Sagramanda

by Alan Dean Foster

  This involved considerably more than simply unsnapping a strap or untying a couple of knots. First, Sanjay's lean visitor entered a code into the hand unit he extracted from the pocket of his ragged shorts. An LED on the pack, which was woven of impenetrable carbon fiber composite camouflaged to look like cheap burlap, flashed green. Entry and broadcast of a second code brought forth another green light plus a soft click from somewhere within. Had anyone else tried to force their way into the pack without successfully entering both codes, the amount of C-4 explosive integrated into its inner lining was sufficient in quantity and purity to scatter the would-be intruder's body parts plus those of anyone in his immediate vicinity over a distance more expansive than the standard cricket field. As the pack's owner unsealed the top flap Sanjay leaned forward, the better to see what the man with the mongoose countenance had brought for him.

  There were a dozen small packets, every one as neatly wrapped and bound as a Chinese New Year present. Each was hand-identified in English, that being as much the language of general commerce throughout the subcontinent as it was in the rest of the wider world. One package said “Acetaminophen syntase—Pandeswami Industries, Guwahati.” The two next to the first declared their contents to be “Multivitamin with proprietary Ayurvedic herbs and supplements.” All three packages contained nothing of the kind, unless one counted as a similarity the fact that they were packed tight with synthesized pharmaceuticals.

  Illegal recreational pharmaceuticals.

  Sanjay had always been a very fast learner. He had been the first in his village age group to master English verbs, the first to inquire about how to use a computer keyboard, the first to try voice recognition commands. Once he obtained the small business loan that had enabled him to open his little shop, it had not taken him long to learn that even when dealing with ignorant tourists, the profit margin on T-shirts and silver anklets and carved wooden elephants was small. Much smaller than on other things that could be sold to travelers out of a shop such as his.

  He prided himself on never selling such items to Indians. Well, not to Hindus, anyway. He was a strong BJP man, firmly believing them to be corrupt but less corrupt than the members of the Congress and other parties. When resigned to a life in hell always vote for the lesser devil, his father had once told him. Though considering himself to be completely unprejudiced, he was happy enough to sell drugs to Buddhists, and Muslims, and the occasional Sikh, as well as to eager tourists.

  You are throwing away your lives as well as your money, he wanted to tell them when they came looking for his shop (he had already gained a modest reputation for availability of certain chemical combinants). You were born with all these advantages, and you are casting them to the winds for a few moments of false pleasure, he felt the urge to say.

  But he did not. Because he had a wife, and two children, and had not the brutal ancestors of his fresh-faced customers raped and stolen from his own progenitors whatever had taken their fancy? Ghosh's Keepsakes was not exactly a front for a reprise of the Sepoy Rebellion, but neither did his misgivings over what he was doing cause him to lose much sleep. Especially not when some smart-mouthed French or Italian kid wearing fake Indian clothing and sporting long dreads ambled in off the street, acting as if he owned the place, and flashed a wallet stuffed with more rupees than Sanjay's long-suffering father was used to seeing in a year.

  So he beamed at Bindar, who was forever looking over his shoulder as if Durga herself was on his tail with a knife in each of her eight arms, and selected one of the packets at random. His visitor simply nodded, knowing in advance what Sanjay intended to do with the package. Unless, of course, the shopkeeper had taken leave of his rural but carefully honed senses.

  Using his remote, Sanjay unlocked the bottom drawer of his counter. It did not look like a drawer, but like a section of the counter base itself. Recognizing his thumbprint, the drawer slid out. It contained not trinkets and bangles, not even the good 22k gold jewelry he kept for knowledgeable customers, but several pieces of gleaming white electronics.

  Carefully puncturing the packet he had selected he used a small spoon to tip a tiny bit of the beige powder it contained into an open receptacle atop one such device. Practiced fingers manipulated a set of buttons. Sanjay did not know how the instruments worked. It was not necessary that he did. While lights flickered and danced, Bindar struggled as he always did not to lean forward and peer over the counter.

