Sagramanda, a Novel of Near-Future India

*2*

Even dressed for protection from the appalling after noon heat, Depahli De turned heads in the mall. For most of her life it was a place she would never even have thought of entering, much less have felt comfortable in. Then she had met Taneer, and her life had changed forever.

Now she walked proudly, breasts thrust forward against her fancy sari, perfect hips switching just so, a little of the 22k gold that Taneer had lavished on her the equal of all but the richest women perusing the expensive goods on the tenth floor. Her eyes sparkled beneath radiant color-shifting makeup she had only recently learned how to apply. Her blemishless pale skin, just tinged with hues of coffee, glistened as if peeled from an apsara. Lightly applied floral perfume mixed with her own natural pheromones left a trail of lavender and musk in her wake, an invisible plume of eroticism, like a locomotive puffing out sex instead of steam. Men gaped in spite of themselves while their women silently gritted their teeth and tried not to make their envious glares too obvious.

Depahli didn't care. Let the Brahmin bitches growl and curse under their breath! She had taken enough shit from their kind from the time she had been old enough to understand what it meant to be born the lowest of the low. Now she could ignore them. Soon, with luck, it would be her turn to look down on them.

Depahli De had been born a Dalit. An outcaste, or Untouchable.

Of course, that supposedly meant nothing in today's India. Caste had long ago officially been abolished as a method of discrimination. Officially. Real life, just as in the matrimonial ads that filled the pages of the country's newspapers and magazines and websites, was another matter entirely.

Like so many Untouchables, as a young girl Depahli had considered herself condemned to a life of degradation and poverty. A male member of a higher caste, one of the four varnas, might opt to drop down in caste and marry her, but this happened only very rarely. Despite the beauty that was apparent from a very early age she could not even find work as a prostitute except among her own kind. For a member of a higher caste to touch her would be to pollute himself. For one to sleep with her would be to pollute himself irredeemably. She smiled to herself as she stopped to finger the material of a fine carbon-silk business suit imported from Italy.

Dear, sweet Taneer was irredeemably polluted indeed.

They had only met because she'd had the guts to flee the squalid surroundings of her home in a run-down industrial section of Nagpur after her uncle Chamudi had raped her. That was ten years ago. She had been fourteen. With virtually no money but a great deal of determination she had walked, hitched, and begged her way to Sagramanda. Glorious, steaming, pulsing, fetid Sagramanda, where it was said that any thing was possible, even for one born an outcaste. Where, surrounded by a hundred million fellow seeking souls, it was even possible to shrug off a question about caste as irrelevant and deftly turn a discus sion to other matters.

And wonder of wonders, she had managed to do all of it without having to sell herself. Not wholly, anyway.

She had modeled. Both nude and clothed. She was not ashamed of having a body men admired. So extraordinary was her appearance that by the time she was seventeen she had steady work in the trivit studios. On only one thing had she insisted: no intercourse, no penetration. Dry fucking she would consent to, but she wouldn't do hardcore. It cost her a great deal of money, but she had remained firm in her private principles. Or as one disappointed but grudgingly admiring vitographer had told her, firm in her principal privates.

Still, she had managed. One man's appetite might be limited, but that of the box and the Net, she had learned, was insatiable. Even among stiff competition she had stood out as exceptional.

She knew she had stumbled across an exceptional man when, col lapsing in his arms one day while sobbing uncontrollably, she had revealed the nature of her career to Taneer. How much more damage could it do, she had argued with herself, when he already knew she was an outcaste? Her instincts had been proven right and her trust rewarded. Astonishingly, he had only smiled reassuringly at her and said, "One day you must show me some of your better virtuals." Ecstatic at his plain-spoken acceptance of her unsavory past, she had spent all that night showing him the reality.

That was the day when she realized she would do more than love Taneer Buthlahee forever. If necessary, she would die for him. In acknowledging her ancestry and her work, he had in a sense already died for her. Could she do no less for him?

