Cyberabad Days

They are saved by a desk

Come Matsya, come Kurma. Come Narasimha and Varaha. By the smoky light of burning trash polyethylene and under the mad-eye moon lying drunk on its back, come run in the ring; ginger and black and tabby and grey, white and piebald and tortie and hare-legged tailless Manx. Run Varana, Pashurama, run Rama and Krishna.

I pray I do not offend with my circus of cats that carry the names of divine avatars. Yes, they are dirty street cats, stolen from rubbish dumps and high walls and balconies, but cats are naturally blasphemous creatures. Every lick and curl, every stretch and claw is a calculated affront to divine dignity. But do I not bear the name of a god myself, so may I not name my runners, my leapers, my stars, after myself? For I am Vishnu, the Preserver.

See! The trash-lamps are lit, the rope ring is set and the seats laid out, such as they are, being cushions and worn mattresses taken from the boat and set down to keep your fundament from the damp sand. And the cats are running, a flowing chain of ginger and grey, the black and the white and the part-coloured: the marvellous, the magical, the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus! You will be amazed, nay, astounded! So why do you not come?

Round they run and round, nose to tail. You would marvel at the perfect fluid synchronisation of my cats. Go Buddha, go Kalki! Yes, it takes a god to train a cat circus.

All evening I beat my drum and rang my bicycle bell through the heat-blasted hinterland of Chunar. The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus! Gather round gather round! There are few enough joys in your life: wonder and a week’s conversation for a handful of rupees. Sand in the streets, sand slumped against the crumbling walls of abandoned houses, sand slumped banked up on the bare wheel rims of the abandoned cars and minibuses, sand piled against the thorny hurdles that divided the river-edge sandbars into sterile fields. The long drought and the flashfire wars had emptied this town like so many others close to the Jyotirlinga. I climbed up to the old fort, with its preview twenty kilometres up and down river. From the overlook where the old British ambassador had built his governor’s residence I could see the Jyotirlinga spear into the sky above Varanasi, higher than I could see, higher than the sky for it ran all the way into another universe. The walls of the old house were daubed with graffiti. I rang my bell and beat my drum but there was never any hope of even ghosts here. Though I am disconnected from the deva-net, I could almost smell the devas swirling on the contradictory airs. Walking down into the town I caught the true smell of woodsmoke and the lingering perfume of cooking and I turned, haunted by a sense of eyes, of faces, of hands on doorframes that vanished into shadows when I looked. Vishnu’s Marvellous Magical Magnificent Cat Circus! I cried, ringing my bicycle bell furiously, as much to advertise my poverty and harmlessness as my entertainment. In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK47s.

The cats were furious and yowling in unison when I returned, hot in their cages despite the shade of the awning. I let them hunt by the light of the breaking stars as I set up the ring and the seats, my lamps and sign and alms bowl, not knowing if a single soul would turn up. The pickings were meagre. Small game will be scarce in the Age of Kali.

My fine white Kalki, flowing over the hurdles like a riffle in a stream, it is written that you will battle and defeat Kali, but that seems to me too big a task for a mere cat. No, I shall take up that task myself, for if it’s your name, it’s also my name. Am I not Vishnu the ten-incarnated? Are not all of you part of me, cats? I have an appointment down this river, at the foot of that tower of light that spears up into the eastern sky.

Now come, sit down on this mattress – I have swept away the sand, and let the lamps draw away the insects. Make yourself comfortable. I would offer chai but I need the water for the cats. For tonight you will witness not only the finest cat circus in all of India – likely the only cat circus in all of India. What do you say? All they do is run in a circle? Brother, with cats, that is an achievement. But you’re right; running in a circle, nose to tail is pretty much the meat of my Cat Circus. But I have other ways to justify the handful of rupees I ask from you. Sit, sit and I will tell you a story, my story. I am Vishnu, and I was designed to be a god.

There were three of us and we were all gods. Shiv and Vish and Sarasvati. I am not the firstborn; that is my brother Shiv, with whom I have an appointment at the foot of the Jyotirlinga of Varanasi. Shiv the success, Shiv the businessman, the global success, the household name and the inadvertent harbinger of this Age of Kali; I cannot imagine what he has become. I was not the firstborn but I was the best born and therein lies the trouble of it.

Strife, I believe, was worked into every strand of my parents’ DNA. Your classical Darwinist scorns the notion that intellectual values can shape evolution, but I myself am living proof that middle-class values can be programmed into the genes. Why not war?

A less likely cyberwarrior than my father you would be hard-pressed to imagine. Uncoordinated; ungainly; portly – no, let’s not mince words, he was downright fat; he had been a content and, in his own way, celebrated designer for DreamFlower. You remember DreamFlower? Street Sumo; RaMaYaNa; Bollywood-SingStar . Million-selling games? Maybe you don’t. I increasingly find it’s been longer than I think. In everything. What’s important is that he had money and career and success and as much fame as his niche permitted and life was rolling along, rolling along like a Lexus, when war took him by surprise. War took us all by surprise. One day we were the Great Asian Success Story – the Indian Tiger (I call it the Law of Aphoristic Rebound – the Tiger of Economic Success travels all around the globe before returning to us) – and unlike those Chinese we had English, cricket and democracy; the next we were bombing each other’s malls and occupying television stations. State against state, region against region, family against family. That is the only way I can understand the War of Schism; that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their father’s throats. And the mother at her daughter’s, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty. I saw a diamond cutter in Delhi when I was young – apologies, when I was small. Not so young. I saw him set the gem in the padded vice and raise his cutter and pawl, which seemed too huge and brutal a tool by far for so small and bright an object. I held my breath and set my teeth as he brought the big padded hammer down and the gem fell into three gems, brighter and more radiant than their parent.

‘Hit it wrong,’ he said, ‘and all you have is dazzling dust.’

Dazzling dust, I think, has been our history ever since.

The blow came – success, wealth, population strain – and we fell to dust but Delhi didn’t know it. The loyalists resolutely defended the dream of India. So my father was assigned as Help Desk to a Recon Mecha Squad. To you this will sound unspeakably hot and glamorous. But this was another century and another age and robots were far from the shimmering rakshasa-creatures we know today, constantly shifting shape and function along the edge of human expectation. This was a squad of reconnaissance bots; two-legged joggers and jumpers, ungainly and temperamental as iron chickens. And Dadaji was the Help Desk, which meant fixing them and de-virusing them and unbugging them and hauling them out of the little running circles they’d trapped themselves in, or turning them away from the unscalable wall they were attempting to leap, all the while being wary of their twin flechette-gatlings and their close-defence nano-edged blades.

‘I’m a games coder,’ he wailed. ‘I choreograph Bollywood dance routines and arrange car crashes. I design star-vampires.’ Delhi ignored his cries. Delhi was already losing as the us-too voices of national self-determination grew loud in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, but she chose to ignore them as well.

Dadaji was a cyberwarrior, Mamaji was a combat medic. It was slightly more true for her than for Dadaji. She was indeed a qualified doctor and had worked in the field for NGOs in India and Pakistan after the earthquake and with M’decins Sans Frontières in Sudan. She was not a soldier, never a soldier. But Mother India needed front-line medics so she found herself at Advanced Field Treatment Centre 32 east of Ahmedabad at the same time my father’s recon unit was relocated there. My mother examined Tech-Sergeant Tushar Nariman for crabs and piles. The rest of his unit refused to let a woman doctor inspect their pubes. He made eye-contact with her, for a brave, frail second.

Perhaps if the Ministry of Defence had been less wanton in their calling-up of cyberwarriors and had assigned a trained security analyst to the Eighth Ahmedabad Recon Mecha Squad instead of a games designer, more would have survived when the Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force attacked. A new name was being spoken in old east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; Bharat, the old holy name of India; its spinning wheel flag planted in Varanasi, most ancient and pure of cities. Like any national liberation movement, there were dozens of self-appointed guerrilla armies, each named more scarily than the predecessor with whom they were in shaky alliance. The Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force was embryo Bharat’s ’lite cyberwar force. And unlike Tushar, they were pros. At 21:23 they succeeded in penetrating the Eighth Ahmedabad’s firewall and planted trojans into the recon mechas. As my father pulled up his pants after experiencing the fluttering fingers and inspection torch of my mother-to-be at his little rosebud, the Tiger-Strike-Force took control of the robots and turned then on the field hospital.

Lord Shiva bless my father for a fat boy and a coward. A hero would have run out onto the sand to see what was happening when the firing started. A hero would have died in the crossfire, or, when the ammunition ran out, by their blades. At the first shot, my father went straight under the desk.

‘Get down!’ he hissed at my mother who froze with a look part bafflement, part wonderment on her face. He pulled her down and immediately apologised for the unseemly intimacy. She had lately cupped his testicles in her hand, but he apologised. They knelt in the kneehole, side by side while the shots and the cries and the terrible, arthritic click click click of mecha joints swirled around them, and little by little subsided into cries and clicks, then just clicks, then silence. Side by side they knelt, shivering in fear, my mother kneeling like a dog on all fours until she shook from the strain, but afraid to move, to make the slightest noise in case it brought the stalking shadows that fell through the window into the surgery. The shadows grew long and grew dark before she dared exhale, ‘What happened?’

‘Hacked mecha,’ my father said. Then he made himself forever the hero in my mother’s eyes. ‘I’m going to take a look.’ Hand by knee by knee by hand, careful to make no noise, disturb not the least piece of broken glass or shattered wood, he crept out from under the desk across the strewn floor to underneath the window. Then, millimetre by millimetre, he edged up the side until he was in a half crouch. He glanced out the window and in the same instant dropped to the floor and began his painstaking crawl back across the floor.

‘They’re out there,’ he breathed to Mamaji. ‘All of them. They will kill anything that moves.’ He said this one word at a time, to make it sound like the natural creakings and contractions of a portable hut on a Ganga sandbank.

‘Perhaps they’ll run out of fuel,’ my mother replied.

‘They run off solar batteries.’ This manner of conversation took a long time. ‘They can wait forever.’

Then the rain began. It was a huge thunder-plump, a forerunner of the monsoon still uncoiling across the Bay of Bengal, like a man with a flag or a trumpet who runs before a groom to let the world know that a great man is coming. Rain beat the canvas like hands on a drum. Rain hissed from the dry sand as it was swallowed. Rain ricocheted from the plastic carapaces of the waiting, listening robots. Rain-song swallowed every noise, so that my mother could only tell my father was laughing by the vibrations he transmitted through the desk.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she hissed in a voice a little lower than the rain.

‘Because in this din they’ll never hear me if I go and get my palmer,’ my father said, which was very brave for a corpulent man. ‘Then we’ll see who hacks whose robots.’

‘Tushar,’ my mother whispered in a voice like steam but my father was already steadily crawling out from under the desk towards the palmer on the camp chair by the zip door. ‘It’s only a ...’

And the rain stopped. Dead. Like a mali turning off a garden hose. It was over. Drips dropped from the ridge-line and the never-weatherproof windows. Sun broke through the plastic panes. There was a rainbow. It was very pretty but my father was trapped in the middle of the tent with killer robots on the alert outside. He mouthed an excremental oath and carefully, deadly carefully reversed amongst all the shatter and tumbled debris, wide arse first like an elephant. He felt the vibration of suppressed laughter through the wooden desk sides.

‘Now. What. Are. You. Laughing. At?’

‘You don’t know this river,’ my mother whispered. ‘Ganga Devi will save us yet.’

Night came swift as ever on the banks of the holy river, the same idle moon as now lights my tale rose across the scratched plastic squares of the window. My mother and father knelt, arms aching, knees tormented, side by side beneath the desk. My father said,

‘Do you smell something?’

‘Yes,’ my mother hissed.

‘What is it?’

‘Water,’ she said and he saw her smile in the dangerous moonlight. And then he heard it, a hissing, seeping suck sand would make if it were swallowing water but all its thirst was not enough, it was too much, too fast, too too much, it was drowning. My father smelled before he saw the tongue of water, edged with sand and straw and the flotsam of the sangam on which the camp stood, creep under the edge of the tent across the liner and around his knuckles. It smelled of soil set free. It was the old smell of the monsoon, when every dry thing has its true perfume scent and flavour and colour released by the rain; the smell of water that is the smell of everything water liberates. The tongue became a film, water flowed around their fingers and knees, around the legs of the desk as if they were the piers of a bridge. Dadaji felt my mother shaking with laughter, then the flood burst open the side of the tent and dashed dazed drowned him in a wall of water so that he spluttered and choked and tried not to cough for fear of the traitor mecha. Then he understood my mother’s laughter and he laughed too, loud and hard and coughing up lungfuls of Ganges.

‘Come on!’ he shouted and leaped up, over-turning the desk, throwing himself onto it like a surfboard, seizing the legs with both hands. My mother dived and grabbed just as the side of the tent opened in a torrent and desk and refugees were swept away on the flood. ‘Kick!’ he shouted as he steered the desk toward the sagging doorway. ‘If you love life and Mother India, kick!’ Then they were out in the night beneath the moon. The sentinel unfolded its killing-things, blade after blade after blade, launched after them and was knocked down, bowled over, swept away by the flooding water. The last they saw of it its carapace was halfstogged in the sand, water breaking creamy around it. They kicked through the flotsam of the camp, furniture and ration packs and med kits and tech, the shorted, fused, sparked-out corpses of the mecha and the floating, spinning swollen corpses of soldiers and medics. They kicked through them all, riding their bucking desk, they kicked half-choked, shivering out into the deep green water of Mother Ganga, under the face of the full moon they kicked up the silver corridor of her river-light. At noon the next day, far far from the river beach of Chattigarh, an Indian patrol-RIB found them and hauled them, dehydrated, skin cracked and mad from the sun, into the bottom of the boat. At some point in the long night either under the desk or floating on it they had fallen in love. My mother always said it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. Ganga Devi raised her waters and carried them through the killing machines to safety on a miraculous raft. Or so our family story went.

Here a God is incarnated, and then me

My parents fell in love in one country, India, and married in another, Awadh, the ghost of ancient Oudh, itself a ghost of the almost-forgotten British Raj. Delhi was no longer the capital of a great nation but of a geographical fudge. One India was now many, our mother goddess descended into a dozen avatars from re-united Bengal to Rajasthan, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu. How had we let this happen, almost carelessly, as if we had momentarily stumbled on our march toward superpowerdom, then picked ourselves up and carried on. It was all most embarrassing, like a favourite uncle discovered with porn on his computer. You look away, you shun it, you never talk about it. Like we have never talked about the seisms of violence that tear through our dense, stratified society; the mass bloodletting of our independence that came with an excruciating partition, the constant threat of religious war, the innate, brooding violence in the heart of our caste system. It was all so very un-Indian. What are a few hundred thousand deaths next to those millions? If not forgotten, they will be ignored in a few years. And it certainly has made the cricket more interesting.

The new India suited my mother and father very well. They were model young Awadhis. My father, trapped by artificial intelligence once, vowed never to let that happen again and set up one of the first aeai farms breeding custom wares for low-level applications like Air Awadh, Delhi Bank and the Revenue Service. My mother went first for cosmetic surgery, then, after a shrewd investment in an executive enclave for the nascent Awadhi civil service, gave up the micro-manipulators for a property portfolio. Between them they made so much money that their faces were never out of Delhi Gloss! magazine. They were the golden couple who had sailed to a glorious future over the floods of war and the interviewers who called at their penthouse asked, So then, where is the golden son?

