Teranesia

5

The detention camp was ten kilometres out of Exmouth, a small town on the north-west coast of Australia. Prabir found this puzzling, because almost everyone in the camp had come ashore at least a thousand kilometres further north. He knew that Darwin was home to a large community of Indonesian exiles, sympathetic people with invaluable local knowledge who would have happily visited the camp and offered advice, if it had only been closer. And though the government provided legal aid to help the detainees apply for refugee status, there were no lawyers in Exmouth, so they all had to travel great distances from Perth or Darwin. The camp had only one phone for twelve hundred inmates, so the lawyers had little choice but to make the trip in person, and this ate away at the time they might otherwise have spent on actual casework—not least because the cost of travel came out of each applicant’s legal aid allocation.

It was several weeks before it occurred to him that the location had been chosen for precisely these reasons.

The ABRMS guerrillas had dumped Prabir and Madhusree on Yamdena, where a Chinese woman from eastern Java had taken pity on them and paid for them to join her family on a boat south. But the family had relatives in Sydney to sponsor them, and they’d left the camp after a month.

Six months later, Prabir overheard a social worker telling one of the guards, ‘I’m sure we can adopt out the girl; she’s young enough, and she’s pretty cute. But her brother’s a complete basket case. You’re going to be stuck with him for years.’

The next time the lawyers made their trek into the wilderness, Prabir spoke his first words to anyone but Madhusree since the Chinese family had left.

He said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want asylum here. We have to go to my mother’s cousin Amita, in Toronto.’

The lawyer said, ‘Cousin Amita? Do you know her full name?’

Prabir shook his head. ‘But she teaches at a university there. She’ll be in their directory. You could find her email address in no time.’

The lawyer looked sceptical, but she slid her notepad across the desk to Prabir. ‘Why don’t you do the honours?’

He stared down at the machine. ‘I’ll look up her address, but would you talk to her, please?’ Prabir had never met Amita, or even spoken to her. ‘I might say something foolish and ruin everything.’

Amita and her partner Keith met them at the airport, signing for them and taking them from the social worker. Madhusree allowed them each a turn at holding her and pulling baby faces; Prabir had lectured her for hours on the need to make a good impression.

In the car, Keith drove, and Amita rode in the back with them. Madhusree—who’d stayed awake for all five flights, entranced by the views—fell asleep in Prabir’s arms. Keith pointed out Toronto’s landmarks, and seemed to expect Prabir to be amazed by every large building.

Amita said, ‘I have something for you, Prabir.’ She handed him a small, moulded plastic object that looked like a hearing aid.

Prabir said, ‘Thank you.’ He was too nervous to ask what it was. He slipped it into his pocket.

Amita smiled indulgently. ‘Put it in your ear, darling. That’s what it’s for.’

Reluctantly, Prabir fished it out and complied. A woman’s voice said, ‘Don’t be sad.’ What was it, a radio? He waited for something more. After a few seconds, the voice repeated, ‘Don’t be sad.’

Amita was watching him expectantly. Prabir thought it best to tell her straight away, lest he be blamed for damaging the gift. ‘I think it’s broken. It just keeps repeating itself.’

Amita laughed. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. It’s a sample mantra: it reads your mood, and gives you a message to cheer you up, whenever you need it.’

‘Don’t be sad,’ said the earpiece.

‘I chose the sample myself,’ Amita explained proudly. ‘It’s taken from an old Sonic Youth song. But of course you can reprogram it with anything you like.’

Prabir tried hard to look grateful. ‘Thank you, Amita. It’s wonderful.’ He had to wait until they were home and he was safely in the toilet with the door locked before he could free himself from the inane chant. He unscrewed the device easily, and his first thought was to drop the battery into the toilet bowl, but then he feared it might resist flushing, or Amita might ask for the device back to show him how to load a new sample, and realise what he’d done from its diminished weight.

Inspiration struck: he reversed the button-shaped cell, swapping positive for negative, and re-assembled the earpiece. It was mute. It also rendered him partially deaf, but that was a small price to pay. He could find out later how to wipe the sample while still running the circuitry that let him hear normally.

Prabir stared down at his shoes. He was shaking with anger, but he had to be polite to Amita and Keith, or they’d separate him from Madhusree.

The house was an endless succession of cavernous rooms painted white; it made him feel disembodied. Amita had put Madhusree down to sleep, in a room all her own. Now she showed Prabir his room; it was even larger than Madhusree’s, and despite all the furniture and gadgets it contained, there was a vast amount of unused floor space. Prabir thanked Amita for everything—struggling to conceal his dismay at the sense of debt he felt from being showered with gifts like this—before suggesting that they move Madhusree in with him. ‘She’s not used to being alone.’

Amita and Keith exchanged glances. Amita said, ‘All right. Maybe for a week or two.’

After dinner, Keith bade them goodnight and drove away. Prabir was confused. ‘Doesn’t he live here?’

