Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely-moving night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver dropped into my ear.

I was terribly afraid.

Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jewelled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.

‘My goddess,’ he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.

The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a horse’s, but delicately upcurved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.

How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten-year-old boy?

Servants and dressers held me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.

‘Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,’ Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a red thornless rose between his fingers. ‘Old school. It’s dissociative disorder these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviours. It was what you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Splitting.’

Night in the gardens of the dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on silver thalis were medjool dates, halva – crisp with flies – folded paan. A security robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.

Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behaviour. Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat – what need had the wife of Brahmin for crude cash? – I did not know where to direct it. Yet some demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of hastening travellers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second skull, full of the awful realisation of what I had done.

A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the ’hoek behind my ear. Ashok , I wrote across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!

‘I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be many, why can’t I just be one? Be me?’ I beat the heels of my hands on my forehead in frustration. ‘Make me well, make me right!’ Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot chai in the first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of the Shakya River. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. How else could anyone could survive being a goddess?

Goddess. My Goddess.

Ashok could not understand. ‘Would you cure a singer of his talent? There is no madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.

‘Have you thought what you’re going to do?’

I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.

‘Maybe for a while, if you could…’

‘It’s not a good time… Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next ten years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values still count in Awadh. You should know.’

I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, ‘Where can I go?’

The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees by the roll for an ex-goddess.

Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.

‘I have a place in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking terms.’

‘Oh thank you, thank you…’ I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the water garden, he was sweating freely.

‘It’s not a gift. It’s… employment. A job.’

‘A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I will. What is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do it…’

‘There are commodities I need transported.’

‘What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t mater, I can carry anything.’

‘Aeais.’ He rolled a paan from the silver dish. ‘I’m not going to wait around for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication ’ware.’

‘The Hamilton Acts,’ I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most of Ashok’s mumbles and rants meant.

‘Word is, everything above level 2.5.’ Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes widened as the paan curled through his skull.

‘Of course, I will do anything I can to help.’

‘I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.’ He touched his right forefinger to his third eye.

I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out there beyond the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair back.