And something else.
Something was different from the way it had been when Ranjit had been there as a boy. Then he saw that in the corner of the children’s room there was a trace of something on the wall, and when he looked more carefully, he saw that it was a nearly obliterated religious poster, written in Sanskrit.
Well, of course! This was the house’s northeast corner, and this had once been the home’s puja corner, the sacrosanct space for devotion and prayer that every gods-fearing Hindu household possessed. But what had become of it now? Where was the idol of Shiva—of any one of the gods, anyway—on its little stand? Where was the incense container or the plate to hold flowers for the offering or any other of the ritual necessities for worship? There was nothing! It had been a good many years since Ranjit had thought of himself as in any sense religious, but when he looked on the heap of washed but unfolded children’s clothing in what had once been the home’s immaculate and holy puja space, he did feel a sense of, well, almost revulsion. It just wasn’t the way a proper Hindu family, atheist or not, should conduct itself.
When he heard voices approaching from outside and went out to introduce himself, he became less sure that this was a proper Hindu family. Its head, the wife of Kirthis Kanakaratnam, did not dress like a proper Hindu woman. She was wearing men’s overalls and a pair of men’s boots, and she was pulling a child’s coaster wagon that held, along with some smaller items, two of those big plastic jugs of water and one small female child. There were three more children, a ten-or twelve-year-old girl bearing another girl, the tiniest one yet, on her back and a boy, gamely shouldering a canvas sack of something. “Hello,” Ranjit said in general to them all. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian, Ganesh Subramanian’s son, and he sent me down with some stuff for you. It’s inside on the table. You must be Mrs. Kanakaratnam.”
The woman didn’t deny the charge. She dropped the handle of the cart and cast a glance at the sleeping passenger to make sure she was still sleeping. Then she held out her hand to be shaken. “I am Kanakaratnam’s wife,” she agreed. “Thanks. Your father has been very good to us. Can I offer you a drink of water? We don’t have any ice, but you must be thirsty after carrying that stuff all the way down here.”
He was, and gratefully drank the tumblerful she poured him out of one of the jugs. (All of their drinking water, she explained, had to be portaged in. The long-ago Boxing Day tsunami had flooded their well water with salt from the bay, and it had never recovered. It was all right for washing and for some kinds of cooking, but not to quench thirst.)
Mrs. Kanakaratnam, he observed, was a woman in her thirties, apparently healthy, not unattractive, not particularly stupid, either, but seriously at odds with a world that had turned against her. Another thing about Mrs. Kanakaratnam was that she didn’t especially like to be called Mrs. Kanakaratnam. She explained that both she and her husband really had not liked being stuck in this tropical nowhere that was called Sri Lanka. They wanted to be where things were happening—which was to say, probably America. But they had had to settle for another country because the American embassy had turned down their request for visas. They had immigrated to a different place entirely—it was Poland—and then that hadn’t worked out, either. “So,” she said, her tone something close to defiant, “we did the best we could. We took American names. He wouldn’t let me call him Kirthis anymore. He took the name George, and I was Dorothy. Dot for short.”
“It’s a nice name,” Ranjit volunteered. He didn’t actually have an opinion about the name. He simply wanted to cool down the hostility in her voice.
Apparently he was successful, because she became chatty, explaining that they had given the same sorts of names to the children when they came along. It seemed that for a time Dot Kanakaratnam had popped one out in every even-numbered year. First Tiffany, the oldest at eleven, then the only boy, Harold, now nine, and Rosie and Betsy, seven and five. In a very offhand way, she mentioned that her husband was now in jail; she announced the news in such a manner that Ranjit thought it best to reserve judgment.
When he did have a chance to make a judgment, Ranjit thought they were reasonably nice kids, sometimes sweet and sometimes entertainingly impudent, and always working hard at the tricky and difficult, but amusing, business of growing up. Ranjit found himself liking them. So much so that before he left the Kanakaratnam house he volunteered to take the children to the beach on his next day off.
