Great!’
‘Time!’
‘“The gorilla experiment was part of our investigation into these techniques, but Bios Laboratories will not be pursuing its work in primate production.”’
‘Where are you based?’
‘Madam, I’m getting another call. I really ought to go.’
‘OK. Thanks for your help.’
‘Time’s up? What do you mean time’s up?’
‘You have to make sure these people understand that there is only one thing that is important here and that’s efficiency.’
‘My massage is over. Can’t believe an hour is up already.’
‘You have to make sure they know how to avoid this kind of chitchat. And deal with that guy. This isn’t a chat line we’re running.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘I’m sorry, Mira, I’m doing something here.’
‘Were you listening to the article?’
‘Yes. In fact I know Stephen Hall. He was at Cambridge with me. We played squash.’
‘Don’t you see? This is our chance! We can have a child! Why don’t you go and see him?’
‘OK, Mira. I will.’
A few days later, Dr Stephen Hall showed Rajiv into the living room of a large old house whose Victorian lattice windows filtered out most of the scant light of the Cambridge afternoon. They sat down on armchairs that were crowded into the tiny space left by the grand piano and outsized television that dominated the room.
‘Now. Tell me what can I do for you?’
Stephen poured cream into his coffee and stirred intently.
‘I need you to make my wife and I a child. We will pay, of course.’ Rajiv narrated the history of his ill-fated attempts at reproduction.
Dr Hall considered deeply. He looked anxious.
‘Have you thought of adopting?’
‘I haven’t come here for your bloodless European solutions. I don’t need to visit one of the world’s leading biotechnology experts to get advice on adoption. I want a child whose flesh and blood is my wife’s and my own. That is why I am here.’
‘How much would you pay?’
‘Five million pounds.’
‘I see.’ He took a gulp from his coffee cup with just-perceptible agitation.
‘You realize that we’d need to do the work outside the country. It’s illegal here. I’d probably set up a lab in the Bahamas. We’d need to ship a lot of equipment and people. It could–’
‘I know how much money you’ll need to spend and it’s nowhere near five million pounds. I’d already included a healthy profit for you. But if it’s an issue, let’s say seven million. No more negotiation.’
‘And if I were to say yes, what would you want?’
‘I want you to make me a son. A perfect son. A son who will be handsome and charming. Brilliant and hardworking. Who can take over my business. Who will never disappoint or shame me. Who will be happy. A son, above all, who can sleep.’
‘In a probabilistic science like genetics it is dangerous to try and optimize every parameter. You start stretching chance until it snaps and you end up getting nothing.’
‘Nevertheless. Those are my demands.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Time inside an aeroplane always seemed to be staged by the airline company to deceive, its studied slowness a kind of tranquillizer for the seat-belted cattle in their eight-hour suspension, to which passport control and baggage claim would be the only antidote. Synthesized versions of ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Candle in the Wind’ reminded passengers of old, familiar feelings but with the human voice removed, emotions loaded with blanks for a safer, more pleasant ride. Mealtimes were announced in advance: the rhythms of earth were felt to continue uninterrupted here in this airborne tube so that the indignation at chicken when lamb had run out was far more consequential than ‘Isn’t it only two hours since breakfast?’ High-alcohol wine, parsimonious lighting and channel upon channel of Julia Roberts anaesthesia completed the gentle high-altitude lullaby.
No matter how many times he flew, Rajiv, naturally, never succumbed to these sedatives. As time slowed down all around him, his heartbeat accelerated with the raging speed on the other side of the titanium membrane, the whole screaming, blinking 300-litres-a-second combustion of it, the 800-kilometre-an-hour gale in which Karachi-Tehran-Moscow-Prague-Frankfurt-Amsterdam each stuck for a second on the windscreen like a sheet of old newspaper and then swooped into the past. As the plane cut its fibre-optic jet stream through the sky, Rajiv’s insomniac sorrow at living in a different time from everyone else became panic as the movement of the day tilted and buckled, the unwavering sun, always just ahead, holding time still for hours and hours and burning his dim, sleepless pupils. Used to carrying the leaden darkness of the night through the day with him, he now carried Indian Standard Time in his guts into far-flung places, and there was an ear-splitting tectonic scraping within him as it went where it should never have been. Time shifted so gently around the surface of the globe, he thought: there should have been no cause for human bodies to be traumatized by its discontinuities–until people started piercing telegraphic holes from one time zone to another, or leaping, jet-engined, between continents. The universe was not born to understand neologisms like jet lag.
It was the same, every time.
Stephen worked quickly. Working in the Bahamas from blood and tissue samples sent from Delhi he managed to mimic the processes by which the DNA of two adults is combined at the moment of fertilization. He took human egg cells from the ovaries of aborted embryos, blasted the nucleus from them, and replaced it with the new genetic combination. He created a battery of two hundred eggs, and waited.
At length he identified one healthy and viable zygote, splitting happily into two every few hours. He called Mira, who flew out that day, and implanted it in her womb.
She returned to Delhi via London, where she had some shopping to do in Bond Street. Neither customs nor security detected the microscopic contraband she carried within her.
After nine months, Mira was rosy and rotund, and Rajiv an exuberant and solicitous father-to-be. No one could remember seeing him so glad or so animated. Even the black crescents that seemed branded under his eyes started to fade. He called Mira several times a day to enquire after her temperature and the condition of her stomach. He brought her flowers and sweets in the evening and hosted small parties in his home where she would dazzle the guests with her happiness and even replay Bollywood routines from the old days. At length, her labour began.
The obstetrician and nurses came to the house to attend her in her bedroom while Rajiv sat in his study with the door closed, fiddling with a pencil. He sweated with suspense, but would not allow himself to venture out. Finally, a nurse came to the door.
‘The labour is over, sir.
