by Ian McDonald
‘You clearly haven’t seen an Old Firm game.’
While Anye talks Vishram has been moving his body around, closing off her access to the dance floor, her friends. Manoeuvre two - the isolation - complete, he moves on to manoeuvre three. He pretends to recognise the music.
‘I like this one.’ He detests it but it’s a good solid 115. ‘You fancy a wee boogie?’
‘I fancy a wee boogie very much,’ she says, coming out of the corner at him with a low light in her eyes. The regulation five dances later, he’s found out that she’s a Law Major at Glasgow U, an SNP party worker and likes mountains, new nations, going out with her mates and coming home without them. This sounds flawless to Vishram Ray, so he buys her another - her friends have receded into a glum huddle at the end of the bar nearest the women’s toilets - necks it quick and dirty and hauls her out for another couple on the floor. She dances heavy but enthusiastic, all limbs. He likes them meaty. Halfway through the mid- tempo shift-of-pace number his hip pocket starts calling his name. He ignores it.
‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’
He hauls out the palmer hoping it’ll be someone wanting to talk to him about comedy. It’s not. Vishram, it’s Shastri. Not now, old servant. Absolutely not now.
But he’s getting bored with the party. Cut to manoeuvre four.
‘Do you want to stay here, or shall we go on somewhere else?’
‘I’m easy,’ she says.
Right answer.
‘Do you fancy coming back to mine, wee coffee?’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘I would.’
Outside on Byres Road there’s still lingering magic hour blue over the rooftops. The car lights look unnatural, theatrical, a scene shot day for night. The taxi slo-mos through a midnight twilight. Anye sits close on the big leather seat. Vishram slips the hand. She slides back on the seat to open up the front of her hipsters. He hooks panty elastic. Manoeuvre five.
‘Funny man,’ she says, guiding his fingers.
The golden stone of the tenements seem to glow in the half dark. Vishram can feel the stored warmth from the stonework on his face. There’s still a smell of cut grass from the park.
‘This is nice,’ Anye says. ‘Expensive.’
Vishram still has his hand down her pants, guiding her up the steps with his hot finger. His groin, his breathing, his belly muscles all tell him he’s going to have her big and heavy and naked on his floor. He’s going to find out the noises she makes. He’s going to see the dirt in her head, the things she wants another body to do to her. Vishram almost tumbles through the door in a rush of want. His foot sends the thing waiting for him skittering across the lobby. He thinks about leaving it. The automatic lights pick out the green and silver logo of The Company.
‘Just a wee second.’
Already his proto-stiffie is subsiding.
The plastic priority mail wallet is addressed to Vishram Ray, Apartment 1a, 22 Kelvingrove Terrace, Glasgow, Scotland. Sick, sober and de-aroused, Vishram opens the envelope. Inside, two items; a letter from Shastri the wrinkled retainer and a ticket from Glasgow via LHR to Varanasi, first class, one way.
He began the thing with the woman in the very good suit in the BharatAir Raja Class lounge because he’s still glowing on the winning high and the booze but mostly frustrated libido.
He had the zip just pulled on his jam of travel essentials when the limo arrived. He’d offered Anye a ride back to hers. She’d given him a freezing, solid Gallic SNP-activist look.
‘I’m sorry, it’s family.’
She looked very cold, in those pants, that much bare skin, hurrying through the early August Glasgow pre-dawn. Vishram made it to check-in with ten minutes to spare. He was the sole occupant of the sharp end of the short shuttle flight to London. He came down the airbridge slightly vertiginous from the velocity of it all and headed straight to the first class lounge with a determination for vodka. The shower, the shave, the change of clothes and a shot of Polish restored his Vishram Ray-ness. He felt good enough about himself to try to hook the woman in the comfortable-for-flying suit into casual chat. Just to pass the time. Lounge reptile.
Her name is Marianna Fusco. She is a corporate lawyer. She has been summoned to Varanasi to attend to a complex trusteeship issue.
‘Me, I’m just the black sheep, the court jester. The youngest brother sent to England to study law at some ‘bridge university; except he ends up in Scotland aspiring to stand-up. The highest human art form, incidentally. And not all that different from law, I suspect. We’re both creatures of the arena.’
