Arms Race

by Nic Low

  I want my hotel listed.

  Impossible, the manager repeated. If I change the guidebook it is no longer the guidebook. No one will buy a copy if it differs from the original.

  But they’re already different. Those last copies are blank.

  Those we sell in the villages. The further from Delhi, the worse the copy. But this a problem of technology, not intention. If I could make every copy perfect, I would.

  All I ask is one small addition. Here.

  Jora passed a crumpled slip of paper across the manager’s desk. Grains of sand spilled onto the dark wood. The manager took the paper, then swept his sleeve across the desk. He began to read.

  But this is a fantasy, he said. I am sure you would like your hotel to have the best food in Rajasthan. You wish it to be so, but your desire does not make it so.

  But it’s the honest truth.

  Perhaps. But it would be dishonest of me to make this change.

  You think you’re honest, copying someone else’s book?

  The copies I make are honest to the original.

  But are they honest to India? How, if they don’t include my hotel?

  Ask the editors of Lonely Planet.

  It’s a tiny addition. Two lines of text.

  Do you see two lines of empty space waiting for you? Go back to your village. India is full.

  Jora clasped the stacks of thousand-rupee notes and slid the money back towards the manager. India is never full, he said.

  The manager’s nostrils flared. He gripped the arms of his chair and sat forward. Listen, choot. You are an illiterate village dog. I have been to the West. I know what these people want, and I will stay true to their vision. They are not interested in yours.

  Jora stood and scooped the cash into his bag. I am a village man, he said, and you are an uncle-fucking pirate and a fool. Put me in your book!

  The manager rose to his feet, and the two short men stood glaring at each other.

  Out of the question, the manager shouted. Now get out of my office!

  Jora spent the seventeen-hour journey home in a fury. He railed against the manager and the sons of daughters of camels who had fathered him. Yet, hour by hour, the steady weight of the bag in his lap calmed him down. There was enough in there to pay off much of his debt. But he wouldn’t pay off his debt. When he stepped from the bus into the freezing sands of Jaisalmer, he knew what he would do instead.

  Sir, you need a hotel? a tout called out to him. Shahi Palace! Very good write-up in Lonely Planet!

  It was his nephew Raj, sitting at Shinde’s chai stall. Jora sat and called for tea, and handed Raj the bag.

  Feel that, he said.

  What’s in there?

  About ten lakh cash.

  Raj laughed and weighed the bag in his hand. Books, na? How many copies did you get changed?

  Have a look.

  Raj opened the bag and went still. He looked up at his uncle, then back down into the bag. What is—he said. How is this—

  That’s for you, Jora said. I want you to buy every photocopier in Rajasthan.

  Raj and his brothers’ battered yellow Maruti became a familiar sight, trundling back and forth with copiers strapped to the roof. In a month they acquired enough machines to fill a derelict tannery. The north wall was half buried beneath sand blown in from the desert, but the rent was cheap.

  Next Jora went to his brothers in the restaurant kitchen. He laid an original Lonely Planet on the chopping block. Sharpen your knives, he said. Imagine you are cutting a diamond.

  His brothers went to work on the binding, slicing out each page.

  Then Jora sat down with his niece Nisha. Your ignorant uncle can’t read or write, he said. How’d you like to do it for me?

  In the mornings and after school Nisha studied the guidebook. Then she carefully composed a paragraph about Shahi Palace on the hotel’s antiquated laptop, and pasted it over the entry for Sarkar Mansions. It was hard to tell that it wasn’t part of the original.

  On the morning of the first printing Jora closed the hotel and assembled his staff at the tannery. It was the dead of winter and there were no guests. Jora issued instructions, his breath fogging in the cold, and there were questions and laughter and barking dogs, but soon enough everyone stood ready. Though there would be no race, Jora couldn’t help himself. He raised his arms, and brought them swiftly down.

  Go!

  When the copies were made and the bindings done and the books stacked in the hotel lobby, Jora was proud. He took one and thumbed through it. They were rough: pages were upside down or missing, and in his copy someone had swapped the entry on Shimla for a photograph of Kabir Bedi in very small shorts. But to Jora, who could not read and could not write, they were perfect. He was in there. His family, his hotel, his life.

  He snapped the book shut and turned to the desk. Raj, he called. Have you been to the city before?

  All the time.

  Jora laughed. Not Jodhpur. How’d you like to go to Delhi? On my money?

  Raj attempted a shrug. Then he broke into an enormous smile.

  You take these to Delhi, Jora said, and you don’t come back until you’ve sold every last one.

  Two days after the family had seen Raj and Sunil off from the bus station, the boys were back. Sunil’s arm was broken. Raj’s handsome face was an ugly pulp.

