River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  As Shaheen Badoor Khan crunches back over the raked gravel to the state car the dark trees and shrubs around him light up with birdsong. For a moment he thinks it is the singing ringing in his inner ear of all the lies that are his life rubbing past each other as they flock to the light. Then he realises it is the overture of the dawn chorus, the herald birds that sing in the darkest of night. Shaheen Badoor Khan stops, turns, lifts up his head, listens. The air is hot but piercingly clean and present. He breathes pure darkness. He senses the heavens a dome above him, each star a pin of light spearing down into his heart. Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the universe wheel around him. He is at once axle and engine, subject and object, turned and turner. A tiny thing, a small song calling out with countless others into the vast dark. Time will smooth out his deeds and misdeeds; history will flatten his name into the general dust. It is nothing. For the first time since those fisher children splashed and adventured in the Kerala sunset he understands free. Joy kindles in the well of his manipura chakra. The Sufi moment of seflessness, timelessness. God in the unexpected. He does not deserve it. The mystery of it is that it never comes to those who think they do.

  ‘Where to, sahb?’

  Responsibilities. After enlightenment, duty.

  ‘To the haveli.’ It is all downhill now. The words having been said once are easy to repeat. Sajida Rana had been right. He should have told her first. The accusation had surprised him: Shaheen Badoor Khan had been reminded, sharply, that his Prime Minister was a woman, a married woman who would not take her husband’s name. He polarises the windows dark against prying eyes.

  Bilquis doesn’t deserve it. She deserves a good husband, a true man who, even if she no longer loved him or shared his bed or his life, would do her no disgrace in public, would smile and talk the right talk and never cause her to cover her face in shame among the Ladies of the Law Circle. He had it all - Sajida Rana had said as much - he had it all and he still could not stop himself from destroying it. How deeply he deserves what has happened to him. Then on the sun-cracked Bharat government leather upholstery, Shaheen Badoor Khan’s perceptions turn. He doesn’t deserve it. No one deserves it and everyone deserves it. Who can hold his head up, and who would presume to judge? He is a good advisor; the best advisor. He has served his country wisely and well. It still has need of him. Perhaps he can go dark, burrow down like some toad in a drought to the bottom of the mud and wait for the climate to change.

  An edge of light fills the streets as the government car whirrs along, soft as a moth. Shaheen Badoor Khan allows himself to smile inside his cube of darkened glass. The car turns the corner where the sadhu sits on a concrete slab, one arm held aloft in a sling strapped around a lamp-post. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows that trick. After a time you lose all feeling. The car stops abruptly. Shaheen Badoor Khan has to put out his hands to keep himself from falling.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Trouble, sahb.’

  Shaheen Badoor Khan unpolarises the window. The road ahead of him is blocked with early traffic. People have left their cabs and are leaning against their open doors to watch the spectacle that has stopped them. Bodies stream past the intersection; shadowy men in white shirts and dark pants, young men with first moustaches, moving at a steady, angry jog, lathis jerking up and down in their hands. A battery of drummers passes, a group of fierce, sharp-faced women in Kali red; naga sadhus, white with ash, wielding crude Siva trishuls. Shaheen Badoor Khan watches a vast, pink papier ‘niche effigy of Ganesha lumber into view, gaudy, almost fluorescent in the rising light. It veers from side to side, steered unsteadily by bare-legged puppeteers. Behind Ganesha, an even more extraordinary sight; the billowing orange and red spire of a rath yatra. And torches. In every hand, with every attendant and runner, a fire. Shaheen Badoor Khan dares open the window a crack. An avalanche of sound falls on him: a vast, inchoate roar. Individual voices emerge, take up a theme; submerge again: chants, prayers; slogans, nationalist anthems, karsevak hymns. He does not need to hear the words to know who they are. The great gyre of protestors around Sarkhand Roundabout has broken out and is streaming across Varanasi. It would only do so if it had a greater object for its hate. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows where they are going with fire in their hands. The word is out. He had hoped for longer.

  Shaheen Badoor Khan looks behind him. The road is still clear.

  ‘Get me out of here.’

