Chosen Spirits

by Samit Basu

  Avik Roy and Rajat Gupta had always been unlikely friends: Avik was studious, intelligent, conventional, Rajat a charming hustler. New India had treated them very differently, and driven them apart, but Rudra remembers holidays together, birthday parties, concerts, remembers awkwardly holding a massive bouquet in a hospital lobby when Rono was born. Rono is immersed in a phone game now, his interest in Rudra's evident loserness long dissipated. Joey keeps checking her phone as well: Rudra's vaguely pleased to see that Avik and Rajat's children have at least one addiction in common, even if it's something that defines everyone in their generation.

  The guards must have sent a warning message, because his brother strides out of the house before the car even stops outside the open doors. Rudra is impressed by the time Rohit must have put in at the gym or one of the family clinics: he looks like a cartoon thundercloud of pure muscle. His shaved head is a light green, his dhoti a brilliant white. As the car stops, the brothers come face to face.

  'Let's talk,' Rohit says.

  It's not much of a conversation, it never is: Rohit has inherited not just Rajat's chain of ethically dubious luxury body-modding 'wellness' clinics, but his power-presentation skills as well. He doesn't take long, the speech seems rehearsed. There is no room for Rudra at the actual ceremony, especially since he hasn't observed any of the proper rituals since their father's death (stop opening and shutting your mouth, Rudra, just listen). He may meet their mother later, but she is deeply disappointed with him for not being there during this terrible time when his family needed him most. No, they hadn't taken his calls, but that was because they'd had the wrong number saved, and the whole world had been calling to express their grief. That's why he hadn't received the news, obviously. A simple miscommunication. He is most welcome to spend the day at home, but he has to promise not to disturb any of the guests, especially the important ones. Rohit will talk to him later in the evening, there are important things to say, but he is not to be bothered until then. There is a lot of work to be done. No, his help is not required. No, he hadn't blocked his taxi account, how ridiculous. If Rudra was going to go home, that was fine, but all the cars were busy, and he should head out before any of the other guests saw him. No, Ma was definitely busy too, pay attention.

  And then his brother disappears, leaving Rudra reeling from a thousand memories of one-sided brother-chats, conscious only of a desire to charge his dying phone and disappear into it. He tries to convince himself he's home, genetically speaking. If home is where the people you love most are, his real home is currently a server in New Zealand.

  He has a bath. His Kalkaji flat hadn't seen water in four days now, and he'd emptied the last borrowed bucket in the morning. The first-floor bathroom he slips into is all grey marble and Japanese design: he can't remember when he's last felt this kind of water pressure. There are devices he doesn't understand saying things in happy-child Japanese and making cheerful noises. He loses himself in gels and foams and conditioners and textured scrubs, remembering at the very last possible second to stop himself from first singing, then masturbating. He considers moving into this house. They'd refuse if he asked, and of course he'd never ask, but what if he just brought his stuff over in a truck and took up residence? They wouldn't even notice him. He's been invisible to them all his life, when he was a child he was often convinced he really couldn't be seen, he was a ghost, a POV camera. A floating whisper adrift in a hurricane.

  He feels the grime on his clothes when he puts them back on, his body clean and smelling like a fancy spa. The house is filling up: there are voices everywhere, echoing up from the ground floor through spotless corridors as Rudra shuffles through, staring like a tourist at the smart-paint sculptures growing in their cocoons. The smell of incense floats up, with strains of classical music. Some kind of chanting. He finds his brother's bedroom. The AC welcomes him, speakers start playing some waily Punjabi pop. Rohit doesn't appear to have changed at all since they last met, so if he remembers correctly... yes. From a shoebox on the bottom shelf of one of the cupboards, he extracts three neatly rolled-up joints. It looks like there are sensors on the box: is Rohit getting an alert? Best to be prepared. Two joints go into his pocket, and he lights up the third, not even bothering to open a window. A long, burning, deeply satisfying drag: if Rohit handles his money like he handles his rolling it's no wonder business is booming. Pure vegetarian. He opens a long-unused productivity app on his phone and makes a note to eat some token-defiance beef.

