Teranesia

It was only when he began exchanging messages directly with Eleanor, an academic historian living in New York City, that Prabir found himself painted into a corner. After two brief notes on the Majapahit Empire, Eleanor began telling him about her family, her graduate students, her tropical fish. She soon switched from plain text to video, and began sending Prabir miniature home movies and guided tours of Manhattan. This could all have been faked, but not easily, and it probably would have been enough to convince his father that Eleanor was an honest and entirely benign correspondent to whom Prabir could safely confess his true age. But it was already too late. Prabir had responded to Eleanor’s first, written description of her family with an account of his journey from Calcutta to an unnamed island in the Banda Sea – accompanied by his wife and young son – for the purpose of studying butterflies. This exotic story had delighted her, and triggered a barrage of questions. Prabir had felt unable to refuse her answers, and he hadn’t trusted himself to fabricate an entire adult biography, consistent with the things he’d already told her, out of thin air. So he’d kept on cannibalising his father’s life, until it became unthinkable to confess what he’d done either to Eleanor, or to his father.

Rajendra Suresh had been abandoned on the streets of Calcutta when he was six years old. He’d refused to tell Prabir what he remembered of his earlier life, so Prabir declared to Eleanor that his past was veiled by amnesia. ‘I could be the son of a prostitute, or the lost scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families.’

‘Wouldn’t wealthy parents have gone looking for you?’ Eleanor had wondered. Prabir had hinted at revelatory dreams of scheming evil uncles and fake kidnappings gone wrong.

Rajendra had survived as a beggar for almost five years when he first encountered the Indian Rationalists Association. (Outside the family – Prabir had had this drummed into him from an early age – the organisation was never to be referred to by its initials, unless they were swiftly followed by some suitable clarifying remark.) They couldn’t grant him the protection of an orphanage – their resources were stretched too thin – but they’d offered him two free meals a day, and a seat in one of their classrooms. This had been enough to keep him from starvation, and to save him from the clutches of the Mad Albanian, whose servants prowled the city hunting down children and lepers. Prabir had had nightmares about the Mad Albanian – far too disturbing to share with Eleanor – in which a stooped, wrinkled creature pursued him down alleys and into open sewers, trying to wash his feet with a cloth drenched in lamb’s blood.

The IRA’s avowed purpose was to rid the country of its mind-addling legacy of superstition, along with the barriers of caste and gender that the same gibberish helped prop up. Even before they’d begun their social programmes – feeding and educating street children, teaching women business skills and self-defence – the Calcutta Rationalists had taken on the gurus and the God-men, the mystical healers and miracle workers who plagued the city, and exposed them as frauds. At the age of twelve, Rajendra had witnessed one of the movement’s founders, Prabir Ghosh, challenge a local holy man who made his living curing snake bites to save the life of a dog who’d been thrust into a cage with a cobra. In front of an audience of a thousand enthusiastic believers, the holy man had waved his hands over the poor convulsing animal for fifteen minutes, muttering ever more desperate prayers and incantations, before finally confessing that he had no magical powers at all, and that anyone bitten by a snake should seek help from the nearest hospital without delay.

Rajendra was impressed by the man’s honesty, however belated; some charlatans kept bluffing and blustering long after they’d lost all credibility. But the power of the demonstration impressed him even more. It was common knowledge that many snakes were not poisonous, and that a shallow enough bite or a strong enough constitution could enable some people to survive an encounter with a truly venomous species. The holy man’s reputation must have flourished on the basis that he’d ‘cured’ people who would have survived anyway – each success a joyous miracle worth trumpeting loudly, to be retold with embellishments a hundred times, as opposed to each sad and unsurprising death. But this simple trial had cleared away all the confounding issues: the snake was poisonous, the bites were deep and numerous … and the victim had died in front of a thousand witnesses.