The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (38 page)

Over green tea Shulka began talking about that new novel everyone but everyone was reading, the one about the Delhi girl on the husband-hunt and her many suitors, the scandalous one,
An Eligible Boy
. Everyone but everyone but Jasbir.

Help!
he subvocalized into his inner ear.

Scanning it now
, Ram Tarun Das said.
Do you want a thematic digest, popular opinions or character breakdowns?

Just be there,
Jasbir silently whispered, covering the tiny movement of his jaw by setting the tea-pot lid ajar, a sign for a refill.

“Well, it’s not really a book a man should be seen reading . . .”

“But . . .”

“But isn’t everyone?” Ram Tarun Das dropped him the line. “I mean, I’m only two-thirds of the way in, but . . . how far are you? Spoiler alert spoiler alert.” It’s one of Sujay’s
Town and Country
expressions. Finally he understands what it means. Shulka just smiles and turns her tea bowl in its little saucer.

“Say what you were going to say.”

“I mean, can’t she see that Nishok is the one? The man is clearly, obviously, one thousand per cent doting on her. But then that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

“But Pran, it would always be fire with him. He’s the baddest of bad-mashes but you’d never be complacent with Pran. She’ll never be able to completely trust him and that’s what makes it exciting. Don’t you think you feel that sometimes it needs that little edge, that little fear that maybe, just maybe you could lose it all to keep it alive?”

Careful, sir,
murmured Ram Tarun Das.

“Yes, but we’ve known ever since the party at the Chatterjis where she pushed Jyoti into the pool in front of the Russian ambassador that she’s been jealous of her sister because she was the one that got to marry Mr Panse. It’s the eternal glamour versus security. Passion versus stability. Town versus country.”

“Ajit?”

“Convenient plot device. Never a contender. Every woman he dates is just a mirror to his own sweet self.”

Not one sentence, not one word had he read of the hit trash novel of the season. It had flown around his head like clatter-winged pigeons. He’s been too busy being that Eligible Boy.

Shulka held up a piece of sweet, salt, melting fatty duck breast between her porcelain forceps. Juice dripped on to the table cloth.

“So, who will Bani marry, then? Guess correctly and you shall have a prize.”

Jasbir heard Ram Tarun Das’s answer begin to form inside his head.
No
, he gritted on his molars.

“I think I know.”

“Go on.”

“Pran.”

Shulka stabbed forward, like the darting bill of a winter crane. There was hot, fatty soya duck in his mouth.

“Isn’t there always a twist in the tale?” Shulka said.

In the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC Deependra checks his hair in the mirror and smoothes it down.

“Dowry thievery; that’s what it is. They string you along, get their claws into your money, then they disappear and you never see a paisa again.”

Now Jasbir really really wants to get back to his little work cluster.

“Deep, this is fantasy. You’ve read this in the news feeds. Come on.”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire. My stars say that I should be careful in things of the heart and beware false friends. Jupiter is in the third house. Dark omens surround me. No, I have hired a private investigation aeai. It will conduct a discreet surveillance. One way or the other, I shall know.”

Jasbir grips the stanchion, knuckles white, as the phatphat swings through the great mil of traffic around Indira Chowk. Deependra’s aftershave oppresses him.

“Exactly where are we going?”

Deependra had set up the assignation on a coded palmer account. All he would say was that it required two hours of an evening, good clothes, a trustworthy friend and absolute discretion. For two days his mood had been grey and thundery as an approaching monsoon. His PI Aeai had returned a result but Deependra revealed nothing, not even a whisper in the clubbish privacy of the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC.

The phatphat, driven by a teenager with gelled hair that falls in sharp spikes over his eyes – an obvious impediment to navigation – takes them out past the airport. At Gurgaon the geography falls into place around Jasbir. He starts to feel nauseous from more than spike-hair’s driving and Deependra’s shopping mall aftershave. Five minutes later the phatphat crunches up the curve of raked gravel outside the pillared portico of the Haryana Polo and Country Club.

“What are we doing here? If Shulka finds out I’ve been to shaadi when I’m supposed to be dating her it’s all over.”

“I need a witness.”

Help me Ram Tarun Das
, Jasbir hisses into his molars but there is no reassuring spritz of silvery music through his skull to herald the advent of the Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. The two immense Sikhs on the door nod them through.

Kishore is sloped against his customary angle of the bar, surveying the territory. Deependra strides through the throng of eligible boys like a god going to war. Every head turns. Every conversation, every gossip falls silent.

