River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘On Varanasi?’ Mrs Sharma is affronted. Mrs Chopra thinks that would be typical of Awadh, a vindictive, weasel nation. The jawans took Kunda Khadar so easily because Awadh’s troops are already moving on the capital. Mrs Sood wonders if they are spreading plagues. ‘You know, like spraying crops.’ Her husband is a middle-manager in a big biotech firm, booking air-dusting on monocrops the size of entire districts. The ladies hope the Ministry of Health would give enough warning to relocate to their summer bungalows in the hills ahead of the rush.

  ‘I should expect the more important elements in society would be informed first,’ says Mrs Laxman. Her husband is a senior civil servant. But Mrs Chopra has heard another rumour, that the Banglas’ ridiculous iceberg is actually starting to work and that the winds are swinging around, drawing the monsoon back to true. This morning as she took tea on the verandah she was certain, certain, she saw a line of shadow along the horizon to the south east.

  ‘Well then, nobody will need to invade anybody,’ Mrs Laxman declares but the Begum Khan, who is married to Sajida Rana’s Private Secretary and has the word from the Bharat Sabha, is derisive.

  ‘If anything, it makes war more likely. Even if the monsoon started tomorrow it would take a week for the levels to rise on Ganga. And do you think the Awadhis are going to let us see any of it? They’re as thirsty as we are. No, I tell you, pray it doesn’t rain, because as soon as the first drop hits, Delhi’ll want its dam back. That, of course, is predicated on whether the Banglas’ ludicrous iceberg is anything more than a juggernaut of pseudo-science and the opinion, frankly, is no.’

  The Begum Khan has a reputation as a hard, opinionated woman, with too much learning and too few manners. Muslim traits; but that’s not the sort of thing you mention in company. But she is a voice men listen to, in her articles and radio pieces and talks. And there are strange rumours about her quiet, busy little husband.

  ‘Seems we’re dammed if we do and damned if we don’t,’ Mrs Sharma puns in English. The ladies smile and the cricket ground rustles to applause as Bharat hit a boundary. A sport of gentle, distant sounds, cricket; muted handclaps, a click of ball on bat, muffled voices. The umpire lowers his finger, the scoreboard flips over, the ladies turn back to the sky. The confrontation is ended, the contrails blowing ragged on a high wind from the south east, the monsoon wind. The shy Mrs Sood wonders who won.

  ‘Why, our side, of course,’ says Mrs Chopra but Parvati can see that Begum Khan is not so sure. Parvati Nandha shades herself with her parasol from the sun that edges under the canopy. It doubles as sunscreen for her palmer on which scores and Test statistics flash up, beamed diagonally across the pitch, through the umpires and the outfield and the infield and the wicket keeper and the batsman and the bowler, from Krishan, down on the boundary line in the day-ticket stands.

  The English bowler winds up. TREVELYAN says the palmer. SOMERSET. PACE. 16TH CAP FOR ENGLAND. CLEAN BOWLED SIX SRI LANKAN WICKETS IN THE SECOND TEST IN COLOMBO, 2046 SEASON.

  The batsman steps forward, bat held out in front like a narrow shield. He bears the ball down, his counterpart at the far wicket tenses. No. The ball runs a little way before a fielder (SQUARE SHORT LEG says the palmer) scoops it up, looks around, sees no one vulnerable out on the wicket, lobs it back to the bowler.

  LAST BALL OF OVER, Krishan palms.

  ‘Their square short leg was right on top of that one,’ Parvati says. The ladies halt in their talk of state, mildly perturbed. But once again she feels outbatted, a Deep Fine Leg watching the ball scurry towards the boundary. She has tried so hard, learned the language and the rules and still they are beyond her; the war, government strategy, the Ranas, international power politics. She persists: ‘Husainy’s up next, he’ll take Trevelyan’s pace delivery like it’s being served to him on a thali.’

