River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  Parvati throws her hands up but Mrs Sadurbhai cuts in and breaks her protest.

  ‘Parvati, why take needless risks? You say you are safe here and maybe you are, but what if all these wonderful machines fail and the bombs fall on your lovely garden? Parvati, it may only be a risk the size of a grain of rice but why take any risk at all? Come back with me to Kotkhai; the Awadhi fighting machines will never find you there. It will only be for a little time, until this unpleasantness is over.’

  Parvati Nandha sets down her chai glass. The low sun shines into her face, she must shade her eyes to read her mother’s expression.

  ‘What is this about really?’

  ‘I’m not at all sure what you mean.’

  ‘I mean, you’ve never really thought my husband sufficiently honours me.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t, I don’t, Parvati. You married within jati and that is a treasure beyond price. It just grieves me when ambitious women - no, we are speaking as we find here this evening, so I shall call them what they are, caste-jumpers: there, that’s it said - when caste-jumpers flaunt their wealth and husbands and status to which they have less right than you. It hurts me, Parvati . . .’

  ‘My husband is a highly respected and important civil servant. I know of no one who speaks of him with the slightest disrespect. I want for nothing. See, this fine garden? This is one of the most sought after government apartments.’

  ‘Yes, but government, Parvati. Government.’

  ‘I have no desire to move to Cantonment. I am content here. I also have no desire to come with you to Kotkhai in some ruse to focus my husband’s attention on my needs because you do not think he appreciates me enough.’

  Parvati, I never . . .’

  ‘Oh, forgive me.’ The women fall silent at the third voice. Krishan stands at the head of the stairs in his cricketing best. ‘I need to, ah, check the drip irrigator.’

  ‘Mother, this is Krishan, my garden designer. All this is the work of his hands.’

  Krishan namastes.

  ‘A remarkable transformation,’ Mrs Sadurbhai says grudgingly.

  ‘Often the finest gardens grow from the least promising soils,’ Krishan says and leaves to fiddle purposelessly with the pipes and taps and regulators.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ Mrs Sadurbhai whispers to her daughter. Parvati catches Krishan’s eye as he lights little terracotta oil cups along the bed borders as day ebbs from the sky. The tiny flames gutter and sway in the wind that has sprung up among the rooftops. Thunder growls in the dark east. ‘He has a familiar way with him. He gives looks. It is never good when they give looks.’

  He has come to see me, Parvati thinks. He has followed me here to be with me, to keep me safe from the tongues of the caste-jumping women, to be strong for me when I am in need.

  The garden is transformed into a constellation of lamps. Krishan bows to the ladies of the house.

  ‘I’ll bid you a good night and I hope to find you well in the morning.’

  ‘You should have him pick up those apricot stones,’ Mrs Sadurbhai throws after Krishan as he goes down the stairs. ‘They will only attract monkeys.’

  VISHRAM

  Marianna Fusco really does have the most magnificent nipples, Vishram thinks as she heaves herself out of the pool and drips across the tiles to the sunlounger. He traces them through wet lycra; round and hand-filling, pores puckered into little sub-nipples, textured, satisfying. The cold water has brought them up like champagne corks.

  ‘Ah God, that’s great,’ Marianna Fusco declares, shaking out her wet hair and knotting a silk wrap around her waist. She flops weightily into the chair beside Vishram, leans back, slides on shades. Vishram motions for the waiter to pour coffee.

  He hadn’t meant to move into the same hotel as his legal advisor. War had put suites at a premium; every hotel car park in Varanasi was full of satellite uplink vans, every bar full of foreign correspondents catching up on the boring bits between conflicts. He had not even realised it was the same hotel at which he had left her after the disastrous first night limo ride until he saw her descending in an elevator through the glass atrium. He knew the cut of that suit anywhere.

  The suite is unexceptionably comfortable but Vishram can’t sleep in it. He misses the hypnagogic tendril patterns of his bedroom’s painted roof. He misses the morning-glory comfort of Shanker Mahal’s erotic carvings. He misses sex. Vishram watches the sweat bead Marianna’s arm before the water drops have even dried.

  ‘Vish.’ She’s never called him that before. ‘I mightn’t be staying for much longer.’

  Vishram sets his coffee cup down carefully so no rattle may betray his dismay.

  ‘Is it the war?’

  ‘I’ve had calls from head office; the Foreign Office advice is for non-essential British passport holders to leave, and my family’s worried too, especially after the rioting . . .’ Her family, that brawling constellation of partnerships and remarriages among five different races across the red brick terracelands of South London. The front of her swimsuit has dried in the sun but it’s still damp and body-hugging next to the chair. Vishram has always had a notion for one-pieces. Conceal to appeal. Its wet cling emphasises the muscled curve of Marianna Fusco’s lower back. Vishram feels his cock stir in his Varanasi silk trunks. He would love to take her there and then down into the pool, legs hooked over in the lapping water with the roar of the morning rush hour bouncing over the wall from the street beyond.

