Page 3

"I don’t know," I confess. "I haven’t tried."

"Well, try now," he says impatiently. I already know we’re going to get along wonderfully.

I try. I try my best to lift my left arm, the one without a forest of plastic tubes attached to it, as far as I can tell. At first I can’t even feel it exists. Then it begins to rise, slowly, slowly, like a pillar. I roll down my eyes as far as I can as it comes into view.

And I scream.

Whatever else I don’t remember, I do know this: the hand at the end of the rising left arm is not my own.

"I thought you knew," the woman doctor says. "I thought someone would have told you by now."

We’re in the room now, alone. She’s put down the clipboard and drawn up a stool to the side of my bed, and is watching me gravely with her large eyes. Her name, she’s said, is Radhika. Dr Radhika.

"Radhika what?" I’d asked.

"Just Radhika."

"How should I know?" I answer now. "Who else has even talked to me but you?"

She has the grace to look embarrassed, and would probably have blushed if she’d been fairer. "We’d planned to break the news when we thought you could handle it," she tells me. "But somehow it slipped everyone’s mind. I think each of us assumed someone else had done it."

"So just let me go through this again." I lift my hand again, study the unfamiliar long tapered fingers, darker and more delicate than mine had ever been. "This isn’t my body."

"It is now," Dr Radhika hastens to assure me. "It’s your body every bit as much as your old one was."

"It isn’t my body," I snap, suddenly angry. "It’s someone else’s body, and you’ve put me inside it."

"All we’ve done is transplant your brain and upper spinal cord into this body," she says. "The brain controls everything – it’s you – so this body is yours. This is you, now."

"Is that so?" My anger is still simmering. "And why did you do it? To play at being gods?"

"We’ve been over this before," she says patiently. "Your old body was too badly damaged to survive, and hers was brain dead but perfect in every other way."

"So you did a swap. What would she have thought of it? That she was getting the bad end of the bargain?" It’s a ridiculous thing to say, and Radhika doesn’t try to reply to the question. Instead she puts a cool hand over mine.

"Try and rest," she says. "I know it must be a shock. We’ll be bringing in a counsellor later on. She’ll talk to you and help you adjust."

"And she’s got a lot of experience in this kind of thing, does she? She’s helped a lot of people who woke up in strangers’ bodies get used to their new situation?"

"Well," Dr Radhika says, as she gathers up her clipboard and rises to her feet. "Not exactly."

"What does that mean, not exactly?"

Radhika looks back at me from the door. "It means you’re the first."

"The first? What, in India?"

"No." Radhika’s little chin rises defiantly and proudly. "In the world."

"Yes," the psychiatrist says, smiling. Her name’s Prachi something, I didn’t get it all, and when she smiles she shows an enormous amount of gum and very small teeth. She’d begun by wearing a surgical mask too, but pulled it down. "This has never been done before. Isn’t it wonderful?"

"Wonderful?" I’m still agitated. "Not only am I stranded in someone else’s body with no memories of who I am, but this has never been done before, so nobody knows how to help me – and you call it wonderful?"

"There’s always got to be a first time, isn’t there?" Prachi leans over me and smiles again. She seems to like smiling. "And you were a perfect subject, my dear – you both were."

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