River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘I can’t go to Kotkhai and I can’t go to the Cantonment. But Krishan, I cannot stay here, on this rooftop.’ Parvati sits up, listening, alert. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven thirty.’

  ‘I must go. Mother will be back. She would not miss Town and Country for a million rupees.’ Parvati dusts the rooftop grit from her clothes, rearranges the drape of her sari, flicks her long straight hair over her left shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Krishan. I shouldn’t burden you. You have a garden to grow.’

  She flits barefoot across the roof garden. Moments later he hears the blaring theme from Town and Country drift up the stairs. Krishan moves from bed to bed, tying down his growing things.

  Mr Nandha pushes the plate away from him untouched.

  ‘This is brown food. I cannot eat brown food.’

  Mrs Sadurbahai does not remove the thali but stands resolutely by the stove.

  ‘That is good honest country fare. What is wrong with my cooking that you cannot eat it?’

  Mr Nandha sighs.

  ‘Wheat, pulses, potato. Carbohydrate carbohydrate carbohydrate. Onions, garlic ghee. Heavy heavy spices.’

  ‘My husband . . .’ Parvati starts to say but Mr Nandha cuts in.

  ‘I have a white diet. It is all Ayurvedically calculated and balanced. What has happened to my white diet sheet?’

  ‘Oh that, that went with the cook.’

  Mr Nandha grips the edge of the table. It has been long gathering, like the monsoon heavy in his sinuses. Before Mrs Sadurbhai abseiling in like Sajida Rana’s elite troops, before the afternoon’s meeting when the reality of politics trampled over his dedication and sense of mission, before even this Kalki case unfolded, he has been assailed by the feeling that he battles against madness, that order has one champion against the gathering chaos, that all others may succumb but one must remain to lift the sword that ends the Age of Kali. Now it is here in his house, in his kitchen, around his table, coiling its white blind roots through his wife.

  ‘You come to my home, you turn my household upside down, you fire my cook, you throw away my diet sheets, I come home from a strenuous and demanding day’s work to find myself served slop I cannot eat!’

  ‘Dearest, really, mother’s only trying to help,’ Parvati says but Mr Nandha’s knuckles are white now.

  ‘Where I come from, a son has respect for his mother,’ Mrs Sadurbhai returns. ‘You have no respect for me, you think I am an ignorant and superstitious peasant up from the country. You think no one knows anything next to you and your important work and your Angreez education and your horrible, tuneless Western music and your bland white food that is like what babies eat and not fit for a real man doing real work. You think you are a gora; you think you are better than me and you think you are better than your wife, my daughter - I know it - but you are not and you are not a firengi; if the white men saw you they would laugh at you, see the babu thinks he is a Westerner! I tell you this, no one has any respect for an Indian gora.’

  Mr Nandha is amazed by the paleness of his knuckles. He can see the blood vessels through them.

  ‘Mrs Sadurbhai, you are a guest under my roof . . .’

  ‘A fine roof, a government roof . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Nandha says slowly, carefully, as if each word is a weight of water drawn up from a well. ‘A fine government roof, earned by my care and dedication to my profession. A roof under which I expect the peace and calm and domestic order that profession demands. You know nothing of what I do. You understand nothing of the forces I battle, the enemies I hunt. Creatures with the ambitions of gods, madam. Things you could not even begin to understand, that threaten our every belief about our world, I confront them on a daily basis. And if my horrible, tuneless Western music, if my bland white firengi diet, my cook and my sweeper all give me that peace and calm and domestic order so that I can face another day in my work, is that unreasonable? ’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Sadurbhai throws back. She knows she is in a losing stance but she also understands that it is a fool who dies with a weapon undrawn. ‘What is unreasonable is that I hear no part in all this for Parvati.’

  ‘Parvati, my flower.’ The air in the kitchen is slow as syrup. Mr Nandha feels the momentum and weight behind every word, every movement of his head. ‘Are you unhappy? Do you want for anything?’

  Parvati begins to speak but her mother rides over her.

