Hari Kunzru - Transmission

A few days after the body was flown to Firenze for cremation, a French lawyer stunned the world by announcing that two weeks previously Mrs Haydon had deposited with him a computer disk, with instructions that in the event of her death it be passed on to newspapers in the US and Europe. The disk turned out to contain a single document, an erratic and rambling narrative which is part autobiography, part diary of the first year of her marriage. She describes an unhappy early life, alienated from her father and unable to make friends because of her mother’s peripatetic lifestyle. Repeatedly she returns to her sister’s suicide. In one undated line, she writes, ‘Chaque jour plus vite: Caroline, moi.’ She appears to have married on a whim, meeting her husband when he came to view a penthouse in the building where she lived with her former boyfriend. ‘I just wanted to go somewhere,’ she writes. ‘I didn’t really care where.’

Though affecting, most of the material is only of personal interest. The important passages concern the period just before she met her husband, when she was working as a film publicist and became involved in the Leela Zahir disappearance. The Indian media had developed a particular fascination for her because of a rumoured entanglement with Rajiv Rana. The document appears, in part, to be a statement to them, in which she confesses to helping Leela leave Scotland.

Mrs Haydon’s testament appears to show that Zahir’s disappearance was not abduction (as her mother claimed) or suicide, but a well-planned bid to ‘escape prison’. ‘Why would she stay?’ she writes. ‘She had nothing. It was a kind of prostitution.’ The idea that Leela Zahir, idol to the nation, was actually the ‘slave of her brothel-keeper mother’ shocked India profoundly. Leela’s suffering augmented her holiness, and angry mobs gathered outside several houses owned by members of the film community, burning Faiza Zahir’s Pali Hill residence to the ground in a night of rioting that spread across Mumbai and left several people dead. Faiza Zahir was abroad at the time, and now occasionally rings journalists from her new home in Dubai to denounce the ‘Caro bitch’ as a liar.

Gabriella Haydon writes that she was looking out of her window at the Clansman’s Lodge Hotel, when a face appeared at it looking ‘like Cathy in Wuthering Heights ’. Since she was on an upstairs floor, this was quite frightening. As she stared in horror, she realized it was Leela Zahir, who had somehow climbed up on to the roof and then down a drainpipe to tap on her window. She let the girl in and found that she was warmly dressed, and carrying a small backpack. To her surprise Leela ‘hugged me and said I was her only friend. We sat on the bed and she told me about her life and the things her mother made her do. I was horrified.’

Gabriella claims Leela had a well-thought-out plan of escape, but needed help. ‘I was sympathetic to her,’ she writes, ‘and I hated all the people involved in that film. So I said I would hide her in my room and drive her to Inverness Airport the next morning.’ She did not ask where she was heading after that, but ‘she said she had a friend. A boyfriend, she said, and then corrected herself. He was not a boyfriend, but she’d talked to him on the internet and they were going to meet each other. She did not say any more.’

The next morning, while police were beginning an intensive search that would eventually involve helicopters and teams of divers searching Loch Lone, Gabriella made good on her promise. ‘We said almost nothing to each other during the journey. Then she took her bag and walked into departures. I thought of asking to go with her.’

By the early autumn, the various Leela-variant viruses had been brought under control. Shaken sysops were able to go into work without a sense of dread, and computer-security specialists started to count their money. Of course blame had to be apportioned somewhere, and by general consensus it fell on the Virugenix corporation. With its reputation shredded and its share price locked into a downward spiral, the company’s senior management was forced to resign en masse. Even this was not enough to turn things round, and within a year the Virugenix brand had disappeared from the world’s screens, its assets absorbed by its rivals. From a secret address in Montana, former Ghostbuster Darryl Gant now runs Mehtascourge.org, one of the more extreme Leela research sites, which focuses on hunting down the man he sees behind many of the world’s ills, from his own redundancy to the scaling down of the American space programme.

Gant has his work cut out. There are sightings of Arjun Mehta and Leela Zahir around the world, sometimes alone, sometimes in company. She is seen begging in the streets of Jakarta and talking on the phone in the back of New York cabs. He is spotted one day at an anti-globalization demo in Paris and the next coming on to the pitch in a hockey match in rural Gujarat. He has got enormously fat. She has been surgically altered to look like a European. One persistent report, mostly from Pacific Rim countries, has a young man fitting Mehta’s description accompanied by a South Asian woman of a similar age, ‘tomboyishly’ or ‘punkily’ dressed. They are sometimes seen kissing or holding hands. According to conspiracy theorists, there is only one possible explanation, only one pattern that makes sense.

Thanks to Dan O’Brien of NTK, Fred Cohen, Natasha Staley, Sarah Gordon and Carey Nachemberg for technical advice. Thanks to my father for other kinds of advice. Thanks also to Simon Prosser, Jonny Geller, Donna Poppy and many others at Curtis Brown and Hamish Hamilton.