  Gohil complies without question. The big car backs up, swings round, hooting savagely at traffic as it mounts the concrete central strip and crunches down on to the opposite side of the road. As Shaheen Badoor Khan blackens the windows, he glimpses smoke coiling up into the sky in the east, oily as burning fat from a funeral pyre against the yellow dawn.

  TAL

  The phatphat is headed nowhere, just driving. Tal had thrust a bouquet of rupees at the taxi driver and told him that: just drive.

  Yt has to get away. Abandon job, home, everything yt had made for ytself in Varanasi. Go to a place where nobody knows yts name. Mumbai. Back to Mum. Too close. Too bitchy. Deep south, Bangalore, Chennai. They have big media industries there. There is always work for a good designer. Even Chennai might not be far enough. If yt could change yts name, yts face again. Yt could go via Patna, buy more surgery from Nanak. Stick it on the tab. If yts credit was still good with Nanak. Yt’d need work, soon. Yes, that’s yt; get everything, get to the station, get to Patna, get a new identity.

  Tal taps the driver.

  ‘White Fort.’

  ‘Don’t go there this time of night.’

  ‘I’ll pay you double.’

  Yt should have taken the money. The cash in yts bag is running out like water through sand. The cards that aren’t at the limit are close to it. A crore rupees, untraceable, unstoppable, a draft, that could take yt anywhere. Anywhere on the planet. But that would be to accept yts role. Who has written that yt must be punished? What has yt done to deserve global infamy? Tal looks at yts small life, unpicks the terrible vulnerabilities that have turned it into an unthinking political weapon. Alien, alone, isolated, new. They had been watching from the moment yt stepped off the shatabdi. Tranh, the night of burning delirium in the airport hotel - the best sex yt has ever known - the temple party, the creamy gilt-edged invitation it had waved around the office like an icon . . . Every one of those chota pegs poured down yts golden throat . . . Yt had been played like a bansuri.

  Tal finds yts fists tight in fury. The heat of yts anger surprises Tal. Safe, sane, wise nute would be to run. But yt wants to know. Yt wants one good, clear look at the face that ordained all this for yt.

  ‘Okay my friend, this is as far as you go.’ The driver waves his radio. ‘Those Shivaji lunatics are on the move. They’ve broken out of Sarkhand Roundabout.’

  ‘You’re leaving me with them out there?’ Tal shouts after the receding phatphat. Yt can hear the rage of Hindutva, swelling and receding in the cavernous streets. And the streets are waking, shop by stall by kiosk by dhaba. A pick-up dumps bundles of morning editions in the concrete centre strip. The newsboys descend like black kites. Tal pulls yts collar around yts betraying features. Yts shaved skull feels hideously vulnerable, a fragile brown egg. Two roads to safety. Yt can see the satellite-dish studded revetments of White Fort beyond the rooftop water tanks and solar panels. Tal slips along the line of vehicles, head-down, avoiding eye contact with the shopkeepers rolling up their shutters, the night workers heading back from a shift on Pacific Coast Time. Sooner, not later, someone will see what yt is. Yt eyes the bundles of newspaper. Front page, banner headline, full colour splash.

  The sound of the mob moves behind yt, left, then right, then close behind. Tal breaks into a jog, coat pulled tight around yts chin despite the rising heat. People are looking now. One more junction. One more junction. The voiceless roar moves again, seemingly in front now, then leaps in volume and vehemence. Tal glances around. They are behind it. A front of jogging males in white shirts turns out of a side street on to the avenue. Ther
e is a moment of silence. Even the traffic falls still and hushed. Then a focused roar strikes Tal with almost physical force. Yt gives a small whimper of fear, throws off yts stupid, encumbering coat and runs. Yips and bays go up behind yt. The karsevaks come leaping in pursuit. Not far. Not far. Not. Far. Not. Far. Not. Far. Close. Close. Close. Tal fires ytself through the forest of pillars that are White Fort’s undercroft. Howling shouts echo and dart off the concrete piles. We are closing. We are fast. We are faster than you, unnatural, perverted thing. You are bloated with unnaturalness and vice. We will stamp on you, slug. We will hear you burst beneath our boots. Missiles clatter and bounce around Tal: cans, bottles, pieces of broken circuitry. And Tal is failing, failing. Fading. There’s nothing left in yt. The batteries are flat. Zero charge. Tal taps commands into yts subdermals. Seconds later the adrenaline rush hits. Yt’ll pay dearly for it later. Yt’ll pay anything now. Tal pulls away from the hunters. Yt can see the elevator bank. Let there be one. Ardhanarisvara, Lord of the divided things, let there be one, and let it work. The hunters slap their hands off the oily concrete pillars. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You.

