Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

Brihaspati showed me what they would do to the circuits in my head.

Help me! I prayed to my gods. And Maya, architect of the demons, answered me. Its memories were my memories and it remembered rendering an architectural simulation of this station long before robot construction spiders started to spin their nanodiamond web. Two visions of Varanasi Station, superimposed. With one difference that might save my life. Maya’s showed me the inside of things. The inside of the platform. The drain beneath the hatch between the rear of the chai-booth and the roof support.

I pushed through the men to the small dead space at the rear. I hesitated before I knelt beside the hatch. One surge of the crowd, one trip, one fall, and I would be crushed. The hatch was jammed shut with dirt. Nails broke, nails tore as I scrabbled it loose and heaved it up. The smell that came up from the dark square was so foul I almost vomited. I forced myself in, dropped a metre into shin-deep sludge. The rectangle of light showed me my situation. I was mired in excrement. The tunnel forced me to crawl but the end of it was promise, the end of it was a semi-circle of daylight. I buried my hands in the soft sewage. This time I did retch up my bed-tea. I crept forward, trying not to choke. It was vile beyond anything I had ever experienced. But not so vile as having your skull opened and knives slice away slivers of your brain. I crawled on my hands and knees under the tracks of Varanasi Station, to the light, to the light, to the light, and out through the open conduit into the cess lagoon where pigs and rag-pickers rooted in the shoals of drying human manure.

I washed as clean as I could in the shrivelled canal. Dhobiwallahs beat laundry against stone slabs. I tried to ignore Nasatya’s warnings about the hideous infections I might have picked up.

I was to meet Ashok’s girl on the street of gajras. Children sat in doorways and open shop fronts threading marigolds onto needles. The work was too cheap even for robots. Blossoms spilled from bushels and plastic cases. My phatphat’s tyres slipped on wet rose petals. We drove beneath a canopy of gajra garlands that hung from poles above the shop-fronts. Everywhere was the smell of dead, rotting flowers. The phatphat turned into a smaller, darker alley and into the back of a mob. The driver pressed his hand to the horn. The people reluctantly gave him way. The alcofuel engine whined. We crept forward. Open space, then a police jawan stepped forward to bar our way. He wore full combat armour. Brihaspati read the glints of data flickering across his visor: deployments, communications, an arrest warrant. I pulled my dupatta over my head and lower face as the driver talked to him. What’s going on? Some badmash. Some dataraja.

Down the street of gajras, uniformed police led by a plain-clothes Krishna Cop burst open a door. Their guns were drawn. In the same breath, the shutters of the jharoka immediately above crashed up. A figure jumped up onto the wooden rail. Behind me, the crowd let out a vast roaring sigh. There he is there the badmash oh look look it’s a girl!

From the folds of my dupatta I saw Ashok’s girli teeter there an instant, then jump up and grab a washing line. It snapped and swung her ungently down through racks of marigold garlands into the street. She crouched a moment, saw the police, saw the crowd, saw me, then turned and ran. The jawan started toward her but there was another quicker, deadlier. A woman screamed as the robot bounded from the rooftop into the alley. Chrome legs pistoned, its insect head bobbed, locked on. Marigold petals flew up around the fleeing girl but everyone knew she could not escape the killing thing. One step, two step, it was behind her. I saw her glance over her shoulder as the robot unsheathed its blade.

I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before, in the petal-strewn streets of Kathmandu, as I rode my litter among my gods and Kumarimas.

The blade flashed. A great cry from the crowd. The girl’s head bounded down the alley. A great jet of blood. Sacrificial blood. The headless body took one step, two.

I slipped from the phatphat and stole away through the transfixed crowd.

I saw the completion of the story on a news channel at a chai-dhaba by the tank on Scindia ghat. The tourists, the faithful, the vendors and funeral parties were my camouflage. I sipped chai from a plastic cup and watched the small screen above the bar. The sound was low but I could understand well enough from the pictures. Delhi police break up a notorious aeai smuggling ring. In a gesture of Bharati-Awadhi friendship, Varanasi Krishna Cops make a series of arrests. The camera cut away before the robot struck. The final shot was of Ashok, pushed down into a Delhi police car in plastic handcuffs.

I went to sit on the lowest ghat. The river would still me, the river would guide me. It was of the same substance as me, divinity. Brown water swirled at my be-ringed toes. That water could wash away all earthly sin. On the far side of the holy river, tall chimneys poured yellow smoke into the sky. A tiny round-faced girl came up to me, offered me marigold gajras to buy. I waved her away. I saw again this river, these ghats, these temples and boats as I had when I lay in my wooden room in my palace in Durbar Square. I saw now the lie Tall Kumarima’s palmer had fed me. I had thought India a jewelled skirt, laid out for me to wear. It was a bride-buyer with an envelope of rupees, it was walking the Silken Wall until feet cracked and bled. It was a husband with the body of a child and the appetites of a man warped by his impotence. It was a saviour who had always only wanted me for my sickness. It was a young girl’s head rolling in a gutter.

Inside this still-girl’s head, my demons were silent. They could see as well as I that that there would never be a home for us in Bharat, Awadh, Maratha, any nation of India.

North of Nayarangadh the road rose through wooded ridges, climbing steadily up to Mugling where it turned and clung to the side of the Trisuli’s steep valley. It was my third bus in as many days. I had a routine now. Sit at the back, wrap my dupatta round me, look out the window. Keep my hand on my money. Say nothing.

I picked up the first bus outside Jaunpur. After emptying Ashok’s account, I thought it best to leave Varanasi as inconspicuously as possible. I did not need Brihaspati to show me the hunter aeais howling after me. Of course they would have the air, rail and bus stations covered. I rode out of the Holy City in an unlicensed taxi. The driver seemed pleased with the size of the tip. The second bus took me from Gorakhpur through the dhal fields and banana plantations to Nautanwa on the border. I had deliberately chosen small, out-of-the-way Nautanwa, but still I bowed my head and shuffled my feet as I came up to the Sikh emigration officer behind his tin counter. I held my breath. He waved me through without even a glance at my identity card.

I walked up the gentle slope and across the border. Had I been blind, I would have known at once when I crossed into my country. The great roar that had followed me as close as my own skin fell silent so abruptly it seemed to echo. The traffic did not blare its way through all obstacles. It steered, it sought ways around pedestrians and sacred cows lolling in the middle of the road, chewing. People were polite in the bureau where I changed my Bharati rupees for Nepalese; did not press and push and try to sell me things I did not want in the shop where I bought a bag of greasy samosas; smiled shyly to me in the cheap hotel where I hired a room for the night. Did not demand demand demand.

I slept so deeply that it felt like a fall through endless white sheets that smelled of sky. In the morning the third bus came to take me up to Kathmandu.