The Weightless World (6 page)

We leave the office. Harry directs me to sit in another garden chair under the tree at the centre of the square, disappears into the site and returns a few minutes later with two plastic thimbles of undrinkably hot chai and a paper plate heaped with chutney sandwiches. As Harry settles into a chair next to me, I wonder what happened to the redoubtable Rajeev. Then I see him, sitting on the other side of the square exactly as we saw him last, cross-legged on the earth in a circle of friends.

I take one sip of the chai then set the little cup on the ground and don’t touch it again. I pick up one of the sandwiches, notice its garish two-tone filling – pink and green – and at once return it to the plate. Meanwhile Harry eats with relish. He chews carefully but quickly, with avid method, as if trying to discover a free gift hidden in his food.

‘What do you do here?’ I ask him. ‘You yourself?’

‘I like to think I’m pretty hands-on. Though I guess my role is primarily, uh, financial.’ He chuckles through his food. ‘I know what you’re thinking: privileged, bleeding-heart, do-good American asshole blowing his dough on never-gonna-happen public venture. Tossing his money into the black hole of Indian inefficiency. That’s what you’re thinking, right?’

‘I’m not thinking anything.’

‘I know how it looks. These guys, they know how it looks too. That’s why they make it look this way.’ He throws back the chai as if it’s a shot of whisky. ‘I come by here maybe twice a week. Every time I come, this is what I see. Guys sitting on the ground, no work, nothing happening. Then I take a look around. And because I know what I’m looking at, I know what I’m seeing. And generally what I’m seeing is two weeks’ work. Achieved in
two, three days.’ He smiles. ‘I just don’t see it happen. They don’t let me. And why should they? Why should they put themselves on the line like that for some fat old loudmouth who shows up waving his cheque-book and saying, “Hey guys, how about we build a school”? If anyone can take credit here, it’s Rajeev. He’s the one making this project work. He they trust. They see what he’s trying to achieve.’

I look again at Rajeev, talking and laughing with his friends. From where I’m sitting, he doesn’t appear to be trying to achieve very much.

I say, ‘How does doing a day’s work put anyone on a line?’

‘What’s a day’s work?’ Harry laughs. ‘For these guys it’s more than a day’s work. It’s an attempt on the future, an assay on the future. A project like this asks you to believe the world can be a better place in the future than it is now, and a lot of these guys aren’t easy with believing that. They know the hazards of building in this city. They know better than anyone what happens when a thing you put up comes down again. So they’re like “Don’t give me that shit”. You know? They’re like “Don’t give me that hope shit”.’

On the other side of the square Rajeev and his friends climb to their feet and begin passing a football between them. For a while the young men only knock the ball loosely back and forth, then as others join them they form teams and re-engage in sharper tussles, running, tackling, shooting, their feet and the ball lost in an ankle-height cloud of dust.

It’s only a matter of time before the ball comes my way. I’ve been nervous ever since it appeared, sure at any second it’s going to smash into the back of my head, so I’m relieved when instead it comes trickling to my feet. The men pause to look at me, to see what I’ll do. Their looks are expectant, without hostility. I
stand and kick the ball to Rajeev. He lifts the ball onto his head and butts it back to me. I return it with a clap of my forehead and then I’m running, leaving the shade of the tree and sprinting out into the afternoon sunshine, into the figures of the game, accepting a pass, escaping a tackle.

It helps that I’m a fucking brilliant football player. But Rajeev and his friends are fairly decent too, by which I mean they’re all better than I am. Only Harry is definitely worse than I am. He throws himself about, howls a lot, falls over a lot, soon develops a dangerous scaly redness and has to settle for shouting encouragement from his chair in the shade.

Rajeev is my team captain; he establishes this by pointing at me then holding his fist to his chest. I nod. Rajeev is my team captain.

We play for an hour or so. The other team wins, despite Rajeev scoring four goals. I score none, though I have one pretty near miss, a helter-skelter attempt, my shot making the keeper leap, though at the last instant he stabs the ball away with a fingertip. Players on both sides clap. I assume they’re applauding the keeper then hands start beating my back. Grinning, Rajeev nods to me. Panting, grinning, the heat starting to get a grip on my head, I nod back. Rajeev is my captain.

‘Something weird happened this morning,’ I say to Harry, when we’re both sitting under the tree again. I’m aware that I’m speaking to him as I used to speak to Ess – as if he were the fount of all wisdom. I don’t like it but I can’t seem to help myself.

‘Oh yes?’ Harry says.