  ‘What my daughter wants is some recognition that she is wife of a careful and dedicated professional, not hidden away on top of a housing block in the city centre.’

  ‘Parvati, is this true?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I thought maybe . . .’ Again her mother tramples her.

  ‘She could have had her pick of anyone, anyone; civil servants, lawyers, businessmen - politicians even, and they would have taken her and put her in her rightful place and shown her off like a flower and given her things she is due.’

  ‘Parvati, my love, I don’t understand this. I thought we were happy here.’

  ‘Then you indeed understand nothing if you do not know that my daughter could have all the riches of the Mughals and she would set them aside just for a child . . .’

  ‘Mother! No!’ Parvati cries.

  ‘. . . a proper child. A child that is worthy of her status. A true heir.’

  The air is thick now. Mr Nandha can barely turn his head to Mrs Sadurbhai.

  ‘A Brahmin? Is that what you are saying? Parvati, is this true?’ She weeps at the end of the table, face hidden in her dupatta. Mr Nandha can feel the table shaking to her sobs. ‘A Brahmin. A genetically engineered child. A human child that lives twice as long but ages half as fast. A human being that can never get cancer, that can never get Alzheimer’s, that can never get arthritis or any number of the degenerative ills that will come to us, Parvati. Our child. The fruit of our union. Is this what you want? We will take our seed to the doctors and they will open it up and take it apart and change it so that it is no longer ours and then fuse it and put that inside you, Parvati; fill you full of hormones and fertility drugs and push it up into your womb until it takes and you swell up with it, this stranger within.’

  ‘Why would you deny her this?’ Mrs Sadurbhai declaims. ‘What parent would refuse a chance for a perfect child? You would deny a mother this?’

  ‘Because they are not human!’ Mr Nandha shouts. ‘Have you seen them? I have seen them. I see them every day in the streets and the offices. They look so young, but there is nothing we know there. The aeais and the Brahmins, they are the destruction of all of us. We are redundant. Dead ends. I strive against inhuman monsters, I will not invite one into my wife’s womb.’ His hands are shaking. His hands are shaking. This is not right. See what these women have brought you to? Mr Nandha pushes himself back from the table and stands up. He feels kilometres tall, vast and diffuse as an avatar from his box, filling buildings. ‘I am going out now. I have business to attend to. I may not be back until tomorrow, but when I do return, your mother will be gone from under this roof.’

  Parvati’s voice follows him down the stairs.

  ‘She is an old woman, it is late, where will she go? You cannot throw an old woman out on to the streets.’

  Mr Nandha makes no reply. He has an aeai to excommunicate. As he walks from the lobby of the government apartment block to the government car pigeons fly up around him in a wheezing applause of wings. He grips the ivory Kalki image in his fist.

  SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

  From this turret drummers once welcomed guests as they crossed the causeway over the swamp. Water birds would rise up on either side; egret, cranes, spoonbills, the wild duck that had drawn Moazam Ali Khan to build his hunting lodge here on the Gaghara’s winter floodplain at Ramghar Lake. The lake is dry now, the swamps parched mud, the birds gone. No drums have played from the naqqar khana in Shaheen Badoor Khan’s lifetime. The lodge had been semi derelict even in his father’s time: Asad Badoor Khan, asleep in the arms o
f Allah beneath his simple marble rectangle in the family graveyard. Over Shaheen Badoor Khan’s lifetime, first rooms then suites then wings were abandoned to the heat and the dust; fabrics rotting and splitting, plaster staining and flaking in the monsoon humidity. Even the graveyard is overgrown with grass and rank weeds, now withered and yellow in drought. The shading ashok trees have been cut down one by one and carried away by the caretakers for fuel.

  Shaheen Badoor Khan has never liked the old hunting lodge of Ramghar Kothi. That is why he has come here to hide. No one but those he trusts knows it still stands.

