Tokyo Cancelled

But his nights were another life altogether. A life of black solitude when everyone around him demonstrated a loyalty more primal–happily, eagerly, gratefully, and so simply!–leaving him behind for the arms of sleep, abandoning him to wish away the hours of night, to experience time as something he had somehow to get through, and thus to become submerged in pointlessness.

While his wife slept upstairs he would wander through their many rooms, like a ghost condemned to revisit a castle every night for eternity, slinking tediously through the same corridors centuries after the life he once knew has given way to silence and dereliction. He would rifle the house aimlessly for new soporifics–books to draw him out of his boredom and panic enough that sleep might steal up on him unnoticed; videos or TV shows for him to surrender his mind to for a while. He wandered in the deep shadows of the garden smoking unaccustomed cigarettes, read the day’s news again, finished off bowls of peanuts that had been put out hours ago for evening guests; finally, he went drowsily to bed to lie next to his wife only to find in his horizontality some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution. At length, the windows would lighten, the azan would sound from distant mosques, and he would start to change from yesterday’s clothes into today’s, simultaneously relieved to be no longer alone and tortured that his strange impotence had been confirmed once more.

Of course he had consulted doctors. He had tried sleeping pills, relaxants, anti-anxiety drugs, meditation and hypnosis. He had diligently read the publications of the Sleep Disorder Society of America and the scientific publications of all the leading somnologists. He had tried every kind of therapeutic bed, pillow, earplug, and eyemask. He had followed the suggestions of friends to play Mozart or classical ragas very softly in his room, had even given a chance to the Sounds of Nature CD collection someone had sent him, lying in bed to the surround sound of cicadas in the rainforest or underwater whale recitatives, and trying to detect signs of somnolence inside himself. None appeared. No therapy, from folk to pharmacological, had managed to prise open for him the gates of the kingdom of slumber, and after some years he stopped looking for help. He did not sleep, and that was that.

It was doctors who confirmed to him, however, what he had himself long suspected: that a lifetime without sleep was almost certainly responsible for the fact that, after ten years of marriage, he and his wife had never conceived a child.

When Rajiv Malhotra had married the Bollywood superstar Mira Sardari, the newspapers had been apoplectic with idolizing, goggling glee. The romance had every element of legend: the society man of the 70s who was jilted by the beautiful–and older–mother and waited twenty years to marry the daughter; the helicopter accident that orphaned the teenage Mira and made her the child of India herself, with doting parents in all the leading families; the secret wedding in a Himalayan resort while Mira was at the height of her fame and in the middle of her classic Exile (no one was there, but everyone was an eyewitness); the ending of her film career ‘so I can devote myself to helping those less fortunate than myself’; his sophistication and massive commerical power. But children, which they both saw as the fulfilment of their lives, did not come. Doctors advised the couple that Rajiv’s sleepless body, incapable of rejuvenating itself, would never produce seed. His private thoughts, that had dwelt single-mindedly on iron and tin for so long, became more and more obsessed by flesh and blood. There was a quietness between him and his wife. And after a while, the editors of newspapers, obsessed with dynasties even more than with money, themselves turned quiet.

One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.

As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.

He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.

He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.

The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.

‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’

‘How is everything?’

‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’

‘Of course, sir.’

The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.

From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.

‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.

‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’

At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.

‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.

‘Hi, it’s me.’

‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’

‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’

‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’

‘Not now.’

‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’

‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’

‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’

‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’

‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’

‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’

‘How dare you talk to me like that?’

‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’

‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them to wait. Listen to me for one minute. You’ll be as excited as I am.’

‘OK, I’m listening–Why is this guy letting her talk on like that? Who cares about her damned dinner? Just give her what she wants and let’s move on–Go on Mira.’

‘SCIENTISTS PRODUCE VIABLE GORILLA CLONE: Claim Human Cloning now Possible.’

‘Madam, can we start from the beginning? Name and the date of travel?’

‘It’s datelined Cambridge, England. I’ll start from the beginning. A group of scientists at Bios Laboratories Ltd today announced they had produced an eight-cell gorilla foetus that would, had it been implanted in a mother gorilla, have given rise to a normal pregnancy and infant. The scientists destroyed the foetus, saying that their objectives were simply to confirm a number of theoretical and technical hypotheses, not to create quote public curiosities–blah blah blah…’

‘Last Thursday. Flight 162. Name is Laurie Kurt.’