  Her words are less than the jet contrails evaporating in the yellow air above Sampurnanand Stadium. Parvati flips up zoom on her palmer, scans the ranked faces across the pitch. She thumbs WHERE ARE YOU? A message comes back: TO RIGHT OF SIGHT SCREENS. THE BIG WHITE THINGS. She swings her screen over the brown, sweating faces. There. Waving smally, so as not to disturb the players. That would not be cricket.

  She can see him. He cannot see her. Fine features, naturally pale skin darkened by his work in the sun on the roof of Diljit Rana Apartments. Clean-shaven; it is only when she contrasts Krishan with the exuberance of moustaches around him that Parvati realises that has been always been an important thing for her in a man. Nandha is a shaving man too. Hair lightly oiled, springing from its chemical confinement, spilling over his forehead. Teeth, when he shouts in delight at some male pleasure from the rules, good and even and present. His shirt is clean and white and fresh, his trousers, as she notices when he stands up to applaud a good two runs, are simple and well ironed. Parvati feels no shame at watching Krishan anonymously. The first lesson she learned from the women of Kotkhai is that men are their most true and most beautiful when they are least conscious of themselves.

  A crack of willow. The crowd surges to its feet. A boundary. The scoreboard clicks over. The Begum Khan is saying now that the Ranas have made N.K. Jivanjee look quite the fool since the Awadhi incursion sent him and his silly rath yatra flying back to Allahabad like Ravana fleeing to Lanka.

  I SPY YOU, whispers the palmer. The screen shows her Krishan’s smiling face. She tilts her parasol in unobtrusive greeting. Behind her the ladies have fallen to chatter of the Dawar’s party and why Shaheen Badoor Khan had not stayed for the entertainment. Begum Khan pleads that he is a very busy man, doubly so in this time of Bharat’s need. Parvati hears the hooks in their voices. She turns to the game. Now that Krishan has opened up cricket’s mysteries, she can see that there is much subtlety and wit in it. A Test Match is not so different from Town and Country.

  MAZUMDAR WILL TAKE JARDINE, Krishan messages. Jardine walks lazily back from the crease, examining the ball, working at it with his thumb, polishing it. He lines up. The fielders tighten up in their strangely- titled positions. Mazumdar, two stripes of anti-dazzle cream beneath his eyes like a tiger’s stripes, prepares to receive the delivery. Jardine bowls. The ball bounces, hits a scuff in the grass, bounces high, bounces sweet. Everyone in Sampurnanand Stadium can see how high, how sweet; can see Mazumdar judge it, weight it, shift his position, bring his bat back, get underneath it, send it soaring up, out into the yellow sky. It is a magnificent stroke, a daring stroke, a brilliant stroke. The crowd roars. A six! A six! It must be. All the gods demand it. Fielders run, eyes on heaven. None will ever catch it. This ball is going up, up, out.

  Keep your eye on the ball, Krishan had told Parvati when it was spades and apricots on the roof garden. Parvati Nandha keeps her eye on the ball as it reaches the top of its arc and gravity overcomes velocity and it falls to earth, towards the crowd, a red bindi, a red eye, a red sun. An aerial assault. A missile from Krishan, seeking out the heart. The ball falls and the spectators rise but none before Parvati. She surges up and the ball drops into her upheld right hand. She cries out at the sting, then yells ‘Jai Bharat!’, mad on the moment. The crowd cheers, she is marooned in sound. ‘Jai Bharat!’ The noise redoubles. Then, as Krishan showed her, she hooks back her sari and flings the ball out across the boundary. An English fielder catches it, nods a salute and skims it to the bowler. But it is six, six, glorious six to Mazumdar and Bharat. I kept my eye on the ball. I kept my hand soft, moved with it. She turns to show off her pride and achievement to her Ladies and finds their faces rigid with contempt.

  Parvati only allows herself to stop when she is outside the ground but even then she can still hear the muttering and feel the burn of shame on her face. A fool a fool a country fool, carried away with the mob, getting up and making an exhibition of herself like someone with no manners, no class at all. She had shown them up. Look at the Cantonment lady who throws the ball like a man! Jai Bharat!

