He read, ‘ “The transputer will only be the first stage in a
revolution that will transform the entire gendered megatext of technology and science. The next hegemony to fall, long overdue
for its own hyperqueer inversion, will be mathematics itself. Once again we will need to rebuild the discipline from the ground
up, rejecting the flawed and biased axioms of the old, male dispensers of truth, transforming their rigid, hierarchical approach
into one that is organic, nurturing, and playful. Proof is dead. Logic is obsolete. The next generation must be taught from
childhood to ridicule Russell’s
Principia
, to tweak the beard of Carl Friedrich Gauss – to
pull down
Pythagoras’s trousers!” ’
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
BladeRunner
TM
OnIce
TM
with MusicInTheStyleOf
TM
GilbertAnd-Sullivan
TM
. 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 MacTheBlade
TM
, 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.
The rally took place on a Sunday; they marched through the streets beneath a cloudless sky. Prabir liked summer in Toronto;
the sun only climbed two-thirds of the way to the zenith, but it made the trip last. Keith seemed to think that thirty-two
degrees was sweltering; when they reached the park and sat down on the grass, he opened the picnic hamper they’d brought and
consumed several cans of beer.
In front of two thousand people, Amita took her place at the lectern. Prabir pointed her out to Madhusree. ‘Look! There’s
Amita! She’s famous!’
Amita began, ‘We’re gathered here today to deplore and denounce racism, and that’s all well and good, but I believe the time
is long overdue for a more sophisticated analysis of this phenomenon to reach the public sphere. My research has shown that
antipathy towards people of other cultures is in fact nothing but a
redirection
of a far more basic form of oppression. A careful study of the language used in Germany in the 1930s to describe the Jews
reveals something quite striking, and yet, to me, deeply unsurprising: every term of racial abuse that was employed was also
a form of
feminisation
. To be weak, to be shiftless, to be untrustworthy – to be
the Other
at all, under patriarchy – what else can this possibly mean, but to be
female?’
If the Nazis had triumphed, Amita explained, they would eventually have run out of distracting false targets, and started
feeding their true enemy – German women – into the gas chambers. ‘Forget all those Riefenstahl Rhine maidens; the real core
of Nazi propaganda films was always a celebration of
male
strength,
male
beauty. In the Thousand-Year Reich, women would have been retained only for breeding, and only for as long as it took to
supplant them with a technological alternative. Once their last essential role was gone, they too would have vanished into
the ovens.
‘I was invited here to address you today because of the colour of my skin, and the country of my birth, and it’s true that
these things make me a target. But we all know that there’s more violence directed against Canadian
women
than there is against every ethnic minority combined. So I stand here before you and say:
as a woman
I too was in Belsen,
as a woman
I too was in Dachau,
as a woman
I too was in Auschwitz!’
Prabir waited anxiously for a riot to start, or at least for someone to shout her down. Surely there were children or grandchildren
of Holocaust survivors in the crowd? And even if there weren’t, there had to be someone with the courage to cry ‘Thief!’
But the crowd applauded. People stood up and cheered.
Amita rejoined them on the grass, lifting Madhusree into her arms. Prabir watched her with a curious sense of detachment,
wondering if he finally understood why she’d agreed to shelter them. She’d made it clear what her idea of compassion was:
to denounce violence, and to show real generosity towards its victims, but then to cash it all in for a cry of ‘Me, too!’
like an infant competing for sympathy. That was what the death of six million strangers meant to her: not a matter of grief,
or horror, but of envy.
She smiled down at him, jiggling Madhusree. ‘What did you think, Prabir?’
‘Will you show me your tattoo?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your number from the camp.’
Amita’s smile vanished. ‘That’s a very childish form of humour. Taking everything literally.’
‘Maybe you should take a few more things literally yourself.’
Keith said sharply, ‘You can apologise now.’
Amita turned to him. ‘Would you stay out of this, please?’
Keith balled his fists and glared down at Prabir. ‘We’re not going to make allowances for you forever. There are plenty of
institutions that’d take you; it wouldn’t be hard to arrange.’ Before Amita could respond he turned and walked away, cupping
his hands over his ears, blocking out everything but his sample mantra.
Amita said, ‘I’d never do that, Prabir. Just ignore him.’
Prabir looked past her face, into the dreamy blue sky. The fear racing through his veins was welcome. The whole problem was,
he’d let himself feel safe. He’d let himself pretend that he’d arrived somewhere. He’d never forget where he stood, now.
Nowhere at all.
He said softly, ‘I’m sorry, Amita. I’m sorry.’
‘Do you want to know where Ma and Baba went?’
Prabir stood beside Madhusree’s bed in the dark. He’d waited there silently for almost an hour, until by chance she’d stirred
and the sight of him had brought her fully awake.
‘Yes.’
He reached down and stroked her hair. In the camp he’d evaded the question, telling her useless half-truths – ‘They can’t
be here now’, ‘They’d want me to look after you’ – until
she’d finally given up asking. The social workers had told him, ‘Say nothing. She’s young enough to forget.’
He said, ‘They’ve gone into your mind. They’ve gone into your memories.’
Madhusree gave him her most sceptical look, but she seemed to be considering the claim.
Then she said decisively, ‘They have not.’
Prabir wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. He said, ‘All right, smart-arse. They’ve gone into mine.’
Madhusree looked annoyed. She pushed his hand away. ‘I want them too.’
Prabir was growing cold. He lifted her out from under the covers and carried her to his bed. ‘Don’t tell Amita.’ Madhusree
scowled at him disdainfully, as if he was an idiot even to raise the possibility.
He said, ‘Do you know what Ma’s name was, before you were born?’
‘No.’
‘She was called Radha. And Baba was called Rajendra. They lived in a huge, crowded, noisy city called Calcutta.’ Prabir repeated
himself in Bengali.