Tokyo Cancelled

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, mystified.

‘That may be so–but what is it doing there? If it grows so much in one night, one morning we will come and find it has strangled our daughter. Get someone to cut it off today and seal the spot with varnish. This bed has been here for–what?–ten years? I can’t understand how this has happened after all this time.’

That day a carpenter was brought who carefully cut off the new stem, sanded down the surface and varnished it until no sign of the growth remained. But the next morning there were two such shoots, each larger than the first and with flowers that filled the room with delightful, dizzying scent.

Rajiv was furious.

‘Change this bed immediately. Get her one with a steel frame. This is–this is–ridiculous!’

A steel bed was installed in the place of the wooden one, and for a time things returned to normal. But it was not so long before another morning visit was met by a room full of white seeds that drifted lazily on the air currents from floor to ceiling, spores emitted by the geometric rows of spiralling grasses that had sprung overnight from the antique Persian rug on the floor of Sapna’s room. Genuinely frightened this time, Rajiv called for tests and diagnoses on both grass and Sapna herself. Nothing could be determined, and Sapna had no explanation. They moved her into another bedroom, where a wicker laundry basket burst overnight into a clump of bamboo-like spears that grew through the ceiling and erupted into the room above. Wherever Sapna slept, things burst into life: sheets, clothes, newspapers, antique wardrobes–all rediscovered their ability to grow.

Each encounter with this nocturnal hypertrophy enraged Rajiv. He would stare at the upstart plant matter that invaded his daughter’s room with the purest hatred he had ever felt. It began to take him over. He could not work for his visions of galloping, coiling roots and shoots. It sickened him. He ordered all organic matter to be removed from Sapna’s bedroom. This controlled things, and for many months their lives were unaffected by this strange phenomenon. But he had been filled with a terror of vegetation, and wherever he went he kept imagining loathsome green shoots sprouting out of car seats and boardroom tables.

One morning, as he arrived at her door, he could hear her sobbing quietly inside. Terrified of what he might find, he opened the door slowly. The room was empty and calm, and Sapna lay twisted up in bed.

‘I’m bleeding, papa. Between my legs.’

Rajiv’s stomach corkscrewed inside him and he ran out of the room. Sweating inside his suit he landed heavily on Mira’s bed.

‘It’s Sapna. She needs you.’

That night, though Sapna’s room had received the customary clearing of all organic traces, and though no one heard anything, not even the sleepless Rajiv, a huge neem tree sprang from the dining room, grew up through the ceiling into the room where Sapna slept, branched out through all four walls, filled the floor above her, and broke through the roof of the house. Vines and creepers snaked up the tree during the night, locking it in a sensuous, miscegenetic embrace and disgorging provocative red flowers bursting with seed. By the time everyone awoke in the morning a crowd had already gathered outside the house to look at this extraordinary sight, and photographers were taking pictures for the city papers.

The Malhotra household stared at the tree in the way that people stare at something that cannot be part of the world they inhabit. They kept touching it, touching the places where it had burst through the walls. Rajiv became grim.

‘Get this cut down today. Get the walls mended. And then we have to find more of a solution to this.’

The tree was not the only miracle of growth to happen that night, though the other one was only discovered afterwards. Amid the furore of fertility, Mira had fallen pregnant.

Rajiv received a telephone call that day from the Defence Minister.

‘Rajiv–would you mind terribly coming in to see me this afternoon? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.’

When Rajiv arrived, a number of senior government officials had gathered to receive him.

‘Rajiv, you know how much we admire and value the contribution you make to the nation. That’s why we’re calling you in like this–informally–so we can avoid any kind of public scandal. It’s come to our notice that there have been certain–goings-on–in your household that are both untoward and unusual. Far be it from us to step into the sanctum of your private affairs, of course–but given what has happened this morning, they may not remain private for very long. We need some kind of explanation from you as to what is happening. And we need to work out a solution with you. So that there is no danger to the public. You understand how it is. Yesterday a bud, today a neem tree–tomorrow perhaps we will wake up and see only a forest where our capital city now stands.’

