In his short and largely cheerless life, Janahara has lacked a great many things; regular nourishment, more than one set of clothes, a semblance of health care, reliably potable water—to name a few. Latterly though, he’s realising just quite how thoroughly fucked over he’s been. Time itself, it seems, like all luxuries, is also the preserve of those already benefiting from an existing level of corporeal comfort. A myopic fixation on the scant privations of hand-to-mouth existence does not allow choice, let alone an appreciation of it. Janahara has never had the luxury of stability, or even a passing familiarity of the rules by which to play; he has sat all his life in a grey, dimly lit box which diffused all shadow. Today, he’s breaking out.
The pure, annealing light that now fills Janahara is a revelation of sorts, but not one he was best placed to immediately appreciate. His current transformation is largely a pharmacological one, the relief from pain a result of world class medical intervention. His chapped lips are soothed by refrigerated Icelandic mineral water, his deeper wounds are dressed with expensive maggot debridement treatments, a nano salve soothes the abrasions on his left flank, and both legs are cradled in smartweave, analgesic casts. Heaven, always a divisive and personal condition, has come fleetingly to Janahara.
Later, as his eyes adjusted to the light, the source begins to form into a vaguely identifiable shape: a huge window looking out, from Janahara’s prone position, onto a featureless pure blue sky, tiny white birds flecking the endless azure. His universe is made up of distilled monochromes; the blue sky, white walls, a whiter bed. He has no idea of where he is and how he got there. All he knows and cares about is that he’s not at the Madhom yard; he gives into the drugs and steps out of his body for a while. The doctors fill him in later; he’s got a lot of doctors, he can afford them, in fact, he can afford whatever he wants.
Earlier that day, seventeen minutes after the accident in the Madhom yard, a Sikorsky heavy lifter thundered over Chittagong from the northwest. Without bothering to touch down and ignoring the agog workers, the flapping management goons and the handshake ping from the yard security network, the Sikorsky lowered a spectra line and grapple and simply winched the entire ISS module, Janahara, suit and all, into the reddening afternoon sky. After eleven minutes of terrifying, whirling flight, the Sikorsky dumped the module directly onto the helipad on top of Dhaka National Orthopaedic Hospital and Rehabilitation Institute and lit off immediately. Responding to feeble shouts from within the module hulk, the genteel surgeons of the DNOH were reluctant at first to rush to the aid of this scabrous (obviously poor) invader into their sterile enclave, but after a standard scan of his RFID tag embedded under the skin of his right pectoral, things started to move much more quickly. Specifically, Janahara became Mr. Azad when his credit line was queried. He was swiftly shuttled from the public ER bay to a private side room on the third floor, and from there to a maglev enabled suite on the twenty-seventh.
Somewhere between being squashed by several tons of obsolete multi-international space hardware, and landing in a supersonic clatter of helicopter blades in the centre of Dhaka, Janahara got rich.