happening,” Uzma says.

  Aman opens his eyes. “I can’t explain,” he says.

  “Can I have an ice-cream?” Anima asks. She’s between them on the auto seat, peering out through the small oval transparent-plastic window at the back.

  “Now’s not the best time,” Uzma says. “We’ll get you one later.”

  Anima grins excitedly. “Or Jai Uncle will bring!” she squeals.

  “Wouldn’t count on it, darling,” Uzma says, forcing a smile. “We might not see Jai Uncle for a few days.”

  “No, no,” Anima says, pointing at the window. “Look, there he is!”

  Aman sticks his head out of the side of the auto and looks down the street behind them. It seems perfectly ordinary, a few cars zipping through an amber Yari Road night — until a Ford Ikon, well behind them, suddenly flies up in the air, tossed off the road, and crashes into a building. Two seconds later, another car goes flying, and Aman sees, in the distance, a small figure leap into the air, jumping like a champion athlete in a hurdles race, soaring above a bus, landing on its roof, crumpling the thin metal, and taking off again as the bus folds beneath him. Jai lands on the road and keeps running, moving far, far faster than their auto.

  Aman pulls his head back into the auto very rapidly.

  “Now, Anima, I need you to be very quiet,” he says. “We’ll hide from Jai Uncle, okay? It’ll be fun.”

  “What?” Uzma is horrified. “He’s really here?”

  “Yup,” Aman says. “He’s running up the road. But he might jump over us and miss us, so let’s just be quiet and hope.”

  “Good plan,” Uzma says.

  “No, no,” Anima says. “I can’t hide from Jai Uncle. He always knows where I am.”

  “How?” Aman asks, ready to collapse.

  “Oh, from this,” Anima says, pointing at a metal bracelet on her left ankle. “After one other uncle came and fought with us, Jai Uncle told us to wear these so we wouldn’t get lost any more.”

  Aman and Uzma exchange defeated glances.


  “You got any bright ideas?” Uzma asks.

  “No. Wait. Maybe we should toss her out?”

  “Maybe we should,” Uzma says.

  They cannot debate this any further as at this point Jai lands on the road in front of them, cracking the tarmac, spinning, rising. He raises an arm, palm facing the onrushing auto. The windshield shatters, the driver’s neck snaps with a loud crunch.

  Anima giggles and the world turns red.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Aman sits in his new office, on a creaky chair surrounded by powerful computers, feeling a bit like a Eurovision keyboardist. His shoulder, badly bruised from the auto crash, still hurts when he moves, but he is otherwise more-or-less uninjured — a condition that Mukesh, currently standing guard over him, is eager to change. But Jai has given strict instructions that Aman is not to be harmed, only removed gently and firmly from his computers should he misbehave. After all, Aman is the key to Jai’s empire and they both know it.

  It has taken considerable effort to assemble this setup in a place like Goa, where it is generally considered impolite to do anything quickly, and keeping this in mind Aman has not told Jai that these computers are completely unnecessary. Aman has no desire to reveal the full extent of his abilities to Jai; it suits him perfectly to attack one site at a time, spending hours over a single password instead of simply asking the site to let him in. He has been stalling Jai’s operations as much as he dares since he first sat in this room three days ago. The first night, he even shut down all the broadband networks in Goa for a brief while, in order to sabotage the transfer of a few billion dollars to Jai’s Dubai bank account.

  While Mukesh periodically curses about Goan internet services and threatens to go kill broadband providers, Aman has been skimming the waves of the internet on his own. The incident at the cricket stadium made headlines, but there were no real revelations. Life in the world outside has moved on, as it does in the subcontinent whenever terrorists, natural disasters and other random calamities strike.

  But then the subcontinent has never had any illusions of safety or prosperity; people know that disaster is just a heartbeat away, and simply cannot afford to panic when something terrible happens. They do not have the luxury of worrying about the collapse of their safe world — their world has never been safe, and lives have to be lived and rising petrol prices gawked at. The usual protocol for assaults on cricketers has been followed — Pakistani terrorists have been blamed, the Indian opposition has called the government spineless, Australian cricket officials have cancelled a tour and lots of Facebook groups have been started.

  Aman is far more interested in the fact that Namrata seems to have gone underground. She’s not gone back to work, and the phone she had used at Wankhede has been silent since that evening.

  Uzma is in another room in the mansion. She’s still unconscious: the crash left her with a concussion and a broken arm. Since he awoke four days ago, Aman has been allowed to see her occasionally, with Mukesh playing chaperone. They’ve always blindfolded him and led him to Uzma’s room on these occasions, and Aman hasn’t bothered to tell them he knows exactly where she is, thanks to their surveillance cameras. He has been told she will be killed if he does not follow every command Jai delivers, but he knows this threat is empty, because everyone in the building is already in love with Uzma. On one of his visits Aman found Jai standing by her bedside, holding her hand and threatening to disembowel one of his cohorts, a healing-powered doctor, for not getting Uzma up and about. Her arm is healed, but Aman suspects the doctor is not trying to wake her. The longer Jai spends by Uzma’s bedside, the less time he has to terrorise his followers.

  Beyond the CPU towers is a view Aman cannot complain about. The Arabian Sea rolls gently in the distance. Between the sea and the mansion are a glittering white-sand beach, a line of palm trees and a well-maintained garden. Jai’s current headquarters is in South Goa, far from the touristy madness of the north, with its rave parties, crowded shacks and bloated, sun-reddened Russian tourists cooking slowly on deckchairs and being mauled by local youths in the name of massage. The southern beaches of Goa are mostly lined with luxury resorts with fenced private beaches. The former owner of the plot of land Jai’s mansion stands on was a Russian gangster. The men sent sporadically by his successors to avenge his death make excellent sport for Jai’s hunters.