She doesn’t rise to that one. Instead, she asks,
‘How many brothers?’
‘Big bear, middle bear.’
‘No sisters?’
‘Not many sisters in Varanasi, or at least, my bit of it.’
‘I’ve heard this,’ she says, turning her body comfortably on the leather couch towards him. ‘What’s it like, a society with four times as many men as women?’
‘Not too many lady lawyers,’ Vishram says, settling back on the creaking upholstery. ‘Not too many ladies anything professional. ’
‘I shall remember to press home my advantages,’ the lawyer says. ‘Can I get you another vodka? It is going to be a long flight.’
Shortly after the third they are called to board. Vishram’s seat goes all the way back. After years of budget airlines, the legroom is incredible. There is such play value in the buttons and toys that he doesn’t notice the passenger strapping in beside him.
‘Well, hello there, isn’t this a coincidence?’ he says.
‘It isn’t,’ Marianna Fusco says, slipping off her jacket. She has good arm definition under her stretch-brocade top.
The first armagnac comes over Belgium as the hypersonic plane climbs steeply towards its thirty-three kilometre cruising altitude. It’s not a drink Vishram has ever considered. He’s a vodka boy. But now he thinks armagnac rather suits the personality he’s playing here. He and Marianna Fusco talk through the indigo sky about their childhoods, hers in a vast nation of family spread out across marriages and remarriages - her constellation family, she calls it, his in the bourgeois patriarchy of Varanasi. She finds the emergent social stratification fascinating and horrifying, as the English always have. It’s what they perennially love about Indian culture and literature. The guilt and thrill of a really good class system.
‘I do come from rather a well-off family.’ Play it up. ‘Not Brahmins, though. Capital “B” Brahmins, I mean. My father’s a Kshatriya, quite devout in his wee way. Tinkering with the DNA would be blasphemous.’
Two more armagnacs and the conversation sags into a doze. In full luxurious recline, Vishram pulls his airline blanket up around his neck. He imagines the chill of near-space beyond that nanocarbon wall. Marianna moves against him under her blanket. She is warm and far too close and breathing in time with him.
Manoeuvre six. Somewhere over Iran he cups a breast. She moves against him. They kiss. Armagnac tongues. She wiggles closer. He slides her breasts out of her white stretch top. Marianna Fusco has big areolar patches with raised pores and nipples like bullets. She hitches up her comfortable-but-business-like skirt as the shockwave rider hits Mach 3.6. He licks and tries the slip but Marianna Fusco intercepts him and guides his finger to that other, pert hole. She gives a little gasp, rides his finger up to the hilt and slickly unzips. Vishram Ray’s heavy dick tumbles out into the gap between the seats. Marianna Fusco rubs her thumb over the glans. Vishram Ray tries not to be overheard by the stewardess and thumbs her clitoris.
‘Fuck,’ she whispers. ‘Rotate it. Fucking rotate.’
She hooks a leg over, settles deeper on to his digit. Sutra at thirty-three kay. A quarter of the way to orbit, Vishram Ray comes carefully into a BharatAir Raja Class napkin. Marianna Fusco has an airline pillow half stuffed into her mouth, making tiny muffled mewling screams. Vishram rolls back, feeling every centimetre of altitude beneath him. He just made it into the most exc
lusive club on the planet, the Twenty-Five-Mile-High Club.
They clean off in the bathroom, separately, giggling uncontrollably at each glance of the other. They straighten their clothes and return soberly to their seats and shortly after they feel the shift in pitch as the aerospacer enters descent, plunging like a burning meteor towards the IndoGangetic plain.
He waits for her on the far side of customs. He admires the cut of her cloth, how her height and the solid way she moves stand out among the Bharatis. He knows there will be no phone calls or e-mails, or comeback. A professional relationship.
‘Could I offer you a lift?’ he asks. ‘My father will have sent a car - I know, it’s cheesy, but he’s old-fashioned about things like that. It’s no problem to drop you at your hotel.’
