River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Vikram, I have to know, are we in any state to resist the Awadhis?’

  Chowdhury waggles his head.

  ‘The air force is one hundred percent.’

  ‘You do not win wars with air power. The army?’

  ‘We risk splitting the entire command if we pursue the cabal too far. Ashok, if the Awadhis want Allahabad, there is very little we can do to stop them.’

  ‘Are our nuclear and chemical deterrents secure?’

  ‘Prime Minister, surely you cannot be advocating first use?’ Secretary Narvekar interjects. Again, Ashok Rana rounds on him.

  ‘Our country is invaded, our cities lie wide open and my own sister has been thrown to a . . . to a . . . mob by her own soldiers. Do you know what they did with that trishul? Do you? Do you? What should I do to defend us? What can I do to keep us safe?’

  The faces turn softly, politely blank, impassively reflecting Ashok Rana’s shouting voice. He hears his edge of hysteria. He lets the words fall. The bulkhead between the conference room and the media centre is decorated with a modern interpretation of the Tandava Nritya, the cosmic dance of Siva; the god wreathed in the chakra of flame, one foot raised. Ashok Rana has lived all his forty-four years in the shadow of the descending foot that will destroy and regenerate the universe.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he says shortly. ‘This is not an easy time.’

  The politicals mumble their acquiescences.

  ‘Our nuclear and chemical capability is secure,’ Chowdhury says.

  ‘That’s all I needed to know,’ says Ashok Rana. ‘Now, this speech . . .’

  A junior aide with two fingers raised to the side of his head interrupts him.

  ‘Prime Minister, a call for you.’

  ‘I stated quite clearly that I am not taking any calls.’ Ashok Rana lets a little iron into his voice.

  ‘Sahb, it is N.K. Jivanjee.’

  Eyes glance at each other around the oval table. Ashok Rana nods to his aide.

  ‘On here.’ He taps the armrest screen. In the press compartment his wife and children have settled into some semblance of sleep, leaning against each other. The head and shoulders of the Shivaji leader takes their place, softly lit by a hooded lamp on his desk. Behind him are the geometrical suggestions of books rowed on shelves.

  ‘Jivanjee. You dare much.’

  N.K. Jivanjee dips his head.

  ‘I can understand why you would think that, Prime Minister.’ The title jolts Ashok Rana. ‘At the outset, I would ask you to accept my sincerest sympathies to your family on its tragic loss and to your late sister’s husband and children. There is no part of Bharat that has not been stricken to the heart by what has happened at Sarkhand Roundabout. I am outraged by this brutal murder - and we call ourselves the mother of civilisations. I unreservedly condemn the treachery of the late Prime Minister’s personal guard and those outlaw elements of the mob. I would ask you to accept that no part of the Shivaji condones this dreadful act. This was a mob element whipped to a frenzy by traitors and renegades.’

  ‘I could have you arrested,’ Ashok Rana says. His ministers and advisors look at him. N.K Jivanjee nervously moistens his lips with the tiniest bud of tongue.

  ‘And how would that serve Bharat? No, no, no, I have another suggestion. Our enemy is at the gates, our armed forces desert us, our cities riot and our leader is brutally murdered. This is not a time for party politics. I propose a government of national salvation. As I have said, the Party of Lord Siva is innocent of any involvement in or support for this outrage, yet we retain some influence with the Hindutva and the milder karsevaks.’

  ‘You can bring the streets under control.’

  N.K. Jivanjee sways his head.

  ‘No politician can promise that. But at such a time opposing parties coming together in a government of national salvation would set a powerful example, not just to the riotous elements, but to all Bharatis, and to Awadh as well. A nation united is not easily defeated.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Jivanjee. It’s an interesting offer. I will call you back, thank you for your good wishes, I accept them.’ Ashok Rana thumbs N.K. Jivanjee into the arm of the chair. He turns to his remnant cabinet. ‘Evaluations, gentlemen?’

  ‘It is a deal with demons,’ V.K. Chowdhury says. ‘But . . .’

