Hari Kunzru - Transmission

As the day of his departure approached, Arjun spent an increasing amount of time in the bathroom, the only room in the house with a lockable door. Its white-tiled dampness had a soothing and womb-like quality One day he was in there, sitting on the toilet reading a paper on genetic algorithms, when there was a commotion in the living room. He emerged to find that his brand-new passport had been returned, with its American-eagle visa stamp on the clean first page. ‘Sweet as!’ said Priti, in her new servicing-Australians accent. Then, a little wistfully, ‘Nice one, Bro.’

Despite repeated phone calls, Databodies was unable to tell him where he would be working, or where exactly they had arranged for him to stay during his first weeks in America. One morning they simply sent a peon to his home with a plane ticket: one-way to San Francisco, travelling via Singapore. A note explained that he would be met at SFO by a company representative.

‘Sfo?’ murmured Mrs Mehta suspiciously. ‘This sounds more Russian than American.’

On his last evening Arjun went to the underground bazaar near his home, to make some final travel preparations. Even late at night the bazaar was a bustling place, where tape decks blared movie songs and hard white light washed out the colours from stalls selling polythene-wrapped shirts, cooking utensils, office supplies and electronics. On the lower level, next door to a wedding emporium, was Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack, a room with peeling walls and half a dozen PCs crammed on to a pair of trestle tables. Its only decoration was a poster of Amjad Khan, leering down threateningly against a background of leaping flames. The manager, Aamir, a skinny Muslim boy a couple of years older than Arjun, was proud of the gangster style of his establishment, which he fostered by leaning intimidatingly against the wall outside, smoking bidis and wearing dark glasses. There was usually a free terminal.

That night Gabbar Singh’s was completely empty. Seeing Arjun, Aamir put down his new ‘torso tiger’ chest exerciser and gave his usual greeting, cocking his fingers into fake pistols and firing a volley of imaginary shots. Then, formalities over, he slapped his friend on the back and slipped smoothly into a sales pitch for his latest CD-ROM production.

‘So what are you calling it this time?’ Arjun asked, sitting down on one of Aamir’s wobbly chairs and opening up a terminal window on the screen in front of him.

‘ Too Too Sexy 2. ’

‘So it’s a sequel to Too Too Sexy? ’

‘Achcha! Hot as hell, I’m telling you. The theme is blondes.’

‘The theme is always blondes, Aamir.’

‘Thank God for full creative control. So, bhai, you will take a copy?’

‘Talk to me later, OK? I have things to do.’

Aamir looked disgruntled. ‘Whatever you say, boss. Just remember, eight hundred plus lovely ladies on single disk is once-only-in-lifetime opportunity. Don’t turn up your nose.’

Arjun nodded and started to type commands at the prompt. He used to wonder how Gabbar Singh’s stayed in business, until Aamir revealed his sidelines. The disks, compilations of downloaded pornographic JPEGs, were only one of several revenue streams. He also pirated software, retailed second-hand hardware, and hired himself out as an occasional web designer, computer tutor, wedding videographer and (so his business card claimed) ‘superstar movie hero/villain’. Rebuffed for now, he dragged a chair into the store doorway and sat reading the film gossip in Cinéblitz, singing along tunelessly to the Hindu religious songs pumping out of the wedding store.

Meanwhile, using a password he should not have known and a user name assigned to someone else, Arjun logged on to the network of NOIT, an institution which mistakenly believed it rescinded all access to students when they graduated. The discovery that Arjun had an active account would surprise the network administrator, Dr Sethi, who was under the impression he was very careful about such things. Tell the doctor that an ex-student possessed full root privileges, the power to alter or delete data and the ability (among other things) to monitor every other user’s activity, and he would have dismissed you as a fantasist.

Yet Arjun could do all this and more. He had enjoyed unimpeded access to Dr Sethi’s beloved system since his very first term at NOIT.

No one had ever noticed Arjun’s unauthorized presence, since he had always taken care to conceal it, especially when making his own alterations to the configuration of the network. If so inclined, he could have wreaked havoc at any time, but havoc had never been on his agenda. Why destroy something so interesting when you could be creative instead? That night, as usual, he bypassed the directories containing the college accounts, the Principal’s private correspondence, the staff payroll information, next term’s examination papers and Dr Sethi’s private archive of bodybuilding pictures. Instead he accessed an innocuous-looking subdirectory, one that the doctor had probably never noticed or, if he had, no doubt believed was full of old log files or other uninteresting artefacts of his system software. Arjun chose a small executable from this subdirectory and ran it. The little program generated a second log-in screen at which he typed a second password, thus gaining entry to his own private area of the network, a zone which over the years he had gradually partitioned off and screened from other eyes.

A secret garden. A laboratory.

He allowed himself a quick peek at one of his projects, then got down to the tedious business of backing up, selecting files and copying them to his local drive, a process which, over Gabbar Singh’s patchy connection, took the best part of an hour. While the blue bar inched across the screen he wandered upstairs and drank a sweet milky coffee at a dhaba facing the main road. It was raining. The traffic, as usual, was relentless, the low rumble of public carriers blending with the clatter of taxis and the angry buzz of auto rickshaws into a full-spectrum roar that never diminished, even this late at night. Small boys ran after the buses, selling corn and peanuts. Soaked cyclists pedalled past with plastic sheeting over their heads. For a while he joined the crowd participating in the aftermath of a traffic accident. A two-wheeler lay on its side, and various people were arguing with the driver of the white minivan which had knocked it over. The shaken scooter driver sat on the kerb a little way off, pressing a handkerchief to his head and staring blankly at an opportunistic stallholder who was trying to sell him a helmet.

Arjun headed back underground to Gabbar Singh’s, where he used Aamir’s cherished rewriter to burn a couple of CDs. All his best toys were now etched on to the little silvered disks, ready to travel in solid state to America. Next he cleaned up: he deleted his data from Aamir’s machine and before exiting the NOIT system ran a script that erased all traces of his session from the school’s logs. Behind the walls of his secret garden, which existed not so much apart from as in between the legitimate areas of the college network, his various experiments were still running their course, stealing spare processor cycles from idle machines, storing themselves in tiny splinters on dozens of different hard disks. Together these fragments formed an interstitial world, a discreet virtuality that could efficiently mask its existence from the students and teachers doing their online business round about it. It was a world which could look after itself for a while, until its creator had time to check on it properly. Until he was successfully installed in California.