The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (117 page)

The calm, the clear, the high cool of Kashmir after the mob heat of Delhi! I bobbed and bounced and grinned in my cot and waved my little hands in joy at the sweet air. Every sense was stimulated, every nerve vibrant. In the evening TikkaTikka would sing, Badshanti tell a story and Nin send stars sweeping over my face.

There was to be an adventure by boat across the lake. There was food and there was drink. We were all to go together. It was a thing of a moment, I can see it still, so small it looked like an accident. It was not. It was deliberate, it was meticulously planned.

“Where’s Gundi-bear? I’ve lost Gundi-bear,” Shiv cried as my father was about to get into the boat. “I need Gundi-bear.” He launched towards the shore along the gangplank. Dadaji swept him up.

“Oh no you don’t; we’ll never get anywhere at this rate. You stay here and don’t move. Now, where did you last see him?”

Shiv shrugged, innocently forgetful.

“Here, I’ll come with you, you’ll never find anything the way you ram and stam around.” My mother sighed her great sigh of exasperation. “Shiv, you stay here, you hear? Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back in two ticks.”

I felt a deeper shadow in the mild shade of the awning. Shiv stood over me. Even if I chose to I could not forget the look on his face. He ran up the gangplank, untied the mooring rope and let it fall into the water. He waggled his fingers,
bye bye
as the wind caught the curve of coloured cotton and carried me out into the lake. The frail little shikara was taken far from the shelter of the Lake Hotel’s island into the rising chop. The wind caught it and turned it. The boat rolled. I began to cry.

Nin saw my face change. TikkaTikka awoke in the little plastic butterfly my parents had hung from the bamboo ridge pole.

The lake is big and the lake deep

And Little Lord Vishnu is falling asleep

The wind is high and the sun is beaming

To carry you off to the kingdom of dreaming
, he sang.

“Hello, Vishnu,” Badshanti said. “Would you like a story today?”

Two blinks.

“Oh, no story? Well then, I’ll just let you sleep. Sweet dreams, Vishnu.”

Two blinks.

“You don’t want a story but you don’t want to sleep?”

One blink.

“All right then, let’s play a game.”

Two blinks. Badshanti hesitated so long I thought her software had hung. She was a pretty rudimentary aeai.

“Not a game, not a story, not sleep?” I blinked. She knew better than to ask “well, what do you want?” Now TikkaTikka sang a strange song I had never heard before,

“Wind and lake water

And gathering storm
,

Carry Lord Vishnu

Far into harm.”

Yes.
The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. On gust could roll it over and send me to the bottom of the Dal Lake. I might be a hero in my own comic but Dr Rao had neglected to give me the genes for breathing underwater.

“Are we on a boat, sailing far far away?” Badshanti asked.

Yes.

“Are you out on water?”

Yes.

“Are we on our own?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu happy?”

No.

“Is Vishnu scared?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu safe?”

Two blinks. Again Badshanti paused. Then she started to shout. “Help aid assist! Little Lord Vishnu is in peril! Help aid assist!” The voice was thin and tinny and would not have reached any distance across the wind-ruffled lake but one of the silent aeais, perhaps stupid Pooli, must also have sent out a radio, bluetooth and GPS alarm, for a fishing boat suddenly changed course, opened up its long-tail engine and sped towards me on a curve of spray.

“Thank you thank you sirs and saviours,” Badshanti babbled as the two fishermen hauled my shikara close with their hard hands and to their astonishment saw a child lying on the mattresses, smiling up at them.

A Map Drawn Inside the Skull

All my long life I have been ordained to be tied to water. My parents were delivered by the flood, my aeais saved me from the drifting boat. Even now I pick my way down the shrivelled memory of the Ganga, descended from the hair of Siva. Water it was that made me into a superhero of Awadh, albeit of a very different, non-tall-building-leaping type from the Awadhi Bhai who refused to grow up through the pages of Virgin comics.