  Jai’s mansion is a palace of wonders built, like his Udhampur base and the new Wankhede stadium, by the powered architect Andy Kharkongor. On the outside it’s a twelve-storey grey building; on the inside it’s Andy’s first attempt at a superpower headquarters. A mind-bending, pop-culture-referencing amalgamation of classic over-the-top Hollywood and Bollywood residences, complete with throne room, vast torture hall with snake pits and shark tanks, in-house Batcave and a Star Trek-themed living area in which most of the powered prisoners from Jai’s Kashmir base now reside — some against their will, but most by choice.

  Aman finds the architect’s power fascinating — he’s able to transform all materials into polymers or alloys with shape memory, and given the right quantity of ingredients can build anything in a few hours. He simply makes bricks, mortar and metal think they were in a particular alignment and they rebuild that imagined structure at his command. Aman’s not exactly been given a guided tour of the facilities, but sometimes Jai lets him walk around the mansion with him, listening to his plans, making suggestions, and Aman has occasionally caught a glimpse of Andy at work. Once, he saw Andy reshape a swimming pool into a map of the world, based on a whim of Jai’s. Tiles cracking, sliding and rejoining, floor rising and reshaping to form continents in the middle of chlorinated water oceans. But this is just the tiniest exercise of Andy’s powers — Jai has promised him the day will come when he can redesign the entire world, transforming it into a paradise of sculpted landscapes, buildings out of science-fiction, bridges that arc across the sky.

  Despite having spent a week with Jai, and three days actively working for him, Aman has no idea what sort of person his captor is. He figures this is because it is possible Jai himself does not know. The only aspect of his superhuman personality that he’s sure about is the one he uses to intimidate, to threaten, and behind the manic mask is a face that’s trying to decide how it looks. Aman has gathered that Vir and he used to be friends, but while Vir essentially remained his human self but with powers, Jai has decided that his new powers deserve a new person behind them and is trying to work out who that is.

  No trace of his old life, his human life, exists except a collection of He-Man and GI Joe dolls lined up on a glass shelf in his functional, spartan bedroom, and a framed family photograph on a windowsill. In this, the family stands atop a hill. Jai is a reedy youth, somewhere in his early teens, brandishing a toy gun in a martial pose some distance apart from his parents. His father, an earnest, bespectacled man, gazes into the distance; his mother holds a little girl, aged not more than two or three, in her arms, and looks proudly at her little soldier. It’s a happy picture.

  Jai has decided to bring back into fashion an aspiration that died out in the middle of the twentieth century: military conquest of the world. Aman has asked what he plans to do with the world once he’s conquered it. Jai has no idea, but knows he will establish a global capital at Jaipur, already conveniently named after him. He wants to accomplish what Genghis Khan, Alexander and Julius Caesar could not. And before people raise statues to him, he wants to build himself in the image of his idols — but does not know how.

  Following Jai around his mansion, Aman sees that his people obey him without question, flinching when he speaks and never meeting his eyes. He has learned to inspire fear, and knows he has not yet understood how to simply inspire. He practises speeches all day, sometimes in the middle of observing Aman at work, but after a minute or two of fiery rhetoric he gives up. He obsessively studies great world leaders, trying to understand how to fake benevolence, compassion, divinity. He lectures himself for hours on end, exercises that always end
in shattered mirrors and books crumpled to pulp.

  Aman knows Jai is too smart to trust him, but he also knows that Jai desperately wants Aman to like him. This is simply because Aman’s powers, if used in Jai’s service, will upgrade Jai’s wildest schemes from laughable to merely ambitious.

  “I know we got off to a shaky start, and I apologise for that. We were all learning how to use our powers. I’ve changed my plans since then, and you have too,” Jai had said to Aman on their first day. They were on the roof of the building at the time, and Sher was holding Aman over the edge with one arm. Jai’s face shone from either sweat or sincerity as he continued, “A bad beginning doesn’t mean we can’t work together. Learn to respect and trust each other. Just think of the rewards, Aman. Think of what we could achieve. A better world. It’s what we both want.”

  This had been Aman’s moment to prove his heroism, to take a stand and a long fall. Instead, he had simply said, “As long as Uzma is not harmed,” wishing he could be sure that this was his real reason for agreeing to work for his captor. He’d had his Face Darth Vader moment, and had fluffed his lines.

  Since that moment, he’d become a part of Jai’s team — and not just a part. From the resentful glares of Mukesh and Sher, Aman realised he had been unofficially promoted to Chief Henchman. As his first bonus, he had not been dropped from the roof.

  Jai’s plan for world domination is a fairly simple one. Aman had been confused initially by its sheer arrogance, but after staring at it for a while in PDF form, he had been forced to admit it was good.

  Once Jai has picked a country, a polite email will be sent to its government demanding its surrender. If this is refused or ignored, Aman will go online and shut the country down. He is to disable all communications, empty all banks, shut off power grids, block up dams, refineries, plants and pipelines. He will switch off the media and close ports, airports and rail stations.

  They will let the country stew in its own juices for a while. Uncertainty and anger, aided by a shortage of food and water, will spread in hours or days, depending on the country. Inevitably, in the darkness, with nothing but survival to distract them, citizens will panic. Thousands will die, riots will spread, local governments will collapse. Only the fittest will survive.