After my father’s death I wandered for decades. There was nothing for me in Delhi. I had a Buddhist’s non-attachment though my wandering was far from the spiritual search of my time as a sadhu. The world was all too rapidly catching up my put-upon characters of Town and Country. For the first few years I filed increasingly sporadic articles with Gupshup. But the truth was that everyone now was the Voras and the Deshmukhs and the Hirandanis. The series twittered into nothingness, plotlines left dangling, family drama suspended. No one really noticed. They were living that world for real now. And my sense reported the incredible revolution in a richness and detail you cannot begin to imagine. In Kerala, in Assam, in the beach-bar at Goa or the game park in Madhya Pradesh, in the out-of-the-way places I chose to live, it was at a remove and thus comprehensible. In Delhi it would have been overwhelming. Sarasvati kept me updated with calls and emails. She had so far resisted the Eye of Shiva, and the thrilling instantaneousness and intimacy, and subtler death of privacy, of direct thought-to-thought communication. Shiv’s Third Revolution had given firmness and vision to her gadfly career. Sarasvati had chosen and set herself among the underclass. I took some small pleasure from the television and online pundits saying that maybe that old fart Shakyamuni had been right in those terrible populist potboilers in Gupshup, and the blow of technology had cracked India, all India, that great diamond of land, into two nations, the fast and slow, the wired and the wire-less, the connected and the unconnected. The haves and the have-nots. Sarasvati told me of a moneyed class soaring so fast into the universal-computing future they were almost red-shifted, and of the eternal poor, sharing the same space but invisible in the always-on, always-communicating world of the connected. Shadows and dust. Two nations; India – that British name for this congeries of ethnicities and languages and histories, and Bharat, the ancient, atavistic, divine land.
Only with distance could I attain the perspective to see this time of changes as a whole. Only by removing myself from them could I begin to understand these two nations. India was a place where the visible and the invisible mingled like two rivers flowing into each, holy Yamuna and Ganga Mata, and a third, the invisible, divine Saraswati. Humans and aeais met and mingled freely. Aeais took shapes in human minds, humans became disembodied presences strung out across the global net. The age of magic had returned, those days when people confidently expected to meet djinns in the streets of Delhi and routinely consulted demons for advice. India was located as much inside the mind and the imagination as between the Himalayas and the sea or in the shining web of communications, more complex and connected and subtle than any human brain, cast across this subcontinent.
Bharat was poor. Bharat had cracked hands and heels, but she was beautiful. Bharat cleaned and swept and cooked and looked after children, Bharat drove and built and pushed carts through the streets and carried boxes up flights of stairs to apartments. Bharat was always thirsty. How human it is to be so engrossed by our latest crisis that we forget we have failed to solve the crisis before that. Storage was India’s problem. Information was increasing exponentially, available memory only arithmetically. Data-Malthusianism threatened the great technological revolution. Water was Bharat’s. The monsoon, ever fickle, had dispersed into a drizzle, a few thunderstorms that ran off the crusted earth as soon as it dropped its rain, a tantalising line of grey clouds along the horizon that never came closer. The Himalayan glaciers that fed the great rivers of North India and the slow-running Brahmaputra were exhausted; grey moraines of pebbles and dry clay. The mother of droughts was coming. But what was this to a connected class? They could pay for desalinated water, wasn’t India born from the waters? And if the worst came to the worst and the universe ended in fire, they could, through their dazzling new technology, translate themselves out of their icky physical bodies into that dream India between the real and the virtual worlds. Bodhisofts, they called these ascended creatures. Shiv would have been proud of a name like that.
From my beach-bar, from my dive school, from my game reserve and bookshop and dance club and coffeehouse and walking-tour company, from my restaurant and antique shop and meditation retreat, I watched my prophecies come true. Yes, I embarked on all those enterprises. Ten of them, one for each of the dashavatara of my divine namesake. All of them on the edge of the world, all of them with that overview down onto the Age of Kali. I lost count of the years. My body grew into me. I became a tall, lean, high-foreheaded man, with a high voice and long hands and feet. My eyes were very beautiful.
I measured the years by the losses. I re-established contact with my old political counterpart in Varanasi, Shaheen Badoor Khan. He had been as surprised as any when I had vanished so abruptly from the political stage but his own career was not without a hiatus and when he discovered that I was the Shakyamuni behind the Town and Country articles (widely syndicated) we began a lively and lengthy correspondence that continued up until his death at the age of seventy-seven. He died completely, and like a good Muslim. Better the promise of paradise than the cloudy doubts of the bodhisoft. My own mother slipped from the world into the realms of the bodhisofts. Sarasvati would not say whether it was a fearful illness or just ennui at the world. Either way I never looked for her among the skyscraper-sized memory stacks that now besieged Delhi along the line of the old Siri Ring. Lakshmi too, that almost-wife and sweetest of co-conspirators, entered the domain of the bodhisofts where she could explore the subtle mathematical games that so delighted her without limits. It was not all loss. The Age of Kali brought a friend; another great Khan, my old tutor from the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College. He would swirl out of the cloud of I-dust that had replaced the screens and ’hoeks for those who atavistically refused the Eye of Shiva and he would spend many a delightful evening lecturing me on my moral laxity.
Then the dust started to blow through the streets of Delhi. It was not the dust from the perpetual drought that burned the fields and reduced the crops to powder and sent millions from Bharat into the cities of India. It was the dust of Shiva, the sacred ash of the Purusa Corporation’s nanoscale computers, released into the world. Bharat might be choking, but here! here! was the solution to India’s memory problems. Shiv did have a name for these, a good name too. He called them devas.
He called me. It was decades since we had spoken last in the garden of his house in Varanasi, over lemonade. I was running the dharamshala at Pandua then. It was spacious and peaceful and cool and the only disturbance was the over-heavy feet of the Westerners who flocked to the place. They are not naturally barefooted people, I have found. The I-dust relay chimed, a call. I was expecting Mr Khan. My brother whirled out of the helix of motes instead. He had lost weight, too much weight. He looked well, too much well. He could have been anything: flesh, aeai agent, bodhisoft. We greeted each other and said how well each other looked.