‘You should have told me earlier.’
‘He didn’t want to. He wants to be in control if it.’
‘What is it exactly?’
‘Huntingdon’s.’
‘Can they do anything?’
‘They never could. They still can’t.’
Sarasvati blared her way through the scrimmage of traffic wheeling about the Parliament Street roundabout. The Shaivites still defended their temple, tridents upheld, foreheads painted with the true tilak of Shiva, the three white horizontal stripes. I had seen that other mark on the forehead of almost every man and woman on the street. Sarasvati was pure.
‘He would have known whenever he had the genetic checks when I was conceived,’ I said. ‘He never said.’
‘Maybe it was enough for him to know that you could never develop it.’
Dadaji had two nurses and they were kind, Nimki and Papadi he called them. They were young Nepalis, very demure and well-mannered, quiet spoken and pretty. They monitored him and checked his oxygen and emptied his colostomy bag and moved him around in his bed to prevent sores and cleared away the seepage and crusting around the many tubes that ran into his body. I felt they loved him after a fashion.
Sarasvati waited outside in the garden. She hated seeing Dad this way, but I think there was a deeper distaste, not merely of what he had become, but of what he was becoming.
Always a chubby man, Tushar Nariman had grown fat since immobility had been forced on him. The room was on the ground floor and opened out onto sun-scorched lawns. Drought-browned trees screened off the vulgarity of the street. It was exercise for the soul if not the body. The neurological degeneration was much more advanced than I had guessed.
My father was big, bloated and pale but the machine overshadowed him. I saw it like a mantis, all arms and probes and manipulators, hooked into him through a dozen incisions and valves. Gandhi it was who considered all surgery violence to the body. It monitored him through sensory needles pinned all over his body like radical acupuncture and, I did not doubt, through the red Eye of Shiva on his forehead. It let him blink and it let him swallow, it let him breathe and when my father spoke, it did his speaking for him. His lips did not move. His voice came from wall-mounted speakers, which made him sound uncannily divine. Had I been hooked into a third eye, he would have spoken directly into my head like telepathy.
‘You’re looking good.’
‘I’m doing a lot of walking.’
‘I’ve missed you on the news. I liked you moving and shaking. It’s what we made you for.’
‘You made me too intelligent. Super-success is no life. It would never have made me happy. Let Shiv conquer the world and transform society: the superintelligent will always choose the quiet life.’
‘So what have you been up to, son, since leaving government?’
‘Like I said, walking. Investing in people. Telling stories.’
‘I’d argue with you, I’d call you an ungrateful brat, except Nimki and Papadi here tell me it would kill me. But you are an ungrateful brat. We gave you everything – everything – and you just left it at the side of the road.’ He breathed twice. Every breath was a battle. ‘So, what do you think? Rubbish, isn’t it?’
‘They seem to be looking after you.’
My father rolled his eyes. He seemed in something beyond pain. Only his will kept him alive. Will for what I could not guess.
‘You’ve no idea how tired I am of this.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘It’s defeatist? It doesn’t take your superhuman intellect to work out that there are no good solutions for this.’
I turned a chair around and perched on it, hands folded on the back, my chin resting on them.
‘What is it you still need to achieve?’
Two laughs, one from the speakers, the other a phlegmy gurgle from the labouring throat.
‘Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?’
‘Don’t we all? We’re Indian, that’s what we’re about.’
‘No, but really. The transmigration of the soul?’
‘What exactly are you doing?’ No sooner had I asked the question than I had raced to the terrible conclusion. ‘The Eye of Shiva?’
‘Is that what you call it? Good name. Keeping me ticking over is the least part of what this machine does. It’s mostly processing and memory. A little bit of me goes into it, every second.’
Uploaded consciousness, the illusion of immortality, endless reincarnation as pure information. The wan, bodiless theology of post-humanity. I had written about it in my Nation articles, made my soapi families face it and discover its false promises. Here it was now in too too much flesh, in my own real-world soap, my own father.
‘You still die,’ I said.
‘This will die.’
‘This is you.’
‘There is no physical part of me today that was here ten years ago. Every atom in me is different, but I still think I’m me. I endure. I remember being that other physical body. There’s continuity. If I had chosen to copy myself like some folder of files, yes, certainly I would go down into that dark valley from which there is no return. But maybe, maybe, if I extend myself, if I move myself memory by memory, little by little, maybe death will be no different from trimming a toenail.’
There could never be silence in a room so full of the sounds of medicine, but there were no words.
‘Why did you call me here?’
‘So you would know. So you might give me your blessing. To kiss me, because I’m scared, son, I’m so scared. No one’s ever done this before. It’s one shot into the dark, What if I’ve made a mistake, what if I’ve fooled myself? Oh please kiss me and tell me it will be all right.’
I went to the bed. I worked my careful way between the tubes and the lines and wires. I hugged the pile of sun-starved flesh to me. I kissed my father’s lips and as I did my lips formed the silent words, I am now and always must be Shiv’s enemy but if there is anything of you left in there, if you can make anything out of the vibrations of my lips on yours, then give me a sign.
I stood up and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’
‘I love you, son.’
The lips didn’t move, the fingers didn’t lift, the eyes just looked and looked and filled up with tears. He swam my mother to safety on an upturned desk. No. That was someone else.
My father died two months later. My father entered cybernetic nirvana two months later. Either way, I had turned my back once again on Great Delhi and walked out of the world of humans and aeais alike.
The morning of the white horse
What? You expected a hero? I walked away, yes. What should I have done, run around shooting like filmi star? And who should I have shot? The villain? Who is the villain here? Shiv? No doubt he could have provided you with a great death scene, like the very best black-moustached Bollywood baddies do, but he is no villain. He is a businessman, pure and simple. A businessman with a product that has changed every part of our world completely and forever. But if I were to shoot him nothing would change. You cannot shoot cybernetics or nanotechnology; economics stubbornly refuses to give you an extended five-minute crawling death-scene, eyes wide with incomprehension at how its brilliant plans could all have ended like this. There are no villains in the real world – real worlds, I suppose we must say now – and very few heroes. Certainly not ball-less heroes. For after all, that’s the quintessence of a hero. He has balls.
No, I did what any sensible Desi-boy would do. I put my head down and survived. In India we leave the heroics to those with the resources to play that game: the gods and the semigods of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Let them cross the universes in three steps and battle demon armies. Leave us the important stuff like making money, protecting our families, surviving. It’s what we’ve done through history, through invasion and princely war, through Aryans and Mughals and British: put our heads down, carried on and little by little survived, seduced, assimilated and in the end conquered. It is what will bring us through this dark Age of Kali. India endures. India is her people and we are all only, ultimately the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burningghat. We are a billion and half heroes. Who can defeat that? So, will I yet be the hero of my own long life? We shall see.