Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Never mind. We’ll have that. Devi Johar doesn’t have that.’ So my father was sent with a plastic cup to catch his sacred fish. My mother went with him; to make it an act of love but mostly because she didn’t trust him with Western porn. A few Fridays later Dr Rao harvested a clutch of my mother’s turtle-eggs with a long needle. She didn’t need my father there for that. This was an act of biology. The slow-spoken doctor did his work and called up eight blastulas from the deep ocean of his artificial wombs. One was selected: Me! Me! Little me! Here I am! See me! See me! and I was implanted into my mother’s womb. It was then that she discovered the inconvenience: my doubled lifespan was bought at the price of ageing at half the speed of baseline, non-Brahminic humanity. After sixteen months of pregnancy, sixteen months of morning sickness and bloating and bad circulation and broken veins and incontinence and backache but worst of all, not being able to smoke, my mother, with a great shriek of At last At last! Get the fucking thing out of me! gave birth on 9 August 2027 and I made my entry as a player in this story.

  My brother hates me

  What a world, into which I was born! What times: an age of light and brilliance. Shining India truly found herself in Shining Awadh, Shining Bharat, Shining Maratha, Shining Bengal - all the shining facets of our many peoples. The horrors of the Schisming were put behind us, apart from war-maimed begging on metro platforms, gangs of undersocialised ex-teencyberwarriors, occasional flare-ups from hibernating combat ’ware buried deep in the city net and Concerned Documentary Makers who felt that we had not sufficiently mourned our self-mutilation and achieved reconciliation. Reconciliation? Delhi had no time for such Western niceties. Let the dead burn the dead, there was money to be made and pleasure to be savoured. Our new boulevards and maidans, our malls and entertainment zones were brilliant with the bright and the young and the optimistic. It was a time of bold new fashions, father-scandalising hemlines and mother-troubling hairstyles; of new trends and obsessions that were old and cold as soon as they hit the gossip sites; of ten thousand shattering new ideas that disappeared as soon as they were iterated like a quantum foam of thought. It was youth, it was confidence, it was the realisation of all that old Mother India had claimed she might be but most of all it was money. As in Delhi, so in Varanasi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur. But most of all, I think, in Delhi. In India she had been capital by whim, not by right. Mumbai, even Kolkata always outshone her. Now she truly was capital of her own nation, without rival, and she dazzled. My earliest memory, from the time when my senses all ran together and sounds had smells and colours had textures and a unified reality above those crude divisions, was of lines of light streaming over my upturned face, light in all colours and more, light that, to an undifferentiated cortex, hummed and chimed like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. I suppose I must have been in our car with our chauffeur driving us somewhere through the downtown lights to some soir’e or other, but all I remember is grinning up at the streaming, singing light. When I think of Delhi even now, I think of it as a river of light, a torrent of silver notes.

  And what a city! Beyond Old Delhi and New Delhi, beyond the Newer Delhis of Gurgaon and the desirable new suburbs of Sarita Vihar and New Friends Colony, the Newest Delhis of all were rising. Invisible Delhis, Delhis of data and digits and software. Distributed Delhis, networked Delhis, Delhis woven from cable and wireless nodes, intangible Delhis woven through the streets and buildings of the material city. Strange new peoples lived here: the computer-constructed cast of Town and Country, the all-conquering soap opera that, in its complete artificiality, was more real than life itself. It was not just the characters who drew our fascinations, the genius of the production lay in the CG-actors who believed they played and had a separate existence from those characters, and whose gupshup and scandal, whose affairs and marriages meant more to us than our friends and neighbours. Other brilliant creatures streamed past and through us on our streets and squares: the aeais; the pantheon of artificial intelligences that served our immaterial needs from banking to legal services to household management to personal secretarial services. In no place and every place, these were entities of levels and hierarchies; high-end aeais cascading down through subroutines into low-grade monitors and processors; thousands of those same daily-grind Level 0.8 (the intelligence of a street pig) scaling up through connection and associations into Level ls - the intelligence of a monkey; those again aggregating together into the highest, the Level 2s, indistinguishable from a human seventy per cent of the time. And beyond them were the rumoured, feared Level 3s: of human intelligence and beyond. Who could understand such an existence, beings of many parts that did not necessarily recognise each other? The djinns, those ancient haunters of their beloved Delhi, they understood; and older than they, the gods. They understood only too well. And in the material city, new castes appeared. A new sex appeared on our streets as if stirred out of heaven, neither male nor female, rejecting the compromises of the old hijras to be aggressively neither. The nutes, they called themselves. And then of course there were those like me; improved in egg and sperm, graced with outrageous gifts and subtle curses: the Brahmins. Yes I was an upper-middle-class brat born into genetic privilege, but Delhi was laid out before me like a wedding banquet. She was my city.