Amita shook her head. ‘We’re separated. But we’re still good friends, and he’s agreed to spend some time here now that you and Madhusree have arrived.’

‘But why?’ Prabir wanted to kick himself as soon as the words escaped his lips. Amita had made great sacrifices for his sake; he had to put things more diplomatically.

Amita explained, ‘I decided that you and your sister should be exposed to both male and female narratives.’

‘You mean… he’ll help you read to us?’ Prabir didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but surely Amita would be relieved to hear that there was no need to have her ex-lover hanging around just to do the male voices in bedtime stories. ‘I can read for myself. And we could take turns reading to Madhusree.’

Madhusree interjected. ‘I can read, too!’ This wasn’t true, but Prabir had taught her the Latin alphabet in the camp, and her spoken English was already as good as her Bengali.

Amita sighed with amusement and tousled Prabir’s hair. ‘I meant our personal narratives, funny boy. Though all such texts are fluidly gendered, in order to decode and contextualise your own experiences you’ll benefit from familiarity with at least the fundamental binary templates.’

Prabir glanced discreetly at the wine bottle in the middle of the table.

In bed, he lay awake for hours, cocooned in crisp sheets and a heavy blanket. It was cold, he needed the bedclothes, but he felt like he was in a straitjacket. He wasn’t troubled by the unfamiliar shadows in the room, or the faint traffic sounds that faded into silence, though he’d grown used to listening to the chain-smoking men in the camp hawking up mucus all night. It wasn’t just pointless feeling homesick, it was meaningless: there was no right way the room could have looked, no comfort the sounds of the night could have delivered. From his hammock on the island, or his bed in Calcutta, his parents would still have been dead.

He watched Madhusree sleeping. They would never reach the shore, they would never reach safety. There was no such thing. It had all been in his head.

The next time Keith was in the house, Prabir took the opportunity to interrogate him.

‘How did you meet Amita?’ he asked innocently. Amita was out on some errand, so they were alone in the living room with Madhusree, who was playing delightedly with the puppy Keith had brought for her.

‘It was at a performance space in the city,’ Keith began tentatively. ‘Twelve years ago.’ He frowned, struggling to dredge up details. ‘The Anorexic Androgynes were reciting the Unabomber Manifesto, with backing music by Egregious Beards.’ He added helpfully, ‘They were a Country Dada band, but they broke up years ago.’

Prabir wasn’t interested in any of this; he wanted to hear about the couple’s passion for knowledge. ‘So how did you end up working at the university together?’

‘Well, I’d already done a PhD in X-Files Theory at UCLA, and Amita was just starting her Masters in Diana Studies with the University of Leeds, via the net. U Toronto was in the process of opening its own Department of Transgressive Discourse—at last!—so it was only natural that we both applied for positions.’

When Prabir pressed Keith for explanations of all the phrases he didn’t understand in this account, his heart sank. ‘And this is what Amita has done for the last twelve years?’

Keith laughed. ‘No, no, of course not! That was just her Masters; she’s moved on. For her doctorate she tackled an entirely different subject: developing an interactive graphic novel of Conrad’s Nostromo, as an exercise in post-colonial transliteracy. Nostromo becomes a comic-book superhero in Lycra, who loses his powers whenever he’s exposed to radiation from silver ingots. This ironises and recontextualises Conrad’s own highly ambiguous relationship with the economic benefits of imperialism, and cleverly undermines the whole myth of the artist as quasi-divine standard-bearer for transcendent morality.’

Prabir was beginning to wonder if Keith was playing an elaborate joke on him. ‘And what is she studying now?’

Keith smiled proudly. ‘For the past four years, she’s been working on a radical new paradigm in computing. She’s still had no luck getting funding to build a prototype, but that can only be a matter of time.’

‘Amita has designed a computer?’ Now Prabir knew he was being taken for a ride. ‘When did she find time to study engineering?’

‘Oh, she’ll hire an engineer when she gets funding.’ Keith waved a hand dismissively. ‘Her contribution is purely intellectual. Mathematical.’

‘Mathematical?’

Keith regarded him dubiously. ‘You might be a bit young to understand this. Do you know how computers work, Prabir?’

‘More or less.’

‘Zeroes and ones. You understand the binary system?’ Keith grabbed a notepad that was lying on the coffee table in front of them, and drew the two digits.

Prabir tried not to sound offended. ‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Have you ever wondered why computers are so hostile to women?’

‘Hostile?’ Prabir had some trouble deciding what Keith was most likely to mean by this claim. Paranoid delusions of artificial intelligence weren’t necessarily out of the question. ‘You mean… why do some men harass women on the net?’

Keith said, ‘Well, yes, but it goes far deeper than that. Amita’s work not only reveals the fundamental reason for the problem, it offers a stunningly simple solution.’ He jabbed at the notepad with his finger. ‘Zero and one. Absence and presence. And just look how they’re drawn! “Zero” is female: the womb, the vagina. “One” is male: unmistakably phallic. The woman is absent, marginalised, excluded. The man is present, dominant, imperious. This blatantly sexist coding underpins all modern digital technology! And then we ask ourselves why women find it an unwelcoming space!

