Fury (25 page)

At the end of the science fiction film Solaris, the story of an ocean-covered planet that functions as a single giant brain, can read men’s minds, and make their dreams come true, the spaceman-hero is back home at last, on the porch of his long-lost Russian dacha, with his children running joyfully around and his beautiful, dead wife alive again at his side. As the camera pulls back, endlessly, impossibly, we see that the dacha is on a tiny island set in the great ocean of Solaris: a delusion, or perhaps a deeper truth than the truth. The dacha diminishes to a speck and vanishes, and we are left with the image of the mighty, seductive ocean of memory, imagination, and dream, where nothing dies, where what you need is always waiting for you on a porch, or running toward you across a vivid lawn with childish cries and happy, open arms.

Tell me. I
already
know.
Neela, with her heart-wisdom, had guessed why, for Professor Solanka, the past was not a joy. When he saw Solaris, he’d found that last scene horrifying. He’d known a man like this, he thought, a man who lived inside a delusion of fatherhood, trapped in a cruel mistake about the nature of fatherly love. He knew a child like this one, too, he thought, running toward the man who stood in the role of father, but that role was a be, a lie. There was no father. This was no happy home. The child was not itself. Nothing was as it seemed.

Yes, Bombay flooded back, and Solanka was living in it once again, or at least in the only part of the city that truly had a hold on him, the little patch of the past from which whole infernos could be conjured forth, his damn Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi, which had shaped his destiny and whose memory he had suppressed for over half a lifetime. Methwold’s Estate: it was more than enough for his needs. And, in particular, an apartment in a block called Noor Ville, in which for a long time he had been raised as a girl.

At first he couldn’t look his story in the eye, could only come at it sideways, by talking about the bougainvillea creeper climbing over the veranda like an Arcimboldo burglar, or like your stepfather at your bedside in the night. Or else he described the crows that came cawing like portents to his windowsill, and his conviction that he would have been able to understand their warnings if only he weren’t so unintelligent, if only he could only have concentrated a little harder, and then he could have run away from home before anything happened, so it was his own fault, his own stupid fault for failing to do the simplest thing, namely to understand the language of birds. Or, he spoke about his best friend, Chandra Venkataraghavan, whose father left home when he was ten. Malik sat in Chandra’s room and interrogated the distraught boy. Tell me how it hurts, Malik begged Chandra. I need to know. That’s how it should also hurt for me. Malik’s own father had disappeared when he was less than a year old; his pretty young mother, Mallika, had burned all the photographs and remarried within the year, gratefully taking her second husband’s name and giving it to Malik as well, cheating Malik of history as well as feeling. His father had gone and he didn’t even know his name, which was also his own. If it had been up to his mother, Malik might never have known of his father’s existence, but his stepfather told him the moment he was old enough to understand. His stepfather, who needed to excuse himself from the accusation of incest. From that if nothing else.

What had his father done for a living? Malik was never informed. Was he fat or thin, tall or short? Was his hair wavy or straight? All he could do was look in the mirror. The mystery of his father’s looks would be solved as he grew, and the face}n the glass answered his questions. “We are Solankas now,” his mother rebuked him. “It doesn’t matter about that person who never existed and who certainly doesn’t exist now. Here is your true father, who puts food on your plate and clothes on your back. Kiss his feet and do his will.”

