Cyberabad Days

Kyle Meets the River

Kyle was the first to see the exploding cat. He was coming back from the compound HFBR-Mart with the slush cone – his reward for scoring a goal in the under elevens – squinted up at the sound of a construction helicopter (they were still big and marvellous and exciting) and saw it leap the narrow gap between the med centre and Tinneman’s coffee bar. He pointed to it one fragment of a second before the security men picked it up on their visors and started yelling. In an instant the compound was full of fleeing people; men and women running, parents sweeping up kids, guards sweeping their weapons this way and that as the cat, sensing it had been spotted, leaped from the roof in two bounds onto the roof of an armoured Landcruiser, then dived to ground and hunted for targets. A security guard raised his gun. He must be new. Even Kyle knew not to do that. They were not really cats at all, but smart missiles that behaved like them, and if you tried to catch them or threatened them with a weapon, they would attack and blow themselves up. From the shade of the arcade he could see the look on the guard’s face as he tried to get a fix on the dashing, dodging robot. Machine-gun rattle. Kyle had never heard it so close. It was very exciting. Bullets cracked all over the place, flying wild. Kyle thought that perhaps he should hide himself behind something solid. But he wanted to see. He had heard it so many times before and now here it was, on the main streets in front of him. That cat-missile was getting really really close. Then the guard let loose a lucky burst; the steel cat went spinning up into the air and blew itself up. Kyle reeled back. He had never heard anything so loud. Shrapnel cracked the case of the Coke machine beside him into red and white stars. The security man was down but moving, scrabbling away on his back from the blast site and real soldiers were arriving, and a med Hummer, and RAV airdrones. Kyle stood and stared. It was wonderful wonderful wonderful and all for him, and there was Mom, running towards him in her flappy-hands, flappy-feet run, coming to take it all away, snatching him up in front of everyone and crying, ‘Oh, what were you doing what were you thinking are you all right all right all right?’

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I saw the cat explode.’

His name is Kyle Rubin and he’s here to build a nation. Well, his father is. Kyle doesn’t have much of an idea of nations and nationhood, just that he’s not where he used to live but it’s OK because it’s not really all that different from the gated community, there are a lot of folk like him, though he’s not allowed to leave the compound. In here is Cantonment. Out there is the nation that’s being built. That’s where his dad goes in the armoured cars, where he directs the construction helicopters and commands the cranes that Kyle can just see from the balcony around the top floor of the International School. You’re not allowed to go there because there are still some snipers working but everyone does and Kyle can watch the booms of the tower cranes swing across the growing towers of the new capital.

It all fell apart, and it takes us to put it back together again, his father explained. Once there was a big country called India, with a billion and a half people in it, but they just couldn’t live together, so they fell to squabbling and fighting. Like you and Kelis’s mom, Kyle said, which made his father raise his eyebrows and look embarrassed and mom – his mom, not Kelis’s – laugh to herself. Whatever, it all fell apart and these poor people, they need us and our know-how to put it all back together for them. And that’s why we’re all here, because it’s families that make us strong and hopeful. And that’s how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don’t think we should be doing that. They think it’s their nation so they should build it. Some people think we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.

Or, as Clinton in class said, the Rana’s control is still weak and there are a lot of under-represented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of left-over weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart-mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Alliance.

The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkand and half of Utter Pradesh on the Indo Gangetic plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.

When there weren’t cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim’s planet.

Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-11. Really he shouldn’t have been playing at all because he didn’t actually live within the compound. His father was the Bharati government’s man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.

At first they had been enemies. On his second game Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the new boy had got all the best balls because he was a Westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in centre: three three four. Cantonment beat US Army two one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.

Salim’s planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman’s coffeehouse, Kyle’s e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full proprioception so-new-it’s-scary lighthoek (trademark) that you could put behind you ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons too. The safety instructions said you weren’t supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime or terror but it was safe enough in Guy’s Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.

Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim’s lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken a while to work out the sweet spot but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech; Mom’s line was that it hadn’t been proved safe yet but Kyle suspected it was his father: it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim’s world there in front of him; Alterre, as it was properly called, and feel yourself falling towards it, through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go, to stop light as a feather with your feet brushing the wave-tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.

‘Aw not these jellyfish guys again,’ said Kyle.

‘No no no, this is different.’ Salim stood beside him above the waves. ‘Look, this is really cool.’ He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into huge raft-fleets and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.

