Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The clouds were low over Kathmandu. The colour ran from the temples in Durbar Square but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the Taleju Devi.

  ‘What will happen to them?’ I asked Tall Kumarima. ‘The bad men.’

  ‘They will likely be hanged,’ she said.

  That autumn after the executions of the traitors, the dissatisfaction finally poured onto the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good with our land and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jewelled skirt. In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history, by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire. My land had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India from the Last Empire - men like gods - and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.

  Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that early, hard winter when the police and government machines restored the old order to the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate. Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.

  ‘Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?’

  I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.

  ‘Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?’

  Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.

  ‘I know how happy we all are here, but change must always happen. Change in the world, like this snow - unnatural, devi, not right - change in our city. And we are not immune to it in here, my flower. Change will come to you, devi. To you, to your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would stop it happening to you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay. Take these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can all stay here together, devi.’ She looked up from her deferential half-bow, into my eyes. She smiled. ‘Have I ever wanted anything but the best for you?’

  I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my fist and slipped from my carved throne. As I went to my room I could hear Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to the goddesses in the carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong colour. Then I filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down, down.

  After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing as miraculously on my bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima, even when she commented on how fractious I was becoming, how strangely inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in the walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have called my disorder, that that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the least odour and the people in my courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went for weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with old blood. With the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical battlefield between my own hormones and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants. It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and bloated in the heat, a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.

  I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell, like the pills had made me feel, it was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body. I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing longer. I became very very aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to me.

  At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me, but I didn’t. I was scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.

  Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the floorboards but it was Smiling Kumarima who drew back in the corridor as we hurried towards the darshan hall, hesitated a moment, said, softly, smiling as always,

  ‘How you’re growing, devi. Are you still . . . ? No, forgive me, of course . . . Must be this warm weather we’re having, makes children shoot up like weeds. My own are bursting out of everything they own, nothing will fit them.’

  The next morning, as I was dressing, a tap came on my door, like the scratch of a mouse or the click of an insect.

  ‘Devi?’

  No insect, no mouse. I froze, palmer in hand, earhook babbling the early morning news reports from Awadh and Bharat into my head.

  ‘We are dressing.’

  ‘Yes, devi, that is why I would like to come in.’

  I just managed to peel off the palmer and stuff it under my mattress before the heavy door swung open on its pivot.

  ‘We have been able to dress ourselves since we were six,’ I retorted.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Smiling Kumarima, smiling. ‘But some of the priests have mentioned to me a little laxness in the ritual dress.’

  I stood in my red and gold night-robe, stretched out my arms and turned, like one of the trance-dancers I saw in the streets from my litter. Smiling Kumarima sighed.

  ‘Devi, you know as well as I . . .’

  I pulled my gown up over my head and stood unclothed, daring her to look, to search my body for signs of womanhood.

  ‘See?’ I challenged.

  ‘Yes,’ Smiling Kumarima said, ‘but what is that behind your ear?’

  She reached to pluck the hook. It was in my fist in a flick.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Smiling Kumarima said, soft smiling bulk filling the space between the door and me. ‘Who gave you that?’

  ‘It is ours,’ I declared in my most commanding voice but I was a naked twelve-year-old caught in wrongdoing and that commands less than dust.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  I clenched my fist tighter.

  ‘We are a goddess, you cannot command us.’

  ‘A goddess is as a goddess acts and right now, you are acting like a brat. Show me.’

  She was a mother, I was her child. My fingers unfolded. Smiling Kumarima recoiled as if I held a poisonous snake. To the eyes of her faith, I did.

  ‘Pollution,’ she said faintly. ‘Spoiled, all spoiled.’ Her voice rose. ‘I know who gave you this!’ Before my fingers could snap shut, she snatched the coil of plastic from my palm. She threw the earhook to the floor as if it burned her. I saw the hem of her skirt raise, I saw the heel come down, but it was my world, my oracle, my window on the beautiful. I dived to rescue the tiny plastic foetus. I remember no pain, no shock, not even Smiling Kumarima’s shriek of horror and fear as her heel came down, but I will always see the tip of my right index finger burst in a spray of red blood.