  As a matter of professional regard, Sanjay was not smiling now. He liked Bindar, who had come to Sagramanda from a village even poorer than Sanjay's and who had chosen a profession far more dangerous than that of shopkeeper. But it was hard to keep a straight face when his restless visitor was twisting and squirming in the chair like a man whose previous night's meal of curried goat was threatening to come back on him.

  It took only a couple of minutes for the precision instrument to render its verdict and end the courier's agony.

  “Quite satisfactory,” Sanjay declared. The drawer shut down and locked automatically when he pushed it closed. A second touch on the remote would have opened a panel in a dirty section of floor behind him. Storing the merchandise could wait until Bindar's departure. After all, if the courier, good man though he was, saw the location of Sanjay's hiding place, then it would be a hiding place no longer.

  Though even Sanjay's small shop accepted a wide range of credcards there were some transactions to be made in this world where cash was still preferred. Bindar's tension eased when Sanjay returned from a back room with a small box. Opening the box, the whippet-thin courier thumbed rapidly through the wad of bills it contained; a comforting masala of rupees, euros, yen, and dollars. He didn't count it all, just as Sanjay had not tested every packet. If the total was short, someone would accost the shopkeeper one day and have a word with him about the discrepancy. Perhaps break a bone or two. Or put out an eye. The same thing could happen to Bindar if one of the packets Sanjay had accepted turned out to be full of, say, turbinado sugar instead of fashionable hallucinogenics.

  The transaction completed, the two men exchanged gossip, further sports talk, political conversation, and more tea. Bindar did not linger. He had other deliveries to make, other collections to pursue. Both men found themselves discussing the disappearance of a mutual acquaintance who had shorted a certain midlevel distributor in the district of High Hooghly. The acquaintance had been found just last week. In three different parts of the city. Simultaneously. It was an object lesson no one needed to dwell upon.

  Bindar finished the last of his tea, rose, and moved toward the door. Fingering his remote, Sanjay unlocked it, at the same time reopening his shop for business and brightening the windows so passing customers could once more see inside as soon as he had safely locked away the delivery.

  “Take care of yourself, my friend,” he told the departing courier. “Watch out for evil spirits and loose women.”

  “Every chance I get.” Bindar smirked. They were bound together by business and a common heritage. Neither of which would keep Bindar from having Sanjay's throat cut if he ever felt the shopkeeper had cheated him: a purely businesslike sentiment Sanjay silently reciprocated.

  But—business was good, and there was no reason this day for such dark thoughts to trouble either man. Bidding Bindar good-bye, Sanjay returned to his chair behind the counter; the one that circulated a permanent cooling fluid throughout its seat and frame. There was no need to advertise that he had just restocked a certain singular portion of his inventory. His regular customers would know, and travelers would find out. Switching on the store box, he settled back and relaxed as a schedule of available entertainment materialized in the tunnel that opened in front of him.

  He chose an old movie. He liked the old movies, even if they were in black and white. Three-dimensionalized, the figures appeared in front of him, one-quarter actual size, whirling and dancing and singing something about love and fate and the caprices of the Gods. Business was good, life was good, he told himself
as he directed the brewer to make another cup of chai—iced, this time.

  Next year, he told himself. Next year he would bring Chakra and the children to Sagramanda to live with him. Would get them out of the hot, stinking, poverty-stricken countryside forever.

  One man's picturesque village is another man's slum.

  Even dressed for protection from the appalling afternoon heat, Depahli De turned heads in the mall. For most of her life it was a place she would never even have thought of entering, much less have felt comfortable in. Then she had met Taneer, and her life had changed forever.

  Now she walked proudly, breasts thrust forward against her fancy sari, perfect hips switching just so, a little of the 22k gold that Taneer had lavished on her the equal of all but the richest women perusing the expensive goods on the tenth floor. Her eyes sparkled beneath radiant color-shifting makeup she had only recently learned how to apply. Her blemishless pale skin, just tinged with hues of coffee, glistened as if peeled from an apsara. Lightly applied floral perfume mixed with her own natural pheromones left a trail of lavender and musk in her wake, an invisible plume of eroticism, like a locomotive puffing out sex instead of steam. Men gaped in spite of themselves while their women silently gritted their teeth and tried not to make their envious glares too obvious.

