by Ian McDonald
I snap the fingers of my right hand into my palm to activate the software in the palmer glove. I hold that hand a hovering few centimetres above her fluorescent body-paint-stained belly. I don’t touch. We never touch. That’s the rule. Sex has rules. I move my hand in a series of gestures as gentle and precise as any classical dancer’s mudras over Ashurbanipal. Not touching, never touching, never even flexing a finger. It’s not about physical touch. It’s our own thing. But inside her head, I am touching her, more intimately than any rubbing or pushing or chafing of parts. The ’hoek beams signals through the bone, stimulating those parts of the brain that correspond to my slow calligraphy. I am writing my signature across her body. As she in return maps the me drawn on the inside of my skull. How does it feel? Like a cat must feel when it’s stroked. Like an otter must feel diving and turning and performing its underwater acrobatics. Like a fire must feel when the wind catches it and sweeps it up a forested mountainside. And without the poetry; like I want to cringe and melt at the same time. Like I must move in a direction I can’t explain and my body can’t express. Like there is something in my mouth that grows bigger with every second but never changes size, like a reverse turd, only sweet and joyful, is working its way back up into my colon. Like I need need need to pee something that isn’t pee that my body hasn’t learned yet. Like I want this to end and never end. It goes on for a long long time and terrible little crying noises come out of our eight-year-aged lips as the aeai steers us through the howling torus of traffic on Siri Ring. We are teens and we are making out in the car.
There is a coming. Oh yes, there is a coming. Like soft fireworks, or the giggling drop at the top of a Ferris wheel or the feeling you get on those nights when the air is clear and you can see out from the roof pool all the billion lights of Delhi and you are connected to every single one. Like a djinn, made of fire. Ecstatic and guilty and dirty, like you’ve shouted a dirty word at a sophisticated party. My nipples are very very sensitive.
Then I start with Purrzja. And then Shayman. As I said, it’s entirely our own thing. It’s well into dark by the time we put up our seats and straighten our clothing and re-gel our hair and I flick off the autodrive and take us up out and over the Ring on a curving off ramp to a club. It’s a bit of a freak place - nutes like it and where nutes are welcome we are usually welcome - but the door knows us - knows our money - and there are always chati mag paps there. Tonight is no exception: we pose and pimp and preen for the cameras. I can write the society column headlines already. GENE-TWEAK FREAKS ON COCKTAIL CLUB ORGY. Except we don’t drink. We’re underage for that.
It’s always late when we get back. Only the house steward and aeais wait for us, gently chiding that it is a school day tomorrow. Don’t they understand that those are the best nights? This night the lights are on in the big drawing room. I can see them from the approach to the car park. My mother waits for me. She’s not alone. There’s a man and a woman with her, money people, I can tell that right away from their shoes, their fingernails, their teeth, the cut of their clothes and the prickle of aeai servitors hovering around them; all those things I can assess in a glance.
‘Vishnu, this is Nafisa and Dinesh Misra.’
I namaste, a vision in clashing cross-cultural trash.
‘They are going to be your new mother and father-in-law.’
~ * ~
My lovely consort
My cats can do other tricks too; I feel you grow bored of them running in their ring. Cats! Cats! See, a clap of my hands and they go and sit on their little stools: Matsya and Kurma, Varaha and Narasimha, Vamana, Parashurama, Rama and Krishna and Buddha and Kalki. Good cats. Clever cats. Rama, stop licking yourself. Hah! One word from me and they do as they will. Now, please feel this hoop, just ordinary paper. Yes? Yes. And these, the same, yes? Yes.
I set them out around the ring. Tabby Parashurama is squeezing his eyes closed in that way that makes him look very very smug.
By the way, I must thank you for coming to watch The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus. Yes, that’s the official name. It’s on the letters of registration. Yes, and I pay whatever taxes are due. It’s a small entertainment, but at least it’s working. You have solar? Not hooked up to the zero point? Very long-sighted of you. Now: watch! Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki!
They flow from their painted stools like liquid and run around the inside of the ring, an effortless, cat-lazy lope. The trick with cat circuses, I have found, is to convince them they are doing it for themselves.
And lo! I clap my hands and in perfect unison my cats leap from their ordained orbits clean through the paper hoops. Your applause please, but not for me: for Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki. Now they run in a circle, hurdling through the hoops. What was that? Is there a lesson in every trick? What do you mean? The spiritual significance of the cats I call to perform? I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think cats especially spiritual; quite the reverse; they are the most worldly and sensual of creatures, though the Prophet Mohammed, so it’s said, was a great lover of cats and famously cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb a cat that had fallen asleep there.