There was of course no end of ruction after five-and-half-year old Shiv tried to expose me in an open boat. He made no attempt to deny it. He bore it stoically. The worst of it was my father’s therapy-speak. I almost felt for him. At least my mother was angry, blazingly, searingly angry. She didn’t try to wrap it up in swathes
of how did you find it
and
I imagine you’re feeling
and
let’s try and talk through this like men.
It didn’t end when the monsoon finally came late and scanty and we returned to Delhi slick and greasy with rain, the wonderful, rich smell of wet dust perfuming the air more purely than any incense. Four days later it ended and Delhi became afraid. That was how my parents kept the story out of the papers.
FIFTEEN MILLION THIRSTY THROATS
is a more immediate headline than
FIVE-YEAR-OLD TRIES TO DROWN BRAHMIN BROTHER
. Just.

There was counselling, of course, long and expensive and in the end producing no better result than the child psychologist saying, “This is possibly the most intractable case of sibling rivalry I have ever seen. Your son has a colossal sense of entitlement and deeply resents what he perceives as a loss of status and parental affection. He’s quite unrepentant and I fear he might make a second attempt to cause Vishnu harm.” My parents took these words and reached their own solution. Shiv and I could not live together so we must live apart. My father took an apartment across the city. Shiv went with him. I stayed with Mamaji, and one other. Before they parted plump Tushar loved my mother a goodbye-time, without planning or sex selection or genetic regulation. And so Sarasvati was born, the last of the three gods; my sister.

We grew up together. We lay in our cots side by side, looking not at our stimulating and educational toys but at each other. For a blissful time she paralleled me. We learned to walk and talk and regulate our bowels together. When we were alone I would murmur the words I knew to her, the words that had roosted and chattered so long in my skull and now were free, like someone throwing open a dark and fetid pigeon loft on a Delhi rooftop. We were close as twins. Then week by week, month by month, Sarasvati outgrew me. Bigger, better co-ordinated, more physically developed, her tongue never stumbled over her few and simple words while poems and vedas rattled inarticulate inside me. She grew out of being twin to bigger sister. She was the surprise, the delight, the child free from expectations and thus she could never disappoint. I loved her. She loved me. In those murmurous evenings filled with sunset and the cool of the air-conditioning, we found a common language and knowing born of shared playing that our various and despised ayahs, even our Mother, could never penetrate.

Across the city, on his own glass tower top filled with the staggering, pollution-born sunsets of great Delhi, Shiv grew up apart. He was six and a half, he was top of his class, he was destined for greatness. How do I know this? Once a week my father came to see his other son and daughter and for a snatched evening with his darling. I had long superseded TikkaTikka, Pooli, Nin and Badshanti with more powerful (and discreet) aeai attendants, ones that, as soon as I had the words on my tongue, I found I could reprogramme to my needs. I sent them out like djinns through the apartment. Not a word was spoken, not a glance exchanged that I could not know it. Sometimes the glances would become looks, and the murmurs cease and my parents would make love to each other. I saw that too. I did not think it particularly wrong or embarrassing; I knew fine and well what they were doing but, though it made them very happy, it did not look like a thing I would ever want.

I look back now from age and loss and see those babbling days with Sarasvati as the age of gold, our Satya Yuga of innocence and truth. We stumbled together towards the sunlight and found joy in every fall and bump and grin. Our world was bright and full of surprises’ delights in discovery for Sarasvati, pleasure in her evident delight for me. Then school forced us apart. What a terrible, unnecessary thing school is. I feel in it the enduring envy of parents for idle childhood. Of course it could be no ordinary school for little Lord Vishnu. Dr Renganathan Brahminical College was an academy for the elite of the elite. Education was intimate and bespoke. There were eight in my year and that was large enough for divisions. Not all Brahmins were equal in the Dr Renganathan College. Though we were all the same age we divided ourselves, quite naturally, like meiosis, into Old Brahmins and Young Brahmins, Or, as you like, Big Brahmins and Little Brahmins. Those who aged half as fast but would live twice as long and those who would enjoy all the gifts of health and smarts and looks and privilege but would still fall dead at whatever age the meditech of that era could sustain. Intimations of mortality in Miss Mukudan’s reception class.