Dr. Solanka was the second husband, a consultant at Breach Candy Hospital and a gifted composer of music in his spare time, and he was indeed a generous provider. However, as Malik discovered, his stepfather required more than just his feet to be kissed. When Malik was six years old, Mrs. Mallika Solanka-who had never conceived again, as if her absconding first husband had taken the secret of fertility away with him--was declared incapable of further childbearing and the boy’s torment began.
Bring clothes and let his hair grow long and be will be our daughter as well as our son. No but, husband, how can it be, I mean, is that okay? Sure! Why not? In privacy of home all things decreed by paterfamilias are sanctioned by God
Oh, my weak mother, you brought me ribbons and frocks. And when the bastard told you that your frail constitution, all wheezes and colds, would benefit from daily exercise, when he sent you away for long walks at the Hanging Gardens or Mahalaxmi Racecourse, did you not think to ask why he did not walk by your side; why, dismissing the ayah, he insisted on caring for his little “girl” alone? Oh, my poor dead mother who betrayed her only child. After a whole year of this, Malik had finally screwed up enough courage to ask the unaskable.
Mummy, why does Doctor Sahib push me down? What push you down, how push you down, what nonsense is this? Mummy, when he stands there and puts his hand on my bead and pushes me down and makes me kneel. When, Mummy, he loosens his pajama, when, Mummy, when he lets it fall.
She had hit him then, hard and repeatedly.
Never tell me your evil lies again or I will beat you till you are deaf and dumb. For some reason you have a down on this man who is the only father you have ever known. For some reason you don’t want your mother to be happy, so you tell these lies, don’t think I don’t know you, the wickedness in your heart; how do you think itfeels when all the mothers say, your Malik, darling, such imagination, ask him a question and who knows what he’ll come out with? Oh, I know what it means: it means you are telling whoppers all over town, and l have an evil liar for a child.

After that he was deaf and dumb. After that when the pushes came on the top of his beribboned head he thudded obediently to his knees, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. But long months later things did change. One day Dr. Solanka was visited by Chandra’s father, Mr. Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan the important banker, and they remained closeted together for more than an hour. Voices were raised, then swiftly lowered. Mallika was summoned, then swiftly dismissed. Malik hung back at the far end of a corridor, wide-eyed, speechless, clinging to a doll. Finally, Mr. Venkat left, looking like thunder, pausing only to pick up and hug Malik (who was dressed for Venkat’s visit in a white shirt and shorts), and to mutter, with high color burning in his face, “Don’t worry, my boy.
Quoth the raven: nevermore.”
That same afternoon, all the dresses and bows were taken away to be burned; but Malik insisted on being allowed to keep his dolls. Dr. Solanka never laid a forger on him again. Whatever threats Mr. Venkat had made had had their effect. (When Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan left home to become a
sanyasi,
ten-year-old Malik Solanka had greatly feared that his stepfather might revert to the old routine. But it seemed Dr. Solanka had learned his lesson. Malik Solanka, however, never spoke to his stepfather again.)

From that day on Malik’s mother was different, too, interminably apologizing to her young son and weeping without restraint. He could barely speak to her without provoking an awful howl of guilty grief. This alienated Mali- He needed a mother, not a waterworks utility like the one on the Monopoly board. “Please, Ammi,” he scolded her when she had embarked on one of her frequent hug-and-sob fests. “If I can control myself, so can you.” Stung, she let him go, and after that did her weeping privately, muffled by pillows. So life resumed its air of surface normality, Dr. Solanka going about his business, Mallika running the household, and Malik locking his thoughts away, confiding only in whispers, only in the hours of darkness, to the dolls who crowded around him in bed, like guardian angels, like blood kin: the only family he could bring himself to trust.

“The rest doesn’t matter,” he said, the confession over. “The rest is ordinary-getting on with it, growing up, getting away from them, having my life.” A huge burden had fallen from him. “I don’t have to carry them around anymore,” he added, full of wonder. Neela put her arms around him and moved in even closer. “Now it’s I who have imprisoned you,” she said. “I’m the one asking you to go here, do that. But this time it’s what we both want. In this prison, you’re finally free.” He relaxed against her, even though he knew there was one last gate he had not unlocked: the gate of full disclosure, of absolute, brutal truth, behind which lay the strange thing that had happened between Mila Milo and himself. But that, he persuaded himself catastrophically, was for another day.

Everywhere on earth-in Britain, in India, in distant Lilliputpeople were obsessed by the subject of success in America. Neela was a celebrity back home simply because she had gotten herself a good job – “made it big” - in the American media. In India, great pride was taken in the achievements of U.S.-based Indians in music, publishing (though not writing), Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. British levels of hysteria were even higher. British journalist gets work in U.S.A.! Incredible! British actor to play second lead in American movie! Wow, what a superstar! Cross-dressing British comic wins two Emmys! Amazing. Wwe always knew British transvestism was best! American success had become the only real validation of one’s worth. Ah, genuflection, Malik Solanka thought. Nobody knew how to argue with money these days, and all the money was here in the Promised Land.

