able to enjoy.’
He led a double life. By day he would lead the life of people: working, eating, attending social functions, chatting to family and friends. Of course fatigue gnawed at him like a cancer: his organs felt as if they were of lead and ready to drag him down into a void, his eyes were like boulders in his head. But there was light and there were people, and he felt a part of the world. He worked endlessly, slowly transforming his father’s steel company into a global industrial empire that made him feel involved, significant.
But his nights were another life altogether. A life of black solitude when everyone around him demonstrated a loyalty more primal–happily, eagerly, gratefully, and so simply!–leaving him behind for the arms of sleep, abandoning him to wish away the hours of night, to experience time as something he had somehow to get through, and thus to become submerged in pointlessness.
While his wife slept upstairs he would wander through their many rooms, like a ghost condemned to revisit a castle every night for eternity, slinking tediously through the same corridors centuries after the life he once knew has given way to silence and dereliction. He would rifle the house aimlessly for new soporifics–books to draw him out of his boredom and panic enough that sleep might steal up on him unnoticed; videos or TV shows for him to surrender his mind to for a while. He wandered in the deep shadows of the garden smoking unaccustomed cigarettes, read the day’s news again, finished off bowls of peanuts that had been put out hours ago for evening guests; finally, he went drowsily to bed to lie next to his wife only to find in his horizontality some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution. At length, the windows would lighten, the azan would sound from distant mosques, and he would start to change from yesterday’s clothes into today’s, simultaneously relieved to be no longer alone and tortured that his strange impotence had been confirmed once more.
Of course he had consulted doctors. He had tried sleeping pills, relaxants, anti-anxiety drugs, meditation and hypnosis. He had diligently read the publications of the Sleep Disorder Society of America and the scientific publications of all the leading somnologists. He had tried every kind of therapeutic bed, pillow, earplug, and eyemask. He had followed the suggestions of friends to play Mozart or classical ragas very softly in his room, had even given a chance to the Sounds of Nature CD collection someone had sent him, lying in bed to the surround sound of cicadas in the rainforest or underwater whale recitatives, and trying to detect signs of somnolence inside himself. None appeared. No therapy, from folk to pharmacological, had managed to prise open for him the gates of the kingdom of slumber, and after some years he stopped looking for help. He did not sleep, and that was that.
It was doctors who confirmed to him, however, what he had himself long suspected: that a lifetime without sleep was almost certainly responsible for the fact that, after ten years of marriage, he and his wife had never conceived a child.
When Rajiv Malhotra had married the Bollywood superstar Mira Sardari, the newspapers had been apoplectic with idolizing, goggling glee. The romance had every element of legend: the society man of the 70s who was jilted by the beautiful–and older–mother and waited twenty years to marry the daughter; the helicopter accident that orphaned the teenage Mira and made her the child of India herself, with doting parents in all the leading families; the secret wedding in a Himalayan resort while Mira was at the height of her fame and in the middle of her classic Exile (no one was there, but everyone was an eyewitness); the ending of her film career ‘so I can devote myself to helping those less fortunate than myself’; his sophistication and massive commerical power. But children, which they both saw as the fulfilment of their lives, did not come. Doctors advised the couple that Rajiv’s sleepless body, incapable of rejuvenating itself, would never produce seed. His private thoughts, that had dwelt single-mindedly on iron and tin for so long, became more and more obsessed by flesh and blood. There was a quietness between him and his wife. And after a while, the editors of newspapers, obsessed with dynasties even more than with money, themselves turned quiet.
One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.
As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.
He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.
He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.
The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.
‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’
‘How is everything?’
‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.
From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.
‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.
‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’
At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.
‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’
‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’
‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’
‘Not now.’
‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’
‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’
‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’
‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’
‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’
‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’
‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’
‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them