  The pallav of my yellow sari flapped in the wind a
s I darted through the Delhi evening crush-hour. Beating the heel of his hand on his buzzer, the driver of the little wasp-coloured phatphat cut in between a lumbering truck-train painted with gaudy gods and apsaras and a cream government Maruti and pulled into the great chakra of traffic around Connaught Place. In Awadh you drive with your ears. The roar of horns and klaxons and cycle-rickshaw bells assailed from all sides at once. It rose before the dawn birds and only fell silent well after midnight. The driver skirted a sadhu walking through the traffic as calmly as if he were wading through the Holy Yamuna. His body was white with sacred ash, a mourning ghost, but his Siva trident burned blood red in the low sun. I had thought Kathmandu dirty, but Delhi’s golden light and incredible sunsets spoke of pollution beyond even that. Huddled in the rear seat of the autorickshaws with Deepti, I wore smog mask and goggles to protect my delicate eye make-up. But the fold of my sari flapped over my shoulder in the evening wind and the little silver bells jingled.

  There were five in our little fleet. We accelerated along the wide avenues of the British Raj, past the sprawling red buildings of old India, towards the glass spires of Awadh. Black kites circled the towers, scavengers, pickers of the dead. We turned beneath cool neem trees into the drive of a government bungalow. Burning torches lit us to the pillared porch. House staff in Rajput uniforms escorted us to the shaadi marquee.

  Mamaji had arrived before any of us. She fluttered and fretted among her birds; a lick, a rub, a straightening, an admonition. ‘Stand up stand up, we’ll have no slumping here. My girls will be the bonniest at this shaadi, hear me?’ Shweta, her bony, mean-mouthed assistant, collected our smog-masks. ‘Now girls, palmers ready.’ We knew the drill with almost military smartness. Hand up, glove on, rings on, ’hoek behind ear jewellery, decorously concealed by the fringed dupattas draped over our heads. ‘We are graced with Awadh’s finest tonight. Crème de la crème.’ I barely blinked as the r’sum’s rolled up my inner vision. ‘Right girls, from the left, first dozen, two minutes each then on to the next down the list. Quick smart!’ Mamaji clapped her hands and we formed a line. A band struck a medley of musical numbers from Town and Country, the soap opera that was a national obsession in sophisticated Awadh. There we stood, twelve little wives-a-waiting while the Rajput servants hauled up the rear of the pavilion.

  Applause broke around us like rain. A hundred men stood in a rough semi-circle, clapping enthusiastically, faces bright in the light from the carnival lanterns.

  When I arrived in Awadh, the first thing I noticed was the people. People pushing people begging people talking people rushing past each other without a look or a word or an acknowledgement. I had thought Kathmandu held more people than a mind could imagine. I had not seen Old Delhi. The constant noise, the everyday callousness, the lack of any respect appalled me. You could vanish into that crowd of faces like a drop of rain into a tank. The second thing I noticed was that the faces were all men. It was indeed as my palmer had whispered to me. There were four men for every woman. It would never cease to amaze me, how a simple technique to predetermine a child’s sex could utterly warp a nation.

  Fine men good men clever men rich men, men of ambition and career and property, men of power and prospects. Men with no hope of ever marrying within their own class and caste. Men with little prospect of marrying at all. Shaadi had once been the word for wedding festivities, the groom on his beautiful white horse, so noble, the bride shy and lovely behind her golden veil. Then it became a name for dating agencies: lovely wheatcomplexioned Agarwal, US-university MBA, seeks same civil service/military for matrimonials. Now it was a bride-parade, a marriage-market for lonely men with large dowries. Dowries that paid a hefty commission to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency.

  The Lovely Girls lined up on the left side of the Silken Wall that ran the length of the bungalow garden. The first twelve men formed up on the right. They plumped and preened in their finery but I could see they were nervous. The partition was no more than a row of saris pinned to a line strung between plastic uprights, fluttering in the rising evening wind. A token of decorum. Purdah. They were not even silk.