  We set up at Old Delhi, Raj said through swollen lips. We were only there a day and these five men came up to us and said it was their corner. You know what the bastards said? Fuck off back to your village. India is full.

  Jora hurled his drink off the balcony. That dog, he cried. India is never full! What about the books?

  Raj dropped his gaze. I’m sorry, Uncle-ji.

  Jora spent the days shouting at his waiters, and the nights drinking Old Monk by himself in the restaurant. He’d spent everything. There was no more money for toner or paper. There were few guests and no books. All he had was a sand-strewn room full of ancient photocopiers, and crushing debt.

  India, he told his glass, is empty.

  One morning Nisha came to see him.

  Why aren’t you at school? he asked.

  Nisha handed him a sheet of paper. I made this for you, Uncle-ji.

  It was the main Jaisalmer page from the guidebook, except that Nisha had pasted new paragraphs over the entire text, and replaced the photographs with hand-drawn pictures. It looked like a school assignment.

  That’s lovely, Jora said. I’ll put it on the wall in my office.

  No, Nisha said, pointing to the new paragraphs. That’s Sunil’s camel treks, and that’s the taxi drivers, and that’s the laundry service on Fort Road.

  But they’re not in the guide, Jora said. Why would we put them in the—

  Jora went door to door. He asked his friends and neighbours if they wanted to appear in a new edition of Lonely Planet. He sat cross-legged in their homes and invented prices according to the sweetness of their tea. He charged the shawl sellers in the old fort one hundred rupees for a listing. Srinagar’s Jewellers paid two tho
usand. Nisha wrote the entries and pasted them in, and if a business wanted a photo but didn’t have one, she drew them a picture. In a month they had enough money to buy paper.

  This time the printing was quicker, but sales were slower than the Jodhpur bus. Local bookwallahs shook their heads and pointed to their existing stock, and Jora didn’t dare send anyone back to the capital. The few copies Raj sold at the bus station made little difference to bookings at the hotel.

  The only vendor Jora could find who didn’t seem to stock Lonely Planet was in the waiting room at Jodhpur Station. The gap-toothed old Marxist who ran the stall was always busy. People came to sit and argue politics with him, and most left with a book under their arm. Jora studied his wares and then approached.

  Do you have Lonely Planet India? he asked.

  No sir. Imperialist trash. What I have is this.

  The man pulled a foxed volume from the bottom of a pile. This is the only guide to India you’ll ever need.

  Jora studied the faded red cover. The characters seemed more unfamiliar than usual. What language is this? he asked.

  Russian. Hotels all approved for their socialist values. This is the latest edition. Nineteen sixty-six.

  Listen, baba, Jora said. How would you like to sell an up-to-date, um, socialist version of Lonely Planet?

  The man jumped to his feet. Does such a thing exist?

  Jora pulled the guide from his bag. See here, he said. Everyone’s listed. No one is turned away. I’ll give them to you very cheap.

  The man took the book and flicked through. He paused at Kabir Bedi’s tiny shorts.

  And I’ll feature your stall in the next edition, Jora said.

  The man’s eyes gleamed. You would put me in Lonely Planet? he asked.

  For free.

  The bookwallah smiled. He had a mischievous gap between his paan-stained incisors. I can sell these, he said. How many have you got?

  The Jodhpur bookwallah pressed copies on every tourist coming through the station. His whole family was in the book trade, and within a month the guide was displayed in markets and bazaars across the city. The vendors bragged to friends that they themselves would appear in the next edition, and by the end of winter the second printing was nearly sold out. Bookings at the hotel slowly rose.

  With the change in seasons the heat began to build. Nisha stayed home from school, working beneath the turning fans to add the new material. Word had spread far beyond the bookwallahs that it was now possible for anyone to get themselves listed in Lonely Planet. Jora held court in the rooftop restaurant. Officials from the surrounding panchayats climbed the stairs to beg for the inclusion of their villages. Wealthy families had their weddings and mansions written in. For a handful of coins even the fruit vendors who lined the market could have their work praised in the guide.

  There is always room, Jora cried. India is never full!

  The tannery blazed with the light of photocopiers long into each night. They went through a third printing, and then a fourth, and with each new addition the book became more idiosyncratic. Nisha grew tired of imitating the guide’s original style. Her entries began to sound like a studious thirteen-year-old Rajastani girl, and when she could no longer keep pace with new additions, people were allowed to write their own.

  The fonts grew wildly mixed. Hinglish and Bengali and hyperbole crept in. People supplied their own skewed maps that placed themselves at the centre of their city or town. They spoke of how their broadband was as fast as light, their railways faster still. They wrote of how their lassi prolonged life, how the women of their town had the finest minds and fiercest gods. The book grew to six hundred pages.

