Teranesia

‘She was called Radha. And Baba was called Rajendra. They lived in a huge, crowded, noisy city called Calcutta.’ Prabir repeated himself in Bengali.

He turned his bedside lamp on low, then took his notepad from his desk and summoned up a picture of his mother. It was the shot taken at the IRA parade, the only image he had of her, rescued from the net workspace where he’d placed it before deciding not to mail it to Eleanor.

Madhusree’s eyes lit up in amazement.

Prabir said, ‘Radha knew everything about the human body. She was the smartest, strongest person in Calcutta. Her Ma and Baba had a big, beautiful house, but she didn’t care about that.’ He scrolled the notepad’s window to reveal the picture of his father; Madhusree had apparently grown nonchalant about metal through skin, but she leant forward eagerly to examine Rajendra’s face, more recognisable than her mother’s. ‘So she fell in love with Rajendra, who had nothing, but he was smart and strong like Radha. And he loved her too.’

Prabir thought: I’m ruining it. He didn’t want to fill her head with sugar-coated stories that might as well be fairy tales. He could still feel his father’s hands around him, holding him up to the sky. He could still hear his mother’s voice, telling him they were heading for the island of butterflies. How could he ever make them as real again for Madhusree?

Madhusree was having second thoughts about the picture of Radha. ‘Why isn’t she crying?’

Prabir put his fingers to his cheek. ‘There’s a spot where there’s hardly any nerve endings.’ He’d checked one of the virtual bodies on the net. ‘There are lots of tiny threads in your skin for feeling pain, but if you don’t cut them it doesn’t hurt.’

Madhusree looked doubtful.

There were kebab skewers in the kitchen. He could sterilise one in a gas flame, or use disinfectant from the medicine cabinet. The thought of pushing the metal right through his own flesh made his stomach clench; he wouldn’t have minded someone else performing the trick on him—that could hardly have been worse than the injections he’d had to dissolve the scar tissue on his face—but the prospect of having to apply the force himself was daunting.

But his mother had done it; that wasn’t a fairy tale, the proof was right in front of him. It was just a matter of being confident that you understood what you were doing.

He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He put the notepad down on the pillow and climbed off the bed. ‘Just the cheeks, though, not the tongue. And when you’re older, you have to help me pull the truck.’

Madhusree didn’t make commitments lightly; she examined the picture of her father again. Prabir leant over her. ‘Look at their faces. If it hurt, they wouldn’t be smiling, would they?’

Madhusree considered the merits of this argument, then nodded solemnly.

‘OK.’

PART THREE

6

Prabir worked late to finish a project, to keep it from nagging at his thoughts all weekend. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but there were some minor problems that demanded his concentration; he lost himself in the details and the time flew by. But when he was done, instead of dashing for the elevators with a clear conscience, gleefully consigning the bank to oblivion, he sat for fifteen minutes in a kind of stupor, staring out across the rows of deserted cubicles.

He turned back to his work station and reran the tests on the credit card plug-in, one more time. It was a standard piece of anthropomorphic software, an ‘investment adviser’ with voice and appearance tailored to the customer’s psychological and cultural profile, who appeared on the card and offered suggestions for shuffling money between various financial instruments. It was a sales gimmick, more than anything else. People who played the markets seriously had to arm themselves with far more sophisticated tools, and know how to use them; anyone who didn’t want to waste time becoming an expert was better off relying on one of the bank’s standard low-risk algorithms. And most people did just that. But the bank had identified a demographic of potential customers who’d be attracted by this kind of novelty: the illusion of technology labouring ceaselessly on their behalf, but only to put the facts at their fingertips, always leaving the final decision to them.

It was worth doing anything well. Even this. But as Prabir watched the array of sixteen sample advisers reacting flawlessly to a barrage of test data, he just felt tired and ridiculous, as if he’d stayed back to straighten all the pictures in the corridors. He wasn’t even impressing his superiors, making his position more secure; the only way to do that would be to spend his evenings studying advanced financial voodoo at quant school, a prospect he found dispiriting beyond words. But he’d probably be idle now for half the day on Monday, before the sales consultants and market researchers made up their minds on the next gimmick.

As he stepped out of his cubicle, the screen and the desk light flickered off; a sprite in the ceiling guided him through the darkness to the elevators. Wasting a few hours on a Friday night was no great tragedy, but he felt the same sense of anticlimax every time he went looking for some kind of satisfaction from the job. He had to be stupid, or morbidly compulsive, to keep on acting as if there was any to be found.

It was only half past nine, but as he walked out on to Bay Street he suddenly felt light-headed with hunger, as if he’d been fasting all day. He bought a glutinous foil-packed meal from a vending machine, and ate it waiting for the bus. It was a crisp winter night; the sky looked clear, but it was a blank starless grey behind the street lights.

When he arrived home, Madhusree’s door was closed, so he didn’t disturb her. As he sank into the couch the TV came on, with no sound and the picture half-size. Watching an image three metres wide was fine if you wanted to get drawn in, but all that activity in your peripheral vision was counter-productive if you were really just hoping to doze off as soon as possible. Prabir kept thinking about work—even with the adviser finished, there were half a dozen things he could be tinkering with—but the bank had a strict policy of no remote access for software development.

Someone rang the doorbell down on the street; a window appeared in the corner of the screen, showing Felix shuffling his feet against the cold. Prabir felt a rush of guilt; he’d been meaning to call him all week. Felix spread his arms and looked straight into the camera, comically imploring. Prabir said, ‘Come on up.’

Felix entered the apartment smiling, looking around. ‘So what are you up to?’

Prabir indicated the TV. ‘Stupefaction therapy.’

‘Do you want to go somewhere?’

‘I don’t know. I just got home; I’m pretty tired.’

Felix nodded sympathetically. ‘Me too.’ He didn’t look tired. ‘I came straight here; I had a batch of coins in a reducing bath I couldn’t leave.’

‘Have you eaten?’ Prabir took a few steps towards the kitchen. ‘We’ve got plenty of food, if you don’t mind something reheated.’

‘No, it’s OK. I grabbed something at work.’ Felix took off his jacket and they sat on the couch.

Prabir said, ‘What kind of coins?’

‘English. Eighteenth century. Nothing very interesting.’ Felix was a preservationist at the Royal Ontario Museum; his job was a mixture of everything from art history to zoology. He often complained that most of what he did was mundane lab work, but he seemed to have a very different notion of ‘mundane’ than anyone who’d worked in retail banking.

He leant forward and kissed Prabir, then moved closer and put an arm around him. Prabir did his best to respond enthusiastically, kissing back, trying to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. He wanted nothing more than to be at ease, to be as unselfconscious as Felix was, but his heart still skipped a beat out of sheer panic at the first touch.

Even when Madhusree had first moved in with him, nine years before, Amita hadn’t fought him for custody;