The mask of “Zameen of Rijk” had been modeled after Neela Mahendra, that was obvious, but in the case of Akasz Kronos,” it seemed to Solanka, the opposite was true: as time passed, he had come to resemble his creation more and more. The long silver hair, the eyes made mad by loss. (He’d always had the mouth.) A strange piece of mask theater was being played out on this remote island stage, and Professor Malik Solanka had been unable to shake off the notion that the action intimately concerned him, that the great or perhaps trivial matter of his perhaps significant, more probably rather pitiful life—but, still, his life!—was arriving, here in the South Pacific, at its final act. This was not a reasonable idea, but he had been, ever since the slightly tragic but mostly farcical events of the Night of the Furies, in an unreasonable frame of mind, having regained consciousness with a broken molar giving him considerable trouble, and a broken heart and wounded life that gave him more grief even than the pounding tooth. In the dentist’s chair, he tried to shut out the tape of early Lennon-McCartney tunes and the pleasant prattle of the New Zealander quarryman delving deep inside his jaw—it came back to him from somewhere that the Beatles had begun life as the Quarrymen. He concentrated on Neela: what she might be thinking, how to get her back. She had demonstrated that in affairs of the heart she was very like the man that women had always accused him of being. She was there until she wasn’t. When she loved you, she loved one hundred percent, with no holds barred; but plainly she was also an ax-murderer, capable at any moment of severing the head of a suddenly rejected love. Confronted by his past—a past that in his opinion had no bearing whatsoever on his love for her—she had reached her snapping point, pulled on her clothes, exited, and almost at once embarked on a twenty-four-hour plane journey across the globe without a solicitous phone call about his jaw, let alone a word of loving farewell or even a guarded promise to try and work things out later, when history let up and gave her a bit of time. But she was also a woman familiar with being pursued. She might even be a little addicted to it. At any rate—Solanka persuaded himself while the New Zealander’s babbling road-drill hammered at his jaw—he owed it to himself, having found so remarkable a woman, not to lose her by default.
To fly east was to hurtle toward the future—the jet-propelled hours rushed by too fast, the next day arrived on wings—but it felt like a return to the past. He traveled forward toward the unknown and toward Neela, but for the first half of the journey the past tugged at his heart. When he saw Bombay below him, he pulled on a sleep mask and closed his eyes. The plane stopped in the city of his birth for a full hour, but he refused a transit card and stayed on board. Even in his seat, however, he was not safe from feeling. The sleep mask was no use. Cleaners came on board, chattering and clattering, a platoon of women in shabby purples and pinks, and India arrived with them, like a disease: the erectness of their bearing, the loud nasal intonation of their speech, their dusters, their hard workers’ eyes, the remembered perfume of half-forgotten unguents and spices-coconut oil, fenugreek, kalonji—that lingered on their skin. He felt giddy, asphyxiated, as if suffering from motion discomfort, though he was never airsick and the plane was, after all, on the ground, refueling, with all its engines shut down. After takeoff, as they headed east across the Deccan, he began to breathe again. When there was water down below again, he began, a little, to relax. Neela had wanted to go to India with him, was excited by the idea of discovering the land of her forefathers with the man of her choice. He had been the man of her choice, he must hold on to that. “I hope,” she had told him, with great seriousness, “that you are the last man with whom I will ever sleep.” The power of such promises is great, and under their enchantment he had even allowed himself to dream of return, had permitted himself to believe that the past could be—had been—stripped of its power, so that in the future all things could be achieved. But now Neela had vanished like a conjurer’s assistant, and his strength had gone with her. Without her, he was convinced, he would never walk the Indian streets again.
The aerodrome, as its outdated name forewarned, was what a tourist determined to put a brave face on catastrophe would call “olde-worlde” or “quaint.” In fact it was a pigsty, decrepit, malodorous, with sweating walls and two-inch roaches crunching like nutshells underfoot. It should have been torn down years ago, and had indeed been scheduled for demolition—it was after all on the wrong island, and the helicopters that linked it to the capital, Mildendo, looked worryingly down-at-the-heels but the new airport, GGI (Golbasto Gue Intercontinental), had beaten the old place to it by falling down completely a month after it was finished, owing to the local Indo-Lilly contractors’ overimaginative, if financially beneficial, rethink of the correct relationship, in the mixing of concrete, between water and cement.