  He had sounded the horn for ten minutes before the staff roused themselves to the idea that someone might want to visit the lodge. They were an aged couple, poor but prideful Muslims, he a retired schoolteacher. For struggling against entropy they were permitted a wing rent-free and paid a weekly handful of rupees for rice and dal. The surprise on old man Musa’s face as he swung open the double gates could not be hidden. It might have been the unannounced visit after four years of neglect. Or he might know everything from Voice of Bharat news. Shaheen Badoor Khan drove into the shelter of the stable cloister and ordered his lodge keeper to bar the gate.

  Before an eastern horizon like a black wall Shaheen Badoor Khan moved among the dusty graves of his clan. His Mughal forefathers had named the monsoon the Hammer of God. That hammer had fallen and he was still alive. He could plan. He could dream. He could even hope.

  Moazam Ali Khan’s mausoleum stood among pulpy tree stumps in the oldest part of the graveyard, the first Khan to be buried here on their gravel rise above the flood silts. The shade foliage had been cut down over seasons by the Musas, but the current steward of Ramghar approved of this despoilment. It allowed the small but classically proportioned tomb to stretch its bones, let its sandstone skin breathe, a building unveiled. Shaheen Badoor Khan ducked under the east-facing arch into the domed interior. The delicate jali screens had long since crumbled and he knew from childhood adventures that the burial vault beneath was haunted by bats but even in its decay the tomb of the founder of the political line of Khan graced the visitor. Moazam Ali had led a life of achievement and intrigue storied by the Urdu chroniclers as Prime Minister to the Nawabs of Awadh in the time that power haemorrhaged from the fading Mughals at Agra to their nominal lieges at Lucknow. He had overseen the transformation of a squalid medieval trading city into a flower of Islamic civilization, then, scenting the fragility of it all from the hair-pomade of the envoys of the East India Company, retired from public life with his small but fabled harem of Persian poetesses to study Sufi mysticism in the game-shooting lodge donated by a grateful nation. First and greatest of the Khans. Since Moazam Ali and his poetesses lived and studied among the calling marsh birds, it has been a slow decline to dust. The gloom beneath the dome deepened by the instant as the monsoon advanced on Ramghar Kothi with its promise of swamps refreshed, lakes restored. Shaheen Badoor Khan’s fingers traced the outline of the mihrab, the niche facing Mecca.

  Two generations later, Mushtaq Khan lay beneath an elegant chhatri, open to the wind and the dust. Saviour of the family reputation and fortune by remaining staunch to the Raj as North India mutinied. Engraved illustrations in the newspapers of 1857 showed him defending property and family from besieging sepoy hordes, pistol in either hand, cartridge smoke billowing. The truth was less dramatic; a small detachment of mutineers had charged Ramghar and been repulsed without casualty by small arms fire but it was enough to earn him the title among the British of That Faithful Mohammedan; and the Hindus Killer Khan, a kudos among the Lords of the Raj he would carefully convert into a campaign for special political recognition for Muslims. How proud he would have felt, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks, to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophesies from the barrel of an AK47. Time, death and dust. Temple bells clanged out across the dead marsh. From the south, the horn of a train, constantly blaring. Soft thunder shook the air.

  And here, beneath this marble stele on the gravel bank that had the only soil deep enough to accept a grave, was his own grandfather, Sayid Raiz Khan, judge and nation builder who had kept his wife and family safe through the Partition Wars in which a million people died, steadfast in his belief that there must be an India and that India, to be all Nehru claimed on that midnight in 1947, must have a seat of honour for Muslims. Here, his own father; campaigning lawyer and campaigning Parliamentarian in two Parliament Houses, one in Delhi, one in Varanasi. He had fought his own Partition Wars. The Faithful Mohammedan Khans, each generation warring against the achievements of the previous one, unto the last drop.

  The headlights of the car are visible for kilometres across the flat, treeless land. Shaheen Badoor Khan descends the crumbling steps from the drum tower to open the gate. Ramghar’s servants are old and meek and deserving of sleep. He starts at a touch of rain on his lip, gently tastes it with his tongue.

  I started a war for this.