‘OK, this is the bit: Dr Stephen Hall, the Technical Director at Bios Laboratories, said that the experiment showed how far the science had come.’

‘Let me just find that on the system for you. Hope you made it to the dinner in the end, after they’d come so far?’

‘In the end. Thank God. They were venture capitalists from France who were looking to put money into my company. It was the only time in four months we all had spare diary time. Can you believe that?’

‘I’m going crazy listening to this small talk. If this guy wants to chat he can do it in his spare time. He’s supposed to do one call every two minutes. What’s his average? Check it.’

Somewhere in California a police siren swelled, Dopplered, and faded.

‘Rajiv? Are you listening? “A few years ago these eight cells would have been on the cover of Time magazine and people would have been saying that this has turned our idea of nature on its head.”’

‘We’ve got this amazing technology, it’s going to turn the lives of three hundred million Americans literally upside-down–and I’m sitting stuck in St Louis–of all places!–missing the only time I could get with these VCs in four months.’

‘“Now we have well-established techniques for doing this kind of thing, and can achieve our objectives with a high degree of predictability–and no one is really surprised anymore.”’

‘He’s making eighteen calls an hour, sir.’

‘Then why is he still here?–Mira, hang on a minute–That’s not how you were briefed. If he’s not doing his job, fire him. That’s what you’re here for!’

‘You can imagine how I felt–’

‘Otherwise I’ll fire you.’

‘When asked what this meant for the future of human cloning, Hall was unequivocal. “It’s going to happen. We could do it now. And someone will do it. One thing that history has taught us is that human curiosity never sleeps, no matter what obstacles the doomsayers try to put in its way.”’

‘Mira, please!’

‘–this was possibly the most important moment of my life–’

‘Oh, Rajiv–you’re on television! Can you hear?’

Rajiv’s microphoned voice crackled through his mobile phone.

‘India’s new wealth will come not from any natural resource but from an entirely fortuitous fact: its one billion people slap bang on the opposite side of the world from America.’

‘–they told me I would change the future–’

‘A billion people awake while America’s three hundred million sleep. Awake in their droves, ten and a half time zones from New York, thirteen and a half from San Francisco.’

‘He’s been on this call for four and a half minutes already.’

‘You look so nice. Nice smile. And people are applauding.’

‘In the electronic age it doesn’t matter where anyone is anymore.’

‘Is anyone apart from me remotely conscious of the value of time, for God’s sake?’

‘And Indians can fit in a whole day of work between the time that Americans swipe out in the evening and the time they set their double mocha down on their desk the next morning. It’s an unbeatable formula.’

‘Kurt, Laurie–I have it.’

‘Thanks to us, the sun need never set on the American working day.’

‘OK, I have that delayed flight on my screen here. And the other ticket you purchased. American Airlines. Paid for at 2.24 p.m. Central Time last Thursday. We’re very sorry for the delay and the inconvenience.’

‘India’s new asset is its time zone. Indian Standard Time is its new pepper, its new steel!’

‘We’ll credit one thousand eight hundred fifteen dollars and forty-seven cents to the American Express card you paid with.’

‘That’s the end of that news item. But you did look nice.’

‘Thank you very much. You have an accent. Where are you from?’

‘He’s out of here.’

‘I’m from India.’

‘Now listen. Protesters–cloning–undermining society–yes: “These technologies mean dramatic new possibilities for medical therapy and for bringing children to infertile couples, and when people realize that their world view can continue unthreatened by what people like me do–and that previously incurable conditions can now be treated–they’ll stop making all this fuss.”’

Mira’s voice began to quiver with the massage. Rajiv could hear the smack of palms on oily skin.

‘India! I would so love to go to India. I believe Americans have so much to learn from India. What do you think of the US?’

‘It goes on: Chief Executive Robert Mills confirmed that human cloning was not on the company’s agenda. “It’s illegal in this country anyway,” he said. “But the mandate we have been given by our investors is very precise: to develop a patent portfolio of world-class sheep and cattle genetic material, and the techniques to exploit that material in the global agricultural marketplace.”’

‘America is–fine! Great!’

‘Time!’