Shiva Nariman made his appearance on 27 September 2025. Siva, oldest God in the world, Siva, first and favoured, Siva from whose matted hair the holy Ganga descended, generative force, auspicious one, lord of paradox. The photo rights went to Gupshup magazine for five hundred thousand Awadhi rupees. The golden boy’s nursery was featured on the nightly Nationwide show and became quite the style for a season. There was great interest in this first generation of a new nation; the Awadh Bhais, the gossip sites called them. They were the sons not just of a small coterie of prominent Delhi middle class, but of all Awadh. The nation took them to its heart and suckled them from its breasts, these bright, bouncing brilliant boys who would grow up with the new land and lead it to greatness. It was never to be mentioned, not even to be thought, how many female foetuses were curetted or flushed out or swilled away, unimplanted, into the medical waste. We were a new country, we were engaged in the great task of nation-building. We could overlook a demographic crisis that had for years been deforming our middle classes. What if there were four times as many boys as girls? They were fine strong sons of Awadh. The others, they were only females.

So easily I say we, for I seem to have ended up as an impresario and storyteller but the truth is that I did not exist, I didn’t even exist then, not until the day the baby spoke at the Awadhi Bhai Club. It was never anything as formal as a constituted club; the blessed mothers, darlings of the nation, had fallen together by natural mutual need to cope with a media gawping into every aspect of their lives. Perfection needs a support group. They naturally banded together in each other’s living rooms and penthouses, and their mothers and ayahs with them. It was a gilded Mothers and Infants group. The day the baby spoke my mother had gathered with Usha and Kiran and Devi. It was Devi’s baby who spoke. Everyone was talking about exhaustion and nipple softening oil and peanut allergies when Vin Johar lolling in his rocker opened his brown brown eyes, focused across the room and clearly said, ‘Hungry, want my bottle.’

‘Hungry, are we my cho chweet?’ Devi said.

‘Now,’ said Vin Johar. ‘Please.’

Devi clapped her hands in delight.

‘Please! He hasn’t said “please” before.’

The rest of the penthouse was still staring, dazed.

‘How long has he been talking?’ Usha asked.

‘Oh, about three days,’ Devi said. ‘He picks up everything you say.’

‘My bottle now,’ demanded Vin Johar. ‘Quickly.’

‘But he’s only…’ Kiran said.

‘Five months, yes. He’s been a bit slower than Dr Rao predicted.’

The mothers’ mothers and the ayahs made furtive hand gestures, kissed charms to turn away evil. It was my Mamaji, dangling fat, content Shiv on her knee, who understood first.

‘You’ve been, you’ve had, he’s a…’

‘Brahmin, yes.’

‘But you’re a Sudra,’ Kiran wondered.

‘Brahmin,’ Devi said with such emphasis that no one could fail to hear the capital. ‘We’ve had him done, yes.’

‘Done?’ asked Usha and then realised, ‘Oh.’ And, ‘Oh!’

‘He’ll be tall and he’ll be strong and he’ll be handsome, of course; that bit we didn’t have to engineer – and he’ll be fit and healthy. Oh so healthy – he’ll never get heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s; with his immune system he can laugh off almost any virus or infection. His immune system will even take out malaria! Imagine that! And intelligence; well, let’s just say, Dr Rao told us there isn’t even a test smart enough to stretch him. He’ll just need to see a thing once and he’s learned it – like that! And his memory, well, Dr Rao says there are double the number of connections in the brain, or something like that: what it means is that he’ll have a phenomenal memory. Like that Mr Memory on India’s Got Talent, only even better. He won’t be able to forget anything. No forgetting birthdays and phone calls to his Mata when he’s off around the world with some big corporation. Look at him, look at him, isn’t he just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen; those baby baby blue eyes. Look at you, look at you, just look at you my little lord? See them all, see them, your friends? They are princes each and every one, but you, you are a god. Oh, I could bite your bum, oh, just bite it like that it’s so beautiful and plump and gorgeous.’ Devi held Vin Johar up like a trophy in a cricket match. She kissed him on his bare belly where his little vest had ridden up. ‘Oh you little god.’

Then Shiv let out a long wail. All through Devi’s song of praise to her genetically improved darling son, my mother’s grip had gradually tightened in envy on golden Shiv, now hopelessly outmoded, until he cried out in pain. Her fingers had left bruises like purple carrots along his ribs.

Shiv gazed up at the mobile turning in the air-conditioning above his cot, innocent and unaware of how his visual acuity was being stimulated by the cleverly designed blobs and clouds. My mother fretted and stormed by turns around the pastel-lit apartment until Dadaji returned from the office. After Shiv was born, his duties at the office grew more arduous and his hours longer. He was never a terribly good father really. He was useless at cricket.

‘What are you doing on Friday?’ Mamaji demanded.

‘Um, I’m not sure, there’s something at the office.’

‘Cancel it.’

‘What?’ He was never very good at manners either, but then he was a Top Geek.

‘We’re seeing Dr Rao.’

‘Dr who?’

‘Dr Rao. At the Swaminathan Clinic.’ He knew the name. He knew the clinic. All Delhi, even Top Geeks, knew of the strange and miraculous children that came out of there. He just needed a moment for his balls to unfreeze and drop from that place close to the warmth of his perineum where they had retreated in terror.

‘Friday, eleven thirty, with Dr Rao himself. We are having a baby.’

It wasn’t Friday eleven thirty, nor the Friday after. It was not for six Fridays, after the initial consultation and the financial check and the medical assessment and the one-to-ones, first Mamaji then Dadaji, and only then did they get to choose from the menu. It was a menu, like in the most rarefied restaurant you can imagine. My parents blinked. Intelligence yes good looks yes enhanced concentration yes expanded memory and improved recall yes health wealth strength happiness, everything Vin Johar had. And more.

‘Extended lifespan?’

‘Ah yes, that is a new one. A new technique that has just been licensed.’

‘Does that mean?’

‘Exactly what it says.

My parents blinked again.

‘Your son,’ (for this was me they were building) ‘will enjoy a greatly increased span of life in full health and vigour.’

‘How much increased?’

‘Double the current human norm; what is that? Let me think, for people like us, affluent, educated, middle class, with access to quality health-care, that’s currently eighty years. Well double that.’

A third time they blinked.

‘One hundred and sixty years old.’

‘At the very least, you must remember that medical miracles are occurring every day. Every single day. There’s no reason your son…’

‘Vishnu.’

My father stared open-mouthed at my mother. He didn’t know there was a name. He hadn’t yet realised that he had no say in this whatsoever. But his balls understood, cringing in his loose-and-cooling-good-for-sperm-production silk boxers.

‘Vishnu, the Lord, governor and sustainer.’ Dr Rao dipped his head in respect. He was an old-fashioned man. ‘You know, I have often thought how the processes of conception, gestation and parturition are reflected in the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu: the fish the restless sperm, the turtle of Kurma the egg, the saving of the earth from the bottom of the ocean by Varaha the fertilisation…’

‘What about the dwarf?’ my father asked. ‘The dwarf Brahmin?’

‘The dwarf, yes,’ Dr Rao drawled. He was a man of slow speech, who seemed to lose the end of his sentences the closer he approached them. This led many people to make the mistake of thinking him stupid when what he was doing was shaping the perfect conclusion. As a consequence he didn’t do many television or net interviews. ‘The dwarf’s always the problem, isn’t he? But your son will assuredly be a true Brahmin. And Kalki, yes, Kalki. The ender of the Age of Kali. Who’s to say that he might not see this world end in fire and water and a new one be born? Yes, longevity. It’s very good, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences.’

‘Never mind. We’ll have that. Devi Johar doesn’t have that.’ So my father was sent with a plastic cup to catch his sacred fish. My mother went with him; to make it an act of love but mostly because she didn’t trust him with Western porn. A few Fridays later Dr Rao harvested a clutch of my mother’s turtle-eggs with a long needle. She didn’t need my father there for that. This was an act of biology. The slow-spoken doctor did his work and called up eight blastulas from the deep ocean of his artificial wombs. One was selected: Me! Me! Little me! Here I am! See me! See me! and I was implanted into my mother’s womb. It was then that she discovered the inconvenience: my doubled lifespan was bought at the price of ageing at half the speed of baseline, non-Brahminic humanity. After sixteen months of pregnancy, sixteen months of morning sickness and bloating and bad circulation and broken veins and incontinence and backache but worst of all, not being able to smoke, my mother, with a great shriek of At last At last! Get the fucking thing out of me! gave birth on 9 August 2027 and I made my entry as a player in this story.

My brother hates me

What a world, into which I was born! What times: an age of light and brilliance. Shining India truly found herself in Shining Awadh, Shining Bharat, Shining Maratha, Shining Bengal – all the shining facets of our many peoples. The horrors of the Schisming were put behind us, apart from war-maimed begging on metro platforms, gangs of undersocialised ex-teencyberwarriors, occasional flare-ups from hibernating combat ’ware buried deep in the city net and Concerned Documentary Makers who felt that we had not sufficiently mourned our self-mutilation and achieved reconciliation. Reconciliation? Delhi had no time for such Western niceties. Let the dead burn the dead, there was money to be made and pleasure to be savoured. Our new boulevards and maidans, our malls and entertainment zones were brilliant with the bright and the young and the optimistic. It was a time of bold new fashions, father-scandalising hemlines and mother-troubling hairstyles; of new trends and obsessions that were old and cold as soon as they hit the gossip sites; of ten thousand shattering new ideas that disappeared as soon as they were iterated like a quantum foam of thought. It was youth, it was confidence, it was the realisation of all that old Mother India had claimed she might be but most of all it was money. As in Delhi, so in Varanasi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur. But most of all, I think, in Delhi. In India she had been capital by whim, not by right. Mumbai, even Kolkata always outshone her. Now she truly was capital of her own nation, without rival, and she dazzled. My earliest memory, from the time when my senses all ran together and sounds had smells and colours had textures and a unified reality above those crude divisions, was of lines of light streaming over my upturned face, light in all colours and more, light that, to an undifferentiated cortex, hummed and chimed like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. I suppose I must have been in our car with our chauffeur driving us somewhere through the downtown lights to some soir’e or other, but all I remember is grinning up at the streaming, singing light. When I think of Delhi even now, I think of it as a river of light, a torrent of silver notes.

And what a city! Beyond Old Delhi and New Delhi, beyond the Newer Delhis of Gurgaon and the desirable new suburbs of Sarita Vihar and New Friends Colony, the Newest Delhis of all were rising. Invisible Delhis, Delhis of data and digits and software. Distributed Delhis, networked Delhis, Delhis woven from cable and wireless nodes, intangible Delhis woven through the streets and buildings of the material city. Strange new peoples lived here: the computer-constructed cast of Town and Country, the all-conquering soap opera that, in its complete artificiality, was more real than life itself. It was not just the characters who drew our fascinations, the genius of the production lay in the CG-actors who believed they played and had a separate existence from those characters, and whose gupshup and scandal, whose affairs and marriages meant more to us than our friends and neighbours. Other brilliant creatures streamed past and through us on our streets and squares: the aeais; the pantheon of artificial intelligences that served our immaterial needs from banking to legal services to household management to personal secretarial services. In no place and every place, these were entities of levels and hierarchies; high-end aeais cascading down through subroutines into low-grade monitors and processors; thousands of those same daily-grind Level 0.8 (the intelligence of a street pig) scaling up through connection and associations into Level ls – the intelligence of a monkey; those again aggregating together into the highest, the Level 2s, indistinguishable from a human seventy per cent of the time. And beyond them were the rumoured, feared Level 3s: of human intelligence and beyond. Who could understand such an existence, beings of many parts that did not necessarily recognise each other? The djinns, those ancient haunters of their beloved Delhi, they understood; and older than they, the gods. They understood only too well. And in the material city, new castes appeared. A new sex appeared on our streets as if stirred out of heaven, neither male nor female, rejecting the compromises of the old hijras to be aggressively neither. The nutes, they called themselves. And then of course there were those like me; improved in egg and sperm, graced with outrageous gifts and subtle curses: the Brahmins. Yes I was an upper-middle-class brat born into genetic privilege, but Delhi was laid out before me like a wedding banquet. She was my city.

Delhi loved me. Loved me, loved all of my Brahmin brothers and occasional sisters. We were wonders, freaks, miracles and avatars. We might do anything, we were the potential of Awadh. Those first-born were accidents of birth, we, the Brahmins, were the true Awadhi Bhais. We even had our own comic, of that name. With our strange genetic powers, we battled criminals, demons and Bharatis. We were superheroes. It sold pretty well.

You might think I was blithe enough, a genetically high-caste blob bouncing in my baby-rocker blinking up into the sunlight beaming through the glass walls of our tower-top penthouse. You would be wrong. As I lay giggling and blinking, neural pathways were twining up through my medulla and cerebellum and Area of Broca with preternatural speed. That blur of light, that spray of silver notes rapidly differentiated into objects, sounds, smells, sensations. I saw, I heard, I sensed but I could not yet understand. So I made connections, I drew patterns, I saw the world pouring in through my senses and up the fiery tree of my neurons as relation, as webs and nets and constellations. I formed an inner astrology and from it, before I could call dog ‘dog’ and cat ‘cat’ and Mamaji ‘Mamaji’, I understood the connectedness of things. I saw the bigger picture; I saw the biggest picture. This was my true superpower, one that has remained with me to this day. I never could fly to Lanka in a thought or lift a mountain by the force of my will, I was not master of fire or thunder or even my own soul, but I could always take one look and know the whole, absolute and entire.

The naming of names. That was where Mamaji first realised that Dr Rao’s blessings were not unmixed. The soir’e that day was at Devi Johar’s house, she of the amazing Vin. There he was, running around the place with his ayah trying to keep up with him in kiddie-wear by SonSun of Los Angeles. Shiv played with the other non-Brahmins on the roof garden, happy and content at their own limited, non-enhanced activities. How fast the gilt had rubbed off him, after I was born! As for me, I sat in my bouncer, burbling and watching big-eyed the mothers of the golden. I knew Shiv’s jealousy, though I didn’t have the words or the emotional language for it. I saw it in a thousand looks and glances, the way he sat at the table, the way he rode in the car, the way he toddled along behind Ayah Meenakshi as she pushed me through the mall, the way he stood by my cot and gazed soft-eyed at me. I understood hate.

Vin asked Devi if he could go out and play with the others on the roof garden, please.

‘All right, but don’t show off,’ Devi Johar said. When he had toddled away, Devi crossed her ankles demurely and placed her hands on her knees, so.

‘Mira, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but your Vish; well, he isn’t talking yet. At his age, Vin had a vocabulary of two hundred words and a good grasp of syntax and grammar.’

‘And shouldn’t he be, well, at least crawling?’ Usha asked.

‘How old is he; fifteen months? He does seem a little on the ... small side,’ Kiran chimed in.

My Mamaji broke down in tears. It was the crying nights and the sshing to sleep, the rocking and the cleaning and the mewling and puking, the tiredness, oh, the tiredness, but worst of all, the breast feeding.

‘Breast? After a year?’ Usha was incredulous. ‘I mean, I’ve heard that some mothers keep them on the teat for years, but they’re from the villages, or mamas who love their sons too much.’

‘My nipples feel like mulberries,’ my Mamaji wept. ‘You see, he’s fifteen months old, but biologically, he not even eight months yet.’

I would live twice as long, but age half as fast. Infancy was a huge, protracted dawn; childhood an endless morning. When Shiv started school I would only have begun toddling. When I was of university age I would still have the physiology of a nine-year- old. Adulthood, maturity, old age, were points so distant on the great plain of my lifespan that I could not tell if they were insects or cities. In those great days I would come into my own, a life long enough to become part of history; as a baby, I was a mother’s nightmare.