That was forty-eight hours in the future. Ranjit spent a fair share of that time wondering whether he could handle the responsibilities that went with it. For instance, what if one of them had to, you know, go?
In the event, Tiffany took over without being asked. When Rosie had to pee, Tiffany directed her into the gentle surf, where the massive dilution afforded by the Bay of Bengal took care of the sanitary requirements. And when Harold had to do the other thing, Tiffany led him by the hand to one of the construction workers’ portable toilets without bothering Ranjit about it at all. Between times they marched splashingly around the shallows together, Ranjit leading the procession as gander of the group, the kids his gosling train. They lunched on sandwiches swiped from the workers’ buffet. (The workers didn’t seem to mind. They liked the kids, too.) In the hottest hours of the day the children napped in the palms above the high tide mark, and when Tiffany ordered a taking-it-easy time, they sat and listened while Ranjit told them wonderful stories about Mars and the moon and the great brood of Jovian satellites.
Of course, in other parts of the world things were less amiable.
In Israeli school yards ten-year-old Palestinian girls were blowing up themselves and everybody around them. In Paris four husky North Africans demonstrated their feelings about French politics by killing two Eiffel Tower guards and hurling eleven tourists off the top platform. Things just as bad were going on in Venice, Italy, and Belgrade, Serbia, and even worse ones in Reykjavik, Iceland…and those few of the world leaders whose own countries didn’t happen to be in flames—yet—were at their wits’ ends trying to find some way of dealing with it.
Ranjit, however, didn’t really care….
Well, no. He cared quite a lot about such things when he thought about them, but he did his best not to think about them very much.
In this he somewhat resembled the giddy revelers in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.” His world, like theirs, was terminally unwell. But meanwhile the sun was warm and the children were thrilled when he showed them how to capture star turtles and try to get them to race, and told them stories. The kids enjoyed hearing Ranjit’s stories very nearly as much as he enjoyed telling them.
Funnily enough, at that same time some, or all (it was rarely possible to say which), of the Grand Galactics were trying to teach a wholly other phylum of living things a somewhat similar lesson.
These other creatures of course were not turtles, though they did have turtlish hard shells and turtlishly low IQs. What the Grand Galactics were trying to teach them was the use of tools.
This was one of the many, many matters that were the self-imposed concerns of the Grand Galactics. A human might think of it as an attempt to raise the standards of the galaxy’s living things.
Their idea was that if the hard shells learned to use a lever, a hook, and a striking stone, they might be taking the first steps toward dawning intelligence. And if that happened, then under the micromanaging tutelage of the Grand Galactics they might go further. Indeed, they might go all the way to primo technology, without ever having discovered such unwanted distractions as subjugation, exploitation, or war.
Well, this program would take a long, long time. But the Grand Galactics had plenty of time to spend, and they thought it was worth a try. They considered that it would be worth their while if, in the long future history of the universe, just one species could manage to evolve all the way to matter transmission and space colonies without having learned the art of murder along the way. The Grand Galactics were assuredly intelligent and pow
erful. But sometimes they were also naïve.
9
LAZY DAYS
Everything considered, Ranjit was reasonably pleased with his summer. The job was easy, and no one seemed to mind if he brought his four goslings along to work. He was only to bother with babysitting them, Dot insisted, on the days when she absolutely had to be away from the house. There were a fair number of those days, though. Sometimes that was because she needed to look for work, although there she didn’t have much luck. More often she had to sell off a few more of their possessions to keep the children fed and clothed.
Ranjit noted that the absences did get more frequent. He thought that perhaps Dot was gaining confidence in him. He didn’t mind. Whether it was interest or mere politeness, the kids seemed enthralled by both his stories and his mathematical tricks. Ranjit’s years of puzzling over number theory had not been entirely for nothing. With his fellow students he had learned ways of playing with numbers that the average layman had never heard of.