Ah, Miss Mukudan! Your golden bangles and your Cleopatra smiling eyes, your skin the soft dark of the deepest south; your ever-discreet moustache and smell of camphor as you bent over me to help my fumble-fingers with my buttons or the Velcro fastenings on my shoes. You were my first vague love. You were the undifferentiated object of affection of all of us. We loved you for your lofty remoteness, your firmness and hinted-at tetchiness and the delicious knowledge that to you we were just more children to be turned from blind and selfish little barbarians into civilized young human beings. We loved you because you were not the mother-smother of our cottonwool parents. You took no shit.

The Class of 31 was too much even for the redoubtable Miss Mukudan. At age four our engineered brains were pushing us down the strange and separate roads into strange ways of looking at the world, quasi-autistic obsessions, terrifying savant insights or just plain incomprehensibility. We were each given a personalized tutor to accompany us day and night. Mine was called Mr Khan and he lived inside my ear. A new technology had arrived to save us. It was the latest thing in comms – which has always seemed the most faddish and trivial of technologies to me. No more did you need to be trapped by screens or pictures in the palm of your hand or devices that wrote on your eyeball as delicately as a bazaar fakir writing tourists’ names on a grain of rice. A simple plastic hook behind the ear would beam cyberspace into your head. Direct electromagnetic stimulation of the visual, auditory and olfactory centres now peopled the world with ghost messages and data spreads, clips from
Town and Country
, video messages, entire second-life worlds and avatars and, inevitably, spam and junk mailing. And for me, my customised aeai tutor, Mr Khan.

How I hated him! He was everything Miss Mukudan was not; irascible, superior, gruff and per sis tent. He was a little waspy Muslim, thin as a wire with a white moustache and a white Nehru cap. I would rip off the “hoek” in frustration and whenever I put it on again, after Miss Mukudan’s ministrations – we would do anything for her – he would take up his harangue from the very syllable at which I had silenced him.

“Look and listen, you bulging pampered privileged no-right-to-call-yourself-a-proper-Brahmin brat,” he would say. “These eyes these ears, use them and learn. This is the world and you are in it and of it and there is no other. If I can teach you this I will have taught you all you need to ever learn.”

He was a stern moralist, very proper and Islamic. I looked at Miss Mukudan differently then, wondering what assessments she had made that assigned Mr Khan especially to me. He had been programmed just for Vishnu. How had he been built? Did he spring into being perfectly formed or did he have a history, and how did he think of this past? Did he know it for a lie, but a treasured one; was he like the self-deceiving aeai actors of
Town and Country
who believed they existed separately from the roles they played? If he masqueraded as intelligent, did that mean he was intelligent? Was intelligence the only thing that could not be simulated? Such thoughts were immensely interesting to a strange little eight-year-old suddenly becoming aware of those other strange citizens of his tight world. What was the nature of the aeais, those ubiquitous and for the most part unseen denizens of great Delhi? I became quite the junior philosopher.

“What is right to you?” I asked him one day as we rode back in the Lexus through a Delhi melted by the heat into an impermeable black sludge. It was Ashura. Mr Khan had told me of the terrible battle of Karbala and the war between the sons of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). I watched the chanting, waling men carrying the elaborate catafalques, flogging their backs bloody, beating their foreheads and chests. The world, I was beginning to realize, was far stranger than I.

“Never mind me what is right to me, impudent thing. You have the privileges of a god, you’re the one needs to think about right action,” Mr Khan declared. In my vision he sat beside me on the back seat of the Lex, his hands primly folded in his lap.

“It’s a serious question.” Our driver hooted up alongside the dour procession. “How can right action mean anything to you, when anything you do can be undone and anything you undo can be done again. You’re chains of digits, what do you need morality for?” Only now was I beginning to understand the existence of the aeais, which had begun with the mystery of TikkaTikka, Pooli, Badshanti and Nin living together and sharing common code inside my plastic star. Common digits but separate personalities. “It’s not as if you can hurt anyone.”

“So right action is refraining from causing pain, is it?”

“I think that it’s the start of right action.”

“These men cause pain to themselves to express sorrow for wrong action; albeit the actions of their spiritual forebears. In so doing they believe they will make themselves more moral men. Consider those Hindu saddhus who bear the most appalling privations to achieve spiritual purity.”