‘I know breast is best, but maybe you should consider switching to formula,’ Devi said soothingly.

See how I recall every word? Another of Dr Rao’s equivocal gifts. I forget only what I choose to unremember. I understood every word – at eighteen months my vocabulary was far in advance of your precious Vin, bitch Devi. But it was trapped inside me. My brain formed the words but my larynx, my tongue, my lips and lungs couldn’t form them. I was a prisoner in a baby-bouncer, smiling and waving my fat little fists.

Four there were who understood me, and four only, and they lived in the soft-contoured plastic butterfly that hung over my cot. Their names were Tikka Tikka, Badshanti, Pooli and Nin. They were aeais, set to watch over me and entertain me with songs and stories and pretty patterns of coloured lights because Mamaji considered Ayah Meenakshi’s sleepy-time stories far too terrifying for a suggestible Brahmin. They were even more stupid than my parents but it was because they were deeply dense that they had no preconceptions beyond their Level 0.2 programming and so I could communicate with them.

TikkaTikka sang songs.

He sang that every night. I liked it, I still sing it to myself as I pole my circus of cats along the ravaged shores of Mata Ganga.

Pooli impersonated animals, badly. He was a cretin. His stupidity insulted me so I left him mute inside the plastic butterfly.

Badshanti, lovely Badshanti, she was the weaver of stories. ‘Would you like to hear a story, Vishnu?’ were the words that led into hours of wonder. Because I don’t forget. I know that she never repeated a story, unless I asked her to. How did I ask? For that I must introduce the last of my four aeais.

Nin spoke only in patterns of light and colour that played across my face, an ever-wheeling kaleidoscope that was supposed to stimulate my visual intelligence. Nin-no-words was the intelligent one; because he could interpret facial expression, he was the one I first taught my language. It was a very simple language of blinking. One deliberate blink for yes, two for no. It was slow, it was tortuous but it was a way out of the prison of my body. With Nin reading my answers to Badshanti’s questions, I could communicate anything.

How did my brother hate me? Let me take you to that time in Kashmir. After the third drought in a row my mother vowed never again to spend a summer in Delhi’s heat, noise, smog and disease. The city seemed like a dog lying at the side of the street, panting and feral and filthy and eager for any excuse to sink its teeth into you, waiting for the monsoon. Mamaji looked to the example of the British of a hundred years before and took us up to the cool and the high places. Kashmir! Green Kashmir, blue lake, the bright houseboats and the high beyond all, the rampart of mountains. They still wore snow, then. I remember blinking in the wonder of the Dal Lake as the shikara sped us across the still water to the hotel rising sheer like a palace in one of Badshanti’s tales from the water. My four friends bobbed in the wind of our passage as the boat curved in across the lake to the landing stage where porters in red turbans waited to transport us to our cool summer apartment. Shiv stood in the bow. He wanted to throw them the landing rope.

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.

‘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,

Yes. The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. One 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 coordinated, 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 towertop 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 reprogram 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 ’lite of the ’lite. 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 civilised 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 personalised 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 persistent. 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. Had he 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, wailing men carrying the elaborate catafalques, flogging their backs bloody, beating their foreheads and chests. The world, I was beginning to realise, 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 butterfly. 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 sadhus who bear the most appalling privations to achieve spiritual purity.’

‘Spiritual purity isn’t necessarily morality,’ I said, catching the line Mr Khan had left dangling for me. ‘And they choose to do it to themselves. It’s something else altogether if they choose to do it to others.’

‘Even if it means those others may be made better men?’

‘They should be left to make their own minds up on that.’

We cruised past the green-draped faux-coffin of the martyr.

‘So what then is the nature of my relationship with you? And your mother and father?’

My Mamaji, my Dadaji! Two years after that conversation, almost to the day, my flawless memory recalls, when I was a nine-year-old-in-a-four-year-old’s body and Sarasvati was a cat-lean, ebullient seven, my mother and father very gently, very peacefully, divorced. The news was broken by the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the big sofa in the lounge with the smog of Delhi glowing in the afternoon sun like a saffron robe. A full range of aeai counselling support hovered around the room, in case of tears or tantrums or anything else they couldn’t really handle. I remember feeling a suspicion of Mr Khan on the edge of my perceptions. Divorce was easy for Muslims. Three words and it was over.

‘We have something to tell you, my loves,’ said my mother. ‘It’s me and your father. Things haven’t been going so well with us for quite some time and well, we’ve decided that it’s best for everyone if we were to get a divorce.’

‘But it won’t mean I’ll ever stop being your Dad,’ plump Tushar said quickly. ‘Nothing’ll change, you’ll hardly even notice. You’ll still keep living here, Shiv will still be with me.’

Shiv. I hadn’t forgotten him – I couldn’t forget him – but he had slipped from my regard. He was more distant than a cousin, less thought of than those remote children of your parents’ cousins, to whom I’ve never considered myself related at all. I did not know how he was doing at school or who his friends were or what sports teams he was on. I did not care how he lived his life or pursued his dreams across that great wheel of lives and stories. He was gone from me.

We nodded bravely and trembled our lips with the right degree of withheld emotion and the counsel-aeais dissolved back into their component code clusters. Much later in the room we had shared as bubbling babies and was now our mutual den, Sarasvati asked me, ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

‘I don’t think we’ll even notice,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad they can stop having that ugly, embarrassing sex.’

Ah! Three little letters. Sex sex sex, the juggernaut looming over our childhoods. The kiddy thrill of being naked – doubly exciting in our body-modest society – took on an edge and became something I did not quite understand. Oh, I knew all the words and the locations, as Sarasvati and I played our games of doctors and patients in our den, her pulling up her little vest and pulling down her pants as I listened and examined and prodded vaguely. We knew these were grown-up things not for the eyes of grown-ups. Mamaji would have been horrified and called in squadrons of counselling ’ware if she had discovered our games but I had long since suborned the aeais. If she had looked at the security monitors she would have seen us watching the Cartoon Network; my own little CG Town and Country playing just for her. Sex games for children; everyone plays them. Bouncing up and down in the pool, pressing ourselves against the jets in the rooftop spa, suspecting something in the lap of artificial waves across our private places as ochre dust-smog from the failed monsoon suffocated Delhi. And when we played horsey-horsey, she riding me around like Lakshmibai the warrior Rani, there was more in the press of her thighs than just trying to hold on as I cantered across the carpets. I knew what it should be, I was mostly baffled by my body’s failure to respond the way a twelve-year-old’s ought. My lust may have been twelve but my body was six. Even Miss Mukudan’s purity and innocence lost its lustre as I began to notice the way her breasts moved as she leaned over me, or the shape of her ass – demurely swathed in a sari, but no concealment was enough for the lusty curiosity of boy-Brahmins – as she turned to the smart-silk board.

‘Now,’ said Mr Khan one day on the back seat of the Lexus. ‘Concerning onanism…’ It was a dreadful realisation. By the time puberty hit me like a hammer I would be twenty-four. Mine was the rage and impotence of angels.

Now five burning years have passed and we are driving in a fast German car. I am behind the wheel. The controls have been specially modified so that I can reach the pedals. The gear-shift is a standard. If I cut you up on the Siri Ring, after the flicker of road rage, you’d wonder: that’s a child driving that Mercedes. I don’t think so. I’m of legal age. I passed my test without any bribery or coercion; well, none that I know of. I am old enough to drive, get married and smoke. And I smoke. We all smoke, my Little Brahmin classmates and me. We smoke like stacks, it can’t do us any harm, though we are all wearing smogmasks. The monsoon has failed for the fourth time in seven years; whole tracts of north India are turning into dust and blowing through the hydrocarbon-clogged streets and into our lungs. A dam is being built on the Ganges, Kunda Khadar, on the border with our eastern neighbour Bharat. It is promised to slake our thirst for a generation but the Himalaya glaciers have melted into gravel and Mother Ganga is starved and frail. The devotees at the Siva temple in the middle of the Parliament Street roundabout protest at the insult to the holy river with felt-marker banners and three-pronged trisuls. We bowl past them, hooting and waving and up Sansad Marg around Vijay Chowk. The comics portraying us as Awadh’s new superheroes were quietly dropped years ago. Now what we see about ourselves in print tends to be headlines like TINY TEARAWAYS TERRORISE TILAK NAGAR, or BADMASH BABY BRAHMINS.

There are four of us, Purrzja, Shayman, Ashurbanipal and me. We are all from the college – still the Brahminical College! – but when we are out we all have our own names, names we’ve made up for ourselves that sound strange and alien, like our DNA. Strange and alien we make ourselves look too; our own style cobbled from any source that seems remote and outr’: J-punk hair, Chinese bows and ribbons, French street sports fashion and tribal make-up entirely of our own design. We are the scariestlooking eight-year-olds on the planet. By now Sarasvati is a coltish, classy fifteen-year-old. Our closeness has unravelled; she has her own social circles and friends and crushing things of the heart that seem so important to her. Shiv, so I hear, is in his first year at the University of Awadh Delhi. He won a scholarship. Best marks in his school. He’s followed his father into informatics. Me, I howl up and down the boulevards of Delhi trapped in the body of a kid.

We race past the open arms of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The red stone looks insubstantial as sand in the amber murk.

‘That’s your home, that is, Vish,’ Purrzja shouts through her mask. It’s well known that Mamaji Has Plans for me. Why should she not? Every other part of me is designed. A good legal job, a prominent practice, a safe parliamentary seat and a steady, planned ascent towards the top of whatever political party afforded the best chance of ambition. It’s assumed that one day I will lead the nation. I’m designed to rule. I floor the pedal and the big Merc leaps forward. Traffic parts like my divine counterpart churning the soma. Their autodrive aeais make them as nervous as pigeons.

Out on the Siri Ring; eight lanes of taillights in each direction, a never ceasing roar of traffic. The car eases into the flow. Despite the barriers and warning signs police pull twenty bodies a day from the soft shoulder. The ring does not obey old Indian rules of traffic. Men race here, hedge-fund managers and datarajas and self-facilitating media mughals; racing around the twin chambers of Delhi’s heart. I flick on the autodrive. I am not here to race. I am here for sex. I recline the driving seat, roll over and Ashurbanipal is beneath me. Her hair is drawn back behind her ear to show off the plastic curl of the ’hoek. It’s part of the look.

I snap the fingers of my right hand into my palm to activate the software in the palmer glove. I hold that hand a hovering few centimetres above her fluorescent body-paint-stained belly. I don’t touch. We never touch. That’s the rule. Sex has rules. I move my hand in a series of gestures as gentle and precise as any classical dancer’s mudras over Ashurbanipal. Not touching, never touching, never even flexing a finger. It’s not about physical touch. It’s our own thing. But inside her head, I am touching her, more intimately than any rubbing or pushing or chafing of parts. The ’hoek beams signals through the bone, stimulating those parts of the brain that correspond to my slow calligraphy. I am writing my signature across her body. As she in return maps the me drawn on the inside of my skull. How does it feel? Like a cat must feel when it’s stroked. Like an otter must feel diving and turning and performing its underwater acrobatics. Like a fire must feel when the wind catches it and sweeps it up a forested mountainside. And without the poetry; like I want to cringe and melt at the same time. Like I must move in a direction I can’t explain and my body can’t express. Like there is something in my mouth that grows bigger with every second but never changes size, like a reverse turd, only sweet and joyful, is working its way back up into my colon. Like I need need need to pee something that isn’t pee that my body hasn’t learned yet. Like I want this to end and never end. It goes on for a long long time and terrible little crying noises come out of our eight-year-aged lips as the aeai steers us through the howling torus of traffic on Siri Ring. We are teens and we are making out in the car.

There is a coming. Oh yes, there is a coming. Like soft fireworks, or the giggling drop at the top of a Ferris wheel or the feeling you get on those nights when the air is clear and you can see out from the roof pool all the billion lights of Delhi and you are connected to every single one. Like a djinn, made of fire. Ecstatic and guilty and dirty, like you’ve shouted a dirty word at a sophisticated party. My nipples are very very sensitive.

Then I start with Purrzja. And then Shayman. As I said, it’s entirely our own thing. It’s well into dark by the time we put up our seats and straighten our clothing and re-gel our hair and I flick off the autodrive and take us up out and over the Ring on a curving off ramp to a club. It’s a bit of a freak place – nutes like it and where nutes are welcome we are usually welcome – but the door knows us – knows our money – and there are always chati mag paps there. Tonight is no exception: we pose and pimp and preen for the cameras. I can write the society column headlines already. GENE-TWEAK FREAKS ON COCKTAIL CLUB ORGY. Except we don’t drink. We’re underage for that.

It’s always late when we get back. Only the house steward and aeais wait for us, gently chiding that it is a school day tomorrow. Don’t they understand that those are the best nights? This night the lights are on in the big drawing room. I can see them from the approach to the car park. My mother waits for me. She’s not alone. There’s a man and a woman with her, money people, I can tell that right away from their shoes, their fingernails, their teeth, the cut of their clothes and the prickle of aeai servitors hovering around them; all those things I can assess in a glance.

‘Vishnu, this is Nafisa and Dinesh Misra.’

I namaste, a vision in clashing cross-cultural trash.

‘They are going to be your new mother and father-in-law.’

My lovely consort

My cats can do other tricks too; I feel you grow bored of them running in their ring. Cats! Cats! See, a clap of my hands and they go and sit on their little stools: Matsya and Kurma, Varaha and Narasimha, Vamana, Parashurama, Rama and Krishna and Buddha and Kalki. Good cats. Clever cats. Rama, stop licking yourself. Hah! One word from me and they do as they will. Now, please feel this hoop, just ordinary paper. Yes? Yes. And these, the same, yes? Yes.

I set them out around the ring. Tabby Parashurama is squeezing his eyes closed in that way that makes him look very very smug.

By the way, I must thank you for coming to watch The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus. Yes, that’s the official name. It’s on the letters of registration. Yes, and I pay whatever taxes are due. It’s a small entertainment, but at least it’s working. You have solar? Not hooked up to the zero point? Very long-sighted of you. Now: watch! Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki!

They flow from their painted stools like liquid and run around the inside of the ring, an effortless, cat-lazy lope. The trick with cat circuses, I have found, is to convince them they are doing it for themselves.

And lo! I clap my hands and in perfect unison my cats leap from their ordained orbits clean through the paper hoops. Your applause please, but not for me: for Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki. Now they run in a circle, hurdling through the hoops. What was that? Is there a lesson in every trick? What do you mean? The spiritual significance of the cats I call to perform? I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think cats especially spiritual; quite the reverse; they are the most worldly and sensual of creatures, though the Prophet Mohammed, so it’s said, was a great lover of cats and famously cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb a cat that had fallen asleep there.

Now, on with the story. Where am I going? Don’t you know it’s a terrible rudeness to interrupt the storyteller? You came here to see the cat circus, not watch some old goondah spin a yarn? You’ve seen cats leap through paper hoops, what more do you want? Where am I going? Very well then, to Varanasi. No, I am not. Look at me, look at this forehead, put your finger there, yes right there, do you see a tilak, do you feel a little crusty lump, do you feel anything but my own skin? No you do not. It’s not just the bodhisofts who go to Varanasi. Here’s the deal. I have plenty more tricks in my little ring here on the sand, but to see them you will have to listen to my story and remember, the power may be working but the broadcasters are out. Nothing on your screens tonight. But you’ll like this. It’s a wedding scene. What is a story without a wedding?

