Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself - ring, call me, ring, call me, ring, take me out of this - she fires back, ‘If you ever had one.’

  Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf a sting.

  ‘Fuck you, hijra!’ Esha snatches up towel, bag, Palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair. No point changing, the heat out there will soak through anything in a moment. ‘I’m out of here.’

  Pranh doesn’t call after her. Yt’s too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.

  ‘Memsahib Rathore?’

  The chauffeur is in full dress and boots. His only concession to the heat is his shades. In bra top and tights and bare skin, she’s melting. ‘The vehicle is fully air-conditioned, memsahib.’

  The white leather upholstery is so cool her flesh recoils from its skin.

  ‘This isn’t the Krishna Cops.’

  ‘No memsahib.’ The chauffeur pulls out into the traffic. It’s only as the security locks clunk she thinks, Oh Lord Krishna, they could be kidnapping me.

  ‘Who sent you?’ There’s glass too thick for her fists between her and driver. Even if the doors weren’t locked, a tumble from the car at this speed, in this traffic, would be too much for even a dancer’s lithe reflexes. And she’s lived in Delhi all her life, basti to bungalow, but she doesn’t recognise these streets, this suburb, that industrial park. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Memsahib, where I am not permitted to say for that would spoil the surprise. But I am permitted to tell you that you are the guest of A. J. Rao.’

  The palmer calls her name as she finishes freshening up with bottled Kinley from the car-bar.

  ‘Hello!’ (Kicking back deep into the cool cool white leather, like a filmi star. She is star. A star with a bar in a car.)

  Audio-only. ‘I trust the car is acceptable?’ Same smooth-suave voice. She can’t imagine any opponent being able to resist that voice in negotiation.

  ‘It’s wonderful. Very luxurious. Very high status.’ She’s out in the bastis now, slums deeper and meaner than the one she grew up in. Newer. The newest ones always look the oldest. Boys chug past on a home-brew chhakda they’ve scavenged from tractor parts. The cream Lex carefully detours around emaciated cattle with angular hips jutting through stretched skin like engineering. Everywhere, drought dust lies thick on the crazed hardtop. This is a city of stares. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the conference?’

  A laugh, inside her auditory centre.

  ‘Oh, I am hard at work winning water for Bharat, believe me. I am nothing if not an assiduous civil servant.’

  ‘You’re telling me you’re there, and here?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing for us to be in more than one place at the same time. There are multiple copies of me, and subroutines.’

  ‘So which is the real you?’

  ‘They are all the real me. In fact, not one of my avatars is in Delhi at all, I am distributed over a series of dharma-cores across Varanasi and Patna.’ He sighs. It sounds close and weary and warm as a whisper in her ear. ‘You find it difficult to comprehend a distributed consciousness; it is every bit as hard for me to comprehend a discrete, mobile consciousness. I can only copy myself through what you call cyberspace, which is the physical reality of my universe, but you move through dimensional space and time.’

  ‘So which one of you loves me then?’ The words are out, wild, loose and unconsidered. ‘I mean, as a dancer, that is.’ She’s filling, gabbling. ‘Is there one of you who particularly appreciates Kathak?’ Polite polite words, like you’d say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta’s and Priya’s hideous match-making soir’es. Don’t be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man’s world, now. But she hears glee bubble in A. J. Rao’s voice.

  ‘Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha.’

  Her name. He used her name.

  It’s a shitty street of pi-dogs and men lounging on charpoys scratching themselves but the chauffeur insists, here, this way memsahib. She picks her way down a gali lined with unsteady minarets of old car tyres. Burning ghee and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A. J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. ‘Memsahib.’

  She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the charbagh are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn: the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks towards the crack-roofed pavilion at the centre where paths and water channels meets, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.

  ‘The Shalimar Gardens,’ says A. J. Rao in the base of her skull. ‘Paradise as a walled garden.’

  And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the charbagh channels which shiver with water. The tiered roof of the pavilion gleams with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into malis sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.

  Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. ‘Oh,’ she says, numb with wonder. ‘Oh!’

  ‘A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favourite places in all India, even though it’s almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it’s an evening stroll for the basti people. The past is a passion of mine; it’s easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me.’

  Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A. J. Rao. No, she thinks, never flesh. A djinn. A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster. Then trick me.

  ‘It is as the old Urdu poets declare,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘Paradise is indeed contained within a wall.’

  It is far past four but she can’t sleep. She lies naked - shameless - but for the ’hoek behind her ear on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name. Esha.

  She’s up, kneeling on the bed, hand to ’hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.

  ‘I’m here.’ A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.

  ‘It’s late, I know, I’m sorry . . .’

  She looks across the room into the palmer’s camera.

  ‘It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep.’ A tone in that voice. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The mission is a failure.’

  She kneels in the centre of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.

  ‘The conference? What? What happened?’ She whispers, he speaks in her head.

  ‘It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing.
We will return to Varanasi in the morning.’

  Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself, stupid, romantic girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much is he is at Red Fort assisting his human superiors.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?’

  ‘People will always disappoint you.’

  A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.

  ‘How very . . . disembodied of you Esha.’ Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. ‘Will you dance for me?’

  ‘What, here? Now?’

  ‘Yes. I need something . . . embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful.’

  Need. A creature with the powers of a god, needs. But Esha’s suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.

  ‘Music . . .’ she stammers. ‘I can’t perform without music . . .’ The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over tabla, sarangi and bansuri. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bed-cover. They cannot see you, they don’t even exist, except in your head. And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice. Terrible driven things, musicians.

  ‘I’ve incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night,’ A. J. Rao says. ‘A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals.’

