Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  Lord Shiva bless my father for a fat boy and a coward. A hero would have run out onto the sand to see what was happening when the firing started. A hero would have died in the crossfire, or, when the ammunition ran out, by their blades. At the first shot, my father went straight under the desk.

  ‘Get down!’ he hissed at my mother who froze with a look part bafflement, part wonderment on her face. He pulled her down and immediately apologised for the unseemly intimacy. She had lately cupped his testicles in her hand, but he apologised. They knelt in the kneehole, side by side while the shots and the cries and the terrible, arthritic click click click of mecha joints swirled around them, and little by little subsided into cries and clicks, then just clicks, then silence. Side by side they knelt, shivering in fear, my mother kneeling like a dog on all fours until she shook from the strain, but afraid to move, to make the slightest noise in case it brought the stalking shadows that fell through the window into the surgery. The shadows grew long and grew dark before she dared exhale, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Hacked mecha,’ my father said. Then he made himself forever the hero in my mother’s eyes. ‘I’m going to take a look.’ Hand by knee by knee by hand, careful to make no noise, disturb not the least piece of broken glass or shattered wood, he crept out from under the desk across the strewn floor to underneath the window. Then, millimetre by millimetre, he edged up the side until he was in a half crouch. He glanced out the window and in the same instant dropped to the floor and began his painstaking crawl back across the floor.

  ‘They’re out there,’ he breathed to Mamaji. ‘All of them. They will kill anything that moves.’ He said this one word at a time, to make it sound like the natural creakings and contractions of a portable hut on a Ganga sandbank.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll run out of fuel,’ my mother replied.

  ‘They run off solar batteries.’ This manner of conversation took a long time. ‘They can wait forever.’

  Then the rain began. It was a huge thunder-plump, a forerunner of the monsoon still uncoiling across the Bay of Bengal, like a man with a flag or a trumpet who runs before a groom to let the world know that a great man is coming. Rain beat the canvas like hands on a drum. Rain hissed from the dry sand as it was swallowed. Rain ricocheted from the plastic carapaces of the waiting, listening robots. Rain-song swallowed every noise, so that my mother could only tell my father was laughing by the vibrations he transmitted through the desk.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ she hissed in a voice a little lower than the rain.

  ‘Because in this din they’ll never hear me if I go and get my palmer,’ my father said, which was very brave for a corpulent man. ‘Then we’ll see who hacks whose robots.’

  ‘Tushar,’ my mother whispered in a voice like steam but my father was already steadily crawling out from under the desk towards the palmer on the camp chair by the zip door. ‘It’s only a ...’

  And the rain stopped. Dead. Like a mali turning off a garden hose. It was over. Drips dropped from the ridge-line and the never-weatherproof windows. Sun broke through the plastic panes. There was a rainbow. It was very pretty but my father was trapped in the middle of the tent with killer robots on the alert outside. He mouthed an excremental oath and carefully, deadly carefully reversed amongst all the shatter and tumbled debris, wide arse first like an elephant. He felt the vibration of suppressed laughter through the wooden desk sides.

  ‘Now. What. Are. You. Laughing. At?’

  ‘You don’t know this river,’ my mother whispered. ‘Ganga Devi will save us yet.’

  Night came swift as ever on the banks of the holy river, the same idle moon as now lights my tale rose across the scratched plastic squares of the window. My mother and father knelt, arms aching, knees tormented, side by side beneath the desk. My father said,

  ‘Do you smell something?’

  ‘Yes,’ my mother hissed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Water,’ she said and he saw her smile in the dangerous moonlight. And then he heard it, a hissing, seeping suck sand would make if it were swallowing water but all its thirst was not enough, it was too much, too fast, too too much, it was drowning. My father smelled before he saw the tongue of water, edged with sand and straw and the flotsam of the sangam on which the camp stood, creep under the edge of the tent across the liner and around his knuckles. It smelled of soil set free. It was the old smell of the monsoon, when every dry thing has its true perfume scent and flavour and colour released by the rain; the smell of water that is the smell of everything water liberates. The tongue became a film, water flowed around their fingers and knees, around the legs of the desk as if they were the piers of a bridge. Dadaji felt my mother shaking with laughter, then the flood burst open the side of the tent and dashed dazed drowned him in a wall of water so that he spluttered and choked and tried not to cough for fear of the traitor mecha. Then he understood my mother’s laughter and he laughed too, loud and hard and coughing up lungfuls of Ganges.

