Tokyo Cancelled. That ring of finality, of authority, is confined only to the title. What follow are vaguely unsettling tales, spread over continents and cultures, rooted in none. An overarching tale of dispersed homogeneity, of cancelled flights and restless transits where the airport becomes a thing of permanence. Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport as their final destination Tokyo lies inaccessible, hidden in snow. To pass the night, they do what strangers in isolation often do: tell stories to each other. The stories come from all over. Istanbul, New York, New Delhi, Odessa. Each is almost like an airport board flashing names of destinations. Like the airport displays, the names hide more than they show. So, the thirteen stories cover the whole globe but could be from anywhere. In the first one — ‘The Tailor’ — Ibrahim is a prince who, fed up with the usual round of parties, decides to go on a voyage around the provinces of the kingdom, “to see how those villagers spend all their damned time”. Meanwhile in Delhi, “there was lived a man who had never been able to sleep”. Rajiv Malhotra lives in a colonial mansion on Prithviraj Road, is married to a former film star and has a fleet of cars. To balance such bounty perhaps, he is unable to sleep and later to have a child. To have a perfect son, a doctor who specialises in cloning is hired. The result: a misshapen boy who Malhotra abandons, and a beautiful girl who has the ability to give life to things around her. People sprouting branches is often childhood’s abiding terror. In Dasgupta’s stories there is the resigned pain of a life superimposed with life. On the streets of Paris, Fareed lives out his last days. A rare plant is growing inside his body, its flowers bunching under his skin, compressing his brain and nerves. He roams around the streets looking for words that will explain the mysteries of death, and when he’s too weak to do that, Bernard, a changeling and former banker with Goldman Sachs, does it for him. The changeling who is not supposed to grow old and understand the meaning of death finally knows it first-hand. Bernard falls asleep with Fareed, waking to find himself entwined by the plant’s branches in a death-like grip. In Rana Dasgupta’s debut novel, time is crystallised into a few hours or days or months but space is unrestricted, even undefined. The airport itself where the passengers form this tell-tale huddle is in ‘‘the middle of Nowhere, in a place that was Free of Duty. like a black corridor between two worlds, two somewheres.” In ‘The Memory Editor’, Thomas sits in a London office playing memory censor. He painstakingly goes through the memory database, freeing people of remembrances of deaths, betrayals and ruins. “At night he left the office bloated and dazed with hundreds of new memories. he could not separate himself from the memories.” Tokyo Cancelled has been called the Canterbury Tales of our times, an epic story cycle that comes full circle on our days. Dasgupta creates myths that allow him to soar above the strictly real to dream out a make-belief that’s a floating symbol of contemporary culture. It allows him to stretch the credulous to show the incredulous texture of our reality. An ambitious Japanese businessman’s ruinous obsession with a doll, a couple in Manhattan discovering how to transubstantiate matter with the help of a box of Oreo cookies — the girl becomes a store at Madison Avenue. Meanwhile, a wingless bird walks cross Europe to lead a Ukrainian merchant to her Bangladeshi lover. In the end the dreams, hopes and despair of the tales linger on in a vaguely restless huddle. There is a sense — intended or unintended — that the more one moves, the less one has moved.
