Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘Both of them?’ the nute said. Yt would have raised an eyebrow had yt possessed any hair on yts shaven head to raise.

‘History is quiet on the subject of half-eunuchs,’ I said.

No one, alas, ever delivers such dialogue. Ticking lines, arch exchanges, loaded looks, these are things of story not real life. But I am telling you a story, my story, which is much more than just history or even memory. For if I choose to forget, I can also choose to remember and make what I chose memory. So if I wish the nute surgeon’s office to be at the top of a winding, creaking flight of stairs, each level haunted by the eyes of suspicious and hostile Old Delhiwallahs, if I decide to remember it so, it will be so. Likewise, if I choose to recall that office to be a charnel house of grotesque surgical implements and pictures of successfully mutilated body-parts like a demon-infested hell from a Himalayan Buddhist painting, it will be so forever. Perhaps it’s less strange a concept for you than for me. I more than anyone know the deceptiveness of physical appearance, but you seem young enough to have grown up in a world comfortable with universal memory, every breath and blink swarming with devas continuously writing and rewriting physical reality. And if the devas choose to rewrite that memory, who is there to say that it’s not so?

But there is east light in the sky beyond the blazing pillar of the Jyotirlinga, I have far to go, you have yet to see the most astonishing things my cats can achieve and the reality is that the surgery of Dr Anil was in a tastefully restored haveli in the warren of streets in the shadow of the Red Fort, the surgery elegant and discreet and fronted by the delightful Miss Modi, and Dr Anil was welcoming, professional, subtle and frankly surprised by my request.

‘I usually deal in more… substantial surgery,’ yt said. The Ardhanarisvara Clinic was Delhi’s leading centre for nute transformation. Leading through whispers and rumours; in bright new Awadh we might claim to be urbane, global, cosmopolitan and unshockable but nute culture, those who decided to escape our desperate sex wars by choosing a third way, a neither-way, was still almost as hidden and secretive as the ancient transgendered hijras who had long ago hidden themselves away in Old Delhi. The ancient city; older than any memory, its streets convoluted like the folds of a brain, has always looked after those with needs beyond the merely average.

‘I think what I’m asking is substantial enough,’ I said.

‘True true,’ Dr Anil said, putting his fingers together in a spire in that way that all doctors, male, female, transgendered or nute, seem to learn on day one of medical school. ‘So, both testicles.’

‘Yes, both.’

‘And not the penis.’

‘That would be perverse.’

‘You’re sure you won’t consider the chemical option? It’s reversible, should you ever reconsider.’

‘No, not chemical. I don’t want it to be reversible. I want to remove myself from the future. I want this to end with me. I’m more than a stud animal. Complete physical castration, yes.’

‘It’s quite simple. Much more so than the usual kind of thing we do here.’ I knew well the medical procedures that flowed out from here to the anonymous godowns and grey surgery clinics beyond the Siri Ring orbital expressway. There is a video for everything somewhere in the online world and I had watched with fascination what those humans who desired another gender had done to themselves. The things strung out through the gel tanks, skin flayed, muscles laid open, organs drawn out and suspended in molecular sieve cradles, were so far from anything human as to be curious, like strange forest flowers, rather than obscene. I was much more of a coward, leaving only my two little organs on the doorstep of gender. ‘My only reservation would be that, as you are biologically prepubescent, it would be an internal orchidectomy. Miss Modi will draw up a consent form.’ Yt blinked at me, a delicate, faun-like creature behind a heavy Raj desk, too too lovely to speak of such things as testicular surgery. ‘Forgive me for asking, I haven’t met any High Brahmins before, but you are of an age to sign a consent form?’

‘I’m of an age to be legally married.’

‘Yes, but you must understand, mine is a business that attracts scrutiny in Awadh.’

‘I’m of an age to pay you a profane sum of money to give me what I want.’

‘Profane it is then.’

Surprisingly mundane it was. I did not even need to be driven out to the nasty industrial zones. In the cubicle I changed into the surgical gown, the sleeves too too long, the hem trailing on the ground, slid up onto the disinfectant-stinky operating table in the basement surgery and felt the needling suffusion of the local anaesthetic. Robot arms, fingertips fine as insect antennae, danced in under the control of Dr Anil. I felt nothing as I blinked up into the lights and strained to hear their synaesthetic music. The dancing arms withdrew; I felt nothing. And I still felt nothing as the car spun me back through streets full of pulsing, potent, hormone-raddled people. A mild twinge from the sutures pulling against the weave of my clothes. No pain, little loss, nothing of the sense of lightness and freedom I had read of in the literature of castration fetishists. A unique pleasure, sexual castration; an orgasm to end all orgasms. I had not even had that. The cell-weave treatments would heal the wound in three days and hide all evidence, until the passing years revealed that my voice was not significantly deepening, my hair not receding, that I was growing unusually tall and willowy and that I had singularly failed to contractually conceive any children.

‘Do you want to take them with you?’ Dr Anil asked as yt sat me down in yts consulting room after the short operation.

‘Why should I wish to do that?’

‘It was a tradition in China. Imperial eunuchs would be given their excised genitals preserved in a jar of alcohol to bury beside them on their deaths, so that they might enter heaven whole men.’

‘It was a tradition in Ottoman Turkey that eunuchs, after their cutting clean, would sit in a dung-heap for three days to heal their wounds, or die. I don’t care for that tradition either. They’re not mine, they’re not me; they belong to someone else. Burn them or throw them to the pi-dogs, I don’t care.’

Thunder growled over me, a promise of a monsoon, the day was darkening. Lightning glowed cloud to cloud as I rode the elevator up the outside of Ramachandra Tower. Lakshmi sat curled on the sofa, the breaking storm magnificent behind her. Dry lightning, a false prophet of rain. All prophecies of rain were false these days,

‘Did you do it, are you all right?’

I nodded. It was beginning to hurt now. I clenched my teeth, kicking in the analgesic nanoinfuser Dr Anil had planted there. Lakshmi clapped her hands in joy. ‘I’ll go tomorrow. Oh dear Lord, I’m so happy, so happy.’ And then, there, in the dark apartment glowing with muted lighting, she kissed me.

We did not tell anyone. That was part of the pact. Not our parents, not our relatives, not our circle of Brahmin friends, not even our aeais. Not even dear Sarasvati; I wouldn’t burden her with this. There was work we had to do before we announced to our respective families how we had so drastically denied their plans for us. Then we could sweetly and painlessly divorce.

What is the proper work of eunuchs?

Does it make you uncomfortable, that word? Does it make you cross your legs, boys; does it give you a hollow clench in your uterus, ladies? When you hear it, do you see something other than a human being, something less? How then is it any different from other words of distinction: Kshatriya, Dalit? Brahmin? Eunuch. It is a very old and noble word, a fine and ancient tradition practised in all the great cultures of earth. The principle is to give up the lesser to gain the greater. Of all those pitiful puffs of cock-juice, how many will ever turn into human beings? Come on, be honest. It’s almost all wasted. And never imagine that the ball-less are sexless, or without desire. No, the great castrati singers, the eunuch poets and holy visionaries, the grand viziers and royal advisers all understood that greatness came at a price and that was generation. Empires could be entrusted to eunuchs, free from dynastic urges. The care and feeding of great nations is our proper work, and with all the gifts my parents had endowed me I steered myself toward the political cradle of the nation.