Such creative rethinking turned out to be a feature of life in Lilliput-Blefuscu. Professor Solanka walked into the Blefuscu Aerodrome’s customs hall and at once heads began to turn, for reasons that, flight-exhausted and stupid with heartache though he was, he had anticipated and immediately understood. An Indo-Lilly customs officer in dazzling whites bore down on him, staring hard. “Not possible. Not possible. No notification was received. You are who? Your good name, please?” he said suspiciously, holding out his hand for Solanka’s passport. “As I thought,” the officer finally said. “You are not.” This was gnomic, to say the least, but Solanka merely inclined his head in a gesture of mild assent. “It is unseemly” the officer added mysteriously, “to set out to mislead the public of a country in which you are only a guest, dependent on our famous tolerance and goodwill.” He made a peremptory gesture to Solanka, who duly opened his cases. The customs officer gazed vengefully upon their contents: the neatly packed fourteen pairs each of socks and underpants, fourteen handkerchiefs, three pairs of shoes, seven pairs of pants, seven shirts, seven bush-shirts, seven polo shirts, three ties, three folded and tissued linen suits, and one raincoat, just in case. After a judicious pause, he smiled broadly, revealing a set of perfect teeth that filled Solanka with envy. “Heavy duty payable,” the officer beamed. “So many dutiable items are there.” Solanka frowned. “It’s just my clothes. Surely you don’t make people pay to bring in what they need to cover their nakedness.” The customs officer stopped smiling, and frowned far more ferociously than Solanka. “Avoid obscene utterance, please, Mr. Trickster,” he instructed. “Here is much that is not clothe. Video camera is here, also wristwatches, cameras, jewelry. Heavy duty payable. If you wish to lodge protest, that is of course your democratic privilege. This is Free Indian Lilliput-Blefuscu: Filbistan! Naturally, if protest is desired, you will be welcome to take a seat in interview room and discuss all points with my boss. He will be free very soon. Twenty-four, thirty-six hours.” Solanka got the point. “How much?” he asked, and paid up. In the local sprugs it sounded like a lot, but it translated into American as eighteen dollars and fifty cents. With a great flourish, the customs officer made a large chalk X on Solanka’s bags. “You come at great historical moment,” he told Solanka portentously. “Indian people of Lilliput-Blefuscu have finally standed up for our right. Our culture is ancient and superior and will henceforth prevail. Let the fittest survive, isn’t it. For one hundred years good-for-nothing Elbee cannibals drank grog-kava, glimigrim, flunec, Jack Daniel’s and Coke, every kind of godless booze—and made us eat their shit. Now they can eat ours instead. Please: enjoy your stay.”
In the helicopter shuttle to Mildendo on the island of Lilliput, the other passengers stared at Professor Solanka as incredulously as the customs officer had. He decided to ignore their behavior and turned his attention instead to the countryside below. As they flew over the sugarcane farms of Blefuscu, he noted the high piles of black igneous boulders near the center of each field. Once indentured Indian laborers, identified only by numbers, had broken their backs to clear this land, building these rock piles under the stony supervision of Australian Coolumbers and storing in their hearts the deep resentment born of their sweat and the cancellation of their names. The rocks were icons of accumulated volcanic wrath, prophecies from the past of the eruption of Indo-Lilly fury, whose effects were everywhere to be seen. The rickety LB Air helicopter made its landing, to Solanka’s immense relief, on the still-intact apron of the ruined Golbasto Gue Intercontinental Airport, and the first thing he saw was a giant cardboard representation of “Commander Akasz,” that is to say of the FRM leader Babur in his Akasz Kronos mask and cloak. Contemplating this image, Solanka wondered with a pounding heart whether, in making his trans-global journey, he had acted as a lovelorn fool and political nail For the dominant image in Lilliput-Blefuscu—a country close to civil war, in which the president himself was still being held hostage, and a high-tension state of siege existed, and unpredictable developments could occur at any moment—was, as he had known it must be, a close likeness of himself. The face looking down at him from the top of the fifty-foot cutout—that face framed in long silver hair, with its wild eyes and dark-lipped Cupid’s bow mouth, was his very own.