  ‘You can swap bits of yourself in and out?’ Esha asks. The tabla player has started a slow Natetere tap-beat on the dayan drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, they will be counting. It’s hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can’t hear; no one can hear but her. And A. J. Rao. The sarangi player sets his bow to the strings, the bansuri lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A sangeet, but not one she has ever heard before.

  ‘It’s making it up!’

  ‘It’s a composition aeai. Do you recognise the sources?’

  ‘Krishna and the gopis.’ One of the classic Kathak themes: Krishna’s seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the bansuri, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.

  ‘Will you dance, lady?’

  And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly, girli. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the one hundred and eight gopis, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape mudras, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn’t feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh’s cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the tabla, the beat of dayan and bayan. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A. J. Rao did not chose this Kathak wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.

  Light wakes her. She is sticky, naked, embarrassed. The house staff could find her. And she has a killing headache. Water. Water. Joints nerves sinews plead for it. She pulls on a Chinese silk robe. On her way to the kitchen, the voyeur eye of her palmer blinks at her. No erotic dream then, no sweat hallucination stirred out of heat and hydrocarbons. She danced Krishna and the one hundred and eight gopis in her bedroom for an aeai. A message. There’s a number. You can call me.

  Throughout the history of the eight Delhis there have been men - and almost always men - skilled in the lore of djinns. They are wise to their many forms and can see beneath the disguises they wear on the streets - donkey, monkey, dog, scavenging kite - to their true selves. They know their roosts and places where they congregate - they are particularly drawn to mosques - and know that that unexplained heat as you push down a gali behind the Jama Masjid is djinns, packed so tight you can feel their fire as you push through them. The wisest - the strongest - of fakirs know their names and so can capture and command them. Even in the old India, before the break-up into Awadh and Bharat and Rajputana and the United States of Bengal - there were saints who could summon djinns to fly on their backs from one end of Hindustan to the other in a night. In my own Leh there was an aged aged Sufi who cast one hundred and eight djinns out of a troubled house: twenty-seven in the living room, twenty-seven in the bedroom and fifty-four in the kitchen. With so many djinns there was no room for anyone else. He drove them off with burning yoghurt and chillis but warned: do not toy with djinns, for they do nothing without a price, and though that may be years in the asking, ask it they surely will.

  Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais. If the djinni are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi’s boulevards and chowks: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi’s nervous system each second. The city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of the time; they are a young, energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power.

  The djinns watch in dismay from their rooftops and minarets: that such powerful creatures of living word should so blindly serve the clay creation, but mostly because, unlike humans, they can foresee the time when the aeais will drive them from their ancient, beloved city and take their places.

  This durbar, Neeta’s and Priya’s theme is Town and Country: the Bharati mega-soap that has perversely become fashionable as public sentiment in Awadh turns against Bharat. Well, we will just bloody well build our dam, tanks or no tanks; they can beg for it, it’s our water now, and, in the same breath, what do you think about Ved Prakash, isn’t it scandalous what that Ritu Parvaaz is up to? Once they derided it and its viewers but now that it’s improper, now that’s unpatriotic, they can’t get enough of Anita Mahapatra and the Begum Vora. Some still refuse to watch but pay for daily plot digests so they can appear fashionably informed at social musts like Neeta’s and Priya’s dating durbars.

  And it’s a grand durbar; the last before the monsoon - if it actually happens this year. Neeta and Priya have hired top bhati-boys to provide a wash of mixes beamed straight into the guests’ ’hoeks. There’s even a climate control field, labouring at the limits of its containment to hold back the night heat. Esha can feel its ultrasonics as a dull buzz against her molars.

  ‘Personally, I think sweat becomes you,’ says A. J. Rao, reading Esha’s vital signs through her palmer. Invisible to all but Esha, he moves beside her like death through the press of Town and Country-fied guests. By tradition the last durbar of the season is a masked ball. In modern, middle-class Delhi that means everyone wears the computer-generated semblance of a soap character. In the flesh they are the socially mobile dressed in smart-but-cool hot season modes, but in the mind’s eye, they are Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala, dashing Govind and conniving Dr Chatterji. There are three Ved Prakashs and as many Lal Darfans, the aeai actor that plays Ved Prakash in the machine-made soap. Even the grounds of Neeta’s fianc’s suburban bungalow have been enchanted into Brahmpur
, the fictional town of Town and Country, where the actors that play the characters believe they live out their lives of celebrity tittle-tattle. When Neeta and Priya judge that everyone has mingled and networked enough, the word will be given and everyone will switch off their glittering disguises and return to being wholesalers and lunch vendors and software rajahs. Then the serious stuff begins, the matter of finding a bride. For now Esha can enjoy wandering anonymously in the company of her friendly djinn.

  She has been wandering much these weeks, through heat streets to ancient places, seeing her city fresh through the eyes of a creature that lives across many spaces and times. At the Sikh gurdwara she saw Tegh Bahadur, the Ninth Guru, beheaded by fundamentalist Aurangzeb’s guards. The gyring traffic around Vijay Chowk melted into the Bentley cavalcade of Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy, as he forever quit Lutyen’s stupendous palace. The tourist clutter and shoving curio vendors around the Qutb Minar turned to ghosts and it was 1193 and the muezzins of the first Mughal conquerors sang out the adhaan. Illusions. Little lies. But it is all right, when it is done in love. Everything is all right in love. Can you read my mind? she asked as she moved with her invisible guide through the thronging streets, that every day grew less raucous, less substantial. Do you know what I am thinking about you, aeai Rao? Little by little, she slips away from the human world into the city of the djinns.