‘“The gorilla experiment was part of our investigation into these techniques, but Bios Laboratories will not be pursuing its work in primate production.”’

‘Where are you based?’

‘Madam, I’m getting another call. I really ought to go.’

‘OK. Thanks for your help.’

‘Time’s up? What do you mean time’s up?’

‘You have to make sure these people understand that there is only one thing that is important here and that’s efficiency.’

‘My massage is over. Can’t believe an hour is up already.’

‘You have to make sure they know how to avoid this kind of chitchat. And deal with that guy. This isn’t a chat line we’re running.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘I’m sorry, Mira, I’m doing something here.’

‘Were you listening to the article?’

‘Yes. In fact I know Stephen Hall. He was at Cambridge with me. We played squash.’

‘Don’t you see? This is our chance! We can have a child! Why don’t you go and see him?’

‘OK, Mira. I will.’

A few days later, Dr Stephen Hall showed Rajiv into the living room of a large old house whose Victorian lattice windows filtered out most of the scant light of the Cambridge afternoon. They sat down on armchairs that were crowded into the tiny space left by the grand piano and outsized television that dominated the room.

‘Now. Tell me what can I do for you?’

Stephen poured cream into his coffee and stirred intently.

‘I need you to make my wife and I a child. We will pay, of course.’ Rajiv narrated the history of his ill-fated attempts at reproduction.

Dr Hall considered deeply. He looked anxious.

‘Have you thought of adopting?’

‘I haven’t come here for your bloodless European solutions. I don’t need to visit one of the world’s leading biotechnology experts to get advice on adoption. I want a child whose flesh and blood is my wife’s and my own. That is why I am here.’

‘How much would you pay?’

‘Five million pounds.’

‘I see.’ He took a gulp from his coffee cup with just-perceptible agitation.

‘You realize that we’d need to do the work outside the country. It’s illegal here. I’d probably set up a lab in the Bahamas. We’d need to ship a lot of equipment and people. It could–’

‘I know how much money you’ll need to spend and it’s nowhere near five million pounds. I’d already included a healthy profit for you. But if it’s an issue, let’s say seven million. No more negotiation.’

‘And if I were to say yes, what would you want?’

‘I want you to make me a son. A perfect son. A son who will be handsome and charming. Brilliant and hardworking. Who can take over my business. Who will never disappoint or shame me. Who will be happy. A son, above all, who can sleep.’

‘In a probabilistic science like genetics it is dangerous to try and optimize every parameter. You start stretching chance until it snaps and you end up getting nothing.’

‘Nevertheless. Those are my demands.’

‘I’ll do it.’

Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than ‘Isn’t it only two hours since breakfast?’ High-alcohol wine, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anaesthesia completed the gentle high-altitude lullaby.

No matter how many times he flew, Rajiv, naturally, never succumbed to these sedatives. As time slowed down all around him, his heartbeat accelerated with the raging speed on the other side of the titanium membrane, the whole screaming, blinking 300-litres-a-second combustion of it, the 800-kilometre-an-hour gale in which Karachi-Tehran-Moscow-Prague-Frankfurt-Amsterdam each stuck for a second on the windscreen like a sheet of old newspaper and then swooped into the past. As the plane cut its fibre-optic jet stream through the sky, Rajiv’s insomniac sorrow at living in a different time from everyone else became panic as the movement of the day tilted and buckled, the unwavering sun, always just ahead, holding time still for hours and hours and burning his dim, sleepless pupils. Used to carrying the leaden darkness of the night through the day with him, he now carried Indian Standard Time in his guts into far-flung places, and there was an ear-splitting tectonic scraping within him as it went where it should never have been. Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities–until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like jet lag.

It was the same, every time.

Stephen worked quickly. Working in the Bahamas from blood and tissue samples sent from Delhi he managed to mimic the processes by which the DNA of two adults is combined at the moment of fertilization. He took human egg cells from the ovaries of aborted embryos, blasted the nucleus from them, and replaced it with the new genetic combination. He created a battery of two hundred eggs, and waited.

At length he identified one healthy and viable zygote, splitting happily into two every few hours. He called Mira, who flew out that day, and implanted it in her womb.

She returned to Delhi via London, where she had some shopping to do in Bond Street. Neither customs nor security detected the microscopic contraband she carried within her.

