by Ian McDonald
‘Only success, Mr Ray. Only success. To repeat and perhaps amplify my employers’ message to you, you intend to run a full-scale demonstration of the zero-point project. Odeco desires this very much. It wishes you to know that it will back you to ensure the success of the project. Whatever that entails, Mr Ray. Ah. This seems to be my floor. Good day to you, Mr Ray.’
Chakraborty slips between the doors before they fully open. Vishram ascends a full floor before he thinks to drop a level back to where the weird little man got off. He looks out into the curving corridor. Nothing, no one to see. He could have stepped into an office. He could as easily have stepped into another, zero-point universe. The lowering sun beats into the elevator but Vishram shudders. He needs to get out somewhere tonight, away from all this, even for a handful of hours. But which woman is he going to ask?
PARVATI
The apricot flies in a high, rising arc out over the parapet, turning slowly, bleeding a trail of juice from its crushed skin. It drops out of sight between the buildings, the long fall to the street.
‘So that crossed the boundary in the air, so that makes it?’
‘A six!’ Parvati exclaims, clapping her hands together.
The crease is a line in gardener’s chalk, the wicket a ply seedling box with three sides knocked off, stood on its heel. Krishan leans on his bat; a spade.
‘A six is technically a weak shot,’ he says. ‘The batsman has to get under it and he’s no real control over where it’s going. Too easy for the fielders to get an eye on it and make the catch. The real enthusiast will always applaud a four more than a six. It’s a much more controlled stroke.’
‘Yes, but it looks so much more bold,’ Parvati says, then her hands fly to her mouth to suppress giggles. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking, someone down there . . . and they haven’t done anything, but all of a sudden they’re covered in apricot . . . and they think, what’s going on? Apricots are falling out of the sky. It’s the Awadhis! They’re bombing us with fruit!’ She folds over in helpless laughter. Krishan does not understand the joke but he feels the infection of laughing tug at his ribcage.
‘Again again!’ Parvati picks up a fresh apricot from the folded cloth, hitches her sari, makes her short run, slings the fruit sidearm. Krishan slices the apricot down into a skittering roll towards the parapet drain slits. Shattered flesh sprays up in his face.
‘Four!’ Parvati calls, pressing four fingers to her arm.
‘Properly, it’s a no-ball because it was thrown, not bowled.’
‘I can’t do that overarm thing.’
‘It’s not hard.’
Krishan bowls a handful of apricots one at a time, slow up the back, accelerating into the downswing, counterbalancing with his free arm. The soft fruit go bouncing into the shrub rhododendron.
‘Now, you try.’
He tosses Parvati an under-ripe apricot. She catches it sweetly, bares the sleeve of her choli. Krishan watches the play of her muscles as she tries to make the run and step and swing in her cumbersome, elegant clothing. The apricot slips from her grasp, drops behind her. Parvati rounds on it, teeth bared in exasperation.
‘I cannot do it!’
‘Here, let me help you.’
The words are spoken before Krishan can apprehend them. Once as a boy in a school lesson he read on the school web that all consciousness is written in the past tense. If so, then all decisions are made without conscience or guilt and the heart speaks truly but inarticulately. His path is already set. He steps up behind Parvati. He rests one hand on her shoulder. With the other he takes her wrist. She catches her breath but her fingers remain curled around the ripe apricot.
Krishan moves her arm back, down, turns the palm upwards. He guides her forward, forward again, pressing the left shoulder down, moving the right arm up. ‘Now pivot on to the left foot.’ They hang a precarious moment in their dance, then Krishan sweeps her wrist to the zenith. ‘Now, release!’ he commands. The cloven apricot flies from her fingers, hits the wooden decking, bursts.
‘A fine pace delivery,’ Krishan says. ‘Now, try it against me.’ He takes up his position at the crease, sights with his spade-bat, affording Parvati all the sporting courtesies. She retreats beyond the further chalk line, adjusts her clothing, makes her run. She lunges forward, releases the fruit. It hits the deck cleavage first, bounces crankily, spinning. Krishan steps forward with his spade, the apricot hits the top, skips and splatters against the wicket. The flimsy plywood falls. Krishan tucks his spade beneath his arm and bows.
