The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (36 page)

“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 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 pajamas. 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 sub-systems 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 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 partner. Last of all, on the morning of the Jaitly shaadi,

“Eyebrows sir. You will never get a bride with brows like a hairy saddhu. 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 someone 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.

“Now, sir,” whispers Ram Tarun Das standing at Jasbir’s shoulder. “Faint heart, as they say.”

Jasbir’s mouth is dry. A secondary application Sujay pasted onto the Ram Tarun Das aeai tells him his precise heart rate, respiration, temperature and the degree of sweat in his palm. He’s surprised he’s still alive.

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 practise 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! Improvization 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 needlepoint 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.