  Her palmer has been vibrating, message after message after message. She does not want to s
ee them. She does not want even to look back for fear he might have come after her. She heads across the landscaped area to the road. Taxis. There must be taxis, any time on a match day. She stands by the cracked roadside, parasol raised as the phatphats and city cabs slide past. Where are you going who are you driving this time of day? Can’t you see a lady is hailing you?

  Hope-to-be lady. Never-was lady. Never-can-be lady.

  A moped cab swings through the traffic to the kerb. The driver is a buck-toothed youth with a straggle of down for a moustache.

  ‘Parvati!’ The voice is behind her. This is worse than death. She climbs into the back and the driver accelerates away, past the startled, staring figure in the pressed black trousers and the sharply ironed pure white shirt. Returning to the empty apartment, shaking with shame and wanting to die, Parvati finds the doors unlocked and her mother with her travelling baggage encamped in the kitchen.

  SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

  The dam is a long, low curve of bulldozed earth, huge as a horizon, one end invisible from the other, anchored in the gentle contours of the Ganga valley. The Bharati Air Force tilt-jet comes in over Kunda Khadar from the east. It passes low over the waving jawans, turns above the lake. The aeai strike-copters flock closer than Shaheen Badoor Khan finds comfortable. They fly as birds fly, daring manoeuvres no human pilot could attempt, by instinct and embodiment. The tilt-jet banks, the aeaicraft dart and swoop to cover and Shaheen Badoor Khan finds himself looking down into a wide, shallow bowl of algae-stained water rimmed by dirty, sandy gravel as far as the eye can see, white and toxic as salt. A silty sump not even a cow would drink. Across the aisle Sajida Rana shakes her head and whispers, ‘Magnificent.’

  If they had listened, if they had not rushed in the soldiers, heads full of Jai Bharat!, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. The people want a war, Sajida Rana had said at the cabinet meeting. The people shall have one, now.

  The Prime Ministerial jet lands on a hastily-cleared field on the edge of a village ten kays on the Bharati side of the dam. The aeaicraft flock above it like kites over a Tower of Silence. The occupation force has made its divisional headquarters here. Mechanised units dig in to the east, robots sow a minefield. Shaheen Badoor Khan in his city suit blinks behind his label shades in the hard light and notes the villagers standing at the edges of their requisitioned and ruined fields. In her tailored combats Sajida Rana is already striding purposefully towards the receiving line of officers and guards and V.S. Chowdhury. She wants to be Number One pin-up on the barrack-room walls; Mama Bharat, up there with Nina Chandra. The officers namaste and escort Prime Minister and prime counsellor through the dust to the hummers. Sajida Rana strides out, Minister Chowdhury trotting alongside as he attempts to brief her. Little yipping dog, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. As he climbs into the sweatbox of the hummer’s passenger compartment he glances back at the tilt-jet, perched on its wheels and engines as if fearful of contamination. The pilot is a black-visored tick plugged into the plane’s head. Beneath the sensor-tipped nose the long barrel of an autocannon is like the proboscis of some insect that lives by sucking the juices from another. A dainty killer.

  Shaheen Badoor Khan sees the banana club, the blind smile of the old woman, identifying her guests by pheromone; the dark alcoves where the voices mingled and laughed and the bodies relaxed into each other. The alien, beautiful creature, swimming out of the dark and the dhol beat like a nautch dancer.

  The hummer smells of Magic Pine air freshener. Shaheen Badoor Khan unfolds blinking into the light that glares from the concrete road surface. They are on the dam-top road. The air is rank with dead soil and stagnant water. Magic Pine is almost preferable. A thin piss of yellow water trickles from the spillway flume. That is Mother Ganga.