There was, for instance, the one called Russian peasant multiplication. To begin with Ranjit determined that only Tiffany had got far enough in school to learn to multiply. To the others he said, “Don’t feel bad if you don’t know how to multiply numbers. In the old days there were plenty of grown-ups, particularly in places like Russia, who didn’t know how to do it, either. So they invented a trick. They called it ‘Russian multiplication,’ and it goes like this. First write down the two numbers side by side, like this. Say you want to multiply twenty-one by thirty-seven.”
He pulled from his pocket the little notebook he had had the fore-thought to take with him, wrote quickly, and displayed the page:
“Thendo you know how to double a number? Fine. Then double the number on the left, thats the twenty-one, and halve the number on the right, and write them under the first numbers. So then you get”
“There’s a one left after you halve that number on the right, but don’t worry about it. Just throw that leftover one away. Then you do the same halving and doubling thing with the next numbers, and the ones after that, until the number on the right side gets down to a one.”
“And whenever the number in the right-hand column is even, you just strike out that whole line.”
“And you add up the numbers in the left-hand column.”
Under it Ranjit wrote triumphantly “21 × 37 = 777” and said, “And that’s the answer!”
Ranjit waited for a response. Actually, he got four different ones. Little Betsy took her cue to clap her hands, applauding Ranjit’s success. Rosie looked pleased but puzzled, Harold was frowning, and Tiffany politely asked if she could borrow Ranjit’s pen and paper. He peered over her shoulder as she wrote:
“Yes,” she announced, “that’s right. Give me two other numbers, please, Ranjit.”
He gave her an easy one, eight times nine, and then another even easier one when Harold demanded a chance. He got it, and seemed as though he would gladly have gone on doing elementary Russian multiplication for some time longer, but the youngest girls were beginning to look rebellious. Ranjit deferred the thought of showing them why Russian multiplication was an example of binary arithmetic for another time. Well pleased at the success of his first infliction of number theory on the kids, he said, “That was fun. Now let’s catch some more turtles.”
Gamini Bandara got to Sri Lanka right on schedule, but when he called Ranjit, he was apologetic. His time was even more overprogrammed than he had realized. He wouldn’t be able to visit Tricomalee at this particular time, so would Ranjit very much mind coming up to Colombo for their visit instead?
Actually, Ranjit was a little put out, and didn’t very well conceal it. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know if I can get away from my job.” But Gamini was persuasive and, in the event, the foreman at the construction job was glad enough to let Ranjit take as many days as he liked (having a brother-in-law who would gladly take Ranjit’s place, and paycheck, while he was away). And Ganesh Subramanian positively went all out to help him. Ranjit had been afraid his father would be upset at the prospect of Gamini coming back into the picture. He wasn’t. Apparently a short visit, especially one that took place a considerable distance away, was not a problem. Ganesh made it as easy as possible for his son. “Bus?” he said with a dismissive gesture. “Certainly you won’t take the bus. I’ve got a van that’s assigned to me and I don’t use it. Take it, Ranjit. Keep it as long as you like. Who knows, the temple insignia on its doors may discourage some ill-intentioned people from letting the air out of your tires.”
So Ranjit arrived in Colombo with a bag in the back of the van packed with several days’ worth of clothes. Puzzlingly, Gamini had let him know that he would be staying at a hotel instead of his father’s house. Ranjit understood the choice of that particular hotel—it had a bar the two boys had visited frequently enough in their explorations of the city—but it surprised him that Gamini’s father had let him get away for even one night.
When Ranjit asked to be announced, the desk clerk shook his head, pointing to the bar. And indeed there in the bar was Gamini, and not alone. He had a girl on either side of him, and a nearly empty wine bottle on his table.
All three got up to greet Ranjit. The blond girl was named Pru; the other, whose name was Maggie, had hair of a lipstick color that had never been produced by human genes. “Met them on the plane,” Gamini said when he had finished the introductions. “They’re Americans. They’re students in London, they say, but the school they go to is the University of the Arts—that’s the one where the only thing you learn is how to look good. Ouch!”