‘Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,’ Salim had said. ‘And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.’

But not in a cool way, Kyle thought.

Apart from his teach and his skill at football, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit: he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right – all the wrong labels – and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents and the next they’d be setting you up for people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.

‘Now, isn’t this so cool?’ Salim said, his toes brushing the wave-tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great ocean-going jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of footballs, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush and acid-smelling liquid and a host of balloon dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind; higher than the sail-tops now, and Kyle could make out detail: each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.

‘It’s a completely new way of reproducing,’ Salim said. ‘It’s a new species!’ Kyle knew what that meant. By the rules of Alterre, played out on eleven million computers around the globe, whoever found a new species gave it his or her name. ‘They’re not kronkaeurs any more. I went and registered them; they’re mansooris!’

Gunfire on Monday Tuesday Wednesday. They were working up to something; that was the pattern of it. (Dad Dad who are they this time, is it the Hindus? but his father had eyes and ears and arms only for Mom, full of thanks and praise to have him safe home from that fearsome city.) The Cantonment went to orange alert but security was still unprepared for the ferocity of the attack. Bombers simultaneously attacked twelve Western-owned targets across Old and New Varanasi. The twelfth and final device was a car-bomb driven at full speed across the Green Zone, impervious to automatic fire, its driver dead or ecstatic to die. Close-defence robots uncoiled from their silos and leaped, nanodiamond blades unsheathed, but the bombers had recced Cantonment’s weaknesses well. Slashed, gashed, leaking oil and fuel, engine dead but still rolling under a heaving cancer of robots trying to cocoon it in impact-foam, the car rammed the inner gate and blew up.

On the soccer pitch the referee had heard the general alert siren, judged the distance to the changing room and ordered everyone to lie flat in the goal. Kyle had just wrapped his arms around his head – Day One Lesson One – when the boom lifted him off the ground by the belly and punched every breath of wind out of him. For a moment he thought he had gone deaf, then the sounds of sirens and RAV airdrones pushed through the numb until he was sitting on the grass beside Salim seemingly at the centre of a vast spiral of roar. It was much bigger than the exploding cat. A column of smoke leaned over toward the south. Hummers were rushing past, security men on foot dodging between them. The football net was full of chunks of blast-foam and scraps of wire and fragments of shattered plastic robot shell and warning signs in three languages that this was a restricted area with security authorised in the use of deadly force. A shard of nanodiamond anti-personnel blade was embedded in the left upright. The referee stood up, took off his shirt and wrapped it around the shard wedged under the crossbar.

‘Would you look at that?’ Kyle said.

There was a long green smear down the front of his fresh-laundered soccer shirt.

‘Salim’s always welcome here,’ Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. ‘Just make sure he calls home to let them know he’s all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you’ll do that.’

Of course they did and of course they didn’t and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had re-secured the Green Zone: that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked-down was locked-out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic-smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties but they were also saying that the network wasn’t fully restored and that was why he couldn’t call; if there had been Western casualties they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn’t count and anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle’s dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn’t trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.

On the house smartsilk screen you couldn’t get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the sense of walking like God over the water but in the house, even with Mom in her distracted fold-laundry state, it wasn’t smart to use the buddy-lead. Anyway, Kyle didn’t want to give her more to worry about. Three days in Alterre was more like three million years: still water water water whichever way he turned the point of view, but the Mansooris had evolved. High above the blue Atlantic, fleets of airships battled.

‘Whoa,’ said Kyle Rubin and Salim Mansoori.

In three days the jelly-fish balloons had become vast sky-going gasbags, blimp-creatures, translucent airships the size of the Boeing troop transports that brought supplies and workers in to the secure end of Varanasi airport. Their bodies were ridged like the condom Kyle had been shown at the back of the bike rack behind the school; light rippled over them and broke into rainbows as the air-jellies manoeuvred. For this was battle, no doubt about it. This was hot war. The sky-jellyfish trailed long clusters of tentacles beneath them, many hanging in the water, their last connection with their old world. But some ended in purple stingers, some in long stabbing spines, some in barbs, and these the airships wielded as weapons. The air-medusas raised or lowered sail-flaps to tack and manoeuvre into striking positions. Kyle saw one blimp, body blotched with black sting-weals, vent gas from nose and tail and drop out of combat. In a tangle of slashing and parrying tentacles Kyle watched a fighting blimp tear a gash the length of an army hummer down an opponent’s flank with its scimitar-hook. The mortally wounded blimp vented glittering dust, crumpled, folded in half in the middle and plunged into the sea where it split like a thrown water-balloon. The sea instantly boiled with almkvists, spear-fast scavengers all jaw and speed.