  ‘I have to tell you Vish, I didn’t really want this brief. I had projects I was working on.’

  ‘It’s not really my idea of a gig either,’ Vishram says. ‘I had a good career going as a stand-up comedian. I was funny. I made people laugh. That’s not a thing to brush off: oh, Vishram what silliness are you up to now? Well stop it right now and come here, there’s important stuff for you to do. And do you know what the worst part of it is, the part that really makes me choke? I love it. I fucking love it. I love this corporation and the people who work for it and what they’re trying to do and the things they’ve got out at that research place. That’s what really annoys me, the bastard didn’t give a fuck about my feelings but he was right all along. I will fight to save this company and that’s with or without you and if it’s going to be without you, if you are going to leave me, I need to clear a couple of things with you and the first is that I adore the sight of your nipples through that swimsuit and the second is there is not a moment at a meeting or a briefing or at the desk or on the phone that I do not think about sex with you in the pointy end of a BharatAir 375.’

  Marianna Fusco’s hands are flat on the armrests. She looks dead ahead, eyes invisible behind her Italian shades.

  ‘Mr Ray.’

  Oh fuck.

  ‘Come on then.’

  Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the size of Vishram’s penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the gentleman’s way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a thugee. The stretchy swimsuit fabric takes some ripping but it’s what she wants and Vishram is only too eager to oblige and he loves the feel of it in his fists, tearing apart, exposing her. He tries to push into her vagina, she rolls away saying no no no, I’m not letting that thing in there. She lets him get three fingers in both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot up inside her and she straddles him, big nipples silhouetted against the yellow storm-light, handing him until he comes and after he’s come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out, each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and full-body thrash.

&
nbsp; By the time either of them can speak again it is twenty past eleven on the Noughties retro wall-clock and they lie side by side on the mat drinking minibar malt from the bottle and thrilling to the flickers and growls of approaching thunder.

  ‘I will never, ever be able to look at that silk wrap the same way,’ Vishram says. ‘Where did you learn that from?’

  ‘Who said I had to be taught?’ Marianna Fusco rolls on to her side. ‘It’s you Indians have this guru thing.’

  The room flashlights blue to a stronger pulse of lightning. Vishram thinks of the photograph on the cover page of his morning news-site; the faces white in the camera flash, the man, open mouthed, the alien, sexlessly beautiful nute with the bank notes in yts hand. What do they do? he thinks. What do they think they can do? And whatever they can do, does it deserve the destruction of a man’s career and family? He had always thought of and practised sex as one thing, one set of actions and reactions whatever the sexual orientation but on the floor with Marianna Fusco among the shreds of her swimsuit and the knotted snake of a scarf he had lovingly pulled out of her colon he realises it is a nation of many erogenies and responses, as full of languages and cultures as India.

  ‘Marianna,’ he says, staring at the ceiling. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘Vish.’ The nick again. ‘This time there really is something I need to tell you.’ She sits up. ‘Vish, I told you I was hired by your father to oversee the transfer of power.’

  ‘Hired, ah, right, so what does that make what we’ve just done?’

  ‘You know, any real comedian I’ve ever known doesn’t try to be funny in real life. Vish, I was hired by another company. I was hired by Odeco.’

  Vishram feels he is falling into the floor. Muscles go limp, his hands fall open, an unconscious Corpse Asana.

  ‘Well, now it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Soften the horny fucker before you knife him . . .’

  ‘Hey!’ Marianna Fusco sits up, leans over him. Her hair falls around her face, a soft dark silhouette against the windows. ‘That is not right and it is not fair. I am not a corporate . . . whore. We did not do this because it was some plot or conspiracy. Fuck you, Vishram Ray. I told you because I trusted you, because I like you, because I like sex with you. You’ve had your hand up my ass, how much more trust would you like?’

  Vishram counts the spaces between the lightning flicker and the thunder growl. One Odeco two Odeco three Odeco four . . . The rain is almost upon them.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on,’ he says to the bland, international-stylie ceiling. ‘Who’s behind what, who’s funding what, who’s got a stake in what and who is working for what and why.’

  ‘You think I know any better?’ Marianna Fusco says, rolling on to her side and pressing her long, dense body against Vishram’s. He can feel the soft kiss of her pubic hair against his thigh. He wonders at the yonic secrets she keeps from him. ‘I’m a junior partner in a London corporate law firm. We do mergers, acquisitions and hostile takeovers. We’re not very good at cloak and dagger, skulduggery and conspiracy theory.’

  ‘So can you tell me, what is Odeco?’

  ‘Odeco is an international group of venture capitalists based in various tax havens. They specialise in blue-sky technology and in what some might consider the grey economy; industries that aren’t strictly illegal but have a dodgy reputation, like Darwinware. They’ve invested in Silicon Jungles in cyberabads all across the developing world, including a sundarban right here in Varanasi.’

