Rana Dasgupta - Tokyo Cancelled

Imran was left winded and limp. For a time he could not talk, but knelt on the ground supporting his heavy head in his hands. At length he looked up at the tower.

‘I have to meet her.’

‘I can’t see how you would do that. No one ever meets her.’

‘I will find a way.’

Imran spent the next few days exploring the out-of-the-way places of this city he did not know, looking for people who could help him plan his break-in. He struck up conversations with shopkeepers and restaurant owners, followed connections until he found dead ends, stood by night among sleeping bodies and campfires in dormant office complexes for rendezvous that did not happen, called lists of mobile phone numbers only for suspicious men to hang up on him. But in the end his work paid off, and he had assembled explosives and firearms and a small team to prepare the blast and guard their operation.

Dressed in black, they met at the tower in the early hours of the morning on a night when the moon was just a nick in the sky. The drowsy security guard was deftly disarmed and gagged, and they set about putting their explosives in place. Imran’s new-found expert slapped the steel as if it were a boisterous friend.

‘I would say it’s about eight inches thick. No way we can blast through it. We’d make a very big noise and this baby would still be sitting here smiling back at us. But you can see it’s made of eight-foot panels welded together and we can blast at the joins. Don’t worry. We can pop one of these big ladies easy as putting your eye out.’

With that he and his companion began to drill into the joins with the unabashed scream of steel on steel.

‘Quiet, for God’s sake!’ hissed Imran.

‘Do you want to get in here or not?’ He fixed Imran with the glare of a master workman who needs no counsel, and Imran gestured his submission. Drills fired up once more, puncturing the smooth exterior and ejecting fine spirals of silver, while Imran winced at this racket in the night and looked around for the security people who would certainly descend on them. But no one came; and soon the panel was framed by twelve even holes, and the men were filling them with a paste like halwa.

‘Let’s talk it through one more time. The blast will pop her outwards. No one stands in the way. You’ll be disorientated–think through your actions now. You three are going in with torches. Remember your way back. Once you get out you turn right–look at where the van is waiting. Are you ready?’

Imran looked up at the gloomy tower, and could not get rid of the thought, ‘Did I dream this once before?’ His heart was hammering in his throat.

The massive steel panel burst cleanly out of the wall and landed in the dust in an explosion so loud that everything in its wake was just a numb rumble. He staggered from the force of the blast, took hold of his thoughts, reached for his flashlight, and plunged into the swirling dust that filled the neat square hole in the wall. He ran into the room–and stopped short.

The lights were on, and Sapna stood shivering before him, clasping herself in a shawl, her eyes wide. He stood motionless, looking. She was beautiful to him, and her eyes answered his own in many mysterious ways; her very reality seemed astonishing, as if suddenly the afterimage that rippled briefly on corneal waters whenever he looked away from the sun, the presence that had for so long shimmered just beyond his senses, had at last become solid–this was true; but why was it that, as he looked, as he wished for all the clocks of the world to stop for the moment of his looking, his head was distracted, filled with other kinds of ticks and tocks that were not to do with time, that were the sound of a mechanism falling into place, the dials of a mighty safe lining up and opening, not just an eight-foot-square steel entrance but a channel between worlds that brought things unaccustomedly close and in an instant made the yearning of the poets of his childhood seem quaint and unnecessary; and as confusion raced like police sirens through the exhilarating night of his encounter, even as the men began to shout from behind and, in that other dimension, time was still galloping onwards, even as somewhere he was aware of how he must look, bursting in from the night at the head of a band of men with guns and a job to do, he knew now that all the reservoir of his desire, which had jangled inside him all his life, which filled his very chromosomes and made them yell out in the darkness, had not been enough to prepare him for this domino-like unfolding of everything he thought was solid around the trembling form of the woman who now stood before him.

‘What is happening? Get him out of there! Let’s go!’

Sapna continued to look at him.

‘Am I dreaming this again?’ she said, as if puzzled. ‘Or is it really you this time?’

Imran stood stupidly; but anyway he was not given time to respond as the men grabbed him and Sapna and dragged them both outside. His mind whirled and he followed them in a daze, lights flashed all around him, and there was a shift in reality; he tried to wake himself up to it, it seemed urgent…

They were surrounded. A ring of policemen shone bright lights at them, pointed guns.

‘You fucking idiot,’ the explosives chief shouted at Imran. ‘I thought you had it in you. You froze. Now we’re all fucked.’

They dropped their weapons and were grouped together and handcuffed. The night seemed strangely big, and the red and blue lights of the police vans hurt the eyes. One of the policemen was on the phone.

‘Six men. One of them’s deformed. Reminds me of someone, actually. The girl’s here too…The Defence Minister? Why? It’s three in the morning…Oh. I see…I’ll wait for you to call me back.’

They were all made to lie down on the ground. It began to rain. The phone rang.

‘Yes? Hello, Sir…Yes…A sort of dwarf…You’re exactly right. Just like a bull…Rajiv Malhotra? I see…No, we’ll make very sure. We’ll be very discreet…Yes, I know the place…The girl too? I don’t think the girl is an accomplice in this, sir…She doesn’t look dangerous…Of course. Very good.’

Thus it was that slightly before dawn, Imran and Sapna were locked into adjacent rooms in a high-security mental asylum that sat in the middle of large grounds in an unobtrusive location on the outskirts of the city.

For three days, high-ranking government officials thought of nothing but the Malhotra Issue. Rajiv Malhotra had asked for three days to conduct his own investigation into what had happened, during which time his daughter would remain in the asylum along with the ugly creature who was, it now turned out, none other than the star of The Ramayana and of so many memorable advertisements whose makers would be horrified when they found out that the deviant creature they had taken pity on, sponsored, and enriched was in real life a far more sinister kind of interloper than the antisocial influences he had been asked to portray on television. A low-class loner with sick thoughts whom even wealth and fame had not been able to civilize, who still kept the company of illegal elements, a criminal of the worst sort who destroyed private property by night in the throes, no doubt, of a monstrous sexual hunger for whose gratification he could not avail himself of the standard amenities but conceived instead an intricate plot to assault the decency of a daughter of the city’s leading family. No one could understand why it was that Rajiv Malhotra extended his three days’ protection to such a despicable character, but the connections of businessmen as prominent as he always extended into murky places and it was best not to ask. For three days phone calls passed between the Defence Minister, the director of the asylum, the Chief of Police, and Rajiv Malhotra himself. The officials were stern with the businessman: he had failed in his guarantee to manage his daughter’s Situation without the assistance of the State, and no concessions beyond the three days were allowed him. He was not permitted to visit the asylum or to speak to either of its new inmates.