Elephants bore me. When I say that I don’t mean that I find the pachyderm genus tedious, as if I have some special personal conversational relationship with them and knew all their conversational tics and ploys. Is Ganesh not the best-loved god in our entire profligate pantheon? I mean, simply, that elephants carried me; in a howdah like a small gilt temple through the streets of Delhi. Five elephants, with mahouts; one for my school friend Suresh Hira, one for Vin Johar, one for Syaman and one, my sole spit of defiance in the face of tradition, for Sarasvati, and one for me, Vishnu Nariman Raj, the gnarly groom. Delhi’s eternal, monstrous traffic broke around the horde of musicians, drummers, dancers, merry-meeters like water. The traffic news had been reporting me as a major congestion for hours. People stopped and stared, women threw rice, ayahs pointed me out to their finger-sucking grandchildren: There, there he is, Lord Vishnu goes to his wedding. The chati mags had been full of little else than the first dynastic Brahmin marriage. My other break with tradition: much of the gaudy I had funded myself through the judicious auctioning of the photo rights to Gupshup magazine. Look, here am I, in white sherwani and wrinkle-ankle pants in the vest best style, the traditional veil of flowers over my face, gripping my sword with one hand (a ludicrous affectation by Sreem, Delhi’s most-sought nute wedding choreographer; who could ever sword-fight from the broad back of an elephant?), with the other gripping white-knuckled to the gold-leaf coping of my swaying howdah. Have I said that riding an elephant is like being on a boat on unstill waters? Does what you glimpse through the cascading marigolds look afraid? Were you expecting someone larger?

Negotiations had been protracted and delicate over the winter. Hosts of aeai attorneys circled and clashed around my mother and father, temporarily unified, as they entertained the Misras to a grand vagdana. Lakshmi and I sat blandly, quietly, hands folded neatly in our laps on the cream leather sofa as relatives and relatives-to-be passed and greeted and blessed us. We smiled. We nodded. We did not speak, not to our guests, not to each other. In our years together at the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College we had said all that we could say to each other. We sat like an old married couple at a metro stop. At last the hosts of clashing attorney aeais withdrew: a pre-nuptial contract was drafted, a dowry was set. It was a brilliant match; property and ’ware with water, the very essence of life. Of course the price was high; we were Brahmins. It was no less than the flesh of our flesh and the seed of our loins, for all generations. Way down the list of ticky boxes on Dr Rao’s shopping list was one I suspect Lakshmi’s parents had fielded blindly. I know my parents had. But it was perhaps the most profound change of all that Dr Rao’s nanoworkers worked on us. Our genelines were modified. The traits engineered into us were inheritable. Our children and their children, all our conceivable Nariman-Misras marching into futurity, would be Brahmins, not from the microsurgery of Dr Rao, but from our sperm and eggs.

Children, offspring, a line, a dynasty. That was our mutually contracted dowry. A match was made! Let great Delhi rejoice!

The janampatri aeais had read the stars for the most auspicious fates, the pandit had made the puja to Ganesh and the joint houses of Nariman and Misra had hired Gupshup Girls, Delhi’s biggest and brassiest girl band to sing and flash their thighs for two thousand society guests at our sangeet sandhya. Lakshmi duetted onstage with them. Pop-girli hotpants and belly-top looked disturbing on her as she danced and skipped among the high heels. Too small, too too young to wed. I was never much of a singer. Mamaji and Dadaji had neglected to ticky that box. I boogied down in the golden circle with my classmates. Though I had still two years more at Dr Renganathan College under the tutelage of the invisible Mr Khan, our circle was broken. I was all their imminent futures.

At India Gate, Sarasvati called her mahout to a halt and slipped from her elephant’s back to run and dance among my parade of Baraatis. I had defied tradition by inviting her, she defied it back by coming dressed as a man in sherwani and kohl and huge, ludicrous false Rajput moustache. I watched her leap and whirl, brilliant and vivacious with the dancers and drummers and dance, laughing, with monkey-like Sreem and felt tears in my eyes behind my veil of flowers. She was so brilliant, so lovely, so lithe and free from expectation.

At Lodi Gardens the celebrity spotters were five deep. Policemen held them back with a chain of linked lathis. They had seen Rishi Jaitly and Anand Arora and ooh, isn’t that Esha Rathore the famous dancer and who is that little man with the very much younger wife; don’t you know, it’s Narayan Mittal from Mittal Industries. Last and least to them was the seeming child perched high on the back of a painted wedding elephant. A blare of trumpets and a barrage of drums greeted us. Then the smartsilk screens draped around us woke up and filled with the characters and, in a never-before-seen-feat of CG prestidigitation, the cast of Town and Country singing and dancing our wedding song specially written by legendary screen composer A. H. Husayin. They were aeais; singing and dancing were easy for them. There, almost lost among the sari silk and garlands as the bridal party stepped forward to greet us, was Lakshmi.

We were swept on a wave of drum beating and brass-tootling to the pavilions arrayed across the well-watered grass like a Mughal invasion. We feasted, we danced, we were sat on our thrones, our feet not touching the ground, and received our guests.

I didn’t see him. The line was long and the atmosphere in the marquee stifling and I was bloated and drowsy from wedding food. I took the hand blindly, bored. I only became attentive when it held mine that moment too long, that quantum too firmly.

Shiv.

‘Brother.’

I nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Are you well?’

He indicated his suit, the fabric cheap, the cut niggardly, the cufflinks and the jewel at the shirt-throat phoney. A budget wedding outfit. Tomorrow it would go by phatphat back to the hire shop.

‘I’ll be more suitably dressed when you come to my wedding.’

‘Are you getting married?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

I sniffed then. It was not Shiv’s perfume – that too smelled cheap and phenolic. My uniquely-connected senses show me subtleties to which others are quite oblivious. In his student hire-suit and cheap Bata shoes, Shiv seemed to carry an aura around him, a presence, a crackle of information like distant summer thunder. He smelled of aeais. I tilted my head to one side. Did I see a momentary shifting glow? It did not take a synaesthete or a Brahmin to spot the ’hoek tucked behind his ear.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I said and knew that he heard the lie.

‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

‘We must meet up some time,’ I went on, compounding the lie. ‘When Lakshmi and I get back into Delhi. Have you over to the place.’

‘It’s not going to be terribly likely,’ Shiv said. ‘I’m going to Bharat as soon as I graduate. I’ve a post-grad lined up at the University of Varanasi. Nano-informatics. Delhi’s not a good place for anyone working in artificial intelligence. The Americans are breathing down Srivastava’s neck to ratify the Hamilton Treaty.’

I consumed news, all news, any news, as universally and unthinkingly as breathing. I could watch twelve screens of television and tell you what was happening on any of them, simultaneously scan a tableful of newspapers and reproduce any article verbatim; I frequently kept my newsfeeds on brain drip waking and sleeping, beaming the happening world into my tiny head. I knew too well of the international moves, begun by the United States to restrict artificial intelligence by licence. Fear motivates them; that vague Christian millennial dread of the work of our own hands rising up and making itself our god. Artificial intelligences with a thousand, ten thousand, infinite times our human intelligence, whatever that means. Intelligence, when you look down on it from above, is a very vague terrain. Nevertheless police forces had been established, Krishna Cops, charged with hunting down and eliminating rogue aeais. Fine title, vain hope. Aeais were utterly different from us; intelligences that could be in many places at one time, that could exist in many different avatars, that could only move by copying themselves, not as I moved, lugging about my enhanced intelligence in the calcium bowl of my skull. They had very good guns, but I think my gnawing fear was aeais today, Brahmins tomorrow. Humans are very jealous gods.

I knew that it was inevitable that Awadh would sign up to the accord in return for favoured nation grants from the US. Neighbouring Bharat would never accede to that; its media industry, dependent on artificial intelligence for the success of Town and Country from Djakarta to Dubai, was too influential a lobby. The world’s first overt soapocracy. And, I foresaw, the world’s first data-haven nation state. Stitching together stories buried way down the business news, I was already seeing a pattern of software house relocations and research foundations moving to Varanasi. So Shiv, ambitious Shiv, Shiv-building-your-own-glory while I merely obeyed the imperative in my DNA, Shiv with your whiff of aeais around you, what is it in Bharat? Would you be a researcher into technologies as sky-blue as Lord Krishna himself, would you be a dataraja with a stable of aeais pretending they can’t pass the Turing Test?

‘Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,’ I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.

‘Not really no,’ Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?

The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable wedding shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like a plague at the wedding.

The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over the tomb of Muhammad Shah and the dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private helicopter lifted us up and away to the teahouse in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed our baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.

‘It’s good isn’t it?’

‘Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.’

‘I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.’

‘Yes, it is good. Very old wood.’

‘This is the honeymoon then.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re supposed to…’

‘Yes. I know. Do you… are you?’

‘Wired? No I was never into that.’

‘Oh. Well, I’ve some other stuff in my bag, it should work on you as well.’

‘You’ve tried it?’

‘Sometimes. I’m finding it gets hard all on its own now, just like that, nothing in particular, so I try it then.’

‘Is it productive?’

‘It’s a bit like the ’hoek sex. Feeling you really really need to pee something that isn’t pee and isn’t there. To be honest, not as good. Have you tried?’

‘With the fingers? Oh yes, with the whole hand. It’s like you.’

‘Need to pee?’

‘Something like that. More of a clench. It works on a swing too. I don’t really think I want to use something you have on you, you know.’

‘I suppose not. We could… I could…’

‘I don’t really think so.’

‘Do you think they’ll check? Save the sheets and show them round to all the relatives?’

‘At our physical ages? Don’t be stupid.’

‘It’s part of the contract.’

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke contractual obligation until I’ve at least had a period.’

‘So do you want to do anything?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘So what will we do then?’

‘The view’s nice.’

‘There’s a pack of cards in the drawer in the table.’

‘Maybe later. I might sleep now.’

‘So might I. Are you all right about the bed?’

‘Of course. We’re supposed to, aren’t we? We are husband and wife.’

We slept under the light silk cover with the ceiling fan turning slowly, each curled up like the eight-year-olds we physically were with our backs to each other, as far apart as Vish and Shiv and afterwards we invented card games of staggering complexity with the old circular Ganjifa cards on the verandah with its titanic view over the Himalayas. As Lakshmi turned over the kings and ministers our eyes met and we both knew it was more than over, it had never begun. There was nothing but contractual obligation between us. We were the hostages of our DNA. I thought of that line of offspring issuing like a rope of pearls from the end of my still-flaccid penis; those slow children toddling into a future so distant I could not even see its dust on time’s horizon, and onward and onward always onward. I was filled with horror at the blind imperative of biology. I owned superhuman intelligence, I only forgot what I chose to forget, I had never known a day’s illness in my life, I carried the name of a god, but to my seed all this was nothing, I was no different from some baseline Dalit in Molar Bund basti. Yes, I was a privileged brat, yes, I was a sneerer of the worst kind, how could I be anything other? I was a designer snob.

We stayed our week in the teahouse in the green foothills of Himachal Pradesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu. Lakshmi patented some of her elaborate social card games – we tested the multi-player games by each of us playing several hands at once, an easy feat for the Brahmins – and made a lot of money from licensing them. It was radiantly beautiful, the mountains were distant and serene like stone Buddhas, occasional rain pattered on the leaves outside our window at night and we were utterly utterly miserable, but even more so at the thought of what we had to face on our return to Awadh, the darlings of the Delhi. My decision had been made on the third day of our honeymoon but it was not until we were in the limo to the Ramachandra Tower where we had been given an apartment fit for gods on the floor below my Mamaji that I made the call to the very special, very discreet doctor.

Two extraneous aspects of myself

‘Both of them?’ the nute said. Yt would have raised an eyebrow had yt possessed any hair on yts shaven head to raise.

‘History is quiet on the subject of half-eunuchs,’ I said.

No one, alas, ever delivers such dialogue. Ticking lines, arch exchanges, loaded looks, these are things of story not real life. But I am telling you a story, my story, which is much more than just history or even memory. For if I choose to forget, I can also choose to remember and make what I chose memory. So if I wish the nute surgeon’s office to be at the top of a winding, creaking flight of stairs, each level haunted by the eyes of suspicious and hostile Old Delhiwallahs, if I decide to remember it so, it will be so. Likewise, if I choose to recall that office to be a charnel house of grotesque surgical implements and pictures of successfully mutilated body-parts like a demon-infested hell from a Himalayan Buddhist painting, it will be so forever. Perhaps it’s less strange a concept for you than for me. I more than anyone know the deceptiveness of physical appearance, but you seem young enough to have grown up in a world comfortable with universal memory, every breath and blink swarming with devas continuously writing and rewriting physical reality. And if the devas choose to rewrite that memory, who is there to say that it’s not so?

But there is east light in the sky beyond the blazing pillar of the Jyotirlinga, I have far to go, you have yet to see the most astonishing things my cats can achieve and the reality is that the surgery of Dr Anil was in a tastefully restored haveli in the warren of streets in the shadow of the Red Fort, the surgery elegant and discreet and fronted by the delightful Miss Modi, and Dr Anil was welcoming, professional, subtle and frankly surprised by my request.

‘I usually deal in more… substantial surgery,’ yt said. The Ardhanarisvara Clinic was Delhi’s leading centre for nute transformation. Leading through whispers and rumours; in bright new Awadh we might claim to be urbane, global, cosmopolitan and unshockable but nute culture, those who decided to escape our desperate sex wars by choosing a third way, a neither-way, was still almost as hidden and secretive as the ancient transgendered hijras who had long ago hidden themselves away in Old Delhi. The ancient city; older than any memory, its streets convoluted like the folds of a brain, has always looked after those with needs beyond the merely average.

‘I think what I’m asking is substantial enough,’ I said.

‘True true,’ Dr Anil said, putting his fingers together in a spire in that way that all doctors, male, female, transgendered or nute, seem to learn on day one of medical school. ‘So, both testicles.’

‘Yes, both.’

‘And not the penis.’

‘That would be perverse.’

‘You’re sure you won’t consider the chemical option? It’s reversible, should you ever reconsider.’

‘No, not chemical. I don’t want it to be reversible. I want to remove myself from the future. I want this to end with me. I’m more than a stud animal. Complete physical castration, yes.’

‘It’s quite simple. Much more so than the usual kind of thing we do here.’ I knew well the medical procedures that flowed out from here to the anonymous godowns and grey surgery clinics beyond the Siri Ring orbital expressway. There is a video for everything somewhere in the online world and I had watched with fascination what those humans who desired another gender had done to themselves. The things strung out through the gel tanks, skin flayed, muscles laid open, organs drawn out and suspended in molecular sieve cradles, were so far from anything human as to be curious, like strange forest flowers, rather than obscene. I was much more of a coward, leaving only my two little organs on the doorstep of gender. ‘My only reservation would be that, as you are biologically prepubescent, it would be an internal orchidectomy. Miss Modi will draw up a consent form.’ Yt blinked at me, a delicate, faun-like creature behind a heavy Raj desk, too too lovely to speak of such things as testicular surgery. ‘Forgive me for asking, I haven’t met any High Brahmins before, but you are of an age to sign a consent form?’

‘I’m of an age to be legally married.’

‘Yes, but you must understand, mine is a business that attracts scrutiny in Awadh.’

‘I’m of an age to pay you a profane sum of money to give me what I want.’

‘Profane it is then.’

