ran past her to his wife’s bedroom. There she lay, exhausted and pale, and beside her on the bed were two sleeping babies. One was a radiant, beautiful girl. The other was a boy, a shrunken, misshapen boy with an outsized head that had the pointed shape of a cow’s.
‘What is this?’ he cried in horror. ‘That is not my son! That is some–creature!’
The nurses susurrated, trying to bring calm and allow the new mother to rest, reassuring the father, telling him that new babies often look a bit–funny?–this was quite normal and not to worry, and anyway we all learn to love our children in the end, even if they have some adorable little quirk that makes them different–isn’t that what also makes them unique?
Rajiv was not listening. ‘I want that child out of my house this day!’ He stormed out and summoned his lifelong companion and servant, Kaloo.
‘A terrible thing has happened, Kaloo. My wife has given birth to two children: a girl, and a boy who is a deviant. I cannot allow the boy to stay here a moment longer. I want you to take him away. Give him to a family where he’ll be cared for. Promise them a yearly stipend–whatever they need–as long as they look after him. But I don’t want to know where he is or what happens to him, and I don’t want him to know about me. Take him away, Kaloo! Away from Delhi–somewhere else. And as long as we are all alive this secret stays between you and me.’
In a very few hours the matter was taken care of. Telling no one, not even Rajiv, where he was going, Kaloo wrapped the baby up and set out with a wet nurse for the airport. He took Rajiv’s private plane and flew to Bombay. While the nurse looked after the baby in a hotel room, Kaloo wandered the streets looking for a family who would care for the child. His gaze was attracted by the kindly face of a Muslim bookseller. He approached him and told him the story.
‘Sir–my wife and I would be so happy! We have no children and have always wanted a son!’
‘I will deliver the boy to you this very evening. And every year on this day I will visit you with money. You cannot contact me, nor should you make any attempt to discover the origins of the boy. I hope you will be loving parents to him.’
He and the wet nurse took the baby to the bookseller’s home that evening and delivered him into his new mother’s arms. She wept with joy.
‘We will call him Imran,’ she said reverentially. ‘He will be a man like a god.’
Rajiv and Mira named their daughter Sapna, and from the first day of her life everyone who saw her was enchanted by her. She was so beautiful that jaded politicians and wrinkled businessmen rediscovered the meaning of the word ‘breathtaking’ when they looked into her cot. As Rajiv forgot his rage of her birthday, and Mira allowed her resentment of her husband’s peremptory behaviour to subside, both of them lapsed into a deep love affair with their daughter.
Everyone agreed there was something marvellous about her sleep. People would stop at Rajiv’s house just to see the baby sleeping, for the air she exuded with her slow breathing smelled better than anything they had ever smelt. It made one feel young and vital, it made you feel–though none of them would ever say it aloud–like reproducing!
Eternally ignorant himself of the pleasure of sleep, Rajiv’s body and mind were calmed and rejuvenated by the voluptuous sleep of his daughter.
She was only four or five years old when she sat at the family piano and picked out, with unaccustomed fingers but rapidly increasing harmonic complexity, a Hindi film song she had heard on the radio that morning. Rajiv immediately installed an English piano teacher who quickly found herself involved in conversations of the greatest philosophical complexity with her young pupil, who was interested in understanding why the emotions responded so readily to certain melodic or harmonic combinations.
One morning, when Rajiv entered Sapna’s bedroom to kiss her goodbye, he noticed something he had not seen before. The wooden headboard of her bed seemed to have sprouted a green shoot that in one night had grown leaves and a little white flower. He summoned his wife.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, mystified.
‘That may be so–but what is it doing there? If it grows so much in one night, one morning we will come and find it has strangled our daughter. Get someone to cut it off today and seal the spot with varnish. This bed has been here for–what?–ten years? I can’t understand how this has happened after all this time.’
That day a carpenter was brought who carefully cut off the new stem, sanded down the surface and varnished it until no sign of the growth remained. But the next morning there were two such shoots, each larger than the first and with flowers that filled the room with delightful, dizzying scent.
Rajiv was furious.
‘Change this bed immediately. Get her one with a steel frame. This is–this is–ridiculous!’
A steel bed was installed in the place of the wooden one, and for a time things returned to normal. But it was not so long before another morning visit was met by a room full of white seeds that drifted lazily on the air currents from floor to ceiling, spores emitted by the geometric rows of spiralling grasses that had sprung overnight from the antique Persian rug on the floor of Sapna’s room. Genuinely frightened this time, Rajiv called for tests and diagnoses on both grass and Sapna herself. Nothing could be determined, and Sapna had no explanation. They moved her into another bedroom, where a wicker laundry basket burst overnight into a clump of bamboo-like spears that grew through the ceiling and erupted into the room above. Wherever Sapna slept, things burst into life: sheets, clothes, newspapers, antique wardrobes–all rediscovered their ability to grow.
Each encounter with this nocturnal hypertrophy enraged Rajiv. He would stare at the upstart plant matter that invaded his daughter’s room with the purest hatred he had ever felt. It began to take him over. He could not work for his visions of galloping, coiling roots and shoots. It sickened him. He ordered all organic matter to be removed from Sapna’s bedroom. This controlled things, and for many months their lives were unaffected by this strange phenomenon. But he had been filled with a terror of vegetation, and wherever he went he kept imagining loathsome green shoots sprouting out of car seats and boardroom tables.
One morning, as he arrived at her door, he could hear her sobbing quietly inside. Terrified of what he might find, he opened the door slowly. The room was empty and calm, and Sapna lay twisted up in bed.
‘I’m bleeding, papa. Between my legs.’
Rajiv’s stomach corkscrewed inside him and he ran out of the room. Sweating inside his suit he landed heavily on Mira’s bed.
‘It’s Sapna. She needs you.’
That night, though Sapna’s room had received the customary clearing of all organic traces, and though no one heard anything, not even the sleepless Rajiv, a huge neem tree sprang from the dining room, grew up through the ceiling into the room where Sapna slept, branched out through all four walls, filled the floor above her, and broke through the roof of the house. Vines and creepers snaked up the tree during the night, locking it in a sensuous, miscegenetic embrace and disgorging provocative red flowers bursting with seed. By the time everyone awoke in the morning a crowd had already gathered outside the house to look at this extraordinary sight, and photographers were taking pictures for the city papers.
The Malhotra household stared at the tree in the way that people stare at something that cannot be part of the world they inhabit. They kept touching it, touching the places where it had burst through the walls. Rajiv became grim.
‘Get
