Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

She barely hears the applause as she curtsies to the bright lights and runs off stage. In the dressing room as her assistants remove and carefully fold the many jewelled layers of her costume, wipe away the crusted stage makeup to reveal the twenty-two-year-old beneath, her attention keeps flicking to her lighthoek, curled like a plastic question on her dressing table. In jeans and silk sleeveless vest, indistinguishable from any other of Delhi’s four million twentysomethings, she coils the device behind her ear, smoothes her hair over it and her fingers linger a moment as she slides the palmer over her hand. No calls. No messages. No avatars. She’s surprised it matters so much.

The official Mercs are lined up in the Delhi Gate. A man and woman intercept her on her way to the car. She waves them away.

‘I don’t do autographs…’ Never after a performance. Get out, get away quick and quiet, disappear into the city. The man opens his palm to show her a warrant badge.

‘We’ll take this car.’

It pulls out from the line and cuts in, a cream-coloured highmarque Maruti. The man politely opens the door to let her enter first but there is no respect in it. The woman takes the front seat beside the driver; he accelerates out, horn blaring, into the great circus of night traffic around the Red Fort. The airco purrs.

‘I am Inspector Thacker from the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing,’ the man says. He is young and good-skinned and confident and not at all fazed by sitting next to a celebrity. His aftershave is perhaps overemphatic.

‘A Krishna Cop.’

That makes him wince.

‘Our surveillance systems have flagged up a communication between you and the Bharati Level 2.9 aeai A. J. Rao.’

‘He called me, yes.’

‘At 21:08. You were in contact for six minutes twenty-two seconds. Can you tell me what you talked about?’

The car is driving very fast for Delhi. The traffic seems to flow around it. Every light seems to be green. Nothing is allowed to impede its progress. Can they do that? Esha wonders. Krishna Cops, aeai police: can they tame the creatures they hunt?

‘We talked about Kathak. He’s a fan. Is there a problem? Have I done something wrong?’

‘No, nothing at all, Ms But you do understand, with a conference of this importance… On behalf of the department, I apologise for the unseemliness. Ah. Here we are.’

They’ve brought her right to her bungalow. Feeling dirty, dusty, confused she watches the Krishna Cop car drive off, holding Delhi’s frenetic traffic at bay with its tame djinns. She pauses at the gate. She needs, she deserves, a moment to come out from the performance, that little step away so you can turn round and look back at yourself and say, yeah, Esha Rathore. The bungalow is unlit, quiet. Neeta and Priya will be out with their wonderful fianc’s, talking wedding gifts and guest lists and how hefty a dowry they can squeeze from their husbands-to-be’s families. They’re not her sisters, though they share the classy bungalow. No one has sisters any more in Awadh, or even Bharat. No one of Esha’s age, though she’s heard the balance is being restored. Daughters are fashionable. One upon a time, women paid the dowry.

She breathes deep of her city. The cool garden microclimate presses down the roar of the Delhi to a muffled throb, like blood in the heart. She can smell dust and roses. Rose of Persia. Flower of the Urdu poets. And dust. She imagines it rising up on a whisper of wind, spinning into a charming, dangerous djinn. No. An illusion, a madness of a mad old city. She opens the security gate and finds every square centimetre of the compound filled with red roses.

Neeta and Priya are waiting for her at the breakfast table next morning, sitting side-by-side close like an interview panel. Or Krishna Cops. For once they aren’t talking houses and husbands.

‘Who who who where did they come from who sent them so many must have cost a fortune…’

Puri the housemaid brings Chinese green chai that’s good against cancer. The sweeper has gathered the bouquets into a pile at one end of the compound. The sweet of their perfume is already tinged with rot.

‘He’s a diplomat.’ Neeta and Priya only watch Town and Country and the chati channels but even they must know the name of A. J. Rao. So she half lies. ‘A Bharati diplomat.’

Their mouths go oooh, then ah as they look at each other. Neeta says, ‘You have have have to bring him.’

‘To our durbar,’ says Priya.

‘Yes, our durbar,’ says Neeta. They’ve talked gossiped planned little else for the past two months: their grand joint engagement party where they show off to their as-yet-unmarried girlfriends and make all the single men jealous. Esha excuses her grimace with the bitterness of the health-tea.

‘He’s very busy.’ She doesn’t say busy man. She cannot even think why she is playing these silly girli secrecy games. An aeai called her at the Red Fort to tell her it admired her. Didn’t even meet her. There was nothing to meet. It was all in her head. ‘I’m don’t even know how to get in touch with him. They don’t give their numbers out.’

‘He’s coming,’ Neeta and Priya insist.

She can hardly hear the music for the rattle of the old airco but sweat runs down her sides along the waistband of her Adidas tights to gather in the hollow of her back and slide between the taut curves of her ass. She tries it again across the gharana’s practice floor. Even the ankle bells sound like lead. Last night she touched the three heavens. This morning she feels dead. She can’t concentrate, and that little lavda Pranh knows it, swishing at her with yts cane and gobbing out wads of chewed paan and mealy eunuch curses.

‘Ey! Less staring at your palmer, more mudras! Decent mudras. You jerk my dick, if I still had one.’

Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself – ring, call me, ring, call me, ring, take me out of this – she fires back, ‘If you ever had one.’

Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf a sting.

‘Fuck you, hijra!’ Esha snatches up towel, bag, Palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair. No point changing, the heat out there will soak through anything in a moment. ‘I’m out of here.’

Pranh doesn’t call after her. Yt’s too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.

‘Memsahib Rathore?’

The chauffeur is in full dress and boots. His only concession to the heat is his shades. In bra top and tights and bare skin, she’s melting. ‘The vehicle is fully air-conditioned, memsahib.’

The white leather upholstery is so cool her flesh recoils from its skin.

‘This isn’t the Krishna Cops.’

‘No memsahib.’ The chauffeur pulls out into the traffic. It’s only as the security locks clunk she thinks, Oh Lord Krishna, they could be kidnapping me.

‘Who sent you?’ There’s glass too thick for her fists between her and driver. Even if the doors weren’t locked, a tumble from the car at this speed, in this traffic, would be too much for even a dancer’s lithe reflexes. And she’s lived in Delhi all her life, basti to bungalow, but she doesn’t recognise these streets, this suburb, that industrial park. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Memsahib, where I am not permitted to say for that would spoil the surprise. But I am permitted to tell you that you are the guest of A. J. Rao.’

The palmer calls her name as she finishes freshening up with bottled Kinley from the car-bar.

‘Hello!’ (Kicking back deep into the cool cool white leather, like a filmi star. She is star. A star with a bar in a car.)