  He opens Rohit's cupboards and exhales on his clothes. Carbon nanotube sportswear and fertility-regulating briefs, what an unbelievable asshole. The mirror starts overlaying outfit options on his body; he tries to instruct it to make nudity the default setting but he doesn't have admin privileges. He stubs the joint out on the mirror before sinking on to the bed: it wouldn't do to burn the house down on his first visit.

  He wakes up with a start to the sound of loud moans: it's Mehta Uncle, call-centre owner turned click-farm magnate, and... his new wife? Someone else's wife? They're making out by the door, hands wiggling everywhere. They have those absurd mood-sensitive smartatts, both glowing bright pink. He's lying right there, in broad daylight, and they haven't even seen him. It still works, this invisibility cloak. Mehta Uncle's friend seems nice, and it would be nice to see a live naked person for once, and her blouse is about to come off, but this seems bad form for a funeral, so Rudra coughs loudly and they yell in shock, covering up.

  'I haven't seen anything,' Rudra says, rising swiftly. 'Got to go.'

  'Jesus, you look just like your father did at your age,' Mehta whispers. 'Almost gave me a heart attack. Where have you-'

  'This has been a pleasure,' Rudra says, bowing — and wishing mid-bow that he didn't behave this way when embarrassed — 'but I have a pressing family engagement.' He catches a glimpse of himself in Rohit's mirror — poor little rich boy. So edgy, living in a multicultural low-rent neighbourhood full of people whose histories he's scared to ask about, whose lives he couldn't have endured for an hour. Behind every door in that warren is a different alt-universe horror story. Like every Useless Culture Colony Younger Son — there are several downstairs, he knows, all fashionably bored and cool — he's not even a real person, he's handed his identity over to his family. If he looks himself up right now — he ignores the impulse as usual — he'll find he's doing very well in whatever career he supposedly has. Good Rudra has spent the last five years at Harvard studying bio-augmentation instead of dropping out and slumming it, being all self-reliant and independent but so inherently obedient that even his rebellion is budget-friendly. It's just a phase, he'll come around eventually. One day, he might even get to wear his own smartatt, though he'll never be as physically fit as the company employee who proxies for him. Rudra is the human equivalent of a shell company: if he dies today, how long will it be before his family notices?

  Mehta Uncle and his friend stare at him — do they think he's expecting an invitation to join in? He leaves, his high wholly vanished. He wanders around corridors, a lifelong pastime: in the house he grew up in, there weren’t many doors, but there was one that led to a ‘backside’ balcony full of decaying cartons. Rudra would keep opening and closing the door, hoping that if he got the timing right, it would open into another dimension: a mirror city, a fantasy paradise, a time-traveller’s ship, another planet. This mansion has many doors, but he doesn’t really want to look inside any of them anymore.

  The family ghost enters the hall largely unobserved. The shraddho rituals are in full flow. A priest reads out shlokas while inaccurate translations in English and Hindi float up on everyone's phones. Rohit sweats in front of a fire, surrounded by a vast array of flowers, fruits, mounds of rice and ceremonial paraphernalia. Rudra catches his first glimpse of his mother. She's Flowing in a corner, flanked by two of her most formidable Colony Aunty friends. Large tears stream down her face, and her sari is on trend as always. Rudra has blocked most people he knows, and stays off the meatspace data st
ream as much as he possibly can. Sometimes he worries about being the last person to learn about a war or a tsunami because he's silenced everyone who might tell him. But his mother always finds innovative ways to force her daily ruminations on clothes, spirituality, current affairs and high-end travel and living down his throat. She actually hires spammer agencies to make it difficult for people to block her.