‘Cool,’ both boys said together.

‘Hey now, didn’t you promise you’d let your folks know as soon as the network was up?’ said Mom, standing behind them. ‘And Kyle, you know your dad doesn’t like you playing that game.’

But she wasn’t mad. She couldn’t be mad. Dad was safe, Dad had called in, Dad would be home soon. It was all in the little tremble in her voice, the way she leaned over between them to look at the screen, the smell of perfume just dabbed on. You know these things.

It had been close. Kyle’s Dad called Kyle in to show him the rolling news and point out where his company car had been when the bombers hit the escort hummers.

‘There’s next to no protection in those things,’ he said over jerky, swooping flash-cut images of black smoke boiling out of yellow flames and people standing and shouting and not knowing what to do; pictures taken from a passer-by’s palmer. ‘They used a drone RAV; I saw something go past the window just before it hit. They were aiming for the soldiers, not for us.’

‘It was a suicide attack here,’ Kyle said.

‘Some karsevak group claimed responsibility; some group no one’s ever heard of before. Fired everything off in one shooting match.’

‘Don’t they go straight into a state of moksha if they blow themselves up in Varanasi?’

‘That’s what they believe, son. Your soul is released from the wheel of reincarnation. But I still can’t help feeling that this was the final throw. Things are getting better. The Ranas are taking control. People can see the difference we’re making. I do feel we’ve turned the corner on this.’

Kyle loved it when his dad talked military, though he was really a structural engineer.

‘So Salim got home safe.’

Kyle nodded.

‘That’s good.’ Kyle heard his father sigh in the way that men do when they’re supposed to talk about things they don’t want to. ‘Salim’s a good kid, a good friend.’ Another intake of breath. Kyle waited for it to shape into a but.

‘Kyle, you know, that game. Well…’

Not a but, a well.

‘Well, I know it’s real educational and a lot of people play it and enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but, it’s not really right. I mean, it’s not accurate. It claims it’s an evolution simulation, and it is as far as it goes. But if you think about it, really, it’s just following rules laid down by someone else. All that code was programmed by someone else; so really, it’s evolution inside a bigger framework that’s been deliberately designed. But they don’t tell you, Kyle, and that’s dishonest; it’s pretending to be something it’s not. And that’s why I don’t like it; because it isn’t honest about the truth, and I know that whatever I say, what you do with Salim is your thing, but I do think you’re not to play it here, in the house. And it’s good you’ve got a good friend here – I remember when Kelis was your age when we were in the Gulf, she had a really good friend, a Canadian girl – but it would be good if you had a few more friends from your own background. OK? Now, how about “Wrestle Smackdown” on cable?’

The referee had gone down with a head-butt to the nuts in the first thirty seconds so it was only when the decibel count exceeded the mundane Varanasi traffic roar that security heads-upped, guns-downed and came running. A guard-woman in full colour-smear combats and smart-visor locked her arms around Kyle and hauled him out of the steel-cage match into which the under-eleven practice had collapsed.

‘I’ll sue you I’ll sue the ass of you your children will end up living in a cardboard box, let go of me,’ Kyle yelled. The security woman hauled.

It was full fight, boys, girls, supporters, cheerleaders. At the bottom of the dog-pile, Striker Salim and Ozzie Ryan. Security hauled them off each other and returned the snoopy RAV drones that flocked to any unusual action to their stand-by roosts. Parameds rushed to the scene. There was blood, there were bruisings and grazings, there were torn clothes and black eyes. There were lots and lots of tears but no contusions, no concussions, no breaks.

Then the gitmoisation.

Coach Joe: OK, so want to tell me what that was about?

Ozzie Ryan: He started it

Striker Salim: Liar! You started it.

Coach Joe: I don’t care who started it; I want to know what all that was about.

Ozzie Ryan: He’s the liar. His people just lie all the time; they don’t have a word for the truth.

Striker Salim: Ah! Ah! That’s such a lie too.

Ozzie Ryan: See? You can’t trust them: he’s a spy for them, it’s true; before he came here they never got in, since he came there’s been things happening almost every day. He’s a spy and he’s telling them all ways to get in and kill us because he thinks we’re all animals and going to hell anyway.