Surprisingly mundane it was. I did not even need to be driven out to the nasty industrial zones. In the cubicle I changed into the surgical gown, the sleeves too too long, the hem trailing on the ground, slid up onto the disinfectant-stinky operating table in the basement surgery and felt the needling suffusion of the local anaesthetic. Robot arms, fingertips fine as insect antennae, danced in under the control of Dr Anil. I felt nothing as I blinked up into the lights and strained to hear their synaesthetic music. The dancing arms withdrew; I felt nothing. And I still felt nothing as the car spun me back through streets full of pulsing, potent, hormone-raddled people. A mild twinge from the sutures pulling against the weave of my clothes. No pain, little loss, nothing of the sense of lightness and freedom I had read of in the literature of castration fetishists. A unique pleasure, sexual castration; an orgasm to end all orgasms. I had not even had that. The cell-weave treatments would heal the wound in three days and hide all evidence, until the passing years revealed that my voice was not significantly deepening, my hair not receding, that I was growing unusually tall and willowy and that I had singularly failed to contractually conceive any children.

‘Do you want to take them with you?’ Dr Anil asked as yt sat me down in yts consulting room after the short operation.

‘Why should I wish to do that?’

‘It was a tradition in China. Imperial eunuchs would be given their excised genitals preserved in a jar of alcohol to bury beside them on their deaths, so that they might enter heaven whole men.’

‘It was a tradition in Ottoman Turkey that eunuchs, after their cutting clean, would sit in a dung-heap for three days to heal their wounds, or die. I don’t care for that tradition either. They’re not mine, they’re not me; they belong to someone else. Burn them or throw them to the pi-dogs, I don’t care.’

Thunder growled over me, a promise of a monsoon, the day was darkening. Lightning glowed cloud to cloud as I rode the elevator up the outside of Ramachandra Tower. Lakshmi sat curled on the sofa, the breaking storm magnificent behind her. Dry lightning, a false prophet of rain. All prophecies of rain were false these days,

‘Did you do it, are you all right?’

I nodded. It was beginning to hurt now. I clenched my teeth, kicking in the analgesic nanoinfuser Dr Anil had planted there. Lakshmi clapped her hands in joy. ‘I’ll go tomorrow. Oh dear Lord, I’m so happy, so happy.’ And then, there, in the dark apartment glowing with muted lighting, she kissed me.

We did not tell anyone. That was part of the pact. Not our parents, not our relatives, not our circle of Brahmin friends, not even our aeais. Not even dear Sarasvati; I wouldn’t burden her with this. There was work we had to do before we announced to our respective families how we had so drastically denied their plans for us. Then we could sweetly and painlessly divorce.

I nuzzle the earlobe of power

What is the proper work of eunuchs?

Does it make you uncomfortable, that word? Does it make you cross your legs, boys; does it give you a hollow clench in your uterus, ladies? When you hear it, do you see something other than a human being, something less? How then is it any different from other words of distinction: Kshatriya, Dalit? Brahmin? Eunuch. It is a very old and noble word, a fine and ancient tradition practised in all the great cultures of earth. The principle is to give up the lesser to gain the greater. Of all those pitiful puffs of cock-juice, how many will ever turn into human beings? Come on, be honest. It’s almost all wasted. And never imagine that the ball-less are sexless, or without desire. No, the great castrati singers, the eunuch poets and holy visionaries, the grand viziers and royal advisers all understood that greatness came at a price and that was generation. Empires could be entrusted to eunuchs, free from dynastic urges. The care and feeding of great nations is our proper work, and with all the gifts my parents had endowed me I steered myself toward the political cradle of the nation.

How almost right my mother was, and how utterly wrong-headed. She had seen me carried in through the doors of the Lok Sabha on the shoulders of cheering election workers. I preferred the servant’s entrance. Politicians live and die by the ballot box. They are not there to serve, they are there to gain and hold office. Populism can force them to abandon wise and correct policies for whims and fads. The storm of ballots will in the end sweep them and all their good works from power. Their grand viziers endure. We understand that democracy is the best system by which a nation seems to be governed.

Months of social networking – the old-fashioned, handshake and gift type – and the setting up and calling in of favours and lines of political credit, had gained me an internship to Parekh, the Minister for Water and the Environment. He was a tolerable dolt, a Vora from Uttaranchal with a shopkeeper’s shrewdness and head for details, but little vision. He was good enough to seem in control and a politician often needs little more for a long and comfortable career. This was the highest he would ever rise; as soon as the next monsoon failure hit and the mobs were hijacking water tankers in the street, he would be out. He knew I knew this. I scared him, even though I was careful to turn down the full dazzle of my intelligence to a glow of general astuteness. He knew I was far from the nine-year-old I seemed to be but he really had no idea of my and my kind’s capabilities and curses. I chose my department carefully. Naked ambition would have exposed me too early to a government that was only now realising it had never properly legislated around human gene-line manipulation. Even so I knew the colour of all the eyes that were watching me, skipping through the glassy corridors of the Water Ministry. Water is life. Water, its abundance and its rarity, would sculpt the future of Awadh, of all the nations of North India, from the Panjab to the United States of Bengal. Water was a good place to be bright, but I had no intention of remaining there.

The dam at Kunda Khadar neared completion, that titanic fifteen-kilometre bank of earth and concrete like a garter around the thigh of Mother Ganga. Protests from downstream Bharat and the USB grew strident but the tower cranes lifted and swung, lifted and swung day and night. Minister Parekh and Prime Minister Srivastava communicated daily. The Defence Ministry was brought into the circle. Even the PR staffers could smell diplomatic tension.

It was a Thursday. Even before, I called it Bold Thursday, to commit myself, to get myself up. The genes don’t make you brave. But I had prepared as rigorously as I could; which was more than anyone in the Lok Sabha, Minister Parekh included. Srivastava was due with his entourage for a press conference from the ministry to reassure the Awadhi public that Kunda Khadar would do its job and slake Delhi’s bottomless thirst. Everyone was turned out smart as paint: moustaches plucked, clacks creased, shirts white as mourning. Not me. I had picked my spot long before: a brief bustle down the corridor as Srivastava and his secretarial team was coming up. I had no idea what they would be talking about but I knew they would be talking; Srivastava loved his ‘walking briefings’; they made him seem a man of action and energy. I trusted that my research and quicker wit would win.

I heard the burble of voices. They were about to turn the corner. I went into motion, pushed myself into the wall as the press of suits came toward me. My senses scanned five conversations, lit on Srivastava’s murmur to Bhansal his parliamentary secretary, ‘If I knew we had McAuley’s support.’

Andrew J. McAuley, President of the United States of America. And the answer was there.

‘We could negotiate an output deal in return for Sajida Rana accepting partial ratification of the Hamilton Acts,’ I said, my voice shrill and pure and piercing as a bird.

The Prime Ministerial party bustled past but Satya Shetty, the Press Secretary, turned with a face of thunder to strike down this upstart, mouthy intern. He saw a nine-year-old. He was dumb-struck. His eyes bulged. He hesitated. That hesitation froze the entire party. Prime Minister Srivastava turned towards me. His eyes widened. His pupils dilated.

‘That’s a very interesting idea,’ he said and in those five words I knew he had identified, analysed and accepted the gift I had offered him. A Brahmin adviser. The strange, savant child. The child genius, the infant guru, the little god. India adored them. It was PR gold. His staffers parted as he stepped toward me. ‘What are you doing here?’

I explained that I was on an internship with Minister Parekh.

‘And now you want more.’

Yes, I did.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him. He nodded his head.

‘Yes, the wedding. I remember. So, it’s a career in politics, is it?’

It was.

‘You’re certainly not backward about being forward.’

My genes wouldn’t allow it. My first political lie.

‘Well, ideas do seem to be in short stock at the moment.’ With that he turned, his entourage closed around him and he was swept on. Satya Shetty dealt me a glare of pure despite; I held his eyes until he snapped his gaze away. I would see him and all his works dust while I was still fresh and filled with energy. By the time I returned to my desk there was an invitation from the Office of the Prime Minister to call them to arrange an interview.

I told my great achievement to the three women in my life. Lakshmi beamed with delight. Our plans were working. My mother was baffled; she no longer understood my motivations, why I would accept a lowly and inconspicuous civil service position rather than a high-flyer in our superstar political culture. Sarasvati jumped up from her sofa and danced around the room, then clapped her hands around my face and kissed my forehead long and hard until her lips left a red tilak there.

‘As long as there’s joy in it,’ she said. ‘Only joy.’

My sister, my glorious sister, had voiced a truth that I was only now developing the maturity to recognise. Joy was all. Mamaji and Dadaji had aimed me at greatness, at blinding success and wealth, power and celebrity. I had always possessed the emotional intelligence, if not the emotional vocabulary, to know that the blindingly powerful and famous were seldom happy, that their success and wealth often played against their own mental and physical well-being. All my decisions I made for me, for my peace, well-being, satisfaction and to keep me interested throughout my long life. Lakshmi had chosen the delicate world of complicated games. I had chosen the whirl of politics. Not economics; that was too dismal a science for me. But the state and those statelets beyond Awadh’s borders with which I could see we were as inextricably entwined as when we were one India, and the countries beyond those, and the continents beyond; that fascinated me. The etiquette of nations was my pleasure. There was joy in it, Sarasvati. And I was brilliant at it. I became the hero of my childhood comics, a subtle hero, Diplomacy Man. I saved your world more times than you can ever know. My superpower was to see a situation entire, connected, and all those subtler forces acting upon it that other, less gifted analysts would have discounted. Then I would give it a nudge. The smallest, slightest tap, one tiny incentive or restriction, even a hint at how a policy might be shaped, and watch how the social physics of a complex capitalist society scale them up through power laws and networks and social amplifiers to slowly turn the head of the entire nation.

In those first few years I was constantly fighting for my own survival. Satya Shetty was my deadliest enemy from the moment our eyes had met in the corridor in the Water Ministry. He was influential, he was connected, he was clever but not clever enough to realise he could never beat me. I just let my drips of honey fall into Krishna Srivastava’s ear. I was always right. Little by little his cabinet and Satya Shetty’s allies realised that, more than being always right, I was essentially different from them. I didn’t seek high office. I sought the greatest well-being. I was the perfect adviser. And I looked great on television: Prime Minister Srivastava’s dwarf vizier, trotting behind him like some throw-back to the days of the Mughals. Who isn’t, at some level, unnerved by the child prodigy? Even if I was twenty-two years old now, with puberty – whatever that might mean for me personally – looming on the horizon of my Brahmin generation like the rumbles of a long-delayed monsoon.

It was that treacherous monsoon that became the driver of Awadhi politics, town and country, home and away. Thirsty nations are irrational nations; nations that pray and turn to strange saviours. The great technocracy of the United States of Bengal had, in a display of national hysteria, put its faith in a bizarre plan to haul an iceberg from Antarctica into the Sundarbans with the hope that the mass of cold air would affect the shifting climatic patterns and claw the monsoon back over India. Strange days, a time of rumours and wonders. The end of the Age of Kali was upon us and once again the gods were descending upon us, walking in the shapes of ordinary men and women. The Americans had found something in space, something not of this world. The datahavens of Bharat, boiling with aeais, had spawned Generation Three artificial intelligences; legendary entities whose intelligence as far outstripped mine as mine did the fleas crawling on my poor, harassed cats. Sajida Rana, politically embattled from resurgent Hindu fundamentalism, was preparing a pre-emptive strike on Kunda Khadar as a PR stunt. This last rumour I took seriously enough from my trawling of the Bharati press to call for a departmental level meeting between my ministry and its Bharati counterpart. Did I mention that I was now parliamentary secretary to Krishna Srivastava? A steady, not stellar, climb. It was still too easy to lose grip and fall into the reaching hands of my rivals.

My counterpart at the Bharat Bhavan was a refined Muslim gentleman, Shaheen Badoor Khan, from an excellent family and impeccably educated. Behind his pitch-perfect etiquette and a dignity I envied deeply for I was a small, scampering child next to him, I did sense a sadness; an ache behind the eyes. We recognised and liked each other immediately. We knew instinctively that we both cared deeply enough for our countries to be prepared to betray them. Such a thing could never be said, or even implied. Thus our conversation, as we walked among the Buddha’s deer of old Sarnath, our security men discreet shadows among the trees, the security drones circling like black kites overhead seemed as casual and elliptical as two old dowagers on a Friday afternoon stroll.

‘Awadh has always seemed to me a country at peace with itself,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan said. ‘As if it’s solved some great and quintessentially Indian paradox.’

‘It wasn’t always so,’ I said. Behind the security fence Western tourists on the Buddha trail tried to hold down their flapping robes in the rising wind. ‘Delhi’s streets have run red far too many times.’

‘But it’s always been a cosmopolitan city. Varanasi, on the other hand, always has and always will be the city of Lord Siva.’

I waggled my head in agreement. I knew now what I would report to Srivastava. Sajida Rana is under pressure from the Hindutvavadis. She will launch a pre-emptive strike at Kunda Khadar. Awadh will have the moral high ground; we must not lose it.

‘I have a relative in Varanasi,’ I said casually.

‘Oh, so?’

‘My brother – a Shiva himself, so no surprise really that he should end up in Varanasi.’

‘And is he a Brahmin like yourself?”

‘No, but he is very gifted.’

‘We do seem to attract talent. It’s one of our blessings, I suppose. I have a younger brother in the United States. Terrible at keeping in contact, terrible; my mother, well, you know what they’re like. Of course it’s my responsibility.’

You’re worried that your brother has drifted into business that could adversely affect your standing, if it became public, was what this sage Mr Khan was telling me. You want me to keep an eye on him, in return you’ll open up a secure channel of communications between us to prevent war between Bharat and Awadh.

‘You know what brothers are like,’ I said.

The information was beaming into my head even as I stepped off the plane at Indira Gandhi airport. Shiv had opened a company, Purusa, in Varanasi. He had attracted substantial funding from a venture capital company called Odeco and match-funding from the research and development division at Bharat’s mighty Ray Power. His field was nanoscale computing. Top designers and engineers were working with him. The Ghost Index, which valued companies with the potential to become global players when they went public, valued Purusa as one of their top five to watch. He was young and he was hot and he was headed for orbit. He had made some questionable friends among Bharat’s datarajas and a cloud of high-level aeais hid much of Purusa’s activities from its rivals and from the Bharati government. The Krishna Cops had a file on him and a deliberately clumsy team of aeai wards to keep him aware that he was known to them. My own Awadhi intelligence service surveillance aeais were of a subtler stripe than the police. They coded themselves into the very informational fabric of Purusa. The security of Awadh was a flimsy fiction; I was intensely curious as to what my brother was up to. What Shiv planned was of course monstrously ambitious. He had cracked open the prison of the skull. More prosaically, Purusa had developed a prototype biochip that could interface directly with the brain. No more a tacky coil of plastic behind the ear and the soft invasion of electromagnetic radiation into the brain, like shouting in a temple. This was engineered protein, stuff of our stuff, which sent its artificial neurons through skin and bone to mesh with the threads of thought. It was the third eye, forever open to the unseen world. See how easily I resort to the language of the mystical? Omniscience was standard; anyone so infected had access to all the knowledge and all the bitchy triviality of the global web. Communication was no longer a click and a call, it was a thought, a subtle telepathy. Virtual worlds became real. The age of privacy, that first Western luxury that Indian wealth bought, was over. Where our own thoughts ended and those of others began, how would we know? We would touch the world of the aeais, in their dispersed, extended, multi-levelled perceptions. Speculation led to speculation. I could see no end to them. Lakshmi, disturbed from her mathematical games, would sense my mood and look up to see the adult anxiety on my child’s face. This technology would change us, change us utterly and profoundly. This was a new way of being human, a fault-line, a diamond cutter’s strike across society. I began to realise that the greatest threat to Awadh, to Bharat, to all India, was not water. It was the pure and flawless diamond Shiv and his Purusa Corporation dangled and spun in front of each and every human. Be more, be everything. So engaged was I that I did not notice when the warning came down the Grand Trunk Road from Shaheen Badoor Khan in Varanasi and thus was caught sleeping when Sajida Rana sent her tanks to take Kuna Khadar without a shot.