The attendant who wandered over to see if he could help was young and trim, neatly dressed in natty gray and blue. It was amusing to watch him try to control his eyes. Struggling to remain locked on her own, they found themselves wandering all over her like a security scanner at the airport. Not to tease but to please the poor fellow, who despite the attention paid to his appearance was anything but hand some, she took a deeper breath and leaned close.

"I would like this suit, but in forest green. Do you have anything like that?" She had discovered that whenever she chose to deliberately lower it, her voice could make even confident conversationalists stammer.

The young salesman was no orator. "I-I'll check the imben-the inventory." He stepped back. Or rather, retreated helplessly as he gestured to the nearest female clerk. "If you'd like to step into our scanner, please?"

Please. She had spent an entire childhood never hearing the word. Though it was commonly directed her way now, she never tired of it. "Of course," she murmured obligingly.

The department's scanner raced red lights up and down her form, penetrating her sari to take her measurements. Yes, they did have the suit she had selected available in a dark green. Would she care to view the color? Checking the sample, she condescended to approve. The appropriate suit was pulled from inventory and sent to the store's tailor. Half an hour later, after the material had been melted, re formed, rewoven, and cooled, she returned to pick up her package.

She paid with cash. Ever since Taneer had gone into hiding they had paid for everything with cash. Her beloved had told her that in some parts of the world cash was no longer accepted for large pur chases. To the best of his knowledge, however, that was not yet true anywhere in Asia. The bag containing her purchase slung deftly over one arm, she left the store and sauntered out into the mall's towering atrium. It was a wonderland that as a child she had not even imagined could exist, except in dreams.

Like translucent balloons, automated ads drifted through the mul iple converging halls of the mall, rising and falling from floor to floor as easily as they negotiated side passages and entryways. Electronics kept them banned from certain areas such as the children's playground and the food court. The latter was a favorite stop of hers. Growing up, she had never imagined there could be so many different kinds of food. Growing up, she had never imagined there could be so much food.

Though she could now pay for whatever kind of dish she wanted, as often as she wanted, she never left as much as a crumb on her plate. Not even when sampling such exotic cuisine as game from Africa or chili from America. Even when venturing into Starbeans, she made herself finish every last sip of coffee concoctions that were sometimes too rich for a digestive system that had evolved to cope with far simpler fare.

Employing built-in aerogel cameras, adverts designed to appeal specifically to the young, female, and middle-to-upper-class zeroed in on her repeatedly. The constant battle between manufacturers of pocket-sized ad-blockers and the designers of mobile advertisements had spurred technological leaps among both. Depahli rarely used the blocker that Taneer had bought for her. Truth be told, she enjoyed enough of the ads to allow them access. Even the ones for the omnipresent matrimonial services that allowed her to compare, fancifully of course, other prospective suitors to Taneer. Invariably, all were found wanting.

Not all the ads she walked through were gender-specific. The expensive three-dimensional one for the new Maruti Hathi 4x4 skirted the edge of acceptability. Until appropriate regulations had been put in place, mobile adverts had diverted some people to their deaths by blocking their vision or unsettling their sense of balance.

More noise than usual in front of her drew her attention. It was coming from the vicinity of the food court, her intended destination. Suddenly the milling, well-dressed crowd that had been promenading noisily in both directions surged toward her. The shouts of angry men formed a low counterpoint to the screams of women and the anxious cries of confused children.

A handful of men and women formed a tight knot that forced its way through the crowd. Most but not all of them were young. As she ducked to one side and sought shelter against the transparent polycarbonate wall that kept patrons from tumbling into the open, multistory atrium, several loud pops were distinctly audible above the noise of the crowd.

Ignoring the scattering, panicky mallers, the retreating men and women kept up a continuous running fire on their pursuers-half a dozen khaki-clad mall security personnel. Dark as an African but wearing a multihued cap over his shaved skull, one squat, mustachioed runner took a stun pellet in the right leg. Grimacing, he went down in the center of the walkway, right in front of the crouching Depahli. A moment later two of the security guards were all over him. The look on their faces was known to her. It was one she recognized all too well from her childhood. They very much wanted to beat and kick the man with the now paralyzed leg. But there were too many witnesses, and they had to settle for roughly taking him into custody.

