Cyberabad Days (28 page)

     Him. Impossibly, him. Looking right at her, through the white-clad players as if they were ghosts. And very slowly, he lifts a finger and taps it to his right ear.

     She knows what she'll find but she must raise her fingers in echo, feel with horror the coil of plastic overlooked in her excitement to get to the game, nestled accusing in her hair like a snake.

* * * *

     "So, who won the cricket then?"

     "Why do you need to ask me? If it were important to you, you'd know. Like you can know anything you really want to."

     "You don't know? Didn't you stay to the end? I thought the point of sport was who won. What other reason would you have to follow intra-Civil Service cricket?"

     If Puri the maid were to walk into the living room, she would see a scene from a folk tale: a woman shouting and raging at silent dead air. But Puri does her duties and leaves as soon as she can. She's not at ease in a house of djinns.

     '"Sarcasm is it now? Where did you learn that? Some sarcasm aeai you've made part of yourself? So now there's another part of you I don't know, that I'm supposed to love? Well, I don't like it and I won't love it because it makes you look petty and mean and spiteful."

     "There are no aeais for that. We have no need for those emotions. If I learned these, I learned them from humans."

     Esha lifts her hand to rip away the 'hoek, hurl it against the wall.

     "No!"

     So far Rao has been voice-only, now the slanting late-afternoon golden light stirs and curdles into the body of her husband.

     "Don't," he says. "Don't ... banish me. I do love you."

     "What does that mean?" Esha screams "You're not real! None of this is real! It's just a story we made up because we wanted to believe it. Other people, they have real marriages, real lives, real sex. Real ... children."

     "Children. Is that what it is? I thought the fame, the attention was the thing, that there never would be children to ruin your career and your body. But if that's no longer enough, we can have children, the best children I can buy."

     Esha cries out, a keen of disappointment and frustration. The neighbors will hear. But the neighbors have been hearing everything, listening, gossiping. No secrets in the city of djinns.

     "Do you know what they're saying, all those magazines and
chati
shows? What they're really saying? About us, the djinn and his wife?"

     "I know!" For the first time, A.J. Rao's voice, so sweet, so reasonable inside her head, is raised. "I know what every one of them says about us. Esha, have I ever asked anything of you?"

     "Only to dance."

     "I'm asking one more thing of you now. It's not a big thing. It's a small thing, nothing really. You say I'm not real, what we have is not real. That hurts me, because at some level it's true. Our worlds are not compatible. But it can be real. There is a chip, new technology, a protein chip. You get it implanted, here." Rao raises his hand to his third eye. "It would be like the 'hoek, but it would always be on. I could always be with you. We would never be apart. And you could leave your world and enter mine...."

     Esha's hands are at her mouth, holding in the horror, the bile, the sick vomit of fear. She heaves, retches. Nothing. No solid, no substance, just ghosts and djinns. Then she rips her 'hoek from the sweet spot behind her ear and there is blessed silence and blindness. She holds the little device in her two hands and snaps it cleanly in two.

     Then she runs from her house.

* * * *

     Not Neeta not Priya, not snippy Pranh in yts
gharana
, not Madhuri, a smoke-blackened hulk in a life-support chair, and no not never her mother, even though Esha's feet remember every step to her door; never the
basti
. That's death.

     One place she can go.

     But he won't let her. He's there in the
phatphat
, his face in the palm of her hands, voice scrolling silently in a ticker across the smart fabric:
come back, I'm sorry, come back, let's talk come back, I didn't mean to come back
. Hunched in the back of the little yellow and black plastic bubble she clenches his face into a fist but she can still feel him, feel his face, his mouth next to her skin. She peels the palmer from her hand. His mouth moves silently. She hurls him into the traffic. He vanishes under truck tires.

     And still he won't let her go. The
phatphat
spins into Connaught Circus's vast gyratory and his face is on every single one of the video-silk screens hung across the curving facades. Twenty A.J. Rao's, greater, lesser, least, miming in sync.

     
Esha Esha come back
, say the rolling news tickers.
We can try something else. Talk to me. Any ISO, any palmer, anyone....

