Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  Sensation at the gate. The male stars of Town and Country buzz around a woman in an ivory sequined dress. It’s a bit damn clever: she’s come as Yana Mitra; freshest fittest fastest boli sing-star. And boli girlis, like Kathak dancers, are still meat and ego, though Yana, like every item-singer, has had her computer avatar guest on T’n’C.

  A. J. Rao laughs. ‘If they only knew. Very clever. What better disguise than to go as yourself. It really is Yana Mitra. Esha Rathore, what’s the matter, where are you going?’

  Why do you have to ask don’t you know everything then you know it’s hot and noisy and the ultrasonics are doing my head and the yap yap yap is going right through me and they’re all only after one thing, are you married are you engaged are you looking and I wish I hadn’t come I wish I’d just gone out somewhere with you and that dark corner under the gulmohar bushes by the bhati-rig looks the place to get away from all the stupid stupid people.

  Neeta and Priya, who know her disguise, shout over, ‘So Esha, are we finally going to meet that man of yours?’

  He’s already waiting for her among the golden blossoms. Djinns travel at the speed of thought.

  ‘What is it what’s the matter . . .’

  She whispers, ‘You know sometimes I wish, I really wish you could get me a drink.’

  ‘Why certainly, I will summon a waiter.’

  ‘No!’ Too loud. Can’t be seen talking to the bushes. ‘No; I mean, hand me one. Just hand me one.’ But he cannot, and never will. She says, ‘I started when I was five, did you know that? Oh, you probably did, you know everything about me. But I bet you didn’t know how it happened: I was playing with the other girls, dancing round the tank, when this old woman from the gharana went up to my mother and said, I will give you a hundred thousand rupees if you give her to me. I will turn her into a dancer; maybe, if she applies herself, a dancer famous through all of India. And my mother said, Why her? And do you know what that woman said? Because she shows rudimentary talent for movement, but mostly because you are willing to sell her to me for one lakh rupees. She took the money there and then, my mother. The old woman took me to the gharana. She had once been a great dancer but she got rheumatism and couldn’t move and that made her bad. She used to beat me with lathis, I had to be up before dawn to get everyone chai and eggs. She would make me practise until my feet bled. They would hold up my arms in slings to perform the mudras until I couldn’t put them down again without screaming. I never once got home - and do you know something? I never once wanted to. And despite her, I applied myself, and I became a great dancer. And do you know what? No one cares. I spent seventeen years mastering something no one cares about. But bring in some boli girl who’s been around five minutes to flash her teeth and tits . . .’

  ‘Jealous?’ asks A. J. Rao, mildly scolding.

  ‘Don’t I deserve to be?’

  Then bhati-boy One blinks up ‘You Are My Soniya’ on his palmer and that’s the signal to demask. Yana Mitra claps her hands in delight and sings along as all around her glimmering soapi stars dissolve into mundane accountants and engineers and cosmetic nano-surgeons and the pink walls and roof gardens and thousand thousand stars of Old Brahmpur melt and run down the sky.

  It’s seeing them, exposed in their naked need, melting like that soap-world before the sun of celebrity, that calls back the mad Esha she knows from her childhood in the gharana. The brooch makes a piercing, ringing chime against the cocktail glass she has snatched from a waiter. She climbs up onto a table. At last, that boli bitch shuts up. All eyes are on her.

  ‘Ladies, but mostly gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.’ Even the city behind the sound-curtain seems to be holding its breath. ‘I am engaged to be married!’ Gasps. Oohs. Polite applause, who is she, is she on tivi, isn’t she something arty? Neeta and Priya are wide-eyed at the back. ‘I’m very very lucky because my husband-to-be is here tonight. In fact, he’s been with me all evening. Oh, silly me. Of course, I forgot, not all of you can see him. Darling, would you mind? Gentlemen and ladies, would you mind slipping on your ’hoeks for just a moment. I’m sure you don’t need any introduction to my wonderful wonderful fianc’, A. J. Rao.’

  And she knows from the eyes, the mouths, the low murmur that threatens to break into applause, then fails, then is taken up by Neeta and Priya to turn into a decorous ovation, that they can all see Rao as tall and elegant and handsome as she sees him, at her side, hand draped over hers.

  She can’t see that boli girl anywhere.

  He’s been quiet all the way back in the phatphat. He’s quiet now, in the house. They’re alone. Neeta and Priya should have been home hours ago, but Esha knows they’re scared of her.

  ‘You’re very quiet.’ This, to the coil of cigarette smoke rising up towards the ceiling fan as she lies on her bed. She’d love a bidi; a good, dirty street smoke for once, not some Big Name Western brand.

  ‘We were followed as we drove back after the party. An aeai aircraft surveilled your phatphat. A network analysis aeai system sniffed at my router net to try to track this com channel. I know for certain street cameras were tasked on us. The Krishna Cop who lifted you after the Red Fort durbar was at the end of the street. He is not very good at subterfuge.’

  Esha goes to the window to spy out the Krishna Cop, call him out, demand of him what he thinks he’s doing?

  ‘He’s long gone,’ says Rao. ‘They have been keeping you under light surveillance for some time now. I would imagine your announcement has upped your level.’