The moving fight flowed in a steady curve around the fourth-floor level, finally petering out near the carpark exit. Security made one more arrest, but the other intruders managed to get away. All around Depahli shaken couples and families with crying children were rising to their feet. Talk of what had happened was terse and quickly put aside. After all, it was not as if such things didn't happen in Sagramanda every day.

The nature of the intruders and their offense became clear as soon as she entered the food court. McDonald's and Pizza Hut had been targets, but so had Cum-In Chicken, Flash Satay, and other non-American fast food outlets. A quick survey of those that had been vandalized and those that had been spared gave more than a subtle clue to the agenda of the attackers. All of those outlets that had been despoiled served meat. Those whose offerings were strictly vegetarian had been spared.

The attackers had been members of one of several underground but well-known radical vegan groups. Perhaps the Pushkar Commandos, she mused. Their members had been much in the news lately, ever since their fire-bomb attack on the offices of a certain national concern that had its headquarters on the east coast and specialized in the cloning and genetic engineering of avian foodstock. Having no sympathy for their aims, she deliberately and defiantly sought out an undamaged outlet that served not only meat, but beef. Bright, stinging memories of preadolescent starvation tend to trump whatever philosophies purport to discredit particular kinds of nourishment.

She ordered a double burger and fries, and to wash it all down, a Nathmull's teacola.

Sitting there, watching the crowd recover from the shock of the intrusion and temporarily free from the persistent drifting ads that were kept outside the dining area, she had time to ponder how drastically her life had changed. From a future promising nothing better than an arranged marriage to another Untouchable like herself, or worse, indentured servitude in a child sweatshop or outright sale as a lifetime servant to an abusive family, she had come to this. Sitting in the Chowringhee Mall eating American-style food, gold dangling from her ears and neck and encircling her fingers, a bag of designer clothing resting at her feet. Her perfectly made-up mouth contorted into a grimace of self-reflection, but not even that could distort her beauty. Not too many years ago she would have been abysmally grateful had someone just given her the shopping bag.

Gold, jewelry, clothing. An apartment, albeit a secret one, with a real induction stove, and a vit, and a molly player. A car, surely, was in her future, though until things were resolved her beloved insisted it was safer for the both of them to continue to rely on public transportation, where their movements would be far more difficult to track. And Taneer Buthlahee. She had him, too. Nothing would or could make her let go of any of that.

The two men did not ask permission to sit down opposite her. Like her, they were in their mid-twenties. They were fashionably dressed. Both wore gleaming wrist communicator/chronographs that reeked of money. So did their attitudes.

"I don't think I've seen in you in here before," said the first. He made it sound like a challenge.

His companion grinned, showing perfectly capped (or regenerated) white teeth. He had a very thin, movie-star mustache and was to all appearances as confident in his looks as in his money. "I know I haven't. There is no way I would forget you, if I had seen you."

She bit down into the last of the hamburger, wishing the curried ketchup were hot enough to match the heat rising inside her. But she kept her voice level. "That's all right. You can pretend."

Sudden confusion did not diminish the man's smile. "Pretend what?"

"That you've never seen me."

Now the smile did fade, though the man's companion laughed appreciatively. "Looks and wit! Where are you from, beautiful?" Resting his chin in one hand, he leaned over the table and did his best to establish unbreakable eye contact with her.

"From the place to which I am now going." Flashing a quick, tight smile of her own, she swallowed the last of the teacola and reached down with one hand to pick up her shopping bag. Before she could rise, the disappointed smiler had grabbed her other wrist. Not painfully. Just hard enough to restrain her. As her uncle Chamudi had often restrained her. Gently but irresistibly, his grin returning to its full enhanced orthodontic brilliance, the man started to pull her across the table toward him.

