Computers have not really changed radically in terms of their underlying architecture over the last half-century; what we think of as advancement or progress is really a slowly growing ease of human use, an amenability to human cognition and manipulation that is completely dependent on vast increases in processing power and storage capabilities. As you can tell from our journey down the stack of languages mentioned earlier, the purpose of each layer is to shield the user from the perplexing complexities of the layer just below, and to allow instructions to be phrased in a syntax that is just a bit closer to everyday, spoken language. All this translation from one dialect to a lower one exacts a fearsome cost in processing cycles, which users are never aware of because the chips which do all the work gain astonishing amounts of computing ability every year; in the famous formulation by Intel co-founder George E. Moore, the number of transistors that can be fitted on to an integrated circuit should double approximately every two years. Moore’s Law has held true since 1965. What this means in practical terms is that computers get exponentially more powerful and smaller every decade.

According to computer scientist Jack Ganssle, your iPad 2 has “about the compute capability of the Cray 2, 1985’s leading supercomputer. The Cray cost $35 million more than the iPad. Apple’s product runs 10 hours on a charge; the Cray needed 150 KW and liquid Flourinert cooling.”⁷ He goes on to describe ENIAC — the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — which was the world’s first general-purpose, fully electronic computer capable of being programmed for diverse tasks. It was put into operation in 1945.⁸ “If we built [an iPhone] using the ENIAC’s active element technology,” Ganssle writes:

the phone would be about the size of 170 Vertical Assembly Buildings (the largest single-story building in the world) … Weight? 2,500 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. And what a power hog! Figure over a terawatt, requiring all of the output of 500 of Olkiluoto power plants (the largest nuclear plant in the world). An ENIAC-technology iPhone would run a cool $50 trillion, roughly the GDP of the entire world.⁹

So that smartphone you carry in your pocket is actually a fully programmable supercomputer; you could break the Enigma code with it, or design nuclear bombs. You can use it to tap out shopping lists because millions of logic gates are churning away to draw that pretty keyboard and all those shadowed checkboxes. And I can write working programs because modern high-level languages like C# protect me from the overwhelming intricacy of the machine as it actually is. When I write code in C#, I work within a regime that has been designed to be “best for human understanding,” far removed from the alien digital idiom of the machine. Until the early fifties, programmers worked in machine code or one of its close variants. As we’ve just seen, instructions passed to the computer’s CPU have to be encoded as binary numbers (“1010101 10001011 …”), which are extremely hard for humans to read and write, or even distinguish from one another. Representing these numbers in a hexadecimal format (“55 8B …”) makes the code more legible, but only slightly so. So assembly language was created; in assembly, each low-level machine-code instruction is represented by a mnemonic. So our earlier hexadecimal representation of “Hello, world!” becomes:

One line of code in assembly language usually translates into one machine-code instruction. Writing code in assembly is more efficient than writing machine code, but is still difficult and error-prone.

In 1954, John Backus and a legendary team of IBM programmers began work on a pioneering high-level programming language, FORTRAN (from FORmula TRANslation), intended for use in scientific and numerical applications. FORTRAN offered not only a more English-like vocabulary and syntax, but also economy — a single line of FORTRAN would be translated into many machine-code instructions. “Hello, world!” in FORTRAN is:

All modern high-level languages provide the same ease of use. I work inside an orderly, simplified hallucination, a maya that is illusion and not-illusion — the code I write sets off other subterranean incantations which are completely illegible to me, but I can cause objects to move in the real world, and send messages to the other side of the planet.

4 HISTORIES AND MYTHOLOGIES

The American novels I found on the shelves of my lending library in Bombay were dense little packets of information and emotion and culture from across the globe. I consumed them and the values and mythologies they incarnated, and was transformed in some very intimate way. Once I was in America, face-to-face with the foreign, I wrote a novel about another Indian encounter with the Other: about colonialism, about the coming together and clash of cultures. Despite my love for American modernism, it turned out I didn’t want to write a modernist novel. I ended up writing a hybrid book, a kind of mongrel construction which used, in one half, the Indian storytelling mode of magical tale-within-tale and all the sacred and profane registers of classical Indian literature; the other half operated more or less within the mode of modern psychological realism. Colonialism exercised its depredations not only within the realms of economics and politics; an essential part of its ideology was the assertion that Indian narrative modes were primitive, or childish, or degenerate, and that Western aesthetic norms were more civilized and sophisticated. History was progress, the colonized were told, and the West was more evolved. The current state of the world was living proof of this developmental teleology. I wanted to write a book that incarnated in its very form a resistance to this Just-So story about culture.

I understood this intention quite clearly as I wrote, but looking back now I see, also, a very young writer finding a form to contain all his various selves. I was moving between cultures, from India to America and back. I was a wanderer between nation states, I negotiated my way through their rigid borders and bureaucracies, and what could be more modern than that? I was surely a postmodern lover of modernist fiction. Yet, in my creative urges, in the deepest parts of myself, I also remained somehow stubbornly premodern. I didn’t use those premodern forms only for political and polemical reasons; I wasn’t only trying to ironize psychological “realism” by placing it next to the epic and the mythical, or only to create lo real maravilloso as a critique of bourgeois Western imperial notions of the real. No, the impulse was not merely negative. This multiply layered narrative was how I lived within myself, how I knew myself, how I spoke to myself. There was the modern me, and also certain other simultaneous selves who lived on alongside. These “shadow selves”—to follow sociologist Ashis Nandy — responded passionately and instantly to epic tropes, whether in the Mahabharata or in Hindi films; believed implicitly and stubbornly in reincarnation despite a devotion to Enlightenment positivism; insisted on regarding matter and consciousness as one; and experienced the world and oneself as the habitations of devatas, “deities” who simultaneously represent inner realities and cosmic principles. So my book — to speak in my voice — had to contain these selves too.

This un-modern half of my book tended to confuse my American writing-program peers. In our workshops, the prevailing aesthetic tended toward minimalism; the models were Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason. The winding tales I brought in were judged, at least initially, to be melodramatic, mystical, exotic, strange. I didn’t try to explain what I was trying to do mainly because I didn’t have a vocabulary in which I could articulate the lived sensation of this shadow-world within me. I wrote on.