Teranesia

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 Logic is obsolete.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.