Cyberabad Days (24 page)

     "So which one of you loves me then?" The words are out, wild, loose, and unconsidered. "I mean, as a dancer, that is." She's filling, gabbling. "Is there one of you that particularly appreciates
Kathak
?" Polite polite words, like you'd say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta and Priya's hideous match-making soirees.
Don't be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man's world, now
. But she hears glee bubble in A.J. Rao's voice.

     "Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha."

     Her name. He used her name.

     It's a shitty street of pie-dogs and men lounging on
charpoys
scratching themselves, but the chauffeur insists,
here, this way memsahb
. She picks her way down a
gali
lined with unsteady minarets of old car tires. Burning
ghee
and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A.J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. "
Memsahb
."

     She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the
charbagh
are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn: the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks toward the crack-roofed pavilion at the center where paths and water channels meet, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.

     "The Shalimar Gardens," says A.J. Rao in the base of her skull. "Paradise as a walled garden."

     And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the
charbagh
channels which shiver with water. The tiered roofs of the pavilion gleam with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into
malis
sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.

     Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. "Oh," she says, numb with wonder. "Oh!"

     "A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favorite places in all India, even though it's almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it's an evening stroll for the
basti
people. The past is a passion of mine; it's easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me."

     Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A.J. Rao.
No
, she thinks,
never flesh. A
djinn.
A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster. Then trick me
.

     "It is as the old Urdu poets declare," says A.J. Rao. "Paradise is indeed contained within a wall."

* * * *

     It is far past four but she can't sleep. She lies naked--shameless--but for the 'hoek behind her ear on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name.
Esha
.

     She's up, kneeling on the bed, hand to hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.

     "I'm here." A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.

     "It's late, I know, I'm sorry..."

     She looks across the room into the palmer's camera.

     "It's all right, I wasn't asleep." A tone in that voice. "What is it?"

     "The mission is a failure."

     She kneels in the center of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.

     "The conference? What? What happened?" She whispers, he speaks in her head.

     "It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing. We will return to Varanasi in the morning."

     Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself,
stupid, romantic
girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much is he is at the Red Fort assisting his human superiors.

     "I'm sorry."

     "Yes," he says. "That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?"

     "People will always disappoint you."

     A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.

     "How very ... disembodied of you, Esha." Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. "Will you dance for me?"

     "What, here? Now?"

     "Yes. I need something ... embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful."

     Need. A creature with the powers of a god,
needs
. But Esha's suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.

     "Music..." she stammers. "I can't perform without music..." The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over
tabla
,
sarangi
and
bansuri
. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bedcover.
They cannot see you, they don't even exist, except in your head
.
And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice.
Terrible driven things, musicians.

     "I've incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night," A.J. Rao says. "A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals."

     "You can swap bits of yourself in and out?" Esha asks. The
tabla
player has started a slow
Natetere
tap-beat on the
dayan
drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, they will be counting. It's hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can't hear; no one can hear but her. And A.J. Rao. The
sarangi
player sets his bow to the strings, the
bansuri
lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A
sangeet
, but not one she has ever heard before.

     "It's making it up!"

     "It's a composition aeai. Do you recognize the sources?"

     "Krishna and the
gopis
." One of the classic
Kathak
themes: Krishna's seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the
bansuri
, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.

     "Will you dance, lady?"

     And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly,
girli
. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the
One Hundred and Eight Gopis
, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape
mudras
, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn't feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh's cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the
tabla
, the beat of
dayan
and
bayan
. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A.J. Rao did not choose this
Kathak
wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.

     Light wakes her. She is sticky, naked, embarrassed. The house staff could find her. And she's got a killing headache. Water. Water. Joints nerves sinews plead for it. She pulls on a Chinese silk robe. On her way to the kitchen, the voyeur eye of her palmer blinks at her. No erotic dream then, no sweat hallucination stirred out of heat and hydrocarbons. She danced Krishna and the one hundred and eight gopis in her bedroom for an aeai. A message. There's a number.
You can call me
.

* * * *

     Throughout the history of the eight Delhis there have been men--and almost always men--skilled in the lore of djinns. They are wise to their many forms and can see beneath the disguises they wear on the streets--donkey, monkey, dog, scavenging kite--to their true selves. They know their roosts and places where they congregate--they are particularly drawn to mosques--and know that that unexplained heat as you push down a
gali
behind the Jama Masjid is djinns, packed so tight you can feel their fire as you move through them. The wisest--the strongest--of fakirs know their names and so can capture and command them. Even in the old India, before the break up into Awadh and Bharat and Rajputana and the United States of Bengal--there were saints who could summon djinns to fly them on their backs from one end of Hindustan to the other in a night. In my own Leh there was an aged aged sufi who cast one hundred and eight djinns out of a troubled house: twenty-seven in the living room, twenty-seven in the bedroom and fifty-four in the kitchen. With so many djinns there was no room for anyone else. He drove them off with burning yoghurt and chilies, but warned:
do not toy with djinns, for they do nothing without a price, and though that may be years in the asking, ask it they surely will.

     Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais. If the
djinni
are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi's boulevards and
chowks
: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi's nervous system each second. The city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being 99.99 percent of the time, they are a young race, an energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power.

     The djinns watch in dismay from their rooftops and minarets: that such powerful creatures of living word should so blindly serve the clay creation, but mostly because, unlike humans, they can foresee the time when the aeais will drive them from their ancient, beloved city and take their places.

* * * *

     This
durbar
, Neeta and Priya's theme is
Town and Country
: the Bharati mega-soap that has perversely become fashionable as public sentiment in Awadh turns against Bharat. Well, we will just bloody well build our dam, tanks or no tanks; they can beg for it, it's our water now, and, in the same breath, what do you think about Ved Prakash, isn't it scandalous what that Ritu Parvaaz is up to? Once they derided it and its viewers but now that it's improper, now that it's unpatriotic, they can't get enough of Anita Mahapatra and the Begum Vora. Some still refuse to watch but pay for daily plot digests so they can appear fashionably informed at social musts like Neeta and Priya's dating
durbars
.

     And it's a grand
durbar
; the last before the monsoon--if it actually happens this year. Neeta and Priya have hired top
bhati
-boys to provide a wash of mixes beamed straight into the guests' 'hoeks. There's even a climate control field, laboring at the limits of its containment to hold back the night heat. Esha can feel its ultrasonics as a dull buzz against her molars.

     "Personally, I think sweat becomes you," says A.J. Rao, reading Esha's vital signs through her palmer. Invisible to all but Esha, he moves beside her like death through the press of Town and Countrified guests. By tradition the last
durbar
of the season is a masked ball. In modern, middle-class Delhi that means everyone wears the computer-generated semblance of a soap character. In the flesh they are the socially mobile, dressed in smart-but-cool hot season modes, but, in the mind's eye, they are Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala, dashing Govind and conniving Dr. Chatterji. There are three Ved Prakashes and as many Lal Darfans--the aeai actor that plays Ved Prakash in the machine-made soap. Even the grounds of Neeta's fiancé’s suburban bungalow have been enchanted into Brahmpur, the fictional Town where
Town and Country
takes place, where the actors that play the characters believe they live out their lives of celebrity tittle-tattle. When Neeta and Priya judge that everyone has mingled and networked enough, the word will be given and everyone will switch off their glittering disguises and return to being wholesalers and lunch vendors and software rajahs. Then the serious stuff begins, the matter of finding a bride. For now Esha can enjoy wandering anonymous in company of her friendly djinn.