Turbulence (27 page)

Worse still, immediately after the mob manipulator had let go, Jai’s tidal wave of fury had swallowed up many people who had no idea why they were in a stranger’s house in Harrow, or why they had no recollection of the last few rage-hazed minutes. Jai had spent several minutes in his parents’ room, sobbing over their corpses, killing anyone who sought to disturb his last minutes with his family. Then he’d set the house on fire by way of cremation — while still inside it.

When the smoke cleared and firemen rushed in, Jai was gone. The only person who claimed to have seen him since then was Rajan “Raz” Patel, the young manager of a local cornershop. He had become a known face across the world with his story about how Jai had walked into his store.

“The geezer’s clothes were well burnt to, like, rags, man, and I knew him from the telly and I thought,
This is it, mate, this is the end for Raz.
Yeah, but he said he liked the song I was playing — Kishore Kumar, man, my pappaji’s favourite — and so he’d just popped in to see if he could score some buttermilk. Said he needed to think a bit, and drink a bit, yeah? Honestly, man, buttermilk, I don’t know why — I thought he was well hamstered. Turns out I did have some buttermilk, yeah, cuz I run the best shop in the city, innit? So he drinks it, and then he’s off. Cost me a couple of quid, but he just set fire to his dead family, innit? He can have some buttermilk on me.”

Perhaps swayed by Rajan Patel’s generosity, Jai has thus far not destroyed London. All of Great Britain has put itself under siege, and journalists all over the world have finally started making connections — the missing British travellers, the deaths around the world, the strange incidents at the Ram Lila ground and the Wankhede Stadium, tabloid reports on bizarre creatures sighted all over India. But no one’s managed to put it all together yet — the origin story of this renegade superhuman is proving to be as elusive as Aman is to Uzma at the moment.

She checks the ground floor — he’s not there, and several Tias take a break from cooking to tell her he’s not left the house. She finds him, finally, in Sundar’s room, sorting through mountains of miscellaneous mad-scientist trash. Uzma is reminded, sharply, of her night of discovery, of the strange cold feeling that welled up inside her stomach when she first saw Sundar’s bizarre puppet-walk, a feeling that has not yet gone away.

“I don’t think Sundar’s dead,” Aman says as Uzma enters the room. “I wondered about the label on his ray-gun the first time I saw it — I knew it sounded familiar, but I forgot to look it up.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Uzma says. “Where is Sundar if he’s not dead? Did he zap himself to America?”

“No, that would be far too mundane,” Aman says. “I think he time-travelled.”

“Eh?”

“The label on the ray gun said ‘Tachyon Dislocator’.”

“Is that supposed to mean anything to me?”

“Well, tachyons are hypothetical sub-atomic particles that travel faster than light.”

“English, please.”

“Sorry. Basically tachyons are these things that a lot of science-fiction writers talk about as agents of faster-than-light communication. And time travel. So, if the gun said it was a tachyon dislocator, and things he zapped with it disappeared…”

“Sundar zapped himself and that blue light guy into the future?”

“Or the past. Knowing Sundar, the future, yes. It’s possible, that’s all.”

“Really, Aman? Time travel? Isn’t that a bit much?”

“If you step out this room and across a corridor, you will find a man sleeping in mid-air. Why should we rule out time travel? He was designing gadgets from the future anyway. Maybe he was following instructions he’d put in his brain from the future. I don’t know.”

Carefully removing a nameless object that seems to be
constructed entirely out of razor blades and plasticine, Uzma sits.

“What the hell,” she says. “Time travel. After what we’ve seen, why not, right?”

“Exactly.”

“Is he coming back? Can he, if he wants to?”

Aman shrugs. “You tell me,” he says. “If I were you, I wouldn’t even think about it. I tried, and I have a headache now.”

He walks towards the centre of the room, waving his arms.

“I’ve not gone completely crazy, in case you’re wondering,” he says. “I’m looking for that armour. If he was somehow sending messages to himself from the future, and the last thing he did was make that armour disappear…”

“Aman? What happens to Jai now?”

“I don’t know,” he says, turning around. “I’m doing things your way now. Not trying to play with the world.”

“Yes, but he needs to be stopped.”

