Tokyo Cancelled. Rana Dasgupta

white; and, as Imran and Sapna clutched hands and watched from above, the ring of trees wrenched the building in all directions; it opened like a flower, and its centre fell out and crashed to the ground. There was sky above them and ground below, and all around them, in amphitheatrical cutaway, were the stacked worlds of the hospital, from whose truncated edges hung screaming people who eventually had to loose their grip and fall one by one through the open well of the building onto the pile of stone and steel below.

      From his sentry post where he had made up for the shameful laxity of the police observers with his own unsleeping surveillance, Rajiv’s model son watched in horror as the asylum broke open like a wasp’s nest, as white-robed pupae began to rain from it and wriggle away who knew where, ready to infiltrate the city and lay new eggs of their own in its fissures and sewers. It was not thus that his father’s girl child and her accomplice creature would find their escape. He seized a rifle from one of the still sleeping policemen and began to climb one of the trees.

      Imran and Sapna teetered on the edge of their gaping concrete tree house as shots began to strike the people around them. He dragged Sapna down, ‘Quick, we have to jump for it’, but already she was struck and was lying breathless over his knee, blood welling from above her hip onto the floor. Bullets still flew, stopping the shrieks of women in their throats, lodging in the plaster. A red stain fanned out from Sapna’s side across the ground, the racing trees slowed down, grew in weaker and weaker bursts that seemed to keep time with Sapna’s fading heartbeat, and finally stopped. The raging bedlam of exploding cellulose and masonry ceased, and there was quiet. The wind sighed through the branches, and the azan sounded far away. Sapna lay white and motionless.

      With a roar, Imran flew at the gunman who was his brother. He scrambled across the still branches and hanging lintels, spread wide his enormous arms, ran with a fury that was too mad and too fast for fingers to find their grip or bullets to be loaded, and alighted on the branch where the killer leant before he could clamber off it. He struck the rifle from his grasp and, with trembling mouth still searching for a curse terrible enough, seized him by the throat, squeezed his skull with his outsized sinews, and snapped his neck with a single flourish of rage. He held him for a moment to let the poison of his anger seep in and dispatch him still further, clasped the brother he did not know he had, supported his body until the force had gone entirely, and let him drop to the ground below, limbs outstretched and head waggling uselessly.

      With a sense that all the world had ended, Imran clambered back to where Sapna lay. He crossed the tangle of branches in despair, neared the circle of white people that knelt around her, that parted as he approached, knelt down among them himself–and saw something miraculous.