  ‘He has you over a log,’ Chief Justice Laxman says. ‘He is a very clever man.’

  ‘I see no other practicable option than to take his suggestion,’ Trivul Narvekar says. ‘With two riders; first, that we make the suggestion. We extend the hand of peace to our political foes. Second, we rule certain cabinet positions out of the discussion.’

  ‘He will want cabinet posts?’ Ashok Rana asks. Secretary Narvekar’s astonishment is unfeigned.

  ‘What other reason would he have for suggesting it? I suggest we keep the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry inviolable. Apologies, Chief Justice.’

  ‘What would we suggest for our new friend Jivanjee himself?’ Laxman asks, pressing the steward call to summon a Bells, to which he is legendarily partial.

  ‘I can’t see him settling for much less than Interior Minister,’ Narvekar says.

  ‘Chuutya,’ grunts Laxman into his Scotch.

  ‘This’ll be no Muslim marriage to get out of,’ Narvekar says. Ashok Rana toggles the screen to watch his wife and children sleeping against each other in the cheap seats. The clock reads oh four fifteen. Ashok Rana’s head aches, his feet and sinuses feel swollen, his eyes dusty and weary. All senses of time and space and perspective have vanished. He could be floating in space in this migraine-inducing light. Chowdhury is talking about Shaheen Badoor Khan: ‘That’s one Begum wishing the divorce thing ran the other way.’

  The men laugh softly in the harsh directional light of the overhead halogens.

  ‘You have to admit, he has rather receded into the background, ’ Narvekar says. ‘Twenty-four hours is a long time in politics.’

  ‘Never trusted the fellow,’ Chowdhury says. ‘Always felt there was something oily about him, too refined, too polite . . .’

  ‘Too Muslim?’ Narvekar asks.

  ‘You said it; something not quite . . . manly. And I’m not so sure I agree with what you say about him vanishing into the background. You say twenty-four hours is a long time; I say, in politics nothing is unconnected. One loose pebble starts a landslide. For one horseshoe nail, the battle was lost. Butterfly in Beijing, all that. Khan is the root of it, for his own sake I hope he is out of Bharat.’

  ‘Hijra,’ Laxman comments. His ice clinks in the glass.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Ashok Rana says, hearing his voice as if spoken by another at a great distance, ‘my sister is dead.’ Then, after a grace-moment, he says, ‘So, our answer to Mr Jivanjee?’

  ‘He has his Government of National Salvation,’ Secretary Narvekar says. ‘After the speech.’

  The staffers in the second cabin speed-draft a revised speech. Ashok Rana skims the print-out adding marginal marks in blue ink. Government of National Salvation. Extend Hand of Friendship. Unity in Strength. Through this Trying Time as One Nation. The Nation United Will Never be Defeated.

  ‘Prime Minister, it’s time,’ Trivul Narvekar hints. He guides Ashok Rana to the studio at the front of Vayu Sena One. It is little bigger than an airline toilet; a camera, a boom microphone, a desk and chair and a Bharati flag draped from a pole, a vision mixer and sound engineer beyond the glass panel in the booth’s mirror image. The sound engineer shows Ashok Rana how the desk hinges up so he can slip behind it on to the chair. A seat belt is fitted in case of turbulence or an unexpected landing. Ashok Rana notices the cloying smell of scented furniture polish. A young woman he does not recognise from his press corps dresses him with a new tie, a pin bearing the spinning wheel of Bharat and tries to do something with his hair and sweaty face.

  ‘Forty seconds, Prime Minister,’ Trivul Narvekar says. ‘The speech will autocue on screen in front of the camera.’ Ashok Rana panics about wha
t to do with his hands. Clasped? Bunch of bananas? Semi-namaste? Gesturing?

  The vision mixer takes over. ‘And satellite uplink is active and we’re counting down twenty, nineteen, eighteen, the red dot means the camera is live, Prime Minister, cue insert . . . Run VT . . . six, five, four, three, two . . . and cue.’