Somewhat less gently and just as irresistibly, she raised her left leg, locked it out straight, and pushed the heel of her foot against his crotch underneath the table. "Keep pulling," she suggested encouragingly.

The smile drained away from the man's face. So did some of the color. Letting go of her wrist, he sat back in his chair and affected the air of the unaffected as he looked around to see if anyone else noticed what was happening. In this he had only partial success.

She withdrew her foot. What she wanted to do was ram it into him hard enough so that it came out his asshole, with his balls balanced on her heel. But it would do no good to antagonize this spoiled pair any further. Mall security might take an interest in any more expansive confrontation, and if there was one thing Taneer had impressed on her more than anything else it was a need right now to avoid attracting any kind of official attention.

So she fought off the urge to make a point, drew back her leg, and rose. At least she could enjoy the look on the face of Mr. Smiley's now bewildered companion. As for Mr. Smiley himself, he was looking increasingly unwell.

"So interesting to make your acquaintance. Not seeing you again soon, I think." She sashayed off, lengthening her stride as she reached the boundaries of the food court, deliberately refusing to look back. When she finally did so, her smarmy, self-confident accosters were nowhere to be seen. She started to shake: with anger, not with fear. Getting herself back under control, she began working her way toward the exit that linked the mall to its proprietary subway terminal.

Never again would a man, any man, treat her the way Uncle Chamudi had done. Touch her the way he had. The pop-out ceramic blade that was built into and took the shape of the heel of her shoe remained sheathed. Smiley-face would never know how lucky he had been that she had decided only to make an impression on him.

She did not go straight home. Taneer's instructions as to how she needed to travel had been very explicit. He had only to tell her some thing once and she would remember it. Halfway across the city she got out of the subway, took the escalator up to the street, and began to walk. Baroghly was a border area. As she covered ground, her sur roundings changed very quickly from lower middle-class to poor. Not to abject poor. She did not go as far as the antiquated hovels of Outer Sealadhan. She did not have to. There was enough of a mix in the human crush of Baroghly to suit her needs.

The reek from the public restroom was almost overpowering. No tourists could have stood it for more than a few seconds, and few respectable citizens of the city would have tried. Waiting until the entrance to the women's section was deserted, Depahli did not hesitate, but walked straight toward it and entered. She did not like the stench, but she had no trouble tolerating it. It was more than familiar to her from her childhood as well as from her early years in Sagramanda.

On the third try she found an empty plastic stall that was not over whelmed with the stain of urine, the slickness of vomit, and the smear of human feces. Removing the collapsible, lightweight garment holder from her bag, she undressed as quickly as possible. Every gleam of gold went into a small box. The contents of a can of deodorized antiseptic played over her naked body. From the bottom of the bag she extracted a second, airtight container. The pre-stained, simple cotton sari it held fit her loosely, badly, thoroughly obscuring her figure. Today's veil was beige, with strategic yet unrevealing rips and tears.

She stood thus inside the stall, listening to the comings and goings of poor women and their chattering, bawling, screaming children, before finally emerging. The stink of the restroom clung to her clothing but, thanks to the spray, not to her skin. No one looked in her direction when she stepped outside the overwhelmed public facility. No covetous female or lustful male eyes followed her progress as she limped up the street.

A short stroll through the sultry, steaming early evening would bring her to a bus stop. The creaking fuel-cell bus would carry her to the terminal for an older subway line, one that did not cross the gleaming tracks of the line that ran past Chowringhee Mall. One more change to another line, suffering the disapproving stares of irritated middle-class commuters, would deposit her a few blocks from the innocuous apartment building that was home. That would be followed by another foray into a much cleaner public restroom where she would change again, finally able to walk free and clean back to the temporary home she and Taneer shared.