‘Mrs Nandha, you have clean bowled me.’
The next day Parvati introduces Krishan to her friends the Prekashs, the Ranjans, the Kumars and the Maliks. She lays out the magazines like dhuris on the sun-warmed decking. The air is as still and heavy as poured metal this morning, pressing the traffic din and smoke down under a layer of high pressure. Parvati and her husband fought last night. They fought his way, which consists of him making statements and then defending them with lofty silence, sniping down her sallies with looks of high disdain. It was the old fight: his tiredness, her boredom; his remoteness, her need for society; his growing coldness, her ticking ovaries.
She opens the chati mags to the full colour centre spreads. Perfect courtships; glossy weddings; centrefold divorces. Krishan sits in the tailor-position, toes clasped in his hands.
‘This is Sonia Shetty, she plays Ashu Kumar. She was married to Lal Darfan - in real life, not in Town and Country - but they divorced back in the spring. I was really surprised about that, everyone thought they were together forever, but she’s been seen around with Roni Jhutti. She was at the premiere of Prem Das, in a lovely silver dress, so I think it’s only a matter of time before we get an announcement. Of course, Lal Darfan’s been saying all kinds of things about her, that she is slack and a disgrace. Isn’t it strange how actors can be nothing like their characters in Town and Country? It’s quite changed the way I think about Dr Prekash.’
Krishan flips the thick, shiny pages, aromatic with petrochemicals.
‘But they aren’t real either,’ he says. ‘This woman wasn’t married to anyone in real life, she wasn’t at any premiere with any actor. They’re just software that believes it’s another kind of software.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ Parvati says. ‘No one believes they’re real people. Celebrity has never been about what’s real. But it’s nice to pretend. It’s like having another story on top of Town and Country, but one that’s much more like the way we live.’
Krishan rocks gently.
‘Forgive me, but do you miss your family very much?’
Parvati looks up from her chati glamshots.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘It just strikes me that you treat unreal people like family. You care about their relationships, their ups and downs, their lives, if you can call them that.’
Parvati pulls her dupatta over her head to protect it from the high sun.
‘I think about my family, my mother every day. Oh, I wouldn’t go back, not for a moment, but I thought with so many people, so much going on, to be in the capital, I would have a hundred worlds to move through. But it is easier to be invisible than it was ever was in Kotkhai. I could disappear completely here.’
‘Kotkhai, where is that?’ Krishan asks. Above him aircraft contrails merge and tangle, spyship and killer, hunting each other ten kilometres above Varanasi.
‘In Kishanganj District, in Bihar. You have just made me realise a strange thing, Mr Kudrati. I mail my mother every day and she tells me about her health and how Rohini and Sushil and the boys are and all the people I know from Kotkhai, but she never tells me about Kotkhai.’
So she tells him of Kotkhai, for in telling she tells herself. She can go back to clutches of cracked mud-brick houses gathered around the tanks and pumps; she can walk again down the gently sloping main street of shops and corrugated iron awnings sheltering the stonecutters’ workshops. This was the men’s world, of drinking tea and listening to th
e radio and arguing politics. The women’s world was in the fields, at the pump and the tanks, for water was the women’s element, and the school where the new teacher Mrs Jaitly from the city ran evening classes and discussion groups and a micro-credit union funded on egg money.
Then it changed. Trucks from Ray Power came and poured out men who put up a tent village so that for a month there were two Kotkhais as they built their wind turbines and solar panels and biomass generators and gradually webbed every house and shop and holy place together with sagging cables. Sukrit the battery seller cursed them that they had put a good man out of business and a good daughter to prostitution.
‘We are part of the world now,’ Mrs Jaitly had told her women at the evening group. ‘Our web of cables connects to another web, connects to a greater web, connects to a web across the whole world.’
