The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  You’ve got the entry lines, you’ve got the exit lines and the stuff in the middle Ram Tarun Das will provide.

  He follows her glance down into the car park. A moment’s pause, a slight inclination of his body towards hers. That is the line.

  So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus? Ram Tarun Das whispers in Jasbir’s skull. He casually repeats the line. He has been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in how to make it sound natural. He’s as good as any newsreader, better than those few human actors left on television.

  She turned to him, lips parted a fraction in surprise.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She will say this, Ram Tarun Das hints. Again, offer the line.

  ‘Are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just pick one. Whatever you feel, that’s the right answer.’

  A pause, a purse of the lips. Jasbir subtly links his hands behind his back, the better to hide the sweat.

  ‘Lexus,’ she says. Shulka, her name is Shulka. She is a twenty-two year-old marketing graduate from Delhi U working in men’s fashion, a Mathur—only a couple of caste steps away from Jasbir’s folk. The Demographic Crisis has done more to shake up the tiers of varna and jati than a century of the slow drip of democracy. And she has answered his question.

  ‘Now, that’s very interesting,’ says Jasbir.

  She turns, plucked crescent-moon eyebrows arched. Behind Jasbir, Ram Tarun Das whispers, now, the fetch.

  ‘Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?’

  A small frown now. Lord Vishnu, she is beautiful.

  ‘I was born in Delhi . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  The frown becomes a nano-smile of recognition.

  ‘Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai—no, I’m definitely Mumbai.’

  Jasbir does the sucked-in-lip-nod of concentration Ram Tarun Das made him practice in front of the mirror.

  ‘Red Green Yellow Blue?’

  ‘Red.’ No hesitation.

  ‘Cat Dog Bird Monkey?’

  She cocks her head to one side. Jasbir notices that she, too, is wearing a ‘hoek. Tech girl. The cocktail bot is on its rounds, doing industrial magic with the self-righting glasses and its little spider-fingers.

  ‘Bird . . . no.’ A sly smile. ‘No no no. Monkey.’

  He is going to die he is going to die.

  ‘But what does it mean?’

  Jasbir holds up a finger.

  ‘One more. Ved Prakash, Begum Vora, Dr Chatterji, Ritu Parvaaz.’

  She laughs. She laughs like bells from the hem of a wedding skirt. She laughs like the stars of a Himalaya night.

  What do you think you’re doing? Ram Tarun Das hisses. He flips through Jasbir’s perceptions to appear behind Shulka, hands thrown up in despair. With a gesture he encompasses the horizon wreathed in gas flares. Look, tonight the sky burns for you, sir, and you would talk about soap opera! The script, stick to the script! Improvisation is death. Almost Jasbir tells his matchmaker, Away djinn, away. He repeats the question.

  ‘I’m not really a Town and Country fan,’ Shulka says. ‘My sister now, she knows every last detail about every last one of the characters and that’s before she gets started on the actors. It’s one of those things I suppose you can be ludicrously well informed about without ever watching. So if you had to press me, I would have to say Ritu. So what does it all mean, Mr. Dayal?’

  His heart turns over in his chest. Ram Tarun Das eyes him coldly. The finesse: make it. Do it just as I instructed you. Otherwise your money and my bandwidth are thrown to the wild wind.

  The cocktail bot dances in to perform its cybernetic circus. A flip of Shulka’s glass and it comes down spinning, glinting, on the precise needle-point of its forefinger. Like magic, if you know nothing about gyros and spin-glasses. But that moment of prestidigitation is cover enough for Jasbir to make the ordained move. By the time she looks up, cocktail refilled, he is half a room away.

  He wants to apologise as he sees her eyes widen. He needs to apologise as her gaze searches the room for him. Then her eyes catch his. It is across a crowded room just like the song that Sujay mumbles around the house when he thinks Jasbir can’t hear. Sujay loves that song. It is the most romantic, heart-felt, innocent song he has ever heard. Big awkward Sujay has always been a sucker for veteran Holywood musicals. South Pacific. Carousel, Moulin Rouge, he watches them on the big screen in the living room, singing shamelessly along and getting moist-eyed at the impossible loves. Across a crowded room, Shulka frowns. Of course. It’s in the script.