  ‘Come on!’ he shouted and leaped up, over-turning the desk, throwing himself onto it like a surfboard, seizing the legs with both hands. My mother dived and grabbed just as the side of the tent opened in a torrent and desk and refugees were swept away on the flood. ‘Kick!’ he shouted as he steered the desk toward the sagging doorway. ‘If you love life and Mother India, kick!’ Then they were out in the night beneath the moon. The sentinel unfolded its killing-things, blade after blade after blade, launched after them and was knocked down, bowled over, swept away by the flooding water. The last they saw of it its carapace was halfstogged in the sand, water breaking creamy around it. They kicked through the flotsam of the camp, furniture and ration packs and med kits and tech, the shorted, fused, sparked-out corpses of the mecha and the floating, spinning swollen corpses of soldiers and medics. They kicked through them all, riding their bucking desk, they kicked half-choked, shivering out into the deep green water of Mother Ganga, under the face of the full moon they kicked up the silver corridor of her river-light. At noon the next day, far far from the river beach of Chattigarh, an Indian patrol-RIB found them and hauled them, dehydrated, skin cracked and mad from the sun, into the bottom of the boat. At some point in the long night either under the desk or floating on it they had fallen in love. My mother always said it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. Ganga Devi raised her waters and carried them through the killing machines to safety on a miraculous raft. Or so our family story went.

  Here a God is incarnated, and then me

  My parents fell in love in one country, India, and married in another, Awadh, the ghost of ancient Oudh, itself a ghost of the almost-forgotten British Raj. Delhi was no longer the capital of a great nation but of a geographical fudge. One India was now many, our mother goddess descended into a dozen avatars from re-united Bengal to Rajasthan, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu. How had we let this happen, almost carelessly, as if we had momentarily stumbled on our march toward superpowerdom, then picked ourselves up and carried on. It was all most embarrassing, like a favourite uncle discovered with porn on his computer. You look away, you shun it, you never talk about it. Like we have never talked about the seisms of violence that tear through our dense, stratified society; the mass bloodletting of our independence that came with an excruciating partition, the constant threat of religious war, the innate, brooding violence in the heart of our caste system. It was all so very un-Indian. What are a few hundred thousand deaths next to those millions? If not forgotten, they will be ignored in a few years. And it certainly has made the cricket more interesting.

  The new India suited my mother and father very well. They were model young Awadhis. My father, trapped by artificial intelligence once, vowed never to let that happen again and set up one of the first aeai farms breeding custom wares for low-level applications like Air Awadh, Delhi Bank and the Revenue Service. My mother went first for cosmetic surgery, then, after a shrewd investment in an executive enclave for the nascent Awadhi civil service, gave up the m
icro-manipulators for a property portfolio. Between them they made so much money that their faces were never out of Delhi Gloss! magazine. They were the golden couple who had sailed to a glorious future over the floods of war and the interviewers who called at their penthouse asked, So then, where is the golden son?

  Shiva Nariman made his appearance on 27 September 2025. Siva, oldest God in the world, Siva, first and favoured, Siva from whose matted hair the holy Ganga descended, generative force, auspicious one, lord of paradox. The photo rights went to Gupshup magazine for five hundred thousand Awadhi rupees. The golden boy’s nursery was featured on the nightly Nationwide show and became quite the style for a season. There was great interest in this first generation of a new nation; the Awadh Bhais, the gossip sites called them. They were the sons not just of a small coterie of prominent Delhi middle class, but of all Awadh. The nation took them to its heart and suckled them from its breasts, these bright, bouncing brilliant boys who would grow up with the new land and lead it to greatness. It was never to be mentioned, not even to be thought, how many female foetuses were curetted or flushed out or swilled away, unimplanted, into the medical waste. We were a new country, we were engaged in the great task of nation-building. We could overlook a demographic crisis that had for years been deforming our middle classes. What if there were four times as many boys as girls? They were fine strong sons of Awadh. The others, they were only females.

  So easily I say we, for I seem to have ended up as an impresario and storyteller but the truth is that I did not exist, I didn’t even exist then, not until the day the baby spoke at the Awadhi Bhai Club. It was never anything as formal as a constituted club; the blessed mothers, darlings of the nation, had fallen together by natural mutual need to cope with a media gawping into every aspect of their lives. Perfection needs a support group. They naturally banded together in each other’s living rooms and penthouses, and their mothers and ayahs with them. It was a gilded Mothers and Infants group. The day the baby spoke my mother had gathered with Usha and Kiran and Devi. It was Devi’s baby who spoke. Everyone was talking about exhaustion and nipple softening oil and peanut allergies when Vin Johar lolling in his rocker opened his brown brown eyes, focused across the room and clearly said, ‘Hungry, want my bottle.’

  ‘Hungry, are we my cho chweet?’ Devi said.

  ‘Now,’ said Vin Johar. ‘Please.’

  Devi clapped her hands in delight.

  ‘Please! He hasn’t said “please” before.’

  The rest of the penthouse was still staring, dazed.

  ‘How long has he been talking?’ Usha asked.

  ‘Oh, about three days,’ Devi said. ‘He picks up everything you say.’

  ‘My bottle now,’ demanded Vin Johar. ‘Quickly.’

  ‘But he’s only . . .’ Kiran said.

  ‘Five months, yes. He’s been a bit slower than Dr Rao predicted.’

  The mothers’ mothers and the ayahs made furtive hand gestures, kissed charms to turn away evil. It was my Mamaji, dangling fat, content Shiv on her knee, who understood first.

  ‘You’ve been, you’ve had, he’s a . . .’

  ‘Brahmin, yes.’

  ‘But you’re a Sudra,’ Kiran wondered.