‘So Amita proposed a new paradigm, for both hardware and software. The old, male-dominated hardware is replaced by the transgressive computer, or transputer. The old, male-dominated software is translated into a brand-new language, called Ada—after Ada Lovelace, the unsung mother of computing.’

Prabir ventured, ‘I think someone’s already named a language after her.’

But Keith refused to be distracted. ‘What is this new paradigm? It’s simple! Every one becomes a zero, every zero becomes a one: a universal digital gender reassignment! And the beauty of it is, on the surface everything looks like business as usual. If all hardware and all software undergoes the same inversion, programs continue to produce the same results—there is no change whatsoever to the naked eye. But deep inside every microchip, the old phallocentric coding is being subverted, billions of times per second! The old power structures are turned on their head every time we switch on our computers!’

Prabir had had enough; Keith must think he was some kind of uneducated hick who’d swallow anything. If he’d been feeding him these increasingly tall tales to see how much he could get away with, it was time to call his bluff.

‘Computers don’t have little numerals inside them,’ Prabir said flatly. ‘Zero is usually coded in memories by the absence of electrical charge in a capacitor, and one by the presence of charge, but sometimes even that’s reversed. And even when it’s not reversed… absence is coded as absence, presence is coded as presence. There are no diagrams of vaginas and penises, or anything else to do with people’s sex.’

Keith said uncertainly, ‘Well, maybe not literally. But you can hardly deny that the symbols themselves permeate technological culture. No one lives in the so-called “physical” world of electrons and capacitors, Prabir! The true space we inhabit is cultural!’

Prabir stood and picked up the notepad, exasperated. ‘These are Hindu-Arabic numerals! People have used them for centuries; they have nothing to do with computers. If you really imagine that they’re drawings of private parts, it’s not technology that should offend you—it’s mathematics!’

Keith shouted, ‘Yes, yes! You’re absolutely right! Don’t move; I’ll be back in five seconds!’ He ran from the room.

Madhusree gave Prabir a questioning look. Prabir said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re just playing a game.’ And I’m winning.

Keith returned, carrying a book, flicking through it, looking for something. ‘Aha!’ He held the cover up for Prabir. ‘From the Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of Cyberfeminist Discourse. This was the paper Amita gave last year, which made The New York Times describe her as “Canada’s most exciting living intellectual”.’

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.

He turned his bedside lamp on low, then took his notepad from his desk and summoned up a picture of his mother. It was the shot taken at the IRA parade, the only image he had of her, rescued from the net workspace where he’d placed it before deciding not to mail it to Eleanor.

Madhusree’s eyes lit up in amazement.

Prabir said, ‘Radha knew everything about the human body. She was the smartest, strongest person in Calcutta. Her Ma and Baba had a big, beautiful house, but she didn’t care about that.’ He scrolled the notepad’s window to reveal the picture of his father; Madhusree had apparently grown nonchalant about metal through skin, but she leant forward eagerly to examine Rajendra’s face, more recognisable than her mother’s. ‘So she fell in love with Rajendra, who had nothing, but he was smart and strong like Radha. And he loved her too.’

Prabir thought: I’m ruining it. He didn’t want to fill her head with sugar-coated stories that might as well be fairy tales. He could still feel his father’s hands around him, holding him up to the sky. He could still hear his mother’s voice, telling him they were heading for the island of butterflies. How could he ever make them as real again for Madhusree?

Madhusree was having second thoughts about the picture of Radha. ‘Why isn’t she crying?’

Prabir put his fingers to his cheek. ‘There’s a spot where there’s hardly any nerve endings.’ He’d checked one of the virtual bodies on the net. ‘There are lots of tiny threads in your skin for feeling pain, but if you don’t cut them it doesn’t hurt.’

Madhusree looked doubtful.

There were kebab skewers in the kitchen. He could sterilise one in a gas flame, or use disinfectant from the medicine cabinet. The thought of pushing the metal right through his own flesh made his stomach clench; he wouldn’t have minded someone else performing the trick on him—that could hardly have been worse than the injections he’d had to dissolve the scar tissue on his face—but the prospect of having to apply the force himself was daunting.

But his mother had done it; that wasn’t a fairy tale, the proof was right in front of him. It was just a matter of being confident that you understood what you were doing.

He said, ‘I’ll show you.’ He put the notepad down on the pillow and climbed off the bed. ‘Just the cheeks, though, not the tongue. And when you’re older, you have to help me pull the truck.’

Madhusree didn’t make commitments lightly; she examined the picture of her father again. Prabir leant over her. ‘Look at their faces. If it hurt, they wouldn’t be smiling, would they?’

Madhusree considered the merits of this argument, then nodded solemnly.

‘OK.’