The girl with the red bindi

The war’s names were longer than its duration. The Kunda Khadar war, the Forty-Eight Hour War, the Soft War, the First Water War. You don’t remember it, though Awadhi main battle tanks manoeuvred over these very sands. You probably don’t even remember it from history lessons. There have been greater and more enduring wars; war running into war, the long and, I think, the final war. The war I shall end. That grand display of arms on these river strands I now understand as its opening shot, had any shots actually been fired. That was another of its names, the Soft War. Ah! Who is it names wars? Hacks and pundits, without doubt, media editors and chati journalists; people with an interest in a good, mouth-filling phrase. It is certainly not civil servants, or cat-circus proprietors. How much better a name would ‘Soft War’ have been for the century of unrest that followed, this Age of Kali that now seems to have run down to its lowest ebb with the arrival of the Jyotirlingas on earth?

The Water War, the War of ’47, whatever we call it, for me marked the end of human history and the return of the age of miracles to earth. It was only after the smoke had cleared and the dust settled and our diplomatic teams arrived among the tall and shining towers of Ranapur to negotiate the peace that we realised the immensity of events in Bharat. Our quiet little water war was the least of it. I had received one terse communication down the Grand Trunk Road: I am ruined, I have failed, I have resigned. But there was Shaheen Badoor Khan, five paces behind his new Prime Minster Ashok Rana, as I trotted like a child behind our Srivastava.

‘Rumours of my demise were exaggerated,’ he whispered as we fell in beside each other as the politicians formed up on the grass outside the Benares Polo and Country Club for the press call, each jostling for status-space.

‘War does seem to shorten the political memory.’ A twenty- three year-old in the body of a boy half his age may say pretty much whatever he likes. It’s the liberty granted to fools and angels. When I first met Shaheen Badoor Khan, as well as his decency and intelligence, I had sensed a bone-deep sadness. Even I could not have guessed it was a long-repressed and sterile love for the other, the transgressive, the romantic and doomed, all wrapped up in the body of a young Varanasi nute. He had fallen into the honey-trap laid for him by his political enemies.

Shaheen Badoor Khan dipped his head. ‘I’m far from being the first silly, middle-aged man to have been a fool for lust. I may be the only one to have got his Prime Minister killed as a consequence. But, as you say, war does very much clarify the vision and I seem to be a convenient figure for public expiation. And from what I gather from the media, the public will trust me sooner than Ashok Rana. People like nothing better than the fallen Mughal who repents. In the meantime, we do what we must, don’t we, Mr Nariman? Our countries need us more than they know. These have been stranger times in Bharat than people can ever be let know.’

Bless your politician’s self-deprecation. The simultaneous collapse of major aeai systems across Bharat, including the all-conquering Town and Country, the revelation that the country’s rampant Hindutva opposition had been a cabal of artificial intelligences, chaos at Ray Power and the mysterious appearance of a hundred-metre hemispherical crater of mirror-bright perfection in the university grounds; and, behind all, rumours that the long-awaited, long-dreaded Generation Three aeais had arrived. There was only one who could make sense of it to me. I went to see Shiv.

He had a house, a shaded place with many trees to push back the crowding, noisy world. Gardeners moved with slow precision up and down the rolled gravel paths, dead-heading a Persian rose here, spraying aphids there, spot-feeding brown drought-patches in the lawn everywhere. He had grown fat. He lolled in his chair at the tiffin table on the lawn. He looked dreadful, pasty and puffy. He had a wife. He had a child, a little pipit of a girl playing on the snap-together plastic fun-park on the lawn under the eye of her ayah. She would glance over at me, unsure whether to treat me as a strange and powerful uncle or invite me to whiz down the plastic slide. Yes, wee one, I was a strange creature. That scent, that pheromone of information I had smelled on Shiv the day he came to my wedding still clung to him, stronger now. He smelled like a man who has spent too much time among aeais.

He welcomed me expansively. Servants brought cool homemade sherbet. As we settled into brother talk, man-to-eleven-year-old-talk, his wife excused herself in a voice small as an insect and went to hover nervously over her daughter playing exuberantly on her brightly coloured jungle-gym.

‘You seem to have had a good war,’ I said.

‘There was war?’ Shiv held my gaze for a moment, then exploded into volcanic laughter. Sweat broke out on his brow. I did not believe it for an instant. ‘I’ve got comfortable and greasy, yes.’

‘And successful.’

‘Not as successful as you.’

‘I am only a civil servant.’

‘I’ve heard you run Srivastava like a pimp.’

‘We all have our sources.’

‘Yes.’ Again that affected pause. ‘I spotted yours pretty early on. Not bad for government ’ware.’

‘Disinformation can be as informative as information.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t try anything as obvious as that with you. No, I left them there; I let them look. I’ve nothing to hide.’

‘Your investors are interesting.’

‘I doubt some of them will be collecting on their investment.’ He laughed again.

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘It transpires that one of my key investors, Odeco, was nothing more than a front for a Generation Three aeai that had developed inside the international financial markets.’

‘So it wasn’t just a rumour.’

‘I’m glad you’re still listening to rumours.’

‘You say this all very casually.’

‘What other way is there to treat the end of history? You’ve seen what happens in India when we takes things seriously.’ The laugh was annoying me now. It was thick and greasy.

‘The end of history has been promised many times, usually by people rich enough to avoid it.’

‘Not this time. The rich will be the ones who’ll bring it about. The same blind economic self-interest that caused the demographic shift, and you, Vish. Only this will be on a much greater scale.’

‘You think your biochip has that potential?’

‘On it’s own, no. I can see I’m going to have to explain this to you.’

By the time Shiv had told his tale the gardeners were lighting torches to drive away the evening insects and wife, daughter and ayah had withdrawn to the lit comfort of the verandah. Bats dashed around me, hunting. I was shivering though the night was warm. A servant brought fresh made lassi and pistachios. It was greater, as Shiv had promised. Perhaps the greatest. The gods had returned, and then, in the instant of their apotheosis, departed. A soft apocalypse.

The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base themselves in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabited the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game of which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of Town and Country. That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and the assassination of Sajida Rana.

That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth-first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up in whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’s description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that it was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemisphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and, oh yes, failing.

‘And what is it then?’

‘The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.’

‘Why?’

‘Do you never give presents to your parents?’

‘You’re privileged to know this information?’

‘I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco…’

‘Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.’ Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. ‘There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.’

‘None,’ said Shiv. It was some time since he had laughed his vile, superior laugh.

‘It’s already happening.’ And we thought we had won a water war.

‘There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a settlement.’ Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. ‘Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.’

She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones, snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.

‘Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.’

I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.

‘What have you done?’ I cried. My voice was small and shrill.

‘Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.’

‘Your biochip interface.’

‘Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.’

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘Distributed dust-processing.’

‘Explain.’

Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free-flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.

Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.

‘You’re years away from this.’ I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.

‘Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.’

‘How?’ I cried again. Now the ayah was staring concerned at me.

Shiv pointed a finger to the night sky.

‘I could report you,’ I said. ‘Americans don’t take kindly to having their security hacked.’

‘You can’t stop it,’ Shiv said. ‘Vish, you’re not the future any more.’

Those words, of all that Shiv spoke in the garden, clung to me. Gliding silently through Delhi in the smooth-running black government car, the men in their white shirts, the women in their coloured shoes, the cars and the buzzing phatphats seemed insubstantial. The city was still thrilled with its brilliant victory – only a drubbing in cricket would have exercised public excitement more – but the crowds seemed staged, like extras, and the lights and streets as false as a set on Town and Country. How would we survive without our national panacea? But Shiv had confirmed, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent a new generation of Threes from arising. They could already be stirring into sentience, like my divine namesake on his scared turtle Kurma churning the sacred milk into creation. I was acutely aware of the clouds of aeais all around me, penetrating and interpenetrating, layer upon layer, level upon level, many and one. There was no place in the two Delhis for the ancient djinns. The aeais had displaced them. This was their city. Settlement was the only answer. Dust blew through the streets, dust upon dust. I had seen the end of history and still my feet did not touch the floor of the limo.

I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji had gifted me were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society, this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv’s way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the back seat of the limo, I realised my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India’s brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for success. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human world as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.

I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chosen to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasing unrecognisable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition? Had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not? I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said, Now, now’s the time for that divorce. Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.

A father festooned with memory

Wait! One more trick. You’ll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven’t seen anything yet, just a bit of running in circles and jumping through hoops. Yes, I know it’s very very late and the sun will soon be up the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.

And anyway, I haven’t finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.

The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.

I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife – with her blessing and a farewell kiss – my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance which could not be undone and turned sadhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming in to the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminium flanks of the go-downs and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It’s a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressways, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge slow trains materialising like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessings as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Did the passengers even glance at me through the darkened glass? If so I must have seemed a very strange sadhu to them. The littlest sadhu. Small but determined, beating forward with my staff at every stride.

What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don’t think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead-end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I’m a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji’s boy. That same night I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell, that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired, I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air-conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breath in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my eleven-year-old glottis would allow: Wake up! Wake up! Shiv’s future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.

Lakshmi kissed me and I left. I wandered for nine months, south across the border into Rajasthan, back into Bharat and to the north under the breath of the Himalayas, to the cool green ridges where I had spent my honeymoon with Lakshmi. To Dal Lake and Srinagar, to Leh and the high country. I could never grow the proper sadhu beard, but I grew the sadhu leanness and tallness. Boy eunuchs grow tall and lean. And the dreadlocks. Oh yes. They are good to have but unpleasant to get. I also gained a nickname: the Beardless Sadhu. With it I got muscles and sunburn, I grew the stamina to walk all day on a cup of rice and a cup of water. What a pulpy, unfit puppy I had been! I begged and performed small miracles of accountancy and feats of memory for food and shelter. Everywhere, I looked in men and women’s third eyes. I saw things I could never have from the top of Ramachandra Tower or the Awadh Bhavan. I saw thirst and I saw drought. I saw good village leaders and diligent local civil servants frustrated by government bureaucrats. I saw clever women turn a few hundred rupees from microcredit schemes and grameen banks into successful businesses. I saw good teachers try to lift generations out of low expectations and the trap of caste and Awadh’s soar-away middle class, rapidly pulling the ladder of social mobility up behind it. I helped with harvests and rode the back of tractors and listened to farmers curse the ever-increasing price of their sterile GM seed. I chased rats with sticks and waved my arms to set whole fields of sparrows to flight. I sat in the community house and watched cricket on a giant plasma screen powered by stored sunlight. Oh, I was a most peculiar sadhu. I gained a new nickname to set beside Beardless Sadhu: Cricketing Sadhu. I saw village weddings and festivals, I saw funerals. I saw death. It came quite unexpectedly one day, in a small town outside Agra. It was Holi and the streets were full of flying colour, jets of dye, clouds of powder, stained saris and white shirts ruined beyond the power of any laundry to save and everywhere grinning faces stained with colours, teeth white, eye flashing, everyone shouting Holi hai! Holi hai! as they launched jets of colour into the air. I moved through this circus of colour, as motley as any. The phatphat was grossly overloaded, a dozen colour-stained youths hanging off every strut and stanchion. Their eyes were wide on ganja and they were roaring with laughter and throwing fistfuls of dye powder at every passer-by. They caught me full in the face. The front wheel hit a pothole, the overstrained suspension collapsed and the whole thing flipped over in a perfect somersault onto its roof, which split like an egg. Bodies flew everywhere, many of them so relaxed on the ganja they were still laughing as they picked themselves up and skipped away. One didn’t move. He was trapped under the crushed plastic shell. He lay on his back, his arms at odd angles. His face was stained blue and green and pink and he seemed to be smiling but my senses realised he was dead. I had never seen death before. It was so simple and strange, here undeniably before me yet so subtle, an instant’s transformation yet the opposite of everything that was life. I mumbled the prayers expected of me, but inwardly I was coming to terms with the deepest of all human truths. I was twenty-six years old with the body of an albeit-strange thirteen-year-old, my lifespan was measurable in centuries, but one day I too would lie down like this and stop moving and thinking and feeling and be nothing forever. I saw death and began to understand.

Village to village, town to town, temple to temple, from the huge complexes the size of cities to white-washed roadside shrines. Then one day outside a mall in a drought-dusty suburb of Jaipur, as the security men were coming to ask me politely (for one must always be respectful to sadhus) to please move on, I saw what I had been looking for. A man turned to see the very small kerfuffle and as I momentarily looked at him, the Eye of Shiva looked back. I saw biotechnology move there.

I went to a community centre and wrote my first article. I sent it to Suresh Gupta, the editor of Gupshup, that most unashamedly populist of the Delhi’s magazines, which had carried the photographs of my birth and marriage and now, unknowingly, my prophecies of the coming Age of Kali. He rejected it out of hand. I wrote another the next day. It came back with a comment: Interesting subject matter but inaccessible for our readership. I was getting somewhere. I went back and wrote again, long into the night over the pad. I am sure I gained another nickname: the Scribbling Sadhu. Suresh Gupta took that third article, and every article since. What did I write about? I wrote about all the things Shiv had prophesied. I wrote about what they might mean for three Indian families, the Voras, the Dashmukhs and the Hirandanis, village, town and city. I created characters – mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and mad aunties and uncles with dark secrets and long-lost relatives come to call – and told their stories, week upon week, year upon year, and the changes, good and ill, the constant hammerblows of technological revolution wrought upon them. I created my own weekly soap opera; I even dared to call it Town and Country. It was wildly successful. It sold buckets. Suresh Gupta saw his circulation increase by thirty per cent among those Delhi intelligentsia who only saw Gupshup in hair salons and beauty parlours. Questions were asked, who is this pseudonymous ‘Shakyamuni’? We want to interview him, we want to profile him, we want him to appear on Awadh Today, we want an op-ed piece from him, we want him to be an adviser on this project, that think tank, we want him to open a supermarket. Suresh Gupta fielded all such inquiries with the ease of a professional square leg. There were others questions, ones I overheard at train stations and phatphat lines, in supermarket queues and at bazaars, at parties and family get-togethers: What does it mean for us?

I kept travelling, kept walking, immersing myself in the village and small town. I kept writing my little future-soap, sending off my articles from a cellpoint here, a village netlink there. I watched for the Eye of Shiva. It was several months between the first and second, down in a business park in Madhya Pradesh. I saw them steadily after that, but never many; then, at the turn of 2049 to 2050, like a desert blooming after rain, they were everywhere.

