Cyberabad Days - [River of Gods 02]

by Ian McDonald

  There’s a ritual to shaadi nights. The first part of it involves Jasbir in the bathroom for hours playing pop music too loud and using too much expensive water while Sujay knocks and leaves copious cups of tea at the door and runs an iron over Jasbir’s collars and cuffs and carefully removes the hairs of previous shaadis from Jasbir’s suit jacket. Sujay is Jasbir’s housemate in the government house at Acacia Bungalow Colony. He’s a character designer on the Awadh version of Town and Country, neighbour-and-rival Bharat’s all-conquering artificial intelligence generated soap opera. He works with the extras, designing new character skins and dropping them over raw code from Varanasi. Jahzay Productions is a new model company, meaning that Sujay seems to do most of his work from the verandah on his newfangled lighthoek device, his hands drawing pretty, invisible patterns on air. To office-bound Jasbir, with a ninety-minute commute on three modes of transport each way each day, it looks pretty close to nothing. Sujay is uncommunicative and hairy and neither shaves nor washes his too-long hair enough but his is a sensitive soul and he compensates for the luxury of being able to sit in the cool cool shade all day waving his hands by doing housework. He cleans, he tidies, he launders. He is a fabulous cook. He is so good that Jasbir does not need a maid, a saving much to be desired in pricey Acacia Bungalow Colony. This is a source of gossip to the other residents of Acacia Bungalow Colony. Most of the goings-on in Number 27 are the subject of gossip over the lawn sprinklers. Acacia Bungalow Colony is a professional, family gated community.

  The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir’s collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly-fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check teeth for lunch-time spinach and other dental crimes.

  ‘So what do you think of them then?’ Jasbir says.

  ‘They’re white,’ grunts Sujay.

  The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phatphat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plot-lines on Town and Country. It’s Jasbir’s major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals; soap-opera gossip. In his experience, what the women really want is gupshup from the metasoap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country. ‘Auh,’ Sujay will say. ‘Different department.’

  There’s the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. ‘Your father left a message. He wants to see you.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘You’ve hired a what?’ Jasbir’s retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer, confidentially, across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.

  ‘A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers.’ Jasbir’s father inclines his head toward the open living-room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her non-eligible boys, Jasbir’s mother watches the test match on the smart-silk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service paycheck. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. ‘She’s found this special matchmaker.’

  ‘Wait wait wait. Explain to me special.’

  Jasbir’s father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a tea-cup.

  ‘Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra ... Well, she’s updated it a bit, this being the twenty-first century and everything, so she’s, ah, found a nute.’

  A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless-steel draining-board.

  A nute?’ Jasbir hisses

  ‘He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once.’

  Anant lets out an aie!, soft and involuntary as a fart.

  ‘I think the word you’re looking for is “yt”,’ Jasbir says. “And they’re not hijras the way you knew them. They’re not men become women or women become men. They’re neither.’

  ‘Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes; whatever; it’s not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh.’ Mrs Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like papercuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.

  ~ * ~

  Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men snowing men hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage resumes. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name, a few had passed beyond being rivals into becoming friends.

  ‘Teeth!’ A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leant Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. ‘Where did you get those, badmash?’ He was an old university colleague of Jasbir’s, much given to high-profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was In Finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It’s the game, isn’t it? Kishore rolls on, ‘Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra’s night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It’s all in the stars, and on your palmer.’

  Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned workcluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir’s Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was a call, then a date. Now it’s a proposal.

  ‘Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh,’ Deependra said lugubriously. ‘Our eyes will meet, she will nod - just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I’d ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I’ve already promised them all to my brothers and cousins. It’s written. Trust me.’

  It was a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janampatri artificial intelligence.

  A Nepali khidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dancefloor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.

  ‘Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honour and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!’

  Two attendants slid open the folding windows onto the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule -five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re muttering about in there,’ Mrs Dayal calls over the mantra commentary of Harsh
a Bhogle. ‘I’ve had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay.’ There is a spatter of applause from the Test Match.

  ‘I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them,’ Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. ‘She’s had the talk. Yt’ll start making the match. There’s nothing to be done about it. There are worse things.’

  The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right, Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.

  Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world', well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket. And there’s too much milk in the tea.

  ~ * ~

  A dream wind like the hot gusts that forerun the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool white spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Avenue Bungalows. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandis of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.

  ‘Very clever, very pretty but I think I’ll wait until the price comes down.’

  ‘It’s, um, not the ’hoek,’ Sujay mutters. ‘You know, well, the matchmaker your mother hired. Well, I thought, maybe you don’t need someone arranging you a marriage.’ Some days Sujay’s inability to talk to the point exasperates Jasbir. Those days tend to come after another fruitless and expensive shaadi night and the threat of a matchmaker but particularly after Deependra of the non-white teeth announces he has a date. With the girl. The one written in the fourth house of Rahu by his pocket astrology aeai. ‘Well, you see I thought, with the right help you could arrange it yourself.’ Some days, debate with Sujay is pointless. He follows his own calendar. ‘You, ah, need to put the ’hoek back on again.’

  Silver notes spray through Jasbir’s inner ears as the little curl of smart plastic seeks out the sweet spot in his skull. Pixel birds swoop and swarm like starlings on a winter evening. It is inordinately pretty. Then Jasbir gasps aloud as the motes of light and sound sparklingly coalesce into a dapper man in an old-fashioned high-collar sherwani and wrinkle-bottom pyjamas. His shoes are polished to mirror-brightness. The dapper man bows.

  ‘Good morning, sir. I am Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness.’

  ‘What is this doing in my house?’ Jasbir unhooks the device beaming data into his brain.