  Depahli didn't care. Let the Brahmin bitches growl and curse under their breath! She had taken enough shit from their kind from the time she had been old enough to understand what it meant to be born the lowest of the low. Now she could ignore them. Soon, with luck, it would be her turn to look down on them.

  Depahli De had been born a Dalit. An outcaste, or Untouchable.

  Of course, that supposedly meant nothing in today's India. Caste had long ago officially been abolished as a method of discrimination. Officially. Real life, just as in the matrimonial ads that filled the pages of the country's newspapers and magazines and websites, was another matter entirely.

  Like so many Untouchables, as a young girl Depahli had considered herself condemned to a life of degradation and poverty. A male member of a higher caste, one of the four varnas, might opt to drop down in caste and marry her, but this happened only very rarely. Despite the beauty that was apparent from a very early age she could not even find work as a prostitute except among her own kind. For a member of a higher caste to touch her would be to pollute himself. For one to sleep with her would be to pollute himself irredeemably. She smiled to herself as she stopped to finger the material of a fine carbonsilk business suit imported from Italy.

  Dear, sweet Taneer was irredeemably polluted indeed.

  They had only met because she'd had the guts to flee the squalid surroundings of her home in a run-down industrial section of Nagpur after her uncle Chamudi had raped her. That was ten years ago. She had been fourteen. With virtually no money but a great deal of determination she had walked, hitched, and begged her way to Sagramanda. Glorious, steaming, pulsing, fetid Sagramanda, where it was said that anything was possible, even for one born an outcaste. Where, surrounded by a hundred million fellow seeking souls, it was even possible to shrug off a question about caste as irrelevant and deftly turn a discussion to other matters.

  And wonder of wonders, she had managed to do all of it without having to sell herself. Not wholly, anyway.

  She had modeled. Both nude and clothed. She was not ashamed of having a body men admired. So extraordinary was her appearance that by the time she was seventeen she had steady work in the trivit studios. On only one thing had she insisted: no intercourse, no penetration. Dry fucking she would consent to, but she wouldn't do hardcore. It cost her a great deal of money, but she had remained firm in her private principles. Or as one disappointed but grudgingly admiring vitographer had told her, firm in her principal privates.

  Still, she had managed. One man's appetite might be limited, but that of the box and the Net, she had learned, was insatiable. Even among stiff competition she had stood out as exceptional.

  She knew she had stumbled across an exceptional man when, collapsing in his arms one day while sobbing uncontrollably, she had revealed the nature of her career to Taneer. How much more damage could it do, she had argued with herself, when he already knew she was an outcaste? Her instincts had been proven right and her trust rewarded. Astonishingly, he had only smiled reassuringly at her and said, “One day you must show me some of your better virtuals.” Ecstatic at his plain-spoken acceptance of her unsavory past, she had spent all that night showing him the reality.

  That was the day when she realized she would do more than love Taneer Buthlahee forever. If necessary, she would die for him. In acknowledging her ancestry and her work, he had in a sense already died for her. Could she do no less for him?

  The attendant who wandered over to see if he could help was young and trim, neatly dressed in natty gray and blue. It was amusing to watch him try to control his eyes. Struggling to remain locked on her own, they found themselves wandering all over her like a security scanner at the airport. Not to tease but to please the poor fellow, who despite the attention paid to his appearance was anything but handsome, she took a deeper breath and leaned close.

  “I would like this suit, but in forest green. Do you have anything like that?” She had discovered that whenever she chose to deliberately lower it, her voice could make even confident conversationalists stammer.

  The young salesman was no orator. “I—I'll check the imben—the inventory.” He stepped back. Or rather, retreated helplessly as he gestured to the nearest female clerk. “If you'd like to step into our scanner, please?”

