The string spelled out the word ‘NAXAL’, with a swastika in the place of the ‘X’. Geena smiled faintly to herself at the virtual graffiti. Put there – well, a tiny and almost undetectable transmitter dropped nearby, a speck amid the dirt at the foot of the wall – by some Indian old-line supporter, she guessed, maybe some kid whose family kept up a loyalty to one of the many parties of the Left on the subcontinent who opposed the Naxal insurrection and who often enough were the first in its line of fire.
Geena walked on, vaguely troubled. Something about the slogan rang false. It seemed to be making a simplistic equation: Naxal = Nazi. And that wasn’t right. She half-smiled again, recalling the line from The Big Lebowski. Nazis, whatever else might be said about them, at least weren’t nihilists.
You couldn’t say that about the Naxals. In all she knew of history, Geena could think of only one parallel, and it terrified her. Way back in the thirteenth century BCE there had for many more centuries than thirteen been civilisation right across the Middle East. It had been brought down in the brief span of twenty-seven years, by people who had come out of nowhere and burned down every city in their known world. If, in any heap of ruins, enough survivors were left to begin rebuilding, the City Burners came back after a few years and sacked it again. With equal thoroughness they’d destroyed every record. The City Burners had come from the plains, the deserts, the mountains, the sea. They had completed their task, and then vanished from history. It wasn’t even clear whether they were invaders from without or rebels from below. No history was written about them, because by the time they’d finished, there wasn’t a person alive within a thousand miles who could write.
The Naxals were like that. They’d started out as some kind of Maoists, but their ideology had mutated into what seemed like sheer nihilism, fuelled by a hatred of industrial civilisation itself, with a strategy to bring it down. Her supervisor, Dr Ahmed Estraguel, whom she was vaguely planning to see tomorrow morning, had said that People’s War resembled the Naxal strategy the way a protein resembled a prion. The movement was a pure self-replicator, recruiting new cadre out of the very devastation that their actions and the state’s counteractions brought about. Decades of fighting across an ever-increasing range – far beyond the original ‘Red Corridor’ that they’d vaunted when it had merely extended the length of India, and by now well to the north into central Asia and southern Russia and as far south as Indonesia – had turned them into an engine of destruction that would have made the Khmer Rouge shudder. (Say what you like about the tenets of the Angkar, dude…) They’d merged with and absorbed the defeated remnants of older, lesser movements – the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the rebels in Chechnya and Uzbekistan – and taken over what remained of their tattered, though still far-flung, networks. But the Naxals’ longest reach was in inspiration and ideology, and in the virtual. They’d gone viral, inspiring popups, usually but not always in communities of south Asian origin – including in Southall, a few kilometres away.
Which was why Geena had, in the two years she’d lived in Uxbridge, been stopped in the street five times and questioned by the police. Each time, a simple ID check and a few polite answers had seen her on her way. So when, half an hour after she’d seen the slogan, and just as she was a few streets away from where she lived, she turned a corner to find a police van parked at the wayside and three armoured cops blocking her path, she felt barely more than annoyed.
The street was otherwise deserted. Semis, bungalows, villas, New Trees. Smell of goats and chickens. Cars and bike racks. No kids running about. A policeman stepped forward, raising a Kevlar-gloved palm. The other two held back, hands lightly resting on holsters and batons at their belts. Geena stopped. She said nothing.
‘Your ID, please.’
Geena handed over the card. The policeman held it in front of the scanner on his helmet. Mirrored text scrolled on his visor. He asked her name, her address, her place of work, her…
Wearily but promptly, she complied.
The policeman stepped back, still holding Geena’s card, and with his other hand beckoned behind him. One of his colleagues took his place – a woman, Geena now saw, more slightly built and more heavily armoured than the others.
‘Last night,’ the policewoman said, ‘you passed a piece of virtual graffiti, near the junction of Hillingdon Road and Huxley Drive. Could you describe it?’
‘It was the word “Naxal” with a swastika in place of the “x”.’
‘Uh-huh.’ A nod. ‘And tonight you noticed it again?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena. ‘About twenty minutes ago?’ ‘Yes,’ said Geena, puzzled. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Plenty of time to report it, then.’
Geena felt baffled. ‘Report it? Why?’
‘It’s a serious offence.’
‘What? It’s virtual graffiti!’ Geena waved a hand around, indicating other samples of the art. ‘I don’t think there’s even a law against it yet; you couldn’t get them for anything apart from littering, and that’s Council, that’s—’
‘The content,’ the policewoman interrupted, her voice hardening. ‘Glorifying terrorism. Written support of an illegal organisation. Aid and comfort to the enemy.’
‘But… but…’ Geena floundered, disoriented by the absurdity of the claim. ‘It’s against the Naxals! It’s saying they’re Nazis!’
‘Ms Fernandez,’ the policewoman said, with sarcastic patience, ‘I do understand that you’re from a Catholic background. But you must have celebrated Diwali at school, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena, with a sudden lift-shaft feeling as she realised where this line of questioning was going.
‘Then I take it you recognise the significance of the swastika in Hindu culture?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘So what this graffiti is really saying is something like “Hail the Naxals! Good luck to the Naxals!” Isn’t that right?’
‘Well, maybe,’ said Geena, trying to keep a tremor out of her voice, and to sound like she was just thinking aloud. ‘I suppose it could be read that way, but in a political context the significance of the symbol changes, and I’m sure most people would read it the way I did.’
‘The way you say you did,’ said the policewoman, also as if turning things over in her mind. She seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to be a little more certain than that.’ She waved towards the van. ‘Would you step inside the van for a moment, please?’
‘No!’ Geena looked from side to side. Nobody around. Somewhere a dog barked. Blue flicker of plasma telly on curtains. Bleats and clucks. She wanted to run, even though she knew it was hopeless. Her legs wouldn’t move. Her knees shook.
The policewoman took another step forward, hand reaching out, not yet touching her.
‘No, please, no!’ It came out as a wail.
Grabbed. The other two leapt forward, surrounding her. One of them wrenched away her bag. The other deftly pulled her glasses from her face. Her feet were off the ground. Bundled around the back of the van. In. Slam, muffled, like a bank vault.
The interior of the van had half a dozen seats with head and limb restraints. Geena thrashed like a child, and with as little effect. Before she had time to do anything, she was being held down, then fixed in. The restraints were syn bio stuff, soft on the skin, unyielding.
The policewoman lifted off her helmet, revealing a pleasant young face and a heap of tied-up hair. She held out a cupped hand. One of her colleagues, still visored, tossed her a small metal object that looked like a miniature grenade. She flipped the top off, pressed down a switch. An inch-long jet of flame shot up, blue and white. Geena couldn’t take her eyes off it.