Cyberabad Days (11 page)

     How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes, had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and canals and pumps and pipes in my power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.

A
n Eligible Boy

     A robot is giving Jasbir the whitest teeth in Delhi. It is a precise, terrifying procedure involving chromed steel and spinning, shrieking abrasion heads. Jasbir's eyes go wide as the spidery machine-arms flourish their weapons in his face, a demon of radical dentistry. He read about the Glinting Life! Cosmetic Dentistry Clinic (Hygienic, Quick, and Modern) in the February edition of Shaadi! For Eligible Boys. In double-page spread it looked nothing like these insect-mandibles twitching inside his mouth. He'd like to ask the precise and demure dental nurse (married, of course) if it's meant to be like this, but his mouth is full of clamps and anyway an Eligible Boy never shows fear. But he closes his eyes as the robot reaches in and spinning steel hits enamel.

     Now the whitest teeth in Delhi dart through the milling traffic in a rattling phatphat. He feels as if he is beaming out over an entire city. The whitest teeth, the blackest hair, the most flawless skin and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Jasbir's nails are beautiful. There's a visiting manicurist at the Ministry of Waters, so many are the civil servants on the shaadi circuit. Jasbir notices the driver glancing at his blinding smile. He knows; the people on Mathura Road know, all Delhi knows that every night is great game night.

     On the platform of Cashmere Cafe Metro Station, chip-implanted police-monkeys canter, shrieking, between the legs of passengers, driving away the begging, tugging, thieving macaques that infest the subway system. They pour over the edge of the platform to their holes and hides in a wave of brown fur as the robot train slides into the stop. Jasbir always stands next to the Women Only section. There is always a chance one of them might be scared of the monkeys— they bite—and he could then perform an act of Spontaneous Gallantry. The women studiously avoid any glance, any word, any sign of interest, but a true Eligible Boy never passes up a chance for contact. But that woman in the business suit, the one with the fashionable wasp-waist jacket and the low-cut hip-riding pants, was she momentarily dazzled by the glint of his white white teeth?

     "A robot, madam," Jasbir calls as the packer wedges him into the 18:08 to Barwala. "Dentistry of the future." The doors close. But Jasbir Dayal knows he is a white-toothed Love God and this, this will be the shaadi night he finally finds the wife of his dreams.

     Economists teach India's demographic crisis as an elegant example of market failure. Its seed germinated in the last century, before India became Tiger of Tiger economies, before political jealousies and rivalries split her into twelve competing states. A lovely boy, was how it began. A fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful son, to marry and raise children and to look after us when we are old. Every mother's dream, every father's pride. Multiply by the three hundred million of India's emergent middle class. Divide by the ability to determine sex in the womb. Add selective abortion. Run twenty-five years down the x-axis, factoring in refined, twenty-first-century techniques such as cheap, powerful pharma patches that ensure lovely boys will be conceived and you arrive at great Awadh, its ancient capital Delhi of twenty million, and a middle class with four times as many males as females. Market failure. Individual pursuit of self-interest damages larger society. Elegant to economists; to fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful young men like Jasbir caught in a wife-drought, catastrophic.

     There's a ritual to shaadi nights. The first part involves Jasbir in the bathroom for hours playing pop music too loud and using too much expensive water while Sujay knocks and leaves copious cups of tea at the door and runs an iron over Jasbir's collars and cuffs and carefully removes the hairs of previous shaadis from Jasbir's suit jacket. Sujay is Jasbir's housemate in the government house at Acacia Bungalow Colony. He's a character designer on the Awadh version of Town and Country, neighbor-and-rival Bharat's all-conquering artificial intelligence—generated soap opera. He works with the extras, designing new character skins and dropping them over raw code from Varanasi. Jahzay Productions is a new model company, meaning that Sujay seems to do most of his work from the verandah on his new-fangled lighthoek device, his hands drawing pretty, invisible patterns on air. To office-bound Jasbir, with a ninety-minute commute on three modes of transport each way each day, it looks pretty close to nothing. Sujay is uncommunicative and hairy and neither shaves nor washes his too-long hair enough, but his is a sensitive soul and compensates for the luxury of being able to sit in the cool cool shade all day waving his hands by doing housework. He cleans, he tidies, he launders. He is a fabulous cook. He is so good that Jasbir does not need a maid, a saving much to be desired in pricey Acacia Bungalow Colony. This is a source of gossip to the other residents of Acacia Bungalow Colony. Most of the goings-on in Number 27 are the subject of gossip over the lawn sprinklers. Acacia Bungalow Colony is a professional, family gated community.

     The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir's collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check teeth for lunchtime spinach and other dental crimes.

     "So what do you think of them then?" Jasbir says.

     "They're white," grunts Sujay.

     The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phat-phat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plotlines on Town and Country. It's Jasbir's major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals: soap-opera gossip. In his experience what the women really want is gupshup from the meta-soap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country. "Auh," Sujay will say. "Different department."

     There's the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?

     "Oh, I almost forgot," Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. "Your father left a message. He wants to see you."

     "You've hired a what?" Jasbir's retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer, confidentially across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.

     "A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers." Jasbir's father inclines his head towards the open living room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her noneligible boys, Jasbir's mother watches the test match on the smartsilk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service paycheck. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs. Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. "She's found this special matchmaker."

     "Wait wait wait. Explain to me special."

     Jasbir's father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a teacup.

     "Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra . . . Well, she's updated it a bit, this being the twenty-first century and everything, so she's, ah, found a nute."

     A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless steel draining board.

     "A nute?" Jasbir hisses.

     "He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once." Anant lets out an aie! soft and involuntary as a fart.

     "I think the word you're looking for is
yt,"
Jasbir says. "And they're not hijras the way you knew them. They're not men become women or women become men. They're neither."

     "Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes—whatever; it's not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh," Mrs. Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like paper cuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.

     Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men, snowing men, hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage resumes. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name; a few had passed beyond being rivals to become friends.

     "Teeth!" A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leaned Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. "Where did you get those, badmash?" He was an old university colleague of Jasbir's, much given to high-profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was In Finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It's the game, isn't it? Kishore rolls on, "Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra's night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It's all in the stars, and on your palmer."

     Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned work cluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir's Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was a call, then a date. Now it's a proposal.

     "Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh," Deependra said lugubriously. "Our eyes will meet, she will nod—just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I'd ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I've already promised all my brothers and cousins. It's written. Trust me."

     It is a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janampatri artificial intelligence.

     A Nepali khidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dance floor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.

     "Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honor, and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!"

     Two attendants slid open the folding windows onto the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule—five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.

     "Don't think I don't know what you're muttering about in there," Mrs. Dayal calls over the mantra commentary of Harsha Bhogle. "I've had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay." There is a spatter of applause from the test match.

     "I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them," Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. "She's had the talk. Yt'll start making the match. There's nothing to be done about it. There are worse things."

     The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right, Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.

     Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world, well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket. And there's too much milk in the tea.

     A dream wind like the hot gusts that forerun the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool, white, spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Bungalow Colony. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandos of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.

     "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."