  Please. She had spent an entire childhood never hearing the word. Though it was commonly directed her way now, she never tired of it. “Of course,” she murmured obligingly.

  The department's scanner raced red lights up and down her form, penetrating her sari to take her measurements. Yes, they did have the suit she had selected available in a dark green. Would she care to view the color? Checking the sample, she condescended to approve. The appropriate suit was pulled from inventory and sent to the store's tailor. Half an hour later, after the material had been melted, reformed, rewoven, and cooled, she returned to pick up her package.

  She paid with cash. Ever since Taneer had gone into hiding they had paid for everything with cash. Her beloved had told her that in some parts of the world cash was no longer accepted for large purchases. To the best of his knowledge, however, that was not yet true anywhere in Asia. The bag containing her purchase slung deftly over one arm, she left the store and sauntered out into the mall's towering atrium. It was a wonderland that as a child she had not even imagined could exist, except in dreams.

  Like translucent balloons, automated ads drifted through the multiple converging halls of the mall, rising and falling from floor to floor as easily as they negotiated side passages and entryways. Electronics kept them banned from certain areas such as the children's playground and the food court. The latter was a favorite stop of hers. Growing up, she had never imagined there could be so many different kinds of food. Growing up, she had never imagined there could be so much food.

  Though she could now pay for whatever kind of dish she wanted, as often as she wanted, she never left as much as a crumb on her plate. Not even when sampling such exotic cuisine as game from Africa or chili from America. Even when venturing into Starbeans, she made herself finish every last sip of coffee concoctions that were sometimes too rich for a digestive system that had evolved to cope with far simpler fare.

  Employing built-in aerogel cameras, adverts designed to appeal specifically to the young, female, and middle-to-upper-class zeroed in on her repeatedly. The constant battle between manufacturers of pocket-sized ad-blockers and the designers of mobile advertisements had spurred technological leaps among both. Depahli rarely used the blocker that Taneer had bought for her. Truth be told, she enjoyed enough of the ads to allow them access. Even the ones for the omnipresent matrimonial services that allowed her to compare, fancifully of course, other pr
ospective suitors to Taneer. Invariably, all were found wanting.

  Not all the ads she walked through were gender-specific. The expensive three-dimensional one for the new Maruti Hathi 4×4 skirted the edge of acceptability. Until appropriate regulations had been put in place, mobile adverts had diverted some people to their deaths by blocking their vision or unsettling their sense of balance.

  More noise than usual in front of her drew her attention. It was coming from the vicinity of the food court, her intended destination. Suddenly the milling, well-dressed crowd that had been promenading noisily in both directions surged toward her. The shouts of angry men formed a low counterpoint to the screams of women and the anxious cries of confused children.

  A handful of men and women formed a tight knot that forced its way through the crowd. Most but not all of them were young. As she ducked to one side and sought shelter against the transparent polycarbonate wall that kept patrons from tumbling into the open, multistory atrium, several loud pops were distinctly audible above the noise of the crowd.

  Ignoring the scattering, panicky mallers, the retreating men and women kept up a continuous running fire on their pursuers—half a dozen khaki-clad mall security personnel. Dark as an African but wearing a multihued cap over his shaved skull, one squat, mustachioed runner took a stun pellet in the right leg. Grimacing, he went down in the center of the walkway, right in front of the crouching Depahli. A moment later two of the security guards were all over him. The look on their faces was known to her. It was one she recognized all too well from her childhood. They very much wanted to beat and kick the man with the now paralyzed leg. But there were too many witnesses, and they had to settle for roughly taking him into custody.

  The moving fight flowed in a steady curve around the fourth-floor level, finally petering out near the carpark exit. Security made one more arrest, but the other intruders managed to get away. All around Depahli shaken couples and families with crying children were rising to their feet. Talk of what had happened was terse and quickly put aside. After all, it was not as if such things didn't happen in Sagramanda every day.