After nine months, Mira was rosy and rotund, and Rajiv an exuberant and solicitous father-to-be. No one could remember seeing him so glad or so animated. Even the black crescents that seemed branded under his eyes started to fade. He called Mira several times a day to enquire after her temperature and the condition of her stomach. He brought her flowers and sweets in the evening and hosted small parties in his home where she would dazzle the guests with her happiness and even replay Bollywood routines from the old days. At length, her labour began.

The obstetrician and nurses came to the house to attend her in her bedroom while Rajiv sat in his study with the door closed, fiddling with a pencil. He sweated with suspense, but would not allow himself to venture out. Finally, a nurse came to the door.

‘The labour is over, sir. And you have twins. A boy and a girl. Both are healthy. You had better come.’

Rajiv ran past her to his wife’s bedroom. There she lay, exhausted and pale, and beside her on the bed were two sleeping babies. One was a radiant, beautiful girl. The other was a boy, a shrunken, misshapen boy with an outsized head that had the pointed shape of a cow’s.

‘What is this?’ he cried in horror. ‘That is not my son! That is some–creature!’

The nurses susurrated, trying to bring calm and allow the new mother to rest, reassuring the father, telling him that new babies often look a bit–funny?–this was quite normal and not to worry, and anyway we all learn to love our children in the end, even if they have some adorable little quirk that makes them different–isn’t that what also makes them unique?

Rajiv was not listening. ‘I want that child out of my house this day!’ He stormed out and summoned his lifelong companion and servant, Kaloo.

‘A terrible thing has happened, Kaloo. My wife has given birth to two children: a girl, and a boy who is a deviant. I cannot allow the boy to stay here a moment longer. I want you to take him away. Give him to a family where he’ll be cared for. Promise them a yearly stipend–whatever they need–as long as they look after him. But I don’t want to know where he is or what happens to him, and I don’t want him to know about me. Take him away, Kaloo! Away from Delhi–somewhere else. And as long as we are all alive this secret stays between you and me.’

In a very few hours the matter was taken care of. Telling no one, not even Rajiv, where he was going, Kaloo wrapped the baby up and set out with a wet nurse for the airport. He took Rajiv’s private plane and flew to Bombay. While the nurse looked after the baby in a hotel room, Kaloo wandered the streets looking for a family who would care for the child. His gaze was attracted by the kindly face of a Muslim bookseller. He approached him and told him the story.

‘Sir–my wife and I would be so happy! We have no children and have always wanted a son!’

‘I will deliver the boy to you this very evening. And every year on this day I will visit you with money. You cannot contact me, nor should you make any attempt to discover the origins of the boy. I hope you will be loving parents to him.’

He and the wet nurse took the baby to the bookseller’s home that evening and delivered him into his new mother’s arms. She wept with joy.

‘We will call him Imran,’ she said reverentially. ‘He will be a man like a god.’

Rajiv and Mira named their daughter Sapna, and from the first day of her life everyone who saw her was enchanted by her. She was so beautiful that jaded politicians and wrinkled businessmen rediscovered the meaning of the word ‘breathtaking’ when they looked into her cot. As Rajiv forgot his rage of her birthday, and Mira allowed her resentment of her husband’s peremptory behaviour to subside, both of them lapsed into a deep love affair with their daughter.

Everyone agreed there was something marvellous about her sleep. People would stop at Rajiv’s house just to see the baby sleeping, for the air she exuded with her slow breathing smelled better than anything they had ever smelt. It made one feel young and vital, it made you feel–though none of them would ever say it aloud–like reproducing!

Eternally ignorant himself of the pleasure of sleep, Rajiv’s body and mind were calmed and rejuvenated by the voluptuous sleep of his daughter.

She was only four or five years old when she sat at the family piano and picked out, with unaccustomed fingers but rapidly increasing harmonic complexity, a Hindi film song she had heard on the radio that morning. Rajiv immediately installed an English piano teacher who quickly found herself involved in conversations of the greatest philosophical complexity with her young pupil, who was interested in understanding why the emotions responded so readily to certain melodic or harmonic combinations.

One morning, when Rajiv entered Sapna’s bedroom to kiss her goodbye, he noticed something he had not seen before. The wooden headboard of her bed seemed to have sprouted a green shoot that in one night had grown leaves and a little white flower. He summoned his wife.