  Delhi loved me. Loved me, loved all of my Brahmin brothers and occasional sisters. We were wonders, freaks, miracles and avatars. We might do anything, we were the potential of Awadh. Those first-born were accidents of birth, we, the Brahmins, were the true Awadhi Bhais. We even had our own comic, of that name. With our strange genetic powers, we battled criminals, demons and Bharatis. We were superheroes. It sold pretty well.

  You might think I was blithe enough, a genetically high-caste blob bouncing in my baby-rocker blinking up into the sunlight beaming through the glass walls of our tower-top penthouse. You would be wrong. As I lay giggling and blinking, neural pathways were twining up through my medulla and cerebellum and Area of Broca with preternatural speed. That blur of light, that spray of silver notes rapidly differentiated into objects, sounds, smells, sensations. I saw, I heard, I sensed but I could not yet understand. So I made connections, I drew patterns, I saw the world pouring in through my senses and up the fiery tree of my neurons as relation, as webs and nets and constellations. I formed an inner astrology and from it, before I could call dog ‘dog’ and cat ‘cat’ and Mamaji ‘Mamaji’, I understood the connectedness of things. I saw the bigger picture; I saw the biggest picture. This was my true superpower, one that has remained with me to this day. I never could fly to Lanka in a thought or lift a mountain by the force of my will, I was not master of fire or thunder or even my own soul, but I could always take one look and know the whole, absolute and entire.

  The naming of names. That was where Mamaji first realised that Dr Rao’s blessings were not unmixed. The soir’e that day was at Devi Johar’s house, she of the amazing Vin. There he was, running around the place with his ayah trying to keep up with him in kiddie-wear by SonSun of Los Angeles. Shiv played with the other non-Brahmins on the roof garden, happy and content at their own limited, non-enhanced activities. How fast the gilt had rubbed off him, after I was born! As for me, I sat in my bouncer, burbling and watching big-eyed the mothers of the golden. I knew Shiv’s jealousy, though I didn’t have the words or the emotional language for it. I saw it in a thousand looks and glances, the way he sat at the table, the way he rode in the car, the way he toddled along behind Ayah Meenakshi as she pushed me through the mall, the way he stood by my cot and gazed soft-eyed at me. I understood hate.

  Vin asked Devi if he could go out and play with the others on the roof garden, please.

  ‘All right, but don’t show off,’ Devi Johar said. When he had toddled away, Devi crossed her ankles demurely and placed her hands on her knees, so.

  ‘Mira, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but your Vish; well, he isn’t talking yet. At his age, Vin had a vocabulary of two hundred words and a good grasp of syntax and grammar.’
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  ‘And shouldn’t he be, well, at least crawling?’ Usha asked.

  ‘How old is he; fifteen months? He does seem a little on the ... small side,’ Kiran chimed in.

  My Mamaji broke down in tears. It was the crying nights and the sshing to sleep, the rocking and the cleaning and the mewling and puking, the tiredness, oh, the tiredness, but worst of all, the breast feeding.