But old India was dying, Nehru’s dream bursting at the seams under the pressure of ethnic and cultural division and an environment sagging beneath a billion and a half humans. Kotkhai prided itself that its backwardness and isolation would insulate it from Diljit Rana’s idiosyncratic mix of Hinduism and future vision. But the men were talking at the dhaba, reading out columns from the evening news about National Armies and armed militias and lightning raids to seize and hold a fistful of sand-poor villages like Kotkhai in the grab for national territory. Jai Bharat! The young men went first. Parvati had seen how her father watched them leave on the country bus. S.J. Sadurbhai had never forgiven his wife for only delivering him daughters. He daily envied the middle classes who could afford to choose the sex of their children. They were building a strong nation, not weak and womanly as old India had been, bickering herself to death. It was almost a relief in the Sadurbhai house when he announced that he and his apprentice Gurpal from the garage were driving off to the war. A good war. A man’s war. They drove off and in all Kotkhai there were only two casualties, those two, killed in the truck they were driving by an aeai attack helicopter that could not tell friend from foe. A man’s war, a man’s death.
Three weeks later a nation was born and war replaced with soap. Within a month of the proclamation of new Bharat, more men brought more cables, fibre-optic cables, down which came news and gupshup and soap. Teacher Jaitly railed against Town and Country as mind-gelling propaganda promulgated by the state to stifle real political debate but week by week her classes dwindled, woman by woman, until in the end she returned to the city, defeated by the affairs of the Prekashs and Ranjans. The new village gathering place was around the state-supplied widescreen. Parvati grew to womanhood in the light of Town and Country. From it she learned all the skills needed to become the perfect wife. Within six months Parvati was in Varanasi receiving the final social lacquer that would get her into every best party and durbar on the loop. A half-year later, at a wedding of some cousin of a cousin, she caught a whisper from her second cousin once-removed Deepti, and looked where the whisper pointed, across the lantern-lit gardens, through the glowing awning to the thin, scholarly looking man trying not to be seen looking at her. She remembers that the tree under which he stood was hung with tiny wicker birdcages containing candles. She imagined him haloed in stars.
A further six months and the arrangements were complete, the dowry lodged in Parvati’s mother’s grameen account and a taxi booked to carry Parvati’s few things to the new penthouse flat in the heart of great Varanasi. Except that the things looked like orphans in the cedar-lined closets and penthouse it might be but everyone was now moving out of that dirty, crowded, noisy Kashi to the green soft Cantonment and the thin, scholarly man cloaked with stars was only a policeman. But with a word or a wave of her hand the Prekashs and Ranjans would be there, round to call, who were as happy in Kotkhai as Varanasi, who knew neither snobbery nor caste and whose doings and scandals were always interesting.
On the Thursday Krishan works late on the roof. There are many needling things that require finishing off; the electrical supply to the drip irrigation, the grouting on the path of round stones, the brackets on the bamboo screens around the meditation bowl. He tells himself that he will not be able to move on unless he completes these small niggles but the truth is that Krishan is curious to see again this Mr Nandha, this Krishna Cop. He knows from the papers and the radio chat what it is they do but he cannot comprehend why what he hunts down is such a terrifying menace. So he works until the sun swells to a globe of blood in the west beyond the towers of the money town, tightening bolts and cleaning tools until he hears the door close downstairs and Parvati’s voice meet the deeper, wordless male rumble. The conversation grows in definition with each step he descends. She is asking, pleading, wanting him to take her out. She wants to go somewhere, get away from this high apartment. His voice is tired and flat and Krishan knows that it will say no to anything she suggests. He sets down his bag and waits by the door. He is not eavesdropping, he tells himself. Doors are thin and words have their natural volume: The policeman is impatient now. His voice hardens, like a parent worn away by an insatiable child. Then Krishan hears the voice bark in anger, a chair scrape back from a table. He seizes his bag, retreats down the main stairs. The door flies open and Mr Nandha strides down the stair to the lobby door, face set like a carving. He brushes past Krishan as if he were a lizard on a wall. Parvati comes out of the kitchen. She and Mr Nandha face each other at opposite ends of the stairs. Krishan, invisible, is trapped between their voices.
‘Go then!’ she shouts. ‘It is obviously so important.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Nandha says. ‘It is so important. But I would not trouble you with matters of national security.’
