The Calcutta Chromosome

New York: sometime in the future. Antar is thinking back to 1995, and that particular day that he spent with Murugan in the Thai restaurant. He thought Murugan had gone mad, and upon returning to his office uploaded everything he had on Murugan’s case and sent it back to the Director. He was confident that the whole matter was behind him.

However, when he got home, he found a series of messages on his answering machine. Murugan had left a number of angry messages on his machine. Antar fast-forwarded to the end, catching the final sentence of Murugan’s last message: “there’s a document waiting for you right this minute, in your mail-folder” (116). Antar looked at the computer screen and saw that there was a message waiting for him, but he wanted nothing to do with it, and deleted the whole file without reading it.

Antar remembers the answering machine, thinking he had disposed of it. Yet the more he thinks about it, he isn’t sure, and decides to check his closet, where he keeps a lot of discarded objects. Sure enough, after removing a pile of old items, he spots it, still wrapped in plastic.