Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

Protein chips; only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a husband.

So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometres from the nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometres north in Delhi a man in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.

You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you.

I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I now knew were other parts of myself. But I was not afraid of them. In Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; it is the winners who write the history. The universe would look no different had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.

No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. No one but you could endure another mind in there.

The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, jelly-shoes, rings and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me but was afraid of what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and wondered why my life could not be like theirs.

‘It’s grown back well.’ Ashok knelt before me on my cushions in the chhatri. It was his sacred place, his temple. He raised his palmer-gloved hand and touched his forefinger to the tilak over my third eye. I could smell his breath. Onions, garlic, rancid ghee. ‘You may feel a little disoriented…’

I gasped. Senses blurred, fused, melted. I saw heard felt smelled tasted everything as one undifferentiated sensation, as gods and babies sense, wholly and purely. Sounds were coloured, light had texture, smells spoke and chimed. Then I saw myself surge up from my cushions and fall towards the hard white marble. I heard myself cry out. Ashok lunged towards me. Two Ashoks lunged towards. But it was neither of those. I saw one Ashok, with two visions, inside my head. I could not make shape or sense out of my two seeings, I could not tell which was real, which was mine, which was me . Universes away I heard a voice say help me . I saw Ashok’s houseboys lift me and take me to bed. The painted ceiling, patterned with vines and shoots and flowers, billowed above me like monsoon storm clouds, then blossomed into darkness.

In the heat of the night I woke stark, staring, every sense glowing. I knew the position and velocity of each insect in my airy room that smelled of biodiesel, dust and patchouli. I was not alone. There was another under the dome of my skull. Not an awareness, a consciousness; a sense of separateness , a manifestation of myself. An avatar. A demon.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered. My voice sounded loud and full of bells, like Durbar Square. It did not answer – it could not answer, it was not a sentience – but it took me out onto the charbagh water garden. The stars, smudged by pollution, were a dome over me. The crescent moon lay on its back. I looked up and fell into it. Chandra. Mangal. Budh. Guru. Shukra. Shani. Rahu. Ketu. The planets were not points of light, balls of stone and gas; they had names, characters, loves, hatreds. The twenty-seven Nakshatars spun around my head. I saw their shapes and natures, the patterns of connections that bound the stars into relationships and stories and dramas as human and complex as Town and Country . I saw the wheel of the rashis, the Great Houses, arc across the sky, and the whole turning, engines within engines, endless wheels of influence and subtle communication, from the edge of the universe to the centre of the earth I stood upon. Planets, stars, constellations; the story of every human life unfolded itself above me and I could read them all. Every word.

All night I played among the stars.

In the morning, over bed-tea, I asked Ashok, ‘What is it?’

‘A rudimentary Level 1.9. A janampatri aeai, does astrology, runs the permutations. It thinks it lives out there, like some kind of space monkey. It’s not very smart, really. Knows about horoscopes and that’s it. Now get that down you and grab your stuff. You’ve a train to catch’

My reserved seat was in the women’s bogie of the high-speed shatabdi express. Husbands booked their wives on it to protect them from the attentions of the male passengers who assumed every female was single and available. The few career women chose it for the same reason. My fellow passenger across the table from me was a Muslim woman in a formal business shalwar. She regarded me with disdain as we raced across the Ganga plain at three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour. Little simpering wife-thing.

You would not be so quick to judge if you knew what we really were , I thought. We can look into your life and tell you everything that has, is and will ever happen to you, mapped out in the chakras of the stars . In that night among the constellations my demon and I had flowed into each other until there was no place where we could say aeai ended and I began.

I had thought holy Varanasi would sing to me like Kathmandu, a spiritual home, a city of nine million gods and one goddess, riding through the streets in a phatphat. What I saw was another Indian capital of another Indian state; glass towers and diamond domes and industry parks for the big world to notice, slums and bastis at their feet like sewage pigs. Streets began in this millennium and ended in one three before it. Traffic and hoardings and people people people but the diesel smoke leaking in around the edges of my smog mask carried a ghost of incense.

Ashok’s Varanasi agent met me in the Jantar Mantar, the great solar observatory of Jai Singh; sundials and star spheres and shadow discs like modern sculpture. She was little older than me; dressed in a cling-silk top and jeans that hung so low from her hips I could see the valley of her buttocks. I disliked her at once but she touched her palmer-glove to my forehead in the shadows around Jai Singh’s astrological instruments and I felt the stars go out of me. The sky died. I had been holy again and now I was just meat. Ashok’s girli pressed a roll of rupees into my hand. I barely looked at it. I barely heard her instructions to get something to eat, get a kafi, get some decent clothes. I was bereft. I found myself trudging up the steep stone steps of the great Samrat not knowing where I was who I was what I was doing halfway up a massive sundial. Half a me. Then my third eye opened and I saw the river wide and blue before me. I saw the white sands of the eastern shore and the shelters and dung fires of the sadhus. I saw the ghats, the stone river steps, curving away on either side further than the reach of my eyes. And I saw people. People washing and praying, cleaning their clothes and offering puja and buying and selling and living and dying. People in boats and people kneeling, people waist deep in the river, people scooping up silver handfuls of water to pour over their heads. People casting handfuls of marigold flowers onto the stream, people lighting little mango-leaf diya lamps and setting them afloat, people bringing their dead to dip them in the sacred water. I saw the pyres of the burning ghat, I smelled sandalwood, charring flesh, I heard the skull burst, releasing the soul. I had heard that sound before at the old royal burning ghats of Pashupatinath, when the President’s mother died. A soft crack, and free. It was a comforting sound. It made me think of home.