Now, on with the story. Where am I going? Don’t you know it’s a terrible rudeness to interrupt the storyteller? You came here to see the cat circus, not watch some old goondah spin a yarn? You’ve seen cats leap through paper hoops, what more do you want? Where am I going? Very well then, to Varanasi. No, I am not. Look at me, look at this forehead, put your finger there, yes right there, do you see a tilak, do you feel a little crusty lump, do you feel anything but my own skin? No you do not. It’s not just the bodhisofts who go to Varanasi. Here’s the deal. I have plenty more tricks in my little ring here on the sand, but to see them you will have to listen to my story and remember, the power may be working but the broadcasters are out. Nothing on your screens tonight. But you’ll like this. It’s a wedding scene. What is a story without a wedding?
~ * ~
Elephants bore me. When I say that I don’t mean that I find the pachyderm genus tedious, as if I have some special personal conversational relationship with them and knew all their conversational tics and ploys. Is Ganesh not the best-loved god in our entire profligate pantheon? I mean, simply, that elephants carried me; in a howdah like a small gilt temple through the streets of Delhi. Five elephants, with mahouts; one for my school friend Suresh Hira, one for Vin Johar, one for Syaman and one, my sole spit of defiance in the face of tradition, for Sarasvati, and one for me, Vishnu Nariman Raj, the gnarly groom. Delhi’s eternal, monstrous traffic broke around the horde of musicians, drummers, dancers, merry-meeters like water. The traffic news had been reporting me as a major congestion for hours. People stopped and stared, women threw rice, ayahs pointed me out to their finger-sucking grandchildren: There, there he is, Lord Vishnu goes to his wedding. The chati mags had been full of little else than the first dynastic Brahmin marriage. My other break with tradition: much of the gaudy I had funded myself through the judicious auctioning of the photo rights to Gupshup magazine. Look, here am I, in white sherwani and wrinkle-ankle pants in the vest best style, the traditional veil of flowers over my face, gripping my sword with one hand (a ludicrous affectation by Sreem, Delhi’s most-sought nute wedding choreographer; who could ever sword-fight from the broad back of an elephant?), with the other gripping white-knuckled to the gold-leaf coping of my swaying howdah. Have I said that riding an elephant is like being on a boat on unstill waters? Does what you glimpse through the cascading marigolds look afraid? Were you expecting someone larger?
Negotiations had been protracted and delicate over the winter. Hosts of aeai attorneys circled and clashed around my mother and father, temporarily unified, as they entertained the Misras to a grand vagdana. Lakshmi and I sat blandly, quietly, hands folded neatly in our laps on the cream leather sofa as relatives and relatives-to-be passed and greeted and blessed us. We smiled. We nodded. We did not speak, not to our guests, not to each other. In our years together at
the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College we had said all that we could say to each other. We sat like an old married couple at a metro stop. At last the hosts of clashing attorney aeais withdrew: a pre-nuptial contract was drafted, a dowry was set. It was a brilliant match; property and ’ware with water, the very essence of life. Of course the price was high; we were Brahmins. It was no less than the flesh of our flesh and the seed of our loins, for all generations. Way down the list of ticky boxes on Dr Rao’s shopping list was one I suspect Lakshmi’s parents had fielded blindly. I know my parents had. But it was perhaps the most profound change of all that Dr Rao’s nanoworkers worked on us. Our genelines were modified. The traits engineered into us were inheritable. Our children and their children, all our conceivable Nariman-Misras marching into futurity, would be Brahmins, not from the microsurgery of Dr Rao, but from our sperm and eggs.
Children, offspring, a line, a dynasty. That was our mutually contracted dowry. A match was made! Let great Delhi rejoice!
The janampatri aeais had read the stars for the most auspicious fates, the pandit had made the puja to Ganesh and the joint houses of Nariman and Misra had hired Gupshup Girls, Delhi’s biggest and brassiest girl band to sing and flash their thighs for two thousand society guests at our sangeet sandhya. Lakshmi duetted onstage with them. Pop-girli hotpants and belly-top looked disturbing on her as she danced and skipped among the high heels. Too small, too too young to wed. I was never much of a singer. Mamaji and Dadaji had neglected to ticky that box. I boogied down in the golden circle with my classmates. Though I had still two years more at Dr Renganathan College under the tutelage of the invisible Mr Khan, our circle was broken. I was all their imminent futures.
At India Gate, Sarasvati called her mahout to a halt and slipped from her elephant’s back to run and dance among my parade of Baraatis. I had defied tradition by inviting her, she defied it back by coming dressed as a man in sherwani and kohl and huge, ludicrous false Rajput moustache. I watched her leap and whirl, brilliant and vivacious with the dancers and drummers and dance, laughing, with monkey-like Sreem and felt tears in my eyes behind my veil of flowers. She was so brilliant, so lovely, so lithe and free from expectation.