‘Thank you,’ Marianna Fusco says. ‘I don’t like the look of the taxi rank.’
It’s easy to spot the limo. The chauffeur is actually flying little Ray Power company flags from the wings. He doesn’t miss a beat as he takes Marianna Fusco’s bag, sticks it in the trunk and chases a small posse of beggars and badmashes. The few seconds of heat between airport and air-conditioned car stun Vishram. He’s been too long in a cold climate. And he had forgotten the scent, like ashes of roses. The car pulls into the wall of colour and sound. Vishram feels the heat, the warmth of the bodies, the greasy hydrocarbon soot against the glass. The people. The never failing river of faces. The bodies. Vishram discovers a new emotion. It has the blue remembered familiarity of homesickness but is expressed through the terrible mundane squalor of the people that throng beneath these boulevards. Homenausea. Nostalgic horror.
‘This is near the Sarkhand Roundabout, isn’t it?’ Vishram says in Hindi. ‘I’d like to see it.’
The driver waggles his head and takes the next right.
‘Where are we going?’ Marianna Fusco asks.
‘Somewhere to tell that constellation family of yours about,’ Vishram says.
Police barricades block the main road so the driver takes a way he knows through intestinally narrow back streets and turns out of them straight into a riot. He hits the brakes. A young male tumbles over the bonnet. He picks himself up, more shaken than damaged, a chubby post-teen with a wisp of a holy moustache, but the impact has rocked the car and its passengers. Instantly, the crowd’s attention switches from the gaudy statue of Hanuman under his shady concrete chhatri to the car. Hands drum the hood, the roof, the doors. They bounce the limo on its springs. The crowd sees a big Merc, tinted windows, company flags, a thing allied to the forces that would demolish their sacred place and turn it into a metro station.
The driver slams the car into reverse, smokes rubber as he backs down the alley beneath the banners of laundry and rickety wooden balconies. Bricks lob through the air, crack off the metal work. Marianna Fusco gives a small cry as the windscreen suddenly stars into a white spider web. Steering by rear-view cam, the driver slots his car between two flanking bamboo scaffold towers. The young karsevaks chase the car, striking at it with lathis and calling curses on the faithless Ranas and their demonic Moslem spin-doctors. They wave the torn-off company flags. One petrol bomb in these alleys, and hundreds are dead, Vishram Ray thinks. But the driver navigates the maze to his point of entry, finds a momentary gap in the constant torrent of traffic and throws his car backwards into it. Trucks buses mopeds slam to a halt. The driver handbrakes it. The holy boys follow them through the traffic, slipping between phatphats and Japanese pickups painted with Hindu iconography. Slipping, jogging, gaining. The driver raises his hands in desperation. Nothing to be done in this traffic. Glancing over his shoulder, Vishram can read their shirt-buttons. Then Marianna Fusco cries out Oh Jesus God! and the car slams to a halt hard enough for Vishram to jar the bridge of his nose off the back of the driver’s seat. Through tears and stun he sees a steel demon drop out of the sky before him; Ravana the devourer, demon- lord, squatting on hydraulic-loaded titanium hams, ten blades spread like a fan. The tiny mantis-head looks right at him, unfolds a dentist’s arsenal of sensor pods and probes. Then it leaps again. Vishram feels clawed toes rake the limo’s roof. He whirls, looks out the back to see it land beside a bus-stop. Traffic freezes, karsevaks scatter like goats. The thing stalks away down the street, quartering the boulevard with gatling pods. It wears the stars and bars on its carapace. A US combat robot.
‘What the . . .’ They’ve started a war while he was in immigration. The driver points to the street across the intersection to a street of neon shopfronts and glowing umbrellas where a man in dark, expensive clothing yells imprecations at the departing machine. Behind him are two fillets of Mercedes SUV. The man picks up lumps of circuitry and metal and shies them after the battle-bot. ‘I still don’t . . .’
‘Sahb,’ the driver says as he engages drive. ‘Have you been so long gone you have forgotten Varanasi ?’
The journey to Marianna Fusco’s hotel is in grim silence. She thanks him politely, the Rajput doorman salutes and lifts her bag and she goes up the steps without a look back.
