Communications Breakdown, page 8
“Well, not as big.”
“But . . . everything?”
“Everything.”
I hug him. He hates it. I blink my way back into the dark theater.
“It’s not over,” I say. “It is not over. Here’s what we do. Get everything and everyone over to Millwall Park. We are going the full Bard.”
A procession of hands carries the Much the kilometer from the Space to Millwall Park. Friends of the project, neighbors, community all lend hands and wheels. There goes the portico of the ducal palace in Messina on a shopping trolley. Dom shuttles back and forth, weaving between the stalled cars on his cargo bike. I try not to think of a refugee convoy. The crew is already at work building, fastening, propping and staying. Somewhere they’ve found scaffolding. Somehow, three dead pickups have been pushed into the park to act as levels. Kids on bikes roam the streets blowing airhorns and shouting that the Millwall Much is on! On! On! Tonight! Millwall Park! Ain’t no sun storm’s stoppin’ our show! Many have already seen the procession and brought folding chairs, blankets, food, drink, children, and arranged them on the crescent berm at the south end of the park that will forever after be the Grassy Knoll.
The park fills. So many people. More than the Space could ever have accommodated. This is the Isle of Dogs, this is the East giving two fingers to a treacherous sun god, to one thing constant never, setting west over the smoke towers of London. Above us the sky grows bright. As I’d hoped.
As I knew.
Trix always says I’m too modest.
I patrol the preparations though my work is done now. Dom sets up lines of garden flambeaux to guide the audience to the Grassy Knoll.
“What I can’t figure is how the cops knew we had a generator,” I say.
Dom lights a garden torch.
“Oh, I can,” he says. “Some people just like to see the world turn dark. I shall be having words with my brother.” He looks up, hands me the rest of the torches. “Put these in for me. I got to get backstage.”
He whips out a battery torch and flashes a response to a signal from the control scaffold. We tried the walkies more in hope than expectation but telecoms are a sea of sinister static so we worked out a light-semaphore. Firefly flashes wink across Millwall Park.
I climb the scaffolding tower and duck under a bar. The planks creak alarmingly under my feet. Arcs of fire spiral people in to the arena; the crowd mutters and laughs, that sound of preshow expectation that is every bit as good as the ovation at the end. Signal lights flicker behind the scenery, the pickups, the groups of excited performers. All beneath the glorious, glowing, golden aurora, as bright as stage lighting.
“I love you, Ben,” Trix says.
“What?” I say, and, “Um?”
“Just that.” She kisses me.
“One moment,” I say, and I take her in my arms and kiss her back, up under the burning sky. “Okay, you can do it now.”
Trix raises her torch, gives three short blinks, the mariachis march in, and the Millwall Community Much Ado about Nothing opens.
All the way up Sebondale Street she hears laughter, voices, singing, music, but there is no opening in the tall park railings. She leaves her bike at the changing rooms gate without even chaining it to the railings.
“I’m with the show,” she gasps to the front of house staffer in hi-viz and is past her before she can object. A fast, silent run across the grass, dodging between stagehands and groups of community actors shuffling nervously for their cues.
“Seen Dom?” she whispers to the community choir, smoking behind a HiAce. One of them nods stage-left.
“Dom Dom Dom,” she hisses to the stage manager. “I need to know: Dom, are you interested in Hekla?”
“Claudia? What the fuck?”
“Romantically. Heart stuff.”
“No. Even if I were, she wouldn’t be interested in me.”
“So what Jay said . . .”
“Fucking Jay,” Dom says, loud enough to turn the heads of the waiting actors.
“That’s all I need to know,” Claudia says. “In that case, I want on.”
“We’re well into the second half.”
“You’ve got no trumpet.” She unzips her instrument from its case. It gleams in the aurora light. “You need trumpet.”
Movement at stage right. Instruments strike up. Claudia recognizes the opening measure of “Sigh No More, Ladies,” mariachi style.
“Dom.”
“Go.”
