by Ian McDonald
‘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 - 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 is that for humans and aeais, we both need to tell people about it.’
‘When did you find out she was using an aeai assistant?’
‘Oh, at once, sir. These things are obvious to us. And if you’ll forgive the parlance, we don’t waste time. Fascination at the first nanosecond. Thereafter, well, as you saw on the unfortunate scene from Town and Country, we scripted you.’
‘So we thought you were guiding us . . .’
‘When it was you who were our go-betweens, yes.’
‘So what happens now?’ Jasbir slaps his hands on his thighs.
‘We are meshing at a very high level. I can only catch hints and shadows of it, but I feel a new aeai is being born, on a level far beyond either of us, or any of our co-characters. Is this a birth? I don’t know, but how can I convey to you the tremendous, rushing excitement I feel?’
‘I meant me.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. Of course you did. I am quite, quite dizzy with it all. If I might make one observation; there’s truth in what your parents say. First the marriage, then the love. Love grows in the thing you see every day.’
Thieving macaques dart around Jasbir’s legs and pluck at the creases of his pants. Midnight metro, the last train home. The few late-night passengers observe a quarantine of mutual solitude. The djinns of unexplained wind that haunt subway systems send litter spiralling across the platform. The tunnel focuses distant shunts and clanks, uncanny at this zero hour. There should be someone around at the phatphat stand. If not he’ll walk. It doesn’t matter.
He met her at a fashionable bar, all leather and darkened glass, in an international downtown hotel. She looked wonderful. The simple act of her stirring sugar into coffee tore his heart in two.
‘When did you find out?’
‘Devashri Didi told me.’
‘Devashri Didi.’
‘And yours?
‘Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. A very proper, old fashioned Rajput gent. He always called me sir; right up to the end. My house-mate made him. He works in character design on Town and Country.’
‘My older sister works in PR in the meta-soap department at Jazhay. She got one of the actor designers to put Devashri Didi together.’ Jasbir has always found the idea of artificial actors believing they played equally artificial roles head-frying. Then he found aeai love.
‘Is she married? Your older sister, I mean.’
‘Blissfully. And children.’
‘Well, I hope our aeais are very happy together.’ Jasbir raised a glass. Shulka lifted her coffee cup. She wasn’t a drinker. She didn’t like alcohol. Devashri Didi had told her it looked good for the Begum Jaitly’s modern shaadi.
‘My little quiz?’ Jasbir asked.
‘Devashri Didi gave me the answers you were expecting. She’d told me it was a standard ploy, personality quizzes and psychic tests.’
‘And the Sanskrit?’
‘Can’t speak a word.’
Jasbir laughed honestly.
‘The personal spiritual journey?’
‘I’m a strictly material girl. Devashri Didi said . . .’
‘. . . I’d be impressed if I thought you had a deep spiritual dimension. I’m not a history buff either. And An Eligible Boy?’
‘That unreadable tripe?’
‘Me neither.’
‘Is there anything true about either of us?’
‘One thing,’ Jasbir said. ‘I can tango.’
Her surprise, breaking into a delighted smile, was also true. Then she folded it away.
‘Was there ever any chance?’ Jasbir asked.
‘Why did you have to ask that? We could have just admitted that we were both playing games and shaken hands and laughed and left it at that. Jasbir, would it help if I told you that I wasn’t even looking? I was trying the system out. It’s different for suitable girls. I’ve got a plan.’
‘Oh,’ said Jasbir.
‘You did ask and we agreed, right at the start tonight, no more pretence.’ She turned her coffee cup so that the handle faced right and laid her spoon neatly in the saucer. ‘I have to go now.’ She snapped her bag shut and stood up. Don’t walk away, Jasbir said in his silent Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness voice. She walked away.
‘And Jasbir.’
‘What?’
‘You’re a lovely man, but this was not a date.’
A monkey takes a liberty too far, plucking at Jasbir’s shin. Jasbir’s kick connects and sends it shrieking and cursing across the platform. Sorry, monkey. It wasn’t you. Booms rattle up the subway tube; gusting hot air and the smell of electricity herald the arrival of the last metro. As the lights swing around the curve in the tunnel, Jasbir imagines how it would be to step out and drop in front of it. The game would be over. Deependra has it easy. Indefinite sick leave, civil service counselling and pharma. But for Jasbir there is no end to it and he is so so tired of playing. Then the train slams past him in a shout of blue and silver and yellow light, slams him back into himself. He sees his face reflected in the glass,
his teeth still divinely white. Jasbir shakes his head and smiles and instead steps through the opening door.
It is as he suspected. The last phatphat has gone home for the night from the rank at Barwala metro station. It’s four kays along the pitted, flaking roads to Acacia Bungalow Colony behind its gates and walls. Under an hour’s walk. Why not? The night is warm, he’s nothing better to do and he might yet pull a passing cab. Jasbir steps out. After half an hour a last, patrolling phatphat passes on the other side of the road. It flashes its light and pulls around to come in beside him. Jasbir waves it on. He is enjoying the night and the melancholy. There are stars up there, beyond the golden airglow of great Delhi.
Light spills through the French windows from the verandah into the dark living room. Sujay is at work still. In four kilometres Jasbir has generated a sweat. He ducks into the shower, closes his eyes in bliss as the jets of water hit him. Let it run let it run let it run. He doesn’t care how much he wastes, how much it costs, how badly the villagers need it for their crops. Wash the old tired dirt from me.
A scratch at the door. Does Jasbir hear the mumble of a voice? He shuts off the shower.
‘Sujay?’
‘I’ve, ah, left you tea.’
‘Oh, thank you.’
