The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (37 page)

“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 per cent.”

Nahin’s hands hesitate over the pretty hand drawn spirals and wheels.
You were a man before,
Jasbir thinks.
That’s a man’s gesture. 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 pre-emptive 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 watercooler.

“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 light-headed 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 per cent 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 Vishnupada.’” 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 gatehouse 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.

Date Two. Jasbir had practised with the chopsticks for every meal for a week. He swore at rice, he cursed dal. Sujay effortlessly scooped rice, dal, everything from bowl to lips in a flurry of stickwork.

“It’s easy for you, you’ve got that code-wallah Asian culture thing.”

“Um, we are Asian.”

“You know what I mean. And I don’t even like Chinese food, it’s so bland.”

The restaurant was expensive, half a week’s wage. He’d make it up on overtime; there were fresh worries in Dams and Watercourses about a drought.

“Oh,” Shulka said, the nightglow of Delhi a vast, diffuse halo behind her. She is a goddess, Jasbir thought, a devi of the night city with ten million lights descending from her hair. “Chopsticks.” She picked up the antique porcelain chopsticks, one in each hand like drum sticks. “I never know what to do with chopsticks. I’m always afraid of snapping them.”

“Oh, they’re quite easy once you get the hang of them.” Jasbir rose from his seat and came round behind Shulka. Leaning over her shoulder he laid one stick along the fold of her thumb, the other between ball of thumb and tip of index finger. Still wearing her lighthoek. It’s the city girl look. Jasbir shivered in anticipation as he slipped the tip of her middle finger between the two chopsticks. “Your finger acts like a pivot, see? Keep relaxed, that’s the key. And hold your bowl close to your lips.” Her fingers were warm, soft, electric with possibility as he moved them. Did he imagine her skin scented with musk?

Now,
said Ram Tarun Das from over Shulka’s other shoulder
. Now do you see? And by the way, you must tell her that they make the food taste better.

They did make the food taste better. Jasbir found subtleties and piquancies he had not known before. Words flowed easily across the table. Everything Jasbir said seemed to earn her starlight laughter. Though Ram Tarun Das was as ubiquitous and unobtrusive as the waiting staff, they were all his own words and witticisms.
See, you can do this,
Jasbir said to himself.
What women want, it’s no mystery; stop talking about yourself, listen to them, make them laugh.