‘Mehta A. K.?’
He stared hard out of the window.
‘Mehta A. K.?’
It was no use. The woman with the list was speaking to him. Weakly he put up his hand and allowed her to show him into an office, where she indicated a seat in front of a pine-veneer desk. On the far side, legs ostentatiously crossed, lounged a man who appeared to be less a human being than a communications medium, a channel for the transmission of consumer lifestyle messages. From his gelled hair to his lightly burnished penny loafers, every particular of his appearance carried a set of aspir-ational associations, some explicit (the branding on his tennis shirt, his belt buckle, the side arms of the UV sun goggles perched on his head), some implicit (the heft of his Swiss watch, the Swissness of that watch) and some no more than hints, wafts of mediated yearning written in the scent of his scruffing lotion, the warp and weft of his khaki slacks.
Arjun tugged at his collar.
‘Sunny Srinivasan,’ said the channel, leaning over the desk and shaking hands. ‘So how are you today?’
Sunny Srinivasan’s features were regular and well defined. He had the polite yet aggressive air of a man who enjoys competitive racket sports. When he spoke, his words rang out with decisiveness and verve, his dragged vowels and rolling consonants returning the listener to the source of all his other signs of affluence: Amrika. Residence of the Non-Resident Indian.
‘Arjun Mehta,’ said Arjun, immediately kicking himself for forgetting the transatlantic mode of address. ‘I mean, nice day. I’m having a nice day.’
Sunny Srinivasan opened his mouth, unhooding a smile like a dentally powered searchlight. ‘I’m glad to hear that, Arjun. Everyone should have a nice day — every day.’
Arjun nodded gravely, shrinking a little further in his chair. The careers counsellor at NOIT had more than once told him he lacked positivity. Sunny Srinivasan, by contrast, exuded the stuff. Here was a fellow who had patently experienced an unbroken progression of nice days, stretching back into the mists of what had probably been a very nice childhood. As Sunny reached out his hand to relieve him of his documents, Arjun marvelled at his skin. Every section of the man not covered with luxury cotton casual wear seemed to glow with ostentatious life, as if some kind of optical membrane had been inserted under the epidermis. He glanced down at his own arms and hands, ordinary and unremarkable. They looked like the ‘before’ illustration in a cosmetics advertisement.
As Arjun considered skincare, Sunny flicked through his certificates, holding one or two up to the light. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘it all looks most excellent. What I need to know from you now is how much you’re bullshitting.’
‘Bull —? What do you mean?’
‘Well, Arjun K. Mehta, educated to B.Sc. standard at North Okhla Institute of Technology, on paper your qualifications look good. Not great, but good. The question is, are they real?’
‘Entirely. One hundred per cent.’
‘Glad to hear it. Half the losers out there in the waiting room bought their diplomas in the bazaar. Another quarter have completed some two-bit nightschool computer course and faked it up to look like a college education. But you, Arjun, you’re telling me you’re the real deal. Right?’
‘Absolutely Real deal. Thumbs up. As I said on my application, I can provide references. I am skilled in all major areas — networking, database —’
‘Let me stop you there.’ Sunny held up his smooth, lipid-nourished hands. ‘You don’t need to wow me with all that. I’ll tell you a secret, Arjun: I don’t know the difference between SQL and HTML. And I don’t care. To me it’s all letters. What I care about is butts, good properly qualified desi butts sitting on good American office chairs, earning good consultancy dollars for Databodies and for me. Understand?’
‘Absolutely,’ murmured Arjun. Sunny Srinivasan was appearing more impressive by the minute.
Sunny leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘So what I’m going to do is this,’ he announced, as if the thought were the product of long rumination. ‘I’m going to take your application, get you checked out by my people, and, if you’re telling the truth, I’m going to send you to America and start making you rich.’
Arjun could not believe it. ‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that, Arjun. When you’re a Databodies IT consultant, things happen. Your life starts moving forward. You start to become who you always dreamed of becoming. That’s our mission, Arjun. To help people become their dreams. That’s what we stand for.’
‘And you can guarantee me a job in America?’
‘Boy, good programmers like you are gold dust over there. Everyone knows American college students are only interested in cannabis and skateboarding, right? You leave it with me. If you’re telling the truth, you’re going to be raking in the dollars just as soon as we can get you on a flight.’
Arjun could barely contain his gratitude. He reached across the desk and clasped Srinivasan’s hand. ‘Thank you, sir! Thank you! Have a nice day!’
‘No, thank you, Arjun. Good to have you aboard.’
Several thousand miles away, in a picturesque yet accessible area of the Masai Mara game reserve, India’s dreamgirl clutched the rim of the basket as she felt the balloon break contact with the earth. The propane burner roared, and, as instructed by the director, the pilot crouched down by her feet to keep out of shot. There was a sickening lurch, the wind blew her hair across her face, and she tried to keep smiling at the glass disc of the camera lens as it receded fifty, eighty, a hundred feet below her. Soon the crew and all their mess of lights and cables were lost, one more dark patch mottling the savannah. When she felt it was safe to stop smiling, she relaxed her face muscles and asked for a drink of water.
Arjun Mehta walked back out on to Janpath, grinning at the drivers leaning against their cars at the taxi stand. Amrika! Becoming his dreams! More than any other memory of the meeting, even that of Sunny’s sunglasses, this phrase stuck in his mind. His current favourite daydream was set in a mall, a cavern of bright glass through which a near-future version of himself was travelling at speed up a broad black escalator. Dressed in a button-down shirt and a baseball cap with the logo of a major software corporation embroidered on the peak, Future-Arjun was holding hands with a young woman who looked not unlike Kajol, his current filmi crush. As Kajol smiled at him, the compact headphones in his ears transmitted another upbeat love song, just one in the never-ending library of new music stored in the tiny MP3 player at his belt.
As the bus trundled over the Yamuna Bridge, past the huge shoreline slum seeping its refuse into the river, he ran several variations of this basic fantasy, tweaking details of dress and location, identity of companion and soundtrack. The roar of public carriers receded into the background. Lost in his inner retail space, he stared blankly out of the window, his eyes barely registering the low roofs of patchworked thatch and blue polythene by the roadside, the ragged children, standing under the tangle of illegally strung power-lines. High in the sky overhead was the vapour trail of a jet, a commercial flight crossing Indian airspace en route to Singapore. In its first-class compartment sat another traveller, rather more comfortably than Arjun, who was squashed against the damp shoulder of a man in a polyester shirt. Did Guy Swift sense some occult connection with the boy on the bus 30,000 feet below? Did he perhaps feel a tug, a premonition, the kind of unexplained phenomenon which has as its correlative a shiver or a raising of the hairs on neck or arms? No. Nothing. He was playing Tetris on the armrest games console.