  Green light. Green light is salvation, green light is life. Tal dives towards the green elevator light as the door slides open. Yt squeezes through the dark slit, hits the button. The doors close. Fingers squeeze through, feeling for the sensors, the switches, the flesh within, anything. Centimetre by centimetre, they force the door open.

  ‘There he is, the chuutya!’

  Yt! Yt! Tal screams silently as it smashes at the fingers with yts fists, yts sharp boot heels. The fingers reel back. The door seals. The ascent begins. Tal goes two levels low to draw them up, waits while the doors open and the doors close and then goes up one over. As yt creeps down the stairwell, glossy from the steady tread of bare feet and reeking of dank ammonia even in drought, yt hears a growing babble of voices. Tal edges around the turn. Yts neighbours are crowded into Mama Bharat’s open door. Tal edges a step lower. Everyone is talking, gesticulating, some of the women have their dupattas pressed to their mouths in shock. Some bow and bob in the rituals of grief. Men’s voices cut through the jabber and keening, a word here, a phrase there. Yes, the family are coming, right away, who would have left an old woman here on her own, shameful shameful, the police will find them.

  One step closer.

  The smashed door to Mama Bharat’s apartment lies on the floor. Over the heads of the angry men, Tal can see the desecrated room. Walls, windows, paintings of gods and avatars are full of holes. Tal gapes at the holes, not wanting to comprehend. Bullet holes. It is a gape too long. A cry.

  ‘There he is!’

  Neighbour Paswan’s querulous voice. The crowd parts, allowing a clear line of connection between Tal and Paswan’s accusing finger and the feet on the floor. Every head turns. Their feet are in a slick of blood. The slick of startling, fresh, red blood, fresh with life and oxygen, already drawing in the flies. The flies are in the room. The flies are in yts head.

  You’re dispensable now, Tranh had said.

  The feet in the fresh, oily blood. They are still in the building. Yt turns, runs again.

  ‘There he is, the monster!’ Paswan roars. Tal’s neighbours take up the cry. The mass voice throbs in the concrete shaft of the stairwell. Tal grasps huge handfuls of steel banister, hauls ytself up the stairs. Everything aches. Everything screams and moans and tells yt it’s come to the end, there is no more. But Mama Bharat is dead. Mama Bharat is shot and this August morning with the early light climbing down the sides of the shaft from the grimy cupola far above, all the hatred and despite and fear and anger of Bharat is focused on one nute hauling ytself up a concrete stairwell. Yts neighbours, the people yt lived among so quietly these months, want yt torn apart by their hands.

  Yt pushes past two men on the seventh-floor landing. A flicker of memory: Tal glances back. They are young, and lean dressed in baggy pants and white shirts, the Young Bharati Male Street uniform but there is something out of place about them. Something not White Fort. Eyes meet. Tal remembers where yt has seen them before. They wore suits then, fine dark suits. They had passed him on the landing, down there, as Mama Bharat put out the trash and Tal had danced past, blowing a kiss, all excited and bouncing about heading out to the end of it all. They had looked back, as yt looks back now. A good designer never forgets the details.

  You’re dispensable now.

  In the instant it takes them to work out their mistake, Tal has gained a floor and a half but they are young and male and fit and do not wear hi-fashion boots and have not been running for what seems an entire night.

  ‘Out of my way!’ Tal yells as yt ploughs into the head of the daily procession of water girls from the upper levels descending the endless staircases with their plastic litrejohns balanced on their heads. Yt must get into the open. White Fort is a trap, a vast concrete killing machine. Yt has to get out. Get into the crowd, get among the people. They will shield you with their bodies. Tal swings off at the next landing, wrenches open the door and plunges out on to the exterior walkway.