He opens the door to the elevator lobby.
‘I will be on my own, I am always on my own!’ Parvati leans over the chromed railing but the door is closed and her husband is gone without a look. Now she sees Krishan.
‘Will you go too?’
‘I should.’
‘Don’t leave me. I’m always on my own, I hate being on my own.’
‘I really think I have to go.’
‘I am on my own,’ Parvati says again.
‘You have your Town and Country,’ Krishan ventures.
‘That’s just a stupid soap!’ Parvati shouts at him. ‘A stupid television programme. Do you really think I believe it? Do you think I’m some country yokel who can’t tell the difference between a television programme and real life?’ She bites back the anger. The women of Kotkhai’s training holds. ‘I’m sorry. I should not have said that. It wasn’t you it was aimed at. You should not have had to hear any of that.’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Krishan says. ‘He should not speak to you like that; like you are a child.’
‘He is my husband.’
‘Forgive me, I’ve spoken out of turn. I should go. It’s the best thing.’
‘Yes,’ Parvati whispers. She is backlit by the deepening sun, beaming through the apartment windows, turning her skin to gold. ‘It would be the best thing.’
The gold light is amber, trapping the moment. Krishan is sick with tension. The futures balance on a brass pin. Their fall could crush him, crush her, crush them all here in this penthouse apartment. He picks up his bag. But the kick inside takes him.
‘Tomorrow,’ he says, feeling the shake deep in his voice. ‘Tomorrow there is a cricket match at the Dr Sampurnanand Stadium. England, Bharat, the third test. The last, I think. The English will recall their team very soon. Would you . . . could you . . . might you come?’
‘With you?’
Krishan’s heart thunders, then he realises.
‘No, of course not, you could not be seen . . .’
‘But I would very much like to see a Test Match, and against England as well. I know! The Cantonment Set ladies go to the Test. We would be in different parts of the ground, you understand. But we would be there together, sharing it. A virtual date, as the Americans would say. Yes, I shall go tomorrow and show the ladies of The Mall that I am not a rural ignoramus about the game of cricket.’
The sun has dropped, Parvati is no longer golden-skinned, the amber is broken, but Krishan’s heart is in light.
‘We’ll do that then,’ Krishan says. ‘Tomorrow, the Test.’ Then he picks up his bag and is whirled down the lift out into the eternal traffic.
Dr Sampurnanand Stadium is a white concrete bowl, simmering under a beige sky, a pan of heat and anticipation circled around a disc of fresh, watered, microclimate-controlled green. Varanasi has never been one of India’s great cricketing cities like Kolkata or Chennai or Hyderabad or even her neighbour and former rival for capital city-hood, Patna. The Doctor’s stadium had been little more than a bumpy, scorched stretch of withered grass, a crease no bowler of international standing would risk a ball on and no batsman would dare defend. Then came Bharat and the same transfiguring hand of the Ranas that had swept Sarnath into a citadel of audacious architecture and high technology changed the old Sanskrit University sports ground into a hundred-thousand seater. A classic government white elephant, it has never been more than half-full, not even for the 3rd Test of 2038 when Bharat crushed an ailing Australia to win the series, the first and only time. Today its climate-field traps a lens of cool air against forty-degree ambient heat, but the white men out on the field still need plastic bags of water slung on to the pitch. Bharat are 55 for 3, lunch is an hour off and high above the stadium Awadhi and Bharati aeaicraft hunt each other. At the moment the action in the stratosphere is more interesting than the action on the green to the cricketing ladies of canopy-shaded Block 17. The block is owned by Mrs Sharma’s husband, a property developer in Sarnath who bought it as a corporate hospitality tax-break to treat friends and guests and clients. In the season it is a recognised gathering place for society ladies. They make a pretty patch of colour, like an unexpected window-box on the face of a tenement. They squint up through their Western-label sunglasses at the twining helices of contrails. Everything is different since Bharat’s brave jawans made their daring move in the night from Allahabad to seize the Kunda Khadar Dam. Mrs Thakkur opines that they are scouting out an Awadhi attack.