Vikas Swarup - Six Suspects

Our first stop was Dal Lake, which was the most awesome lake I have ever seen. It was lined with tall trees and was full of little houses on boats called – what else? – houseboats, with fabulous carved railings. The lake was dotted with lotus flowers and choked with weeds. Dazzling birds kept darting over its surface. A number of small boats paddled in between the lotus plants. As the fog lifted, I saw snow-covered mountains even taller than Mount Livermore.

On the other side of the lake was a white-domed mosque called the Hazratbal Shrine, which blasted the call for prayer from loudspeakers. Bilal said the shrine was very holy and housed a hair of the Prophet Muhammad. Even the beggars were nice here. They offered me a flower before asking for money.

Our next stop was the Jama Masjid mosque at Nowhatta, in the heart of the old city. Bilal said prayers while I browsed round the bustling old bazaar just outside.

For lunch, Bilal took me to Lal Chowk, which was like Main Street, and we had larrupin' Kashmiri food in a small roadside restaurant.

In the evening, however, there was a bomb blast at the bus station and a curfew was declared from eleven p.m., which didn't really matter because in any case the whole city closed down and went to sleep just after six.

In the middle of the night, Bilal suddenly shook me awake. 'Get up, Larry, there's going to be a raid. We need to go.'

'What happened?' I asked.

'Someone has reported you as a suspicious character. The army may come to arrest you. We need to go to a safe house.'

Bleary eyed, I got up and padded out of the house in my phiran. The street was quiet as a graveyard. Litter burned here and there and a couple of men were gathered in a corner warming their hands over a coal brazier. A few stray dogs howled. Bilal knew the city like the back of his hand. He took me through a maze of alleyways, crossing several streets, skirting a bridge, evading a sentry post, to a small, dilapidated house with a green door.

Inside the house were three of the queerest men I've ever met. The leader was a heavy-set guy with a flowing black beard and a black turban. He had a craggy face with a strange dark mark on his forehead. The second guy was younger and wore a woollen jacket over trousers and shirt. He was the same height as me, but so bucktoothed he could have eaten corn through a picket fence. Standing next to him was a tall, fair, wiry dude with long hair and a handsome, scruffy face. He was clad in baggy cream pyjama bottoms and a long black shirt.

Bilal seemed to be in a hurry to leave. 'Bas, my job was only up to here. These are my friends. They will take you to a safe place. I have to go now, Larry. All the best,' he said, and before I could stop him he rushed out like the dogs were after him.

The three guys in the room looked at me like Mike 'Mad Dog' Benson, the security chief at Walmart, looks at shoplifters. Bilal had said they were his friends. To me they seemed just about as friendly as fire ants.

'Take off your phiran,' the turbaned guy ordered.

'Why?' I asked.

'We want to check you're not carrying a weapon.'

'Whatever floats your boat,' I said and took off the gown.

The bucktoothed guy patted my sweatshirt and jeans. 'He's clean,' he announced. The tension in the air cooled a little.

'Howdy!' I said and extended my hand. 'I'm Larry Page.'

The bucktoothed guy brightened up. 'Bilal told us your name, but I didn't believe him. Are you really the Larry Page who invented Google?'

I cursed pa for naming me Larry (Mom said it was his idea). But if the Indian army was after me and my only chance of escaping was these three jokers, I thought it best to play along. Mr Bucktooth obviously didn't know baby shit from butterscotch, and if he thought I was the Google guy, I had no problem with that. No problem at all.

'Why? You think I can't invent an engine?'

His eyes widened. 'You mean you are the real Larry Page?'

'Is a frog's ass waterproof?'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning yes. I am the guy who invented Google.'

Bucktooth looked like he would faint. 'My name is Rizvan, Mr Page, but everybody calls me Abu Teknikal. It is a great honour to meet you. I am a great fan of Google. I use it all the time,' he gushed.

'Yeah,' I nodded. 'People tell me it's the best thing since sliced bread. But why are you called Teknikal?'

'That's because he is a computer,' said the pyjama guy. 'He knows everything about everything.'

'Really?'

'Show him, Teknikal,' the pyjama guy said.

'Mr Page, I probably know more about you than any other man alive,' Teknikal boasted.

'You're kidding.'

'Yes. I can prove it. You were born on 26 March 1973 in Lansing, Michigan to Dr Carl Victor Page and Gloria Page. While a student on the Ph.D. programme in Computer Science at Stanford University, you met Sergey Brin and together you developed the Google search engine in 1998. The World Economic Forum named you a Global Leader for Tomorrow. You are currently the President of Products at Google Inc. with an estimated net worth of 16.6 billion dollars, making you the twenty-sixth-richest person on Earth. How's that?'

The twenty-sixth-richest person on Earth! The guy was off his rocker. Mom always said it is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt. But I pretended he was the cat's whiskers. 'Well, sock my jaw, that's pretty impressive!'

'What has fascinated me, Mr Page, is your Page Rank technology. How on earth did you get the idea to use an iterative algorithm which corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web to determine the ranking of an individual site?'

I didn't have a clue what he was blabbering about, but I said 'Yeah… Yeah,' and nodded my head a couple of times. 'Page Rank. Now that was a terrific idea, wasn't it? Third best thing to come along since sliced bread.'

The guy was persistent. 'What exactly was your tipping point, Mr Page?'

'You mean the point when it tipped over?'

'I mean the point when you and Sergey knew that you had a winner.'

'That was in April, I would say. Yeah. In April we knew we had a winner.'

That shut him up.

'Won't you introduce me to your friends?' I asked.

'Oh yes, sorry, Mr Page. This is Abu Khaled,' he said, referring to the turbaned guy. 'He's our emir, our leader, our zimmedar.'

'What about him?' I pointed to the pyjama dude.

'That is Abu Omar.'

'So are you guys brothers or what? All of you are called Abu.'

'We are brothers in arms, Mr Page,' he smiled. 'But we're not related to each other. In fact we don't even speak the same language. I'm from Pakistan, from Rawalpindi. Abu Khaled is from Egypt and Abu Omar is from Afghanistan. I speak Urdu, Abu Khaled speaks Arabic and Abu Omar speaks Pashto. So we talk to each other only in English.'

'Good for me. But what are you folks doing in Kashmir?'

'We are helping our friends like Bilal in their fight against the infidels. I am glad you sympathize with our point of view, Mr Page. It is wonderful to have the support of someone as influential as you.'

'Glad to be of assistance, but when do you think I can get back to Delhi? I got a plane to catch, you know – my private 767.' I winked.

'Soon, Mr Page, very soon. But first we need to take you to a safe place. You need to rest now because tomorrow we will go on a very long journey.'

We slept in a small room which was not half as cosy as the one in Bilal's house. What was worse, I had Abu Teknikal on my left and Abu Omar on my right for company. And they kept pestering me with questions half the night.

'You know what,' Teknikal told me. 'Ever since I was seven, it has been a dream of mine to visit America, abode of the internet and the Xbox 360. Home of the Blue Gene and the BigDog. I actually cried when I saw a picture of the Cray X-MP in my school. But your achievements dwarf even those of Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. If the internet is heaven, then Google is God. Do you know what that makes you, Mr Page?'