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Hekla again leads the play’s musical high point. Claudia heard her sing it at the audition at the Space but tonight, before hundreds, thousands maybe, in the late summer warmth, under a sky of honey, her voice is magnificent. Incomparable. Longing. The community choir and musicians fall silent and she sings alone.
“Men were deceivers ever.”
Okay.
And here’s the instrumental break, the hole in the music where there should be solo, soaring trumpet and Claudia steps into it, raises her trumpet to her lips and tears a crack in the sky, notes jazzing and fizzing and pealing under the bright beautiful light of the aurora.
4
Less Than
Lavanya Lakshminarayan
The Gratitude Diorama spins and shimmers in a mist of pixel dust against a silken shamiana. The climate-controlled tent has been handcrafted by thousands of artisans using weaves and fabrics, prints and embroidery from Kanchipuram and Pochampally to Banaras and Kashmir. Millions of holovids and praise-texts pop, bounce, wobble, and shrink, glittering like zari woven across a resplendent canvas. Each flickering story collected from citizens across the country is a testament to an India reimagined. Visitors to the Gallery of the People of Free India marvel at the cloud-hosted digital monument to unity, equality, liberty, and love. A whole new world after the terror of the Regime.
Two streets down, on one of the last remaining tree-lined avenues of New Luru, Kanaka Chetty is at a humbler and far more personally important celebration. She dabs at her eyes with Avik’s pocket handkerchief. Avik takes her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
“They look so happy,” Avik whispers, choking up.
“They deserve to be,” Kanaka whispers back, entwining her spouse’s fingers with her own.
The ecosphere thrives, filled with flora and fauna, unlike most of the city that sprawls beyond its climate-controlled bio-dome. Birdsong trills amidst its canopies and butterflies flit through myriad blooms lining neat pathways. On a constructed mantapam set against two tall champaka trees, Kanaka’s best friends Ben and Nikhil are midway through their nav-Vedic wedding ceremony, designed in entirety to embrace queer positivity. Yesterday’s novo-Christian wedding was similarly reimagined. Religious aunties and uncles on both sides seem happy that the event is being sanctified in the eyes of all their gods.
Ben and Nikhil moped about the pointless ritual of the event all through their bachelor do—burned, no doubt, by the historic weaponization of religion against queer identities under the Regime. Kanaka supposes that being introduced to their families’ gods is an old-fashioned symbol of inclusion and acceptance. She’s relieved that both sides are being supportive of the happy couple.
When Kanaka married Avik three years ago, she chose to wear a sea-blue sari, embroidered with birds, at the ceremony. She switched to a lilac three-piece suit—raw silk with a dramatic peak lapel on the jacket—paired with silver high-heeled boots for their reception. The celebration went off without a hitch until one of her great-aunts pulled her aside and hissed, “I thought you’d be a proper woman after marriage. Pants and boots . . .” Her great aunt shook her head in disapproval. Kanaka laughed. A proper woman. What the fuck is that, even?
The stray comment came back to her on their honeymoon, a remembrance on an errant breeze when the moon lay low over the Mediterranean Sea.
“Am I not a proper woman?” she asked, Avik’s arms entwined around her.
“Define a proper woman,” Avik said, nuzzling the back of her neck.
“I can’t.”
“Exactly.” Avik’s hands continued to travel across her skin, raising gooseflesh until her breathing turned ragged, conversation stilling for the rest of the evening.
“What’s bothering you?” Avik nudges her shoulder.
Kanaka returns to the present and shifts in her seat, crossing her legs at the knee. She gazes down at the pleats in her purple sari, unconventionally folded and draped like a dhoti, ending in a pair of high-top sneakers covered in gold sunbursts.
“You look lovely,” Avik says. “And no, nobody’s staring at you.”
“Stop reading my mind.” Kanaka smiles. “And thank you. I was just wondering . . .”
“It isn’t too much. It’s you.”
Avik leans over and drops his voice. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re at one of the first gay weddings in Free India, surrounded by māmis in Kanjeevaram silks and māmas in safari suits. They’re probably all having their minds blown that a groom and groom wedding is possible.”
Kanaka laughs. He’s got a point. Her smarttech beeps on her wrist, and she taps on the notif. “Not again,” she groans. Avik tuts sympathetically.