It was a lot of effort simply to get home from a day of shopping, but she did not mind. She knew what real work was, and having to endure repeated changes of clothing and public transportation was not work. Operating a hand loom until your fingertips bled and your fin gernails fell out in a poorly ventilated, un-air-conditioned sweatshop surrounded by dozens of other vacant-eyed children, that was work. Begging in the streets for the occasional pitiful rupee or two while fighting off the come-ons of fat, leering, sweaty old men, that was work. Complying with Taneer's directives to repeatedly change her clothing and return home by multiple devious routes, that was not work. It was a game. An important game, to be sure. He had impressed that on her. But not work, nonetheless.

There were people who very badly wanted to take what he had, he had explained to her as he had held both her hands in his and stared solemnly into her eyes. People who would do terrible things to both of them to learn the secret he knew. Better to avoid such people until he could make arrangements to sell the valuable knowledge the details of which only he knew. He was in the process of organizing that sale. It would make them rich. Once the sale was an accomplished fact, there would be no point in anyone hunting them any longer. They would be able to go anywhere they wanted, in confidence and safety. To Delhi, per haps, or Mumbai, or Hyderabad, or even overseas. In America, Taneer had a distant cousin on his mother's side. Perhaps they could go there. The cousin had told Taneer's father Anil that there were many people of Indian extraction in America, and that life there was very good indeed.

Of course, they were in hiding from Anil Buthlahee too. Taneer's father had not been shy in expressing his disapproval of their relation ship. But he could not reach them, could not harm them, in America.

Live in America. Depahli had seen America. In movies, on television, on the Net. It was a place of wonders. Violent, yes. Confusing, yes. But she had not seen anything that suggested she would not be able to adapt to it or that was likely to give her problems.

She lived in Sagramanda.

The tiger had come out of the Sundarbans. That was certain. Under cover of night, it had worked its way into the southeastern suburbs of the city. This was not as difficult to do as a visitor from elsewhere might imagine. Sagramanda was full of parks and residential green-belts; a necessary if permanently insufficient counterweight to the burgeoning pressure of its swollen and always growing population. Eternally in need of land, the expanding megalopolis had long ago pushed and shoved its way up against the immense delta complex where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra merged to form the world's largest remaining mangrove swamp. The ever-shifting waterways on the western side of the border with Bangladesh constituted the Indian portion of the Sundarbans Preserve. Traveling only at night, it was possible for large animals to migrate, to work their way into the outskirts of the metropolis itself. Monkeys did so with ease. The chital and sambar deer that populated many of the city's green areas moved freely between parks and the delta of the Sundarbans.

But not usually a tiger.

Three meters long and twelve years old, the big male weighed more than a quarter of a ton. Among the trees and paved pathways and benches and fountains he drifted silently, a striped wraith invisible beneath the wan illumination of a splinter of moon. He was strong and experienced-but he had also lived a long time. He was old enough to hope for easier prey than the skittish sambar and the swift chital. Also, he had not fed in some time, and was very hungry.

The wildlife division of the municipal authority was as aware of animal movements as were the monkeys and mongooses. Steps had been taken long ago. Though in a city of a hundred million other demands took budgetary precedence over wildlife considerations, some few millions of rupees still trickled down for observation and reaction.

The tiger's approach to the outermost city limits did not go unnoticed. Its heat signature was detected by one of the dozens of auto mated monitoring stations located on the border between inhabited suburb and unpopulated Sundarbans. Identified as a Panthera tigris tigris large enough to present a potential danger should it continue on its present path, the station automatically activated the two intercep tors nearest the big cat.

Quarter ton or not, the tiger moved in utter silence, advancing with less noise than the wind. On a nearly moonless night it was all but invisible. Movement directly ahead made it pause.

Two figures stood staring into the woodland, trying to penetrate a night that was dark as smoke. Both held rifles. Their eyes scanned the tree line intently, unblinkingly. Another person might have found the lack of any eye-blinks unnerving, but they were characteristic of the interceptors. The big cat's nostrils flared; the tips of his whiskers rose. The night air was suffused with the distinctive scent of human. He hesitated.

