Chosen Spirits Read online

  Chosen Spirits

  Samit Basu

  There was a city, famed throughout the world,

  Where dwelt the chosen spirits of the age;

  Delhi its name, fairest among the fair.

  Fate looted it and laid it desolate,

  And to that ravaged city I belong.

  (Mir Taqi Mir, Urdu poet, 1782)

  CHAPTER ONE

  SOMETIMES JOEY FEELS like her whole life is a montage of randomly selected, algorithm-controlled surveillance-cam clips, mostly of her looking at screens or sitting glazed-eyed at meetings. As a professional image-builder and storyteller, she finds the lack of structure even more offensive than the banality of the material. She’s always taken pride in her instinct for cuts and angles and rhythms in the wildly successful stories she produces — one day, one perfect day, her life will be just as award-worthy.

  As she heads into the park near her parents’ house for her regular Sunday morning run — actually the first in three months, but she’s finally managed to wake up early this time, it’s usually way too hot to be outside the house by the time she reaches Little Bengal for her weekly visit — she finds herself idly building another montage in her mind. A classic training sequence, where she builds an incredible body through first failing and then succeeding at the same task, intercut with determined running, some weights, an optional animal sidekick, rounded off with a motivational hope-hop soundtrack. Even the idea is tiring, and she considers going straight to her parents’ house, it’s already hot enough to make her eyes twitch.

  Instead, she goes through her fitness checklist: headphones in place, cooling sportswear hopefully working as much as possible in Delhi, smog mask already making her face sweat, water bottle and pepper spray in the right slots on her smartbelt. A few stretches, and she’s off along the jogging track, keeping a wary eye out for battling stray dogs and monkeys lurking in the trees. The track’s distance markers are all in place: the fascist uncle laughing club shouting religious slogans while leering at her, the neighbourhood wives ambling along in large groups shouting to be heard over the blaring music on their phones, workers attempting their weekly repair of the park’s mysteriously smashed surveillance cams.

  She sees the kolam on her third lap, when she slows down for a second to catch her breath. It’s a simple one, a basic floral pattern with embedded hashtags drawn on a cement patch next to a manhole cover in blue chalk. Joey quickly checks to see the nearest park cam is disabled, takes a picture of the kolam, and uploads it to a decoder app which tells her in a second about the protest it’s an invite for: another slum is being evacuated by the police and builder militia. It’s not far, it’s the neighbourhood where Laxmi, her parents’ domestic helper, used to live before she moved to Kalkaji with her boyfriend, a Cyber-bazaar shop-owner. The app tells her this protest’s potential bloodshed rating is ‘Extremely High’. There’s a cheerful wiggly blood-drop icon.

  On her wrist, her smartatt pulses: a stress alert. The smart tattoo's a new design, her skin's still red around it. A cute elephant-butt pattern that amuses Flowstars and makes funders think it's a Ganesh tribute — Joey has always known how to bridge worlds. She rubs her wrist to stop the alert, but her Narad has woken up on her phone.

  -- Joey, good morning, are you all right? she messages.

  Joey gestures at the phone, I'm fine, go to sleep, but Narad sends her a stream of loving emojis and virtual hugs.

  -- Should we go through some basic stress-relief exercises and techniques?

  -- No.

  -- I see you are at the park. Great work on your daily step-count! Should we do some fun yoga?

  -- No.

  -- I have set up a loveable dog GIF blast every half hour. You are loved.

  Joey pockets her phone and takes a few deep breaths. But it’s too late: as her playlist starts up again, the beat is exactly the same as the drums that were playing at the protest she’d been to, and she’s right back there, hearing the students chant, wishing she knew all the words, staring in growing fear at the riot police amassing behind the barricades, at the water cannon behind them.

