Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

You’ve got the entry lines, you’ve got the exit lines and the stuff in the middle Ram Tarun Das will provide.

He follows her glance down into the car park. A moment’s pause, a slight inclination of his body towards hers. That is the line.

So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus? Ram Tarun Das whispers in Jasbir’s skull. He casually repeats the line. He has been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in how to make it sound natural. He’s as good as any newsreader, better than those few human actors left on television.

She turns to him, lips parted a fraction in surprise.

‘I beg your pardon?’

She will say this , Ram Tarun Das hints. Again, offer the line.

‘Are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just pick one. Whatever you feel, that’s the right answer.’

A pause, a purse of the lips. Jasbir subtly links his hands behind his back, the better to hide the sweat.

‘Lexus,’ she says. Shulka, her name is Shulka. She is a twenty-two-year-old marketing graduate from Delhi U working in men’s fashion, a Mathur – only a couple of caste steps away from Jasbir’s folk. The Demographic Crisis has done more to shake up the tiers of varna and jati than a century of the slow drip of democracy. And she has answered his question.

‘Now, that’s very interesting,’ says Jasbir.

She turns, plucked crescent-moon eyebrows arched. Behind Jasbir, Ram Tarun Das whispers, Now, the fetch.

‘Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?’

A small frown now. Lord Vishnu, she is beautiful.

‘I was born in Delhi…’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

The frown becomes a nano-smile of recognition.

‘Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.’

Jasbir does the sucked-in-lip nod of concentration Ram Tarun Das made him practise in front of the mirror.

‘Red, green, yellow, blue?’

‘Red.’ No hesitation.

‘Cat, dog, bird, monkey?’

She cocks her head to one side. Jasbir notices that she, too, is wearing a ’hoek. Tech girl. The cocktail bot is on its rounds, doing industrial magic with the self-righting glasses and its little spider-fingers.

‘Bird… no.’ A sly smile. ‘No no no. Monkey.’

He is going to die he is going to die.

‘But what does it mean?’

Jasbir holds up a finger.

‘One more. Ved Prakash, Begum Vora, Dr Chatterji, Ritu Parvaaz.’

She laughs. She laughs like bells from the hem of a wedding skirt. She laughs like the stars of a Himalaya night.

What do you think you’re doing? Ram Tarun Das hisses. He flips through Jasbir’s perceptions to appear behind Shulka, hands thrown up in despair. With a gesture he encompasses the horizon wreathed in gas flares. Look, tonight the sky burns for you, sir, and you would talk about soap opera! The script, stick to the script! Improvisation is death . Jasbir almost tells his matchmaker, Away djinn, away . He repeats the question.

‘I’m not really a Town and Country fan,’ Shulka says. ‘My sister now, she knows every last detail about every last one of the characters and that’s before she gets started on the actors. It’s one of those things I suppose you can be ludicrously well informed about without ever watching. So if you had to press me, I would have to say Ritu. So what does it all mean, Mr Dayal?’

His heart turns over in his chest. Ram Tarun Das eyes him coldly. The finesse: make it. Do it just as I instructed you. Otherwise your money and my bandwidth are thrown to the wild wind.

The cocktail bot dances in to perform its cybernetic circus. A flip of Shulka’s glass and it comes down spinning, glinting, on the precise needle-point of its forefinger. Like magic, if you know nothing about gyros and spin-glasses. But that moment of prestidigitation is cover enough for Jasbir to make the ordained move. By the time she looks up, cocktail refilled, he is half a room away.

He wants to apologise as he sees her eyes widen. He needs to apologise as her gaze searches the room for him. Then her eyes catch his. It is across a crowded room just like the song that Sujay mumbles around the house when he thinks Jasbir can’t hear. Sujay loves that song. It is the most romantic, heart-felt, innocent song he has ever heard. Big awkward Sujay has always been a sucker for veteran Hollywood musicals. South Pacific, Carousel, Moulin Rouge , he watches them on the big screen in the living room, singing shamelessly along and getting moist-eyed at the impossible loves. Across a crowded room, Shulka frowns. Of course. It’s in the script.

But what does it mean? she mouths. And, as Ram Tarun Das has directed, he shouts back, ‘Call me and I’ll tell you.’ Then he turns on his heel and walks away. And that, he knows without any prompt from Ram Tarun Das, is the finesse.

The apartment is grossly over-heated and smells of singeing cooking ghee but the nute is swaddled in a crocheted shawl, hunched as if against a persistent hard wind. Plastic tea-cups stand on the low brass table, Jasbir’s mother’s conspicuously untouched. Jasbir sits on the sofa with his father on his right and his mother on his left, as if between arresting policemen. Nahin the nute mutters and shivers and rubs yts fingers.

Jasbir has never been in the physical presence of a thirdgendered. He knows all about them – as he knows all about most things – from the single-professional-male general interest magazines to which he subscribes. Those pages, between the ads for designer watches and robot tooth-whitening, portray them as fantastical, Arabian Nights creatures equally blessed and cursed with glamour. Nahin the matchmaker seems old and tired as a god, knotting and unknotting yts fingers over the papers on the coffee table – ‘The bloody drugs, darlings’ – occasionally breaking into great spasmodic shudders. It’s one way of avoiding the Wife Game , Jasbir thinks.

Nahin slides sheets of paper around on the tabletop. The documents are patterned as rich as damask with convoluted chartings of circles and spirals annotated in inscrutable alphabets. There is a photograph of a woman in each top right corner. The women are young and handsome but have the wide-eyed expressions of being photographed for the first time.

‘Now, I’ve performed all the calculations and these five are both compatible and auspicious,’ Nahin says. Yt clears a large gobbet of phlegm from yts throat.

‘I notice they’re all from the country,’ says Jasbir’s father.

‘Country ways are good ways,’ says Jasbir’s mother.

Wedged between them on the short sofa, Jasbir looks over Nahin’s shawled shoulder to where Ram Tarun Das stands in the doorway. He raises his eyebrows, shakes his head.

‘Country girls are better breeders,’ Nahin says. ‘You said dynasty was a concern. You’ll also find a closer match in jati and in general they settle for a much more reasonable dowry than a city girl. City girls want it all. Me me me. No good ever comes of selfishness.’

The nute’s long fingers stir the country girls around the coffee table, then slide three toward Jasbir and his family. Dadaji and Mamaji sit forward. Jasbir slumps back. Ram Tarun Das folds his arms, rolls his eyes.

‘These three are the best starred,’ Nahin says. ‘I can arrange a meeting with their parents almost immediately. There would be some small expenditure in their coming up to Delhi to meet with you; this would be in addition to my fee.’

In a flicker, Ram Tarun Das is behind Jasbir, his whisper a startle in his ear.

‘There is a line in the Western wedding vows: speak now or forever hold your peace.’