Vishram thinks he hears the driver snigger as he opens the door.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Marianna Fusco whispers in Vishram’s ear as he walks purposefully up the steps. His ’hoek comes to life in his head. A moment’s visual blur as the aeai deletes the junk and filters the ads, then he is striding forwards to meet the director, hand held out in greeting. GANDHINAGAR SURJEET say the blue words hovering in front of him. D.O.B 21/02/2009. WIFE SANJUAY, CHILDREN: RUPESH (7); NAGESH (9). JOINED RAY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT 2043 FROM UNIVERSITY OF BANGALORE RENEWABLE RESOURCES RESEARCH DEPARTMENT. FIRST DOCTORATE. Vishram blinks off the supplementary information.
“Mr. Ray, you are very welcome to our division.”
“It’s a pleasure to be here, Dr. Surjeet.”
It’s all playing a role, really.
“You do find us in something of a state of unreadiness,” he says.
“Not half as unready as me.” The joke seems to go down well. But then they would laugh, wouldn’t they? Dr. Surjeet moves to his department heads.
INDERPAL GAUR, says the relentless palmer. 15/08/2011, CHANDIGARH. RESEARCH SUBDIVISION: BIOMASS. MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE. EMPLOYMENT HISTORY AT
RAY POWER: JOINED R&D 2034 FROM UNIVERSITY OF THE PANJAB, CHANDIGARH CAMPUS.
LET HIM DO THE INTRODUCTIONS, Marianna warns in lilac over Director Surjeet’s head. Dr. Gaur is a toothy, plump woman in traditional dress, through there is nothing old-fashioned about the anodised aluminium ’hoek curled against the side of her pigtail. He wonders what is her ’hoek graffiting about him? VISHRAM RAY: WASTER SON. FAILED LAWYER. ASPIRANT STAND-UP. THINKS HE’S PRETTY DAMN FUNNY.
“It’s a great honour,” she says, namasteing.
“All mine, I assure you,” Vishram says.
And on, down the row of department heads and senior researchers and team leaders and those who have had important papers published.
“I am Khaleda Husainy,” says a small, intense woman in a Western-style suit and a headscarf chador. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ray.” Her discipline is microgeneration. Parasitic power.
“What, people generate power just walking up and down?”
“Pumps in the pavement, yes” she enthuses. “There is immense energy being wasted out there, waiting for us to capture it. Everything you do and say is a source of power.”
“You should hook it up to our legal department.”
It gets a laugh.
“And what do you do to help make Ray Power A-Number One?” Vishram says to a young, almost-good-looking woman whose lapel badge identifies her as Sonia Yadav.
“Nothing,” she says with a smile.
“Ah,” Vishram says, moving on. Hands to shake. Faces to remember. She calls after him. “When I said nothing, I meant, energy from nothing. Endless free power.”
“You’ve got my attention now.”
“I’m taking you to the zero-point lab,” Sonia Yadav explains as she leads Vishram and his entourage to her research unit. She looks at him closely.
“Your eyeballs are moving. Is someone messaging you?”
Vishram shuts off Marianna Fusco’s silent commentary with a twist of a finger.
His father’s engineers have designed a building more furniture than architecture. All is wood and fabric, curved into bows and arches, translucent and airy. The place smells of sap and resin and sandalwood. The floors are strip maple inlaid with marquetry panels of scenes from the Ramayana. Sonia Yadav looks pointedly at Marianna’s heels. She slips them off and closes them in her bag. It feels right to Vishram to be barefoot here. It’s a holy place.
At first sight the zero-point lab disappoints Vishram. There are no humming machines or looping power conduits, just desks and glass partitions, paper piled unsteadily on the floor, whiteboards on the walls. The white boards are full of scrawls. They continue onto the walls. Every square centimetre of surface is crammed with symbols and letters wedged at crazy angles to each other, lassoed in loops of black felt marker, harpooned by long lines and arrows in black and blue to some theorem on the other side of the board. The brawling equations spread over desks, benches, any flat surface that will take felt marker. The mathematics is as unintelligible to Vishram as Sanskrit, but the cocoon of thought and theory and vision comforts him, like being inside a prayer.
“It may not look like much but the research team at EnGen would pay a lot of money to get in here,” Sonia Yadav says. “We do most of the hot stuff over on the University collider, or at the LHC in Europe, but this is where the real work gets done. The headwork.”
“Hot stuff?”
“We’re following two approaches, hot and cold, we call them. I won’t bore you with the theory but it’s to do with energy levels and quantum foam. Two ways of looking at nothing.”
“And you’re hot?” Vishram asks, studying the hieratic glyphs on the wall.
“Absolutely,” Sonia Yadav says.
“And can you do what you say; generate power from nothing?” She stands firm with a light of belief in her eyes. “Yes, I can.”
“Mr. Ray, we really should be moving on,” Director Surjeet urges.
As his party leaves, Vishram picks up a felt marker and quickly writes on the desktop: DNNR, 2NITE?
Sonia Yadav reads the invite upside down.
“Strictly professional,” Vishram whispers. “Tell me what’s hot and what’s not.” OK she writes in red. 8. PICK-UP HERE. She underlines the OK twice.
Immediately outside in the corridor is a sight that instantly detumesces Vishram’s good humour: Govind, in his too-tight suit, with his phalanx of lawyers, bowling down the corridor as if he owned the place. Govind spies his younger brother, opens his mouth to greet, damn, bless, chide—Vishram doesn’t care, never hears because he calls out, loudly,
“Mr. Surjeet, could you please call security.” Then, as the Director talks into his palmer, Vishram holds up one single, commanding finger in front of his brother and his crew. “You, say nothing. This is not your place. This is my place.” Security arrives; two very large Rajputs in red turbans. “Please escort Mr. Ray from the building and scan his face for the security system. He is not to return without my express, written permission.”
The Rajputs seize Govind, one on each arm. It gives Vishram’s heart a pile of pleasure to watch them march him at a fast trot down the corridor.
“Hear me, hear me!” Govind shouts back over his shoulder. “He will wreck it like he has wrecked everything else he has ever been given. I know him of old. The leopard cannot change his spots, he will ruin you all, destroy this great company. Don’t listen to him, he knows nothing. Nothing!”
“I’m so sorry about that,” Vishram says when the doors have sealed behind his still-protesting brother. “Anyway, shall we continue, or have I seen everything?”
It had begun at breakfast.
“Just what have I inherited?” Vishram asked Marianna Fusco through mouthfuls of kitchiri at his breakfast briefing on the east balcony.
“Basically, you’ve got the research and development division.” She laid out the documents around his greasy plate like tarot cards.
“So, no money and a pile of responsibility.”
“I don’t think this is something your father thought up on a whim.”
“How much did you know about this?”
“What, who, where, and when.”
“You’re missing a ‘w’ there.”
“I don’t think anyone understands that ‘w.’”
I can, Vishram thought. I know how good it is to walk away from expectations and obligations. I know how frightening and freeing it is to go our there with nothing but a begging bowl, chancing people’s laughter.
“You could have told me.”
“And breach my professional confidentiality?”