“You . . . you . . . you.” Deependra stammers with rage. His face shakes. “Shaadi stealer!” The whole club bar winces as the slap cracks across Kishore’s face. Then two fists descend on Deependra, one on each shoulder. The man-mountain Sikhs turn him around and arm-lock him, frothing and raging, from the bar of the Haryana Polo and Country Club. “You, you chuutya!” Deependra flings back at his enemy. “I will take it out of you, every last paisa, so help me God. I will have satisfaction!”

Jasbir scurries behind the struggling, swearing Deependra, cowed with embarrassment.

“I’m only here to witness,” he says to the Sikh’s you’re-next glares. They hold Deependra upright a moment to snap his face and bar him forever from Begum Rezzak’s Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency. Then they throw him cleanly over the hood of a new model Li Fan G8 into the carriage drive. He lies dreadfully still and snapped on the gravel for a few moments, then with fetching dignity draws himself up, bats away the dust and straightens his clothes.

“I will see him at the river about this,” Deependra shouts at the impassive Sikhs. “At the river.”

Jasbir is already out on the avenue, trying to see if the phatphat driver’s gone.

The sun is a bowl of brass rolling along the indigo edge of the world. Lights twinkle in the dawn haze. There is never a time when there are not people at the river. Wire-thin men push handcarts over the trash-strewn sand, picking like birds. Two boys have set a small fire in a ring of stones. A distant procession of women, soft bundles on their heads, file over the grassy sand. By the shrivelled thread of the Yamuna an old Brahmin consecrates himself, pouring water over his head. Despite the early heat, Jasbir shivers. He knows what goes into that water. He can smell the sewage on the air, mingled with wood smoke.

“Birds,” says Sujay looking around him with simple wonder. “I can actually hear birds singing. So this is what mornings are like. Tell me again what I’m doing here?”

“You’re here because I’m not being here on my own.”

“And, ah, what exactly are you doing here?”

Deependra squats on his heels by the gym bag, arms wrapped around him. He wears a sharp white shirt and pleated slacks. His shoes are very good. Apart from grunted greetings he has not said a word to Jasbir or Sujay. He stares a lot. Deependra picks up a fistful of sand and lets his trickle through his fingers. Jasbir wouldn’t advise that either.

“I could be at home coding,” says Sujay. “Hey ho. Show time.”

Kishore marches across the scabby river-grass. Even as well-dressed distant speck it is obvious to all that he is furiously angry. His shouts carry far on the still morning air.

“I am going to kick your head into the river,” he bellows at Deependra, still squatting on the riverbank.

“I’m only here as a witness,” Jasbir says hurriedly, needing to be believed. Kishore must forget and Deependra must never know that he was also the witness that night Kishore made the joke in the Tughluk tower.

Deependra looks up. His face is bland, his eyes are mild.

“You just had to, didn’t you? It would have killed you to let me have something you didn’t.”

“Yeah, well. I let you get away with that in the Polo Club. I could have taken you then, it would have been the easiest thing. I could have driven your nose right into your skull, but I didn’t. You cost me my dignity, in front of all my friends, people I work with, business colleagues, but most of all, in front of the women.”

“Well then let me help you find your honour again.”

Deependra thrusts his hand into the gym bag and pulls out a gun.

“Oh my god it’s a gun he’s got a gun,” Jasbir jabbers. He feels his knees turn liquid. He thought that only happened in soaps and popular trash novels. Deependra gets to his feet, the gun never wavering from its aim in the centre of Kishore’s forehead, the precise spot a bindi would sit. “There’s another one in the bag.” Deependra waggles the barrel, nods with his head. “Take it. Let’s sort this right, the man’s way. Let’s sort it honourably. Take the gun.” His voice has gained an octave. A vein beats in his neck and at his temple. Deependra kicks the gym bag towards Kishore. Jasbir can see the anger, the mad, suicidal anger rising in the banker to match the civil servant’s. He can hear himself mumbling
Oh my god oh my god oh my god
. “Take the gun. You will have a honourable chance. Otherwise I will shoot you like a pi-dog right here.” Deependra levels the gun and takes a sudden, stabbing step towards Kishore. He is panting like a dying cat. Sweat has soaked his good white shirt through and through. The gun muzzle is a finger’s-breadth from Kishore’s forehead.

Then there is a blur of movement, a body against the sun, a cry of pain and the next Jasbir knows Sujay has the gun swinging by its trigger guard from his finger. Deependra is on the sand, clenching and unclenching his right hand. The old Brahmin stares, dripping.

“It’s okay now, it’s all okay, it’s over,” Sujay says. “I’m going to put this in the bag with the other and I’m going to take them and get rid of them and no one will ever talk about this, okay? I’m taking the bag now. Now, shall we all get out of here before someone calls the police, hm?”