  ‘Brahmin,’ Devi said with such emphasis that no one could fail to hear the capital. ‘We’ve had him done, yes.’

  ‘Done?’ asked Usha and then realised, ‘Oh.’ And, ‘Oh!’

  ‘He’ll be tall and he’ll be strong and he’ll be handsome, of course; that bit we didn’t have to engineer - and he’ll be fit and healthy. Oh so healthy - he’ll never get heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s; with his immune system he can laugh off almost any virus or infection. His immune system will even take out malaria! Imagine that! And intelligence; well, let’s just say, Dr Rao told us there isn’t even a test smart enough to stretch him. He’ll just need to see a thing once and he’s learned it - like that! And his memory, well, Dr Rao says there are double the number of connections in the brain, or something like that: what it means is that he’ll have a phenomenal memory. Like that Mr Memory on India’s Got Talent, only even better. He won’t be able to forget anything. No forgetting birthdays and phone calls to his Mata when he’s off around the world with some big corporation. Look at him, look at him, isn’t he just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen; those baby baby blue eyes. Look at you, look at you, just look at you my little lord? See them all, see them, your friends? They are princes each and every one, but you, you are a god. Oh, I could bite your bum, oh, just bite it like that it’s so beautiful and plump and gorgeous.’ Devi held Vin Johar up like a trophy in a cricket match. She kissed him on his bare belly where his little vest had ridden up. ‘Oh you little god.’

  Then Shiv let out a long wail. All through Devi’s song of praise to her genetically improved darling son, my mother’s grip had gradually tightened in envy on golden Shiv, now hopelessly outmoded, until he cried out in pain. Her fingers had left bruises like purple carrots along his ribs.

  Shiv gazed up at the mobile turning in the air-conditioning above his cot, innocent and unaware of how his visual acuity was being stimulated by the cleverly designed blobs and clouds. My mother fretted and stormed by turns around the pastel-lit apartment until Dadaji returned from the office. After Shiv was born, his duties at the office grew more arduous and his hours longer. He was never a terribly good father really. He was useless at cricket.

  ‘What are you doing on Friday?’ Mamaji demanded.

  ‘Um, I’m not sure, there’s something at the office.’

  ‘Cancel it.’

  ‘What?’ He was never very good at manners either, but then he was a Top Geek.

  ‘We’re seeing Dr Rao.’

  ‘Dr who?’

  ‘Dr Rao. At the Swaminathan Clinic.’ He knew the name. He knew the clinic. All Delhi, even Top Geeks, knew of the strange and miraculous children that came out of there. He just needed a moment for his balls to unfreeze and drop from that place close to the warmth of his perineum where they had retreated in terror.

  ‘Friday, eleven thirty, with Dr Rao himself. We are having a baby.’

  It wasn’t Friday eleven thirty, nor the Friday after. It was not for six Fridays, after the initial consultation and the financial check and the medical assessment and the one-to-ones, first Mamaji then Dadaji, and only then did they get to choose from the menu. It was a menu, like in the most rarefied restaurant you can imagine. My parents blinked. Intelligence yes good looks yes enhanced concentration yes expanded memory and improved recall yes health wealth strength happiness, everything Vin Johar had. And more.

  ‘Extended lifespan?’

  ‘Ah yes, that is a new one. A new technique that has just been licensed.’

  ‘Does that mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it says.

  My parents blinked again.

  ‘Your son,’ (for this was me they were building) ‘will enjoy a greatly increased span of life in full health and vigour.’

  ‘How much increased?’

  ‘Double the current human norm; what is that? Let me think, for people like us, affluent, educated, middle class, with access to quality health-care, that’s currently eighty years. Well double that.’

  A third time they blinked.

  ‘One hundred and sixty years old.’

  ‘At the very least, you must remember that medical miracles are occurring every day. Every single day. There’s no reason your son . . .’

  ‘Vishnu.’

  My father stared open-mouthed at my mother. He didn’t know there was a name. He hadn’t yet realised that he had no say in this whatsoever. But his balls understood, cringing in his loose-and-cooling-good-for-sperm-production silk boxers.

  ‘Vishnu, the Lord, governor and sustainer.’ Dr Rao dipped his head in respect. He was an old-fashioned man. ‘You know, I have often thought how the processes of conception, gestation and parturition are reflected in the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu: the fish the r
estless sperm, the turtle of Kurma the egg, the saving of the earth from the bottom of the ocean by Varaha the fertilisation . . .’

  ‘What about the dwarf?’ my father asked. ‘The dwarf Brahmin?’

  ‘The dwarf, yes,’ Dr Rao drawled. He was a man of slow speech, who seemed to lose the end of his sentences the closer he approached them. This led many people to make the mistake of thinking him stupid when what he was doing was shaping the perfect conclusion. As a consequence he didn’t do many television or net interviews. ‘The dwarf’s always the problem, isn’t he? But your son will assuredly be a true Brahmin. And Kalki, yes, Kalki. The ender of the Age of Kali. Who’s to say that he might not see this world end in fire and water and a new one be born? Yes, longevity. It’s very good, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences.’