  She’d been fifteen, and her first board exams had been around the corner, so her mother hadn’t wanted to take her along. But her father had insisted: ‘This is a historic moment, and she needs to be out on the street, she needs to see there are people like us there,’ Avik had said. The protest was at Jantar Mantar, against the first wave of discriminatory citizenship laws, and their privilege had kept them perfectly safe. She’d made a poster, something meme-friendly, she can’t even recall what it was. What she remembers most was the energy: young men and women, not much older than her, rising up with the tricolour to try and save the country, the Constitution, the unity that India was founded with... that the regime was trying so hard to destroy. Her parents had seemed strangely thrilled — that evening, after an epic journey home in the cold, they’d explained they’d thought they were alone, that most people in the country had been swallowed up by a tide of bigotry and hate. They’d never been happier being proved wrong.

  She’d gone to a few more protests with her parents, before they’d insisted she stop coming along and focus on her studies, and they’d all pretended this had nothing to do with large-scale attacks on students around the country, that Avik and Romola hadn’t held each other and cried when they watched news of police storming hospitals and libraries, that images of battered and blood-drenched students hadn’t flooded Joey’s private messengers. That things weren’t about to get a lot worse. That a day wouldn’t come, soon after, when Joey wasn’t allowed to leave her house and her parents didn’t know whether to blame the pogrom or the pandemic, because they’d known the end times were coming but hadn’t known they’d be multiple choice.

  But a decade later, Joey’s memories of those days are happy and hopeful, full of an energy and a sense of belonging she hasn’t felt in years. It had taken a day for her to become an expert on identifying propaganda and its unlikeliest distributors. She’d quickly learned the words to ‘Hum Dekhenge’ and all the trickiest protest chants — she still remembers them, though she’s smart enough not to say them out loud. She’d held her mother’s hand at a reading of the Preamble to the Constitution at India Gate, while news filtered in of police brutalities and illegal detentions at a less privileged march. They’d brought in that new year at Shaheen Bagh, with a crowd of people, all ages, all religions, all classes, standing together, singing the national anthem, reclaiming the flag — Joey had wanted to go and sit with the women at the heart of it all, the now-legendary women of Shaheen Bagh, wanted to go sit with her mother and be offered biryani and companionship by strangers, and huddle under a blanket and sing songs of hope and revolution. But there had just been too many people between them and her. They’d stood at a bonfire, watching their breath steam, wrapping their gloved hands around warming cups of tea. There were doctors and volunteers and biscuits and packets of medicine and students with candles, and signs in many languages, and more strength and solidarity and heartbreak in the air than Joey could breathe in.

  She’d decided, that night, that she wouldn’t leave. That she would stay in India, in Delhi, and belong as hard as she could. Many years, many goodbyes and many regrets later, she still cannot accept that she made a huge mistake. But sometimes it feels like everyone she thought she’d grow up around has left — so many of her peers, the generation her parents learned to admire as the children of blood and fire who were paradropped straight out of their adolescence into a citizen’s uprising against totalitarianism, simply got tired and faded away, or changed into something unrecognisable. Like Shaheen Bagh, which now exists only in memory — she knew nothing of it before the protests, and refuses to learn its new name. Was it even real?

>   She’s tried, over the years, to find out what happened to the student leaders she grew up admiring, those clear-eyed, calm, incredibly brave women and men who stared down thugs with batons and marched in straight lines chanting in perfect unison towards armed police, but there aren’t any clear patterns. Some disappeared into detention centres, or off the map, to other countries or the hinterlands. Some disappeared altogether, and it was dangerous to even look them up online. Many were still around, struggling through the feudal systems of one political party or another and slowly transforming into the politicians they’d loathed in college, or working regular-person jobs like Joey’s, trying to pretend the light in their eyes hadn’t dimmed, that they hadn’t given up. She’d helped a couple find jobs last year. She hadn’t asked them the one question she’d wanted to, the one everyone in the country had asked at some point: Did we win? I thought we’d won. Didn’t we win?

