Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The road was one vast train of trucks, winding in and out of the bluffs, looping back on itself, all the while climbing, climbing. The gears on the old bus whined. The engine strove. I loved that sound, of engines fighting gravity. It was the sound of my earliest recollection, before the child-assessors came up a road just like this to Shukya. Trains of trucks and buses in the night. I looked out at the roadside dhabas, the shrines of piled rocks, the tattered prayer banners bent in the wind, the cableways crossing the chocolate-creamy river far below, skinny kids kicking swaying wire cages across the high wires. So familiar, so alien to the demons that shared my skull.

The baby must have been crying for some time before the noise rose above the background hubbub of the bus. The mother was two rows ahead of me, she shushed and swung and soothed the tiny girl but the cries were becoming screams.

It was Nasatya who made me get out of my seat and go to her.

‘Give her to me,’ I said and there must have been some tone of command from the medical aeai in my voice for she passed me the baby without a thought. I pulled back the sheet in which she was wrapped. The little girl’s belly was painfully bloated, her limbs floppy and waxen.

‘She’s started getting colic when she eats,’ the mother said but before she could stop me I pulled away her napkin. The stench was abominable; the shit bulky and pale.

‘What are you feeding her?’

The woman held up a roti bread, chewed at the edges to soften it for a baby. I pushed my fingers into the baby’s mouth to force it open though Vaishvanara the nutritionist already knew what we would find. The tongue was blotched red, pimpled with tiny ulcers.

‘This has only started since you began giving her solid food?’ I said. The mother waggled her head in agreement. ‘This child has ceoliac disease,’ I pronounced. The woman put her hands to her face in horror, began to rock and wail. ‘Your child will be fine, you must just stop feeding her bread, anything made from any grain except rice. She cannot process the proteins in wheat and barley. Feed her rice, rice and vegetables and she will brighten up right away.’

The entire bus was staring as I went back to my seat. The woman and her baby got off at Naubise. The child was still wailing, weak now from its rage, but the woman raised a hand to me. I had come to Nepal with no destination, no plan or hope, just a need to be back. But an idea was already forming.

Beyond Naubise the road climbed steadily, switching back and forth over the buttresses of the mountains that embraced Kathmandu. Evening was coming on. Looking back I could see the river of headlights snaking across the mountainside. When the bus ground around another hairpin bend, I could see the same snake climb up ahead of me in red taillights. The bus laboured up a long steep climb. I could hear, everyone could hear, the noise in the engine that should not have been there. Up we crawled, to the high saddle where the watershed divided, right to the valley of Kathmandu, left to Pokhara and the High Himalaya. Slower, slower. We could all smell the burning insulation, hear the rattling.

It was not me who rushed to the driver and his mate. It was the demon Trivasti.

‘Stop stop at once!’ I cried. ‘Your alternator has seized! You will burn us up.’

The driver pulled into the narrow draw, up against the raw rock. On the offside, trucks passed with millimetres to spare. We got the hood up. We could see the smoke wafting from the alternator. The men shook their heads and pulled out palmers. The passengers piled to the front of the bus to stare and talk.

‘No no no, give me a wrench,’ I ordered.

The driver stared but I shook my outstretched hand, demanding. Perhaps he remembered the crying baby. Perhaps he was thinking about how long it would take a repair truck to come up from Kathmandu. Perhaps he was thinking about how good it would be to be home with his wife and children. He slapped the monkey wrench into my hand. In less than a minute I had the belt off and the alternator disconnected.

‘Your bearings have seized,’ I said. ‘It’s a persistent fault on pre-2030 models. A hundred metres more and you would have burned her out. You can drive her on the battery. There’s enough in it to get you down to Kathmandu.’

They stared at this little girl in an Indian sari, head covered but sleeves of her choli rolled up and fingers greasy with biolube.

The demon returned to his place and it was clear as the darkening sky what I would do now. The driver and his mate called out to me as I walked up beside the line of vehicles to the head of the pass. We ignored them. Passing drivers sounded their multiple, musical horns, offered lifts. I walked on. I could see the top now. It was not far to the place where the three roads divided. Back to India, down to the city, up to the mountains.

There was a chai-dhaba at the wide, oil-stained place where vehicles turned. It was bright with neon signs for American drinks and Bharati mineral water, like something fallen from the stars. A generator chugged. A television burbled familiar, soft Nepali news. The air smelled of hot ghee and biodiesel.

The owner did not know what to make of me, strange little girl in my Indian finery. Finally he said, ‘Fine night.’

It was. Above the smogs and soots of the valley, the air was magically clear. I could see for a lifetime in any direction. To the west the sky held a little last light. The great peaks of Manaslu and Anapurna glowed mauve against the blue.

‘It is,’ I said. ‘Oh it is.’

Traffic pushed slowly past, never ceasing on this high cross-roads of the world. I stood in the neon flicker of the dhaba, looking long at the mountains and I thought, I shall live there . We shall live in a wooden house close to trees, with running water cold from high snow. We shall have a fire and a television for company and prayer banners flying in the wind and in time people will stop being afraid and will come up the path to our door. There are many ways to be divine. There is the big divine, of ritual and magnificence and blood and terror. Ours shall be a little divinity, of small miracles and everyday wonders. Machines mended, programs woven, people healed, homes designed, minds and bodies fed. I shall be a little goddess. In time, the story of me will spread and people come from all over; Nepalis and foreigners, travellers and hikers and monks. Maybe one day a man who is not afraid. That would be good. But if he does not come, that will be good also, for I shall never be alone, not with a houseful of demons.

Then I found I was running, with the surprised chai-wallah calling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’ after me, running down the side of the slow-moving line of traffic, banging on the doors, ‘Hi! Hi! Pokhara! Pokhara!’, slipping and sliding over the rough gravel, towards the far, bright mountains.

Once there was a woman in Delhi who married a djinn. Before the water war that was not so strange a thing. Delhi, split in two like a brain, has been the city of djinns from time before time. The Sufis tell that God made two creations, one of clay and one of fire. That of clay became man; that of fire, the djinni. As creatures of fire they have always been drawn to Delhi, seven times reduced to ashes by invading empires, seven times reincarnating itself. Each turn of the chakra, the djinns have drawn strength from the flames, multiplying and dividing. Great dervishes and brahmins are able to see them but on any street, at any time, anyone may catch the whisper and momentary wafting warmth of a djinn passing.

I was born in Ladakh, far from the heat of the djinns – they have wills and whims quite alien to humans – but my mother was Delhi born and raised, and from her I knew its circuses and boulevards, its maidans and chowks and bazaars, like those of my own Leh. Delhi to me was a city of stories, and so if I tell the story of the djinn’s wife in the manner of a Sufi legend or a tale from the Mahabharata, or even a tivi soap opera, that is how it seems to me: City of Djinns.