Rajiv was taken aback.

‘Yes. Of course. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms.’

‘Now tell us–because we are here to hear your views–what exactly is happening?’

‘ To be very honest, I don’t have a clue. It seems you probably know as much as I do.’

‘And what are you going to do about it?’

‘Well, I thought I could prevent it by simply taking certain precautions in the household. But as of this morning I’m not so sure.’

‘Rajiv, permit us to throw a few ideas in your direction. We have been putting our heads together on this issue for the last few minutes. One of my honourable friends here thought that your daughter–Sapna, is it?–could be of great service to the nation. Suggested we might use her to recultivate some of the desert regions. An elegant suggestion, but perhaps a little fanciful. From what I can gather, the peculiarities of your daughter’s sleep do not obey any obvious scientific principles, and it might be very dangerous to unleash her on the land. No, we gravitated more towards a solution that would involve some sort of–how shall I put it?–confinement. So she can do no harm to anyone–including, we are most anxious to stress, herself.

‘From the very beginning all of us, with one voice, dismissed the idea of jail. For what is your daughter guilty of? And how could a young lady with her upbringing be expected to survive alongside all the despicable souls we have in our jails? On the other hand, I am afraid to say we did not feel there would be a place for her in any of our hospitals. Too much in the public eye. Too much risk.

‘But there is something between a prison and a hospital that might suit everyone concerned. We have a number of excellent institutions for those of our citizens who are not entirely–ahem–compos mentis. Run by true professionals, out of the public eye, nice grounds where the inmates can walk–you know the sort of thing. We thought your daughter might be very happy in a place like that. She could continue her music there, we could conduct the kind of tests that might lead to her eventual recovery and reintegration, and we could ensure she had secure quarters where her own remarkable traits could cause neither upset nor disturbance. What would you say to that?’

None of them was quite prepared for Rajiv’s reaction. One must suppose that, even if you are the defence minister of the world’s second most populous nation, it is an unnerving sight to see the world’s twenty-seventh richest man on his knees before you, weeping.

‘Sir, please don’t take my daughter from me! She is everything I have, and I love her far, far more than my own wretched life. I will do anything, anything–but do not take her from me. Leave it with me, sir–I promise I will find a way out of this–I have money, resources, friends–we will sort this out, don’t worry, we will understand the problem–we will work out how it can be solved in everyone’s interest–have faith in me, sir and I will not disappoint you. Only I beg you this–please let me keep my daughter!’

The government officials were silent, and it was some time before the Minister could summon his voice again.

‘Very well, Rajiv. Perhaps we have been both unfeeling and insensitive. Please go away and think about this, and let us know what you decide–by Wednesday evening?’

After a very few days, construction began of a large tower just outside Delhi. It was to be built with techniques drawn from the design of semiconductor manufacturing plants: there would be no organic materials, no dust or impurity of any kind, and it would be cleaned twice a day by costly machines. After some consideration it was thought better not to put windows in the building lest influences from outside upset the calm equilibrium of the interior. Rajiv went every day to supervise construction, to ensure that the vast confinement he was building for his daughter was designed and constructed with as much love as possible. A leading architect was commissioned to create a fantastic interior for Sapna that included a library of three thousand books, all specially printed on polyester film, and a music room in which was placed a customized piano built entirely of steel. The drawing room contained a television with the best channels from all over the world. But no light came in from outside, and only Rajiv would keep the key to the door. The outer walls were made entirely of steel, as thick as a man’s head. Soon Sapna was transferred there.

She spent her days writing and playing the piano. She only played the western classical repertoire, but she embarked upon a new categorization of it inspired by Hindustani classical music. Her scheme disregarded entirely the biographical accidents that had placed Liszt in Paris or made Beethoven deaf, and paid scant attention to the historical circumstances from which a work sprang or the attendant generic distinctions: ‘Baroque’, ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Modern’, etc. Instead, Sapna was interested in developing rules for understanding the resonances between a particular arrangement of musical sound and the natural universe, especially as apprehended by the human emotions.

