Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Ooh. Oh. What? Oh wow, how?’

‘The machine you wear behind your ear can reach deeper than words and visions,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘So, are you answered?’

‘What?’ The bed is drenched in sweat. She’s sticky dirty needs to wash change clothes move, but the afterglows are still fading. Beautiful beautiful colours.

‘The question you never gave me the chance to answer. Yes. I will marry you.’

‘Stupid vain girl, you don’t even know what caste he is.’

Mata Madhuri smokes eighty a day through a plastic tube hooked through the respirator unit into a grommet in her throat. She burns through them three at time: bloody machine scrubs all the good out of them, she says. Last bloody pleasure I have. She used to bribe the nurses but they bring her them free now, out of fear of her temper that grows increasingly vile as her body surrenders more and more to the machines.

Without pause for Esha’s reply, a flick of her whim whips the life-support chair round and out into the garden.

‘Can’t smoke in there, no fresh air.’

Esha follows her out on to the raked gravel of the formal charbagh.

‘No one marries in caste any more.’

‘Don’t be smart, stupid girl. It’s like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian, Lord Krishna protect me. You know fine what I mean. Not a real person.’

‘There are girls younger than me who marry trees, or even dogs.’

‘So bloody clever. That’s up in some god-awful shithole like Bihar or Rajputana, and anyway, those are gods. Any fool knows that. Ach, away with you!’ The old, destroyed woman curses as the chair’s aeai deploys its parasol. ‘Sun sun, I need sun, I’ll be burning soon enough, sandalwood, you hear? You burn me on a sandalwood pyre. I’ll know if you stint.’

Madhuri the old crippled dance teacher always uses this tactic to kill a conversation with which she is uncomfortable. When I’m gone… Burn me sweetly…

‘And what can a god do that A. J. Rao can’t?’

‘Ai! You ungrateful, blaspheming child. I’m not hearing this la la la la la la la la have you finished yet?’

Once a week Esha comes to the nursing home to visit this ruin of a woman, wrecked by the demands a dancer makes of a human body. She’s explored guilt need rage resentment anger pleasure at watching her collapse into long death as the motives that keep her turning up the drive in a phatphat and there is only one she believes. She’s the only mother she has.

‘If you marry that… thing… you will be making a mistake that will destroy your life,’ Madhuri declares, accelerating down the path between the water channels.

‘I don’t need your permission,’ Esha calls after her. A thought spins Madhuri’s chair on its axis.

‘Oh, really? That would be a first for you. You want my blessing. Well, you won’t have it. I refuse to be party to such nonsense.’

‘I will marry A. J. Rao’

‘What did you say?’

‘I. Will. Marry. Aeai. A. J. Rao.’

Madhuri laughs, a dry, dying, spitting sound, full of bidismoke.

‘Well, you almost surprise me. Defiance. Good, some spirit at last. That was always your problem, you always needed everyone to approve, everyone to give you permission, everyone to love you. And that’s what stopped you being great, do you know that, girl? You could have been a devi, but you always held back for fear that someone might not approve. And so you were only ever… good.’

People are looking now, staff, visitors. Patients. Raised voices, unseemly emotions. This is a house of calm, and slow mechanised dying. Esha bends low to whisper to her mentor.

‘I want you to know that I dance for him. Every night. Like Radha for Krishna. I dance just for him, and then he comes and makes love to me. He makes me scream and swear like a hooker. Every night. And look!’ He doesn’t need to call any more; he is hardwired into the ’hoek she now hardly ever takes off. Esha looks up: he is there, standing in a sober black suit among the strolling visitors and droning wheelchairs, hands folded. ‘There he is, see? My lover, my husband.’

A long, keening screech, like feedback, like a machine dying. Madhuri’s withered hands fly to her face. Her breathing tube curdles with tobacco smoke.

‘Monster! Monster! Unnatural child, ah, I should have left you in that basti ! Away from me away away away!’

Esha retreats from the old woman’s mad fury as hospital staff come hurrying across the scorched lawns, white saris flapping.

Every fairytale must have a wedding.

Of course it was the event of the season. The decrepit old Shalimar Gardens were transformed by an army of malis into a sweet, green, watered maharajah’s fantasia with elephants, pavilions, musicians, lancers, dancers, filmi stars and robot bar-tenders. Neeta and Priya were uncomfortable bridesmaids in fabulous frocks; a great brahmin was employed to bless the union of woman and artificial intelligence. Every television network sent cameras, human or aeai. Gleaming presenters checked the guests in and checked the guests out. Chati mag paparazzi came in their crowds, wondering what they could turn their cameras on. There were even politicians from Bharat, despite the souring relationships between the two neighbours now Awadh constructors were scooping up the Ganga sands into revetments. But mostly there were the people of the encroaching bastis, jostling up against the security staff lining the paths of their garden, asking, She’s marrying a what? How does that work? Can they, you know? And what about children? Who is she, actually? Can you see anything? I can’t see anything. Is there anything to see?

But the guests and the great were ’hoeked up and applauded the groom in his golden veil on his white stallion, stepping with the delicacy of a dressage horse up the raked paths. And because they were great and guests, there was not one who, despite the free French champagne from the well-known diplomatic sommelier, would ever say, but there’s no one there. No one was at all surprised that, after the bride left in a stretch limo, there came a dry, sparse thunder, cloud to cloud, and a hot mean wind that swept the discarded invitations along the paths. As they were filing back to their taxis, tankers were draining the expensively filled qanats.

It made lead in the news.

Kathak star weds aeai lover!!! Honeymoon in Kashmir!!!

Above the chowks and minarets of Delhi, the djinns bent together in conference.

He takes her while shopping in Tughluk Mall. Three weeks and the shop girls still nod and whisper. She likes that. She doesn’t like it that they glance and giggle when the Krishna Cops lift her from the counter at the Black Lotus Japanese Import Company.

‘My husband is an accredited diplomat, this is a diplomatic incident.’ The woman in the bad suit pushes her head gently down to enter the car. The ministry doesn’t need personal liability claims.

‘Yes, but you are not, Mrs Rao,’ says Thacker in the back seat. Still wearing that cheap aftershave.

‘Rathore,’ she says. ‘I have retained my stage name. And we shall see what my husband has to say about my diplomatic status.’ She lifts her hand in a mudra to speak to AyJay, as she thinks of him now. Dead air. She performs the wave again.

‘This is a shielded car,’ Thacker says.

The building is shielded also. They take the car right inside, down a ramp into the basement parking lot. It’s a cheap, anonymous glass and titanium block on Parliament Street that she’s driven past ten thousand times on her way to the shops of Connaught Circus without ever noticing. Thacker’s office is on the fifteenth floor. It’s tidy and has a fine view over the astronomical geometries of the Jantar Mantar but smells of food: tiffin snatched at the desk. She checks for photographs of family children wife. Only himself smart in pressed whites for a cricket match.