Teranesia

Prabir shifted awkwardly on the lab stool. It was easy to laugh off the sense of betrayal he felt, at the thought of Madhusree and Felix ganging up against him. But when he brushed aside his paranoia and told himself that Madhusree was entitled to seek other allies – it couldn’t always be the two of them against the world – that realisation still left him feeling almost unbearably lonely.

Felix looked up and said bluntly, ‘She was a lot younger than you when your parents died. If she’s not worried about going back, why can’t you just accept that?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘You’re the one who always wanted her to be proud of them. Now she wants to carry on their work! And even if there’d been no new discoveries … don’t you think she might have wanted to return eventually? Just to see where everything happened? However much you’ve told her, it’s not the same.’

Prabir said, ‘Can we get out of here? They’re going to give our table to someone else.’

‘Yeah, I’ve finished.’ Felix packed up quickly, then grabbed his jacket. ‘I’m sorry; I’m not going to harangue you all night. But I promised her I’d talk to you.’

‘And now you have.’

Felix led the way out of the work room, into a maze of corridors. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, talk to her. Properly. You owe her that.’

‘I owe her? I’ve only given her eighteen years of my life!’

Felix snorted with amusement. ‘That’s one thing I love about you: you could have given her a lung and a kidney, and you still wouldn’t be able to milk it for sympathy with any conviction.’

Prabir was caught off balance. ‘Don’t be so fucking patronising.’ The compliment pleased him, but this wasn’t the time to admit that.

Felix said, ‘This is a good thing for both of you, any way you look at it. And if you think it’s dangerous for Madhusree to go traipsing through the jungle for a couple of weeks, you can’t have much idea of what most nineteen-year-olds get up to.’

‘Oh, so now you’re the expert on that too?’

‘No, but I can still remember what it was like.’

Prabir had no reply. He’d always imagined that was how he understood Madhusree; by being young enough to remember. But nothing about his own life at nineteen resembled hers. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d had a child to look after; he’d also had any adolescent attraction to risk knocked out of him, well in advance. His entire adulthood had been devoid of excitement. Why should Madhusree have to pay the same price? The whole point had been to make things better for her, to try to give her something like a normal life.

No, the whole point was to keep her safe.

Prabir stopped dead. There was a dusty display case full of tropical butterflies hanging on the wall, with fading labels that looked like they’d been produced on a manual typewriter. It had probably been hanging there since some era when this corridor lay on a route between public exhibits, long before the latest round of rebuilding.

He said, ‘Getting her away from there was the one good thing I’ve done in my life. And now everyone expects me to pack her bags and buy her a ticket. It’s surreal. Why don’t you just ask me to blow my brains out while you’re at it? I’m not going to do it.’

Felix backtracked, and saw what he was looking at. ‘What you did was get her away from the war. She wouldn’t be going back to that.’

Prabir had lost interest in trying to justify himself. He said flatly, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know anything about it.’

Felix wasn’t that easily intimidated. ‘No, but I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me. It’d be a fucking lonely world if that never worked.’

Prabir aimed lower. ‘Doesn’t it ever cross your mind that there are things I don’t want you to understand?’

Prabir worked late, to keep his mind blank for as long as possible. He tinkered for five hours with a perfectly good class definition template for tellers, trying to improve its eye contact and shave a few milliseconds off its response times. In the end he gave up, discarding everything he’d done, trawling through the automatic backups and erasing them all manually – the closest he could get to the physical experience of screwing up a sheaf of paper.

As he walked out of the building he felt a kind of defiant pride, in place of the usual sense of regret at his stupidity. It wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He didn’t want to be with Felix or Madhusree. He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. Numbing himself with a few hours of vacuous make-work every night until he was safely asleep on his feet was infinitely preferable to taking up alcohol.