"Ian McDonald - The Djinn's Wife" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

****
Neeta and Priya are waiting for her at the breakfast table next morning, sitting side-by-side close like an
interview panel. Or Krishna Cops. For once they aren't talking houses and husbands.

"Who who who where did they come from who sent them so many must have cost a fortune...."

Puri the housemaid brings Chinese green chai that's good against cancer. The sweeper has gathered the
bouquets into a pile at one end of the compound. The sweetness of their perfume is already tinged with
rot.
"He's a diplomat." Neeta and Priya only watch Town and Country and the chati channels but even they
must know the name of A.J. Rao. So she half lies: "A Bharati diplomat."

Their mouths go Oooh, then ah as they look at each other. Neeta says, "You have have have to bring
him."

"To our durbar," says Priya.

"Yes, our durbar," says Neeta. They've talked gossiped planned little else for the past two months: their
grand joint engagement party where they show off to their as-yet-unmarried girl friends and make all the
single men jealous. Esha excuses her grimace with the bitterness of the health-tea.

"He's very busy." She doesn't say busy man. She cannot even think why she is playing these silly girli
secrecy games. An aeai called her at the Red Fort to tell her it admired her. Didn't even meet her. There
was nothing to meet. It was all in her head. "I don't even know how to get in touch with him. They don't
give their numbers out."

"He's coming," Neeta and Priya insist.
****
She can hardly hear the music for the rattle of the old airco but sweat runs down her sides along the
waistband of her Adidas tights to gather in the hollow of her back and slide between the taut curves of
her ass. She tries it again across the gharana's practice floor. Even the ankle bells sound like lead. Last
night she touched the three heavens. This morning she feels dead. She can't concentrate, and that little
lavda Pranh knows it, swishing at her with yts cane and gobbing out wads of chewed paan and mealy
eunuch curses.

"Ey! Less staring at your palmer, more mudras! Decent mudras. You jerk my dick, if I still had one."

Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself--ring, call me, ring call
me, ring, take me out of this--she fires back, "If you ever had one."

Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf a sting.

"Fuck you, hijra!" Esha snatches up towel bag palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair.
No point changing, the heat out there will soak through anything in a moment. "I'm out of here."

Pranh doesn't call after her. Yts too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is
an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.

"Memsahb Rathore?"