Cyberabad Days (38 page)

     I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chosen to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasingly unrecognizable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition? Had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not? I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down-ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi, who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said, Now, now's the time for that divorce. Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.

A FATHER FESTOONED WITH MEMORY

     
Wait! One more trick. You'll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven't seen anything yet, just a bit of running in circles and jumping through hoops. Yes. I know it's very very late and the sun will soon be up in the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.

     And anyway, I haven't finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.

     The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.

     I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife—with her blessing and a farewell kiss—my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance, which could not be undone, and turned saddhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming into the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminum flanks of the go-downs and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It's a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressway, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge, slow trains materializing like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessing as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Did the passengers even glance at me through the darkened glass? If so, I must have seemed a very strange saddhu to them. The littlest saddhu. Small but determined, beating forwards with my staff at every stride.

     What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don't think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I'm a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji's boy. The same night that I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell—that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired—I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air-conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breathe in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my ten-year-old glottis would allow: Wake up! Wake up! Shiv's future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.

     Lakshmi kissed me and I left. I wandered without any other purpose than wandering for two years, south across the border into Rajasthan, back into Bharat and to the north under the breath of the Himalayas, to the cool green ridges where I had spent my honeymoon with Lakshmi. To the Dal Lake and Srinagar, to Leh and the high country. I could never grow the proper saddhu beard, but I grew the saddhu leanness and tallness. Boy eunuchs grow tall and lean. And the dreadlocks. Oh yes. They are good to have but unpleasant to get. I also gained a nickname: the Beardless Saddhu. With it I got muscles and sunburn, I developed the stamina to walk all day on a cup of rice and a cup of water. What a pulpy, unfit puppy I had been! I begged and performed small miracles of accountancy and feats of memory for food and shelter. Everywhere, I looked in men and women's third eyes. I saw things I never could have from the top of Ramachandra Tower or the Awadh Bhavan. I saw thirst and I saw drought. I saw good village leaders and diligent local civil servants frustrated by government bureaucrats. I saw clever women turn a few hundred rupees from microcredit schemes and grameen banks into successful businesses. I saw good teachers try to lift generations out of low expectations and the trap of caste and Awadh's soar-away middle class, rapidly pulling the ladder of social mobility up behind it. I helped with harvests and rode the backs of tractors and listened to farmers curse the ever-increasing price of their sterile GM seed. I chased rats with sticks and waved my arms to set whole fields of sparrows to flight. I sat in the community house and watched cricket on giant plasma screens powered by stored sunlight. Oh, I was a most peculiar saddhu. I gained a new nickname to set beside Beardless Saddhu: Cricketing Saddhu. I saw village weddings and festivals, I saw funerals. I saw death. It came quite unexpectedly one day, in a small town outside Agra. It was Holi and the streets were full of flying color, jets of dye, clouds of powder, stained saris and white shirts ruined beyond the power of any laundry to save and everywhere grinning faces stained with colors, teeth white, eyes flashing, everyone shouting, Holi hail Holi hai! as they launched jets of color into the air. I moved through this circus of color, as motley as any. The phatphat was grossly overloaded, a dozen color-stained youths hanging off every strut and stanchion. Their eyes were wide on ganja and they were roaring with laughter and throwing fistfuls of dye powder at every passerby. They caught me full in the face. The front wheel hit a pothole, the overstrained suspension collapsed, the whole thing flipped over in a perfect somersault onto its roof, which split like an egg. Bodies flew everywhere, many of them so relaxed on the ganja they were still laughing as they picked themselves up and skipped away. One didn't move. He was trapped under the crushed plastic shell. He lay on his back, his arms at odd angles. His face was stained blue and green and pink and he seemed to be smiling but my senses realized he was dead. I had never seen death before. It was so simple and strange, here undeniably before me yet so subtle, an instant's transformation yet the opposite of everything that was life. I mumbled the prayers expected of me, but inwardly I was coming to terms with the deepest of all human truths. I was twenty-two years old with the body of an albeit-strange elevenen-year-old, my lifespan was measurable in centuries, but one day I too would lie down like this and stop moving and thinking and feeling and be nothing forever. I saw death and began to understand.

