She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the charbagh are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn: the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks towards the crack-roofed pavilion at the centre where paths and water channels meets, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.
‘The Shalimar Gardens,’ says A. J. Rao in the base of her skull. ‘Paradise as a walled garden.’
And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the charbagh channels which shiver with water. The tiered roof of the pavilion gleams with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into malis sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.
Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. ‘Oh,’ she says, numb with wonder. ‘Oh!’
‘A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favourite places in all India, even though it’s almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it’s an evening stroll for the basti people. The past is a passion of mine; it’s easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me.’
Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A. J. Rao. No, she thinks, never flesh. A djinn. A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster. Then trick me.
‘It is as the old Urdu poets declare,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘Paradise is indeed contained within a wall.’
It is far past four but she can’t sleep. She lies naked – shameless – but for the ’hoek behind her ear on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name. Esha.
She’s up, kneeling on the bed, hand to ’hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.
‘I’m here.’ A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.
‘It’s late, I know, I’m sorry…’
She looks across the room into the palmer’s camera.
‘It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep.’ A tone in that voice. ‘What is it?’
‘The mission is a failure.’
She kneels in the centre of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.
‘The conference? What? What happened?’ She whispers, he speaks in her head.
‘It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing. We will return to Varanasi in the morning.’
Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself, stupid, romantic girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much is he is at Red Fort assisting his human superiors.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?’
‘People will always disappoint you.’
A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.
‘How very… disembodied of you Esha.’ Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. ‘Will you dance for me?’
‘What, here? Now?’
‘Yes. I need something… embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful.’
Need. A creature with the powers of a god, needs. But Esha’s suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.
‘Music…’ she stammers. ‘I can’t perform without music…’ The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over tabla, sarangi and bansuri. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bed-cover. They cannot see you, they don’t even exist, except in your head. And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice. Terrible driven things, musicians.
‘I’ve incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night,’ A. J. Rao says. ‘A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals.’
‘You can swap bits of yourself in and out?’ Esha asks. The tabla player has started a slow Natetere tap-beat on the dayan drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, they will be counting. It’s hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can’t hear; no one can hear but her. And A. J. Rao. The sarangi player sets his bow to the strings, the bansuri lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A sangeet, but not one she has ever heard before.
‘It’s making it up!’
‘It’s a composition aeai. Do you recognise the sources?’
‘Krishna and the gopis.’ One of the classic Kathak themes: Krishna’s seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the bansuri, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.
‘Will you dance, lady?’
And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly, girli. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the one hundred and eight gopis, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape mudras, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn’t feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh’s cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the tabla, the beat of dayan and bayan. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A. J. Rao did not chose this Kathak wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.
Light wakes her. She is sticky, naked, embarrassed. The house staff could find her. And she has a killing headache. Water. Water. Joints nerves sinews plead for it. She pulls on a Chinese silk robe. On her way to the kitchen, the voyeur eye of her palmer blinks at her. No erotic dream then, no sweat hallucination stirred out of heat and hydrocarbons. She danced Krishna and the one hundred and eight gopis in her bedroom for an aeai. A message. There’s a number. You can call me.