  But what does it mean? she mouths. And, as Ram Tarun Das has directed, he shouts back, ‘Call me and I’ll tell you.’ Then he turns on his heel and walks away. And that, he knows without any prompt from Ram Tarun Das, is the finesse.

  The apartment is grossly over-heated and smells of singeing cooking ghee but the nute is swaddled in a crocheted shawl, hunched as if against a persistent hard wind. Plastic teacups stand on the low brass table, Jasbir’s mother’s conspicuously untouched. Jasbir sits on the sofa with his father on his right and his mother on his left, as if between arresting policemen. Nahin the nute mutters and shivers and rubs yts fingers.

  Jasbir has never been in the physical presence of a third-gendered. He knows all about them—as he knows all about most things—from the Single-Professional-Male general interest magazines to which he subscribes. Those pages, between the ads for designer watches and robot tooth whitening—portray them as fantastical, Arabian Nights creatures equally blessed and cursed with glamour. Nahin the matchmaker seems old and tired as a god, knotting and unknotting yts fingers over the papers on the coffee table–‘The bloody drugs, darlings’-occasionally breaking into great spasmodic shudders. It’s one way of avoiding the Wife Game, Jasbir thinks.

  Nahin slides sheets of paper around on the tabletop. The documents are patterned as rich as damask with convoluted chartings of circles and spirals annotated in inscrutable alphabets. There is a photograph of a woman in each top right corner. The women are young and handsome but have the wide-eyed expressions of being photographed for the first time.

  ‘Now, I’ve performed all the calculations and these five are both compatible and auspicious,’ Nahin says. Yt clears a large gobbet of phlegm from yts throat.

  ‘I notice they’re all from the country,’ says Jasbir’s father.

  ‘Country ways are good ways,’ says Jasbir’s mother.

  Wedged between them on the short sofa, Jasbir looks over Nahin’s shawled shoulder to where Ram Tarun Das stands in the doorway. He raises his eyebrows, shakes his head.

  ‘Country girls are better breeders,’ Nahin says. ‘You said dynasty was a concern. You’ll also find a closer match in jati and in general they settle for a much more reasonable dowry than a city girl. City girls want it all. Me me me. No good ever comes of selfishness.’

  The nute’s long fingers stir the country girls around the coffee table, then slide three toward Jasbir and his family. Dadaji and Mamaji sit forward. Jasbir slumps back. Ram Tarun Das folds his arms, rolls his eyes.

  ‘These three are the best starred,’ Nahin says. ‘I can arrange a meeting with their parents almost immediately. There would be some small expenditure in their coming up to Delhi to meet with you; this would be in addition to my fee.’

  In a flicker, Ram Tarun Das is behind Jasbir, his whisper a startle in his ear.

  ‘There is a line in the Western wedding vows: speak now or forever hold your peace.’

  ‘How much is my mother paying you?’ Jasbir says into the moment of silence.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly betray client confidentiality.’ Nahin has eyes small and dark as currants.

  ‘I’ll disengage you for an additional fifty percent.’

  Nahin’s hands hesitate over the pretty hand drawn spirals and wheels. You were a man before, Jasbir thinks. That’s a man’s ge
sture. See, I’ve learned how to read people.

  ‘I double,’ shrills Mrs. Dayal.

  ‘Wait wait wait,’ Jasbir’s father protests but Jasbir is already shouting over him. He has to kill this idiocy here, before his family in their wedding fever fall into strategies they cannot afford.

  ‘You’re wasting your time and my parents’ money,’ Jasbir says. ‘You see, I’ve already met a suitable girl.’

  Goggle eyes, open mouths around the coffee table, but none so astounded and gaping as Ram Tarun Das’s.

  The Prasads at Number 25 Acacia Colony Bungalows have already sent over a preemptive complaint about the tango music but Jasbir flicks up the volume fit to rattle the brilliants on the chandelier. At first he scorned the dance, the stiffness, the formality, the strictness of the tempo. So very un-Indian. No one’s uncle would ever dance this at a wedding. But he has persisted—never say that Jasbir Dayal is not a trier—and the personality of the tango has subtly permeated him, like rain into a dry riverbed. He has found the discipline and begun to understand the passion. He walks tall in the Dams and Watercourses. He no longer slouches at the water-cooler.

