Sagramanda, a Novel of Near-Future India

single red jewel that glistened on her forehead. 'I was just thinking, Depahli. Though I have great respect for all the traditions of my family as well as those of my ancestors, I'm not really what you would call a religious person. But after all the prayers of my childhood, and all that were never answered, I have to admit that Lord Ganesh finally came through with some help.'

'Very substantial help, I should say.' Her smile grew suddenly uncertain. 'Do you think that your father will ever be able to find us and make trouble for us again?'

He shook his head. He was confident now, sure of himself and his future. Of their future. 'My father is a smart and clever man, but only within the world he knows. That is the world of eastern India, from Sagramanda south to Puri and onward as far as Visakhapatnam. He knows nothing of the world beyond except what he has seen in movies and on the vit, and that will not be enough to enable him to find us-even if he can find the will and the money.' He smiled at her. 'Besides, he knows nothing about skiing.'

She cocked her head sideways at him, one golden earring dangling. 'Skiing? You know nothing about skiing either, Taneer.'

'I know. But I will, and soon. You will, too.'

Turning, pressing her back into the single bench seat of the rickshaw, she snuggled close, his hand still holding hers. 'I have never seen snow, my love, except on the tops of the Himalayas, from a distance. In the movies, everyone is always talking about how cold it is.'

'They're right.' He let his cheek rest gently against the top of her head. 'It is cold. But we won't be.'

Forensics had largely finished their work, and the morgue detail was cleaning up. Even for those who dealt daily with the violent con sequences of the seemingly endless conflicts that characterized Sagramanda's merciless underbelly, the remains of the bodies of Jena Chalmette and the tall assassin were sufficiently grisly to make a strong man blanch. It was what they were paid to do, however, and the crew went about its gruesome work enveloped in a respectful professional silence.

Keshu and his people were able to readily identify the foreign woman not only by matching her image to that of the carefully crafted computer composite, but through the false identification papers she carried in her large shoulder bag. The assassin proved more problem atical. He had no individual ident on his person, and they could not attempt a visual match because, due to the tiger's brief but ferocious intercession, the dead man's face had largely gone missing. The chief inspector was not concerned. Subrata and his resourceful colleagues would work their magic with research and reconstruction to produce an identification.

He knew that not only had they found the mystifying, secretive serial killer they had sought, but that the government of India and the municipality of Greater Sagramanda were to be spared the expense of incarcerating and trying her. It was not the resolution he had sought, but it was one he was content to live with. Of course, there remained the mystery of what the three, and subsequently five, people she had been stalking had been doing in the middle of the night in a restricted area of the Sundarbans Preserve, but that was not a problem for him to puzzle out. Others should, and would, attempt to follow up on that.

Then what was he still doing here? he suddenly asked himself. The sun was up, the temperature was doing likewise, he had been awake all night, and he ought not only to be on his way home-he should be home by now, snug and asleep in bed beside his wife. If she was awake, she would be concerned at his absence, but not frantic. Time and experience had taught her years ago that her husband's profession was not one that was respectful of regular hours.

Morning was always the most beautiful time of day. The ambrosial time was even more enchanting in the forest preserve. As a city cop, except for formal vacations and the occasional case that took him into Sagramanda's municipal parks, the only greenery he encountered was in the form of vegetarian meals in the departmental cafeteria.

The team from the morgue was wrapping up its macabre labors, their exertions chilling even on an increasingly hot morning. Lieu tenant Johar and several of his colleagues were compacting the crime scene, recording the last bits of environment and evidence for official records. They were taking extra care because a foreign national had been at the crux of the investigation, and details would have to be pro vided to Interpol, the EEU, and the French government. That left him free to take a walk: something else he rarely had time for.

Two trails lined with brush that had been snapped and broken by those who had fled the tiger led off into the undergrowth. Given all the intensive human activity, including the presence of choppers, the chief inspector felt confident that the big cat was now nowhere in the imme diate vicinity. Informing Johar of his intentions, Keshu struck off into the bush.

