River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  She feels the heat radiate from the big, soft-engined car as it tucks in beside her, a Merc SUV shimmering scarab black. The mirrored window rolls down, the low-level dhol’n’bass thud from the music centre jumps a level.

  ‘Hi! Hi !’

  A gap-toothed, dark-faced gunda leers out at her. He wears a string of pearls knotted around his neck.

  Head down, fists up. Keep moving. Her ass quivers; her palmer, hooked over her waistband, is being called. Not a voice or video or a text: a direct data-transfer. Then the Merc accelerates past and the driver waves his palmer at her and gives an OK sign. He swings the black car through a gap between a municipal bus and a water tanker with its military escort.

  Najia wants to collapse into the cool of the Imperial’s leisure pool but her mystery message won’t let her. It’s a video file. Her journalistic sense whispers caution. She takes the palmer into a shower cubicle and clicks up the video. N.K Jivanjee is seated in a light, airy pavilion of beautifully patterned kalamkaris. The fabric billows gently, pregnantly. N.K Jivanjee namastes.

  ‘Ms Askarzadah, good morning to you. I assume that is when my operatives will deliver this message to you. I trust you have a refreshing walk, I do think exercise first thing in the morning really does get the day off to the best possible start. I do wish I could say that I still greet every dawn with the surya namaskar, but, ah, the years . . . Anyway, my congratulations on the use to which you put my last piece of information. You have exceeded my expectations; I am quite, quite delighted. Therefore I have decided to entrust you with another release of privileged data. You will pick it up from my worker at midnight tonight, at the address which will follow on this screen. This one will be of the utmost sensitivity, I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that it will transform the political shape of this nation. All my previous caveats are repeated, and amplified. Yet again, I’m sure we can rely on you. Thank you, bless you.’

  Najia Askarzadah knows the address. She takes care to lock her palmer in her room before joining her walking mates splashing in the blue pool.

  Go somewhere once and you will be there again sooner than you think. The noise in the club is an assault. The scrap wood benches are packed with men waving betting slips and roaring down on to the blood spattered sand. Many are in uniform. All war is a bet. The instructions on her palmer direct her down the stairs, into the pit. The sound, the stink of sweat and spilled beer and oxidised perfume, are overpowering. Najia pushes between the shouting, gesticulating bodies. Through the forest of hands she can glimpse the fighting microsabres held high by their owners, parading around the sand ring. She wonders about the handsome, feral boy who caught her eye that first night. Then the cats go down, the owners dive over the side of the ring and crowd surges forward with a roar like a hymn. Najia beats through to the satta booths. The bookies measure her with their round, lilac glasses. A fat woman beckons her over.

  ‘Sit, sit here beside me.’

  Najia squeezes on to the bench beside her, Her clothes smell of burned ghee and garlic.

  ‘Have you something for me?’

  The sattawoman ignores her, busy at her book. Her assistant, an old thin man, claws in the cash and sends betting slips skittering across the polished wooden desk. The barker leaps down from his high chair and scuttles into the ring to announce the next bout. Tonight he is dressed as a pierrot.

  ‘No, but I do,’ a voice says sudden and close behind her. She turns. The man leans over the pew-back. He is dressed in black leather; Najia can smell it, smoky, sensual. The feral boy from the Mercedes is beside him; same shirt same grin same string of pearls. The man holds up a manila A4 envelope. ‘This is for you.’ He has dark, liquid eyes, lovely as a girl’s. You do not forget eyes like that and Najia knows she has seen them before. But she hesitates to take the envelope.

  ‘Who are you?

  ‘A paid operative,’ the man says.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘I merely deliver. But I do know that everything in there is real and can be verified.’

  Najia takes the envelope, opens it. Merc-boy’s hand strikes over the partition, staying hers.