Ordinarily, a tiger confronted with a pair of armed human shapes would have turned and retreated. Ordinarily, the scent alone would have been enough to send it loping swiftly back the way it had come. But the tigers of the Sundarbans were and always had been particularly bold. The emptiness in the male's belly was profound. It charged.

Both figures turned immediately to confront it. Rifle muzzles rose, and the sound of gunfire split the night. Flying through the air, two hundred and forty kilos of wide-eyed, gaping-mouthed cat struck the nearer of the two interceptors.

And passed completely through it.

Surprised, the tiger hit the ground, dug in powerful claws, and whirled. Both interceptors had turned to face it. The echo of large-cal iber weapons had grown repetitive. Puzzled but not frightened, the tiger attacked again. This time a massive paw swiped directly through the middle of the other interceptor. Its gun muzzle dropped until it passed right through the tiger's head and neck.

The interceptors were virtuals. Like their images, the strong stink of human was projected from a small, tracked vehicle the size of a lawnmower. The autonomous vehicles could go where no human watchman could go, stay on duty twenty-four hours a day, never grew tired, did not need bathroom or meal breaks, and did not go on strike over the lack of a comprehensive health plan.

Reaching down with a paw, the inquisitive tiger batted hard at the nearest of the motorized devices. The projection of an armed human hunter was skewed sideways, then flickered out entirely as the vehicle was knocked completely over on its side. Half the lights within the device went dark. Meanwhile, the second vehicle had turned toward the tiger, aiming its virtual in the cat's direction. Nose in the air, the tiger turned away and, ignoring the repeated recorded sounds of a heavy weapon being fired, resumed pacing along its original path.

The children should not have been out that late. There were six of them, evenly divided between boys and girls, all friends, all giggling and laughing at their special adventure. They had the playground area on the edge of the housing development all to themselves. It was an upscale complex, benefiting from its proximity to the wildlife pre serve, offering its fortunate residents views toward Bangladesh of trees and water and birds instead of the seething urban stew that was the city interior.

One of the girls tripped one of the boys as he was heading for the gel-coated spiral slide. Uttering a mildly shocking grown-up word, he rose, brushed sand off his pants, and began to chase her. The other boys urged him on while the remaining girls encouraged their darting, weaving companion in her flight. She was a good soccer player and at first avoided his pursuit easily, leaving him frustrated and half angry, half exhilarated. But he was a little faster. Closing on her, he reached for the long, flying, fashionably blue-and-green streaked black hair that trailed behind his teaser.

An enormous dark mass erupted out of a clump of bushes just to their left. It struck silently: no growls, no intimidating roars designed to stop prey in its tracks with blood-chilling sonics. That kind of hunting the tiger left to its cousin the lion. It did not even have to bite. The force of the charge and the weight behind it snapped the girl's neck on impact.

The boy who had nearly caught her stumbled and went down onto his knees, then his face, wrapping both hands protectively over his head as he pushed his face into the sandy soil. Behind him his friends were screaming, girls and boys alike. He did not, could not, look up, so he did not see the tiger carrying the girl off, her neck in its mouth. Bobbing loosely, her head hung straight down, the tips of her carefully streaked hair just brushing the ground. She had died instantly, on impact, so fast it was mercifully doubtful she had even known what had happened.

One of the other boys finally summoned up enough courage to run forward and check on his friend. He was able to comfort him some what, but he could do nothing to still the shaking that was convulsing the other boy's body. Behind them, the surviving girls could not stop screaming.

Farther back, across from the playground, a few lights were starting to wink to life within the nearest apartment building. Anxious adults who were not virtuals were hurrying toward the children. They were not armed, and there was nothing they could do.

Living close to Nature sometimes brought with it things that were not benefits.

The killing would be reported, but it was unlikely anything would be done. Hunting tigers took time and money the city did not have. Furthermore, the status accorded to large predators was inviolate. Cold as it seemed on paper, there were far more children in India than tigers. The incident in the night was an isolated one. It would soon, however, prove itself to be that rare exception to the rule.

Because the tiger had now acquired a taste.