At Lodi Gardens the celebrity spotters were five deep. Policemen held them back with a chain of linked lathis. They had seen Rishi Jaitly and Anand Arora and ooh, isn’t that Esha Rathore the famous dancer and who is that little man with the very much younger wife; don’t you know, it’s Narayan Mittal from Mittal Industries. Last and least to them was the seeming child perched high on the back of a painted wedding elephant. A blare of trumpets and a barrage of drums greeted us. Then the smartsilk screens draped around us woke up and filled with the characters and, in a never-before-seen-feat of CG prestidigitation, the cast of Town and Country singing and dancing our wedding song specially written by legendary screen composer A. H. Husayin. They were aeais; singing and dancing were easy for them. There, almost lost among the sari silk and garlands as the bridal party stepped forward to greet us, was Lakshmi.
We were swept on a wave of drum beating and brass-tootling to the pavilions arrayed across the well-watered grass like a Mughal invasion. We feasted, we danced, we were sat on our thrones, our feet not touching the ground, and received our guests.
I didn’t see him. The line was long and the atmosphere in the marquee stifling and I was bloated and drowsy from wedding food. I took the hand blindly, bored. I only became attentive when it held mine that moment too long, that quantum too firmly.
Shiv.
‘Brother.’
I nodded in acknowledgement.
‘Are you well?’
He indicated his suit, the fabric cheap, the cut niggardly, the cufflinks and the jewel at the shirt-throat phoney. A budget wedding outfit. Tomorrow it would go by phatphat back to the hire shop.
‘I’ll be more suitably dressed when you come to my wedding.’
‘Are you getting married?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
I sniffed then. It was not Shiv’s perfume - that too smelled cheap and phenolic. My uniquely-connected senses show me subtleties to which others are quite oblivious. In his student hire-suit and cheap Bata shoes, Shiv seemed to carry an aura around him, a presence, a crackle of information like distant summer thunder. He smelled of aeais. I tilted my head to one side. Did I see a momentary shifting glow? It did not take a synaesthete or a Brahmin to spot the ’hoek tucked behind his ear.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said and knew that he heard the lie.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘We must meet up some time,’ I went on, compounding the lie. ‘When Lakshmi and I get back into Delhi. Have you over to the place.’
‘It’s not going to be terribly likely,’ Shiv said. ‘I’m going to Bharat as soon as I graduate. I’ve a post-grad lined up at the University of Varanasi. Nano-informatics. Delhi’s not a good place for anyone working in artificial intelligence. The Americans are breathing down Srivastava’s neck to ratify the Hamilton Treaty.’
I consumed news, all news, any news, as universally and unthinkingly as breathing. I could watch twelve screens of television and tell you what was happening on any of them, simultaneously scan a tableful of newspapers and reproduce any article verbatim; I frequently kept my newsfeeds on brain drip waking and sleeping, beaming the happening world into my tiny head. I knew too well of the international moves, begun by the United States to restrict artificial intelligence by licence. Fear motivates them; that vague Christian millennial dread of the work of our own hands rising up and making itself our god. Artificial intelligences with a thousand, ten thousand, infinite times our human intelligence, whatever that means. Intelligence, when you look down on it from above, is a very vague terrain. Nevertheless police forces had been established, Krishna Cops, charged with hunting down and eliminating rogue aeais. Fine title, vain hope. Aeais were utterly different from us; intelligences that could be in many places at one time, that could exist in many different avatars, that could only move by copying themselves, not as I moved, lugging about my enhanced intelligence in the calcium bowl of my skull. They had very good guns, but I think my gnawing fear was aeais today, Brahmins tomorrow. Humans are very jealous gods.
I knew that it was inevitable that Awadh would sign up to the accord in return for favoured nation grants from the US. Neighbouring Bharat would never accede to that; its media industry, dependent on artificial intelligence for the success of Town and Country from Djakarta to Dubai, was too influential a lobby The world’s first overt soapocracy. And, I foresaw, the world’s first data-haven nation state. Stitching together stories buried way down the business news, I was already seeing a pattern of software house relocations and research foundations moving to Varanasi. So Shiv, ambitious Shiv, Shiv-building-your-own-glory while I merely obeyed the imperative in my DNA, Shiv with your whiff of aeais around you, what is it in Bharat? Would you be a researcher into technologies as sky-blue as Lord Krishna himself, would you be a dataraja with a stable of aeais pretending they can’t pass the Turing Test?
‘Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,’ I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.
‘Not really no,’ Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?
The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable wedding shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like a plague at the wedding.
&n
bsp; The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over the tomb of Muhammad Shah and the dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private helicopter lifted us up and away to the teahouse in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed our baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.
‘It’s good isn’t it?’
‘Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.’
‘I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.’
‘Yes, it is good. Very old wood.’
‘This is the honeymoon then.’