     Village to village, town to town, temple to temple, from the huge complexes the size of cities to whitewashed roadside shrines. Then one day outside a mall in a drought-dusty suburb of Jaipur, as the security men were coming to ask me politely (for one must always be respectful to saddhus) to please move on, I saw what I had been looking for. A man turned to see the very small kerfuffle and as I momentarily looked at him, the Eye of Shiva looked back. I saw biotechnology move there.

     I went to a community center and wrote my first article. I sent it to Suresh Gupta, the editor of Gupshup, that most unashamedly populist of Delhi's magazines, which had carried the photographs of my birth and marriage and now, unknowingly, my prophecies of the coming Age of Kali. He rejected it out of hand. I wrote another the next day. It came back with a comment: Interesting subject matter but inaccessible for our readership, I was getting somewhere. I went back and wrote again, long into the night over the pad. I am sure I gained another nickname: the Scribbling Saddhu. Suresh Gupta took that third article, and every article since. What did I write about? I wrote about all the things Shiv had prophesied. I wrote about what they might mean for three Indian families, the Voras, the Dashmukhs, and the Hirandanis, village, town, and city. I created characters—mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters and mad aunties and uncles with dark secrets and long-lost relatives come to call—and told their stories, week upon week, year upon year, and the changes, good and ill, the constant hammerblows of technological revolution wrought upon them. I created my own weekly soap opera; I even dared to call it Town and Country. It was wildly successful. It sold buckets. Suresh Gupta saw his circulation increase by thirty percent among those Delhi intelligentsia who usually only saw Gupshup in hair salons and beauty parlors. Questions were asked, who is this pseudonymous "Shakya-muni"? We want to interview him, we want to profile him, we want him to appear on Awadb Today, we want an op-ed piece from him, we want him to be an advisor on this project, that think tank, we want him to open a supermarket. Suresh Gupta fielded all such enquiries with the ease of a professional Square Leg. There were other questions, ones I overheard at train stations and phatphat lines, in supermarket queues and at bazaars, at parties and family get-togethers: What does it mean for us?

     I kept travelling, kept walking, immersing myself in the village and small town. I kept writing my little future-soap, sending off my articles from a cellpoint here, a village netlink there. I watched for the Eye of Shiva. It was several months between the first and second sightings, down in a business park in Madhya Pradesh. I saw them steadily after that, but never many; then, at the turn of 2049 into 2050, like a desert blooming after rain, they were everywhere.

     I was walking down through the flat dreary country south of the Nepalese border to Varanasi developing my thoughts on evolution, Darwinian and post-Darwinian, and the essential unknowability of singularities when I picked up the message from Sarasvati, on the emergency address. At once I thumbed to Varanasi and booked the first shatabdi to Delhi. My natty dreads, my long nails, the dirt and sacred ash of months on the road went down the pan in the First-Class Lounge. By the time the Vishwanath Express drew into the stupendous nanodiamond cocoon of New Delhi Central I was dressed and groomed, a smart, confident young Delhiwallah, a highly eligible teenager. Sarasvati picked me up in her truck. It was an old battered white Tata without autodrive or onboard or even a functioning air-conditioning system. New Delhi Women's Refuge was painted on the side in blue. I had followed her career—or rather her careers—anonymously while I wandered India. Worthiness attracted her; had she been a Westerner and not a Delhi girl I would have called it guilt at the privilege of her birth. Theater manager here, urban farming collective there, donkey sanctuary somewhere else, dam protest way way down there. She had derided me: deep down at the grass roots was where the real work was done. People work. It had only taken our brother's vision of the end of the Age of Kali for me to come round to her philosophy.

     She was only twenty but looked older, as if the years my youthfulness belied had been added to hers by some karma. She drove like a terrorist. Or maybe it was that I hadn't traveled in a car, in a collapsing Tata pickup, in a city, in Delhi . . . No, she drove like a terrorist.

     "You should have told me earlier."

     "He didn't want me to. He wants to be in control of it."

     "What is it exactly?"

     "Huntingdon's."

     "Can they do anything?"

     "They never could. They still can't."

     Sarasvati blared her way through the scrimmage of traffic wheeling around the Parliament Street roundabout. The Shaivites still defended their temple, tridents upheld, foreheads painted with the true tilak of Shiva, the three white horizontal stripes. I had seen that other mark on the forehead of almost every man and woman on the street. Sarasvati was pure.

     "He would have known whenever he had the genetic checks when I was conceived," I said. "He never said."