  Don't make the same mistakes we did,' her father says to her, even now, years too late. 'This country lied to us, told us we'd be a part of the world, told us things were changing. They're not. We'll miss you terribly. Get out.' He’d been saying this ever since she told them, after college, that she didn’t really want to escape abroad. Her mother had just held her close, and had said she was delighted not to lose her, and things would turn out well in the end. But each weekend, when Romola asks Joey about work, Joey can see her mother feeling guilty, for absolutely no reason.

  It’s mid-morning when Joey finally decides to go indoors and get some fresh air. She enters her parents’ flat and tiptoes past their bedroom towards hers. They’re unnaturally quiet — by this time, they’re normally sitting at breakfast ready to complain about how late she is.

  ‘They’re not home’ Laxmi calls from the kitchen. ‘They went for a job interview.’ Her brother’s home, though, she can hear snores emanating from his room. Laxmi emerges with breakfast on a tray: she insists on cooking everything by hand, ignoring the plaintive beeps of both the food processor and the smart-fridge. She looks at Joey enquiringly and holds out an arm, but Joey hasn’t brought her laundry with her this week.

  Joey shows Laxmi the photo of the protest kolam from the park, and raises an eyebrow. Laxmi shakes her head.

  ‘I’m thinking of going,’ Joey says.

  ‘Not for you, didi,’ Laxmi says. ‘There will be blood, and no cameras.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I want to come too.’

  But Laxmi shakes her head firmly. ‘Raja and his boys will look after me. Didi, when it is time for you to come to one of these, I will tell you. Not safe for you now.’

  They’ve had this conversation before, and Joey wonders, as she digs into her breakfast, if Laxmi can tell how relieved she is each time, and whether she’ll actually make it out of the door the day Laxmi tells her she’s needed, if any of the courage she’d thought she’d had in her mid-teens still lingered inside her.

  By the time her parents return, Joey’s already finished lunch and is fast asleep on the living room sofa, while the TV plays her long-abandoned must-see streaming list. It’s not her parents who wake her up though: it’s her smartatt, which sends a tingle up her wrist, overriding her sleep settings, to warn her that a Favourite Contact is calling for the third time. Her parents wave encouragingly at her as she stomps by them, glaring at her buzzing phone, wiping drool off her chin. Of course it's bloody Indi, avatar swaying cockily as he smiles, hey girl. Her Narad pops up on the screen, raises an inquisitive eyebrow at her: Indi loves surprise video calls, but she shakes her head, gesturing towards the audio-only option. Narad shrugs, and disappears to argue with Indi's AI.

  ‘We had a lovely lunch at the mall,’ her mother says to her back. ‘Lebanese.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Joey says. ‘Did you get the job?’

  ‘Actually I was the one who applied,’ Avik says. ‘But they-’

  Narad appears to let Joey know Indi insists on video, but she’s not having it. It takes three rounds, but Indi finally agrees to voice.

  'I had an amazing idea,' he says. 'So, when we meet the SachVoice guys, we-'

  'It's Sunday, Indi,’ Joey says. 'Do you have a medical emergency?'

  'Listen. This is how we're going to play it-'

  She disconnects, wondering as she does every week why he feels compelled to do this, she's told him so many times it isn't cute. Indi doesn't call back. He has plenty of other people to bother, and the idea he's about to suggest is one she sent him weeks ago.

  She clears her throat, and turns to her parents again, noting with some relief that they’ve occupied the sofa and turned on TV news. Relief not because of the news, which is never good, but because she hates hearing about how difficult it is for her parents to find good jobs.

