They’ve brought her right to her bungalow. Feeling dirty, dusty, confused she watches the Krishna Cop car drive off, holding Delhi’s frenetic traffic at bay with its tame djinns. She pauses at the gate. She needs, she deserves, a moment to come out from the performance, that little step away so you can turn round and look back at yourself and say, yeah, Esha Rathore. The bungalow is unlit, quiet. Neeta and Priya will be out with their wonderful fianc’s, talking wedding gifts and guest lists and how hefty a dowry they can squeeze from their husbands-to-be’s families. They’re not her sisters, though they share the classy bungalow. No one has sisters any more in Awadh, or even Bharat. No one of Esha’s age, though she’s heard the balance is being restored. Daughters are fashionable. One upon a time, women paid the dowry.
She breathes deep of her city. The cool garden microclimate presses down the roar of the Delhi to a muffled throb, like blood in the heart. She can smell dust and roses. Rose of Persia. Flower of the Urdu poets. And dust. She imagines it rising up on a whisper of wind, spinning into a charming, dangerous djinn. No. An illusion, a madness of a mad old city. She opens the security gate and finds every square centimetre of the compound filled with red roses.
Neeta and Priya are waiting for her at the breakfast table next morning, sitting side-by-side close like an interview panel. Or Krishna Cops. For once they aren’t talking houses and husbands.
‘Who who who where did they come from who sent them so many must have cost a fortune…’
Puri the housemaid brings Chinese green chai that’s good against cancer. The sweeper has gathered the bouquets into a pile at one end of the compound. The sweet of their perfume is already tinged with rot.
‘He’s a diplomat.’ Neeta and Priya only watch Town and Country and the chati channels but even they must know the name of A. J. Rao. So she half lies. ‘A Bharati diplomat.’
Their mouths go oooh, then ah as they look at each other. Neeta says, ‘You have have have to bring him.’
‘To our durbar,’ says Priya.
‘Yes, our durbar,’ says Neeta. They’ve talked gossiped planned little else for the past two months: their grand joint engagement party where they show off to their as-yet-unmarried girlfriends and make all the single men jealous. Esha excuses her grimace with the bitterness of the health-tea.
‘He’s very busy.’ She doesn’t say busy man. She cannot even think why she is playing these silly girli secrecy games. An aeai called her at the Red Fort to tell her it admired her. Didn’t even meet her. There was nothing to meet. It was all in her head. ‘I’m don’t even know how to get in touch with him. They don’t give their numbers out.’
‘He’s coming,’ Neeta and Priya insist.
She can hardly hear the music for the rattle of the old airco but sweat runs down her sides along the waistband of her Adidas tights to gather in the hollow of her back and slide between the taut curves of her ass. She tries it again across the gharana’s practice floor. Even the ankle bells sound like lead. Last night she touched the three heavens. This morning she feels dead. She can’t concentrate, and that little lavda Pranh knows it, swishing at her with yts cane and gobbing out wads of chewed paan and mealy eunuch curses.
‘Ey! Less staring at your palmer, more mudras! Decent mudras. You jerk my dick, if I still had one.’
Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself – ring, call me, ring, call me, ring, take me out of this – she fires back, ‘If you ever had one.’
Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf a sting.
‘Fuck you, hijra!’ Esha snatches up towel, bag, Palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair. No point changing, the heat out there will soak through anything in a moment. ‘I’m out of here.’
Pranh doesn’t call after her. Yt’s too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.
‘Memsahib Rathore?’
The chauffeur is in full dress and boots. His only concession to the heat is his shades. In bra top and tights and bare skin, she’s melting. ‘The vehicle is fully air-conditioned, memsahib.’
The white leather upholstery is so cool her flesh recoils from its skin.
‘This isn’t the Krishna Cops.’
‘No memsahib.’ The chauffeur pulls out into the traffic. It’s only as the security locks clunk she thinks, Oh Lord Krishna, they could be kidnapping me.
‘Who sent you?’ There’s glass too thick for her fists between her and driver. Even if the doors weren’t locked, a tumble from the car at this speed, in this traffic, would be too much for even a dancer’s lithe reflexes. And she’s lived in Delhi all her life, basti to bungalow, but she doesn’t recognise these streets, this suburb, that industrial park. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Memsahib, where I am not permitted to say for that would spoil the surprise. But I am permitted to tell you that you are the guest of A. J. Rao.’
The palmer calls her name as she finishes freshening up with bottled Kinley from the car-bar.
‘Hello!’ (Kicking back deep into the cool cool white leather, like a filmi star. She is star. A star with a bar in a car.)
Audio-only. ‘I trust the car is acceptable?’ Same smooth-suave voice. She can’t imagine any opponent being able to resist that voice in negotiation.
‘It’s wonderful. Very luxurious. Very high status.’ She’s out in the bastis now, slums deeper and meaner than the one she grew up in. Newer. The newest ones always look the oldest. Boys chug past on a home-brew chhakda they’ve scavenged from tractor parts. The cream Lex carefully detours around emaciated cattle with angular hips jutting through stretched skin like engineering. Everywhere, drought dust lies thick on the crazed hardtop. This is a city of stares. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the conference?’
A laugh, inside her auditory centre.
‘Oh, I am hard at work winning water for Bharat, believe me. I am nothing if not an assiduous civil servant.’
‘You’re telling me you’re there, and here?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing for us to be in more than one place at the same time. There are multiple copies of me, and subroutines.’
‘So which is the real you?’
‘They are all the real me. In fact, not one of my avatars is in Delhi at all, I am distributed over a series of dharma-cores across Varanasi and Patna.’ He sighs. It sounds close and weary and warm as a whisper in her ear. ‘You find it difficult to comprehend a distributed consciousness; it is every bit as hard for me to comprehend a discrete, mobile consciousness. I can only copy myself through what you call cyberspace, which is the physical reality of my universe, but you move through dimensional space and time.’
‘So which one of you loves me then?’ The words are out, wild, loose and unconsidered. ‘I mean, as a dancer, that is.’ She’s filling, gabbling. ‘Is there one of you who particularly appreciates Kathak?’ Polite polite words, like you’d say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta’s and Priya’s hideous match-making soir’es. Don’t be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man’s world, now. But she hears glee bubble in A. J. Rao’s voice.
‘Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha.’
Her name. He used her name.
It’s a shitty street of pi-dogs and men lounging on charpoys scratching themselves but the chauffeur insists, here, this way memsahib. She picks her way down a gali lined with unsteady minarets of old car tyres. Burning ghee and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A. J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. ‘Memsahib.’