     Infectious paralysis spreads across Connaught Circus. First the people who notice things like fashion ads and
chati
-screens; then the people who notice other people, then the traffic, noticing all the people on the pavements staring up, mouths fly-catching. Even the
phatphat
driver is staring. Connaught Circus is congealing into a clot of traffic: if the heart of Delhi stops, the whole city will seize and die.

     "Drive on drive on," Esha shouts at her driver. "I order you to drive." But she abandons the autorickshaw at the end of Sisganj Road and pushes through the clogged traffic the final half-kilometer to Manmohan Singh Buildings. She glimpses Thacker pressing through the crowd, trying to rendezvous with the police motorbike sirening a course through the traffic. In desperation she thrusts up an arm, shouts out his name and rank. At last, he turns. They beat toward each other through the chaos.

     "Mrs. Rathore, we are facing a major incursion incident...."

     "My husband, Mr. Rao, he has gone mad...."

     "Mrs. Rathore, please understand, by our standards, he never was sane. He is an aeai."

     The motorbike wails its horns impatiently. Thacker waggles his head to the driver, a woman in police leathers and helmet:
in a moment in a moment
. He seizes Esha's hand, pushes her thumb into his palmer-gloved hand.

     "Apartment 1501. I've keyed it to your thumb-print. Open the door to no one, accept no calls, do not use any communications or entertainment equipment. Stay away from the balcony. I'll return as quickly as I can."

     Then he swings up onto the pillion, the driver walks her machine round and they weave off into the gridlock.

     The apartment is modern and roomy and bright and clean for a man on his own, well furnished and decorated with no signs of a Krishna Cop's work brought home of an evening. It hits her in the middle of the big living-room floor with the sun pouring in. Suddenly she is on her knees on the Kashmiri rug, shivering, clutching herself, bobbing up and down to sobs so wracking they have no sound. This time the urge to vomit it all up cannot be resisted. When it is out of her--not all of it, it will never all come out--she looks out from under her hanging, sweat-soaked hair, breath still shivering in her aching chest. Where is this place? What has she done? How could she have been so stupid, so vain and senseless and blind? Games games, children's pretending, how could it ever have been? I say it is and it is so: look at me! At me!

     Thacker has a small, professional bar in his kitchen annex. Esha does not know drink so the
chota peg
she makes herself is much much more gin than tonic but it gives her what she needs to clean the sour, biley vomit from the wool rug and ease the quivering in her breath.

     Esha starts, freezes, imagining Rao's voice. She holds herself very still, listening hard. A neighbor's
tivi
, turned up. Thin walls in these new-built executive apartments.

     She'll have another
chota peg
. A third and she can start to look around. There's a spa-pool on the balcony. The need for moving, healing water defeats Thacker's warnings. The jets bubble up. With a dancer's grace she slips out of her clinging, emotionally soiled clothes into the water. There's even a little holder for your
chota peg
. A pernicious little doubt: how many others have been here before me? No, that is his kind of thinking. You are away from that. Safe. Invisible. Immersed. Down in Sisganj Road the traffic unravels. Overhead, the dark silhouettes of the scavenging kites and, higher above, the security robots, expand and merge their black wings as Esha drifts into sleep.

     "I thought I told you to stay away from the windows."

     Esha wakes with a start, instinctively covers her breasts. The jets have cut out and the water is long-still, perfectly transparent. Thacker is blue-chinned, baggy-eyed and sagging in his rumpled gritty suit.

     "I'm sorry. It was just, I'm so glad, to be away ... you know?"

     A bone-weary nod. He fetches himself a
chota peg
, rests it on the arm of his sofa and then very slowly, very deliberately, as if every joint were rusted, undresses.

     "Security has been compromised on every level. In any other circumstances it would constitute an i-war attack on the nation." The body he reveals is not a dancer's body; Thacker runs a little to upper body fat, muscles slack, incipient man-tits, hair on the belly hair on the back hair on the shoulders. But it is a body, it is real. "The Bharati government has disavowed the action and waived Aeai Rao's diplomatic immunity."