  ‘Breast? After a year?’ Usha was incredulous. ‘I mean, I’ve heard that some mothers keep them on the teat for years, but they’re from the villages, or mamas who love their sons too much.’

  ‘My nipples feel like mulberries,’ my Mamaji wept. ‘You see, he’s fifteen months old, but biologically, he not even eight months yet.’

  I would live twice as long, but age half as fast. Infancy was a huge, protracted dawn; childhood an endless morning. When Shiv started school I would only have begun toddling. When I was of university age I would still have the physiology of a nine-year- old. Adulthood, maturity, old age, were points so distant on the great plain of my lifespan that I could not tell if they were insects or cities. In those great days I would come into my own, a life long enough to become part of history; as a baby, I was a mother’s nightmare.

  ‘I know breast is best, but maybe you should consider switching to formula,’ Devi said soothingly.

  See how I recall every word? Another of Dr Rao’s equivocal gifts. I forget only what I choose to unremember. I understood every word - at eighteen months my vocabulary was far in advance of your precious Vin, bitch Devi. But it was trapped inside me. My brain formed the words but my larynx, my tongue, my lips and lungs couldn’t form them. I was a prisoner in a baby-bouncer, smiling and waving my fat little fists.

  Four there were who understood me, and four only, and they lived in the soft-contoured plastic butterfly that hung over my cot. Their names were Tikka Tikka, Badshanti, Pooli and Nin. They were aeais, set to watch over me and entertain me with songs and stories and pretty patterns of coloured lights because Mamaji considered Ayah Meenakshi’s sleepy-time stories far too terrifying for a suggestible Brahmin. They were even more stupid than my parents but it was because they were deeply dense that they had no preconceptions beyond their Level 0.2 programming and so I could communicate with them.

  TikkaTikka sang songs.

  In a little green boat,

  On the blue sea so deep

  Little Lord Vishnu

  Is sailing to sleep . . .

  He sang that every night. I liked it, I still sing it to myself as I pole my circus of cats along the ravaged shores of Mata Ganga.

  Pooli impersonated animals, badly. He was a cretin. His stupidity insulted me so I left him mute inside the plastic butterfly.

  Badshanti, lovely Badshanti, she was the weaver of stories. ‘Would you like to hear a story, Vishnu?’ were the words that led into hours of wonder. Because I don’t forget. I know that she never repeated a story, unless I asked her to. How did I ask? For that I must introduce the last of my four aeais.

  Nin spoke only in patterns of light and colour that played across my face, an ever-wheeling kaleidoscope that was supposed to stimulate my visual intelligence. Nin-no-words was the intelligent one; because he could interpret facial expression, he was the one I first taught my language. It was a very simple language of blinking. One deliberate blink for yes, two for no. It was slow, it was tortuous but it was a way out of the prison of my body. With Nin reading my answers to Badshanti’s questions, I could communicate anything.

  How did my brother hate me? Let me take you to that time in Kashmir. After the third drought in a row my mother vowed never again to spend a summer in Delhi’s heat, noise, smog and disease. The city seemed like a dog lying at the side of the street, panting and feral and filthy and eager for any excuse to sink its teeth into you, waiting for the monsoon. Mamaji looked to the example of the British of a hundred years before and took us up to the cool and the high places. Kashmir! Green Kashmir, blue lake, the bright houseboats and the high beyond all, the rampart of mountains. They still wore snow, then. I remember blinking in the wonder of the Dal Lake as the shikara sped us across the still water to the hotel rising sheer like a palace in one of Badshanti’s tales from the water. My four friends bobbed in the wind of our passage as the boat curved in across the lake to the landing stage where porters in red turbans waited to transport us to our cool summer apartment. Shiv stood in the bow. He wanted to throw them the landing rope.

  The calm, the clear, the high cool of Kashmir after the mob heat of Delhi! I bobbed and bounced and grinned in my cot and waved my little hands in joy at the sweet air. Every sense was stimulated, every nerve vibrant. In the evening TikkaTikka would sing, Badshanti tell a story and Nin send stars sweeping over my face.