“Well, I can’t stop him. No idea how, in the first place. His only vulnerable point was his family — even Namrata wanted to kidnap them, and she’s one of the good guys, hopefully. This mob person obviously went a step further.”

“Who is he? You know everyone on the list.”

“Not really. I didn’t even know everyone at the house. I’m guessing it’s some British guy Jai couldn’t kill. But I really don’t know where to look. So I’m going to do my own thing and let someone else — maybe Vir, if he wants to — take care of it. I thought that was what you wanted.”

“I don’t know. Jai’s in London. My family lives there. I don’t think I can just go out auditioning yet.”

“You’ve spoken to your parents?”

“Yeah, I got through this morning. They’re fine. But the city’s shutting down. The Police Commissioner’s asked people not to come to London, they’re thinking of closing the Tube, it’s worse than the bombings four years ago. My parents said everyone’s terrified. My brothers have come to stay with them. The scariest thing is, I think Jai knows where I live. People came looking for me, remember? What if he decides to take things out on my family?”

“They should move. I can fix it.”

“They asked me if I had superpowers.”

“What did you say?”

“I said everyone liked me. They laughed. They asked me what I’d been up to. Bollywood, I said. They said to stay here, London’s so unsafe. Weird, huh.”

Aman turns and starts feeling the air again, searching for the invisible armour. He finds it by accident in the end, scattered on the floor in pieces. Sher had probably knocked it over while bouncing around the room, horror-movie Tigger style.

“What does that number mean?” Uzma asks. She points at the wall where the digits 75348 are scrawled.

“Sundar wrote that before he left,” Aman says, his fingers gliding over one invisible piece after another. He searches his memory, trying to remember exactly what Sundar had done before disappearing in a white flash. He finds a large chunk of the armour, the approximate shape of a human torso, and starts feeling for a central panel.

“Yes, but what does it mean?” Uzma asks. “Is it supposed to be some kind of clue?”

“Not a clue.” Aman finds the panel in the middle of the breastplate. He presses down, and there’s a clicking sound. Feeling the same spot again, he finds a square panel filled with a grid of softened round spots: four rows, three columns. Hoping that an incorrect guess will not lead to a decimating explosion, or anything similar, he enters the digits one by one: 75348.

Five soft beeps, a click, a hum.

Red lines form on the breastplate, defining edges, sparkling contours meant to correspond to muscles Aman wishes he had. Around him, other scattered pieces of Sundar’s armour glow with red lines, an insane neon-pencil 3-D diagram of a broken block figure: legs, arms, head, abdomen. The torso section stays where it is; the other pieces flow smoothly across the floor, and Aman moves away swiftly as they align themselves to the torso one by one and slide smoothly into place. The head adds itself last. Twin red points appear in eye sockets. The armour shines silver for a brief instant, and then becomes wholly visible, a sleek, gleaming, beautiful black and silver body, all smooth lines and ridges lying on the floor, more Japanese mech-bot than Iron Man.

Aman reaches out and touches a hand, it’s a light material, some kind of organic/metal alloy, strangely warm. The head is black, with a silver mask covering the eyes, nose and mouth, vaguely like a sombre Mexican wrestler’s mask with long, slender triangular eye slits covered by dark reflector shades.

“When I grow up I want a car like that,” Uzma says.

On either side of the zero on the breastplate panels are two silver buttons, each of which is marked with an arrow, one pointing up and the other down. Aman presses the button with the upwards-looking arrow, and the armour stands up on its own. Aman and Uzma both spring back, startled.

Once it’s on its feet, there’s another click, and the armour
swings open neatly, like an iron maiden. The interior is grey, some kind of foam with thousands of silver lines, millimetres apart, running across it.

“Go ahead,” Uzma says. “Put it on.”

“Hell no,” Aman says.

He steps forward and swings the front half of the armour back into place. It snaps shut gently. Aman and Uzma stare at each other.

“Well, if you’re not going to put it on, why were you looking for it in the first place?” Uzma asks.

“I don’t know,” Aman replies. “I guess I was hoping it would bring Sundar back.”

Uzma examines the armour closely, her gaze stopping at the downwards-pointing arrow on the central panel.

“What does this button do?” she asks, grins, and presses it.

