Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The simultaneous appearance, at eleven thirty-three, of twelve columns of light in cities across India paralysed the rail network. It was one of the least of the disturbances that day but for me, on an island in the middle of the Brahmaputra and needing to get to Delhi, that was the most important. That there were any flights at all was a miracle, that I could book onto one at any price at all was proof indeed that the age of the gods had truly returned. Even when alien universes open up in the hearts of our great and ancient cities, Indian grandmothers will still need to travel to see their wee darlings.

I had tried to call Sarasvati but all com channels into Delhi were down and the call-centre aeais announced indefinite delays before the network was restored. I wondered what it would be like for those accustomed to being strung out across the deva net to be back into just one head as the Air Awadh Airbus took me up over the shrivelled silver thread of the parched Ganga. In the tiny toilet I once again transformed myself back into a shaved, shorn, urbane Delhi-boy. As we descended into Indira Gandhi airport the captain told those of us on the right to look out and we would see the Jyotirlinga. His voice was uncertain, not a tone you want to hear from an airline captain, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. I had been studying it long before the captain’s call: a line of sun-bright light rising from the hazy, grey stain of central Delhi up beyond all sight, further than I could see, craning to look up through the tiny window into the darkening sky.

Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant, made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.

Immigration took an hour and a half. Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.

Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden was filled with the shanties and lean-tos of the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.

Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen on the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifyingly exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.

Before everything, over everything, was the silver spear of the Jyotirlinga.

‘Sarasvati!’

‘Vishnu?’ I could hardly hear her over the roar.

‘I’ve come to get you.’

‘You’ve what?’ It was as noisy where she was. I had a fix. The autodrive would take me there as quickly as it could.

‘You’ve got to get out.’

‘Vish.’

‘Vish nothing. What can you do?’

I did hear her sigh.

‘All right, I’ll meet you.’ She gave me a fresh set of coordinates. The driver nodded. He knew the place. His uniform was crisp and his cap miraculously correct but I knew he was as scared as I.

On Mehrauli Boulevard I heard gunfire. Airdrones barrelled in over the roof of the car, so low their engines shook the suspension. Smoke rose from behind a tatty mall fa¸ade. This street, I recognised it. This was Parliament Road, that was the old Park Hotel, that the Bank of Japan. But so faded, so dilapidated. Half the windows were out on the Park. The secluded gardens around Jantar Mantar on Samsad Marg were overrun with packing-case houses, their plastic roofs pushing right against the austere marble angularities of Jai Singh’s astronomical instruments. Everything was overrun with lean-tos and huts and miserable hard-scrabble shelters.

‘This is as far as I’m going to take you,’ the driver said as we ran into an immovable horde of people and animals and vehicles and military at Talkatora Road.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I ordered the driver as I jumped out.

‘That’s not likely,’ he said.

The press was cruel and chaotic and the most terrifying place I have ever been but Sarasvati was here, I could see her in my mind-map. A cordon of police bots tried to drive me back with the crowds from the steps of the Awadh Bhavan but I ducked under, out and away. I knew this place. I had given my balls to work in this place. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was in the clear. My heart lurched. My vision swam. Delhi, dear Delhi, my Delhi, they let this happen to you. The gracious greens and boulevards, the airy chowks and maidans of the Rajpath were one unbroken slum. Roof after roof after roof, slumping walls, cardboard and wood and brick and flapping plastic. Smoke went up from a dozen fires. This, this was Dalhousie. I knew the name of course. I had never thought it would ever become the name of the great sink where this newest of New Delhi’s condemned would be driven by drought and want. Such disdain did new India show for old Awadh. Who needed a Parliament when universal computing made everything a consensus? From where I guessed the old Imperial India Gate had stood at the end of the gracious Rajpath, there rose the Jyotirlinga. It was so bright I could not look at it for more than moments. It cast a terrible, unnatural silver shine over the degradation and dread. It abused my Brahminic sensibilities. Did I smell voices, hear colour, was that prickle like cold lemon fur on my forehead the radiation of another universe?

People milled around me, smoke blew in my eyes, the down-draft of airdrones and hover cams buffeted me. I had only moments before the army would catch me and move me away with the rest of the panicked crowd. Or worse. I saw bodies on the ground and flames were coming up from a line of plastic shacks.

‘Sarasvati!’

And there she was. Oh, there she was, plunging whip-thin in combat pants and a silk blouse, but filled her wonderful energy and determination out of the pile of collapsing housing. She dragged a child in each hand, smudge-faced and tearful. Tiny mites. In this place, she had slipped from my nuptial elephant to caper with the revellers in her ridiculous man’s costume and exuberant false moustache.