Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The Krishna Cops have been put in to bat by Parks and Cemeteries. Thacker is in the middle of the batting order, but Parks and Cemeteries pace bowler Chaudry and the lumpy wicket is making short work of the department’s openers. One on his way to the painted wooden pavilion, and Thacker striding towards the crease, pulling on his gloves, taking his place, lining up his bat. He is very handsome in his whites, Esha thinks. He runs a couple of desultory ones with his partner at the other end, then a new over. Clop of ball on willow. A rich, sweet sound. A couple of safe returns. Then the bowler lines and brings his arm round in a windmill. The ball gets a sweet mad bounce. Thacker fixes it with his eye, steps back, takes it in the middle of the bat and drives it down, hard, fast, bounding towards the boundary rope that kicks it into the air for a cheer and a flurry of applause and a four. And Esha is on her feet, hands raised to applaud, cheering. The score clicks over the on the big board, and she is still on her feet, alone of all the audience. For directly across the ground, in front of the sight screens, is a tall, elegant figure in black, wearing a red turban.

Him. Impossibly, him. Looking right at her, through the white-clad players as if they were ghosts. And very slowly, he lifts a finger and taps it to his right ear.

She knows what she’ll find but she must raise her fingers in echo, feel with horror the coil of plastic overlooked in her excitement to get to the game, nestled accusing in her hair like a snake.

‘So, who won the cricket then?’

‘Why do you need to ask me? If it were important to you, you’d know. Like you can know anything you really want to.’

‘You don’t know? Didn’t you stay to the end? I thought the point of sport was who won. What other reason would you have to follow intra-civil service cricket?’

If Puri the maid were to walk into the living room, she would see a scene from a folk tale: a woman shouting and raging at silent dead air. But Puri does her duties and leaves as soon as she can. She’s not easy in a house of djinns.

‘Sarcasm is it now? Where did you learn that? Some sarcasm aeai you’ve made part of yourself? So now there’s another part of you I don’t know, that I’m supposed to love? Well, I don’t like it and I won’t love it because it makes you look petty and mean and spiteful.’

‘There are no aeais for that. We have no need for those emotions. If I learned these, I learned them from humans.’

Esha lifts her hand to rip away the ’hoek, hurl it against the wall.

‘No!’

So far Rao has been voice-only, now the slanting late-afternoon golden light stirs and curdles into the body of her husband.

‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Don’t… banish me. I do love you.’

‘What does that mean?’ Esha screams ‘You’re not real! None of this is real! It’s just a story we made up because we wanted to believe it. Other people, they have real marriages, real lives, real sex. Real… children.’

‘Children. Is that what it is? I thought the fame, the attention was the thing, that there never would be children to ruin your career and your body. But if that’s no longer enough, we can have children, the best children I can buy.’

Esha cries out, a keen of disappointment and frustration. The neighbours will hear. But the neighbours have been hearing everything, listening, gossiping. No secrets in the city of djinns.

‘Do you know what they’re saying, all those magazines and chati shows? What they’re really saying? About us, the djinn and his wife?’

‘I know!’ For the first time, A. J. Rao’s voice, so sweet, so reasonable inside her head, is raised. ‘I know what every one of them says about us. Esha, have I ever asked anything of you?’

‘Only to dance.’

‘I’m asking one more thing of you now. It’s not a big thing. It’s a small thing, nothing really. You say I’m not real, what we have is not real. That hurts me, because at some level it’s true. Our worlds are not compatible. But it can be real. There is a chip, new technology, a protein chip. You get it implanted, here.’ Rao raises his hand to his third eye. ‘It would be like the ’hoek, but it would always be on. I could always be with you. We would never be apart. And you could leave your world and enter mine…’

Esha’s hands are at her mouth, holding in the horror, the bile, the sick vomit of fear. She heaves, retches. Nothing. No solid, no substance, just ghosts and djinns. Then she rips her ’hoek from the sweet spot behind her ear and there is blessed silence and blindness. She holds the little device in her two hands and snaps it cleanly in two.

Then she runs from her house.

Not Neeta not Priya, not snippy Pranh in yts gharana, not Madhuri, a smoke-blackened hulk in a life-support chair, and no not ever her mother, even though Esha’s feet remember every step to her door; never the basti. That’s death.

One place she can go.

But he won’t let her. He’s there in the phatphat, his face in the palm of her hands, voice scrolling, silently in a ticker across the smart fabric: come back, I’m sorry, come back, let’s talk, come back, I didn’t mean to, come back. Hunched in the back of the little yellow and black plastic bubble she clenches his face into a fist but she can still feel him, feel his face, his mouth next to her skin. She peels the palmer from her hand. His mouth moves silently. She hurls him into the traffic. He vanishes under truck tires.

And still he won’t let her go. The phatphat spins into Connaught Circus’s vast gyratory and his face is on every single one of the video-silk screens hung across the curving fac¸ades. Twenty A. J. Raos greater, lesser, least, miming in sync.

Esha Esha come back, say the rolling news tickers. We can try something else. Talk to me. Any ISO, any palmer, anyone…

Infectious paralysis spreads across Connaught Circus. First the people who notice things like fashion ads and chati-screens; then the people who notice other people, then the traffic, noticing all the people on the pavements staring up, mouths fly-catching. Even the phatphat driver is staring. Connaught Circus is congealing into a clot of traffic: if the heart of Delhi stops, the whole city will seize and die.

‘Drive on drive on,’ Esha shouts at her driver. ‘I order you to drive.’ But she abandons the autorickshaw at the end of Sisganj Road and pushes through the clogged traffic the final half-kilometre to Manmohan Singh Buildings. She glimpses Thacker pressing through the crowd, trying to rendezvous with the police motorbike sirening a course through the traffic. In desperation she thrusts up an arm, shouts out his name and rank. At last, he turns. They beat towards each other through the chaos.

‘Mrs Rathore, we are facing a major incursion incident…’

‘My husband, Mr Rao, he has gone mad…’

‘Mrs Rathore, please understand, by our standards, he never was sane. He is an aeai.’

The motorbike wails its horns impatiently. Thacker waggles his head to the driver, a woman in police leathers and helmet: in a moment in a moment. He seizes Esha’s hand, pushes her thumb into his palmer-gloved hand.

‘Apartment 1501. I’ve keyed it to your thumbprint. Open the door to no one, accept no calls, do not use any communications or entertainment equipment. Stay away from the balcony. I’ll return as quickly as I can.’

Then he swings up onto the pillion, the driver walks her machine round and they weave off into the gridlock.

The apartment is modern and roomy and bright and clean for a man on his own, well furnished and decorated with no signs of a Krishna Cop’s work brought home of an evening. It hits her in the middle of the big living-room floor with the sun pouring in. Suddenly she is on her knees on the Kashmiri rug, shivering, clutching herself, bobbing up and down to sobs so wracking they have no sound. This time the urge to vomit it all up cannot be resisted. When it is out of her – not all of it, it will never all come out – she looks out from under her hanging, sweat-soaked hair, breath still shivering in her aching chest. Where is this place? What has she done? How could she have been so stupid, so vain and senseless and blind? Games games, children’s pretending, how could it ever have been? I say it is and it is so: look at me! At me!