  Diljit Rana’s urban planners, good neo-Le Corbusiens all, had conceived White Fort as a village in the sky and had drafted in wide sun-lit terraces for urban farming. Most of the drip-irrigated plots have gone to dirt and dust in the long drought and plumbing crisis or grow stands of GM cannabis, tended with painstaking love and bottled spa water. Feral goats, five generations from their first urbanised forebears, graze the trash-piles and desiccated market gardens. They are as sure-footed on the concrete runways and safety rails of White Fort as their native precipices. The maintenance bots duel them ferociously with high-voltage tasers. The goats have a taste for wiring insulation.

  Tal runs. Goats look, up ruminating. Mothers snatch children out of the path of the mad, flying, perverted thing. Old men smoking bidis and solving crosswords in the early sun follow yt with their heads, delighted by action, any action. Young men, idle men cheer and hoot.

  The chemical surge is failing, fading. Yt’s not built to run. Tal glances over yts shoulder. Guns beat up and down in the men’s hands. Black hard guns. That changes everything on the White Fort farm levels. Women whisk children indoors. Old men hide themselves. Young men edge away.

  ‘Help me!’ Tal cries. Yt grabs bins, piles of paper, baskets, anything that might cost the men behind yt a second, pulls them down behind yt. Saris and dhotis and lungis, the daily laundry is pinned out along line after line sagging across the wide sky-streets. Tal ducks under the dripping dhobi, sticks out yts arm to knock out clothes prop after clothes prop. Yt hears damp curses, looks back to see the hunters disentangling themselves from a wet green sari. Sanctuary is in sight, a service elevator at the end of the street filling up with the school run. Tal darts through the closing gates, dodges past the fluttering chaperone. The lift jerks and begins its descent. Tal hears voices. Yt looks up to see the two dacoits hanging over the rail. They put their guns up. From the midst of the press of black-eyed primary-school girls in their beautiful neat uniforms, Tal waves up at them.

  The sun pours scalding light into the canyon streets of Varanasi as Tal moves through the crush hour. Yt slips between the walking schoolkids and the white-shirted civil servants on bicycles, the street sellers and the shopworkers, the doorway sleepers and the students in their labels and Japanese shoes, the delivery drays piled high with cardboard boxes of Lux Macroman underwear and the fine ladies under the canopies of the cycle rickshaws. Any time, any one in that crowd might recognise yt from the front page of the newspaper tucked under his arm, from the breakfast news bulletin on his palmer, from the news stand headline posters or the scrolling ad-screens on every intersection and chowk. One shout; one hand thrust out to snag a jacket sleeve; one Hey! You! Stop! and that milling motion of individuals would crystallise into mob, one mind, one will, one intent.

  Tal skips down trash-strewn steps into VART. Even if the killers had followed yt through the morning crush, they cannot
hope to hunt yt in the labyrinth of Varanasi underground. Tal dodges the line for the iris reader, slips into the women’s queue, who do not permit the Varanasi Area Rapid Transit such liberties with their eyes. Yt drops five rupees into the hopper and squeezes through the barrier before the ladies of New Varanasi can complain.

  Tal works up the platform to the women’s section. Yt scans the crowd for the wake of killers cutting through the press of people. So easy to die here. A hand in the back as the train surges out of the tunnel. And the down-wave is coming, the ashes of the artificial adrenaline hit washing out of yts bloodstream. Tal shivers, alone and small and very very paranoid. A wave of sickeningly hot, electric air; the train slams into the station. Tal rides two stops in the women-only bogie and gets off. Yt counts one train, two, then boards again in the reserved women’s section. Yt has no idea if this is the right thing to do, if there is any right thing to do, if there are any self-help books on how to throw killers on the city metro.

  The robot train slams through the underpinnings of Varanasi, jolting across the points and switchovers. Tal feels naked among the women’s bodies. Yt can hear their thoughts: this is not your place; we do not know what you were but you are no longer one of us, hijra. Then yts heart freezes. Jammed in between a stanchion and the fire extinguisher, an office girl has found room to read the Bharat Times. Her attention is on the back page, the cricket news. The front shrieks an eighty-point banner headline and a half-page photograph. Yt is looking at ytself, face pale in the flash, eyes wide as moons.