Transmission

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Transmission

  Hari Kunzru was born in 1969 and lives in east London. He was an associate editor at Wired and was named the Observer Young Travel Writer of the Year in 1999. He is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and music editor at Wallpaper*. He was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists, 2003, and is the author of The Impressionist and Transmission, both published by Penguin.

  Transmission

  HARI KUNZRU

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by Hamish Hamilton 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2005

  1

  Copyright © Hari Kunzru, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91026-0

  It’s for the Fran

  Signal

  It was a simple message.

  Hi. I saw this and thought of you.

  Maybe you got a copy in your inbox, sent from an address you didn’t recognize: an innocuous two-line email with an attachment.

  leela.exe

  Maybe you obeyed the instruction to

  check it out!

  and there she was: Leela Zahir, dancing in jerky quicktime in a pop-up window on your screen. Even at that size you could see she was beautiful, this little pixelated dancer, smiling as the subject line promised, a radiant 21-year-old smile

  just for you

  That smile. The start of all your problems.

  It’s not as if you had asked for Leela to come and break your heart. There you were, doing whatever you normally do online: filling in form fields, downloading porn, interacting, when suddenly up she flounced and everything went to pieces. For a moment, even in the midst of your panic, you probably felt special. Which was Leela’s talent. Making you believe it was all just for you.

  But there were others. How many did she infect? Thousands? Tens, hundreds of thousands? Impossible to count. Experts have estimated her damage to global business at almost 50 billion US dollars, mostly in human and machine downtime, but financial calculation doesn’t capture the chaos of those days. During Leela’s brief period of misrule, normality was completely overturned. Lines of idle brokers chewed their nails in front of frozen screens. Network nodes winked out of existence like so many extinguished stars. For a few weeks she danced her way around the world, and disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step.

  Of course the whole thing made her famous, beyond even her mother’s wildest imaginings. Leela was already a rising star, India’s new dream girl, shinnying up the greasy lingam of the Mumbai film world like the child in the conjurer’s rope trick. But while Leela’s mother had thought through most eventualities, she hadn’t factored the march of technology into her daughter’s career plan. Mrs Zahir was decidedly not a technical person.

  And so Leela found herself bewitched – the girl with the red shoes, cursed to dance on until her feet bled or the screen froze in messy blooms of ASCII text. Yet despite what her mother may have thought, she was a surface effect. The real action was taking place in the guts of the code: a cascade of operations, of iterations and deletions, an invisible contagion of ones and zeros. Leela played holi and her clinging sari diverted attention from the machinery at work under her skin.

  A chain of cause and effect? Nothing so simple in Leela’s summer. It was a time of topological curiosities, loops and knots, never-ending strips of action and inside-out bottles of reaction so thoroughly confused that identifying a point of origin became almost impossible.

  Morning through Venetian blinds.

  A cinema crowd watches a tear roll down a giant face.

  The beep of an alarm. Groans and slow disengagement of limbs.

  She shuts down her machine and

  They sit together in a taxi

  A curvature. A stoop.

  swivels her chair towards the window and

  Someone in the stalls makes loud kissing noises

  poor posture

  between the two of them a five-inch gap

  she takes another bite of her sandwich

  laughter

  the posture of a young man standing outside a New Delhi office tower.

  An arbitrary leap into the system.

  Round-shouldered, he stands for a moment and pokes a finger inside the collar of his new polycotton shirt. It is too tight.

  Around him Connaught Place seethed with life. Office workers, foreign backpackers, messengers and lunching ladies all elbowed past the beggars, dodging traffic and running in and out of Palika Bazaar like contestants in a demented game. For a moment Arjun Mehta, consumed by hesitation, was the only stationary figure in the crowd. He was visible from a distance, a skinny flagpole of a boy, hunching himself up to lose a few conspicuous inches before making his entrance. The face fluttering on top wore an expression of mild confusion, partly obscured by metal-framed glasses whose lenses were blurred with fingerprints. Attempting to assert its authority over his top lip was a downy moustache. As he fiddled with his collar, it twitched nervously, a small mammal startled in a clearing.

  Finally, feeling himself as small as he would ever get, he clutched his folder of diplomas to his chest, stated his business to the chowkidar, and was waved up the steps into the air-conditioned cool of the office lobby

  Marble under his feet. The traffic noise suddenly muffled.

  Behind the front desk sat a receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relic of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away. For a moment or two the image hung around ominously in his brain – the globe contracting like a deflating beach ball.

  It was punctured by a cleaner pushing a mop over his toes. He frowned at the man, who stared unapologetically back as he continued his progress across the lobby. At the desk the receptionist directed him to a bank of elevators. Stepping out at the eighth floor, he walked up and down a corridor searching, with rising panic, for Office Suite E. Just as he was beginning to think he had b
een given an incorrect address, he came to a door with a handwritten sign taped over the nameplate: INTERVIEWS HERE. He knocked, received no reply, knocked again, then shuffled about for a while wondering what to do. The shuffling did not seem to help, so he kneeled down and polished his smudged shoes with his handkerchief.

  ‘Excuse me please?’

  He looked up at a prim young woman in a peach-coloured salwar-kameez.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you mind moving out of the way?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She brushed past him and unceremoniously pulled the door open to reveal a waiting room filled with nervous young people, sitting on orange plastic chairs with the peculiar self-isolating stiffness interview candidates share with criminal defendants and people in STD-clinic reception areas. The woman swept in and announced herself to a clerk, who checked her name on a list and assigned her a number. Consumed by his own inadequacy, Arjun followed.

  The candidates squirmed. They coughed and played with their hands. They pretended to flick through magazines and made elaborate attempts to avoid eye contact with one another. All the seats were occupied, so Arjun picked a spot near a window and stood there, shifting his weight from foot to foot and trying to reboot himself in positive mode. Listen, Mehta. You don’t know how many positions Databodies has open. Perhaps there are several. The Americans have a skills shortage. They want as many programmers as they can get. But such a number of applicants? There were at least fifty people in the room.

  The air-conditioning system grumbled, failing to counter the heat gain from the mass of sweating job-hungry flesh. Candidates fanned themselves with filled-out forms. Chairs squeaked under moist buttocks. There were three interview rooms in simultaneous operation; and, as people were called in and others arrived, the scene around Arjun changed like a time-lapse photograph of some uncertain natural process, neither generation nor decay. Whenever a seat became free he willed someone else to take it, the illogical hope growing inside his chest that by staying very still and quiet he could preserve himself, would not have to pass through any of the three frosted-glass doors.

  ‘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 h
is 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.

  He had just beaten his high score.