‘How’s things?’ Ahmed asked. This meeting was one pencilled in, just a quick update on how her work was going, but it hadn’t been definite, so he looked mildly surprised and pleased to see her.
‘Things are fine,’ said Geena. ‘At SynBioTech.’ She gestured a heap. ‘Lots of notes. Good obs and some… you know, the ideas are coming along.’
‘Good, good. I’ve been following them on the doc space, and I agree it’s coming along fine, but it’s good to hear it from you.’
He shot her a quick, tight smile, as if to say she should drop in more often.
She acknowledged this with a glance down and a nod. Then she looked up.
‘But apart from that… uh, there’s something I’d like to talk about. Privately.’
Ahmed’s black eyebrows lifted. ‘How privately?’
Geena looked over her shoulder at the door. ‘Off the record. Personal logs only.’
His lips compressed and twitched sideways. ‘Hmm. Very well. I’d better fix us some coffee. Usual?’
‘Black, no sugar, thanks.’
Ahmed sidled past, and out into the corridor. As she waited for his return, Geena scanned from the low vantage of her chair the books on the shelves that lined the walls. Despite all advances in information technology – every title she could see was easily accessible on her glasses – most academics persisted in stockpiling hard copy, as if in anticipation of the day when some Naxal software worm or other global disaster brought down the Net. So Dr Estraguel had his own thesis (Fictitious Capital and the Political Economy of Promise) at floor level, then the sociology textbooks he’d read as an undergraduate – Giddens, Parsons, Habermas – and the theoretical works with which he’d supplemented them – Foucault, Lacan, Derrida; Marx’s Capital (three faded-brown-dust-jacketed hardback volumes in the antique Moscow edition, as well as the more familiar Penguin Classics in battered paperback), with commentaries thereon by Althusser, Dunayevskaya, Fine and Saad-Filho, Ticktin, Mandel and Rosdolsky; early science studies by Popper, Kuhn, Latour, Lakatos, Bloor, Baskhar; rows and rows of monographs and recent books, fiction and non-fiction; on higher shelves the current sociology textbooks, including the latest, to which he’d contributed a chapter himself. But upon them all, as far as Geena could see, dust was gathering. Like almost everyone else with shelved books, when Ahmed wanted to read one he’d glance at its title and summon it on his glasses rather than haul it down.
Coffee, though, you couldn’t digitise that. Its smell and the warning twinge that went along with it. Ahmed came in with two plastic cups and pushed the door shut behind him.
‘Now,’ he said, back behind his desk, ‘Geena, could you please…’
He waved behind his right shoulder in the direction of the ceiling-corner camera.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Geena. ‘Dr Estraguel, I’m requesting that you turn off the internal surveillance camera, and I’m affirming that I’ve read and understood the college regulations in this respect.’
‘Fine, OK.’ Ahmed slipped on his glasses and looked over his shoulder up into the corner, then snapped his fingers. ‘Right.’ He settled back and sipped. ‘Fire away.’
Geena picked up her cup and put it back down at once, so as not to spill it. She clasped her hands together on her lap. She told him what had happened.
‘Oh, Geena!’ Ahmed spread his arms. ‘I would…’
‘Thanks. I know you can’t.’ She sighed. ‘I’m all right, really. It’s just… I named you, you know, as someone I knew who was sort of radical… I didn’t accuse you, didn’t point a finger’ – she caught her breath, tried to laugh – ‘so to speak, as far as I can remember, but to be honest it’s all a bit like white noise in my head, and I’m so sorry.’
Head in her hands, by this point. She sniffed hard. She heard a drawer open and close. Some light weight was scuffed across the desk.
‘Tissues,’ Ahmed said.
‘Thanks.’ She blew. ‘Ugh.’
Steadier now, she took a sip of coffee. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry, Ahmed.’
‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ he said. ‘Anybody would do the same. It’s expected.’
‘I brought your name into—’
Ahmed waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘Not for a second. They can’t touch me on any of that nonsense.’
‘You’ve written an article about the Naxals,’ Geena said, as if he needed reminding. ‘A few years ago now, but…’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Ahmed, with a fleeting smile. ‘“The Pure Theory of Primitive Military Accumulation”. You’ve read it?’
‘Yes, and… it could be interpreted as sympathetic, or at least – what do the cops call it?’ She struggled to remember the phrase thrown in her face the previous night. ‘“Soft support”.’
‘Ah, fuck.’ Ahmed exhaled the word on a long breath. ‘Pardon my English, Geena.’ He glanced over his shoulder, as if at the recording device that wasn’t running. ‘I trust that will be interpreted as an expletive and an intensifier. It’s just that I’m a little taken aback that you might think that they might think that way.’
He touched his steepled, spread fingers to his mouth and nose, repeating this several times, his gaze abstract. Then he smiled, disarmingly.
‘It’s like… you missed the memo. Missed a class, or something.’ Again with the smile. ‘I mean, don’t take this personally, it’s not a criticism of you, if anyone’s failed it’s me or one of my colleagues. Think methodology, Geena.’
Geena thought. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You mean, a mathematical, materialist analysis of Naxal theory and practice can’t be construed as even soft support, because it’s critique, and critique has to assimilate the construction being deconstructed.’
Ahmed raked fingers backward through his hair.
‘True enough, as far as it goes,’ he said, sounding impatient. ‘You didn’t miss that class. But actually, what I was thinking of was more the question of their methodology. That of the repressive state apparatuses.’
He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted his swivel chair back, and rocked a few times.
‘It’s textbook stuff, to be honest,’ he said. ‘But maybe we don’t spell it out clearly enough at the undergraduate level, and we sort of assume our graduate students will pick it up by some kind of tacit process, which… is pretty naive and remiss of us, all things considered.’ He brought the seat back to horizontal with a bump, and leaned forward, elbows on the desk, expounding. ‘Sorry about that. Seriously. So… here’s the thing. Over on the, ah, other side, the smoky states, an article like mine – which was immediately put on the reading list of every staff college in the world, on both sides of the Warm Front – would have been enough to get me in serious hot water, and I don’t mean metaphorically in some places. And even the Russians and the Indians are, well… you know… very much hands-on in dealing with dissent, which is I suppose understandable enough in that the Naxals, to say nothing of the underlying population, are a much more immediate threat over there. Over here, on the other hand, including in China, based on the long experience and political nous of stable ruling-class fractions, blah blah, you know the story – on our side, as I say, it’s an absolute given that all revolutionaries are paper tigers. That Mao allusion isn’t a joke, you know – China’s where it all started. When you have a completely capitalist system run by completely conscious Marxist-Leninists, the relative autonomy of ideology becomes obvious to everyone whose opinion matters. I’m talking about the hegemonic class fractions, people who’ve been to Oxbridge and Harvard and Beijing, not your MBAs and politicians and journalists – not to mention the scientists you’re working with, bless their Daily Mail-reading hearts, or their Guardian-reading hearts for that matter – or any other such-like foot-soldiers, but what the civil service used to call first-class minds. They all get a very good grounding in critical theory at university, that’s part of what their parents are bloody paying for, even if they grumble in the comment columns about their little darlings coming out with all this subversive stuff that leftie lecturers have filled their heads with.’