She chose the expanse of the 24-hour clock face as the map on which the results of her enquiry would be plotted. Every one of its 1,440-minute gradations was held to represent a certain configuration of emotions and natural truths (after a while she found the need to analyse down to the level of the individual second) and these in turn corresponded to the different combinations of the musical ‘essences’ (her term) that could be found in individual pieces of music. She developed a set of diagrams rather like astrological charts to facilitate the complex series of judgements that had to be made in order to uncover the essences of every piece of music and thus allocate it to the correct second of the day.

After she had spent much time correcting the flaws in her system and writing out her treatise, she devoted herself to applying it to the entire piano repertoire, playing a particular piece of music slightly earlier or slightly later each day until she was satisfied that she had hit upon the exact moment at which it achieved that special resonance, rather like a dim room in the thick of a city that is ignited with sunlight for two glorious minutes every day. Most of Bach’s suites (and, contrary to their name, a couple of Chopin’s Nocturnes) came in the morning, although many of the preludes and fugues belonged to the dead of night. The more she perfected her system, the more it seemed that time was the lost secret of European classical music. When she sat, eyes closed before her piano, waiting for the precise instant of the day (about 6.02 in the evening) for which the opening bars of Beethoven’s last piano sonata were intended, when she struck out, astonishingly, into its angular chords, it made everything anyone had heard before sound like the indistinct irritation of hotel lobby soundtracks. When restored–for that is how it felt–to its correct relationship with time, the music seemed to draw itself in the sky, to stride across the constellations and fill people’s hearts with an elation they had imagined but never felt. Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02 ness as they never had before.

Sapna’s father visited her every evening. Every day she would have discovered new things through her reading or from the television that she wanted to discuss with him. He loved her more and more; and as his wife’s pregnancy advanced and she gave birth to a healthy and perfect baby boy, he also felt himself to be in her debt. ‘It is Sapna who restored my fertility to me, even at this late stage in my life,’ he thought. ‘She it is who has finally brought me the son I requested from Dr Hall, so many years ago.’ The fact that his wife had turned her back on Sapna and decided that the whole business of her first pregnancy–illegitimately obtained, she now felt–was a curse she should have nothing more to do with; the fact that Rajiv’s new and otherwise ideal son hated the idea of Sapna from the moment he became conscious of her, would fly into a fury whenever his father unheedingly referred to her as his ‘sister’, and despised him for the care and time he lavished upon the ‘freak in the tower’–all this only increased for Rajiv the poignancy of his daughter’s situation. He never ceased to feel the pain of her incarceration. ‘She deserves so much more.’ It broke his heart every evening to leave her there, and lock the door. Every night he stayed slightly longer, listening to her music or discussing literature or history.

One thing she never discussed with him was the fact that she had fallen in love with a television star. A television star with a bull-shaped head.

The shrunken baby Imran had grown up under the loving care of his parents who lived in the ramshackle bookshop his father ran in a backstreet near to where the tides of the Arabian Sea are broken by the minareted island of Haji Ali’s tomb. The tiny shop had everything: not only guidebooks, innumerable editions of the Koran and stacks of poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, but also perfumes, potions, and pendants with prayers engraved upon them. Pilgrims from small towns would come for souvenirs: plastic wall clocks that showed, behind the inconstant wavering hands, the steadfastness of the marble tomb whose domes were topped with flashing red and yellow lights for effect (‘Keeps perfect time! Will last for years.’); calendars that showed the Ka’aba surrounded by majestic whizzing planets and crescent moons in magentas and emerald greens; novelty prayer mats on which the arch of a mihrab framed a spectacular paradise of golden domes and minarets and silver palm trees. Sleeping on the shop counter, baby Imran would stay awake watching the Turkic elegance of the Muslim wonders waxing and waning in the night sky by the intermittent illumination of hundreds of gaily-coloured LEDs.