‘There was this cleaner. At the hotel. We talked for a bit then he wouldn’t leave me alone. He just stood there. Then he gave me this look, like…’

‘Did he assist you in any way?’

‘Well, yeah, he…’

‘He was waiting for a tip.’

‘It wasn’t anything like that. I was looking for a room, and…’

‘Guy was waiting for a tip.’

‘That’s… not really
on
, is it?’

Harry spreads his arms. ‘You know how much those guys are paid?’

‘No, I know, but… it’s not like that’s
my
fault, is it? Christ.’

‘Is it his fault?’

‘No, obviously not, but still.
Christ
…’ I’m about to elaborate when my phone rings. I dig it out of my pocket. Ess.

‘Where are you?’ he says. ‘Never mind, I don’t care. Get back here. Get back to the hotel. Right now.’

I settle the fare, ricochet out of the cab and scuttle up the steps, past the doorman, into the hotel reception area, where Ess is waiting for me. I’m expecting a tower of wrath, a column of flame, but in fact he seems pleased to see me. Beaming in a shiny white suit with a black pinstripe, the cravat and the red leather shoes back in place, all spirited arm movements and postural buoyancy, he’s unrecognisable as the bed-ridden invalid I visited this afternoon. It’s a couple of seconds at least before I notice there’s a woman with him.

‘Asha Jarwal,’ Ess says, bowing to the woman, ‘it is my great and somewhat belated pleasure to introduce Steven Strauss. Steven Strauss, Asha Jarwal.’

Asha Jarwal: our guide out of the city, into the countryside. She’s here.

‘Nice to meet you, Steven,’ Asha says, offering me her hand.

‘Delighted to make your acquaintance,’ I mutter, taking it.

My first impression is that she’s very glamorous, in a shapeless ornate white-and-gold trouser suit, with a tiny gold handbag, high white heels, numerous sparkly accessories and rather thick and dusky makeup. She could be any age – twenty, forty-five.

My second impression is that she’s very serious. Under the makeup her face is grim, the mouth set and the eyes gravely electric, as if she’s already annoyed with someone. Her hair is a spiral of lively sheen, but pinned back, elaborately constricted. It must hurt her, pull on her scalp, every time she turns her head.

Incongruously, on a strap round her neck she carries a large old-fashioned-looking camera – mechanical, manual, possibly predigital.

Ess says, ‘I believe they’re ready for us upstairs, so what say we head up for a spot of dinner, then repair to the conference room for a late last sort of a briefing?’

For the second night running, dinner on the roof terrace is a muted affair. Amid the urban sparkles Ess does his best, embarking on any number of funny stories and shared recollections, but neither Asha nor I quite takes up his rhythm and time and again the only other sound is the click of a fork on a plate. While Ess speaks, Asha with a preoccupied air tilts her head suavely from side to side. It takes me almost the whole meal to realise that the gesture doesn’t mean she’s disagreeing with him. But what does it mean?

The conference room turns out to be a small dining room on the ground floor with a dinner table and a flip chart in it. Asha takes from her tiny handbag a cube of paper which folds out into a map like a blown-up photograph of a French cheese. She flattens the map down onto the table and she and Ess begin discussing it, leaning together, shoulders almost touching, her lavish red nails stabbing one point after another. They both speak the name of the place I know we’re going to, a word I’ve heard many times but never seen written down, a word that starts with a P and has two or maybe three syllables. I’m still trying to catch the word, to form a picture of it, when Asha says, ‘Beyond this, we’ll just have to see what we find on the ground.’

Ess nods. I nod too. I’m still nodding when I say, ‘Wait. What was that?’

‘I said we can’t speak too confidently about the terrain until we’ve seen it.’ She glances at Ess with a knowing smile. It’s the first smile of hers I’ve seen yet.

‘So you’ve not seen the terrain?’ I try, quite hard, to assume a neutral expression, wide-eyed, high-shouldered. ‘You’ve never been there?’

‘That’s correct. When would I have been there?’ Again she glances at Ess for support, which he all too happily supplies.

‘Well,’ I say, rather less neutrally, ‘I don’t know, when
would
you have been there? You’re guiding us to this place, might it not’ve been an idea to… find it?’

‘I’ve located the place. I’ve considered every detail of Raymond’s narrative, and I’ve located our destination precisely and without the least possibility of error.’

‘But you’ve never been there.’

‘No. I’ve never been there.’ Asha glares at me across the little dinner table. The contained charge of her eyes.

