Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

Now, on with the story. Where am I going? Don’t you know it’s a terrible rudeness to interrupt the storyteller? You came here to see the cat circus, not watch some old goondah spin a yarn? You’ve seen cats leap through paper hoops, what more do you want? Where am I going? Very well then, to Varanasi. No, I am not. Look at me, look at this forehead, put your finger there, yes right there, do you see a tilak, do you feel a little crusty lump, do you feel anything but my own skin? No you do not. It’s not just the bodhisofts who go to Varanasi. Here’s the deal. I have plenty more tricks in my little ring here on the sand, but to see them you will have to listen to my story and remember, the power may be working but the broadcasters are out. Nothing on your screens tonight. But you’ll like this. It’s a wedding scene. What is a story without a wedding?

Elephants bore me. When I say that I don’t mean that I find the pachyderm genus tedious, as if I have some special personal conversational relationship with them and knew all their conversational tics and ploys. Is Ganesh not the best-loved god in our entire profligate pantheon? I mean, simply, that elephants carried me; in a howdah like a small gilt temple through the streets of Delhi. Five elephants, with mahouts; one for my school friend Suresh Hira, one for Vin Johar, one for Syaman and one, my sole spit of defiance in the face of tradition, for Sarasvati, and one for me, Vishnu Nariman Raj, the gnarly groom. Delhi’s eternal, monstrous traffic broke around the horde of musicians, drummers, dancers, merry-meeters like water. The traffic news had been reporting me as a major congestion for hours. People stopped and stared, women threw rice, ayahs pointed me out to their finger-sucking grandchildren: There, there he is, Lord Vishnu goes to his wedding . The chati mags had been full of little else than the first dynastic Brahmin marriage. My other break with tradition: much of the gaudy I had funded myself through the judicious auctioning of the photo rights to Gupshup magazine. Look, here am I, in white sherwani and wrinkle-ankle pants in the vest best style, the traditional veil of flowers over my face, gripping my sword with one hand (a ludicrous affectation by Sreem, Delhi’s most-sought nute wedding choreographer; who could ever sword-fight from the broad back of an elephant?), with the other gripping white-knuckled to the gold-leaf coping of my swaying howdah. Have I said that riding an elephant is like being on a boat on unstill waters? Does what you glimpse through the cascading marigolds look afraid? Were you expecting someone larger?

Negotiations had been protracted and delicate over the winter. Hosts of aeai attorneys circled and clashed around my mother and father, temporarily unified, as they entertained the Misras to a grand vagdana. Lakshmi and I sat blandly, quietly, hands folded neatly in our laps on the cream leather sofa as relatives and relatives-to-be passed and greeted and blessed us. We smiled. We nodded. We did not speak, not to our guests, not to each other. In our years together at the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College we had said all that we could say to each other. We sat like an old married couple at a metro stop. At last the hosts of clashing attorney aeais withdrew: a pre-nuptial contract was drafted, a dowry was set. It was a brilliant match; property and ’ware with water, the very essence of life. Of course the price was high; we were Brahmins. It was no less than the flesh of our flesh and the seed of our loins, for all generations. Way down the list of ticky boxes on Dr Rao’s shopping list was one I suspect Lakshmi’s parents had fielded blindly. I know my parents had. But it was perhaps the most profound change of all that Dr Rao’s nanoworkers worked on us. Our genelines were modified. The traits engineered into us were inheritable. Our children and their children, all our conceivable Nariman-Misras marching into futurity, would be Brahmins, not from the microsurgery of Dr Rao, but from our sperm and eggs.

Children, offspring, a line, a dynasty. That was our mutually contracted dowry. A match was made! Let great Delhi rejoice!

The janampatri aeais had read the stars for the most auspicious fates, the pandit had made the puja to Ganesh and the joint houses of Nariman and Misra had hired Gupshup Girls, Delhi’s biggest and brassiest girl band to sing and flash their thighs for two thousand society guests at our sangeet sandhya. Lakshmi duetted onstage with them. Pop-girli hotpants and belly-top looked disturbing on her as she danced and skipped among the high heels. Too small, too too young to wed. I was never much of a singer. Mamaji and Dadaji had neglected to ticky that box. I boogied down in the golden circle with my classmates. Though I had still two years more at Dr Renganathan College under the tutelage of the invisible Mr Khan, our circle was broken. I was all their imminent futures.

At India Gate, Sarasvati called her mahout to a halt and slipped from her elephant’s back to run and dance among my parade of Baraatis. I had defied tradition by inviting her, she defied it back by coming dressed as a man in sherwani and kohl and huge, ludicrous false Rajput moustache. I watched her leap and whirl, brilliant and vivacious with the dancers and drummers and dance, laughing, with monkey-like Sreem and felt tears in my eyes behind my veil of flowers. She was so brilliant, so lovely, so lithe and free from expectation.

At Lodi Gardens the celebrity spotters were five deep. Policemen held them back with a chain of linked lathis. They had seen Rishi Jaitly and Anand Arora and ooh, isn’t that Esha Rathore the famous dancer and who is that little man with the very much younger wife; don’t you know, it’s Narayan Mittal from Mittal Industries. Last and least to them was the seeming child perched high on the back of a painted wedding elephant. A blare of trumpets and a barrage of drums greeted us. Then the smartsilk screens draped around us woke up and filled with the characters and, in a never-before-seen-feat of CG prestidigitation, the cast of Town and Country singing and dancing our wedding song specially written by legendary screen composer A. H. Husayin. They were aeais; singing and dancing were easy for them. There, almost lost among the sari silk and garlands as the bridal party stepped forward to greet us, was Lakshmi.

We were swept on a wave of drum beating and brass-tootling to the pavilions arrayed across the well-watered grass like a Mughal invasion. We feasted, we danced, we were sat on our thrones, our feet not touching the ground, and received our guests.

I didn’t see him. The line was long and the atmosphere in the marquee stifling and I was bloated and drowsy from wedding food. I took the hand blindly, bored. I only became attentive when it held mine that moment too long, that quantum too firmly.

Shiv.

‘Brother.’

I nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Are you well?’

He indicated his suit, the fabric cheap, the cut niggardly, the cufflinks and the jewel at the shirt-throat phoney. A budget wedding outfit. Tomorrow it would go by phatphat back to the hire shop.

‘I’ll be more suitably dressed when you come to my wedding.’

‘Are you getting married?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

I sniffed then. It was not Shiv’s perfume – that too smelled cheap and phenolic. My uniquely-connected senses show me subtleties to which others are quite oblivious. In his student hire-suit and cheap Bata shoes, Shiv seemed to carry an aura around him, a presence, a crackle of information like distant summer thunder. He smelled of aeais. I tilted my head to one side. Did I see a momentary shifting glow? It did not take a synaesthete or a Brahmin to spot the ’hoek tucked behind his ear.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I said and knew that he heard the lie.