  Jawans form up a hasty honour guard. Shaheen Badoor Khan notes the SAM robots and the nervous glances between the lower level officers. Ten hours ago this was the Republic of Awadh and the soldiers wore green, white and orange triple yin-yangs on their otherwise identical chameleon camous. Easy mortar range from those ghost villages revealed in their architectural nakedness by the dwindling water level. A single sniper, even. Sajida Rana strides on, her hand-tooled boots clicking on the roadbed. The troops are ranked up beyond the dais. Someone is testing the PA with a series of feedback shrieks. The news channel camerapersons spot the Prime Minister in combats and charge her. Military Police draw lathis and brush them aside. Shaheen Badoor Khan waits at the foot of the steps as Prime Minister, Defence Secretary and Divisional Commander mount the dais. He knows what Sajida Rana will say. He put the final lacquer on it himself this morning in the limo to the military airfield. The general susurrus of men gathered together under a hot sun ebbs as they see their commander-in-chief take the microphone. Shaheen Badoor Khan nods in silent pleasure as she holds the silence.

  ‘Jai Bharat!’

  An unscripted moment. Shaheen Badoor Khan’s heart freezes in his throat. The men know it too. The silence hangs, then erupts. Two thousand voices thunder it back. Jai Bharat! Sajida Rana gives the call and response three times. Then she delivers the message of her speech. It is not for the soldiers standing easy on the dam top road, sloped at their weapons in the APCs. It is for the cameras and the mikes and the network news editors. Sought a peaceful resolution. Bharat not a nation that craves war. Tigress roused. Sheathe her claws. Hoped for diplomatic solution. Still achieve a negotiated peace with honour. Noble offer to our enemies. Water should always have been shared. No one nation. Ganga our common life-vein.

  The soldiers don’t shift. They don’t shuffle. They stand in their battle gear in the tremendous heat with their heavy weapons and take this stuff and cheer at the cheer points and hush down when Sajida Rana quiets them with her eyes and hands, and when she leaves them on a final killer: ‘And finally, I bring you another major triumph. Gentlemen, Bharat three hundred and eighty seven for seven!’ they erupt and the chanting starts. Jai Bharat! Jai Bharat! Sajida Rana takes their applause and strides off while it is still fresh and ringing.

  ‘Not bad, eh, Khan?’

  ‘Mazumdar just went for one hundred and seventeen,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan says, falling in behind his leader. The hummer convoy whisks them back to the forward command headquarters. This was always going to be an in and out operation. General Staff had counselled in every way against it but Sajida Rana insisted. The offer of conciliation must be made from a posture of might that would not demean the Rana government. The analysts had studied the satellite data and cywar intelligence and given an hour of reasonable confidence before the Awadhis could muster a retaliation. The hummers and APCs rip back along the corrugated country dirt roads. Their dust plumes must be visible from orbit. The aeaicraft flock in behind like a hunt of raptors. Sentries nervously eye the sky as they hurry Prime Minister Rana and her chief advisor to the powering-up tilt-jet. The hatch seals, Shaheen Badoor Khan belts up and the ship bounds into the air, leaving his stomach down there on the flattened, scorched crops. The pilot climbs at full throttle a hair under stall angle. Shaheen Badoor Khan was not born to fly. He feels every lurch and drop like a little death. His fists grip white on the armrests. Then the tilt-jet flips over into horizontal flight.

  ‘Well that was a bit dramatic, wasn’t it?’ Sajida Rana says, unfastening her seat belt. ‘Bloody army never forgets who’s the woman here. Jai Bharat! Still, that went well. I did think the cricket score finished it off nicely.’

  ‘If you say you, Ma’am.’

  ‘I do say so.’ Sajida Rana writhes in her clinging combats. ‘Bloody uncomfortable things. I don’t how anyone ever does any serious fighting in them. So, your analysis?’

  ‘It will be frank.’

  ‘Is it ever anything else?’

  ‘I think the occupation of the dam is foolhardy. The plan called . . .’

  ‘The plan was good as far as it went, but it had no balls.’

  ‘Prime Minister, with respect . . .’

  ‘This is diplomacy, I know. But fuck it, I am not g
oing to let N.K. Jivanjee play the Hindutva martyr. We’re Ranas, for God’s sake.’ She lets the little touch of theatre ebb, then asks, ‘Our position is still salvageable?’

  ‘Salvageable, but international pressure will be a factor when it hits the news channels. It might give the British their excuse to renew calls for an international conference.’