Servants and dressers approached me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.
“Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,” Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a red thornless rose between his fingers. “Old-school. It’s dissociative disorder these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviours. It was what you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Splitting.”
Night in the gardens of the Dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on silver thalis were medjool dates, halva—crisp with flies—folded paan. A security robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.
Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behaviour. Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat—what need had the wife of Brahmin for crude cash?—I did know where to direct it. Yet some demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of hastening travellers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second skull, full of the awful realisation of what I had done.
A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the hook behind my ear. Ashok, I wrote across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!
“I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be many, why can’t I just be one? Be me?” I beat the heels of my hands off my forehead in frustration. “Make me well, make me right!” Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot chai in first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of Shakya river. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. How else could anyone survive being a goddess?
Goddess. My Goddess.
Ashok could not understand. “Would you cure a singer of his talent? There is no madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.
“Have you thought what you’re going to do?”
I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.
“Maybe for a while, if you could…”
“It’s not a good time… Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next ten years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values still count in Awadh. You should know.”
I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, “Where can I go?”
The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees by the roll for an ex-Goddess.
Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.
“I have a place in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking terms.”
“Oh thank you, thank you…” I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the charbagh, he was sweating freely.
“It’s not a gift. It’s… employment. A job.”
“A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I will; what is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do it…”
“There are commodities needing transport.”
“What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t mater, I can carry anything.”
“Aeais.” He rolled a paan from the silver dish. “I’m not going to wait around for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication ware.”
“The Hamilton Acts,” I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most of Ashok mumbles and rants meant.
“Word is, everything above level 2.5.” Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes widened as the paan curled through his skull.
“Of course, I will do anything I can to help.”
“I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.” He touched his right forefinger to his Third Eye.
I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out there beyond the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair back.
Protein chips; only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a husband.
So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometres from the nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometres north in Delhi a man in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.
You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you.
I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I now knew were other parts of myself. But I was not afraid of them. In Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; it is the winners write the history. The universe would look no different had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.
No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. No one but you could endure another mind in there.
The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, jelly-shoes, rings and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me but was afraid of what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and wondered why my life could not be like theirs.