  ‘Not here,’ the man says. Najia slides the envelope into her shoulder bag. When she turns back again the stall is empty. She wants to ask that nagging question: why me? But the man with lovely eyes would have no answer to that either. She slips her bag over her shoulder and weaves through the crowd as the barker stalks the killing floor, blasting his air-horn and bellowing bet! bet! bet! She remembers where she knows those eyes from. They met across this perspective, her by the balcony rail, he in the satta pit.

  Back on the moped, out in the traffic. The city seems close tonight, threatening, knife-bearing. The cars and trucks want her under their wheels. The street jams up around a cow taking a long luxurious piss in the middle of the road. Najia opens the manila envelope, slides out the top third of the first photograph. She pulls out half. Then the whole. Then she takes out the next photograph. Then the next. Then the next.

  The cow has wandered on. Vans are hooting, drivers shouting, waving, issuing vivid curses at her.

  And the next. And the next. That man. That man is. That man, she recognises him though his is a face that has concealed itself well from the cameras. That man is said to be the will behind Sajida Rana. Her private secretary. Giving money. Wads of cash. To a nute. In a club. Shaheen Badoor Khan.

  The entire street is looking at her. A policeman advances waving his lathi. Najia Askarzadah rams the pictures back into the envelope, heart hammering, twists the throttle, revs away, her little alcohol engine going putty-putter-putt. Shaheen Badoor Khan. Shaheen Badoor Khan. She’s driving by amygdala alone through the blaring, poisonous traffic, seeing the money, seeing the riverside apartment in New Sarnath, seeing the noo clowthz and holidaze and champagne that isn’t Omar Khayyam and interviews and the name on the banner headlines Bharat-wide India-wide Asia-wide Planet-wide and in far cool nice Sweden her parents opening the Dagens Nyheter and it’s their darling daughter’s photograph under the foreign news leadline.

  She stops. Her heart is beating arrhythmically, fluttering, wowing. Caffeine does it shock does it big sex does it joy does it. Getting everything you ever wanted does it. She can see. She can hear. She can sense. A gyre of noise and colour confronts her. No other place her preconsciousness could bring her than to the heart of Bharat’s madness and contradiction. Sarkhand Roundabout.

  Nothing with wheels and an engine is getting through this intersection. The radiating roads have swollen like diseased arteries into tent cities and truck laagers, glossy with yellow streetlight and the glow of sidewalk shrines. Najia sets her feet on the ground and walks her little bike into the fringes, drawn to the magnificent chaos. The spinning wall of colour, glimpsed through the mess of trucks and plastic sheeting, is a wheel of people, loping and chanting as they orbit the gaudily-painted concrete statue of Ganesha. Some carry placards, some hold lathis by the tips, the ends swaying and bobbing over their heads like a forest of cane in a pre-monsoon wind. Some wear dhotis and shirts, some are in western pants, even suits. Some are naked, ash-smeared sadhus. A group of women in red, devotees of Kali, rush past. All have fallen into unconscious lock-step and perfect rhythm. Individuals spin in, spin out, but the wheel turns endlessly. The cylinder of air between the facing buildings throbs like a drum.

  A massive red and orange object lumbers into Najia’s field of vision: rath yatra, like the one she saw on Industrial Road. Perhaps that same one. N.K. Jivanjee’s Chariot of Siva. She walks her bike inward. The syncopated chanting is a mad, joyful hymn. She can feel her breath and pulse fall into rhythm with the dance, feel her womb tighten, her nipples harden. She is part of this insanity. It defines her. It is all the danger and madness she has sought as the antidote to her sane Swedishness. It tells her it is still a life of surprises, worth enduring. Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers! declares a large yellow advertising sign above the crazy mela.

  A buck-t
oothed karsevak thrusts a sheet of A5 at her.

  ‘Read read! Demons attack us, sex-crazed violators of children! ’ he shouts. The flyer is printed front Hindi, back English. ‘Our leaders are in thrall to Bible Christians and Demonic Mohammedans! Mata Bharat founders! Read this paper!’

