Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Breast? After a year?’ Usha was incredulous. ‘I mean, I’ve heard that some mothers keep them on the teat for years, but they’re from the villages, or mamas who love their sons too much.’

‘My nipples feel like mulberries,’ my Mamaji wept. ‘You see, he’s fifteen months old, but biologically, he not even eight months yet.’

I would live twice as long, but age half as fast. Infancy was a huge, protracted dawn; childhood an endless morning. When Shiv started school I would only have begun toddling. When I was of university age I would still have the physiology of a nine-year- old. Adulthood, maturity, old age, were points so distant on the great plain of my lifespan that I could not tell if they were insects or cities. In those great days I would come into my own, a life long enough to become part of history; as a baby, I was a mother’s nightmare.

‘I know breast is best, but maybe you should consider switching to formula,’ Devi said soothingly.

See how I recall every word? Another of Dr Rao’s equivocal gifts. I forget only what I choose to unremember. I understood every word – at eighteen months my vocabulary was far in advance of your precious Vin, bitch Devi. But it was trapped inside me. My brain formed the words but my larynx, my tongue, my lips and lungs couldn’t form them. I was a prisoner in a baby-bouncer, smiling and waving my fat little fists.

Four there were who understood me, and four only, and they lived in the soft-contoured plastic butterfly that hung over my cot. Their names were Tikka Tikka, Badshanti, Pooli and Nin. They were aeais, set to watch over me and entertain me with songs and stories and pretty patterns of coloured lights because Mamaji considered Ayah Meenakshi’s sleepy-time stories far too terrifying for a suggestible Brahmin. They were even more stupid than my parents but it was because they were deeply dense that they had no preconceptions beyond their Level 0.2 programming and so I could communicate with them.

TikkaTikka sang songs.

He sang that every night. I liked it, I still sing it to myself as I pole my circus of cats along the ravaged shores of Mata Ganga.

Pooli impersonated animals, badly. He was a cretin. His stupidity insulted me so I left him mute inside the plastic butterfly.

Badshanti, lovely Badshanti, she was the weaver of stories. ‘Would you like to hear a story, Vishnu?’ were the words that led into hours of wonder. Because I don’t forget. I know that she never repeated a story, unless I asked her to. How did I ask? For that I must introduce the last of my four aeais.

Nin spoke only in patterns of light and colour that played across my face, an ever-wheeling kaleidoscope that was supposed to stimulate my visual intelligence. Nin-no-words was the intelligent one; because he could interpret facial expression, he was the one I first taught my language. It was a very simple language of blinking. One deliberate blink for yes, two for no. It was slow, it was tortuous but it was a way out of the prison of my body. With Nin reading my answers to Badshanti’s questions, I could communicate anything.

How did my brother hate me? Let me take you to that time in Kashmir. After the third drought in a row my mother vowed never again to spend a summer in Delhi’s heat, noise, smog and disease. The city seemed like a dog lying at the side of the street, panting and feral and filthy and eager for any excuse to sink its teeth into you, waiting for the monsoon. Mamaji looked to the example of the British of a hundred years before and took us up to the cool and the high places. Kashmir! Green Kashmir, blue lake, the bright houseboats and the high beyond all, the rampart of mountains. They still wore snow, then. I remember blinking in the wonder of the Dal Lake as the shikara sped us across the still water to the hotel rising sheer like a palace in one of Badshanti’s tales from the water. My four friends bobbed in the wind of our passage as the boat curved in across the lake to the landing stage where porters in red turbans waited to transport us to our cool summer apartment. Shiv stood in the bow. He wanted to throw them the landing rope.

The calm, the clear, the high cool of Kashmir after the mob heat of Delhi! I bobbed and bounced and grinned in my cot and waved my little hands in joy at the sweet air. Every sense was stimulated, every nerve vibrant. In the evening TikkaTikka would sing, Badshanti tell a story and Nin send stars sweeping over my face.

There was to be an adventure by boat across the lake. There was food and there was drink. We were all to go together. It was a thing of a moment, I can see it still, so small it looked like an accident. It was not. It was deliberate, it was meticulously planned.

‘Where’s Gundi-bear? I’ve lost Gundi-bear,’ Shiv cried as my father was about to get into the boat. ‘I need Gundi-bear.’ He launched towards the shore along the gangplank. Dadaji swept him up.

‘Oh no you don’t; we’ll never get anywhere at this rate. You stay here and don’t move. Now, where did you last see him?’

Shiv shrugged, innocently forgetful.

‘Here, I’ll come with you, you’ll never find anything the way you ram and stam around.’ My mother sighed her great sigh of exasperation. ‘Shiv, you stay here, you hear? Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back in two ticks.’

I felt a deeper shadow in the mild shade of the awning. Shiv stood over me. Even if I chose to I could not forget the look on his face. He ran up the gangplank, untied the mooring rope and let it fall into the water. He waggled his fingers, bye bye as the wind caught the curve of coloured cotton and carried me out into the lake. The frail little shikara was taken far from the shelter of the Lake Hotel’s island into the rising chop. The wind caught it and turned it. The boat rolled. I began to cry.

Nin saw my face change. TikkaTikka awoke in the little plastic butterfly my parents had hung from the bamboo ridge pole.

‘Hello Vishnu,’ Badshanti said. ‘Would you like a story today?’ Two blinks.

‘Oh, no story? Well then, I’ll just let you sleep. Sweet dreams, Vishnu.’

Two blinks.

‘You don’t want a story but you don’t want to sleep?’

One blink.

‘All right then, let’s play a game.’

Two blinks. Badshanti hesitated so long I thought her software had hung. She was a pretty rudimentary aeai.

‘Not a game, not a story, not sleep?’ I blinked. She knew better than to ask, ‘Well, what do you want?’ Now TikkaTikka sang a strange song I had never heard before,

Yes . The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. One gust could roll it over and send me to the bottom of the Dal Lake. I might be a hero in my own comic but Dr Rao had neglected to give me the genes for breathing underwater.

‘Are we on a boat, sailing far far away?’ Badshanti asked.

Yes.

‘Are you out on water?’

Yes.

‘Are we on our own?’

Yes.

‘Is Vishnu happy?’

No.

‘Is Vishnu scared?’

Yes.

‘Is Vishnu safe?’

Two blinks. Again Badshanti paused. Then she started to shout. ‘Help aid assist! Little Lord Vishnu is in peril! Help aid assist!’ The voice was thin and tinny and would not have reached any distance across the wind-ruffled lake but one of the silent aeais, perhaps stupid Pooli, must also have sent out a radio, bluetooth and GPS alarm, for a fishing boat suddenly changed course, opened up its long-tail engine and sped towards me on a curve of spray.