He grew slowly and unevenly. His shoulders became broad and sinewy while his legs remained thin and short. His arms were too long for his dwarfish body and from an early age he walked with a simian gait that inspired scorn and hatred among his classmates. They taunted him above all for the size and shape of his enormous head that became more and more solid with the years and whose protruding nose and jaw gave it an undeniable taurine air. Neighbourhood graffiti speculated gleefully about the various kinds of unnatural coupling that could have given rise to such a strange creature: monkeys took their cackling pleasure at the backsides of oblivious-seeming sheep, and bulls threatened to split open the bulbous behinds of curvaceous maidens. One cartoon, hastily erased by the authorities, showed an entire narrative in which a woman, anxious for a child, ate the raw testes of a bull, a meal that resulted not in her own pregnancy but that of her cow. It was an artist of some skill who had drawn the final scene in which the woman stole out by night to seize the bloody baby from the vulva of the cow and put it carefully into bed between her husband and herself. The entire story was narrated by a pointing, moralizing goat.

Imran’s parents were naturally upset by the indignities suffered by their son, and eventually gave in to his insistence that he should not attend school. He spent his days in the bookshop instead, and consumed volumes of poetry that he would recite aloud for the entertainment of customers. In time, word of his remarkable performances spread, and the bookshop would be surrounded during the day by crowds of eager listeners who could not find room inside. The very oddness of his body seemed to lend an expressivity to his interpretations that captivated everyone who heard him, and his outsized chest and neck produced a voice that gave the impression of being drawn from a vast well of emotion. Through him, his audience was able to bypass the difficulties of the Farsi or the archaisms of the Urdu and understand the true meaning of the poet. ‘It is amazing’, one said, ‘that such a young boy should be able to overpower us with his expression of such adult emotions: the yearnings of a lover for his beloved, and of a believer for the Almighty. We have yearned for many things, but never have we seen such yearning as this.’ Another replied, ‘When he talks about the pain of being trapped in time while longing for the eternal we can all finally understand how truly burdensome it is to be temporal creatures, and how glorious eternity must be!’ Imran’s body, its hulking shoulders and massive head supported by a withered frame, seemed to symbolize in flesh the poets’ theme of manly, religious passion trapped in woefully insignificant human form, and no one who heard him could again imagine those poems except on his lips.

When not in his father’s shop, Imran wandered. Since his appearance provoked fear and dismay among the city’s clean and well-to-do, he gravitated towards out-of-the-way places where people were less easily repulsed. He learned the art of appearing utterly insignificant, and thus of passing unnoticed through public places; he slipped completely unseen through the bustling centres of the city only to reappear suddenly at a dhaba or a paan shop where he would exchange handshakes and quiet greetings with five different people. His friendships were forged with marginal characters who made their money from small-time illegal businesses, and they all loved him: for he told jokes with extravagant grimaces that made them roar with laughter, and he always knew ten people who could solve any problem. They came to him with questions: where the best tea could be found, who sold car parts the most cheaply, where you could find a safe abortion, who would be able to get rid of five hundred mobile phones quickly.

One afternoon he found himself in a tiny bar in Juhu where his friends often congregated to play cards and talk business. There was no illumination except for the strips of pure light around the blinds, and the hubbub of heat and taxis and street sellers outside was reduced to a distant murmur. As they drank under the languorous fans, one of them announced:

‘Now Imran will recite us a poem!’

Imran declined, but there was much clapping and encouragement, an empty beer glass was banged rousingly on the table, the bartender came over and made his insistences–and finally he assented. He began to recite a ballad, beginning in such a low voice that they all had to lean towards him to hear.

His ballad told of a princess, long ago, who had been the pride and joy of the king and queen and her brother the prince. She was beautiful and could sing songs that made all of nature sit down and listen. And she had hair of pure gold.