Sujay swings the gym back over his sloping shoulder and strides out for the streetlights, leaving Deependra hunched and crying among the shredded plastic scraps.

“How, what, that was, where did you learn to do that?” Jasbir asks, tagging behind, feet sinking into the soft sand.

“I’ve coded the move enough times; I thought it might work in meat life.”

“You don’t mean?”

“From the soaps. Doesn’t everyone?”

There’s solace in soap opera. Its predictable tiny screaming rows, its scripted swooping melodramas, draw the poison from the chaotic, unscripted world where a civil servant in the water service can challenge a rival to a shooting duel over a woman he met at a shaadi. Little effigies of true dramas, sculpted in soap.

When he blinks, Jasbir can see the gun. He sees Deependra’s hand draw it out of the gym bag in martial-arts-movie slow motion. He thinks he sees the other gun, nestled among balled sports socks. Or maybe he imagines it, a cut-away close-up. Already he is editing his memory.

Soothing to watch Nilesh Vora and Dr Chatterji’s wife, their love eternally foiled and frustrated, and Deepti; will she ever realize that to the Brahmpur social set she is eternally that Dalit girl from the village pump?

You work on the other side of a glass partition from someone for years. You go with him to shaadis, you share the hopes and fears of your life and love with him. And loves turns him into a homicidal madman. Sujay took the gun off him. Big, clumsy Sujay, took the loaded gun out of his hand. He would have shot Kishore. Brave, mad Sujay. He’s coding, that’s his renormalizing process. Make soap, watch soap. Jasbir will make him tea. For once. Yes, that would be a nice gesture. Sujay is always always getting tea. Jasbir gets up. It’s a boring bit, Mahesh and Rajani. He doesn’t like them. Those rich-boy-pretending-they-are-car-valets-so-they-can-marry-for-love-not-money characters stretch his disbelief too far. Rajani is hot, though. She’s asked Mahesh to bring her car round to the front of the hotel.

“When you work out here you have lots of time to make up theories. One of my theories is that people’s cars are their characters,” Mahesh is saying.
Only in a soap would anyone ever imagine that a pick-up line like that would work, Jasbir thinks
. “So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?”

Jasbir freezes in the door.

“Oh, a Lexus.”

He turns slowly. Everything is dropping, everything is falling leaving him suspended. Now Mahesh is saying,

“You know, I have another theory. It’s that everyone’s a city. Are you Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?”

Jasbir sits on the arm of the sofa.
The fetch
, he whispers.
And she will say . . .

“I was born in Delhi . . .”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Mumbai,
murmurs Jasbir.

“Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.”

“Red Green Yellow Blue,” Jasbir says.

“Red.” Without a moment’s hesitation.

“Cat Dog Bird Monkey?”

She even cocks her head to one side. That was how he noticed Shulka was wearing the lighthoek.

“Bird . . . no.”

“No no no,” says Jasbir. She’ll smile slyly here. “Monkey.” And there is the smile. The
finesse.

“Sujay!” Jasbir yells. “Sujay! Get me Das!”

“How can an aeai be in love?” Jasbir demands.

Ram Tarun Das sits in his customary wicker chair, his legs casually crossed. Soon, very soon, Jasbir thinks,
voices will be raised and Mrs Prasad next door will begin to thump and weep
.

“Now sir, do not most religions maintain that love is the fundament of the universe? In which case, perhaps it’s not so strange that a distributed entity, such as myself, should find – and be surprised by, oh, so surprised, sir – by love? As a distributed entity, it’s different in nature from the surge of neurochemicals and waveform of electrical activity you experience as love. With us it’s a more – rarefied experience – judging solely by what I know from my subroutines on
Town and Country
. Yet, at the same time, it’s intensely communal. How can I describe it? You don’t have the concepts, let alone the words. I am a specific incarnation of aspects of a number of aeais and sub-programmes, as those aeais are also iterations of sub-programmes, many of them marginally sentient. I am many, I am legion. And so is she – though of course gender is purely arbitrary for us, and, sir, largely irrelevant. It’s very likely that at many levels we share components. So ours is not so much a marriage of minds as a league of nations. Here we are different from humans in that, for you, it seems to us that groups are divisive and antipathetical. Politics, religion, sport, but especially your history, seem to teach that. For us folk, groups are what bring us together. They are mutually attractive. Perhaps the closest analogy might be the merger of large corporations. One thing I do know, that for humans and aeais, we both need to tell people about it.”