panel was framed by twelve even holes, and the men were filling them with a paste like halwa.
‘Let’s talk it through one more time. The blast will pop her outwards. No one stands in the way. You’ll be disorientated–think through your actions now. You three are going in with torches. Remember your way back. Once you get out you turn right–look at where the van is waiting. Are you ready?’
Imran looked up at the gloomy tower, and could not get rid of the thought, ‘Did I dream this once before?’ His heart was hammering in his throat.
The massive steel panel burst cleanly out of the wall and landed in the dust in an explosion so loud that everything in its wake was just a numb rumble. He staggered from the force of the blast, took hold of his thoughts, reached for his flashlight, and plunged into the swirling dust that filled the neat square hole in the wall. He ran into the room–and stopped short.
The lights were on, and Sapna stood shivering before him, clasping herself in a shawl, her eyes wide. He stood motionless, looking. She was beautiful to him, and her eyes answered his own in many mysterious ways; her very reality seemed astonishing, as if suddenly the afterimage that rippled briefly on corneal waters whenever he looked away from the sun, the presence that had for so long shimmered just beyond his senses, had at last become solid–this was true; but why was it that, as he looked, as he wished for all the clocks of the world to stop for the moment of his looking, his head was distracted, filled with other kinds of ticks and tocks that were not to do with time, that were the sound of a mechanism falling into place, the dials of a mighty safe lining up and opening, not just an eight-foot-square steel entrance but a channel between worlds that brought things unaccustomedly close and in an instant made the yearning of the poets of his childhood seem quaint and unnecessary; and as confusion raced like police sirens through the exhilarating night of his encounter, even as the men began to shout from behind and, in that other dimension, time was still galloping onwards, even as somewhere he was aware of how he must look, bursting in from the night at the head of a band of men with guns and a job to do, he knew now that all the reservoir of his desire, which had jangled inside him all his life, which filled his very chromosomes and made them yell out in the darkness, had not been enough to prepare him for this domino-like unfolding of everything he thought was solid around the trembling form of the woman who now stood before him.
‘What is happening? Get him out of there! Let’s go!’
Sapna continued to look at him.
‘Am I dreaming this again?’ she said, as if puzzled. ‘Or is it really you this time?’
Imran stood stupidly; but anyway he was not given time to respond as the men grabbed him and Sapna and dragged them both outside. His mind whirled and he followed them in a daze, lights flashed all around him, and there was a shift in reality; he tried to wake himself up to it, it seemed urgent…
They were surrounded. A ring of policemen shone bright lights at them, pointed guns.
‘You fucking idiot,’ the explosives chief shouted at Imran. ‘I thought you had it in you. You froze. Now we’re all fucked.’
They dropped their weapons and were grouped together and handcuffed. The night seemed strangely big, and the red and blue lights of the police vans hurt the eyes. One of the policemen was on the phone.
‘Six men. One of them’s deformed. Reminds me of someone, actually. The girl’s here too…The Defence Minister? Why? It’s three in the morning…Oh. I see…I’ll wait for you to call me back.’
They were all made to lie down on the ground. It began to rain. The phone rang.
‘Yes? Hello, Sir…Yes…A sort of dwarf…You’re exactly right. Just like a bull…Rajiv Malhotra? I see…No, we’ll make very sure. We’ll be very discreet…Yes, I know the place…The girl too? I don’t think the girl is an accomplice in this, sir…She doesn’t look dangerous…Of course. Very good.’
Thus it was that slightly before dawn, Imran and Sapna were locked into adjacent rooms in a high-security mental asylum that sat in the middle of large grounds in an unobtrusive location on the outskirts of the city.
For three days, high-ranking government officials thought of nothing but the Malhotra Issue. Rajiv Malhotra had asked for three days to conduct his own investigation into what had happened, during which time his daughter would remain in the asylum along with the ugly creature who was, it now turned out, none other than the star of The Ramayana and of so many memorable advertisements whose makers would be horrified when they found out that the deviant creature they had taken pity on, sponsored, and enriched was in real life a far more sinister kind of interloper than the antisocial influences he had been asked to portray on television. A low-class loner with sick thoughts whom even wealth and fame had not been able to civilize, who still kept the company of illegal elements, a criminal of the worst sort who destroyed private property by night in the throes, no doubt, of a monstrous sexual hunger for whose gratification he could not avail himself of the standard amenities but conceived instead an intricate plot to assault the decency of a daughter of the city’s leading family. No one could understand why it was that Rajiv Malhotra extended his three days’ protection to such a despicable character, but the connections of businessmen as prominent as he always extended into murky places and it was best not to ask. For three days phone calls passed between the Defence Minister, the director of the asylum, the Chief of Police, and Rajiv Malhotra himself. The officials were stern with the businessman: he had failed in his guarantee to manage his daughter’s Situation without the assistance of the State, and no concessions beyond the three days were allowed him. He was not permitted to visit the asylum or to speak to either of its new inmates.
For three days, Sapna did not sleep. Day and night she stood at her fifth-floor window looking out. The grounds were well kept, and the gardeners had recently planted infant trees around the foot of the building. Keeping watch with the police was her brother, Rajiv’s model son whom Sapna had only seen in photographs and who was now a tall, handsome teenager. He had taken it upon himself to ensure, as his clammy-hearted father did not seem to be able to, that no security breaches happened this time, and surveyed the window where she stood with a self-confident hatred that chilled her heart.
For three days she looked out, thinking again of those moments in the television epic when the ten-headed Ravana had attempted to seduce the woefully chaste Sita, with what words! and what yearning! How she had treasured the voice of a man who could desire like that, and how many times had she imagined that her own incarceration might be ended with such a magnificent abduction. What course of events, what impossible, impenetrable strangeness, could have brought that man to her and propelled him through the walls of her cage? What spirit could have caused her dream to be recreated so precisely in reality?
For three days she thought continually on these things. And then she slept.
Imran awoke to find himself in a room with no floor, hanging onto the bars of his window with bloodless fingers.
Buds of bulging paintwork were appearing all over the walls; green shoots burst from them, wavered for a second as if waiting for a distant vegetal communication, suddenly found direction, and streaked up through the ceiling, swelling into vast boughs of furrowed wood and splitting the room apart. He looked down through the bars where he hung: the circle of saplings had grown into giants, their tops soaring into the sky, branches spreading out inside the building as if reaching for a prey, fusing with the bricks and–yes! even as he watched!–lifting the entire asylum clean off the ground and carrying it aloft. The room tipped and Imran was standing upright on the wall, the window bars popped out and fell to the grass that was already far below, the bricks that separated him from his sister collapsed in a cascade: and there was Sapna, still asleep in her bed.
He shook her awake; and already she was running with him, leaping the crevasses that were opening under their feet, fighting through corridors that were quickly becoming impassable from rubble and dust and people. Everywhere there were people in white, inmates who giggled uncontrollably as unseen hands flung wide their cell doors, who shuffled into the hallways, who clucked and ticked and screamed as the floors buckled and sent them sliding on their backsides down the inclines, genitals