"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Mamaji was too respectable to show anything like outright anger, but she had ways of expressing her
displeasure. The smallest crust of roti at dinner, the meanest scoop of dhal. New girls coming, make
room make room—me to the highest, stuffiest room, furthest from the cool of the courtyard pool.

“He asked for my palmer address,” I said.

“If I had a rupee for every palmer address,” Mamaji said. “He was only interested in you as a novelty,
dearie. Anthropology. He was never going to make a proposition. No, you can forget right about him.”

But my banishment to the tower was a small punishment for it lifted me above the noise and fumes of the
old city. If portions were cut, small loss: the food had been dreadful every day of the almost two years I
had been at the haveli. Through the wooden lattice, beyond the water tanks and satellite dishes and kids
playing rooftop cricket, I could see the ramparts of the Red Fort, the minarets and domes of the Jami
Masjid and beyond them, the glittering glass and titanium spires of New Delhi. And higher than any of
them, the flocks of pigeons from the kabooter lofts, clay pipes bound to their legs so they fluted and sang
as they swirled over Chandni Chowk. And Mamaji’s worldly wisdom made her a fool this time, for
Ashok was surreptitiously messaging me, sometimes questions about when I was divine, mostly about
himself and his great plans and ideas. His lilac-colored words, floating in my inner-vision against the
intricate silhouettes of my jali screens, were bright pleasures in those high summer days. I discovered the
delight of political argument; against Ashok’s breezy optimism, I set my readings of the news channels.
From the opinion columns it seemed inevitable to me that Awadh, in exchange for Favored Nation status
from the United States of America, would ratify the Hamilton Acts and outlaw all aeais more intelligent
than a langur monkey. I told none of our intercourse to Mamaji. She would have forbidden it, unless he
made a proposal.

On an evening of pre-monsoon heat, when the boys were too tired even for cricket and the sky was an
upturned brass bowl, Mamaji came to my turret on the top of the old merchant’s haveli. Against
propriety, the jalis were thrown open, my gauze curtains stirred in the swirls of heat rising from the alleys
below.

“Still you are eating my bread.” She prodded my thali with her foot. It was too hot for food, too hot for
anything other than lying and waiting for the rain and the cool, if it came at all this year. I could hear the
voices of the girls down in the courtyard as they kicked their legs in the pool. This day I would have
loved to be sitting along the tiled edge with them but I was piercingly aware that I had lived in the haveli
of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency longer than any of them. I did not want to be their Kumarima. And
when the whispers along the cool marble corridors made them aware of my childhood, they would ask
for small pujas, little miracles to help them find the right man. I no longer granted them, not because I
feared that I had no power any more—that I never had—but that it went out from me and into them and
that was why they got the bankers and television executives and Mercedes salesmen.

“I should have left you in that Nepalese sewer. Goddess! Hah! And me fooled into thinking you were a
prize asset. Men! They may have share options and Chowpatty Beach apartments but deep down,
they’re as superstitious as any back-country yadav.”

“I’m sorry, Mamaji,” I said, turning my eyes away.

“Can you help it? You were only born perfect in thirty-two different ways. Now you listen, cho chweet.
A man came to call on me.”