Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

Audio-only. ‘I trust the car is acceptable?’ Same smooth-suave voice. She can’t imagine any opponent being able to resist that voice in negotiation.

‘It’s wonderful. Very luxurious. Very high status.’ She’s out in the bastis now, slums deeper and meaner than the one she grew up in. Newer. The newest ones always look the oldest. Boys chug past on a home-brew chhakda they’ve scavenged from tractor parts. The cream Lex carefully detours around emaciated cattle with angular hips jutting through stretched skin like engineering. Everywhere, drought dust lies thick on the crazed hardtop. This is a city of stares. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the conference?’

A laugh, inside her auditory centre.

‘Oh, I am hard at work winning water for Bharat, believe me. I am nothing if not an assiduous civil servant.’

‘You’re telling me you’re there, and here?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing for us to be in more than one place at the same time. There are multiple copies of me, and subroutines.’

‘So which is the real you?’

‘They are all the real me. In fact, not one of my avatars is in Delhi at all, I am distributed over a series of dharma-cores across Varanasi and Patna.’ He sighs. It sounds close and weary and warm as a whisper in her ear. ‘You find it difficult to comprehend a distributed consciousness; it is every bit as hard for me to comprehend a discrete, mobile consciousness. I can only copy myself through what you call cyberspace, which is the physical reality of my universe, but you move through dimensional space and time.’

‘So which one of you loves me then?’ The words are out, wild, loose and unconsidered. ‘I mean, as a dancer, that is.’ She’s filling, gabbling. ‘Is there one of you who particularly appreciates Kathak?’ Polite polite words, like you’d say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta’s and Priya’s hideous match-making soir’es. Don’t be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man’s world, now. But she hears glee bubble in A. J. Rao’s voice.

‘Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha.’

Her name. He used her name.

It’s a shitty street of pi-dogs and men lounging on charpoys scratching themselves but the chauffeur insists, here, this way memsahib. She picks her way down a gali lined with unsteady minarets of old car tyres. Burning ghee and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A. J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. ‘Memsahib.’

She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the charbagh are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn: the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks towards the crack-roofed pavilion at the centre where paths and water channels meets, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.

‘The Shalimar Gardens,’ says A. J. Rao in the base of her skull. ‘Paradise as a walled garden.’

And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the charbagh channels which shiver with water. The tiered roof of the pavilion gleams with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into malis sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.

Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. ‘Oh,’ she says, numb with wonder. ‘Oh!’

‘A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favourite places in all India, even though it’s almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it’s an evening stroll for the basti people. The past is a passion of mine; it’s easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me.’

Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A. J. Rao. No, she thinks, never flesh. A djinn. A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster. Then trick me.

‘It is as the old Urdu poets declare,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘Paradise is indeed contained within a wall.’

It is far past four but she can’t sleep. She lies naked – shameless – but for the ’hoek behind her ear on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name. Esha.

She’s up, kneeling on the bed, hand to ’hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.

‘I’m here.’ A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.

‘It’s late, I know, I’m sorry…’

She looks across the room into the palmer’s camera.

‘It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep.’ A tone in that voice. ‘What is it?’

‘The mission is a failure.’

She kneels in the centre of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.

‘The conference? What? What happened?’ She whispers, he speaks in her head.

‘It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing. We will return to Varanasi in the morning.’

Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself, stupid, romantic girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much is he is at Red Fort assisting his human superiors.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?’

‘People will always disappoint you.’

A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.

‘How very… disembodied of you Esha.’ Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. ‘Will you dance for me?’

‘What, here? Now?’

‘Yes. I need something… embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful.’

Need. A creature with the powers of a god, needs. But Esha’s suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.

‘Music…’ she stammers. ‘I can’t perform without music…’ The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over tabla, sarangi and bansuri. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bed-cover. They cannot see you, they don’t even exist, except in your head. And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice. Terrible driven things, musicians.

‘I’ve incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night,’ A. J. Rao says. ‘A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals.’