  The leaflet features a large cartoon of Sajida Rana as a shadow puppet, dancing in her designer combat fatigues, her sticks held by a hook-nosed caricature Arab in and red and white shumagg. His ogal reads Badoor-Khan. She points the way for an American televangelist who sits at the controls of a big bulldozer, cigar erect in mouth, advancing on a Hindu mother and child cowering in the shadow of the rat-vahana of an enraged Ganesha, trunk uplifted, axe drawn back to strike.

  Child-raping paedophile Muslims plan capitulation to Coca-Cola Kultur! First they steal the waters of Mother Ganga, then Sarkhand, then Holy Bharat. Your nation, your soul, are at risk!

  They hate him, thinks Najia Askarzadah, still trembling from the accreted human energy. They hate him worse than anything I can imagine. And I can deliver him to them. I can give them what they want, the highest, hardest fall. Child-raping paedophile? No, much much worse: a lover of things not male, not female. Monsters. Nutes. An un-man. A glare of light, a bloom of yellow flame and a thunder of approval from the jogging crowd. A burning Awadhi flag twists into her view, writhing like a soul in fire. She can lift a finger and send all these futures spinning off into unknown dimensions. She has never felt so alive, so potent, so powerful and capricious. All her life she has been the outsider, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the Afghan Swede; wanting to be part, the whole, the core, the blood. She feels a delirious rub of warm damp against the vinyl of the bike saddle.

  SHIV

  Shiv and Yogendra ride up through a cylinder of sound. Construxx boasts a crew of architectural surveyors who cruise Varanasi and Ranapur’s construction zone jungles looking the best pre- and post-industrial sites. Construxx’s niche is the dips in the cash flow charts. Last month it was the penthouse levels of the Narayan Tower in west Varauna: eighty eight floors of rentable flexform office space; tenants four. This month it is the vast concrete shaft that, when the money comes on line again after the war, will be University metro station. Construxx boasts mighty architecture and word-of-mouth PR . If you want to find it, you must ask the right people in the right places.

  Location of Construxx August 2047 Site. Take the metro to Panch Koshi Station, last stop on the new South Loop line, all chrome and glass and that concrete that looks oily to the touch. At the end of the platform is a temporary wooden staircase down onto the tracks. This section of the line is deactivated. Follow the tunnel until you see a small circle of flickering light. Two dark shapes will emerge on either side of the expanding circle: they are security. You must either impress them with your looks, your style, your celebrity or your status. Or be an invited guest of Nitish and Chunni Nath.

  Construxx August 2047 Site: for best effect, look up. Blue spots swing and dash down from a lighting gantry rigged under the temporary plastic roof. Catwalks, platforms, rigging wires, steel grilles and meshes shatter the light into a net of shadow and aqua. Moving shadows are bodies, dancing, grooving to the personalised tunes coming through their palmers. The DJ box is halfway up the wall, a rickety raft of scaffolding rods and construction mesh. Here a two-human, fifteen-aeai crew pump out a customised channel of Construxx August 2047 mix for every dancer out there on the platforms.

  Construxx August 2047 Site obeys a strict and simple vertical hierarchy. Shiv and Yogendra ride the service elevator up through the new meat and the office grrrls who’ve saved all month for this one night of notoriety and the soapi wannabes and the fine young criminals and the sons and daughters of something, all arrayed on their appropriate platforms. The elevator drags them up red spray-bomb letters, each ten metres high: the dogma of Construxx, filling half the orbit of the concrete shaft: Art Empire Industry. Shiv flicks away his dead bidi. It rolls through the steel grating beneath his feet and falls into the throbbing blue, shedding sparks. The main bar and crush zone is on what will be the ticket concourse. The true gods are up on the vip levels, stacked out over the drop like a fan of playing cards. Shiv moves towards the security. They are two big blonde Russian women in orange coveralls bearing the Construxx mantra and bulges that speak of concealed yet easily accessible firepower. While they scan his invitation, Shiv checks out the action up on the vip level. The Naths are two small figures dressed in gold, like images of gods, giving darshan to their supplicants. A Russia grrrl waves Shiv over to the bar. He is far down the social order.