That last part was because Maggie, the improbably redheaded one, had pinched his ear. “Pay no attention to this slanderer,” she instructed Ranjit. “Pru and I are at Camberwell. That’s the college at Arts where the instructors make you work. Gamini wouldn’t last a week there.”
Making an assumption, Ranjit stuck out his hand. The two girls pumped it earnestly, one after the other. “I’m Ranjit Subramanian,” he said.
The one named Maggie spoke up. “Oh, we know who you are,” she informed him. “Gamini told us everything there is to know about you. You’re a short person with a long name, and you spend all your time solving one single math problem. Gamini says if anybody ever does, you’ll be the one who does it.”
Ranjit, who still suffered occasional attacks of guilt for having neglected the Fermat problem, wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He looked to Gamini for help, but actually the expression on Gamini’s face was itself a little like guilt. “Listen, Ranj,” he began, his tone even more remorseful than his face, “I’d better tell you the bad news right away. When I wrote you, I was hoping you and I would have at least a couple of days together.” He shook his head. “Won’t happen. My dad’s got both of us booked up solid for every day, starting tomorrow. Family, you know.”
Ranjit did know, remembering those days before Gamini left for London. He let his disappointment show on his face. “I’ve got a week, car and all.”
Gamini gave him a rebellious shrug. “Can’t be helped. He even wanted me for dinner tonight, but I told him positively no.” He studied Ranjit for a moment, then grinned. “But, damn, I’m happy to see you! Give us a hug!”
That Ranjit was willing to do, first so as not to embarrass Gamini in front of the girls, then, as Gamini’s lean, hot body pressed against his own, with a return of real affection. “Anyway,” Gamini said, “you haven’t even had a drink yet. Pru, take care of that for me, will you?”
Aware that both girls had been studying something or other artistic, Ranjit tried conversation. “So you want to be an artist?” he asked Maggie.
She gave him an incredulous look. “What, and starve to death? No way! I’m pretty sure that what I’ll be doing is teaching art in some community college near Trenton, New Jersey, where my folks live. Or wherever my husband’s job is, when I have a husband.”
The blonde, Pru, spoke up. “Oh, I’d love to be an artist, Ranjit. I won’t make i
t, though. I have no artistic talent at all, and I don’t want to go back to the family in Shaker Heights. What I’m hoping for is a job as auctioneer at someplace like Sotheby’s. Good money, interesting people to work with, and I’d be around art even if I wasn’t creating any.”
Maggie handed Ranjit his arrack and Coke, laughing. “Fat chance,” she said.
Pru reached around Gamini’s legs with one of her own and kicked her. “Pig,” she said. “I don’t mean right away. You start out as an intern, and maybe the first thing they give you to do is get the numbers from the bid paddles that people at the back of the room are holding up—you know, where the actual auctioneer won’t be looking. Ranjit? Don’t you like arrack and Coke?”
Ranjit didn’t have a good answer to that. Actually, he had liked it pretty well when he and Gamini had been exploring Colombo but hadn’t had any of that particular drink since Gamini had left. But when he tasted it, it went down pretty agreeably. So did the next one.
Although the evening wasn’t what Ranjit had expected, it wasn’t turning out badly at all. At some point the girl named Pru had detached herself from Gamini and settled in next to Ranjit himself. He immediately noticed three things about her. She was warm, she was soft, and she smelled quite nice. Oh, not as nice as Myra de Soyza, or perhaps even as nice—in a quite different way, of course—as Mevrouw Beatrix Vorhulst, but still quite pleasing.
Ranjit not being a fool, he was quite aware that the way women smelled was primarily an artifact purchasable at any pharmacy. No matter. It was still quite pleasing, and Pru had other virtues as well, which included feeling good against his arm and, quite often, saying amusing things. Taken all in all, Ranjit decided that he was having quite a good time.