  Ashok Rana decides what to do with his hands. He lays them loosely on the desktop.

  ‘My fellow Bharatis,’ he reads. ‘It is with heavy heart that I address you this morning . . .’

  In the garden, soaked through with rain. Rain penduluming the heavy leaves of the climbing, twining nicotianas and clematis and kiwi vine. Rain streaming from drain holes in the raised beds, black and foaming with loam; rain sheeting across the carved concrete paving slabs, chuttering in the grooves and channels, dancing in the drains and soakaways, leaping into the overloaded runnels and downpipes; rain cascading in waterfalls from the sagging gutters to the street below. Rain gluing the silk sari to Parvati Nandha’s flat belly, round thighs, small flat-nippled breasts. Rain plastering her long black hair to her skull. Rain running down the contours of her neck, her spine, her breasts and arms and wrists resting neatly, symmetrically on her thighs. Rain swirling around her bare feet and her silver toe rings. Parvati Nandha in her bower. The bag is at her feet, half empty, top folded to keep the rain out of the white powder.

  Muted thunder rolls in from the west. She listens behind it for the sound from the streets. The gunfire seems further away now, fragmented, random; the sirens move from left to right, then behind her.

  There is another sound she listens for.

  There. Since she made the call she has been training herself to distinguish it from the strange new sounds in the city tonight. The rattle of the front door latch. She knew he would come. She counts in her head and as she had timed, he appears a black silhouette in the roof garden door. Krishan cannot see her in her dark bower, soaked by rain.

  ‘Hello?’ he calls.

  Parvati watches him trying to find her.

  ‘Parvati? Are you there? Hello?’

  ‘Over here,’ she whispers. She sees his body straighten, tense.

  ‘I almost didn’t make it. It’s insane out there. Everything is coming apart. There’s people shooting, stuff burning everywhere . . .’

  ‘You made it. You’re here now.’ Parvati rises from her seat and embraces him.

  ‘You’re soaking wet, woman. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Tending to my garden,’ Parvati says, pulling away. She lifts her fist, lets a trickle of powder fall. ‘See? You must help me, there is too much for me to do.’

  Krishan intercepts the stream, sniffs a palmful.

  ‘What are you doing? This is weedkiller.’

  ‘It has to go, it all has to go.’ Parvati walks away, sowing sprays of white powder over the raised beds and pots of drenched geraniums. Krishan makes to seize her hand but she throws the white powder in his face. He reels back. Lightning flares in the west; by its light he grasps her wrist.

  ‘I don’t understand!’ he shouts. ‘You call me in the middle of the night; come over, you say, I have to see you right away. They’ve got martial law out there, Parvati. Soldiers on the streets. They’re shooting everything . . . I saw. No, I don’t want to tell you what I saw. But I come over and I find you sitting in the rain, and this . . .’ He holds her hand up. The rain has smeared the weedkiller to white streaks, a hennaed hand in negative. He shakes her wrist, trying to jerk sanity into this one piece of the world he can apprehend. ‘What is it?

  ‘It has to go.’ Parvati’s voice is flat, childlike. ‘Everything must go. My husband and I, we fought and do you know? It wasn’t terrible. Oh, he was shouting but I wasn’t afraid because what he said made no sense. Do you understand? All his reasons; I heard them and they did not make any sense. And so I have to go now. From here. There’s nothing here. Away from here, away from Varanasi and everything.’

  Krishan sits down on the wooden rim of a raised bed. A swirl in the microclimate brings a surge of anger from the city.

  ‘Go?’

  Parvati clasps his hands between hers.