  Today's news crisis is the discovery of an automated ship in the Indian Ocean swarming with East African climate change refugees, clinging on to the deckless craft like ants in the rain, preferring to risk incredible dangers crossing to unknown lands instead of being slaughtered by European vigilante pirate crews. Her brother’s clearly messed up the family TV content filters, it’s pretty obvious why he would want content filters off on the biggest screen in the house, but her parents shouldn't be seeing this much death. Fortunately there are no dead babies today, but before Joey manages to turn the screen off the damage is done: already images from a concentration camp in Assam and a lynching near Kolkata have burned themselves into their brains. She's grown up with pictures like this, sometimes the faces in the news have been people she’s met, but her parents have to be sheltered with filters: she and Rono must protect them from the psy-op epidemic of confusion and rage that still threatens to engulf the whole country, hoping all the while that the Residents' Association's guards keep the street outside their balcony free of blood.

  Her parents hadn’t had steady work in years: they’d lost their high-paying jobs over the span of a single week while Joey was in college, when the economy had gone over a cliff: her father over a Facebook rant and her mother because she hadn’t understood that it was a loyalty-based economy now, and hadn’t been able to adjust when an oligarch bought her ad agency. She suspects neither Avik nor Romola feel particularly good that their daughter works for some mid-level oligarchs, but it keeps her safe and pays the bills, and all the non-oligarchs are broke.

  Joey switches her parents over to her streaming account, sets them up on a nostalgic sitcom binge, and slides on the sofa next to them, hoping to slip into her standard Sunday rhythm of sleeping through the day, there’s nothing like the background buzz of her family’s voices to help her catch up on her weekly sleep quota. The TV’s on a bit too loud, but her high-decibel tolerance has always been impressive, there's not been any choice on that front really. The problem is that she’s been having too many Real Thoughts since morning, thanks to that bloody kolam, and real sleep hovers frustratingly out of reach. Instead, she can feel a massive headache building, heralding the arrival of her nemesis, the brain-fade that envelops her most days, every time she manages to take her mind off work for five minutes.

  She doesn't even notice when she breaks her weekend phone-avoidance rule, or how much time she spends wandering the corners of the web: she gets lost, as usual, and has no idea why she's reading an article about 20s AI music, when her smartatt pulses: screen haze alert. The new smartatt itches less than the last one, but she still has to physically stop herself from scratching convulsively at her left wrist every time it tingles. The first time she'd had a smartatt done, she used to wake up every morning with abrasions on her wrists, from clawing at the tattoo in her sleep.

  Narad sends her support-signs again, but she finds herself yearning for non-Roy humans, for her college squad, her own women. Every weekend she promises herself she'll stay out of the Flowverse until work calls again, but she's never made it. The truth is, watching the perfectly curated lives of people she actually knows has never caused Joey the anxiety attacks and melancholy that aff
ect everyone she knows: it's because Joey has always had a secret system, one that she believes led her to her often soul-destroying line of work, that allows her to succeed at it without becoming the kind of monster she's seen her peers transform into.

  It's quite simple: Joey has mind-tricked herself into believing that all the people whose Flows she watches actually work for her, perform for her like her actual Flowstar clients — she's delegated the task of having life experiences to them. Every perfect yoga pose, every bright-eyed dog, every star-struck new lover, every impeccably plated meal exists at her command. She's commissioned each live holiday, each luxury sunset, each lavish wedding, each impressive run-map, outsourced every new baby, every inspirational thought, every life hack, every makeup tip. Flow-makers owe her their abs, their afterglows, their banter, even their families.

  There's only one person this trick never works for, and that's Toons, her oldest and closest friend, now wandering around the world with her diplomat family, being a poet-dancer-painter-3D-print-sculptor-fashionista-genius, setting performance goals she wishes her Flowstars could match. Toons isn't in her phone at all times any more, eager to over-analyse the minutest details of her life: she said new government instructions to diplomat families are to minimise private conversations because they're targets for world-class hackers, and that she’d gotten into enough trouble over the years for being more radical-leftist than a diplomat’s daughter was allowed to be, but Joey can't help feeling her best friend's left her. Toons was her life-management app, her aesthetics popup, her live-location watcher, her inactivity warning notification, and all she has left is Narad, a very poor substitute. Narad couldn’t absent-mindedly fix her hair.