  By the fifth printing, no tourist could mistake the book for the real thing, or even a copy of the real thing, but many bought it just the same. Jora’s guide had a unique, combative vitality. There were five entries for Kolkata, each funded by a rival politician, and each more baroque and outrageous than the last. A string of hypothetical mega-cities and dams appeared as peaceful realities. There was a bidding war between slumlords and NGOs to write up the nation’s slums. People airbrushed their children’s faces and Photoshopped their sunsets.

  Tourists began travelling to India expressly to take a holiday based on Jora’s Lonely Planet. To follow it was to give yourself over to chance, to navigate the present with a map of the future. The book had become a thing of pure, virulent aspiration: a guide to the what the country wished and hoped to be.

  To mark the printing of twenty thousand books, Jora bought a bottle of well-aged Laphroaig, and a cheap bottle of locally made 100 Pipers. He sat with his extended family in the rooftop restaurant looking over the desert. The horizon was dotted with campfires: camel traders journeying east to the fair at Pushkar. Jora poured a round of 100 Pipers.

  A toast, he said. We’re on our way to putting a bunch of filthy village dogs on the map. At the end of the week we’ll have paid off one-fifth of our debt.

  They laughed and drank until the distant campfires had burned down, and when the 100 Pipers bottle stood empty Jora took it to his office and refilled it with Laphroaig. The next day, hungover and grinning, he took a copy of his guidebook and signed the title page with a crude X. Then he posted it, along with the whisky, to the factory manager in Delhi.

  With the onset of another winter, sales died away like the monsoon winds. Each morning Jora entered the lobby to more precarious piles of unsold books. By day he laughed it off. But by night he woke to barking dogs and the fuzzy thump of village weddings, and he knew something had changed. He and Raj took the bus to Jodhpur.

  What’s going on? Jora asked the Marxist bookwallah. Why doesn’t anyone want our book anymore?

  They all want it, the man said. The problem is they’ve already got it.

  Jora and Raj walked the streets. The old Marxist was right: every stall had copies of their guide. Children darted out to sell them at traffic lights. They were even in the window of the Oxford Bookstore on Gandhi Marg.

  A week later a tall woman with blond ringlets and a shabby man in fake Ray-Bans came into the hotel restaurant, carrying a copy of Jora’s guide. They looked around at the sweeping view over the desert.

  They were right, the man said. This place is a-mazing.

  And that must be Jora, the woman said, glancing at the guidebook. Hey, she called. Your place is a-mazing.

  Thank you, Jora said, beaming. Please, join me.

  The couple sat and spread their things across his table. While they moaned about rickshaw drivers, Jora found himself gazing at their guidebook. There was something about it. He picked it up. May I?

  Jora read the book the only way he could. He weighed it in his hands. He sniffed it. He tested the paper between finger and thumb. It felt odd, though he couldn’t say why. He flicked to the photo section, and his own image stared back, vivid and bright-eyed. It was definitely his guidebook, and yet—

  He stood sharply, his thali tray crashing to the ground. This is a forgery! he cried.

  The couple stared up at him. Jora brandished the book.

  You, he demanded. Where did you get this?

  But he already knew the answer. He opened the book. Inside the cover, included in t
he printing itself, was his own scrawled X.

  The giant factory in Okhla III. The manager. That bastard was smarter than he looked.

  At dusk Jora assembled his brothers and nephews and cousins at the bus stop. They stood wreathed in blankets, and carried cricket bats and bags of roti and chana dal. In the dim winter monochrome they looked like a mongrel cricket team about to go on tour. Jora went among the men and counted heads.

  Thirty, he told the frightened driver.

  Please, sahib, no trouble, the man said. Is it a family feud? A matter of love?

  No, Jora said, a matter of theft.

  From Jodhpur the mob took a sleeper to Delhi. They stayed awake singing and smoking bidis to hide their nerves. Raj and Sunil bragged about how many copiers they would smash. Other passengers entering the carriage turned and left with eyes averted.

  In Delhi the next morning a convoy of rickshaws ferried them south. Most had never been to Delhi before. The desert men gripped their bats and stared out at the gleaming boutiques and chain stores of South Extension. It was too loud and cold to talk above the engines.

  At Okhla III they piled out to stand in the factory’s shadow.

  Follow me, Jora yelled. He marched towards the guard post with his bat held in both hands.

  There was nobody there. The post was unmanned and the gates stood open. They stormed down to the reception shoulder to shoulder. There was no sign of the receptionist, and Jora simply walked around her desk and buzzed them through.

  Ten of them pushed into the elevator, packed close with the smell of sweat and smoke. Jora could hardly bear to stand still. No Delhi choot stole from him and his family.

  The doors slid apart and the men piled out. The cavernous expanse of the factory opened before them. Jora had no time for the spectacle. He turned towards the manager’s office.