  Reshmi was first to walk and talk the Silken Wall. She was a Yadav country girl from Uttaranchal, big-handed and big-faced. A peasant’s daughter. She could cook and sew and sing, do household accounts, manage both domestic aeais and human staff. Her first prospective was a weasely man with a weak jaw in government whites and a Nehru cap. He had bad teeth. Never good. Any one of us could have told him he was wasting his shaadi fee, but they namasted to each other and stepped out, regulation three paces between them. At the end of the walk Reshmi would loop back to rejoin the tail of the line and meet her next prospective. On big shaadis like this my feet would bleed by the end of the night. Red footprints on the marble floors of Mamaji’s courtyard haveli.

  I stepped out with Ashok, a big globe of a thirty-two-year-old who wheezed a little as he rolled along. He was dressed in a voluminous white kurta, the fashion this season though he was fourth generation Panjabi. His grooming amounted to an uncontrollable beard and oily hair that smelled of too much Dapper Deepak pomade. Even before he namasted I knew it was his first shaadi. I could see his eyeballs move as he read my r’sum’, seeming to hover before him. I did not need to read his to know he was a dataraja, for he talked about nothing but himself and the brilliant things he was doing; the spec of some new protein processor array, the ’ware he was breeding, the aeais he was nurturing in his stables, his trips to Europe and the United States where everyone knew his name and great people were glad to welcome him.

  ‘Of course, Awadh’s never going to ratify the Hamilton Acts - no matter how close Shrivastava is to President McAuley - but if it did, if we allow ourselves that tiny counterfactual - well, it’s the end of the economy: Awadh is IT, there are more graduates in Mehrauli than there are in the whole of California. The Americans may go on about the mockery of a human soul, but they need our Level 2.8s, you know what that is? An aeai that can pass as human ninety-nine per cent of the time - because everybody knows no one does quantum crypto like us, so I’m not worrying about having to close up the data-haven, and even if they do, well, there’s always Bharat - I cannot see the Ranas bowing down to Washington, not when twenty-five per cent of their forex comes out of licensing deals from Town and Country ... and that’s hundred per cent aeai generated . . .’

  He was a big affable clown of a man with wealth that would have bought my palace in Durbar Square and every priest in it and I found myself praying to Taleju to save me from marrying such a bore. He stopped in mid-stride, so abruptly I almost tripped.

  ‘You must keep walking,’ I hissed. ‘That is the rule.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said, standing stupid, eyes round in surprise. Couples piled up behind us. In my peripheral vision I could see Mamaji making urgent, threatening gestures. Get him on. ‘Oh wow. You’re an ex-Kumari.’

  ‘Please, you are drawing attention to yourself.’ I would have tugged his arm, but that would have been an even more deadly error.

  ‘What was it like, being a goddess?’

  ‘I am just a woman now, like any other,’ I said. Ashok gave a soft harrumph, as if he had achieved a very small enlightenment, and walked on, hands clasped behind his back. He may have spoken to me once, twice before we reached the end of the Silken Wall and parted: I did not hear him, I did not hear the music, I did not even hear the eternal thunder of Delhi’s traffic. The only sound in my head was the high-pitched sound between my eyes of needing to cry but knowing I could not. Fat, selfish, gabbling, Ashok had sent me back to the night I ceased to be a goddess.

  Bare soles slapping the polished wood of the Kumari Ghar’s corridors. Running feet, muted shouts growing ever more distant as I knelt, still unclothed for my Kumarima’s inspection, looking at the blood drip from my smashed fingertip onto the painted wood floor. I remember no pain; rather, I looked at the pain from a separate place, as if the girl who felt it were another person. Far far away, Smiling Kumarima stood, h
eld in time, hands to mouth in horror and guilt. The voices faded and the bells of Durbar Square begin to swing and toll, calling to their brothers across the city of Kathmandu until the valley rang from Bhaktapur to Trisuli Bazaar for the fall of the Kumari Devi.

  In the space of a single night, I became human again. I was taken to the Hanumandhoka - walking this time like anyone else on the paving stones - where the priests said a final puja. I handed back my red robes and jewels and boxes of make-up, all neatly folded and piled. Tall Kumarima had got me human clothes. I think she had been keeping them for some time. The President did not come to say goodbye to me. I was no longer the sister of the nation. But his surgeons had put my finger back together well, though they warned that it would always feel a little numb and inflexible.