  ‘Er, please don’t do that,’ Sujay says. ‘It’s not aeai etiquette.’

  Jasbir slips the device back on and there he is, that charming man.

  ‘I have been designed with the express purpose of helping you marry a suitable girl,’ says Ram Tarun Das.

  ‘Designed?’

  ‘I, ah, made him for you,’ says Sujay. ‘I thought that if anyone knows about relationships and marriages, it’s soap stars.’

  ‘A soap star. You’ve made me a, a marriage life-coach out of a soap star?’

  ‘Not a soap star exactly, more a conflation of a number of subsystems from the central character register,’ Sujay says. ‘Sorry Ram.’

  ‘Do you usually do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Apologise to aeais.’

  ‘They have feelings too.’

  Jasbir rolls his eyes. ‘I’m being taught husbandcraft by a mash-up.’

  ‘Ah, that is out of order. Now you apologise.’

  ‘Now then, sir, if I am to rescue you from a marriage forged in hell, we had better start with manners,’ says Ram Tarun Das. ‘Manners maketh the man. It is the bedrock of all relationships because true manners come from what he is, not what he does. Do not argue with me, women see this at once. Respect for all things, sir, is the key to etiquette. Maybe I only imagine I feel as you feel, but that does not make my feelings any less real to me. So this once, I accept your apology as read. Now, we’ll begin. We have so much to do before tonight’s shaadi.’

  Why, Jasbir thinks, why can I never get my shoes like that?

  ~ * ~

  The lazy crescent moon lolls low above the out-flarings of Tughluk’s thousand stacks; a cradle to rock an infant nation. Around its rippling reflection in the infinity pool bob mango-leaf diyas. No polo grounds and country clubs for Begum Jaitly. This is 2045, not 1945. Modern style for a modern nation, that is philosophy of the Jaitly Shaadi Agency. But gossip and want are eternal and in the mood lighting of the penthouse the men are blacker-than-black shadows against greater Delhi’s galaxy of lights and traffic.

  ‘Eyebrows!’ Kishore greets Jasbir with TV-host pistol-fingers two-shot bam bam. ‘No seriously, what did you do to them?’ Then his own eyes widen as he scans down from the eyebrows to the total product. His mouth opens, just a crack, but wide enough for Jasbir to savour an inner fist-clench of triumph.

  He’d felt self-conscious taking Ram Tarun Das to the mall. He had no difficulty accepting that the figure in its stubbornly atavistic costume was invisible to everyone but him (though he did marvel at how the aeai avoided colliding with any other shopper in the thronged Centrestage Mall). He did feel stupid talking to thin air.

  ‘What is this delicacy?’ Ram Tarun Das said in Jasbir’s inner ear. ‘People talk to thin air on the cellphone all the time. Now this suit, sir.’

  It was bright, it was brocade, it was a fashionable retro cut that Jasbir would have gone naked rather than worn.

  ‘It’s very ... bold.’

  ‘It’s very you. Try it. Buy it. You will seem confident and stylish without being flashy. Women cannot bear flashy.’

  The robot cutters and stitchers were at work even as Jasbir completed the card transaction. It was expensive. Not as expensive as all the shaadi memberships, he consoled himself. And something to top it off. But Ram Tarun Das manifested himself right in the jeweller’s window over the display.

  ‘Never jewellery on a man. One small brooch at the shirt collar to hold it together, that is permissible. Do you want the lovely girls to think you are a Mumbai pimp? No, sir, you do not. No to jewels. Yes to shoes. Come.’

  He had paraded his finery before a slightly embarrassed Sujay.

  ‘You look, er, good. Very dashing. Yes.’

  Ram Tarun Das, leaning on his cane and peering intensely, said, ‘You move like a buffalo. Ugh, sir. Here is what I prescribe for you. Tango lessons. Passion and discipline. Latin fire, yet the strictest of tempos. Do not argue, it is the tango for you. There is nothing like it for deportment.’

  The tango, the manicures, the pedicures, the briefings in popular culture and Delhi gossip (‘Soap opera insults both the intelligence and imagination, I should know, sir’), the conversational ploys, the body language games of when to turn so, when to make or break eye-contact, when to dare the lightest, engaging touch. Sujay mooched around the house, even more lumbering and lost than usual, as Jasbir chatted with air and practised Latin turns and drops with invisible partners. Last of all, on the morning of the Jaitly shaadi.

  ‘Eyebrows sir. You will never get a bride with brows like a hairy sadhu. There is a girl not five kilometres from here, she has a moped service. I’ve ordered her, she will be here within ten minutes.’

  As ever, Kishore won’t let Jasbir wedge an answer in, but rattles on, ‘So, Deependra then?’

  Jasbir has noticed that Deependra is not occupying his customary place in Kishore’s shadows; in fact he does not seem to be anywhere in this penthouse.

  ‘Third date,’ Kishore says, then mouths it again silently for emphasis. ‘That janampatri aeai must be doing something right. You know, wouldn’t it be funny if someon
e took her off him? Just as a joke, you know?’

  Kishore chews his bottom lip. Jasbir knows the gesture of old. Then bells chime, lights dim and a wind from nowhere sends the butter-flames flickering and the little diyas flocking across the infinity pool. The walls have opened, the women enter the room.

  ~ * ~

  She stands by the glass wall looking down into the cube of light that is the car park. She clutches her cocktail between her hands as if in prayer or concern. It is a new cocktail designed for the international cricket test, served in an egg-shaped goblet made from a new spin-glass that will always self-right, no matter how it is set down or dropped. A Test of Dragons is the name of the cocktail. Good Awadhi whisky over a gilded syrup with a six-hit of Chinese Kao Liang liqueur. A tiny red gel dragon dissolves like a sunset.