Then Ess says, ‘I don’t think we have any reason to doubt that Asha knows where we’re going. Didn’t you hear what she said? She knows
the story
.’

The story of how Ess met Tarik Kundra.

Once upon a time there was a successful businessman named Raymond Ess. One year he took a break from work and travelled far and wide about India, visiting its cities and exploring its landscape. When the time came that he wished to travel still more broadly, in Mumbai he contacted a back street tour company named Adventurers whose representative Asha Jarwal (after raising a finger and hissing at him, jabbing out the final characters of a report she was writing, and turning back to him with an unforgettable smile) escorted him on a projected thirty-day trek into the polleny wilds.

The trek began well, proceeding over broad plains under blue skies. Then, a little after two o’clock in the afternoon of day eight, Ess and Asha found themselves imprisoned by an entirely
unpredictable swathe of monsoon weather. The two were swept apart. By the time the rain ceased Ess had been driven out alone to the bleakest part of the plain.

For forty days and forty nights – well, two days and a night – he wandered the plain without glimpsing another human being. Soon his supply of food ran out. Then his water ran out. For most of the second day he walked practically on his knees, his lips blistered with thirst. At some point he lost consciousness.

When he awoke he was lying on scorched earth in bright sunlight. A young man in a blazing white kurta and fashionably blocky, black-framed spectacles was standing over him, head at an angle, hands in pockets. This was Tarik Kundra.

Some time later Ess perceived that the young man was carrying him. This wouldn’t have been especially difficult (Ess was light, the young man strong) but still Ess sensed that his saviour had taken on in him a burden more than physical.

They came to a metallic cabin with the look of an abandoned electricity sub-station. It was surrounded by smaller, rougher wooden sheds. This lonely cluster of buildings at the centre of the plain was Tarik Kundra’s home, his test site, his priest hole.

For three days Tarik nursed the sickly Ess, and during this time the men came to know each other well. Not that Tarik was eager, at first, to surrender his secrets. When Ess asked him why his quarters in the cabin were crammed with packets of dry food, industrial quantities of rice and beans, Tarik’s flippant first reply was that he was holding tight for the apocalypse. Later, however, he explained the far stranger and sadder truth.

Tarik was a scientist – in his own words, a ‘technologist’ – and after graduating from an elite Indian university that he wouldn’t name he worked for three years at an elite Indian company that he wouldn’t name either. His work for the unnamed company involved him in researching new technologies; and yet, as he took pains to point out, when his breakthrough came, it had
nothing to do with the work he’d performed in his contract. The breakthrough work was a hobby, until all at once it became something else.

That night Tarik showed Ess what his hobby had become: against the vast canvas of the black sky, he demonstrated his wonderful, impossible machine.

He pointed out further that in inventing the machine he had more or less signed his own death warrant. Before his employers could discover his invention, steal it from him and kill him, he had fled to this lost place on the plain. The cabin, the sheds and a rasping stretch of river a few hundred yards away had been his entire existence for almost a year. He expected it would remain so, now, until he died.

Ess begged to differ. He made it clear to Tarik that he was interested in his machine; that it was, indeed, exactly what he’d been looking for. Offers were made, and rejected. Suggestions met with accusations, assurances likewise. For many days and nights the two men talked, argued, drank. They each punched the other at least half a dozen times.

Finally Tarik was ready to trust him. Ess persuaded him of what in any other setting would have been self-evidently true: that he, Raymond Ess, was a man of power and means and Tarik could trust him when he said he would not only keep his location a secret, not only return and pay him handsomely for his machine, but also provide safe passage out of India so that Tarik could escape his enemies and begin a new life in any corner of the globe.

‘Just you see,’ Ess had told him. ‘Sit tight and I’ll be back here with the money for you one month from now. Maybe two.’

‘Two months,’ Tarik had said, confirming nothing, merely repeating the words.

At last the two new friends parted. Tarik pointed him in the direction of a nearby town and almost two months after
he’d vanished in the monsoon Ess was reunited with Asha at a crowded and joyous Mumbai bus station.

Except it’s not true. None of that happened.

Or
most of it
didn’t happen. Until recently I’ve assumed that the story was cut whole from the cloth of Ess’s insanity. Now I know that Asha Jarwal exists, is in some sense a real person, I’m having to make a few adjustments.

Okay. He hired a guide, travelled the wilds, got lost in a monsoon. Two months later he resurfaced at a bus station with an astonishing story. This much I can accept.