  Drinks are served from the ticket counters. Ranks of cocktail-wallahs mix, shake, chill and pour in a rhythm part dance, part martial art. Cocktail of the night seems to be something called Kunda Khadar. Drop an ice bubble into neat vodka. Ice cracks, seeps a clear liquid that turns red in contact with the alcohol. The blood of Holy Bharat shed on the waters of Mother Ganga. Shiv wouldn’t mind trying one, wouldn’t mind anything with a shot of grain in it to steady his nerve but he can’t even afford the house water. Someone will buy him one. The only eyes that will hold his belong to a girl by the railing, alone, on the edge of the spirals of talk. She is red: short soft terracotta leather skirt, a fall of long, straight crimson hair. An opal nestles in her navel. She has garial skin boots with feathers and bells swinging from the straps, a new look Shiv must have missed in his exile in Shit City. One two three seconds she looks at him then turns away to gaze down into the pit. Shiv leans on the rail and looks out into the motion and light.

  ‘It’s bad luck, you know.’

  ‘What’s bad luck?’ the girl asks. She has a lazy, city drawl.

  ‘This.’ He taps her belly jewel. She flinches but does not recoil. She balances her gyroscopic cocktail glass on the rail and turns to face him. Red tendrils spiral through the clear alcohol. ‘Opals. Bad luck jewels. That is what the English Victorians believed.’

  ‘I can’t say I feel particularly unlucky,’ the girl says. ‘Are you bad luck?’

  ‘The worst kind,’ Shiv says. He relaxes and spreads himself along the railing and so knocks her cocktail off the railing. It drops like a god’s tear, catching the light like a jewel. A woman’s scream comes up from below. ‘And there’s your bad luck. I’m so sorry. I would get you another one . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Her name is Juhi. Shiv steers her towards the ticket booths. Yogendra detaches himself from watching pretty things and follows at a discreet distance. The Kunda Khadars really are very cold and very good and very expensive. The red stuff is cinnamon flavoured, with a little THC kick. Juhi chatters away about the club and its people. Shiv glances up at the vip zone. The Nath siblings have moved up to a higher level yet, two gold stars under the rippling plastic canopy. Juhi kicks him gently, foreplayfully with her garial boot. Feathers and everything.

  ‘I see you looking up there, badmash. Who are you working for?’ Juhi works closer to him.

  Shiv nods towards the Naths, surrounded by their dark fixers. Juhi screws her face up.

  ‘Chuutyas. You have business with them? You be careful. They can do what they like because they have money and their daddy owns the police. They look like angels but inside they are dark and old. They are bad to women. He wants to fuck because he is twenty years old inside his head but he can’t get it up so he has to take hormones and things and even then it’s nothing. I’ve seen bigger on a dog. So he uses toys and things. And she is as bad. She watches him play. I know this because a friend of mine went with them once. They are as bad as each other.’

  Russia grrl catches Shiv’s eye, nods him over, and your little monkey too.

  ‘Come up with me,’ he says to Juhi. ‘You don’t have to meet them.’ He is thinking about when he has his set-up money. There will be more of those Kunda Khadar things and a hotel room and some place with junk food and a television for Yogendra. Shiv begins to feel the glow in his belly. The shoulders go back. The chin up. The step leng
thens, lightens. Golden people turn to look, their Kunda Khadars like little murders in their hands. At the centre of them, the golden children. Nitish and Chunni Nath stand side by side. They are dressed identically in gold brocaded sherwanis. Their faces are smooth and puppy-fat and more open and innocent than they should be. The girl Chunni’s hair hangs to her waist. Nitish is shaved, his scalp glitters with mica dust. Shiv thinks it makes him look like a cancer kid. They smile. Now he sees where it is hiding. In the old, old smiles. Nitish beckons.