‘Jealous?’ asks A. J. Rao, mildly scolding.
‘Don’t I deserve to be?’
Then bhati-boy One blinks up ‘You Are My Soniya’ on his palmer and that’s the signal to demask. Yana Mitra claps her hands in delight and sings along as all around her glimmering soapi stars dissolve into mundane accountants and engineers and cosmetic nano-surgeons and the pink walls and roof gardens and thousand thousand stars of Old Brahmpur melt and run down the sky.
It’s seeing them, exposed in their naked need, melting like that soap-world before the sun of celebrity, that calls back the mad Esha she knows from her childhood in the gharana. The brooch makes a piercing, ringing chime against the cocktail glass she has snatched from a waiter. She climbs up onto a table. At last, that boli bitch shuts up. All eyes are on her.
‘Ladies, but mostly gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.’ Even the city behind the sound-curtain seems to be holding its breath. ‘I am engaged to be married!’ Gasps. Oohs. Polite applause, who is she, is she on tivi, isn’t she something arty? Neeta and Priya are wide-eyed at the back. ‘I’m very very lucky because my husband-to-be is here tonight. In fact, he’s been with me all evening. Oh, silly me. Of course, I forgot, not all of you can see him. Darling, would you mind? Gentlemen and ladies, would you mind slipping on your ’hoeks for just a moment. I’m sure you don’t need any introduction to my wonderful wonderful fianc’, A. J. Rao.’
And she knows from the eyes, the mouths, the low murmur that threatens to break into applause, then fails, then is taken up by Neeta and Priya to turn into a decorous ovation, that they can all see Rao as tall and elegant and handsome as she sees him, at her side, hand draped over hers.
She can’t see that boli girl anywhere.
He’s been quiet all the way back in the phatphat. He’s quiet now, in the house. They’re alone. Neeta and Priya should have been home hours ago, but Esha knows they’re scared of her.
‘You’re very quiet.’ This, to the coil of cigarette smoke rising up towards the ceiling fan as she lies on her bed. She’d love a bidi; a good, dirty street smoke for once, not some Big Name Western brand.
‘We were followed as we drove back after the party. An aeai aircraft surveilled your phatphat. A network analysis aeai system sniffed at my router net to try to track this com channel. I know for certain street cameras were tasked on us. The Krishna Cop who lifted you after the Red Fort durbar was at the end of the street. He is not very good at subterfuge.’
Esha goes to the window to spy out the Krishna Cop, call him out, demand of him what he thinks he’s doing?
‘He’s long gone,’ says Rao. ‘They have been keeping you under light surveillance for some time now. I would imagine your announcement has upped your level.’
‘They were there?’
‘As I said…’
‘Light surveillance.’
It’s scary but exciting, down in the deep muladhara chakra, a red throb above her yoni. Scarysexy. That same lift of red madness that made her blurt out that marriage announcement. It’s all going so far, so fast. No way to get off now.
‘You never gave me the chance to answer,’ says Aeai Rao.
Can you read my mind? Esha thinks at the palmer.
‘No, but I share some operating protocols with scripting aeais for Town and Country – in a sense they are a low-order part of me – they have become quite good predictors of human behaviour.’
‘I’m a soap opera.’
Then she falls back onto the bed and laughs and laughs and laughs until she feels sick, until she doesn’t want to laugh any more and every guffaw is a choke, a lie, spat up at the spy machines up there, beyond the lazy fan that merely stirs the heat, turning on the huge thermals that spire up from Delhi’s colossal heat-island, a conspiracy of djinns.
‘Esha,’ A. J. Rao says, closer than he has ever seemed before. ‘Lie still.’ She forms the question why? And hears the corresponding whisper inside her head hush, don’t speak. In the same instant the chakra glow bursts like a yolk and leaks heat into her yoni. Oh, she says, oh! Her clitoris is singing to her. Oh oh oh oh. ‘How… .’ Again, the voice, huge inside her head, inside every part of her sssshhhhh. Building building she needs to do something, she needs to move needs to rub against the day-warmed scented wood of the big bed, needs to get her hand down there hard hard hard…
‘No don’t touch,’ chides A. J. Rao and now she can’t even move she needs to explode she has to explode her skull can’t contain this her dancer’s muscles are pulled tight as wires she can’t take much more no no no yes yes yes she’s shrieking now tiny little shrieks beating her fists off the bed but it’s just spasm, nothing will obey her and then it’s explosion bam, and another one before that one has even faded, huge slow explosions across the sky and she’s cursing and blessing every god in India. Ebbing now, but still shock after shock, one on top of the other. Ebbing now… Ebbing.
‘Ooh. Oh. What? Oh wow, how?’
‘The machine you wear behind your ear can reach deeper than words and visions,’ says A. J. Rao. ‘So, are you answered?’
‘What?’ The bed is drenched in sweat. She’s sticky dirty needs to wash change clothes move, but the afterglows are still fading. Beautiful beautiful colours.
‘The question you never gave me the chance to answer. Yes. I will marry you.’
‘Stupid vain girl, you don’t even know what caste he is.’
Mata Madhuri smokes eighty a day through a plastic tube hooked through the respirator unit into a grommet in her throat. She burns through them three at time: bloody machine scrubs all the good out of them, she says. Last bloody pleasure I have. She used to bribe the nurses but they bring her them free now, out of fear of her temper that grows increasingly vile as her body surrenders more and more to the machines.
Without pause for Esha’s reply, a flick of her whim whips the life-support chair round and out into the garden.
‘Can’t smoke in there, no fresh air.’
Esha follows her out on to the raked gravel of the formal charbagh.
‘No one marries in caste any more.’
‘Don’t be smart, stupid girl. It’s like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian, Lord Krishna protect me. You know fine what I mean. Not a real person.’
‘There are girls younger than me who marry trees, or even dogs.’
‘So bloody clever. That’s up in some god-awful shithole like Bihar or Rajputana, and anyway, those are gods. Any fool knows that. Ach, away with you!’ The old, destroyed woman curses as the chair’s aeai deploys its parasol. ‘Sun sun, I need sun, I’ll be burning soon enough, sandalwood, you hear? You burn me on a sandalwood pyre. I’ll know if you stint.’
Madhuri the old crippled dance teacher always uses this tactic to kill a conversation with which she is uncomfortable. When I’m gone… Burn me sweetly…
‘And what can a god do that A. J. Rao can’t?’