There’s silence but Jasbir knows Sujay hasn’t gone. ‘Ahm, just to say that I have always . . . I will . . . always. Always . . .’ Jasbir holds his breath, water running down his body and dripping on to the shower tray. ‘I’ll always be here for you.’
Jasbir wraps a towel around his waist, opens the bathroom door and lifts the tea.
Presently Latin music thunders out from the brightly lit windows of Number 27 Acacia Bungalows. Lights go on up and down the close. Mrs Prasad beats her shoe on the wall and begins to wail. The tango begins.
The Little Goddess
I remember the night I became a goddess.
The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger, for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been up since dawn, the washing and dressing and making-up was a long and tiring business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was a budget tourist chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.
I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my father’s mouth was pulled in and he held his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters might be goddesses.
On the street, rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi, look! Best of all fortune! The other girls held on tight to the men’s hands. I lifted my skirts and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.
They took us to the Hanumandhoka. Police and machines kept the people out of Durbar Square. I remember staring long at the machines, with their legs like steel chickens and naked blades in their hands. The President’s Own fighting machines. Then I saw the temple and its great roofs sweeping up and up and up into the red sunset and I thought for one instant its upturned eaves were bleeding.
The room was long and dim and stuffily warm. Low evening light shone in dusty rays through cracks and slits in the carved wood; so bright it almost burned. Outside, you could hear the traffic and the bustle of tourists. The walls seemed thin but at the same time kilometres thick. Durbar Square was a world away. The room smelled of brassy metal. I did not recognise it then but I know it now, it is the smell of blood. Beneath the blood was another smell, of time piled thick as dust. One of the two women who would be my guardians if I passed the test told me the temple was five hundred years old. She was a short, round woman with a face that always seemed to be smiling but when you looked closely you saw it was not. She made us sit on the floor on red cushions while the men brought the rest of the girls. Some of them were crying already. When there were ten of us the two women left and the door was closed. We sat for a long time in the heat of the long room. Some of the girls fidgeted and chattered but I gave all my attention to the wall carvings and soon I was lost. It has always been easy for me to lose myself; in Shakya I could disappear for hours in the movement of clouds across the mountain, in the ripple of the grey river far below and the flap of the prayer banner in the wind. My parents saw it as a sign of my inborn divinity, one of thirty-two that mark girls in whom the goddess could dwell.
In the failing light I read the story of Jayaprakash Malla playing dice with the devi Taleju Bhawani who came to him in the shape of a red snake and left with the vow that she would only return to the rulers of Kathmandu as a virgin girl of low caste, to spite their haughtiness. I could not read its end in the darkness, but I did not need to. I was its end, or one of the other nine girls in the god-house of the devi.
Then the doors burst open wide and firecrackers exploded and, through the rattle and smoke, red demons leaped into the hall. Behind them, men in crimson beat pans and clappers and bells. At once two of the girls began to cry and the two women came and took them away. But I knew the monsters were just silly men. In masks. These were not even close to demons. I have seen demons, after the rain clouds when the light comes low down the valley and all the mountains leap up as one. Stone demons, kilometres high. I have heard their voices, and their breath does not smell like onions. The silly men danced close to me, shaking their red manes and red tongues but I could see their eyes behind the painted holes and they were afraid of me.
Then the door banged open again with another crash of fireworks and more men came through the smoke. They carried baskets draped with red sheets. They set them in front of us and whipped away the coverings. Buffalo heads, so freshly struck off the blood was bright and glossy. Eyes rolled up, lolling tongues still warm, noses still wet. And the flies, swarming around the severed neck. A man pushed a basket towards me on my cushion as if it were a dish of holy food. The crashing and beating outside rose to a roar, so loud and metallic it hurt. The girl from my own Shakya village started to wail; the cry spread to another and then another, then a fourth. The other woman, the old, tall, pinched one with a skin like an old purse, came in to take them out, carefully lifting her gown so as not to trail it in the blood. The dancers whirled around like flame and the kneeling man lifted the buffalo head from the basket. He held it up in my face, eye to eye, but all I thought was that it must weigh a lot; his muscles stood out like vines, his arm shook. The flies looked like black jewels. Then there was a clap from outside and the men set down the heads and covered them up with their cloths and they left with the silly demon men whirling and leaping around them. There was one other girl left on her cushion now. I did not know her. She was of a Vajryana family from Niwar down the valley. We sat a long time, wanting to talk but not knowing if that too was part of the trial. Then the door opened a third time and two men led a white goat into the devi hall. They brought it right between me and the Niwari girl. I saw its wicked, slotted eye roll. One held the goat’s tether, the other took a big ceremonial kukri from a leather sheath. He blessed it and with one fast strong stroke sent the goat’s head leaping from its body.
I almost laughed, for the goat looked so funny, its body not knowing where its head was, the head looking around for the body and then the body realising that it had no head and going down with a kick, and why was the Niwari girl screaming, couldn’t she see how funny it was, or was she screaming because I saw the joke and she was jealous of that? Whatever her reason, smiling woman and weathered woman came and took her very gently away and the two men went down on their knees in the spr
eading blood and kissed the wooden floor. They lifted away the two parts of the goat. I wished they hadn’t done that. I would have liked someone with me in the big wooden hall. But I was on my own in the heat and the dark and over the traffic I could hear the deep-voiced bells of Kathmandu start to swing and ring. Then for the last time the doors opened and there were the women, in the light.
‘Why have you left me all alone?’ I cried. ‘What have I done wrong?’
‘How could you do anything wrong, goddess?’ said the old, wrinkled woman who, with her colleague, would become my mother and father and teacher and sister. ‘Now come along with us and hurry. The President is waiting.’