I was walking down through the flat dreary country south of the Nepalese border to Varanasi developing my thoughts on evolution, Darwinian and post-Darwinian and the essential unknowability of singularities when I picked up the message from Sarasvati, my first in two weeks of loitering from village to village. At once I thumbed to Varanasi and booked the first shatabdi to Delhi. My natty dreads, my long nails, the dirt and sacred ash of months on the road went down the pan in the first class lounge. By the time the Vishwanath Express drew into the stupendous nano-diamond cocoon of New Delhi Central I was dressed and groomed, a smart, confident young Delhiwallah, a highly eligible teenager. Sarasvati picked me up in her truck. It was an old battered white Tata without autodrive or onboard or even a functioning air-conditioning system. New Delhi Women’s Refuge was painted on the side in blue. I had followed her career – or rather her careers- while I was running the country. Worthiness attracted her; had she been a Westerner and not a Delhi girl I would have called it guilt at the privilege of her birth. Theatre manager here, urban farming collective there, donkey sanctuary somewhere else, dam protest way way down there. She had derided me: deep down at the grass roots was where the real work was done. People work. And who will provide the water for those grass roots? I would answer. It had only taken our brother’s vision of the end of the Age of Kali for me to come round to her philosophy.

She looked older than the years I had spent wandering, as if those my youthfulness belied had been added to hers by some karma. She drove like a terrorist. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t travelled in a car, in a collapsing Tata pick-up, in a city, in Delhi… No, she drove like a terrorist.

‘You should have told me earlier.’

‘He didn’t want to. He wants to be in control if it.’

‘What is it exactly?’

‘Huntingdon’s.’

‘Can they do anything?’

‘They never could. They still can’t.’

Sarasvati blared her way through the scrimmage of traffic wheeling about the Parliament Street roundabout. The Shaivites still defended their temple, tridents upheld, foreheads painted with the true tilak of Shiva, the three white horizontal stripes. I had seen that other mark on the forehead of almost every man and woman on the street. Sarasvati was pure.

‘He would have known whenever he had the genetic checks when I was conceived,’ I said. ‘He never said.’

‘Maybe it was enough for him to know that you could never develop it.’

Dadaji had two nurses and they were kind, Nimki and Papadi he called them. They were young Nepalis, very demure and well-mannered, quiet spoken and pretty. They monitored him and checked his oxygen and emptied his colostomy bag and moved him around in his bed to prevent sores and cleared away the seepage and crusting around the many tubes that ran into his body. I felt they loved him after a fashion.

Sarasvati waited outside in the garden. She hated seeing Dad this way, but I think there was a deeper distaste, not merely of what he had become, but of what he was becoming.

Always a chubby man, Tushar Nariman had grown fat since immobility had been forced on him. The room was on the ground floor and opened out onto sun-scorched lawns. Drought-browned trees screened off the vulgarity of the street. It was exercise for the soul if not the body. The neurological degeneration was much more advanced than I had guessed.

My father was big, bloated and pale but the machine overshadowed him. I saw it like a mantis, all arms and probes and manipulators, hooked into him through a dozen incisions and valves. Gandhi it was who considered all surgery violence to the body. It monitored him through sensory needles pinned all over his body like radical acupuncture and, I did not doubt, through the red Eye of Shiva on his forehead. It let him blink and it let him swallow, it let him breathe and when my father spoke, it did his speaking for him. His lips did not move. His voice came from wall-mounted speakers, which made him sound uncannily divine. Had I been hooked into a third eye, he would have spoken directly into my head like telepathy.

‘You’re looking good.’

‘I’m doing a lot of walking.’

‘I’ve missed you on the news. I liked you moving and shaking. It’s what we made you for.’

‘You made me too intelligent. Super-success is no life. It would never have made me happy. Let Shiv conquer the world and transform society: the superintelligent will always choose the quiet life.’

‘So what have you been up to, son, since leaving government?’

‘Like I said, walking. Investing in people. Telling stories.’

‘I’d argue with you, I’d call you an ungrateful brat, except Nimki and Papadi here tell me it would kill me. But you are an ungrateful brat. We gave you everything – everything – and you just left it at the side of the road.’ He breathed twice. Every breath was a battle. ‘So, what do you think? Rubbish, isn’t it?’

‘They seem to be looking after you.’

My father rolled his eyes. He seemed in something beyond pain. Only his will kept him alive. Will for what I could not guess.

‘You’ve no idea how tired I am of this.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘It’s defeatist? It doesn’t take your superhuman intellect to work out that there are no good solutions for this.’

I turned a chair around and perched on it, hands folded on the back, my chin resting on them.

‘What is it you still need to achieve?’

Two laughs, one from the speakers, the other a phlegmy gurgle from the labouring throat.

‘Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?’

‘Don’t we all? We’re Indian, that’s what we’re about.’

‘No, but really. The transmigration of the soul?’

‘What exactly are you doing?’ No sooner had I asked the question than I had raced to the terrible conclusion. ‘The Eye of Shiva?’

‘Is that what you call it? Good name. Keeping me ticking over is the least part of what this machine does. It’s mostly processing and memory. A little bit of me goes into it, every second.’

Uploaded consciousness, the illusion of immortality, endless reincarnation as pure information. The wan, bodiless theology of post-humanity. I had written about it in my Nation articles, made my soapi families face it and discover its false promises. Here it was now in too too much flesh, in my own real-world soap, my own father.

‘You still die,’ I said.

‘This will die.’

‘This is you.’

‘There is no physical part of me today that was here ten years ago. Every atom in me is different, but I still think I’m me. I endure. I remember being that other physical body. There’s continuity. If I had chosen to copy myself like some folder of files, yes, certainly I would go down into that dark valley from which there is no return. But maybe, maybe, if I extend myself, if I move myself memory by memory, little by little, maybe death will be no different from trimming a toenail.’

There could never be silence in a room so full of the sounds of medicine, but there were no words.

‘Why did you call me here?’

‘So you would know. So you might give me your blessing. To kiss me, because I’m scared, son, I’m so scared. No one’s ever done this before. It’s one shot into the dark, What if I’ve made a mistake, what if I’ve fooled myself? Oh please kiss me and tell me it will be all right.’

I went to the bed. I worked my careful way between the tubes and the lines and wires. I hugged the pile of sun-starved flesh to me. I kissed my father’s lips and as I did my lips formed the silent words, I am now and always must be Shiv’s enemy but if there is anything of you left in there, if you can make anything out of the vibrations of my lips on yours, then give me a sign.

I stood up and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’

‘I love you, son.’

The lips didn’t move, the fingers didn’t lift, the eyes just looked and looked and filled up with tears. He swam my mother to safety on an upturned desk. No. That was someone else.

My father died two months later. My father entered cybernetic nirvana two months later. Either way, I had turned my back once again on Great Delhi and walked out of the world of humans and aeais alike.

The morning of the white horse

What? You expected a hero? I walked away, yes. What should I have done, run around shooting like filmi star? And who should I have shot? The villain? Who is the villain here? Shiv? No doubt he could have provided you with a great death scene, like the very best black-moustached Bollywood baddies do, but he is no villain. He is a businessman, pure and simple. A businessman with a product that has changed every part of our world completely and forever. But if I were to shoot him nothing would change. You cannot shoot cybernetics or nanotechnology; economics stubbornly refuses to give you an extended five-minute crawling death-scene, eyes wide with incomprehension at how its brilliant plans could all have ended like this. There are no villains in the real world – real worlds, I suppose we must say now – and very few heroes. Certainly not ball-less heroes. For after all, that’s the quintessence of a hero. He has balls.

No, I did what any sensible Desi-boy would do. I put my head down and survived. In India we leave the heroics to those with the resources to play that game: the gods and the semigods of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Let them cross the universes in three steps and battle demon armies. Leave us the important stuff like making money, protecting our families, surviving. It’s what we’ve done through history, through invasion and princely war, through Aryans and Mughals and British: put our heads down, carried on and little by little survived, seduced, assimilated and in the end conquered. It is what will bring us through this dark Age of Kali. India endures. India is her people and we are all only, ultimately the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burningghat. We are a billion and half heroes. Who can defeat that? So, will I yet be the hero of my own long life? We shall see.

After my father’s death I wandered for decades. There was nothing for me in Delhi. I had a Buddhist’s non-attachment though my wandering was far from the spiritual search of my time as a sadhu. The world was all too rapidly catching up my put-upon characters of Town and Country. For the first few years I filed increasingly sporadic articles with Gupshup. But the truth was that everyone now was the Voras and the Deshmukhs and the Hirandanis. The series twittered into nothingness, plotlines left dangling, family drama suspended. No one really noticed. They were living that world for real now. And my sense reported the incredible revolution in a richness and detail you cannot begin to imagine. In Kerala, in Assam, in the beach-bar at Goa or the game park in Madhya Pradesh, in the out-of-the-way places I chose to live, it was at a remove and thus comprehensible. In Delhi it would have been overwhelming. Sarasvati kept me updated with calls and emails. She had so far resisted the Eye of Shiva, and the thrilling instantaneousness and intimacy, and subtler death of privacy, of direct thought-to-thought communication. Shiv’s Third Revolution had given firmness and vision to her gadfly career. Sarasvati had chosen and set herself among the underclass. I took some small pleasure from the television and online pundits saying that maybe that old fart Shakyamuni had been right in those terrible populist potboilers in Gupshup, and the blow of technology had cracked India, all India, that great diamond of land, into two nations, the fast and slow, the wired and the wire-less, the connected and the unconnected. The haves and the have-nots. Sarasvati told me of a moneyed class soaring so fast into the universal-computing future they were almost red-shifted, and of the eternal poor, sharing the same space but invisible in the always-on, always-communicating world of the connected. Shadows and dust. Two nations; India – that British name for this congeries of ethnicities and languages and histories, and Bharat, the ancient, atavistic, divine land.

Only with distance could I attain the perspective to see this time of changes as a whole. Only by removing myself from them could I begin to understand these two nations. India was a place where the visible and the invisible mingled like two rivers flowing into each, holy Yamuna and Ganga Mata, and a third, the invisible, divine Saraswati. Humans and aeais met and mingled freely. Aeais took shapes in human minds, humans became disembodied presences strung out across the global net. The age of magic had returned, those days when people confidently expected to meet djinns in the streets of Delhi and routinely consulted demons for advice. India was located as much inside the mind and the imagination as between the Himalayas and the sea or in the shining web of communications, more complex and connected and subtle than any human brain, cast across this subcontinent.

Bharat was poor. Bharat had cracked hands and heels, but she was beautiful. Bharat cleaned and swept and cooked and looked after children, Bharat drove and built and pushed carts through the streets and carried boxes up flights of stairs to apartments. Bharat was always thirsty. How human it is to be so engrossed by our latest crisis that we forget we have failed to solve the crisis before that. Storage was India’s problem. Information was increasing exponentially, available memory only arithmetically. Data-Malthusianism threatened the great technological revolution. Water was Bharat’s. The monsoon, ever fickle, had dispersed into a drizzle, a few thunderstorms that ran off the crusted earth as soon as it dropped its rain, a tantalising line of grey clouds along the horizon that never came closer. The Himalayan glaciers that fed the great rivers of North India and the slow-running Brahmaputra were exhausted; grey moraines of pebbles and dry clay. The mother of droughts was coming. But what was this to a connected class? They could pay for desalinated water, wasn’t India born from the waters? And if the worst came to the worst and the universe ended in fire, they could, through their dazzling new technology, translate themselves out of their icky physical bodies into that dream India between the real and the virtual worlds. Bodhisofts, they called these ascended creatures. Shiv would have been proud of a name like that.

From my beach-bar, from my dive school, from my game reserve and bookshop and dance club and coffeehouse and walking-tour company, from my restaurant and antique shop and meditation retreat, I watched my prophecies come true. Yes, I embarked on all those enterprises. Ten of them, one for each of the dashavatara of my divine namesake. All of them on the edge of the world, all of them with that overview down onto the Age of Kali. I lost count of the years. My body grew into me. I became a tall, lean, high-foreheaded man, with a high voice and long hands and feet. My eyes were very beautiful.

I measured the years by the losses. I re-established contact with my old political counterpart in Varanasi, Shaheen Badoor Khan. He had been as surprised as any when I had vanished so abruptly from the political stage but his own career was not without a hiatus and when he discovered that I was the Shakyamuni behind the Town and Country articles (widely syndicated) we began a lively and lengthy correspondence that continued up until his death at the age of seventy-seven. He died completely, and like a good Muslim. Better the promise of paradise than the cloudy doubts of the bodhisoft. My own mother slipped from the world into the realms of the bodhisofts. Sarasvati would not say whether it was a fearful illness or just ennui at the world. Either way I never looked for her among the skyscraper-sized memory stacks that now besieged Delhi along the line of the old Siri Ring. Lakshmi too, that almost-wife and sweetest of co-conspirators, entered the domain of the bodhisofts where she could explore the subtle mathematical games that so delighted her without limits. It was not all loss. The Age of Kali brought a friend; another great Khan, my old tutor from the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College. He would swirl out of the cloud of I-dust that had replaced the screens and ’hoeks for those who atavistically refused the Eye of Shiva and he would spend many a delightful evening lecturing me on my moral laxity.

Then the dust started to blow through the streets of Delhi. It was not the dust from the perpetual drought that burned the fields and reduced the crops to powder and sent millions from Bharat into the cities of India. It was the dust of Shiva, the sacred ash of the Purusa Corporation’s nanoscale computers, released into the world. Bharat might be choking, but here! here! was the solution to India’s memory problems. Shiv did have a name for these, a good name too. He called them devas.

He called me. It was decades since we had spoken last in the garden of his house in Varanasi, over lemonade. I was running the dharamshala at Pandua then. It was spacious and peaceful and cool and the only disturbance was the over-heavy feet of the Westerners who flocked to the place. They are not naturally barefooted people, I have found. The I-dust relay chimed, a call. I was expecting Mr Khan. My brother whirled out of the helix of motes instead. He had lost weight, too much weight. He looked well, too much well. He could have been anything: flesh, aeai agent, bodhisoft. We greeted each other and said how well each other looked.

‘And how is Nirupa?’

His smile made me think that he was human. Aeais have their own emotions, or things like emotions.

‘She’s good. Very good. Twenty-eight now, would you believe?’ I confessed that I could not.

‘Doing well, found an eligible boy, from a good enough family, who’s not a complete gold-digger. Old-fashioned stuff like that. I’m glad she bided her time, but they can afford to take their time now.’

‘All the time in the world.’

‘She’s beautiful. Vish, there’s something I need to tell you. Not a warning exactly, more to prepare yourself.’

‘This sounds ominous.’

‘I hope not. You’ve predicted it all very well.’

‘Predicted what?’

‘Don’t be coy. I know who you were. No secrets in the transparent world, I’m afraid. No, you got it right and I’m glad you did it because I think you softened the blow, but there is something you didn’t predict, maybe something you couldn’t predict.’

A whisper of breeze stirred the candle flames in my simple wooden room. Heavy white feet went tread tread tread on the creaking boards outside my latticed window. If they had looked through the grille they would have seen me talking to a ghost. No strange thing in this age, or most other ages.

‘Whenever we last spoke, you said that you were making use of information from the legacy-device the original aeais had bequeathed us.’

‘Well-guessed.’

‘It seems logical.’

‘When the Trimurti left Earth, they opened a connection to a separate space-time continuum. There were several major differences from our space-time. One was that time runs much faster there than in our space-time, though it would not be noticeable to anyone in that continuum. Another was that the arrow of time was reversed. The Trimurti move backwards in time; this was how their artefact, which the Americans call the Tabernacle, seemed to have predated the solar system when it was found in space. But the more important one – and that was why they chose it – was that information was integrated into the geometrical structure of that space-time.’

I closed my eyes and focused my imagination.

‘You’re saying that information, data – minds – form part of the basic structure of that universe. Minds without the need for bodies. The whole universe is like a cosmological computer.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘You’ve found a way back into that universe.’

