there, we could conduct the kind of tests that might lead to her eventual recovery and reintegration, and we could ensure she had secure quarters where her own remarkable traits could cause neither upset nor disturbance. What would you say to that?’
None of them was quite prepared for Rajiv’s reaction. One must suppose that, even if you are the defence minister of the world’s second most populous nation, it is an unnerving sight to see the world’s twenty-seventh richest man on his knees before you, weeping.
‘Sir, please don’t take my daughter from me! She is everything I have, and I love her far, far more than my own wretched life. I will do anything, anything–but do not take her from me. Leave it with me, sir–I promise I will find a way out of this–I have money, resources, friends–we will sort this out, don’t worry, we will understand the problem–we will work out how it can be solved in everyone’s interest–have faith in me, sir and I will not disappoint you. Only I beg you this–please let me keep my daughter!’
The government officials were silent, and it was some time before the Minister could summon his voice again.
‘Very well, Rajiv. Perhaps we have been both unfeeling and insensitive. Please go away and think about this, and let us know what you decide–by Wednesday evening?’
After a very few days, construction began of a large tower just outside Delhi. It was to be built with techniques drawn from the design of semiconductor manufacturing plants: there would be no organic materials, no dust or impurity of any kind, and it would be cleaned twice a day by costly machines. After some consideration it was thought better not to put windows in the building lest influences from outside upset the calm equilibrium of the interior. Rajiv went every day to supervise construction, to ensure that the vast confinement he was building for his daughter was designed and constructed with as much love as possible. A leading architect was commissioned to create a fantastic interior for Sapna that included a library of three thousand books, all specially printed on polyester film, and a music room in which was placed a customized piano built entirely of steel. The drawing room contained a television with the best channels from all over the world. But no light came in from outside, and only Rajiv would keep the key to the door. The outer walls were made entirely of steel, as thick as a man’s head. Soon Sapna was transferred there.
She spent her days writing and playing the piano. She only played the western classical repertoire, but she embarked upon a new categorization of it inspired by Hindustani classical music. Her scheme disregarded entirely the biographical accidents that had placed Liszt in Paris or made Beethoven deaf, and paid scant attention to the historical circumstances from which a work sprang or the attendant generic distinctions: ‘Baroque’, ‘Classical’, ‘Romantic’, ‘Modern’, etc. Instead, Sapna was interested in developing rules for understanding the resonances between a particular arrangement of musical sound and the natural universe, especially as apprehended by the human emotions.
She chose the expanse of the 24-hour clock face as the map on which the results of her enquiry would be plotted. Every one of its 1,440-minute gradations was held to represent a certain configuration of emotions and natural truths (after a while she found the need to analyse down to the level of the individual second) and these in turn corresponded to the different combinations of the musical ‘essences’ (her term) that could be found in individual pieces of music. She developed a set of diagrams rather like astrological charts to facilitate the complex series of judgements that had to be made in order to uncover the essences of every piece of music and thus allocate it to the correct second of the day.
After she had spent much time correcting the flaws in her system and writing out her treatise, she devoted herself to applying it to the entire piano repertoire, playing a particular piece of music slightly earlier or slightly later each day until she was satisfied that she had hit upon the exact moment at which it achieved that special resonance, rather like a dim room in the thick of a city that is ignited with sunlight for two glorious minutes every day. Most of Bach’s suites (and, contrary to their name, a couple of Chopin’s Nocturnes) came in the morning, although many of the preludes and fugues belonged to the dead of night. The more she perfected her system, the more it seemed that time was the lost secret of European classical music. When she sat, eyes closed before her piano, waiting for the precise instant of the day (about 6.02 in the evening) for which the opening bars of Beethoven’s last piano sonata were intended, when she struck out, astonishingly, into its angular chords, it made everything anyone had heard before sound like the indistinct irritation of hotel lobby soundtracks. When restored–for that is how it felt–to its correct relationship with time, the music seemed to draw itself in the sky, to stride across the constellations and fill people’s hearts with an elation they had imagined but never felt. Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02 ness as they never had before.
Sapna’s father visited her every evening. Every day she would have discovered new things through her reading or from the television that she wanted to discuss with him. He loved her more and more; and as his wife’s pregnancy advanced and she gave birth to a healthy and perfect baby boy, he also felt himself to be in her debt. ‘It is Sapna who restored my fertility to me, even at this late stage in my life,’ he thought. ‘She it is who has finally brought me the son I requested from Dr Hall, so many years ago.’ The fact that his wife had turned her back on Sapna and decided that the whole business of her first pregnancy–illegitimately obtained, she now felt–was a curse she should have nothing more to do with; the fact that Rajiv’s new and otherwise ideal son hated the idea of Sapna from the moment he became conscious of her, would fly into a fury whenever his father unheedingly referred to her as his ‘sister’, and despised him for the care and time he lavished upon the ‘freak in the tower’–all this only increased for Rajiv the poignancy of his daughter’s situation. He never ceased to feel the pain of her incarceration. ‘She deserves so much more.’ It broke his heart every evening to leave her there, and lock the door. Every night he stayed slightly longer, listening to her music or discussing literature or history.
One thing she never discussed with him was the fact that she had fallen in love with a television star. A television star with a bull-shaped head.
The shrunken baby Imran had grown up under the loving care of his parents who lived in the ramshackle bookshop his father ran in a backstreet near to where the tides of the Arabian Sea are broken by the minareted island of Haji Ali’s tomb. The tiny shop had everything: not only guidebooks, innumerable editions of the Koran and stacks of poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, but also perfumes, potions, and pendants with prayers engraved upon them. Pilgrims from small towns would come for souvenirs: plastic wall clocks that showed, behind the inconstant wavering hands, the steadfastness of the marble tomb whose domes were topped with flashing red and yellow lights for effect (‘Keeps perfect time! Will last for years.’); calendars that showed the Ka’aba surrounded by majestic whizzing planets and crescent moons in magentas and emerald greens; novelty prayer mats on which the arch of a mihrab framed a spectacular paradise of golden domes and minarets and silver palm trees. Sleeping on the shop counter, baby Imran would stay awake watching the Turkic elegance of the Muslim wonders waxing and waning in the night sky by the intermittent illumination of hundreds of gaily-coloured LEDs.
He grew slowly and unevenly. His shoulders became broad and sinewy while his legs remained thin and short. His arms were too long for his dwarfish body and from an early age he walked with a simian gait that inspired scorn and hatred among his classmates. They taunted him above all for the size and shape of his enormous head that became more and more solid with the years and whose protruding nose and jaw gave it an undeniable taurine air. Neighbourhood graffiti speculated gleefully about the various kinds of unnatural coupling that could have given rise to such a strange creature: monkeys took their cackling pleasure at the backsides of oblivious-seeming sheep, and bulls threatened to split open the bulbous behinds of curvaceous maidens. One cartoon, hastily erased by the authorities, showed an entire narrative in which a woman, anxious for a child, ate the raw testes of a bull, a meal that resulted not in her own pregnancy but that of her cow. It was an artist of some skill who had drawn the final scene in which the woman stole out by night to seize the bloody baby from the vulva of the cow and put it carefully into bed between