  His father had been the one who kept him informed about really big-news events. When they tore down the KRP Industries Taj Mahal and Changacom Khajuraho six years ago, his father had pulled him out of a national inter-college gaming tournament because Hindus Weren't Safe. Even after he'd left his family, he'd relied on paternal newsbreaks: the 2024 purge, when upper-caste boys all over the country had used mysteriously accessible data to destroy Dalit houses because a Dalit taxi driver had given a Brahmin a low rating in Jaipur. The 2026 horror, the last time he'd heard his father's voice, when police and mobs torched the few remaining lower-income Muslim ghettos in Delhi, targeting survivor families with pinpoint precision. He'd pointed out the obvious, that he wasn't Muslim and didn't live in a part of the city that was being recultured, and wasn’t even going out to do relief work, wasn’t even saying anything on the internet or out loud, so no one was going to kill him and throw him into a drain: he’d even sent pictures of the now-familiar visual of Hindu homes standing untouched between the charred husks of Muslim ones, but his father had wanted him behind his walls in case there were retaliatory riots this time. He'd refused. The last time he'd seen his father was in one of his mother's Flows: he'd seemed happy. It was his birthday, and he kept saying how much he loved celebrating with his whole family.

  She's not the only one Flowing at the ceremony: there are her acolytes, various other guests, there's an official Flow being recorded by a cousin, live coverage plus specially-made videos that Rajat's many, many friends have brought from around the city. A fitting farewell for one of Delhi's earliest social media influencers. There are lots of other fame-aspirants here, but this is not Delhi's elite. Those people are mostly abroad or in hiding, in transformative cocoons, reshaping themselves daily, keeping close tabs on the world they must reemerge into. This is the next layer, New India's young wave now middle-aged, first-generation players replicating whatever they can remember of the lives of those they envied growing up, because now it is their day out of the sun. Rohit's friends are huddled together in a corner, their hands grasping air in the absence of guns or whiskey glasses: one clocks him, whispers, and the whole group gives him ultra-Delhi pre-violence glares. They've still not forgiven him for that time he'd sent messages from Rohit's phone to all their friend groups, telling them recent studies had revealed that all fascists had micropenises, should they all pretend to be communists? It hadn't ended well: his shoulder twitches in memory.

  His mother spots him and gestures from across the room: hundreds of eyes are on him as he walks over.

  They hug. Padmini turns towards the camera and says 'My long-lost son.' She grapples him firmly again.

  'You stink of drugs,' she whispers. 'Even today. Get out.'

  'No,' he says, looking deep into her eyes and finding nothing.

  'Any trouble and we'll have you unpersoned,' she says.

  'No, you won't.' And he detaches himself and walks away. She resumes her Flow, wiping her large, expressive eyes, murmuring about gratitude and unity being the core of her culture.

  Reunion accomplished, Rudra wanders about unsupervised, enjoying the sights. The walls are lined with screens and tributes to his father, a Museum of Rajat: his warmth, his generosity, his humour, his honesty, his open home, his expensive tastes. His father would have wanted physical photographs too, though, even one of those fake oil paintings.

  'Photos fade, babu, paper can be torn, but digital disappears — companies shut down, drives get hacked, bank accounts get locked, governments erase you with one stroke. Nothing is permanent, but never trust anything without a body. Always remember this,' he would always say, but this was also a man who kept no records of his own transactions, and whose collection of alternate legal identities could have filled a small funeral hall. Rudra tries to remember what he's really learned from his father, and he can't think of anything, except the importance of always carrying cash.

  The digital-only displays are his mother's design. The largest screen is hers, currently running an old clip-compilation of a trip they'd taken to Paris. They're in the Louvre, his father complaining about both the insults meted out to Indian tourists and the atrocious, nation-shaming behaviour of those same tourists, his mother taking pictures of herself in front of each painting, his brother sneaking videos of girls who knew exactly what he was doing. She's used the videos he'd shot, but as he waves through the rest of the tribute, he notices he's been cut out of all the others. He's overcome by a strange urge to find himself, and he tries the Roy family tribute, next to theirs, scrolling quickly through his father's childhood photos, and there he is, he exists, he's stuffing his face with ice-cream, but just for a second, and then it’s Romola Aunty telling his father to stop photographing the food, Rajat laughing a little too loudly and turning his camera on her.