Coach Joe: Jesus. Kyle; what happened?

Kyle Rubin: I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, I just heard this noise like and when I looked over they were on the ground tearing lumps out of each other.

Striker Salim: That is so not true… I cannot believe you said that. You were there, you heard what he said.

Kyle Rubin: I didn’t hear everything, I just heard like shouting…

Gitmoisation part two.

Kyle’s dad: Coach Joe called me, but I’m not going to bawl you out, I think there’s been enough of that already. I’m disappointed, but I’m not going to bawl you out. Just one thing: did Ryan call Salim something?

Kyle Rubin: (mumble.)

Kyle’s dad: Son, did Ryan use a racist term to Salim?

Kyle Rubin: (twisting foot.)

Kyle’s dad: I thought Salim was your friend. Your best friend. I think if someone had done something to my best friend, doesn’t matter who he is, what he is, I’d stand up for him.

Kyle Rubin: He said Salim was a diaper-head curry-nigger and they were all spies and Salim was just standing there so I went in there and popped him, Ryan I mean, and he just went for Salim, not me, and then everyone was piling on with Ryan and Salim at the bottom and they were all shouting curry-nigger-lover curry-nigger-lover at me and trying to get me too and then the security came in.

At the end of it two things were certain: soccer was suspended for one month, and when it did come back, Salim would not be playing, never would be again. Cantonment was not safe for Bharatis.

He was trapped, a traffic island castaway. Marooned on an oval of concrete in Varanasi’s never-ebbing torrent of traffic by the phatphat driver when he saw Kyle fiddling in his lap with pogs.

‘Ey, you, out here, get out, trying to cheat, damn gora.’

‘What here, but?’

Out onto this tiny, traffic island twenty centimetres in front of him twenty centimetres behind him, on one side a tall man in a white shirt and black pants, on the other a fat woman in a purple sari who smelled of dead rose, and the phatphat, the little yellow-and-black plastic bubble, looked/sounded like a hornet as it throbbed away into the terrifying traffic.

‘You can’t do this, my dad’s building this country!’

The man and the woman turned to stare. Stares everywhere, every instant from the moment he slipped out of the back of the Hi-Lux at the phatphat stand. They had been eager for his money then, Hey sir, hey sahib, good clean cab, fast fast, straight there no detours, very safe safest phatphat in Varanasi. How was he to know that the cheap, light cardboard pogs were only money inside the Cantonment? And now here he was on his traffic island, no way forward, no way back, no way through the constant movement of trucks, buses, cream-coloured Marutis, mopeds, phatphats, cycle-rickshaws, cows, everything roaring ringing hooting yelling as it tried to find its true way while avoiding everything else. People were walking through that, just stepping out in the belief that the traffic would steer around them; the man in the white shirt, there he went, the woman in the purple sari, Come on boy, come with me, he couldn’t, he daren’t, and there she went and now there were people piling up behind him, pushing him pushing pushing pushing him closer to the kerb, out in that killing traffic…

Then the phatphat came through the mayhem, klaxon buzzing, weaving a course of grace and chaos, sweeping in to the traffic island. The plastic door swivelled up and there, there, was Salim.

‘Come on come on.’

Kyle bounded in, the door scissored down and the driver hooted off into Varanasi’s storm of wheels.

‘Good thing I was looking for you,’ Salim said, tapping the lighthoek coiled behind his ear. ‘You can find anyone with these. What happened?’ Kyle showed him the Cantonment pogs. Salim’s eyes went wide. ‘You really haven’t ever been outside, have you?’

Escaping from Cantonment was easier than anything. Everyone knew they were only looking for people coming in, not going out, so all Kyle had to do was slip into the back of the pick-up while the driver bought a mochaccino to go at Tinneman’s. He even peeked out from under the tarpaulin as the inner gate closed because he wanted to see what the bomb damage was like. The robots had taken away all the broken masonry and metal spaghetti but he could see the steel reinforcing rods through the shattered concrete block work and the black scorch marks over the inner wall. It was so interesting and Kyle was staring so hard that he only realised he was out of Cantonment entirely, in the street, the alien street, when he saw the trucks, buses, cream-coloured Marutis, mopeds, phatphats, cycle-rickshaws, cows close behind the pick-up and felt the city roar surge over him.