One day the princess was carried off by an ugly monster who was shrunken and evil looking and coveted the gold from her head. He shaved off all her hair and made himself rich, and imprisoned her in a tall tower to wait for the hair to grow back. But it grew back so slowly he realized he would have to wait years before there would be such a quantity again. He devoted himself to devising potions to make her hair grow more quickly. Imran’s voice rose: how evil was this monster! and how absolutely comic at the same time! As he told the story, the creature became real for them all; they listened in fascination, they cried with laughter as Imran screwed up his face and recited lists of foul extracts and hideous amputations that the monster would rub into the princess’s delicate scalp or mix with her tea.

Her brother was grief-stricken at her disappearance and left the palace to go and find her. He wandered endlessly; his body became scratched by thorns and eaten by fleas, but still he did not give up. Eventually he heard a wonderful voice singing in the distance, and as he came closer he recognized it as his sister’s; yes indeed, he could glimpse her face through a tiny window at the top of a tall tower. But, though she saw him too, and was happy he had come, he was unable to rescue her, for there was no way into the tower except through a door that was always locked and the tiny window that was at a great height from the ground.

So the prince planted a tree that would grow tall and strong and allow him to climb up and rescue his sister. He would tend the tree lovingly every night, but it grew very slowly, and every day he would mourn the days that she was losing in the tower. His love was so strong and so selfless! and the tough souls who listened to Imran were moved to silence, for they had never heard such a pure expression of yearning as this.

One day the monster found the formula that would make the princess’s hair grow. As soon as he applied his ointment it began to sprout quickly from her head, and in a few minutes was thick and dazzling and hung down to her knees. He let out a scream of inhuman triumph, cut it all off at once and went away to sell it.

As soon as he had gone, the princess took his stinking cauldron and tipped it out of the window. Immediately, the infant tree began to climb towards the sky. In a few minutes it was halfway to the window, branches and twigs and leaves appearing in dazzling patterns, growing around the tower in an arboreal embrace, and bathing its bone-white stone in shade. As it grew, the prince started to climb and was borne upwards on the swelling trunk. Soon it reached all the way to the window, and the princess leapt into her brother’s arms and kissed him joyfully.

But the tree did not stop growing. No matter how fast they tried to climb downwards the tree continued to carry them higher and higher into the air. Frantically, they tried to descend, but now the tower was far below them and they were in the very heavens.

At that point the monster returned, and realized at once what had happened. Furious, he took a great axe and began to chop at the tree. With powerful blows he cut away at the trunk until it finally began to sway. With a mighty crash it fell to the ground, crushing the tower to powder. And the prince and princess were no more.

The men were quiet.

‘Why did they have to die?’

‘Well, what did you expect?’ replied Imran, amused that his audience had become so affected. ‘They were brother and sister. Were they going to get married and live happily ever after?’

‘I suppose not.’

But they were glum.

Then, from the shadowy corner of the bar, a solitary figure began to applaud. None of them had noticed him before.

‘Wonderful! Wonderful! It is years since I have seen a performance like that. You have a fine talent, sir! I would like to see more of what you can do. Allow me to introduce myself. I am a senior executive with an advertising company–as my business card will show. I would like very much to introduce you to some highly influential people I happen to know here in Bombay. I think you may be just what they are looking for. With your permission, of course. Your monster was quite extraordinary. So terrifying, and yet so humorously delivered! I can see a glittering career, sir! There are so few true actors these days.’

And so it was, after a dizzying succession of meetings and auditions, that Imran became the ‘Plaque Devil’ for Colgate toothpaste, in one of the most successful advertising campaigns that India had ever seen. A loathsome, misshapen figure that forced an entry into happy, brightly-lit households, and caused merry dental chaos through his evil schemes until finally repulsed by a laser-filled tube of Colgate, he became a cultural phenomenon such as advertising companies dream of. Children imitated him in the schoolyard, and magazines gave away free Plaque Devil stickers that would adorn the very walls where once graffiti had made shameful innuendos about Imran’s birth. Youngsters found in the character a welcome focus for rebellious feelings, while parents approved of its pedagogic potential and felt that at least their offspring’s unseemly roars and menacing ape-like walk might result in healthier teeth.