  ‘And they came up with the money for the accelerator at the research centre. I met Chakraborty, or rather, Chakraborty met me.’

  ‘I know. Mr Chakraborty is my liaison here in Varanasi.You can believe me or not, but Odeco wants the zero-point project to succeed.’

  ‘He told me he was delighted I was going to run a full demo. The only people I told that to were our friends from EnGen.’

  ‘EnGen is not Odeco.’

  ‘Then how did Chakraborty know about the trial?’

  Marianna Fusco chews her top lip.

  ‘You’ll have to ask Chakraborty. I’m not authorised to tell you. But believe me, anything EnGen has offered you to shut down the experiment, Odeco will match it to keep it open. Match it and more.’

  ‘Good,’ says Vishram Ray sitting up. ‘Because I’m minded to take their money. Can you get me a meeting with your liaison? Provided he doesn’t know already, like telepathy or something? And can we do this again, real real soon?’

  Marianna Fusco tosses back her still-damp and chlorine-perfumed hair.

  ‘Can I borrow a bathrobe? I don’t think I should go down in the lift like this.’

  Forty minutes later Vishram Ray is showered, shaved, suited and humming to himself as he rides down through the glass roof of the hotel atrium. The car waits among the satellite vans. The silk wrap soaks in the Jacuzzi, still in its knots, all the better to scandalise the prying room staff.

  Marigolds on black water. In the open boat Vishram feels the wall of cloud like the hammer of God, raised over him. The wind from the feet of the monsoon stirs the river into a chop. Buffalo press close to shore, nostrils lifted out of the water, flared, sensing the change of the season. Along the ghats women bathers struggle to hold their saris with modesty. It is one of his nation’s perennial contradictions that the culture that wrote and illustrated the Kama Sutra should be so glacially prudish. People in cold, wet Christian Glasgow burned more ardently. He suspects what he has just done with Marianna Fusco would get him twenty in chokey in back-country Bihar.

  The boatman is a fifteen-year-old with a frozen wide smile, struggling against the frets and flows. Vishram feels unclad and exposed to the lightning. Already the factories across the river have put on their lights.

  ‘I hate to say it but EnGen got me a tilt-jet? To a tiger sanctuary? With armed guards and a really good lunch. And their flight crew was a lot better looking than him.’

  ‘Hm?’ Chakraborty says. He stands in the middle of the boat absently watching the passing panoply of shore life. Vishram wishes he wouldn’t do that. He remembers an old number from the College Dram. Soc. production of Guys and Dolls. Sit down you’re rocking the boat. And the devil will drag you under . . . Heavy on the Christian sin and judgement and damnation today Vishram, he thinks.

  ‘I said, it’s kind of choppy.’

  Rowing-boy grins. He has a clean blue shirt and very white teeth.

  ‘Ah yes, a little turbulent, Mr Ray.’ Chakraborty touches a finger to his lips, then shakes it at the gleaming ghats. ‘Do you not find it comforting, knowing where you will end, on these steps, by this shore, before the eyes of all the people?’

  ‘Can’t say it’s a thing I’ve thought too much about.’ Vishram reaches for the gunwales as the boat rocks.

  ‘Really? But you should, Mr Ray. I think a little about death every day. It is most focusing. It is a great reassurance that we leave the particular and rejoin the universal. That I think is the moksha of Ganga. We rejoin the river of history like a drop of rain, our stories told and woven into the stream of time. Tell me - you have lived in the west - is it true that they burn their dead in secret, hidden away from everyone as if they are a thing to be ashamed of?’

  Vishram remembers the funeral in a grimy sandstone district of Glasgow. He had not known the woman well - she had been a flatmate of a girl he had been having sex with because she had a name as an up-and-coming director in the Dram Soc. - but he did recall the sense of shock when he learned she had been killed in a climbing accident in Glencoe. And he does recall the sense of horror in the crematorium; the muffled grief, the eulogy by a stranger that had got her friends’ names wrong, the taped Bach as the sealed casket lurched on the dais and then slowly sank out of sight to the furnace below.

  ‘It is true,’ he says to Chakraborty. ‘They can’t look at it because it scares them. For them, it is the end of everything.’

  On the ash-strewn river steps the process of death and moksha wheels
on. By the waterline a pyre has collapsed, the head and shoulders of the dead loll out, strangely untouched by the flames. That is a burning man, Vishram thinks. The wind swirls smoke and ash over the burning ghat. Vishram Ray watches the burning man slump on his pyre, cave in and collapse in sparks and charcoal and he thinks that Chakraborty is right; it is better by far to end here, death in the midst of life, to leave the particular and rejoin the universal.

  ‘Mr Chakraborty, I would like a very large sum of money from you,’ Vishram Ray says.

  ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘Enough to buy out Ramesh’s part of the company.’

  ‘That will require a sum in the region of three hundred billion rupees. I can give you that in US dollars, if you require.’

  ‘I just need to know that that money could be available to me.’

  Mr Chakraborty does not hesitate.