‘So, where do you want to go then?’ Salim asked. His face was bright and eager to show Kyle his wonderful wonderful city. This was a Salim Kyle had never seen before; Salim not-in-Cantonment, Salim in-his-own-place, Salim-among-his-own-people. This Mansoori seemed alien to Kyle. He was not sure he liked him. ‘There’s theNewBharatSabhaholydeerofSarnath DoctorSampunananandcricketgroundBuddhiststupaRamnagar FortVishwanathTempleJantarMantar…’

Too much too much, Kyle’s head was going round all the people, all the people, the one thing he never saw, never noticed from the roof-top look-out, under all the helicopters and cranes and military RAV drones, there were people.

‘River,’ he gasped. ‘The river, the big steps.’

‘The ghats. The best thing. They’re cool.’ Salim spoke to the driver in a language Kyle had never heard from his mouth before. It did not sound like Salim at all. The driver waggled his head in that way that you thought was no until you learned better, threw the phatphat around a big traffic circle with a huge pink concrete statue of Ganesh to head away from the glass towers of Ranapur into the old city. Flowers. There were garlands of yellow flowers at the elephant god’s feet, little smoking smudges of incense; strange strings of chillies and limes; and a man with big dirty ash-grey dreadlocks, a man with his lips locked shut with fishing hooks.

‘The man, look at the man…’ Kyle wanted to shout but that wonder/horror was behind him, a dozen more unfolding on every side as the phatphat hooted down ever narrower, ever darker, ever busier streets. ‘An elephant, there’s an elephant and that’s a robot and those people, what are they carrying, that’s a body, that’s like a dead man on a stretcher oh man…’ He turned to Salim. He wasn’t scared now. There were no bodies behind him, squeezing him, pushing him into fear and danger. It was just people, everywhere just people, working out how to live. ‘Why didn’t they let me see this?’

The phatphat bounced to a stop.

‘This is where we get out, come on, come on.’

The phatphat was wedged in an alley between a clot of cycle rickshaws and a Japanese delivery truck. Nothing on wheels could pass but still the people pressed by on either side. Another dead man passed, handed high on his stretcher over the heads of the crowd. Kyle ducked instinctively as the shadow of the corpse passed over the dome of the phatphat, then the doors flew up and he stepped out into the side of a cow. Kyle almost punched the stupid, baggy thing, but Salim grabbed him, shouted, ‘Don’t touch the cow, the cow is special, like sacred.’ Shout was the only possible conversation here. Grab the only way not to get separated. Salim dragged Kyle by the wrist to a booth in a row of plastic-canopied market stalls where a bank of chill-cabinets chugged. Salim bought two Limkas and showed the stallholder a Cantonment pog, which he accepted for novelty value. Again the hand on the arm restrained Kyle.

‘You have to drink it here, there’s a deposit.’

So they leaned their backs against the tin bar and watched the city pass and drank their Limkas from the bottle which would have had Kyle’s mom screaming germs bacteria viruses infections and felt like two very very proper gentlemen. In a moment’s lull in the street racket Kyle heard his palmer call. He hauled it out of his pants pocket, a little ashamed because everyone had a newer better brighter cleverer smaller one than him, and saw, as if she knew what dirty thing he had done, it was his mom calling. He stared at the number, the jingly tune, the little smiley animation. Then he thumbed the off button and sent them all to darkness.

‘Come on.’ He banged his empty bottle down on the counter. ‘Let’s see this river then.’

In twenty steps, he was there, so suddenly, so huge and bright Kyle forgot to breathe. The narrow alley, the throng of people opened up into painful light, light in the polluted yellow sky light from the tiers of marble steps that descended to the river and light from the river itself, wider and more dazzling than he had ever imagined, white as a river of milk. And people: the world could not hold so many people, crowding down the steps to the river in their coloured clothes and coloured shoes, jammed together under the tilted wicker umbrellas to talk and deal and pray, people in the river itself, waist deep in the water, holding up handfuls of the water and the water glittering as it fell through their fingers, praying, washing – washing themselves, washing their clothes, washing their children and their sins. Then the boats: the big hydrofoil seeking its way to dock through the little darting rowboats, the pilgrim boats making the crossing from Ramnagar, rowers standing on their sterns pushing at their oars, the tourist boats with their canopies, the kids in inflated tractor tyres paddling around scavenging for river-scraps, down to the bobbing saucers of butter-light woven from mango leaves that the people set adrift on the flow. Vision by vision the Ganga revealed itself to Kyle: next he became aware of the buildings; the guesthouses and hotels and havelis shouldering up to the steps, the ridiculous pink water towers, the many domes of the mosque and the golden spires of the temples and little temple down at the river leaning into the silt; the arcades and jetties and galleries and across the river, beyond the yellow sand and the black, ragged tents of the holy men, the chimneys and tanks and pipes of the chemical and oil plants, all flying the green white and orange wheel-banners of Bharat.

