Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Look and listen, you bulging pampered privileged no-right-to-call-yourself-a-proper-Brahmin brat,’ he would say. ‘These eyes these ears, use them and learn. This is the world and you are in it and of it and there is no other. If I can teach you this I will have taught you all you need to ever learn.’

He was a stern moralist, very proper and Islamic. I looked at Miss Mukudan differently then, wondering what assessments she had made that assigned Mr Khan especially to me. Had he been programmed just for Vishnu? How had he been built? Did he spring into being perfectly formed or did he have a history, and how did he think of this past? Did he know it for a lie, but a treasured one; was he like the self-deceiving aeai actors of Town and Country who believed they existed separately from the roles they played? If he masqueraded as intelligent, did that mean he was intelligent? Was intelligence the only thing that could not be simulated? Such thoughts were immensely interesting to a strange little eight-year-old suddenly becoming aware of those other strange citizens of his tight world. What was the nature of the aeais, those ubiquitous and for the most part unseen denizens of great Delhi? I became quite the junior philosopher.

‘What is right to you?’ I asked him one day as we rode back in the Lexus through a Delhi melted by the heat into an impermeable black sludge. It was Ashura. Mr Khan had told me of the terrible battle of Karbala and the war between the sons of the Prophet (Peace be upon Him). I watched the chanting, wailing men carrying the elaborate catafalques, flogging their backs bloody, beating their foreheads and chests. The world, I was beginning to realise, was far stranger than I.

‘Never mind me, what is right to me, impudent thing. You have the privileges of a god, you’re the one needs to think about right action,’ Mr Khan declared. In my vision he sat beside me on the back seat of the Lex, his hands primly folded in his lap.

‘It’s a serious question.’ Our driver hooted up alongside the dour procession. ‘How can right action mean anything to you, when anything you do can be undone and anything you undo can be done again. You’re chains of digits, what do you need morality for?’ Only now was I beginning to understand the existence of the aeais, which had begun with the mystery of TikkaTikka, Pooli, Badshanti and Nin living together and sharing common code inside my plastic butterfly. Common digits but separate personalities. ‘It’s not as if you can hurt anyone.’

‘So right action is refraining from causing pain, is it?’

‘I think that it’s the start of right action.’

‘These men cause pain to themselves to express sorrow for wrong action; albeit the actions of their spiritual forebears. In so doing they believe they will make themselves more moral men. Consider those Hindu sadhus who bear the most appalling privations to achieve spiritual purity.’

‘Spiritual purity isn’t necessarily morality,’ I said, catching the line Mr Khan had left dangling for me. ‘And they choose to do it to themselves. It’s something else altogether if they choose to do it to others.’

‘Even if it means those others may be made better men?’

‘They should be left to make their own minds up on that.’

We cruised past the green-draped faux-coffin of the martyr.

‘So what then is the nature of my relationship with you? And your mother and father?’

My Mamaji, my Dadaji! Two years after that conversation, almost to the day, my flawless memory recalls, when I was a nine-year-old-in-a-four-year-old’s body and Sarasvati was a cat-lean, ebullient seven, my mother and father very gently, very peacefully, divorced. The news was broken by the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the big sofa in the lounge with the smog of Delhi glowing in the afternoon sun like a saffron robe. A full range of aeai counselling support hovered around the room, in case of tears or tantrums or anything else they couldn’t really handle. I remember feeling a suspicion of Mr Khan on the edge of my perceptions. Divorce was easy for Muslims. Three words and it was over.

‘We have something to tell you, my loves,’ said my mother. ‘It’s me and your father. Things haven’t been going so well with us for quite some time and well, we’ve decided that it’s best for everyone if we were to get a divorce.’

‘But it won’t mean I’ll ever stop being your Dad,’ plump Tushar said quickly. ‘Nothing’ll change, you’ll hardly even notice. You’ll still keep living here, Shiv will still be with me.’

Shiv. I hadn’t forgotten him – I couldn’t forget him – but he had slipped from my regard. He was more distant than a cousin, less thought of than those remote children of your parents’ cousins, to whom I’ve never considered myself related at all. I did not know how he was doing at school or who his friends were or what sports teams he was on. I did not care how he lived his life or pursued his dreams across that great wheel of lives and stories. He was gone from me.

We nodded bravely and trembled our lips with the right degree of withheld emotion and the counsel-aeais dissolved back into their component code clusters. Much later in the room we had shared as bubbling babies and was now our mutual den, Sarasvati asked me, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

‘I don’t think we’ll even notice,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad they can stop having that ugly, embarrassing sex.’

Ah! Three little letters. Sex sex sex, the juggernaut looming over our childhoods. The kiddy thrill of being naked – doubly exciting in our body-modest society – took on an edge and became something I did not quite understand. Oh, I knew all the words and the locations, as Sarasvati and I played our games of doctors and patients in our den, her pulling up her little vest and pulling down her pants as I listened and examined and prodded vaguely. We knew these were grown-up things not for the eyes of grown-ups. Mamaji would have been horrified and called in squadrons of counselling ’ware if she had discovered our games but I had long since suborned the aeais. If she had looked at the security monitors she would have seen us watching the Cartoon Network; my own little CG Town and Country playing just for her. Sex games for children; everyone plays them. Bouncing up and down in the pool, pressing ourselves against the jets in the rooftop spa, suspecting something in the lap of artificial waves across our private places as ochre dust-smog from the failed monsoon suffocated Delhi. And when we played horsey-horsey, she riding me around like Lakshmibai the warrior Rani, there was more in the press of her thighs than just trying to hold on as I cantered across the carpets. I knew what it should be, I was mostly baffled by my body’s failure to respond the way a twelve-year-old’s ought. My lust may have been twelve but my body was six. Even Miss Mukudan’s purity and innocence lost its lustre as I began to notice the way her breasts moved as she leaned over me, or the shape of her ass – demurely swathed in a sari, but no concealment was enough for the lusty curiosity of boy-Brahmins – as she turned to the smart-silk board.

‘Now,’ said Mr Khan one day on the back seat of the Lexus. ‘Concerning onanism…’ It was a dreadful realisation. By the time puberty hit me like a hammer I would be twenty-four. Mine was the rage and impotence of angels.

Now five burning years have passed and we are driving in a fast German car. I am behind the wheel. The controls have been specially modified so that I can reach the pedals. The gear-shift is a standard. If I cut you up on the Siri Ring, after the flicker of road rage, you’d wonder: that’s a child driving that Mercedes. I don’t think so. I’m of legal age. I passed my test without any bribery or coercion; well, none that I know of. I am old enough to drive, get married and smoke. And I smoke. We all smoke, my Little Brahmin classmates and me. We smoke like stacks, it can’t do us any harm, though we are all wearing smogmasks. The monsoon has failed for the fourth time in seven years; whole tracts of north India are turning into dust and blowing through the hydrocarbon-clogged streets and into our lungs. A dam is being built on the Ganges, Kunda Khadar, on the border with our eastern neighbour Bharat. It is promised to slake our thirst for a generation but the Himalaya glaciers have melted into gravel and Mother Ganga is starved and frail. The devotees at the Siva temple in the middle of the Parliament Street roundabout protest at the insult to the holy river with felt-marker banners and three-pronged trisuls. We bowl past them, hooting and waving and up Sansad Marg around Vijay Chowk. The comics portraying us as Awadh’s new superheroes were quietly dropped years ago. Now what we see about ourselves in print tends to be headlines like TINY TEARAWAYS TERRORISE TILAK NAGAR, or BADMASH BABY BRAHMINS.