It was marvelous in the forest. Still cool enough to stroll, with the nocturnal biting insects having clocked out and their diurnal counter parts not yet having clocked in, he was able to wend his way through the tall trees in comparative comfort. Monkeys gamboled in the branches, occasionally pausing to inspect the perambulating inspector. Rollers and other birds sang songs of awakening. Ants, the true masters of the planet, scurried everywhere, busy at the same work they had performed for the forest since time immemorial. He was enveloped by green and brown, with not a machine in sight. He wandered through surroundings that were scenic, stunning, picturesque.

After ten minutes of it, he found himself starting to grow irritable.

City boy, he chided himself lamentingly. Who are you kidding here? Better stick to what you're familiar with, with what you know. Concrete and rubberized walkways are your real paths, nanocarbon pillars and glass sheathing your jungle. He started to turn to retrace his steps.

As he did so, sunlight reflecting off something on the ground caught his eye. Squatting, he reached down to pick up the piece of folded glassine. Its torn edges showed that it had been part of a larger packet. Now it was empty, except for what looked like a clutch of small seeds. Frowning, he turned the fragment of see-through envelope over in his fingers. Definitely seeds. Rising, he looked up the trail, then down. Dropped by someone, probably, in their headlong flight from the tiger.

Even ordinary seeds deserved a chance at life. Almost absently, he shoved the piece of transparent wrapping into his shirt pocket, making sure to fold it double to keep its humble contents from spilling out. Plants were just like visiting relatives, he reflected. He might not be comfortable completely surrounded by them, but in moderation and kept at a reasonable distance they could make for pleasant company.

When they finally sprouted in the self-watering window box he kept in his office, he was mildly disappointed. Hoping for something exotic, he found himself caring instead for a dense fresh growth of jugla. A common roadside weed, jugla at least had somewhat attractive, small yellow flowers. The upside was that they wouldn't require much attention to thrive. That quality would help them survive in the office of a man who very often was not there.

He had spent the morning dealing with the inevitable endless flow of paperwork, a river of reports as long and wide as the Ganges. Now it was time to go out into the field and try to follow up on half a dozen ongoing cases, not to mention the usual riots, political protests, and preholiday confrontations. His driver today was a Corporal Abuya; young, attractive, and puppy-dog eager. He smiled thinly to himself. A few days tramping through the underbelly of Sagramanda would put a damper on that just-out-of-the-academy enthusiasm. Seasoning, it was called. He wondered at what point he had stopped being seasoned and had started being aged.

As soon as he seated himself in the cruiser, pleasantries were exchanged and the corporal efficiently guided the fuel-cell-powered patrol car out of the underground motor pool garage and up into the barely controlled chaos of the city streets. Its clean-burning hydrogen-fueled engine emitted no pollutants into Sagramanda's brown but increasingly tolerable atmosphere while pushing the car along at more-than-adequate speeds.

High above the street, a miniature forest of unassuming roadside weed prospered in its window box. Looking just like any other batch of unpretentious jugla, the plants growing outside the window of Chief Inspector Keshu Jamail Singh's office were in fact slightly different from their commonplace country cousins. The end product of decades of research that had in its most recent stage been supervised by a brilliant and now-vanished biochemist, this particular variety of jugla had been genetically engineered so that, without any extra effort or special nutrients or additional attention, it emitted not one but two gaseous by-products. The usual oxygen, and most unusually and remarkably, free hydrogen.

In secret fields somewhere in central Asia, tens of thousands of acres of cotton and wheat had been plowed under to allow for the planting of a new cash crop. Much to the puzzlement and amusement of the local farmers whose lands had been bought out for the new project, the disciplined agriculturalists who had been brought in to take their place had sown neither of those traditional crops, nor millet, nor sorghum. No, the newcomers had spent