Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

How almost right my mother was, and how utterly wrong-headed. She had seen me carried in through the doors of the Lok Sabha on the shoulders of cheering election workers. I preferred the servant’s entrance. Politicians live and die by the ballot box. They are not there to serve, they are there to gain and hold office. Populism can force them to abandon wise and correct policies for whims and fads. The storm of ballots will in the end sweep them and all their good works from power. Their grand viziers endure. We understand that democracy is the best system by which a nation seems to be governed.

Months of social networking – the old-fashioned, handshake and gift type – and the setting up and calling in of favours and lines of political credit, had gained me an internship to Parekh, the Minister for Water and the Environment. He was a tolerable dolt, a Vora from Uttaranchal with a shopkeeper’s shrewdness and head for details, but little vision. He was good enough to seem in control and a politician often needs little more for a long and comfortable career. This was the highest he would ever rise; as soon as the next monsoon failure hit and the mobs were hijacking water tankers in the street, he would be out. He knew I knew this. I scared him, even though I was careful to turn down the full dazzle of my intelligence to a glow of general astuteness. He knew I was far from the nine-year-old I seemed to be but he really had no idea of my and my kind’s capabilities and curses. I chose my department carefully. Naked ambition would have exposed me too early to a government that was only now realising it had never properly legislated around human gene-line manipulation. Even so I knew the colour of all the eyes that were watching me, skipping through the glassy corridors of the Water Ministry. Water is life. Water, its abundance and its rarity, would sculpt the future of Awadh, of all the nations of North India, from the Panjab to the United States of Bengal. Water was a good place to be bright, but I had no intention of remaining there.

The dam at Kunda Khadar neared completion, that titanic fifteen-kilometre bank of earth and concrete like a garter around the thigh of Mother Ganga. Protests from downstream Bharat and the USB grew strident but the tower cranes lifted and swung, lifted and swung day and night. Minister Parekh and Prime Minister Srivastava communicated daily. The Defence Ministry was brought into the circle. Even the PR staffers could smell diplomatic tension.

It was a Thursday. Even before, I called it Bold Thursday, to commit myself, to get myself up. The genes don’t make you brave. But I had prepared as rigorously as I could; which was more than anyone in the Lok Sabha, Minister Parekh included. Srivastava was due with his entourage for a press conference from the ministry to reassure the Awadhi public that Kunda Khadar would do its job and slake Delhi’s bottomless thirst. Everyone was turned out smart as paint: moustaches plucked, clacks creased, shirts white as mourning. Not me. I had picked my spot long before: a brief bustle down the corridor as Srivastava and his secretarial team was coming up. I had no idea what they would be talking about but I knew they would be talking; Srivastava loved his ‘walking briefings’; they made him seem a man of action and energy. I trusted that my research and quicker wit would win.

I heard the burble of voices. They were about to turn the corner. I went into motion, pushed myself into the wall as the press of suits came toward me. My senses scanned five conversations, lit on Srivastava’s murmur to Bhansal his parliamentary secretary, ‘If I knew we had McAuley’s support.’

Andrew J. McAuley, President of the United States of America. And the answer was there.

‘We could negotiate an output deal in return for Sajida Rana accepting partial ratification of the Hamilton Acts,’ I said, my voice shrill and pure and piercing as a bird.

The Prime Ministerial party bustled past but Satya Shetty, the Press Secretary, turned with a face of thunder to strike down this upstart, mouthy intern. He saw a nine-year-old. He was dumb-struck. His eyes bulged. He hesitated. That hesitation froze the entire party. Prime Minister Srivastava turned towards me. His eyes widened. His pupils dilated.

‘That’s a very interesting idea,’ he said and in those five words I knew he had identified, analysed and accepted the gift I had offered him. A Brahmin adviser. The strange, savant child. The child genius, the infant guru, the little god. India adored them. It was PR gold. His staffers parted as he stepped toward me. ‘What are you doing here?’

I explained that I was on an internship with Minister Parekh.

‘And now you want more.’

Yes, I did.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him. He nodded his head.

‘Yes, the wedding. I remember. So, it’s a career in politics, is it?’

It was.

‘You’re certainly not backward about being forward.’

My genes wouldn’t allow it. My first political lie.

‘Well, ideas do seem to be in short stock at the moment.’ With that he turned, his entourage closed around him and he was swept on. Satya Shetty dealt me a glare of pure despite; I held his eyes until he snapped his gaze away. I would see him and all his works dust while I was still fresh and filled with energy. By the time I returned to my desk there was an invitation from the Office of the Prime Minister to call them to arrange an interview.

I told my great achievement to the three women in my life. Lakshmi beamed with delight. Our plans were working. My mother was baffled; she no longer understood my motivations, why I would accept a lowly and inconspicuous civil service position rather than a high-flyer in our superstar political culture. Sarasvati jumped up from her sofa and danced around the room, then clapped her hands around my face and kissed my forehead long and hard until her lips left a red tilak there.

‘As long as there’s joy in it,’ she said. ‘Only joy.’

My sister, my glorious sister, had voiced a truth that I was only now developing the maturity to recognise. Joy was all. Mamaji and Dadaji had aimed me at greatness, at blinding success and wealth, power and celebrity. I had always possessed the emotional intelligence, if not the emotional vocabulary, to know that the blindingly powerful and famous were seldom happy, that their success and wealth often played against their own mental and physical well-being. All my decisions I made for me, for my peace, well-being, satisfaction and to keep me interested throughout my long life. Lakshmi had chosen the delicate world of complicated games. I had chosen the whirl of politics. Not economics; that was too dismal a science for me. But the state and those statelets beyond Awadh’s borders with which I could see we were as inextricably entwined as when we were one India, and the countries beyond those, and the continents beyond; that fascinated me. The etiquette of nations was my pleasure. There was joy in it, Sarasvati. And I was brilliant at it. I became the hero of my childhood comics, a subtle hero, Diplomacy Man. I saved your world more times than you can ever know. My superpower was to see a situation entire, connected, and all those subtler forces acting upon it that other, less gifted analysts would have discounted. Then I would give it a nudge. The smallest, slightest tap, one tiny incentive or restriction, even a hint at how a policy might be shaped, and watch how the social physics of a complex capitalist society scale them up through power laws and networks and social amplifiers to slowly turn the head of the entire nation.

In those first few years I was constantly fighting for my own survival. Satya Shetty was my deadliest enemy from the moment our eyes had met in the corridor in the Water Ministry. He was influential, he was connected, he was clever but not clever enough to realise he could never beat me. I just let my drips of honey fall into Krishna Srivastava’s ear. I was always right. Little by little his cabinet and Satya Shetty’s allies realised that, more than being always right, I was essentially different from them. I didn’t seek high office. I sought the greatest well-being. I was the perfect adviser. And I looked great on television: Prime Minister Srivastava’s dwarf vizier, trotting behind him like some throw-back to the days of the Mughals. Who isn’t, at some level, unnerved by the child prodigy? Even if I was twenty-two years old now, with puberty – whatever that might mean for me personally – looming on the horizon of my Brahmin generation like the rumbles of a long-delayed monsoon.