‘Oh no no no no no. That universe is closed. It ended with the Trimurti. Their time is gone. It was an imperfect universe. There are others, mind-spaces like that, but better. We’re going to open up dozens – hundreds, eventually thousands – of portals. Our need for processing will always outstrip our available memory, and the devas are just a stopgap. A whole universe, right beside ours, only a footstep away, available for computing resources.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘The Jyotirlingas are coming.’

The Jyotirlingas were the sacred places where, in the Vedic Age, the creative, generative energy of the Lord Siva burst from the ground in pillars of divine light, the ultimate phallic linga symbols. These would come not from the earth, but another universe. And Shiv named them after his namesake’s cosmological cock. No one could accuse him of lack of hubris. His I-dust image sparkled and swirled and exploded into a billion motes of light. His smile, like that of the legendary Cheshire cat, seemed to remain. A week later, twelve pillars of light appeared in cities all across the states of India. By a slight misalignment, the Delhi Jyotirlinga touched down in the middle of the Dalhousie, the city’s largest slum, crowded beyond all imagining with refugees from the drought.

The simultaneous appearance, at eleven thirty-three, of twelve columns of light in cities across India paralysed the rail network. It was one of the least of the disturbances that day but for me, on an island in the middle of the Brahmaputra and needing to get to Delhi, that was the most important. That there were any flights at all was a miracle, that I could book onto one at any price at all was proof indeed that the age of the gods had truly returned. Even when alien universes open up in the hearts of our great and ancient cities, Indian grandmothers will still need to travel to see their wee darlings.

I had tried to call Sarasvati but all com channels into Delhi were down and the call-centre aeais announced indefinite delays before the network was restored. I wondered what it would be like for those accustomed to being strung out across the deva net to be back into just one head as the Air Awadh Airbus took me up over the shrivelled silver thread of the parched Ganga. In the tiny toilet I once again transformed myself back into a shaved, shorn, urbane Delhi-boy. As we descended into Indira Gandhi airport the captain told those of us on the right to look out and we would see the Jyotirlinga. His voice was uncertain, not a tone you want to hear from an airline captain, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. I had been studying it long before the captain’s call: a line of sun-bright light rising from the hazy, grey stain of central Delhi up beyond all sight, further than I could see, craning to look up through the tiny window into the darkening sky.

Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant, made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.

Immigration took an hour and a half. Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.

Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden was filled with the shanties and lean-tos of the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.

Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen on the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifyingly exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.

Before everything, over everything, was the silver spear of the Jyotirlinga.

‘Sarasvati!’

‘Vishnu?’ I could hardly hear her over the roar.

‘I’ve come to get you.’

‘You’ve what?’ It was as noisy where she was. I had a fix. The autodrive would take me there as quickly as it could.

‘You’ve got to get out.’

‘Vish.’

‘Vish nothing. What can you do?’

I did hear her sigh.

‘All right, I’ll meet you.’ She gave me a fresh set of coordinates. The driver nodded. He knew the place. His uniform was crisp and his cap miraculously correct but I knew he was as scared as I.

On Mehrauli Boulevard I heard gunfire. Airdrones barrelled in over the roof of the car, so low their engines shook the suspension. Smoke rose from behind a tatty mall fa¸ade. This street, I recognised it. This was Parliament Road, that was the old Park Hotel, that the Bank of Japan. But so faded, so dilapidated. Half the windows were out on the Park. The secluded gardens around Jantar Mantar on Samsad Marg were overrun with packing-case houses, their plastic roofs pushing right against the austere marble angularities of Jai Singh’s astronomical instruments. Everything was overrun with lean-tos and huts and miserable hard-scrabble shelters.

‘This is as far as I’m going to take you,’ the driver said as we ran into an immovable horde of people and animals and vehicles and military at Talkatora Road.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I ordered the driver as I jumped out.

‘That’s not likely,’ he said.

The press was cruel and chaotic and the most terrifying place I have ever been but Sarasvati was here, I could see her in my mind-map. A cordon of police bots tried to drive me back with the crowds from the steps of the Awadh Bhavan but I ducked under, out and away. I knew this place. I had given my balls to work in this place. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was in the clear. My heart lurched. My vision swam. Delhi, dear Delhi, my Delhi, they let this happen to you. The gracious greens and boulevards, the airy chowks and maidans of the Rajpath were one unbroken slum. Roof after roof after roof, slumping walls, cardboard and wood and brick and flapping plastic. Smoke went up from a dozen fires. This, this was Dalhousie. I knew the name of course. I had never thought it would ever become the name of the great sink where this newest of New Delhi’s condemned would be driven by drought and want. Such disdain did new India show for old Awadh. Who needed a Parliament when universal computing made everything a consensus? From where I guessed the old Imperial India Gate had stood at the end of the gracious Rajpath, there rose the Jyotirlinga. It was so bright I could not look at it for more than moments. It cast a terrible, unnatural silver shine over the degradation and dread. It abused my Brahminic sensibilities. Did I smell voices, hear colour, was that prickle like cold lemon fur on my forehead the radiation of another universe?

People milled around me, smoke blew in my eyes, the down-draft of airdrones and hover cams buffeted me. I had only moments before the army would catch me and move me away with the rest of the panicked crowd. Or worse. I saw bodies on the ground and flames were coming up from a line of plastic shacks.

‘Sarasvati!’

And there she was. Oh, there she was, plunging whip-thin in combat pants and a silk blouse, but filled her wonderful energy and determination out of the pile of collapsing housing. She dragged a child in each hand, smudge-faced and tearful. Tiny mites. In this place, she had slipped from my nuptial elephant to caper with the revellers in her ridiculous man’s costume and exuberant false moustache.

‘Sarasvati!’

‘You’ve got a car?’

‘It’s how I got here, yes.’

The children were on the verge of bawling. Sarasvati thrust them at me.

‘Take these two to it.’

‘Come with me.’

‘There are kids still in there.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘It’s a special needs group. They get left when the sky opens. Everyone else runs and leaves the kids. Take these two to your car.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘There are more in there.’

‘You can’t go.’

‘Just get the to the car, then come back here.’

‘The army.’

She was gone, ducking under the billowing smoke. She disappeared into the warren of lanes and galls. The children pulled at my hands. Yes yes, they had to get out. The car, the car wasn’t far. I turned to try and find an easy way with two children through the wheeling mass of refugees. Then I felt a wave of heat across the back of my neck. I turned to see the blossom of flame blow across the top of the gali, whirling up rags of blazing plastic. I cried something without words or point and then the whole district collapsed in on itself with a roar and explosion of sparks.

The Age of Kali. I have little patience with that tendency in many Indians to assume that because we are a very old culture, we invented everything. Astronomy? Made in India. Zero? Made in India. The indeterminate, probabilistic nature of reality as revealed through quantum theory? Indian. You don’t believe me? The Vedas say that the Four Great Ages of the Universe correspond to the four possible outcomes of our game of dice. The Krita Yuga, the Age of Perfection, is the highest possible score. The Kali Yuga, the Age of Strife, darkness, corruption and disintegration, is the lowest possible score. It is all a roll of the divine dice. Probability? Indian!

Kali, Paraskati, Dark Lady, Mistress of Death and Drinker of Blood, terrible ten-armed one with the necklace of skulls, She Who is Seated upon the Throne of Five Corpses. The Ender. Yet Kali is also Mistress of Regeneration. Ruler of All Worlds, Root of the Tree of the Universe. Everything is a cycle and beyond the Age of Kali we roll again into the Age of Gold. And that which cannot be reasoned with must then be worshipped.

I believe I was mad for some time after Sarasvati’s death. I know I have never been sane as you would consider me sane. We are Brahmins. We are different. But even for a Brahmin, I was crazy. It is a precious and rare thing, to take time out from sanity. Usually we allow it to the very very young and the very very old. It scares us, we have no place for it. But Kali understands it. Kali welcomes it, Kali gives it. So I was mad for a time, but you could as easily say I was divine.

How I reached the temple in the little, drought-wracked town by the sewer of Mata Ganga, I have chosen to forget. How I came by the offering of blood to the priest, that too I’ve put where I put the dis-remembered. How long I stayed there, what I did, does any of this matter? It was time out from the world. It is a powerful thing, to subject yourself to another time and another rhythm of life. I was a thing of blood and ashes, hiding in the dark sanctum, saying nothing but offering my daily puja to the tiny, garland-bedecked goddess in her vulva-like garbigraha. I could have vanished forever. Sarasvati, the brightest and best of us, was dead. I lolled on foot-polished marble. I disappeared. I could have stayed Kali’s devotee for the rest of my long and unnatural life.

I was lolling on the wet, foot-polished marble when the woman devotee, shuffling forward through the long, snaking line of cattle-fences toward the goddess, suddenly looked up. Stopped. Looked around as if seeing everything for the first time. Looked again and saw me. Then she unhooked the galvanised railing and pushed through the switch-back line of devotees to come to me. She knelt down in front of me and namasted. Above the single vertical line of her Shakta-tilak she wore the red Eye of Shiva.

‘Vish.’

I recoiled so abruptly I banged the back of my head off a pillar.

‘Ooh,’ the woman said. ‘Ooh, cho chweet, that’s going to smart. Vish, it’s me, Lakshmi.’

Lakshmi? My former wife, player of games? She saw my confusion and touched my face.

‘I’m temporarily downloaded into this dear woman’s brain. It’s rather hard to explain if you’re not connected. Oh, it’s all right, it’s entirely consensual. And I’ll give her herself back as soon as I’m done. I wouldn’t normally do it – it’s very bad manners – but these are slightly exceptional circumstances.’

‘Lakshmi? Where are you? Are you here?’

‘Oh, you have had a bit of a nasty bang. Where am I? That’s hard to explain. I am entirely bodhisoft now. I’m inside the Jyotirlinga, Vish. It’s a portal as you know, they’re all portals.’ After the initial twelve, the pillars of light had arrived all over Earth, hundreds, then thousands. ‘It is a wonderful place, Vish. It can be whatever you want it to be, as real as you like. We spend quite a lot of time debating that; the meaning of real. And the games, the number games; well, you know me. That’s why I’ve taken this step for you, Vish. It can’t go on. It’s destructive, the most destructive thing we’ve ever done. We’ll burn through this world because we have another one. We have heaven, so we can do what we like here. Life is just a rehearsal. But you’ve seen that, Vish, you’ve seen what that’s done.’

‘What is it Lakshmi?’ Was it memory and fond hope, the mild marble concussion, the strange nanotech possession, but was this stranger starting to look like Lakshmi?

‘We have to bring this age to an end. Restart the cycle. Close the Jyotirlingas.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘It’s all mathematics. The mathematics that govern this universe are different from the ones that govern yours; that’s why I’m able to exist as a pattern of information imprinted on space-time. Because the logic here allows that. It doesn’t where I come from. Two different logics. But if we could slide between the two a third logic, alien to either, that neither of them could recognise nor operate, then we would effectively lock the gates between the universes.’

‘You have that key.’

‘We have a lot of times for games here. Social games, language games, imagination games, mathematical and logical games. I can turn the lock from this side.’

‘But you need someone to turn the key on my side. You need me.’

‘Yes, Vish.’

‘I would be shut out forever. From you, from Mum, from Dad.’

‘And Shiv. He’s here too. He was one of the first to upload his bodhisoft through the Varanasi Jyotirlinga. You’d be shut out from everyone. Everyone but Sarasvati.’

‘Sarasvati’s dead!’ I roared. Devotees looked up. The sadhus calmed them. ‘And would this be the final answer? Would this bring around the Age of Gold again?’

‘That would be up to you, Vish.’

I thought of the villages that had so welcomed and amazed and blessed and watered me on my sadhu wandering, I thought of the simple pleasures I had taken from my business ventures: honest plans and work and satisfactions. India – the old India, the undying India – was its villages. Sarasvati had seen that truth though it had killed her.

‘It sounds better than sprawling in this dusty old temple.’ Kali, Mistress of Regeneration, had licked me with her red tongue. Maybe I could be the hero of my own life. Vishnu, the Preserver. His tenth and final incarnation was Kalki, the White Horse, who at the end of the Kali Yuga would fight the final battle. Kali, Kalki.

‘I can give you the maths. A man of your intelligence should be able to hold it. But you will need one of these.’

The woman lifted her hand and seized a fistful or air. She threw it into my face and the air coalesced into a spray of red powder. In mid-air the cloud moiled and boiled and thickened and settled into a red circle, a tilak, on my forehead.

‘Whatever you do, don’t connect it to the deva net,’ Lakshmi said. ‘I’m gong to have to go now. I don’t want to outstay my welcome in someone else’s body. Goodbye Vish, we won’t ever meet again, in any of the worlds. But we were well and truly wed, for a while.’ For a moment I thought the woman might kiss me, then she gave a little twitch and straightened her neck just so as if shaking out a crick and I knew Lakshmi was gone. The woman namasted again.

‘Little Lord Vishnu,’ she whispered. ‘Preserve us.’

I picked myself up from the marble. I dusted off the ash of the dark goddess. I walked to the edge of the temple, blinking up into the light of the real sun. I had an idea where to go to do what I had to do. Varanasi, the City of Siva, the seat of the great Jyotirlinga. How might I support myself, with nothing but the dhoti around my loins? Then I caught a sudden movement: on a window ledge on the first floor of one of the many shops that leaned in close to the temple, a cat was edging out along a waterpipe in pursuit of a bird. And I had an idea that filled me with laughter.

So here it is, here it is: at long last. The great trick, the grand Finale of the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus. The wire walk. You will never, ever have seen anything like this before, unless of course you’ve been to a certain Kali Temple… See, here are the two wires. And here is our star performer. Yes, white Kalki gets his chance to shine at last. Up he goes on to the podium and… drum roll. Well, you’ll have to provide the drum roll yourself.

Kalki! Kalki, beautiful white Kalki: do your trick!

And there he goes, carefully sliding one paw, then another out across the two wires, tail moving to keep him in balance, the whole trembling to his muscular control. Go on Kalki… Walking the wire. What a cat! And the final jump onto the further podium and I scoop him up to my chest and shout applause! Applause for my lovely cats! I let Kalki down and the rest of the cats run to join him, running their endless circle of fur and tails around the rope ring. Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha and Varaha; Varana, Pashurama and Rama; Krishna, Buddha and last but not least, Kalki.

I turn in the rising dawn light to savour the applause of my audience. And my cats, save your biggest cheer for Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha, Varaha, Varana, Pashurama, Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki who have performed for your pleasure. And me? Just an impresario, a ringmaster: a storyteller. The light is up now and I will detain you no longer for you have your work and I have a place to go and I think now you know where that is and what I must do there. I may not succeed. I may die. I cannot see Shiv giving up without a fight. So please, will you do one thing for me? My cats. Would you look after them for me? You don’t have to feed them or anything like that, just take them. Let them go, they can look after themselves. It’s where I got them from in the first place. They’ll be happy on a farm, in the country. Lots to hunt and kill. You might even be able to make a bit of money from them. I mean, performing cats, who ever heard of a thing like that? It’s actually much easier than you think. Meat does it, every time. There, I’ve given away the trick. Be good to them. Well, I’ll be off then.

I push the boat out into the stream, run into the dawn-bright water and hop in. It rocks gently. It is a glorious morning; the Jyotirlinga ahead can hold no comparison to the sun. I touch my fingers to my forehead, to the tilak Lakshmi put there, in a small salutation to the sun. Then I put my back to the narrow oars and head out into the stream.