his coffee and stirred intently.
‘I need you to make my wife and I a child. We will pay, of course.’ Rajiv narrated the history of his ill-fated attempts at reproduction.
Dr Hall considered deeply. He looked anxious.
‘Have you thought of adopting?’
‘I haven’t come here for your bloodless European solutions. I don’t need to visit one of the world’s leading biotechnology experts to get advice on adoption. I want a child whose flesh and blood is my wife’s and my own. That is why I am here.’
‘How much would you pay?’
‘Five million pounds.’
‘I see.’ He took a gulp from his coffee cup with just-perceptible agitation.
‘You realize that we’d need to do the work outside the country. It’s illegal here. I’d probably set up a lab in the Bahamas. We’d need to ship a lot of equipment and people. It could–’
‘I know how much money you’ll need to spend and it’s nowhere near five million pounds. I’d already included a healthy profit for you. But if it’s an issue, let’s say seven million. No more negotiation.’
‘And if I were to say yes, what would you want?’
‘I want you to make me a son. A perfect son. A son who will be handsome and charming. Brilliant and hardworking. Who can take over my business. Who will never disappoint or shame me. Who will be happy. A son, above all, who can sleep.’
‘In a probabilistic science like genetics it is dangerous to try and optimize every parameter. You start stretching chance until it snaps and you end up getting nothing.’
‘Nevertheless. Those are my demands.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than ‘Isn’t it only two hours since breakfast?’ High-alcohol wine, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anaesthesia completed the gentle high-altitude lullaby.
No matter how many times he flew, Rajiv, naturally, never succumbed to these sedatives. As time slowed down all around him, his heartbeat accelerated with the raging speed on the other side of the titanium membrane, the whole screaming, blinking 300-litres-a-second combustion of it, the 800-kilometre-an-hour gale in which Karachi-Tehran-Moscow-Prague-Frankfurt-Amsterdam each stuck for a second on the windscreen like a sheet of old newspaper and then swooped into the past. As the plane cut its fibre-optic jet stream through the sky, Rajiv’s insomniac sorrow at living in a different time from everyone else became panic as the movement of the day tilted and buckled, the unwavering sun, always just ahead, holding time still for hours and hours and burning his dim, sleepless pupils. Used to carrying the leaden darkness of the night through the day with him, he now carried Indian Standard Time in his guts into far-flung places, and there was an ear-splitting tectonic scraping within him as it went where it should never have been. Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities–until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like jet lag.
It was the same, every time.
Stephen worked quickly. Working in the Bahamas from blood and tissue samples sent from Delhi he managed to mimic the processes by which the DNA of two adults is combined at the moment of fertilization. He took human egg cells from the ovaries of aborted embryos, blasted the nucleus from them, and replaced it with the new genetic combination. He created a battery of two hundred eggs, and waited.
At length he identified one healthy and viable zygote, splitting happily into two every few hours. He called Mira, who flew out that day, and implanted it in her womb.
She returned to Delhi via London, where she had some shopping to do in Bond Street. Neither customs nor security detected the microscopic contraband she carried within her.
After nine months, Mira was rosy and rotund, and Rajiv an exuberant and solicitous father-to-be. No one could remember seeing him so glad or so animated. Even the black crescents that seemed branded under his eyes started to fade. He called Mira several times a day to enquire after her temperature and the condition of her stomach. He brought her flowers and sweets in the evening and hosted small parties in his home where she would dazzle the guests with her happiness and even replay Bollywood routines from the old days. At length, her labour began.
The obstetrician and nurses came to the house to attend her in her bedroom while Rajiv sat in his study with the door closed, fiddling with a pencil. He sweated with suspense, but would not allow himself to venture out. Finally, a nurse came to the door.
‘The labour is over, sir. And you have twins. A boy and a girl. Both are healthy. You had better come.’
Rajiv ran past her to his wife’s bedroom. There she lay, exhausted and pale, and beside her on the bed were two sleeping babies. One was a radiant, beautiful girl. The other was a boy, a shrunken, misshapen boy with an outsized head that had the pointed shape of a cow’s.
‘What is this?’ he cried in horror. ‘That is not my son! That is some–creature!’
The nurses susurrated, trying to bring calm and allow the new mother to rest, reassuring the father, telling him that new babies often look a bit–funny?–this was quite normal and not to worry, and anyway we all learn to love our children in the end, even if they have some adorable little quirk that makes them different–isn’t that what also makes them unique?
Rajiv was not listening. ‘I want that child out of my house this day!’ He stormed out and summoned his lifelong companion and servant, Kaloo.
‘A terrible thing has happened, Kaloo. My wife has given birth to two children: a girl, and a boy who is a deviant. I cannot allow the boy to stay here a moment longer. I want you to take him away. Give him to a family where he’ll be cared for. Promise them a yearly stipend–whatever they need–as long as they look after him. But I don’t want to know where he is or what happens to him, and I don’t want him to know about me. Take him away, Kaloo! Away from Delhi–somewhere else. And as long as we are all alive this secret stays between you and me.’
In a very few hours the matter was taken care of. Telling no one, not even Rajiv, where he was going, Kaloo wrapped the baby up and set out with a wet nurse for the airport. He took Rajiv’s private plane and flew to Bombay. While the nurse looked after the baby in a hotel room, Kaloo wandered the streets looking for a family who would care for the child. His gaze was attracted by the kindly face of a Muslim bookseller. He approached him and told him the story.
‘Sir–my wife and I would be so happy! We have no children and have always wanted a son!’
‘I will deliver the boy to you this very evening. And every year on this day I will visit you with money. You cannot contact me, nor should you make any attempt to discover the origins of the boy. I hope you will be loving parents to him.’
He and the wet nurse took the baby to the bookseller’s home that evening and delivered him into his new mother’s arms. She wept with joy.
‘We will call him Imran,’ she said reverentially. ‘He will be a man like a god.’
Rajiv and Mira named their daughter Sapna, and from the first day of her life everyone who saw her was enchanted by her. She was so beautiful that jaded politicians and wrinkled businessmen