  ‘When I advised you to speak or forever hold your peace, sir, I did not actually mean, lie through your teeth to your parents,’ Ram Tarun Das says. In tango he takes the woman’s part. The lighthoek can generate an illusion of weight and heft so the aeai feels solid as Jasbir’s partner. If it can do all that, surely it could make him look like a woman? Jasbir thinks. In his dedication to detail Sujay often overlooks the obvious. ‘Especially in matters where they can rather easily find you out.’

  ‘I had to stop them wasting their money on that nute.’

  ‘They would have kept outbidding you.’

  ‘Then, even more, I had to stop them wasting my money as well.’

  Jasbir knocks Ram Tarun Das’s foot across the floor in a sweetly executed barrida. He glides past the open verandah door where Sujay glances up from soap-opera building. He has become accustomed to seeing his landlord tango cheek to cheek with an elderly Rajput gentleman. Yours is a weird world of ghosts and djinns and half-realities, Jasbir thinks.

  ‘So how many times has your father called asking about Shulka?’ Ram Tarun Das’s free leg traces a curve on the floor in a well-executed volcada. Tango is all about seeing the music. It is making the unseen visible.

  You know, Jasbir thinks. You’re woven through every part of this house like a pattern in silk.

  ‘Eight,’ he says weakly. ‘Maybe if I called her . . .’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Ram Tarun Das insists, pulling in breath-to-breath close in the embreza. ‘Any minuscule advantage you might have enjoyed, any atom of hope you might have entertained, would be forfeit. I forbid it.’

  ‘Well, can you at least give me a probability? Surely knowing everything you know about the art of shaadi, you could at least let me know if I’ve any chance?’

  ‘Sir,’ says Ram Tarun Das, ‘I am a Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. I can direct you any number of simple and unsophisticated bookie-aeais; they will give you a price on anything though you may not fancy their odds. One thing I will say: Miss Shulka’s responses were very—suitable.’

  Ram Tarun Das hooks his leg around Jasbir’s waist in a final gancho. The music comes to its strictly appointed conclusion. From behind it come two sounds. One is Mrs. Prasad weeping. She must be leaning against the party wall to make her upset so clearly audible. The other is a call tone, a very specific call tone, a deplorable but insanely hummable filmi hit My Back, My Crack, My Sack that Jasbir set on the house system to identify one caller, and one caller only.

  Sujay looks up, startled.

  ‘Hello?’ Jasbir sends frantic, pleading hand signals to Ram Tarun Das, now seated across the room, his hands resting on the top of his cane.

  ‘Lexus Mumbai red monkey Ritu Parvaaz,’ says Shulka Mathur. ‘So what do they mean?’

  ‘No, my mind is made up, I’m hiring a private detective,’ Deependra says, rinsing his hands. On the twelfth floor of the Ministry of Waters all the dating gossip happens at the wash-hand basins in the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC. Urinals: too obviously competitive. Cubicles: a violation of privacy. Truths are best washed with the hands at the basins and secrets and revelations can always be concealed by judicious use of the hot-air hand-drier.

  ‘Deependra, this is paranoia. What’s she done?’ Jasbir whispers. A level 0.3 aeai chip in the tap admonishes him not to waste precious water.

  ‘It’s not what she’s done, it’s what she’s not done,’ Deependra hisses. ‘There’s a big difference between someone not being available and someone deliberately not taking your calls. Oh yes. You’ll learn this, mark my words. You’re at the first stage, when it’s all new and fresh and exciting and you are blinded by the amazing fact that someone, someone at last, at long last! thinks you are a catch. It is all rose petals and sweets and cho chweet and you think nothing can possibly go wrong. But you pass through that stage, oh yes. All too soon the scales fall from your eyes. You see . . . and you hear.’

  ‘Deependra.’ Jasbir moved to the battery of driers. ‘You’ve been on five dates.’ But every word Deependra has spoken has chimed true. He is a cauldron of clashing emotions. He feels light and elastic, as if he bestrode the world like a god, yet at the same time the world is pale and insubstantial as muslin around him. He feels lightheaded with hunger though he cannot eat a thing. He pushes away Sujay’s lovingly prepared dais and roti. Garlic might taint his breath, saag might stick to his teeth, onions might give him wind, bread might inelegantly bloat him. He chews a few cleansing cardamoms, in the hope of spiced kisses to come. Jasbir Dayal is blissfully, gloriously love-sick.