Such reflections had become germane because in his middle fifties he was experiencing the superlative force of a real American hit, a force that blew open all the doors of the city, unlocked its secrets, and invited you to feast until you burst. The Galileo launch, an unprecedented interdisciplinary business enterprise, had gone intergalactic from day one. It turned out to be that happy accident: a necessary myth. LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE T-shirts covered some of the finest chests in the city, becoming a triumphalist slogan for the gym generation that acquired mass public currency overnight. It was proudly worn, too, over some of the flabbiest bellies around, as proof of the wearers’ sense of irony and fun. Demand for the Playstation video game accelerated past all predictions, leaving even Lara Croft floundering in its wake. At the height of the Star Wars phenomenon, spin-off merchandising had accounted for a quarter of the toy industry’s worldwide turnover; since those days, only the Little Brain phenomenon had come close. Now the saga of Galileo-1 was setting new records, and this time the global mania was being driven not by films or television but by website. The new communications medium was finally paying off. After a summer of skepticism about the potential of many massively unprofitable Internet companies, here at last was the prophesied brave new world. Professor Solanka’s surprisingly smooth beast, its hour come around at last, was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. (There were rough edges, though: in the early days the site often crashed under the sheer weight of hits, which seemed to grow faster than the webspyders’ ability to increase access by replication and mirroring, the spinning of new threads of the shining web.)

Once again, Solanka’s fictional characters began to burst out of their cages and take to the streets. From around the world came news of their images, grown gigantic, standing many stories high on city walls. They made celebrity public appearances, singing the national anthem at ball games, publishing cookbooks, guest-hosting the Letterman show. The leading young actresses of the day vied publicly for the coveted leading role of Zameen of Rijk and her double, the cyborg Goddess of Victory. And this time Solanka felt none of the old Little Brain frustration, because, as Mila Milo had promised, it really was his show. He marveled at his own excitement. Creative and corporate meetings filled his days. The e-mail standoff with the webspyders was over. Regular “face time” had become essential. The continuing, possibly even growing, anger of sexually spurned, father-fixated Mila was the single fly in this rich, even Croesus-worthy, ointment. Mila and Eddie arrived stone-faced at the crucial meetings and left without offering Solanka a friendly word. However, her hair and eyes spoke volumes. They changed color frequently, burned like a flame one day and glowered blackly the next. Often the contact lenses clashed violently with the hair, suggesting that Mila was in an exceptionally bad mood on that particular day.

Solanka had no time to deal with the Mila problem. The Galileo project’s ground-floor partners were bursting with ideas about diversification: a restaurant chain! A theme park! A giant Las Vegas hotel, entertainment center and casino in the shape of the two islands of Baburia, to be set in an artificially created “ocean” at the desert’s heart! The number of businesses hammering on the door, pleading to be let in, was almost as hard to set down as the full decimal expression of Tr. The webspyders created and received new proposals for the future of the property almost every day, and Malik Solanka lost himself in the ecstasy, the furia, of the work.

The intervention of the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 in the public affairs of actually existing Earth had not, however, been foreseen. It was Neela who brought Solanka the news. She arrived at West Seventieth Street in a state of high excitement. Her eyes shone as she spoke. There had been a countercoup in Lilliput. It had begun as a burglary: masked men raided Mildendo’s biggest toy store and made off with its entire, just-imported supply of Kronosian Cyborg masks and costumes. Interestingly-given the name of Neela’s shiny-chested flag-bearing pal-no Baburian outfits were taken. The FRM radicals, the revolutionary Indo-Lilly “Fremen” who had orchestrated the raid, as was afterward revealed, identified strongly with the Puppet Kings, whose inalienable right to being treated as equals-as fully moral and sentient beings-was denied by Mogol the Baburian, their deadly foe, of whom Skyresh Bolgolam was accused of being an avatar.