Not looking good for a follow-up fuck, then.
The battered limo turns into the gates between the motor parts shop and the IT school through the screen of ashok trees. At once he is in a different world. The first thing money buys in India is privacy. The street roar is hushed to a pulse. The insanity of his city is shut out.
The house staff has lit naphtha flares all along the drive to welcome the returned prodigal. Drummers greet Vishram Ray with a tattoo and escort the car and there is the house, wide and proud and unbelievably white in the floods. Vishram finds uninvited tears in his eyes. When he was beneath its roof he had always been ashamed to acknowledge that he lived in a palace, cringing at its pillars and pediments and wide portico screened with honeysuckle and hibiscus, its bloody whiteness, its interior of swept marble and old quaint, pornographic wood carvings and ceilings painted in the Nepali style. A family of merchants had built it in the British days in a style to remind them of home. The Shanker Mahal, they named it. Now that adolescent contempt, that embarrassment at being privileged, is swept away as he steps out and the house assails him with the old remembered smells of dust and neem trees and the musk of the rhododendrons and the faint reek of the sewage system that never really worked.
They await him on the steps. Old Shastri, on the lowest rung, already namasteing. Flanking him, the house staff, in two wings, the women to his left, the men to the right. Ram Das the venerable gardener is still there, an incredible age now but still zealous as ever, Vishram doesn’t doubt, in his eternal war against the monkeys. On the middle rank, his brothers. Eldest Ramesh seems taller and thinner than ever, as if the gravity of the interstellar objects he studies is drawing him into the sky, spinning him into a rope of inquiry. Still no significant female. Even in Glasgow, Vishram heard Bharati diaspora rumours about weekend specials to Bangkok. Next, perfect brother, Govind. Perfect suit perfect wife perfect twin heirs Runu and Satish. Vishram sees the middle body fat piling around his chest. The stellar DiDi, former breakfast-tivi presenter and trophy bride, is at his side. At her side the aya cradles the latest line in the dynasty. A girl. How 2047. Vishram coos and chuckies little Priya but something about her gives him the idea that she’s a Brahmin. Something primal, pheromonal, a shift in the body chemistry.
His mother holds the top step; superior in her deference, as Vishram always remembers her. A shadow among the pillars. His father is not present.
‘Where’s Dadaji ?’ Vishram asks.
‘He will meet us tomorrow at the head office,’ is all his mother will say.
‘Do you know what this is about?’ Vishram asks Ramesh when the greetings and cryings and look-at-you-haven’t-you-got-bigs? are done. Ramesh shakes his head as Shastri motions with a finger for a porter to carry Vishram’s case up to his room. Vishram doesn’t want to answer questions about the limo so he begs jet lag and takes himself off to bed. He’d expected to be given his old room, but the porter guides him to a guest bedroom on the
sunrise side of the house. Vishram is affronted at being treated as a stranger and sojourner. Then, as he settles his few things in the huge mahogany wardrobes and tallboys, he is glad not to have his childhood possessions watching him as he returns from his life beyond them. They would drag him back, revert him to teenage again. The old place never had air-conditioning worth a damn so he lies naked on the sheets, appalled by the heat, reading faces in the foliage of the painted ceiling and listening to the rattle of monkey hands and feet in the vines outside his window. He lies on the edge of sleep, slipping towards unconsciousness and reawakening with a start as some half-forgotten sound breaks through from the city beyond. Conceding defeat, Vishram goes naked on to the iron balcony. The air and the perfume of the city of Siva powder his skin. Clusters of winking aircraft lights move over the hazy yellow skyline. The soldiers who fly in the night. He tries to imagine a war. Robot killing machines running through the alleys, titanium blades in all four hands, avatars of Kali. Aeai gunships piloted by warriors half a planet away coming in across the Ganga on strafing runs. Awadh’s American allies fight in the modern manner, without a single soldier leaving home, without a single body bag. They kill from continents away. He fears that strange tableau he had seen enacted on the streets was prophecy. Between the water and the fundamentalists, the Ranas have run out of choices.