  There was to be an adventure by boat across the lake. There was food and there was drink. We were all to go together. It was a thing of a moment, I can see it still, so small it looked like an accident. It was not. It was deliberate, it was meticulously planned.

  ‘Where’s Gundi-bear? I’ve lost Gundi-bear,’ Shiv cried as my father was about to get into the boat. ‘I need Gundi-bear.’ He launched towards the shore along the gangplank. Dadaji swept him up.

  ‘Oh no you don’t; we’ll never get anywhere at this rate. You stay here and don’t move. Now, where did you last see him?’

  Shiv shrugged, innocently forgetful.

  ‘Here, I’ll come with you, you’ll never find anything the way you ram and stam around.’ My mother sighed her great sigh of exasperation. ‘Shiv, you stay here, you hear? Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back in two ticks.’

  I felt a deeper shadow in the mild shade of the awning. Shiv stood over me. Even if I chose to I could not forget the look on his face. He ran up the gangplank, untied the mooring rope and let it fall into the water. He waggled his fingers, bye bye as the wind caught the curve of coloured cotton and carried me out into the lake. The frail little shikara was taken far from the shelter of the Lake Hotel’s island into the rising chop. The wind caught it and turned it. The boat rolled. I began to cry.

  Nin saw my face change. TikkaTikka awoke in the little plastic butterfly my parents had hung from the bamboo ridge pole.

  The lake is big and the lake deep

  And Little Lord Vishnu is falling asleep

  The wind is high and the sun is beaming

  To carry you off to the kingdom of dreaming, he sang.

  ‘Hello Vishnu,’ Badshanti said. ‘Would you like a story today?’ Two blinks.

  ‘Oh, no story? Well then, I’ll just let you sleep. Sweet dreams, Vishnu.’

  Two blinks.

  ‘You don’t want a story but you don’t want to sleep?’

  One blink.

  ‘All right then, let’s play a game.’

  Two blinks. Badshanti hesitated so long I thought her software had hung. She was a pretty rudimentary aeai.

  ‘Not a game, not a story, not sleep?’ I blinked. She knew better than to ask, ‘Well, what do you want?’ Now TikkaTikka sang a strange song I had never heard before,Wind and lake water

  And gathering storm,

  Carry Lord Vishnu

  Far into harm.

  Yes. The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. One gust could roll it over and send me to the bottom of the Dal Lake. I might be a hero in my own comic but Dr Rao had neglected to give me the genes for breathing underwater.

  ‘Are we on a boat, sailing far far away?’ Badshanti asked.

  Yes.

  ‘Are you out on water?’

  Yes.

  ‘Are we on our own?’

  Yes.

  ‘Is Vishnu happy?’

  No.

  ‘Is Vishnu scared?’

  Yes.

  ‘Is Vishnu safe?’

  Two blinks. Again Badshanti paused. Then she started to shout. ‘Help aid assist! Little Lord Vishnu is in peril! Help aid assist!’ The voice was thin and tinny and would not have reached any distance ac
ross the wind-ruffled lake but one of the silent aeais, perhaps stupid Pooli, must also have sent out a radio, bluetooth and GPS alarm, for a fishing boat suddenly changed course, opened up its long-tail engine and sped towards me on a curve of spray.

  ‘Thank you thank you sirs and saviours,’ Badshanti babbled as the two fishermen hauled my shikara close with their hard hands and to their astonishment saw a child lying on the mattresses, smiling up at them.

  A map drawn inside the skull

  All my long life I have been ordained to be tied to water. My parents were delivered by the flood, my aeais saved me from the drifting boat. Even now I pick my way down the shrivelled memory of the Ganga, descended from the hair of Siva. Water it was that made me into a superhero of Awadh, albeit of a very different, non-tall-building-leaping type from the Awadhi Bhai who refused to grow up through the pages of Virgin comics.