Prabir stretched his hand out and took the book. The passage was exactly as Keith had read it. And Amita’s name was at the top of the article.
He sat down, light-headed, still disbelieving. In the camp, when he’d recalled the things his father had said about Amita, he’d feared that she might be religious, but it was even worse than that. She was opposed to everything his parents had stood for: the equality of men and women, the separation of scholarship from self-interest, the very idea of an honest search for truth.
And he’d delivered Madhusree into her hands.
Prabir had been dreading the start of school, but by the end of the first week all his worst fears had proved groundless. The teachers spoke like sane human beings; there was no Keith-and-Amita babble in sixth grade. And he’d been allowed to sit in on Madhusree’s first morning in childcare, which seemed equally harmless. Madhusree had played with other children in the camp, so it had come as no great shock to her to meet the same kind of strange beings again, and though she’d cried when Prabir left her on the second day, when he came home she’d been full of enthusiastic reports of her activities.
Prabir had expected to be beaten up at school, but the other students kept their distance. One boy had started taunting him about his face, but then another boy had whispered something to the first that had made him fall silent. Prabir fervently hoped that they only imagined they knew the story behind the scars; he’d rather have been laughed at than have these strangers discussing anything that had happened on the island.
There were three other students in his class who looked like they might have had Indian parents, but they all spoke with Canadian accents, and when Prabir was around them he thought he sensed an even greater unease than he produced in everyone else. Amita had come to Canada when she was three, and her parents had stopped speaking Bengali immediately; she remembered almost nothing of the language. He was determined to keep Madhusree bilingual, but in her presence he sometimes found himself halting in the middle of sentences, suddenly doubting that he was speaking correctly. He could have tried to contact some of his old classmates from the Calcutta IRA’s net school, but he couldn’t face the prospect of explaining the reasons for his changed circumstances.
In the months that followed, he grew used to the routine: waking at seven, washing and dressing, catching the bus, sitting through lessons. It was like sleep-walking on a treadmill.
On the weekends, there were outings. Keith took him to a festival screening of a film called The Four Hundred Blows. Prabir went along for the novelty of finally experiencing celluloid technology, with its giant image and communal audience. Though he remembered Calcutta being full of movie houses, he’d never been inside one; his parents had preferred to rent a disk, and he’d been far too young to go on his own.
‘So what did you think?’ Keith asked as they crossed the foyer on their way out. He’d been talking about the event for weeks beforehand; apparently this was his all-time favourite film.
Prabir said, ‘I think the spoilt brat was treated far better than he deserved.’
Keith was scandalised. ‘You do know it’s autobiographical? You’re talking about Truffaut!’
Prabir considered this new information. ‘Then he was probably being too gentle on himself. In reality, he was probably even more stupid and selfish.’
Amita had very different tastes, and took him to BladeRunnerTM OnIceTM with MusicInTheStyleOfTM GilbertAnd-SullivanTM. He’d heard that the show was distantly derived from a halfway decent science-fiction novel, but no evidence of that survived amongst the fog, laser beams, and black rubber costumes. During the interval, a disembodied voice calling itself ‘Radio KJTR’ cackled inanities about sex with amputees. The McDonald’s in the foyer was offering a free game/ soundtrack/novelisation ROM with every MacTheBladeTM, which turned out to be a frothy pink drink like liquefied styrofoam. The worst thing was Amita humming ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Mutant Replicant’ for the next six weeks.
By the end of their third month in Toronto there was a perceptible change in the household, as if it had been decided that their settling-in period was over. Amita began hosting dinner parties, and introducing her foster-children to her friends. The guests made goo-goo noises over Madhusree, and handed Prabir calling cards with Dior web sites embedded in the chips.
Keith and Amita’s acquaintances were drawn from almost every profession, but remarkably they all had one thing in common. Arun was a lecturer, writer, editor, social commentator, and poet. Bernice was a sculptor, performance artist, political activist, and poet. Denys was a multimedia consultant, advertising copywriter, film producer… and poet. Prabir flipped through all the cards one night, to be sure he hadn’t left someone out, but there were no exceptions. Dentist, and poet. Actor, and poet. Architect, and poet. Accountant, and poet.
Thankfully, none of these visitors ever raised the subject of the war with him, but that left them with little choice but to ask about school. To Prabir’s dismay, confessing that his best subjects were science and mathematics almost invariably triggered a baffling stream of non sequiturs comparing him with the famous Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Could they really not tell that he was too old for this kind of growup-to-be-an-astronaut flattery? And why did they always invoke Ramanujan? Why not Bose or Chandrasekhar, why not Salam or Ashtekar, why not even (perish the thought) someone Chinese or European or American? Prabir eventually discovered the reason: an Oliver Stone biopic that had been released in 2010. Amita rented it for him. The story was punctuated with sitar-drenched hallucinatory visits from Hindu deities, dispensing cheat notes to the struggling young mathematician. In the end, Ramanujan steps from his deathbed into a desert strewn with snakes, all biting their tails to form the symbol for infinity.
There were worse things in the world than being patronised by the And Poets. Prabir knew that he was a thousand times better off than most of the war’s orphans—and if this fact had ever slipped his mind, the TV was full of harrowing footage from Aceh and Irian Jaya to rub his face in it. The fighting was over, the leaders of the coup had been overthrown, and five provinces had gained independence, but ten million people were starving across the archipelago. He’d been deprived of nothing—save the one thing that no one could restore. Amita not only fed, clothed and sheltered them, she bestowed endless physical affection on Madhusree, and she would have done the same for him if he hadn’t recoiled from her touch.
Prabir found himself growing almost ashamed of his lack of respect for her, and he began to wonder if his fears for Madhusree were unfounded. Amita hadn’t tried to brainwash him with her bizarre theories; maybe Madhusree would be left to make up her own mind.
Maybe Amita really was harmless.
In the summer of 2014, Amita asked Prabir if he’d come to a rally, organised in response to a recent spate of racially motivated bashings, at which she’d been invited to speak. Prabir said yes, happily surprised to learn that Amita wasn’t as detached from reality as he’d imagined, locked away in the university battling colonialism with Nostromo comics and undermining the patriarchy by pointlessly flipping computer bits. At last, here she was doing something of which he could be unequivocally proud.