Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir’s collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly-fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check teeth for lunch-time spinach and other dental crimes.

‘So what do you think of them then?’ Jasbir says.

‘They’re white,’ grunts Sujay.

The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phatphat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plot-lines on Town and Country . It’s Jasbir’s major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals; soap-opera gossip. In his experience, what the women really want is gupshup from the meta-soap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country . ‘Auh,’ Sujay will say. ‘Different department.’

There’s the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. ‘Your father left a message. He wants to see you.’

‘You’ve hired a what?’ Jasbir’s retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer, confidentially, across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.

‘A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers.’ Jasbir’s father inclines his head toward the open living-room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her non-eligible boys, Jasbir’s mother watches the test match on the smart-silk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service pay-check. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. ‘She’s found this special matchmaker.’

‘Wait wait wait. Explain to me special .’

Jasbir’s father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a tea-cup.

‘Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra… Well, she’s updated it a bit, this being the twenty-first century and everything, so she’s, ah, found a nute.’

A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless-steel draining-board.

‘A nute? ’ Jasbir hisses

‘He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once.’

Anant lets out an aie! , soft and involuntary as a fart.

‘I think the word you’re looking for is “yt”,’ Jasbir says. “And they’re not hijras the way you knew them. They’re not men become women or women become men. They’re neither.’

‘Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes; whatever; it’s not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh .’ Mrs Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like papercuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.

Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men snowing men hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage r’sum’s. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name, a few had passed beyond being rivals into becoming friends.

‘Teeth!’ A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leant Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. ‘Where did you get those, badmash?’ He was an old university colleague of Jasbir’s, much given to high-profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was In Finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It’s the game, isn’t it? Kishore rolls on, ‘Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra’s night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It’s all in the stars, and on your palmer.’

Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned workcluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir’s Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was a call, then a date. Now it’s a proposal.

‘Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh,’ Deependra said lugubriously. ‘Our eyes will meet, she will nod – just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I’d ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I’ve already promised them all to my brothers and cousins. It’s written. Trust me.’

It was a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janampatri artificial intelligence.

A Nepali khidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dance-floor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.

‘Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honour and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!’

Two attendants slid open the folding windows onto the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule – five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re muttering about in there,’ Mrs Dayal calls over the mantra commentary of Harsha Bhogle. ‘I’ve had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay.’ There is a spatter of applause from the Test Match.

‘I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them,’ Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. ‘She’s had the talk. Yt’ll start making the match. There’s nothing to be done about it. There are worse things.’

The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right , Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.

Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world, well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket . And there’s too much milk in the tea.

A dream wind like the hot gusts that forerun the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool white spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Avenue Bungalows. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandis of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.