  The Lexus pulls into the courtyard. Its black sleek carapace is jewelled with rain. Shaheen Badoor Khan opens the door. Bilquis Badoor Khan steps out. She wears a formal sari in blue and gold, dupatta pulled over her head. He understands. Hide your face. His is a people that once could die from shame.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says. She raises a hand. Not here. Not now. Not in front of the servants. He indicates the pillared chhatri of the drum turret, stands aside as his wife brushes past, lifting her sari to take the steep steps. The rain has a rhythm now, the south-eastern horizon a celebration in lightning. Rain runs in ropes from the edge of the domed roof of the octagonal Mughal drum tower. Shaheen Badoor Khan says, ‘Before anything else, I have to tell you how very, how profoundly sorry I am over what has happened.’ The words taste like dust on his lips, the dust of his ancestors with the rain seeping down towards them. They swell in his mouth. ‘I . . . no. We had an agreement, I broke it, somehow that got out. The rest will be history. I have been intolerably foolish and it has rebounded on me.’

  He had not known when she first suspected but, since Dara was born, it had become obvious that Bilquis could not be all the things he desired. Theirs was the last Mughal marriage, of dynasty and power and expedience. They had spoken of it overtly only once, after Jehan had left for university and the haveli was suddenly echoing and too full of servants. The conversation had been forced, dry, painful; the sentences couched in allusion and elision for the house staff who overheard everything; just long enough to lay down the agreement that he would never allow it to threaten family and government and she would remain the proper, dutiful politician’s wife. By then they had not slept together for a decade.

  It. They had never given the thing between them a name. Shaheen Badoor Khan is not now certain there is one. His affliction? His vice? His weakness, thorn in the flesh? His perversion? There are no words in the language between two people for its.

  The rain is so heavy Shaheen Badoor Khan can hardly make himself heard.

  ‘I have a few favours left; I have arranged a way out of Bharat; it is a direct flight to Kathmandu. There will be no difficulty entering Nepal. From there we can connect on to anywhere in the world. My own preferences are for Northern Europe, perhaps Finland or Norway. These are large underpopulated countries where we can live anonymously. I have funds in transportable bank drafts set aside, it will be enough for us to buy a property and live adequately, if perhaps not in the comfort we enjoy here in Bharat. Prices are steep and we would have difficulty adjusting to the climate but I think Scandinavia is the best for us.’

  Bilquis’s eyes are closed. She holds a hand up.

  ‘Please, stop this.’

  ‘It does not have to be Scandinavia, New Zealand is another fine, remote country . . .’

  ‘Not Scandinavia, not New Zealand. Shaheen, I will not go with you. I have had enough; you are not the one
who has to apologise. I am. Shaheen, I broke the agreement. I told them. You think you are the only one with a secret life; no! You’re not! And that always was you, Shaheen; so arrogant, that you are the only one can have lies and secrets, Shaheen, for the past five years, I have been working for N.K. Jivanjee. The Shivaji, Shaheen. I, the Begum Bilquis Badoor Khan, betrayed you to the Hindutvas.’

  Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the rain, the thunder, his wife’s voice smear into a thin hiss. He understands now how it might be to die of shock.

  ‘What is this?’ he hears himself say. ‘This is nonsense, nonsense, you are talking nonsense, woman.’

  ‘I suppose it must seem like nonsense, Shaheen, a wife betraying her husband to his greatest enemies. But I did, Shaheen. I betrayed you to the Hindus. Your own wife. Who you turned away from, every night while we still slept together. Five conceptions, five fucks. I counted, five fucks, a woman remembers that. And only two of those were allowed to come to term as our fine sons. Five fucks. I’m sorry, does my coarseness shock you? Is this not how society Begums should talk? You should hear what those good Begums say among themselves, Shaheen. Woman talk. Oh, your ears would burn for shame. Shameless creatures we are, in our chambers and societies. They know, all the women know. Five fucks Khan. I told them, but not it. That I didn’t tell them, Shaheen.