Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

In that street, the people mill. They can’t see this, Esha comprehends. Only me, only me. It is the revenge of the Krishna Cops. Kali raises her scimitars high. Lightning arcs between their tips. She stabs them down into the screen-frozen Town and Country . Esha cries out, momentarily blinded as the Krishna Cops’ hunter-killers track down and excommunicate rogue aeai A. J. Rao. And then they are gone. No gods. The sky is just the sky. The video-silk hoarding is blank, dead.

A vast, godlike roar above her. Esha ducks – now the people in the street are looking at her. All the eyes, all the attention she ever wanted. A tilt-jet in Awadhi air-force chameleo-flage slides over the roof and turns in air over the street, swivelling engine ducts and unfolding wing-tip wheels for landing. It turns its insect head to Esha. In the cockpit is a faceless pilot in a HUD visor. Beside her a woman in a business suit, gesturing for Esha to answer a call. Thacker’s partner. She remembers now.

The jealousy and wrath of djinns.

‘Mrs Rathore, it’s Inspector Kaur.’ She can barely hear her over the scream of ducted fans. ‘Come downstairs to the front of the building. You’re safe now. The aeai has been excommunicated. ’

Excommunicated.

‘Thacker…’

‘Just come downstairs Mrs Rathore. You are safe now, the threat is over.’

The tilt-jet sinks beneath her. As she turns from the rail, Esha feels a sudden, warm touch on her face. Jet-swirl, or maybe just a djinn, passing unresting, unhasting and silent as light.

The Krishna Cops sent us as far from the wrath and caprice of the aeais as they could, to Leh under the breath of the Himalaya. I say us, for I existed; a knot of four cells inside my mother’s womb.

My mother bought a catering business. She was in demand for weddings and shaadis. We might have escaped the aeais and the chaos following Awadh’s signing of the Hamilton Acts but the Indian male’s desperation to find a woman to marry endures forever. I remember that for favoured clients – those who had tipped well, or treated her as something more than a paid contractor, or remembered her face from the chati mags – she would slip off her shoes and dance Radha and Krishna. I loved to see her do it and when I slipped away to the temple of Lord Ram, I would try to copy the steps among the pillars of the mandapa. I remember the brahmins would smile and give me money.

The dam was built and the water war came and was over in a month. The aeais, persecuted on all sides, fled to Bharat where the massive popularity of Town and Country gave them protection, but even there they were not safe: humans and aeais, like humans and djinni, were too different creations and in the end they left Awadh for another place that I do not understand, a world of their own where they are safe and no one can harm them.

And that is all there is to tell in the story of the woman who married a djinn. If it does not have the happy-ever-after ending of Western fairytales and Bollywood musicals, it has a happy-enough ending. This spring I turn twelve and shall head off on the bus to Delhi to join the gharana there. My mother fought this with all her will and strength – for her Delhi would always be the city of djinns, haunted and stained with blood – but when the temple brahmins brought her to see me dance, her opposition melted. By now she was a successful businesswoman, putting on weight, getting stiff in the knees from the dreadful winters, refusing marriage offers on a weekly basis, and in the end she could not deny the gift that had passed to me. And I am curious to see those streets and parks where her story and mine took place, the Red Fort and the sad decay of the Shalimar Gardens. I want to feel the heat of the djinns in the crowded galis behind the Jama Masjid, in the dervishes of litter along Chandni Chowk, in the starlings swirling above Connaught Circus. Leh is a Buddhist town, filled with third-generation Tibetan exiles – Little Tibet, they call it – and they have their own gods and demons. From the old Moslem djinn-finder I have learned some of their lore and mysteries but I think my truest knowledge comes when I am alone in the Ram temple, after I have danced, before the priests close the garbagriha and put the god to bed. On still nights when the spring turns to summer or after the monsoon, I hear a voice. It calls my name. Always I suppose it come from the japa-softs, the little low-level aeais that mutter our prayers eternally to the gods, but it seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, from another world, another universe entirely. It says, The creatures of word and fire are different from the creatures of clay and water but one thing is true: love endures. Then as I turn to leave, I feel a touch on my cheek, a passing breeze, the warm sweet breath of djinns.

Come Matsya, come Kurma. Come Narasimha and Varaha. By the smoky light of burning trash polyethylene and under the mad-eye moon lying drunk on its back, come run in the ring; ginger and black and tabby and grey, white and piebald and tortie and hare-legged tailless Manx. Run Varana, Pashurama, run Rama and Krishna.

I pray I do not offend with my circus of cats that carry the names of divine avatars. Yes, they are dirty street cats, stolen from rubbish dumps and high walls and balconies, but cats are naturally blasphemous creatures. Every lick and curl, every stretch and claw is a calculated affront to divine dignity. But do I not bear the name of a god myself, so may I not name my runners, my leapers, my stars, after myself? For I am Vishnu, the Preserver.

See! The trash-lamps are lit, the rope ring is set and the seats laid out, such as they are, being cushions and worn mattresses taken from the boat and set down to keep your fundament from the damp sand. And the cats are running, a flowing chain of ginger and grey, the black and the white and the part-coloured: the marvellous, the magical, the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus! You will be amazed, nay, astounded! So why do you not come?

Round they run and round, nose to tail. You would marvel at the perfect fluid synchronisation of my cats. Go Buddha, go Kalki! Yes, it takes a god to train a cat circus.

All evening I beat my drum and rang my bicycle bell through the heat-blasted hinterland of Chunar. The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus! Gather round gather round! There are few enough joys in your life: wonder and a week’s conversation for a handful of rupees . Sand in the streets, sand slumped against the crumbling walls of abandoned houses, sand slumped banked up on the bare wheel rims of the abandoned cars and minibuses, sand piled against the thorny hurdles that divided the river-edge sandbars into sterile fields. The long drought and the flashfire wars had emptied this town like so many others close to the Jyotirlinga. I climbed up to the old fort, with its preview twenty kilometres up and down river. From the overlook where the old British ambassador had built his governor’s residence I could see the Jyotirlinga spear into the sky above Varanasi, higher than I could see, higher than the sky for it ran all the way into another universe. The walls of the old house were daubed with graffiti. I rang my bell and beat my drum but there was never any hope of even ghosts here. Though I am disconnected from the deva-net, I could almost smell the devas swirling on the contradictory airs. Walking down into the town I caught the true smell of woodsmoke and the lingering perfume of cooking and I turned, haunted by a sense of eyes, of faces, of hands on doorframes that vanished into shadows when I looked. Vishnu’s Marvellous Magical Magnificent Cat Circus! I cried, ringing my bicycle bell furiously, as much to advertise my poverty and harmlessness as my entertainment. In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK47s.