Or can I? In the dining room Asha announces with a brisk air of prearrangement that our car is due to arrive at any moment. I ask which car and she says the car that’s going to take us out – out into the Mumbai night. Ess nods eagerly.

I try to cry off: I have my Skype call to Alice in fifteen minutes.

‘We can wait,’ Asha says. She regards me steadily. I look right back at her, look her a look that asks:
What are you up to? What are you doing, with this delicate man and his fanciful stories?
And:
What are you? Friend or foe?

‘Can’t talk for long,’ I tell Alice’s face in the screen. ‘The guide’s here.’

‘Oh yeah? What’s she like?’

‘She’s doing my fucking head in, is what she’s like. We’re going out, apparently. It’s all arranged. Because
Asha
says. Because
the guide
says.’

‘Mmn. I suppose this means you’re in business? So to speak.’

‘We hit the road in the morning. “At first light”, whenever the fuck that is.’

‘And you’re cool with this. Just taking it in stride.’

‘I’m going off my nut.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I…’ Her face bats kinetically in the screen. More shifting about on the ghost couch. ‘All right, Jug-head. What’s bugging you? Is it this Asha, or…?’

‘It’s the whole fucking thing. Tomorrow we go tearing off into the countryside… then what? We go round in circles with Ess scratching his head and mumbling, “It may have been here” and “Or maybe it was here”… until what? We run across some random hovel in the wilds and he says “Yes! This is the place! Now we must wait until my good friend Tarik returns from his travels.” And we wait… and we wait…’

‘Do you know how you should think about this situation?’

‘Tell me how I should think about this situation.’

‘What’s the alternative?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Just that. Can you imagine any way you might have told Ess no, any way you might have refused to go with him? Because whatever happened he was taking this trip. Would you have let him go on his own?’

‘Obviously not.’

But the question and my answer both unnerve me. Why
am
I here? Because Ess asked me to come here with him? Or because Martin Cantor did?

‘There you are then,’ she says. ‘Just make sure you watch your step with this Asha. We both know what you’re like.’

‘Do we?’

‘Well, this Asha sounds quite full-on. And you can be… funny about that, can’t you?’

‘Can I?’

‘Oh, come on. You remember how you were about… Marie, was it?’

‘Asha’s not anything like Marie.’

‘Remember when you had to go back under her yoke? You hated it. What did I have to keep telling you? “She’s not ‘bossy’, she’s your boss.” And with what relief you went back to Ess…’

‘That’s bollocks,’ I say. And it is. Marie was my boss when I started at Resolute, in the pool of HR, and I didn’t mind her at all. Just the same, I’ve never pretended that I wasn’t happy when Ess chose me to replace his retiring former assistant (an utterly frightful old crow called Ginger, who loved him, rapturously and ravenously, and hated everyone else). Not that there was any sense of special preference in his choice: he just came into the office one day, did
eeny-meeny-mo
with his eyes, then nodded at me and said, ‘You’ll do.’ Of course I was happy; Marie in HR was Marie in HR, but Ess was
Ess
. And yes, a couple of times last year, while Ess was ill and then later while he was away on sabbatical (exploring the Indian subcontinent – getting lost in monsoons, meeting inventors), I did briefly return to HR and the temporary line management of Marie.

And it was fine. Alice doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She can be going off only whatever I told her at the time, and I never told her that I didn’t like working for Marie. I did like it. Or, well, I didn’t mind it.

‘That’s absolute bollocks,’ I say, because it is.

‘Admit it. You get funny about women, don’t you? You don’t like it when women tell you what to do.’

I stare at her. Unmoored, adrift: I get what? I don’t like what?

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ She sends her eyebrows up with her voice. ‘There’s no shame in it, not any more. You’re just one of those blokes who get slightly twitchy when it’s a bird calling the shots. I’m right though, aren’t I?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re not.’

I’m annoyed, and Alice can see that I am. She sighs, somewhat heavily; her eyes cast about for something to do with all the wideness that has ended up stranded in them. She was teasing
me, winding me up, and we both know it, but somehow we’re trapped on opposite sides of what this knowledge represents.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘never mind. The main thing is I’m not worried about you. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided I’m not worried about you
at all
. You’re a capable guy. You’ll make sure everyone’s fine, you’ll look after Ess, keep an eye on him, keep your fizzy eye on him, and whatever comes along you’ll deal with it.’ Will I? This doesn’t sound much like me. ‘And anyway,’ she’s going on, ‘I still reckon you’re going to get there, meet this inventor chap, buy his machine and come back, oh, richer than Warren Buffet. Richer than Bill Gates!’