Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

So easily I say we , for I seem to have ended up as an impresario and storyteller but the truth is that I did not exist, I didn’t even exist then, not until the day the baby spoke at the Awadhi Bhai Club. It was never anything as formal as a constituted club; the blessed mothers, darlings of the nation, had fallen together by natural mutual need to cope with a media gawping into every aspect of their lives. Perfection needs a support group. They naturally banded together in each other’s living rooms and penthouses, and their mothers and ayahs with them. It was a gilded Mothers and Infants group. The day the baby spoke my mother had gathered with Usha and Kiran and Devi. It was Devi’s baby who spoke. Everyone was talking about exhaustion and nipple softening oil and peanut allergies when Vin Johar lolling in his rocker opened his brown brown eyes, focused across the room and clearly said, ‘Hungry, want my bottle.’

‘Hungry, are we my cho chweet?’ Devi said.

‘Now,’ said Vin Johar. ‘Please.’

Devi clapped her hands in delight.

‘Please! He hasn’t said “please” before.’

The rest of the penthouse was still staring, dazed.

‘How long has he been talking?’ Usha asked.

‘Oh, about three days,’ Devi said. ‘He picks up everything you say.’

‘My bottle now,’ demanded Vin Johar. ‘Quickly.’

‘But he’s only…’ Kiran said.

‘Five months, yes. He’s been a bit slower than Dr Rao predicted.’

The mothers’ mothers and the ayahs made furtive hand gestures, kissed charms to turn away evil. It was my Mamaji, dangling fat, content Shiv on her knee, who understood first.

‘You’ve been, you’ve had, he’s a…’

‘Brahmin, yes.’

‘But you’re a Sudra,’ Kiran wondered.

‘Brahmin,’ Devi said with such emphasis that no one could fail to hear the capital. ‘We’ve had him done, yes.’

‘Done?’ asked Usha and then realised, ‘Oh.’ And, ‘Oh!’

‘He’ll be tall and he’ll be strong and he’ll be handsome, of course; that bit we didn’t have to engineer – and he’ll be fit and healthy. Oh so healthy – he’ll never get heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s; with his immune system he can laugh off almost any virus or infection. His immune system will even take out malaria! Imagine that! And intelligence; well, let’s just say, Dr Rao told us there isn’t even a test smart enough to stretch him. He’ll just need to see a thing once and he’s learned it – like that! And his memory, well, Dr Rao says there are double the number of connections in the brain, or something like that: what it means is that he’ll have a phenomenal memory. Like that Mr Memory on India’s Got Talent , only even better. He won’t be able to forget anything. No forgetting birthdays and phone calls to his Mata when he’s off around the world with some big corporation. Look at him, look at him, isn’t he just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen; those baby baby blue eyes. Look at you, look at you, just look at you my little lord? See them all, see them, your friends? They are princes each and every one, but you, you are a god. Oh, I could bite your bum, oh, just bite it like that it’s so beautiful and plump and gorgeous.’ Devi held Vin Johar up like a trophy in a cricket match. She kissed him on his bare belly where his little vest had ridden up. ‘Oh you little god.’

Then Shiv let out a long wail. All through Devi’s song of praise to her genetically improved darling son, my mother’s grip had gradually tightened in envy on golden Shiv, now hopelessly outmoded, until he cried out in pain. Her fingers had left bruises like purple carrots along his ribs.

Shiv gazed up at the mobile turning in the air-conditioning above his cot, innocent and unaware of how his visual acuity was being stimulated by the cleverly designed blobs and clouds. My mother fretted and stormed by turns around the pastel-lit apartment until Dadaji returned from the office. After Shiv was born, his duties at the office grew more arduous and his hours longer. He was never a terribly good father really. He was useless at cricket.

‘What are you doing on Friday?’ Mamaji demanded.

‘Um, I’m not sure, there’s something at the office.’

‘Cancel it.’

‘What?’ He was never very good at manners either, but then he was a Top Geek.

‘We’re seeing Dr Rao.’

‘Dr who?’

‘Dr Rao. At the Swaminathan Clinic.’ He knew the name. He knew the clinic. All Delhi, even Top Geeks, knew of the strange and miraculous children that came out of there. He just needed a moment for his balls to unfreeze and drop from that place close to the warmth of his perineum where they had retreated in terror.

‘Friday, eleven thirty, with Dr Rao himself. We are having a baby.’

It wasn’t Friday eleven thirty, nor the Friday after. It was not for six Fridays, after the initial consultation and the financial check and the medical assessment and the one-to-ones, first Mamaji then Dadaji, and only then did they get to choose from the menu. It was a menu, like in the most rarefied restaurant you can imagine. My parents blinked. Intelligence yes good looks yes enhanced concentration yes expanded memory and improved recall yes health wealth strength happiness, everything Vin Johar had. And more.

‘Extended lifespan?’

‘Ah yes, that is a new one. A new technique that has just been licensed.’

‘Does that mean?’

‘Exactly what it says.

My parents blinked again.

‘Your son,’ (for this was me they were building) ‘will enjoy a greatly increased span of life in full health and vigour.’

‘How much increased?’

‘Double the current human norm; what is that? Let me think, for people like us, affluent, educated, middle class, with access to quality health-care, that’s currently eighty years. Well double that.’

A third time they blinked.

‘One hundred and sixty years old.’

‘At the very least, you must remember that medical miracles are occurring every day. Every single day. There’s no reason your son…’

‘Vishnu.’

My father stared open-mouthed at my mother. He didn’t know there was a name. He hadn’t yet realised that he had no say in this whatsoever. But his balls understood, cringing in his loose-and-cooling-good-for-sperm-production silk boxers.

‘Vishnu, the Lord, governor and sustainer.’ Dr Rao dipped his head in respect. He was an old-fashioned man. ‘You know, I have often thought how the processes of conception, gestation and parturition are reflected in the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu: the fish the restless sperm, the turtle of Kurma the egg, the saving of the earth from the bottom of the ocean by Varaha the fertilisation…’

‘What about the dwarf?’ my father asked. ‘The dwarf Brahmin?’

‘The dwarf, yes,’ Dr Rao drawled. He was a man of slow speech, who seemed to lose the end of his sentences the closer he approached them. This led many people to make the mistake of thinking him stupid when what he was doing was shaping the perfect conclusion. As a consequence he didn’t do many television or net interviews. ‘The dwarf’s always the problem, isn’t he? But your son will assuredly be a true Brahmin. And Kalki, yes, Kalki. The ender of the Age of Kali. Who’s to say that he might not see this world end in fire and water and a new one be born? Yes, longevity. It’s very good, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences.’

‘Never mind. We’ll have that. Devi Johar doesn’t have that.’ So my father was sent with a plastic cup to catch his sacred fish. My mother went with him; to make it an act of love but mostly because she didn’t trust him with Western porn. A few Fridays later Dr Rao harvested a clutch of my mother’s turtle-eggs with a long needle. She didn’t need my father there for that. This was an act of biology. The slow-spoken doctor did his work and called up eight blastulas from the deep ocean of his artificial wombs. One was selected: Me! Me! Little me! Here I am! See me! See me! and I was implanted into my mother’s womb. It was then that she discovered the inconvenience: my doubled lifespan was bought at the price of ageing at half the speed of baseline, non-Brahminic humanity. After sixteen months of pregnancy, sixteen months of morning sickness and bloating and bad circulation and broken veins and incontinence and backache but worst of all, not being able to smoke, my mother, with a great shriek of At last At last! Get the fucking thing out of me! gave birth on 9 August 2027 and I made my entry as a player in this story.