‘Oh,’ Kyle said. ‘Oh man.’ And: ‘Cool.’

Salim was already halfway down the steps.

‘Come on.’

‘Is it all right? Am I allowed?’

‘Everyone is allowed. Come on, let’s get a boat.’

A boat. People didn’t do things like that but here they were settling on the seat as the boatman pushed out, a kid not that much older than Kyle himself with teeth that would never be allowed inside Cantonment yet Kyle felt jealous of him, with his boat and his river and the people all around and a life without laws or needs or duties. He sculled them through floating butter-candles – diyas, Salim explained to Kyle – past the ghat of the sadhus, all bare-ass naked and skinny as famine, and the ghat where people beat their clothes against rock washing-platforms and the ghat where the pilgrims landed, pushing each other into the water in their eagerness to touch the holy ground of Varanasi, and the ghat of the buffalos – where where? Kyle asked and Salim pointed out their nostrils and black, black-curved horns just sticking up out of the water. Kyle trailed his hand in the water and when he pulled it in it was covered in golden flower peals. He lay back on the seat and watched the marble steps flow past, and beyond them the crumbling, mould-stained waterfront buildings and beyond them the tops of the highest towers of New Varanasi and beyond them the yellow clouds, and he knew that even when he was a very old man, maybe forty or even more, he would always remember this day and the colour of this light and the sound of the water against the hull.

‘You got to see this!’ Salim shouted. The boat was heading in to shore now through the tourists and the souvenir-boats and a slick of floating flower garlands. Fires burned on the steps, the marble was blackened with trodden ashes, half-burned wood lapped at the water’s edge. There were other things among the coals: burned bones. Men stood thigh deep in the water, panning it with wide wicker baskets.

‘They’re Doms, they run the burning ghats. They’re actually untouchable but they’re very rich and powerful because they’re the only ones who can handle the funerals,’ said Salim. ‘They’re sifting the ashes for gold.’

The burning ghats. The dead place. These fires, these piles of wood and ash, were dead people, Kyle thought. This water beneath the boat was full of dead people. A funeral procession descended the steps to the river. The bearers pushed the stretcher out into the water, a man with a red cord around his shoulder poured water over the white shroud. He was very thorough and methodical about it, he gave the dead body a good washing. The river-boy touched his oars, holding his boat in position. The bearers took the body up to a big bed of wood and set the whole thing on top. A very thin man in a white robe and with a head so freshly shaved it looked pale and sick piled wood on top of it.

‘That’s the oldest son,’ Salim said. ‘It’s his job. These are rich people. It’s real expensive to get a proper pyre. Most people use the electric ovens. Of course, we get properly buried like you do.’

It was all very quick and casual. The man in white poured oil over the wood and the body, picked up a piece of lit wood and almost carelessly touched it to the side. The flame guttered in the river wind, almost went out, then smoke rose up and out of the smoke, flame. Kyle watched the fire take hold. The people stood back, no one seemed very concerned, even when the pile of burning wood collapsed and a man’s head and shoulders lolled out of the fire.

That is a burning man, Kyle thought. He had to tell himself that. It was hard to believe, all of it was hard to believe; there was nothing that connected to any part of his world, his life. It was fascinating, it was like a wildlife show on the sat; he was close enough to smell the burning flesh but it was too strange, too alien. It did not touch him. He could not believe. Kyle thought, This is the first time Salim has seen this too. But it was very very cool.

A sudden crack, a pop a little louder than the gunfire Kyle heard in the streets every day, but not much.

‘That is the man’s skull bursting,’ Salim said. ‘It’s supposed to mean his spirit is free.’