The notif expands outward, casting holographic text surrounded by birds, bees, and too many flowers to be tasteful.
Fertility window open! Time to make some babies!
A timer starts to tick down from six days.
“Aargh!” She dismisses the notification and looks around, anxious. She hopes none of the aunties and uncles use this as an opportunity to tell her about the joys of motherhood.
Her new-gen birth control pills are packed with nanobots, tracking and regulating her hormones, syncing all her information with her smarttech, and recommending activities that help her maintain her peak fitness levels. If only the pills weren’t so useful in managing her PCOD, if only they weren’t a contraceptive, if only feeding all their data into the SmartFit+ program weren’t so important to her career . . . The trade-off is being reminded by an algorithm that her ovaries are baby-making machines every month.
One of the many side effects of womanhood, like activewear without pockets.
“We need to find you some smarttech that isn’t so . . . intrusive,” Avik says, wrapping his arm around her.
“All the old tech is dark ages stuff. It’s probably laced with under-the-table surveillance from the Regime, probably still feeding into their databases, probably still manned by some lone right-wing clown launching cyberattacks,” Kanaka sighs. “At least these guys let you know what they’re tracking,”
Another side effect of womanhood is choosing the least dodgy system from an array of dodgy systems, like picking between hot wax and a razor.
At the reception later that evening, Kanaka glides through the cocktail party on a pair of strappy gold heels, wearing a sage green lehenga, pearls at her throat.
“You’re so elegant,” Ben’s mother says in admiration.
“So graceful,” Nikhil’s grandmother chimes in with a compliment of her own.
“Princess,” gasps someone’s five-year-old child, looking up at her in wonder before being ushered away by an embarrassed parent.
Kanaka finally spots Ben and Nikhil bereft of the company of their enthusiastic relatives. She grabs Avik by the wrist and heads their way. “Congratulations, you lovelies!”
Nikhil’s shoulders tense as he turns. Ben’s smile stiffens, then relaxes into a more lopsided grin. “Oh, thank goodness, it’s Keyks.”
“Rescue us,” Nikhil mutters. “I need to mellow out.”
Kanaka keeps up a stream of loud chatter, intended to throw off every kind of would-be interrupter, until Ben and Nikhil are safely away from the family, a bower trailing roses and jasmine creepers concealing them from prying eyes. Nikhil fishes around in his pockets.
“Have the families behaved?” Avik asks, sniggering as Nikhil takes three long, silent drags of THC from his vape.
“His aunt just said, ‘I hope you two are better dads than the ones in Daddy, Daddy! I’m glad Kanaka will be around to help,’” Ben supplies with an eye roll.
Nikhil throws his hands up in the air, dramatically trailing smoke as his hand clenches the vape’s power button. Avik smacks his hand to his forehead. Kanaka wrinkles her nose and grimaces.
Daddy, Daddy! is the latest HoloWorld show intended to portray queer relationships in positive light. Except it doesn’t. The plot revolves around a gay couple who adopt a child and are hapless parents, until their best friend—a cishet woman—moves in with them, bringing good, old-fashioned motherly values into their bohemian lives. Despite millions of protests, it hasn’t been canceled yet, and the matter has now escalated to the judicial system; it’s one of the first tests of whether the Free India government will live up to its promises for a better world.
“I can’t believe she thought Kanaka would make prime parenthood material,” Ben laughs. “Of all the assumptions you could make just because someone’s a woman . . .”
Another side effect of womanhood. A uterus is like an empty handbag, waiting to be filled.
“Kanaka’s never wanted kids!” Nikhil smirks. “Ever since she was fifteen . . . she knew. Still. Talk about wasting your privilege, Keyks.”
“Let me know when all you men are done discussing my uterus,” Kanaka snipes back.
“Just teasing, Keyks.” Nikhil gives her a peck on the cheek. “I’m anxious. Ben and I have wanted kids . . .”
“Since forever,” Ben says.
“And even with this new government and its promises . . .” Nikhil trails off.