  The biggest tribute screen is reserved for the one from their guru's ashram. At least that monster is not here today. One of their biggest fights, definitely a top ten contender, was when Rudra, still in his teens, had refused to prostrate himself before the godman and kiss his feet. His father had hit him then, kept hitting him until the guru graciously forgave him (he took his time). Rudra remembers the guru's benevolent hug. His flesh had been cold and clammy, like a fish. The godman's booth is special in another way: there's an in-booth camera and a QR panel for donations. He considers making faces, but people are watching.

  The godman's network has been good for his parents, though. A lot of the most high-net-worth people here today are fellow cult members. One of the kids lurking outside the hall, chasing cartoon Augmented Reality collectible creatures on her phone, is a familiar face from old cult-social times. He'd had to babysit her when she was five or so, while his father tried to persuade hers, a media baron of some sort, to cover his first holistic-healing clinic. She'd been perfectly well-behaved, but had told him, at some point when the grown-ups were having dinner, that her daddy thought his daddy was a fraud. Her name pops into his head out of nowhere: Kyra. Her whole generation has names that sound like apps or shampoos. Her father isn't here: she's been sent as an ambassador. The other devotees aren't including her in their conversations about aligning spheres and resonant cosmic energy and indigo children. She's probably not one of the godman's chosen soul-daughters that go and live with him from time to time: lucky for her. She sees him watching her, and quickly changes apps: a video of Zaria Salam, the celebrated Muslim investigative journalist, appears on her screen and she closes it quickly. Clearly she’s going through a rebellious phase: he decides his babysitting inspired it years ago.

  His smartatt vibrates. At first he thinks it's the usual notification that his proxy-lifer has walked his diligent ten thousand steps, but there's activity on his phone: a message from his mother: Don't leave, your brother will speak to you.

  Is Padmini worried he'll start some kind of inheritance dispute? That would be hilarious. But wait he does, for hours, as the funeral slowly transforms into a party. Competitive Rabindrasangeet singers from his mother's side of the family wail in turn. Rudra passes through the crowd unseen. Sometimes people talk about him, he can feel their eyes on him, but no one knows what to say to him, for which he's profoundly grateful. He starts a conversation with his long-lost cousin Hindol, pretending to be unaware that Hindol had taken a vow of silence ever since his cult-procured Mizo bride stabbed him in the penis and ran away, but gets bored after a while. He finds unlikely allies: a group of teenagers brought here against their wills, white kurtas and kameezes dragged over their regulation clothes: he can see their T-shirts changing colour underneath. They're lurking on the landing discussing ways to murder various pr
ominent guests. He approves of many of their choices: Tandon, apparently in the news recently for holding children captive in his workshops, gets eaten by cost-cutting robots; Satpathy, the mythology-astrology investment tsar and mainstreamer outrage ninja, has a sex dream about Mao and dies of shame; Shankar, the Chinese-made 3D-printed religious icon franchisee making loud off-colour jokes about prostitutes with QR tattoos, gets an STD and is then clobbered to death by his corporate-Hindu-moral-instructor wife.

  'Chopra, the positive propaganda thinktanker, is force-fed happy pills until he chokes,' he contributes, at one point, forgetting he's a decade older than these kids.

  'That's my dad,' says the girl. The two boys with her size him up, consider punching him, but decide he isn't worth it. Or have they heard the rumours he's deranged, that he's been in rehab all this time? Is that what actually happened, has he just imagined the rest? He considers telling them about his imaginary friend Bon-Rui the Pangolin, an AR pet he'd fallen in love with as a child. He'd taken months to even acknowledge that Bon-Rui existed only on smartglasses his father had brought him from Japan, he'd been convinced the pangolin was just hiding. He'd grown so attached to Bon-Rui that he'd refused to take the smartglasses off, worn them all day and night for weeks, and they'd had to tear them off him as he screamed and kicked. He'd told them he could still see the bouncing blue pangolin for months after that, even without the glasses. They'd laughed, but he'd been telling the truth: he still sees Bon-Rui sometimes, but he's learned not to talk about it. He suspects these teenagers might not enjoy that story. They shoot him classic teenage dirty looks and slouch off, a clear lifelong pack of feral Useless Younger Children. They'll probably run the country one day. Rudra approves.