Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Oh yes, baba. All this, and more. Much much more. I only work on the outside, the externals. To be like me – to become one of us – you have to go deep, right down into the cells.’

Now the robot was creeping over my face. I battled the urge to sweep it away and crush it on the floor. I was a weapon, I was special. This machine would show me how.

‘Woman, man, that’s not a thing easily undone. They take you apart, baba. Everything, hanging there in a tank of fluid. Then they put you back together again. Different. Neither. Better.’

Why , I wanted to ask, why do this thing to yourself? But then I felt a tiny scratch in the corner of my eye as the robot took a scrape from my optic nerve.

‘Three days for the test results, baba.’

Three days, and Dahin brought the results to me as I sat in the Peacock Pavilion overlooking the bazaar. The wind was warm and smelled of ashes of roses as it blew through the jali and turned the delicately handwritten sheets. No implants. No special powers or abilities. No abnormal neural structures, no tailored combat viruses. I was a completely normal fourteen-year-old Kshatriya girl.

I leaped over the swinging stick. While still in the air, I brought my own staff up in a low arc, catching the Azad’s weapon between his hands. It flew from his grasp, clattered across the wooden floor of the hall. He threw a kick at me, rolled to pick up his pole, but my swinging tip caught him hard against the temple, sending him down to the floor like dropped laundry. I vaulted over him, swung my staff high to punch its brass-shod tip into the nerve cluster under the ear. Instant death.

‘And finish.’

I held the staff millimetres away from my enemy’s brain. Then I slipped the lighthoek from behind my ear and the Azad vanished like a djinn. Across the practice floor, Leel set down yts staff and unhooked yts ’hoek. In yts inner vision yts representation of me – enemy, sparring partner, pupil – likewise vanished. As ever at these practice sessions, I wondered what shape Leel’s avatar took. Yt never said. Perhaps yt saw me.

‘All fighting is dance, all dance is fighting.’ That was Leel’s first lesson to me on the day yt agreed to train me in Silambam. For weeks I had watched yt from a high balcony practise the stampings and head movements and delicate hand gestures of the ritual dances. Then one night after yt had dismissed yts last class something told me, stay on , and I saw yt strip down to a simple dhoti and take out the bamboo staff from the cupboard and leap and whirl and stamp across the floor in the attacks and defences of the ancient Keralan martial art.

‘Since it seems I was not born a weapon, then I must become a weapon.’

Leel had the dark skin of a southerner and I always felt that yt was very much older than yt appeared. I also felt – again with no evidence – that yt was the oldest inhabitant of the Hijra Mahal, that yt had been there long before any of the others came. I felt that yt might once have been a hijra and that the dance moves it practised and taught were from the days when no festival or wedding was complete without the outrageous, outcast eunuchs.

‘Weapon, so? Cut anyone who tries to get close you, then when you’ve cut everyone, you cut yourself. Better things for you to be than a weapon.’

I asked Leel that same question every day until one evening thick with smog and incense from the great Govind festival yt came to me as I sat in my window reading the chati channels on my lighthoek.

‘So. The stick fighting.’

That first day, as I stood barefoot on the practice floor in my Adidas baggies and stretchy sports top trying to feel the weight and heft of the fighting staff in my hands, I had been surprised when Leel fitted the lighthoek behind my ear. I had assumed I would spar against the guru ytself.

‘Vain child. With what I teach you, you can kill. With one blow. Much safer to fight your image, in here.’ Yt tapped yts forehead. ‘As you fight mine. Or whatever you make me.’

All that season I learned the dance and ritual of Silambam; the leaps and the timings and the sweeps and the stabs. The sharp blows and the cries. I blazed across the practice floor yelling Kerala battle hymns, my staff a blur of thrusts and parries and killing strokes.

‘Heavy child, heavy. Gravity has no hold on you, you must fly. Beauty is everything. See?’ And Leel would vault on yts staff and time seemed to freeze around yt, leaving yt suspended there, like breath, in midair. And I began to understand about Leel, about all the nutes in this house of hijras. Beauty was everything, a beauty not male, not female; something else. A third beauty.

The hard, dry winter ended and so did my training. I went down in my Adidas gear and Leel was in yts dance costume, bells ringing at yts ankles. The staffs were locked away.

‘This is so unfair.’

‘You can fight with the stick, you can kill with a single blow, how much more do you need to become this weapon you so want to be?’

‘But it takes years to become a master.’

‘You don’t need to become a master. And that is why I have finished your training today, because you should have learned enough to understand the perfect uselessness of what you want to do. If you can get close, if you ever learn to fly, perhaps you might kill Salim Azad, but his soldiers will cut you apart. Realise this, Padmini Jodhra. It’s over. They’ve won.’

In the morning when the sun cast pools of light in the shapes of birds on to the floor of the little balcony, Janda would drink coffee laced with paan and, lazily lifting a finger to twirl away another page in yts inner vision, survey the papers the length and breadth of India, from the Rann of Kutch to the Sundarbans of Bengal.

‘Darling, how can you be a bitch if you don’t read ?’

In the afternoon over tiffin, Janda would compose yts scandalous gossip columns: who was doing what with whom where and why, how often and how much and what all good people should think. Yt never did interviews. Reality got in the way of creativity.

‘They love it, sweetie. Gives them an excuse to get excited and run to their lawyers. First real emotion some of them have felt in years.’

At first I had been scared of tiny, monkey-like Janda, always looking, checking, analysing from yts heavily kohled eyes, seeking weaknesses for yts acid tongue. Then I saw the power that lay in yts cuttings and clippings and entries, taking a rumour here, a whisper there, a suspicion yonder and putting them together into a picture of the world. I began to see how I could use it as a weapon. Knowledge was power. So dry winter gave way to thirsty spring and the headlines in the streets clamoured MONSOON SOON? and RAJPUTANA DEHYDRATES, and Janda helped me build a picture of Salim Azad and his company. Looking beyond those sensationalist headlines to the business sections I grew to recognise his face beneath the headlines: AZAD PLUNDERS CORPSE OF RIVALS. SALIM AZAD: REBUILDER OF A DYNASTY. AZAD WATER IN FIVE RIVERS PROJECT. In the society section I saw him at weddings and parties and premiers. I saw him skiing in Nepal and shopping in New York and at the races in Paris. In the stockmarket feeds I watched the value of Azad Water climb as deals were struck, new investments announced, take-overs and buy-outs made public. I learned Salim Azad’s taste in pop music, restaurants, tailors, designers, filmi stars, fast fast cars. I could tell you the names of the people who hand-sewed his shoes, who wrote the novel on his bedside table, who massaged his head and lit cones of incense along his spine, who flew his private tilt-jets and programmed his bodyguard robots.

One smoggy, stifling evening as Janda cleared away the thalis of sweetmeats yt gave me while I worked (‘Eat, darling, eat and act’) I noticed the lowlight illuminate two ridges of shallow bumps along the inside of yts forearm. I remembered them on Heer all my life and had always known they were as much part of a nute as the absence of any sexual organs, as the delicate bones and the long hands and the bare skull. In the low, late light they startled me because I had never asked, What are they for ?