“Bullshit like Daddy, Daddy! is really setting us back to Regime times,” Ben says sadly.
Nikhil kisses his spouse on the cheek. “We’ll make it happen. We’ll be the best dads ever.”
A server passes by with a tray, and Kanaka lifts four champagne flutes from it. She passes them around and raises her glass. “To my best friends, Ben and Nikhil, and to new adventures all the way to forever and a day, including being the best dads ever.”
Two hours later, Kanaka leans her head back against the cushions in their self-driving car, Avik’s hand in hers. The car’s sound system chimes the time—it’s 11:00 p.m.—with a snatch of song lyric before playing an ancient rock classic.
“Hah! This reminds me of my mother!” Avik says, voice-prompting the volume up. “She caught The Scorpions in concert the second time they played at the Palace Grounds in Bangalore in the aughts. Snuck out of her house because she was only sixteen, and her parents were afraid there’d be pot at the gig. Which there was, of which she did partake.”
Kanaka is warm, and her head is only slightly spinning from all the champagne. She’s right on that blissful edge between wakefulness and sleep, drifting away to the sound of Avik’s stories . . . when her smarttech pops up again. This time, it tells her that her hormone patterns correspond with relaxation—so how about attempting some conception? An animated emoji winks at her on loop, an instant turnoff, which is a shame because Avik really does look dashing in his tailored blue bandhgala.
When they’re home, Avik voice-prompts their immersopod to suggest holofilms about “badass women.” Kanaka’s HoloWorld recs are tailor-made for her, and they swipe through a few before settling on a movie called VR Virtuoso, about an Indian competitive gamer who sticks it to society, or so the blurb suggests.
Kanaka snuggles into him as they lie back on soft silk cushions. The immersopod tilts and optimizes their viewing angle as the film credits begin to roll, wrapping them in a curved sheen of pixels as the film opens into the world of IceMoor. A wind mage appears, dodging spellcasts and deathmists beside a glacial lake. A carefully choreographed battle between two rival teams ensues. Victory hangs in the balance, when the film cuts to a woman in a neon blue haptic suit, leaping and rolling on a pro tactile mat.
“Hah! This could be you!” Avik says in delight.
Kanaka smacks his arm, but grins. She might enjoy this one. The protagonist is even playing Realm Conquerors, the battle arena fantasy MMO that she competes in for a living. The filmmakers have got so many little details right, all the way down to the occasional HUD glitches and the physics issues with the windweaver spells.
Less than half an hour in, though, it begins to fall apart for Kanaka. The movie protagonist has all the success in the world, but no spouse and family of her own.
“Am I less than a woman?” she asks her best friends over cocktails on-screen. They nod earnestly, each offering well-meaning advice, and the rest of the movie follows its protagonist to a happy wedding engagement followed by happier news—she’s going to have a baby! The last line of the film causes Kanaka to burst into laughter. Soft light falls upon its protagonist, dressed in a beautiful floral-patterned skirt, as she stares off into the middle distance, sighing quietly to herself: “I am complete.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Kanaka says, logging out of HoloWorld. “Why is this the only narrative there ever is? Did you see how she goes from neon activewear to pretty dresses to finding true love? And all right, being married, sure—I have you.” She pokes Avik on the arm. “But that and the baby and the pretty frocks? Ugh.”
“I guess it resonates with a lot of people,” Avik says, kissing her forehead. “You are entirely your own person.”
Avik leads her up to bed and hugs her tight, falling asleep in seconds. Kanaka wishes she possessed the same superpower tonight. She’s caught in a thought spiral. Has the notion of womanhood simply been constructed by TV shows and movies over generations, carefully crafted and propagated to the point where a fixed menu of dreams and desires have been internalized by women in real life? How did this pass her by?
Or is there something more essential to womanhood, a tangle of secrets, feelings, and coded language that blooms unexpectedly like a brahma-kamalam on a rainy night? Does she not possess an inner garden of flowers?
Either way, she cannot find it, this hidden and mystical art of socially applauded womanhood. Does this make her less than? She dreams she is an empty plastic bag blowing on the wind.