Then a noise that had been in the back of Kyle’s head moved to the front of his perception: engines, aircraft engines. Tilt-jet engines. Loud, louder than he had ever heard them before, even when he watched them lifting off from the field in Cantonment. The mourners were staring, the Doms turned from their ash-panning to stare too. The boat-boy stopped rowing; his eyes were round. Kyle turned in his seat and saw something wonderful and terrible and strange: a tilt-jet in Coalition markings, moving across the river towards him, yes him, so low, so slow, it was as if it were tiptoeing over the water. For a moment he saw himself, toes scraping the stormy waters of Alterre. River-traffic fled from it, its down-turned engines sent flaws of white across the green water. The boat-boy scrabbled for his oars to get away but there was now a second roar from the ghats. Kyle turned back to see Coalition troopers in full combat armour and visors pouring down the marble steps, pushing mourners out of their way, scattering wood and bones and ash. Mourners and Doms shouted their outrage; fists were raised; the soldiers lifted their weapons in answer. The boat-boy looked around him in terror as the thunder of the jet engines grew louder and louder until Kyle felt it become part of him and when he looked round he saw the big machine, morphing between city and river camouflage, turn, unfold landing gear and settle into the water. The boat rocked violently, Kyle would have been over the side had not Salim hauled him back. Jet-wash blew human ash along the ghats. A single oar floated lost down the stream. The tilt-jet stood knee-deep in the shallow water. It unfolded its rear ramp. Helmets. Guns. Between them, a face Kyle recognised, his dad, shouting wordlessly through the engine roar. The soldiers on the shore were shouting, the people were shouting, everything was shout shout roar. Kyle’s dad beckoned, to me to me. Shivering with fear, the boat-boy stood up, thrust his sole remaining oar into the water like a punt pole and pushed toward the ramp. Gloved hands seized him, dragged him out of the rocking boat up the ramp. Everyone was shouting, shouting. Now the soldiers on the shore were beckoning to the boat-boy and Salim, this way this way, the thing is going to take off, get out of there.

His dad buckled Kyle into the seat as the engine roar peaked again. He felt the world turn, then the river was dropping away beneath him. The tilt-jet banked. Kyle looked out the window. There was the boat, being pulled in to shore by the soldiers, and Salim standing in the stern staring up at the aircraft, a hand raised: goodbye.

Gitmoisation part three.

Dad did the don’t-you-know-the-danger-you-were-in/ trouble-you-caused/expense-you-cost bit.

‘It was a full-scale security alert. Full-scale alert. We thought you’d been kidnapped. We honestly thought you’d been kidnapped. Everyone thought that, everyone was praying for you. You’ll write them, of course. Proper apologies, handwritten. Why did you turn your palmer off? One call, one simple call, and it would have been all right, we wouldn’t have minded. Lucky we can track them even when they’re switched off. Salim’s in big trouble too. You know, this is a major incident, it’s in all the papers, and not just here in Cantonment. It’s even made SKYIndia News. You’ve embarrassed us all, made us look very very stupid. Sledgehammer to crack a nut. Salim’s father has had to resign. Yes, he’s that ashamed.’

But Kyle knew his dad was burning with joy and relief to have him back.

Mom was different. Mom was the torturer.

‘It’s obvious we can’t trust you; well, of course you’re grounded, but really, I thought you knew what it was like here, I thought you understood that this is not like anywhere else, that if we can’t trust each other, we can really put one another in danger. Well, I can’t trust you here and your dad, well, he’ll have to give it up. We’ll have to quit and go back home and the Lord knows, he won’t get a job anything closer to what we have here. We’ll have to move to a smaller house in a less good area, I’ll have to go out to work again. And you can forget about that Salim boy, yes, forget all about him. You won’t be seeing him again.’

Kyle cried himself out that night in bed, cried himself into great shivering, shuddering sobs empty of everything except the end of the world. Way way late he heard the door open.

‘Kyle?’ Mom’s voice. He froze in his bed. ‘I’m sorry. I was upset. I said things I shouldn’t have said. You did bad, but all the same, your dad and I think you should have this.’

A something was laid beside his cheek. When the door had closed, Kyle put on the light. The world could turn again. It would get better. He tore open the plastic bubble-case. Coiled inside, like a beckoning finger, like an Arabic letter, was a lighthoek. And in the morning, before school, before breakfast, before anything but the pilgrims going to the river, he went up on to the roof at Guy’s Place, slipped the ’hoek behind his ear, pulled his palmer-glove over his fingers and went soaring up through the solar farm and the water tanks, the cranes and the construction helicopters and the clouds, up towards Salim’s world.