They step back yet again, startled. The armour implodes without a sound, plates sliding over other plates, the whole structure changing shape, collapsing like a fast-forward film of rotting fruit. Bright red lines appear again, and the armour’s body snaps into the grid it creates, filling in corners. Seconds later, a black briefcase sits innocently on the floor, its surfaces completely smooth except for a small panel near its handle, which when pressed pops up to reveal a familiar grid of buttons.

Uzma picks the briefcase up.

“Can I try it on?” she asks.

“Do you want to put on the armour of the future?” Aman asks. “You could use it to, I don’t know, fight Jai? Maybe that’s what future-Sundar left it for. Go ahead, put it on. Be the champion of the planet or something.”

“You’re being mean,” Uzma says. “But I’m really surprised
you don’t want it. You were so excited about the whole superhero thing.”

“Well, you showed me the error of my ways. I’m a support act at best,” Aman says. “In any case, I never wanted to be an action hero. The things I wanted to do — and failed at, I know — you can’t do with a shiny suit.”

“But maybe this is your moment. You’re the hero who wants to save the world, but other people are stronger and faster — this armour could be the sword you pull out of the stone to save the day.”

“Given how I operate, I’d probably end up killing innocent bystanders.”

“But don’t you even want to find out what it does?”

“What’s got into you?”

“I don’t know. Too much hanging out with superheroes and monsters. I’m getting a little inspired.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Got it,” Uzma says. She raises the briefcase higher; it’s very light. “Should we give it to Vir?”

“Give what to Vir?” Vir asks from the door.

“Advice,” Aman says, turning quickly as Uzma sets the briefcase down.

She dazzles Vir with a wide smile.

“We’re super thrilled that you’ve shown up to save the day,” she says.

“Not alone,” he says, smiling. “Aman is the one who brought as all together, and his strategic skills outshine mine. I am just a soldier. Aman is our real leader, Uzma, and he’s the one who will win the battle with the terror that Jai has allowed himself to become. Tia, too, is a marvel, as are you, I am sure.”

So earnest is Vir’s expression and so honest his eyes that Uzma simpers instead of scoffing. Vir is transfixed by her loveliness, Aman has never felt so unnecessary in a room before.

“Because of Jai, there is no need for us to hide any longer,” Vir says, a martial light in his eye. “We will fight him, and destroy him. And not just us — I think we can persuade many of his followers to switch sides as well. They were only following him out of fear and a lack of alternatives.”

“That’s all very well, Vir, except for one thing,” Aman says. “I’m not leading anything. I know getting together was my plan, but I messed up. Big time. I’ll help, of course. But the most important thing here is not beating Jai up — and that’s assuming you can. The real issue is this: our existence is public knowledge now and it couldn’t have happened in a scarier way, at least as far as the Western world is concerned. There were detectives and journalists sniffing around before, but now there will be spies and mercenaries. Armies, if things get bad.”

“Do we have to go into hiding?” Uzma asks.

“If we want. Fake IDs are obviously not a problem. For us, our families, friends, anyone who needs them. New addresses, new neighbours, new jobs.”

“All those are administrative details. In any case, I have no intention of hiding,” Vir says. “I don’t want a secret identity. I am ready to show my face to the world, be its champion and defender. I’m not really ready, of course, but it’s the only reason I came back. Someone has to do it.”

“Which sounds good, except the world has already seen one Indian Superman, and he’s left people lying around in pieces. So, those of us who want to be known as superheroes — and that would have included me, yesterday — need serious PR to
happen if people are to accept our existence. Right now, we’re everybody’s worst nightmare.”

“But you can change that, can’t you?” Vir asks. “You can control the world’s media. Just tell them that we are to be loved, trusted and admired. People will listen.”

Aman shakes his head.

“Could do that. But it’s not right.”

“Maybe so, but it is what we need,” Vir says.

“Won’t do it,” Aman says. “People have to
choose
to like us.”

“But those who decide we are a danger to society will not hold themselves back, Aman,” Vir says.

“But we’re superpowered, right? We can take it. I’m not saying we suffer in silence while people hunt us down. We have to figure out a way to sell ourselves, make ourselves look good. But I’m not going to just tell people what to do and expect them to follow us. I’ve already manipulated the media, and I’m sure I’ll do it again. But that was to expose corruption, or to let people know things that were being hidden from them. I suppose what I did there was wrong too, in many ways, but I was okay with it. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.”