‘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.