  ‘They were there?’

  ‘As I said . . .’

  ‘Light surveillance.’

  It’s scary but exciting, down in the deep muladhara chakra, a red throb above her yoni. Scarysexy. That same lift of red madness that made her blurt out that marriage announcement. It’s all going so far, so fast. No way to get off now.

  ‘You never gave me the chance to answer,’ says Aeai Rao.

  Can you read my mind? Esha thinks at the palmer.

  ‘No, but I share some operating protocols with scripting aeais for Town and Country - in a sense they are a low-order part of me - they have become quite good predictors of human behaviour.’

  ‘I’m a soap opera.’

  Then she falls back onto the bed and laughs and laughs and laughs until she feels sick, until she doesn’t want to laugh any more and every guffaw is a choke, a lie, spat up at the spy machines up there, beyond the lazy fan that merely stirs the heat, turning on the huge thermals that spire up from Delhi’s colossal heat-island, a conspiracy of djinns.

  ‘Esha,’ A. J. Rao says, closer than he has ever seemed before. ‘Lie still.’ She forms the question why? And hears the corresponding whisper inside her head hush, don’t speak. In the same instant the chakra glow bursts like a yolk and leaks heat into her yoni. Oh, she says, oh! Her clitoris is singing to her. Oh oh oh oh. ‘How . . . .’ Again, the voice, huge inside her head, inside every part of her sssshhhhh. Building building she needs to do something, she needs to move needs to rub against the day-warmed scented wood of the big bed, needs to get her hand down there hard hard hard . . .

  ‘No don’t touch,’ chides A. J. Rao and now she can’t even move she needs to explode she has to explode her skull can’t contain this her dancer’s muscles are pulled tight as wires she can’t take much more no no no yes yes yes she’s shrieking now tiny little shrieks beating her fists off the bed but it’s just spasm, nothing will obey her and then it’s explosion bam, and another one before that one has even faded, huge slow explosions across the sky and she’s cursing and blessing every god in India. Ebbing now, but still shock after shock, one on top of the other. Ebbing now . . . Ebbing.

  ‘Ooh. Oh. What? Oh wow, how?’

  ‘The machine you wear behind your ear can reach deeper than words and visions,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘So, are you answered?’

  ‘What?’ The bed is drenched in sweat. She’s sticky dirty needs to wash change clothes move, but the afterglows are still fading. Beautiful
beautiful colours.

  ‘The question you never gave me the chance to answer. Yes. I will marry you.’

  ‘Stupid vain girl, you don’t even know what caste he is.’

  Mata Madhuri smokes eighty a day through a plastic tube hooked through the respirator unit into a grommet in her throat. She burns through them three at time: bloody machine scrubs all the good out of them, she says. Last bloody pleasure I have. She used to bribe the nurses but they bring her them free now, out of fear of her temper that grows increasingly vile as her body surrenders more and more to the machines.

  Without pause for Esha’s reply, a flick of her whim whips the life-support chair round and out into the garden.

  ‘Can’t smoke in there, no fresh air.’

  Esha follows her out on to the raked gravel of the formal charbagh.

  ‘No one marries in caste any more.’

  ‘Don’t be smart, stupid girl. It’s like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian, Lord Krishna protect me. You know fine what I mean. Not a real person.’

  ‘There are girls younger than me who marry trees, or even dogs.’

  ‘So bloody clever. That’s up in some god-awful shithole like Bihar or Rajputana, and anyway, those are gods. Any fool knows that. Ach, away with you!’ The old, destroyed woman curses as the chair’s aeai deploys its parasol. ‘Sun sun, I need sun, I’ll be burning soon enough, sandalwood, you hear? You burn me on a sandalwood pyre. I’ll know if you stint.’

  Madhuri the old crippled dance teacher always uses this tactic to kill a conversation with which she is uncomfortable. When I’m gone . . . Burn me sweetly . . .

  ‘And what can a god do that A. J. Rao can’t?’

  ‘Ai! You ungrateful, blaspheming child. I’m not hearing this la la la la la la la la have you finished yet?’

  Once a week Esha comes to the nursing home to visit this ruin of a woman, wrecked by the demands a dancer makes of a human body. She’s explored guilt need rage resentment anger pleasure at watching her collapse into long death as the motives that keep her turning up the drive in a phatphat and there is only one she believes. She’s the only mother she has.

  ‘If you marry that . . . thing . . . you will be making a mistake that will destroy your life,’ Madhuri declares, accelerating down the path between the water channels.

  ‘I don’t need your permission,’ Esha calls after her. A thought spins Madhuri’s chair on its axis.

  ‘Oh, really? That would be a first for you. You want my blessing. Well, you won’t have it. I refuse to be party to such nonsense.’

  ‘I will marry A. J. Rao’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I. Will. Marry. Aeai. A. J. Rao.’

  Madhuri laughs, a dry, dying, spitting sound, full of bidismoke.

  ‘Well, you almost surprise me. Defiance. Good, some spirit at last. That was always your problem, you always needed everyone to approve, everyone to give you permission, everyone to love you. And that’s what stopped you being great, do you know that, girl? You could have been a devi, but you always held back for fear that someone might not approve. And so you were only ever . . . good.’