     He crosses to the pool and restarts on the jets. Gin and tonic in hand, he slips into the water with a one-deep, skin-sensual sigh.

     "What does that mean?" Esha asks.

     "Your husband is now a rogue aeai."

     "What will you do?"

     "There is only one course of action permitted to us. We will excommunicate him."

     Esha shivers in the caressing bubbles. She presses herself against Thacker. She feels his man-body move against her. He is flesh. He is not hollow. Kilometers above the urban stain of Delhi, aeaicraft turn and seek.

* * * *

     The warnings stay in place the next morning. Palmer, home entertainment system, com channels. Yes, and balcony, even for the spa.

     "If you need me, this palmer is Department-secure. He won't be able to reach you on this." Thacker sets the glove and 'hoek on the bed. Cocooned in silk sheets, Esha pulls the glove on, tucks the 'hoek behind her ear.

     "You wear that in bed?"

     "I'm used to it."

     Varanasi silk sheets and Kama Sutra prints. Not what one would expect of a Krishna Cop. She watches Thacker dress for an excommunication. It's the same as for any job--ironed white shirt, tie, hand-made black shoes--never brown in town--well polished. Eternal riff of bad aftershave. The difference: the leather holster slung under the arm and the weapon slipped so easily inside it.

     "What's that for?"

     "Killing aeais," he says simply.

     A kiss and he is gone. Esha scrambles into his cricket pullover, a waif in baggy white that comes down to her knees, and dashes to the forbidden balcony. If she cranes over, she can see the street door. There he is, stepping out, waiting at the curb. His car is late, the road is thronged, the din of engines, car horns and
phatphat
klaxons has been constant since dawn. She watches him wait, enjoying the empowerment of invisibility.
I can see you. How do they ever play sport in these things?
she asks herself, skin under cricket pullover hot and sticky. It's already thirty degrees, according to the weather ticker across the foot of the video-silk shuttering over the open face of the new-built across the street. High of thirty-eight. Probability of precipitation: zero. The screen loops
Town and Country
for those devotees who must have their
soapi
, subtitles scrolling above the news feed.

     
Hello Esha
, Ved Prakash says, turning to look at her.

     The thick cricket pullover is no longer enough to keep out the ice.

     Now Begum Vora
namastes
to her and says,
I know where you are, I know what you did.

     Ritu Parzaaz sits down on her sofa, pours
chai
and says,
What I need you to understand is, it worked both ways. That 'ware they put in your palmer, it wasn't clever enough.

     Mouth working wordlessly; knees, thighs weak with
basti
girl superstitious fear, Esha shakes her palmer-gloved hand in the air but she can't find the
mudras
, can't dance the codes right.
Call call call call.

     The scene cuts to son Govind at his racing stable, stroking the neck of his thoroughbred über-star Star of Agra.
As they spied on me, I spied on them.

     Dr. Chatterji in his doctor's office.
So in the end we betrayed each other.

     The call has to go through Department security authorization and crypt.

     Dr. Chatterji's patient, a man in black with his back to the camera turns. Smiles. It's A.J. Rao.
After all, what diplomat is not a spy?

     Then she sees the flash of white over the rooftops. Of course. Of course. He's been keeping her distracted, like a true
soapi
should. Esha flies to the railing to cry a warning but the machine is tunneling down the street just under power-line height, wings morphed back, engines throttled up: an aeai traffic monitor drone.

     "Thacker! Thacker!"

     One voice in the thousands. And it is not hers that he hears and turns toward. Everyone can hear the call of his own death. Alone in the hurrying street, he sees the drone pile out of the sky. At three hundred kilometers per hour it takes Inspector Thacker of the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing to pieces.

     The drone, deflected, ricochets into a bus, a car, a truck, a
phatphat
, strewing plastic shards, gobs of burning fuel and its small intelligence across Sisganj Road. The upper half of Thacker's body cartwheels through the air to slam into a hot
samosa
stand.

     The jealousy and wrath of djinns.