  Date one. The Qutb Minar. Jasbir had immediately protested.

  ‘Tourists go there. And families on Saturdays.’

  ‘It’s history.’

  ‘Shulka isn’t interested in history.’

  ‘Oh, you know her so well after three phone conversations and two evenings chatting on shaadinet–which I scripted for you? It is roots, it is who you are and where you come from. It’s family and dynasty. Your Shulka is interested in that, I assure you, sir. Now, here’s what you will wear.’

  There were tour buses great and small. There were hawkers and souvenir peddlers. There were parties of frowning Chinese. There were schoolchildren with backpacks so huge they looked like upright tortoises. But wandering beneath the domes and along the colonnades of the Quwwat Mosque in his Casual Urban Explorer clothes, they seemed as remote and ephemeral as clouds. There was only Shulka and him. And Ram Tarun Das strolling at his side, hands clasped behind his back.

  To cue, Jasbir paused to trace out the time-muted contours of a disembodied tirthankar’s head, a ghost in the stone.

  ‘Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first Sultan of Delhi, destroyed twenty Jain temples and reused the stone to build his mosque. You can still find the old carvings if you know where to look.’

  ‘I like that,’ Shulka said. ‘The old gods are still here.’ Every word that fell from her lips was pearl-perfect. Jasbir tried to read her eyes but her BlueBoo! cat-eye shades betrayed nothing. ‘Not enough people care about their history any more. It’s all modern this modern that, if it’s not up-to-the-minute it’s irrelevant. I think that to know where you’re going you need to know where you’ve come from.’

  Very good, Ram Tarun Das whispered. Now, the iron pillar.

  They waited for a tour group of Germans moved away from the railed-off enclosure. Jasbir and Shulka stood in the moment of silence gazing at the black pillar.

  ‘Sixteen hundred years old, but never a speck of rust on it,’ Jasbir said.

  Ninety eight percent pure iron, Ram Tarun Das prompted. There are things Mittal Steel can learn from the Gupta kings.

  ‘“He who, having the name of Chandra, carried a beauty of countenance like the full moon, having in faith fixed his mind upon Vishnu, had this lofty standard of the divine Vishnu set up on the hill Vishnu
pada”.’ Shulka’s frown of concentration as she focused on the inscription around the pillar’s waist was as beautiful to Jasbir as that of any god or Gupta king.

  ‘You speak Sanskrit?’

  ‘It’s a sort of personal spiritual development path I’m following.’

  You have about thirty seconds before the next tour group arrives, Ram Tarun Das cuts in. Now sir; that line I gave you.

  ‘They say that if you stand with your back to the pillar and close your arms around it, your wish will be granted.’

  The Chinese were coming, the Chinese were coming.

  ‘And if you could do that, what would you wish for?’

  Perfect. She was perfect.

  ‘Dinner?’

  She smiled that small and secret smile that set a garden of thorns in Jasbir’s heart and walked away. At the centre of the gate house arch she turned and called back, ‘Dinner would be good.’

  Then the Chinese with their shopping bags and sun visors and plastic leisure shoes came bustling around the stainless iron pillar of Chandra Gupta.

  Jasbir smiles at the sunny memory of Date One. Deependra waggles his fingers under the stream of hot air.

  ‘I’ve heard about this. It was on a documentary, oh yes. White widows, they call them. They dress up and go to the shaadis and have their résumés all twinkling and perfect but they have no intention of marrying, Oh no no no, not a chance. Why should they, when there is a never-ending stream of men to wine them and dine them and take out to lovely places and buy them lovely presents and shoes and jewels, and even cars, so it said on the documentary. They are just in it for what they can get; they are playing games with our hearts. And when they get tired or bored or if the man is making too many demands or his presents aren’t as expensive as they were or they can do better somewhere else, then whoosh! Dumped flat and on to the next one. It’s a game to them.’

  ‘Deependra,’ says Jasbir. ‘Let it go. Documentaries on the Shaadi Channel are not the kind of model you want for married life. Really.’ Ram Tarun Das would be proud of that one. ‘Now, I have to get back to work.’ Faucets that warn about water crime can also report excessive toilet breaks to line managers. But the doubt-seeds are sown, and Jasbir now remembers the restaurant.