“Nearly done, baba,” Nanak says. “You can open your eyes, you know.”
Only that cocoon of anaesthetic gel kept Tal from dying of pain. The aeai played yts neural network like a sitar. Tal imagined fingers moving, legs running, felt urgings and stirrings where yt never had before, saw visions and wonders, heard choruses and God whistling, was sucked down by washes of sensation and emotion yt had never known before, hallucinated monster striped buzzing insects filling yts mouth like a gag, then, in the same instant, dwindling to the size of a pea, revisited places yt had never been, regreeted friends yt had never known, remembered lives yt had never lived, tried to cry out yts mother’s name, yts father’s name, God’s name, screamed and screamed but yts body had been shut down, mouthless, helpless. Then the aeai shut Tal’s brain down again and in the amnesia of anaesthesia yt forgot all the wonders and horrors yt had met in the tank of gel. The helpful machines put the top back on yts head, reconnected everything that had been disconnected and draped Tal in yts new skin fresh from the stem cell vat. Five days more yt hung, merely unconscious, in a wash of cell stimulant medium, dreaming the most astonishing dreams. On the tenth morning the aeai disconnected from Tal’s skull, drained the tank, and washed down yts sleek new skin as yt lay there, complete, new, on the transparent plastic, shallow chest rising and falling in the white spotlights.
“Well, that’s you,” Nanak says and Tal opens yts eyes to see the scanner ring split in two and retract inside the diagnostic bed.
“Am I?”
“Apart from time’s usual depredations, you look lovely inside. Full of light. Otherwise, the usual homily about saturated fats, alcohol, tobacco, nonprescription drugs and moderate exercise.”
“What about.” Tal raises a hand to yts head.
“Not a damn thing wrong with you. I issue you a complete bill of health. Isn’t that good? Now, get up and have dinner with me and tell me what this is all about.”
Swinging over the side of the diagnostic bed, Tal tries out a dozen excuses to turn down the invitation and then realises that if yt doesn’t tell Nanak what’s in yts heart, then the entire trip to Patna will have been folly.
“Right then,” yt says. “I accept.”
Dinner is simple, exquisite vegetarian thalis taken on the flying bridge from which captains once overviewed their flotillas of barges. Nanak’s assistant and cook Suniti flits in and out with bottles of cold Kingfisher and advice on how each dish should be eaten, “a mouthful, and hold it until your tongue goes numb,” “two bites,” “a spoon of this, a bite of that, then the lime.” Gandaik FTZ winds down after its day earning dividends for the medical professionals of Nebraska. Music and the smell of ganja coil up from the barges where entrepreneurs emerge from their workshops to lean on the rails and smoke and crack beer in the last of the sun.
“So, now you must pay me,” Ninak says and when yt sees the consternation on Tal’s face, yt touches it lightly, reassuringly. “No no. Suniti will take care of that. You must pay me what you owe me for this excellent food and fine evening and my exquisite company, with what you have kept from me all day, bad baba.”
Tal rolls on to yts back on the soft tatami mat. Above yt, the sky is barred with straps of purple cloud, the first yt has seen in months. Yt imagines yt can smell rain, so long anticipated, an imagination of a memory.
“It’s someone, but you knew that anyway.”
“I had an idea.”
A lone bansuri throws notes out in the softening dark. A musician, down there amongst the badmashes, coiling out an ancient Bihari folk tune.
“Someone who is clever and successful and quiet and deep, with good taste and mysteries and secrets and is scared by it all but wants it so much.”
“Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, janum?”
“Someone who happens to be a man.” Nanak leans forward. “This is a problem to you?”
“I got out of Mumbai to get away from complicated relationships and I’m in the most complex of them all. I Stepped Away because I didn’t want to have to play that game; the man and woman game. You gave me new rules, you put them in my head, down there and now they don’t work, either.”
“You wanted me to check out that everything was functioning within its operational parameters.”
“There has to be something wrong with me.”
“There is nothing wrong with you, Tal. I saw right through you to the other side. You are perfectly healthy in body, mind, and relationships. Now you want me to tell you what to do. You call me guru, you think I’m wise, but I won’t do that. There’s never been a rule of human behaviour that hasn’t been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules. It’s a phenomenon of this universe that the simplest of rules can give rise to the most complex behaviours. The implants just give you a new set of reproduction-free imperatives, that’s all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn’t be worth anything if they didn’t give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute.”
The notes of the flute stalk Tal. Yt smells a rumour of rain on the evening wind that blows up from the river.
“It’s who, not what,” Suniti comments as she gathers up thalis. “Do you love him?”
“I think about him all the time, I can’t get him out of my head, I want to call him and buy him shoes and make him music mixes and find out all the things he likes to eat. He likes Middle Eastern, I know that.”
Nanak rocks on yts hip bones.
“Yes yes yes yes yes. My assistant is, of course, right as she always is, but you haven’t answered her question. Do you love him?”
Tal takes a breath.
“I think so.”
“Then you know what you must do,” Nanak says and Suniti scoops the metal dishes up in the tablecloth and whisks them away, but Tal can tell from the set of her shoulders that she is pleased.
After the dinner is the Jacuzzi. Nanak and Tal lap in nipple-deep water in the big wooden tub on the other wing of the flying bridge, dappled with marigold petals and a subtle slick of tea-tree oil, for Nanak’s persistent athlete’s foot. Incense rises vertically on three sides, the air is preternaturally still, climate in abeyance, waiting.
Patna’s airgiow is a golden nebula on the western horizon. Nanak strokes Tal’s thighs with its long, articulate big toes. There is no gendered rule of arousal in it. It is touching, what nutes do, friends do. Tal lifts two mote Kingfishers from the plastic cool box, uncaps them on the side of the tub. One for yt, one for yts guru.
“Nanak, do you think it will be all right?”
“You, personally? Me? Yes. It is easy for people to have happy endings. This city, this country, this war? I am not so sure. Nanak sees a lot from yts bridge here. Most days I can see the Indian Brown Cloud, I see the water level go down, I see skeletons on the beach, but they don’t frighten me. It is those dreadful children, those Brahmins, they call them. Whoever gave them that name knew a thing of two. I tell you what it is scares Nanak about them. It’s not that they live twice as long, half as fast as we do, or that they are children with the rights and tastes of adults. What frightens me is that we have reached a stage where wealth can change human evolution. You could inherit crores of money, send your children to American schools—like all those inbred half-mad Maharajahs—but you couldn’t buy an IQ, or talents or good looks even. Anything you could do was cosmetic. But with those Brahmins, you can buy a new infrastructure. Parents have always wanted to give their children advantages, now they can hand it down through all future generations. And what parents would not want that for their child? The Mahatma, blessed be his memory, was wise in many many ways, but he never spoke bigger nonsense than when he said about the heart of India was in the villages. The heart of India, and her head, has always been in the middle classes. The British knew this, it’s how a handful of them run us for a hundred years. We are an aggressively bourgeois society; wealth, status, respectability. Now all of those have become directly inheritable, in the genes. You can lose all your money on the markets, go bankrupt, gamble it away, be ruined in a flood but no one can take your genetic advantage away from you. It is a treasure no thief can steal, a legacy they will pass free to their descendants. I have been thinking about this a lot, these days.”