Rana Dasgupta - Tokyo Cancelled

For three days, Sapna did not sleep. Day and night she stood at her fifth-floor window looking out. The grounds were well kept, and the gardeners had recently planted infant trees around the foot of the building. Keeping watch with the police was her brother, Rajiv’s model son whom Sapna had only seen in photographs and who was now a tall, handsome teenager. He had taken it upon himself to ensure, as his clammy-hearted father did not seem to be able to, that no security breaches happened this time, and surveyed the window where she stood with a self-confident hatred that chilled her heart.

For three days she looked out, thinking again of those moments in the television epic when the ten-headed Ravana had attempted to seduce the woefully chaste Sita, with what words! and what yearning! How she had treasured the voice of a man who could desire like that, and how many times had she imagined that her own incarceration might be ended with such a magnificent abduction. What course of events, what impossible, impenetrable strangeness, could have brought that man to her and propelled him through the walls of her cage? What spirit could have caused her dream to be recreated so precisely in reality?

For three days she thought continually on these things. And then she slept.

Imran awoke to find himself in a room with no floor, hanging onto the bars of his window with bloodless fingers.

Buds of bulging paintwork were appearing all over the walls; green shoots burst from them, wavered for a second as if waiting for a distant vegetal communication, suddenly found direction, and streaked up through the ceiling, swelling into vast boughs of furrowed wood and splitting the room apart. He looked down through the bars where he hung: the circle of saplings had grown into giants, their tops soaring into the sky, branches spreading out inside the building as if reaching for a prey, fusing with the bricks and–yes! even as he watched!–lifting the entire asylum clean off the ground and carrying it aloft. The room tipped and Imran was standing upright on the wall, the window bars popped out and fell to the grass that was already far below, the bricks that separated him from his sister collapsed in a cascade: and there was Sapna, still asleep in her bed.

He shook her awake; and already she was running with him, leaping the crevasses that were opening under their feet, fighting through corridors that were quickly becoming impassable from rubble and dust and people. Everywhere there were people in white, inmates who giggled uncontrollably as unseen hands flung wide their cell doors, who shuffled into the hallways, who clucked and ticked and screamed as the floors buckled and sent them sliding on their backsides down the inclines, genitals waving in the air. They instinctively crowded together, drained from the building’s extremities towards its heart, packed the stairwell, told stories to the sky as they plunged also through the solid floors of their madness into the gulfs and gardens that lay below. The stairs thronged with figures in white; and, as Imran and Sapna clutched hands and watched from above, the ring of trees wrenched the building in all directions; it opened like a flower, and its centre fell out and crashed to the ground. There was sky above them and ground below, and all around them, in amphitheatrical cutaway, were the stacked worlds of the hospital, from whose truncated edges hung screaming people who eventually had to loose their grip and fall one by one through the open well of the building onto the pile of stone and steel below.

From his sentry post where he had made up for the shameful laxity of the police observers with his own unsleeping surveillance, Rajiv’s model son watched in horror as the asylum broke open like a wasp’s nest, as white-robed pupae began to rain from it and wriggle away who knew where, ready to infiltrate the city and lay new eggs of their own in its fissures and sewers. It was not thus that his father’s girl child and her accomplice creature would find their escape. He seized a rifle from one of the still sleeping policemen and began to climb one of the trees.

Imran and Sapna teetered on the edge of their gaping concrete tree house as shots began to strike the people around them. He dragged Sapna down, ‘Quick, we have to jump for it’, but already she was struck and was lying breathless over his knee, blood welling from above her hip onto the floor. Bullets still flew, stopping the shrieks of women in their throats, lodging in the plaster. A red stain fanned out from Sapna’s side across the ground, the racing trees slowed down, grew in weaker and weaker bursts that seemed to keep time with Sapna’s fading heartbeat, and finally stopped. The raging bedlam of exploding cellulose and masonry ceased, and there was quiet. The wind sighed through the branches, and the azan sounded far away. Sapna lay white and motionless.

With a roar, Imran flew at the gunman who was his brother. He scrambled across the still branches and hanging lintels, spread wide his enormous arms, ran with a fury that was too mad and too fast for fingers to find their grip or bullets to be loaded, and alighted on the branch where the killer leant before he could clamber off it. He struck the rifle from his grasp and, with trembling mouth still searching for a curse terrible enough, seized him by the throat, squeezed his skull with his outsized sinews, and snapped his neck with a single flourish of rage. He held him for a moment to let the poison of his anger seep in and dispatch him still further, clasped the brother he did not know he had, supported his body until the force had gone entirely, and let him drop to the ground below, limbs outstretched and head waggling uselessly.

With a sense that all the world had ended, Imran clambered back to where Sapna lay. He crossed the tangle of branches in despair, neared the circle of white people that knelt around her, that parted as he approached, knelt down among them himself–and saw something miraculous.

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