Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘You can swap bits of yourself in and out?’ Esha asks. The tabla player has started a slow Natetere tap-beat on the dayan drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, they will be counting. It’s hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can’t hear; no one can hear but her. And A. J. Rao. The sarangi player sets his bow to the strings, the bansuri lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A sangeet, but not one she has ever heard before.

‘It’s making it up!’

‘It’s a composition aeai. Do you recognise the sources?’

‘Krishna and the gopis.’ One of the classic Kathak themes: Krishna’s seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the bansuri, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.

‘Will you dance, lady?’

And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly, girli. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the one hundred and eight gopis, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape mudras, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn’t feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh’s cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the tabla, the beat of dayan and bayan. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A. J. Rao did not chose this Kathak wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.

Light wakes her. She is sticky, naked, embarrassed. The house staff could find her. And she has a killing headache. Water. Water. Joints nerves sinews plead for it. She pulls on a Chinese silk robe. On her way to the kitchen, the voyeur eye of her palmer blinks at her. No erotic dream then, no sweat hallucination stirred out of heat and hydrocarbons. She danced Krishna and the one hundred and eight gopis in her bedroom for an aeai. A message. There’s a number. You can call me.

Throughout the history of the eight Delhis there have been men – and almost always men – skilled in the lore of djinns. They are wise to their many forms and can see beneath the disguises they wear on the streets – donkey, monkey, dog, scavenging kite – to their true selves. They know their roosts and places where they congregate – they are particularly drawn to mosques – and know that that unexplained heat as you push down a gali behind the Jama Masjid is djinns, packed so tight you can feel their fire as you push through them. The wisest – the strongest – of fakirs know their names and so can capture and command them. Even in the old India, before the break-up into Awadh and Bharat and Rajputana and the United States of Bengal – there were saints who could summon djinns to fly on their backs from one end of Hindustan to the other in a night. In my own Leh there was an aged aged Sufi who cast one hundred and eight djinns out of a troubled house: twenty-seven in the living room, twenty-seven in the bedroom and fifty-four in the kitchen. With so many djinns there was no room for anyone else. He drove them off with burning yoghurt and chillis but warned: do not toy with djinns, for they do nothing without a price, and though that may be years in the asking, ask it they surely will.

Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais. If the djinni are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi’s boulevards and chowks: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi’s nervous system each second. The city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of the time; they are a young, energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power.

The djinns watch in dismay from their rooftops and minarets: that such powerful creatures of living word should so blindly serve the clay creation, but mostly because, unlike humans, they can foresee the time when the aeais will drive them from their ancient, beloved city and take their places.

This durbar, Neeta’s and Priya’s theme is Town and Country : the Bharati mega-soap that has perversely become fashionable as public sentiment in Awadh turns against Bharat. Well, we will just bloody well build our dam, tanks or no tanks; they can beg for it, it’s our water now, and, in the same breath, what do you think about Ved Prakash, isn’t it scandalous what that Ritu Parvaaz is up to? Once they derided it and its viewers but now that it’s improper, now that’s unpatriotic, they can’t get enough of Anita Mahapatra and the Begum Vora. Some still refuse to watch but pay for daily plot digests so they can appear fashionably informed at social musts like Neeta’s and Priya’s dating durbars.

And it’s a grand durbar; the last before the monsoon – if it actually happens this year. Neeta and Priya have hired top bhati-boys to provide a wash of mixes beamed straight into the guests’ ’hoeks. There’s even a climate control field, labouring at the limits of its containment to hold back the night heat. Esha can feel its ultrasonics as a dull buzz against her molars.

‘Personally, I think sweat becomes you,’ says A. J. Rao, reading Esha’s vital signs through her palmer. Invisible to all but Esha, he moves beside her like death through the press of Town and Country -fied guests. By tradition the last durbar of the season is a masked ball. In modern, middle-class Delhi that means everyone wears the computer-generated semblance of a soap character. In the flesh they are the socially mobile dressed in smart-but-cool hot season modes, but in the mind’s eye, they are Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala, dashing Govind and conniving Dr Chatterji. There are three Ved Prakashs and as many Lal Darfans, the aeai actor that plays Ved Prakash in the machine-made soap. Even the grounds of Neeta’s fianc’s suburban bungalow have been enchanted into Brahmpur, the fictional town of Town and Country , where the actors that play the characters believe they live out their lives of celebrity tittle-tattle. When Neeta and Priya judge that everyone has mingled and networked enough, the word will be given and everyone will switch off their glittering disguises and return to being wholesalers and lunch vendors and software rajahs. Then the serious stuff begins, the matter of finding a bride. For now Esha can enjoy wandering anonymously in the company of her friendly djinn.

She has been wandering much these weeks, through heat streets to ancient places, seeing her city fresh through the eyes of a creature that lives across many spaces and times. At the Sikh gurdwara she saw Tegh Bahadur, the Ninth Guru, beheaded by fundamentalist Aurangzeb’s guards. The gyring traffic around Vijay Chowk melted into the Bentley cavalcade of Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy, as he forever quit Lutyen’s stupendous palace. The tourist clutter and shoving curio vendors around the Qutb Minar turned to ghosts and it was 1193 and the muezzins of the first Mughal conquerors sang out the adhaan. Illusions. Little lies. But it is all right, when it is done in love. Everything is all right in love. Can you read my mind? she asked as she moved with her invisible guide through the thronging streets, that every day grew less raucous, less substantial. Do you know what I am thinking about you, aeai Rao? Little by little, she slips away from the human world into the city of the djinns.