  People are looking now, staff, visitors. Patients. Raised voices, unseemly emotions. This is a house of calm, and slow mechanised dying. Esha bends low to whisper to her mentor.

  ‘I want you to know that I dance for him. Every night. Like Radha for Krishna. I dance just for him, and then he comes and makes love to me. He makes me scream and swear like a hooker. Every night. And look!’ He doesn’t need to call any more; he is hardwired into the ’hoek she now hardly ever takes off. Esha looks up: he is there, standing in a sober black suit among the strolling visitors and droning wheelchairs, hands folded. ‘There he is, see? My lover, my husband.’

  A long, keening screech, like feedback, like a machine dying. Madhuri’s withered hands fly to her face. Her breathing tube curdles with tobacco smoke.

  ‘Monster! Monster! Unnatural child, ah, I should have left you in that basti ! Away from me away away away!’

  Esha retreats from the old woman’s mad fury as hospital staff come hurrying across the scorched lawns, white saris flapping.

  Every fairytale must have a wedding.

  Of course it was the event of the season. The decrepit old Shalimar Gardens were transformed by an army of malis into a sweet, green, watered maharajah’s fantasia with elephants, pavilions, musicians, lancers, dancers, filmi stars and robot bar-tenders. Neeta and Priya were uncomfortable bridesmaids in fabulous frocks; a great brahmin was employed to bless the union of woman and artificial intelligence. Every television network sent cameras, human or aeai. Gleaming presenters checked the guests in and checked the guests out. Chati mag paparazzi came in their crowds, wondering what they could turn their cameras on. There were even politicians from Bharat, despite the souring relationships between the two neighbours now Awadh constructors were scooping up the Ganga sands into revetments. But mostly there were the people of the encroaching bastis, jostling up against the security staff lining the paths of their garden, asking, She’s marrying a what? How does that work? Can they, you know? And what about children? Who is she, actually? Can you see anything? I can’t see anything. Is there anything to see?

  But the guests and the great were ’hoeked up and applauded the groom in his golden veil on his white stallion, stepping with the delicacy of a dressage horse up the raked paths. And because they were great and guests, there was not one who, despite the free French champagne from the well-known diplomatic sommelier, would ever say, but there’s no one there. No one was at all surprised that, after the bride left in a stretch limo, there came a dry, sparse thunder, cloud to cloud, and a hot mean wind that swept the discarded invitations along the paths. As they were filing back to their taxis, tankers were draining the expensively filled qanats.

  It made lead in the news.

  Kathak star weds aeai lover!!! Honeymoon in Kashmir!!!

  Above the chowks and minarets of Delhi, the djinns bent together in conference.

  He takes her while shopping in Tughluk Mall. Three weeks and the shop girls still nod and whisper. She likes that. She doesn’t like it that they glance and giggle when the Krishna Cops lift her from the counter at the Black Lotus Japanese Import Company.

  ‘My husband is an accredited diplomat, this is a diplomatic incident.’ The woman in the bad suit pushes her head gently down to enter the car. The ministry doesn’t need personal liability claims.

  ‘Yes, but you are not, Mrs Rao,’ says Thacker in the back seat. Still wearing that cheap aftershave.

  ‘Rathore,’ she says. ‘I have retained my stage name. And we shall see what my husband has to say about my diplomatic status.’ She lifts her hand in a mudra to speak to AyJay, as she thinks of him now. Dead air. She performs the wave again.

  ‘This is a shielded car,’ Thacker says.

  The building is shielded also. They take the car right inside, down a ramp into the basement parking lot. It’s a cheap, anonymous glass and titanium block on Parliament Street that she’s driven past ten thousand times on her way to the shops of Connaught Circus without ever noticing. Thacker’s office is on the fifteenth floor. It’s tidy and has a fine view over the astronomical geometries of the Jantar Mantar but smells of food: tiffin snatched at the desk. She checks for photographs of family children wife. Only himself smart in pressed whites for a cricket match.

  ‘Chai?’

  ‘Please.’ The anonymity of this civil service block is beginning to unnerve her: a city within a city. The chai is warm and sweet and comes in a tiny disposable plastic cup. Thacker’s smile seems also warm and sweet. He sits at the end of the desk, angled towards her in Krishna-Cop handbook ‘non-confrontational’.

  ‘Mrs Rathore. How to say this?’

  ‘My marriage is legal . . .’

  ‘Oh I know Mrs Rathore. This is Awadh, after all. Why, there have even been women who married djinns, within our own lifetimes. No. It’s an international affair now, it see
ms. Oh well. Water: we do all so take it for granted, don’t we? Until it runs short, that is.’

  ‘Everybody knows my husband is still trying to negotiate a solution to the Kunda Khadar problem.’

  ‘Yes, of course he is.’ Thacker lifts a manila envelope from his desk, peeps inside, grimaces coyly. ‘How shall I put this? Mrs Rathore, does your husband tell you everything about his work?’

  ‘That is an impertinent question . . .’