  ‘Yes! It is so easy. Leave Varanasi, leave Bharat, go away. He sent my mother away, did you know that? She is in a hotel somewhere; she rings and she rings and she rings but I know what she will say, it’s not safe out there, how could I abandon her in the middle of a dangerous city, I must come and rescue her, take her back. You know, I don’t even know what hotel she is in?’ Parvati throws back her head and laughs at the rain. ‘There is nothing for me back in Kotkhai and there is nothing for me here in Varanasi; no, I can never be part of that world, I learned that at the cricket match, when they all laughed. Where can I go? Only everywhere; you see, it’s so easy when you think you have nowhere to go, because then everywhere becomes open to you. Mumbai. We could go to Mumbai. Or Karnataka - or Kerala, We could go to Kerala, oh, I’d love to go there, the palms and the sea and the water. I’d love to see the sea. I’d love to find out what it smells like. Don’t you see? It’s an opportunity, everything going mad around us; in the middle of it all we can slip away and no one will notice. Mr Nandha will think I have gone to Kotkhai with my mother, my mother will think I am still at home, but we won’t be, Krishan. We won’t be!’

  Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents’ house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky. And the gardener built the garden on the tower for the beautiful, solitary woman whose best friends were in stories and in so doing fell in love with her, though she was a powerful man’s wife. And now in a great storm she asks him to run away with her to another land where they live happily ever after. It is too big, too sudden. Too simple. It is Town and Country.

  ‘What will we do for money? And we will need to get passports to get out of Bharat. Do you have a passport? I don’t, how will I get one? And what will we do when we get there, how will we live?’

  ‘We will find a way,’ Parvati Nandha says and those five words open up the night for Krishan. There are no rules for relationships, no plans for landscaping and planting and feeding and pruning. A home, a job, a career, money. A Brahmin baby, even.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  For an instant he thinks she has not heard or mistaken him for she makes no move, no response. Krishan scoops up two handfuls of the white powder from the sack of weedkiller. He hurls the dust up into the monsoon in a fountain of poison.

  ‘Let it go!’ he shouts. ‘There are other gardens to grow.’

  On the back of the giant elephant flying three thousand metres above the foothills of the Sikkim Himalayas, N.K. Jivanjee namastes to Najia Askarzadah. He is seated on a traditional musnud, a throne of bolsters and cushions on a simple black marble slab. Beyond the brass rail, snow-capped peaks glint in afternoon sun. No haze, no smog-taint, no South Asian Brown Cloud, no monsoon gloom.

  ‘Ms Askarzadah, my sincerest apologies for the cheap sleight of hand but I thought it best to assume a form with which you were familiar.’

  Najia feels high-altitude wind on her skin, the wooden deck shift beneath her feet as the elephant airship drifts in the air currents. She is in deep here. She settles cross-legged on a tasselled cushion. She wonders if it is one of Tal’s.

  ‘Why, what form do you usually take?’

  N.K. Jivanjee spreads his hands.

  ‘Any and every. All and none. I do not wish to be gnomic but that is the reality of it.’

  ‘So which are you, N.K. Jivanjee or Lal Darfan?’

  N.K. Jivanjee dips his head as if in apology for an affront.

  ‘Ah, you see, there you are again, Ms Askarzadah. Both and neither. I am Lal Darfan. I am Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadw
ala - you have no idea how I look forward to the experience of marrying myself. I am every secondary character and minor character and walk-on and redshirt. I am Town and Country. N.K. Jivanjee is a role into which I seem to have fallen - or is it, had thrust upon me? This is a real face I have borrowed - I know how you must always have the body.’

  ‘I think I get this riddle,’ Najia Askarzadah, wiggling her toes inside her power walk trainers. ‘You are an aeai.’

  N.K. Jivanjee claps his hands in delight.

  ‘What you would call a Generation Three aeai. You are correct.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Town and Country - only India’s most popular television programme - is sentient?’

  ‘You interviewed my Lal Darfan manifestation; you know something of the complexity of this production, but you didn’t even glimpse the tip of the iceberg. Town and Country is much bigger than Indiapendent, much bigger even than Bharat. Town and Country is spread across one million computers in every part of India from Cape Comorin to the shadow of the Himalayas.’ He smiles disingenuously. ‘There are sundarbans in Varanasi and Delhi and Hyderabad running nothing but written-out aeai cast members, in case they’re ever brought back into the plot. We are everywhere, we are legion.’