River of Gods (11 page)

"Where's Dadaji?" Vishram asks.

"He will meet us tomorrow at the head office," is all his
mother will say.

"Do you know what this is about?" Vishram asks Ramesh when
the greetings and cryings and look-at-you-haven't-you-got-bigs? are
done. Ramesh shakes his head as Shastri motions with a finger for a
porter to carry Vishram's case up to his room. Vishram doesn't want
to answer questions about the limo, so he begs jet lag and takes
himself off to bed. He'd expected to be given his old room, but the
porter guides him to a guest bedroom on the sunrise side of the
house. Vishram is affronted at being treated as a stranger and
sojourner. Then, as he settles his few things in the huge mahogany
wardrobes and tallboys, he is glad not to have his childhood
possessions watching him as he returns from his life beyond them.
They would drag him back, revert him to teenage again. The old place
never had air-conditioning worth a damn so he lies naked on the
sheets, appalled by the heat, reading faces in the foliage of the
painted ceiling, and listening to the rattle of monkey hands and feet
in the vines outside his window. He lies on the edge of sleep,
slipping towards unconsciousness and reawakening with a start as some
half-forgotten sound breaks through from the city beyond. Conceding
defeat, Vishram goes naked on to the iron balcony. The air and the
perfume of the city of Siva powder his skin. Clusters of winking
aircraft lights move over the hazy yellow skyline. The soldiers who
fly in the night. He tries to imagine a war. Robot killing machines
running through the alleys, titanium blades in all four hands,
avatars of Kali. Aeai gunships piloted by warriors half a planet away
coming in across the Ganga on strafing runs. Awadh's American allies
fight in the modern manner, without a single soldier leaving home,
without a single body bag. They kill from continents away. He fears
that strange tableau he had seen enacted on the streets was prophecy.
Between the water and the fundamentalists, the Ranas have run out of
choices.

A crunch of gravel, a movement on the silver lawns. Ram Das appears
from the moon shadows under the harsingars. Vishram freezes on his
balcony. Another Western way he has slipped into: casual nakedness.
Ram Das steps on to the shaved lawn, parts his dhoti, and takes a
piss by the lazy moon of India, lolling on its side like a temple
gandava. He cleans himself, then turns around and waggles his head
slowly at Vishram, a salutation, a blessing. He goes on his way. A
peacock shrieks.

Home at last.

Until thirty minutes ago, Vishram Ray had boasted that he had never
owned a suit. He has always recognised that some day he might need
one and that when he did he really would so he keeps a set of
measurements with a family of Chinese tailors in Varanasi together
with choice of fabric, cut, lining, and two shirts. He's wearing that
suit now in his seat at the teak boardroom table of Ray Power. It
arrived at the Shanker Mahal half an hour ago by bicycle courier.
Vishram was still adjusting the collar and cuffs as the flotilla of
cars arrived at the steps. Now he's on the twentieth floor of the Ray
tower with Varanasi a smoggy brown stain at his feet, the Ganga a
distant curl of sullied silver, and still no one will tell him what
the hell this is about.

Those Chinese really understand fabric. The collar fit is perfect. He
can hardly see the stitches.

The boardroom doors open. Corporate lawyers file in. Vishram Ray
wonders what the collective noun is for corporate lawyers. A fleece?
A fuckover? Last in line is Marianna Fusco. Vishram Ray can feel his
mouth sag open. Marianna Fusco gives him the smallest of smiles,
certainly less than you would expect from someone you (a) had
first-class sex with and (b) embroiled in a street riot, and sits
down opposite him. Under the teak table, Vishram flicks on his palmer
and types invisible text.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?

The staff open the double doors to now admit the board members.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS A FAMILY BUSINESS MATTER.

Marianna's message appears to Vishram to be hovering over her
breasts. She's in that great and eminently practical suit.

But he's not so bad himself. The bankers and representatives from the
credit unions and grameen banks take their sears. Many of the members
from the rural micro-credit banks have never been so far off the
ground in their lives. As Vishram coolly pours himself a water with
his left hand while his right texts IS THIS A GAME? his father enters
the room. He wears a simple round-collared suit, the length of the
jacket his only concession to fashion, but he turns every head. There
is a look on his face Vishram hasn't seen since he was a boy when his
father was setting up the company, the determined serenity of a man
certain he is doing right. Behind him is Shastri, his shadow.

Ranjit Ray goes to the head of the table. He doesn't take his seat.
He salutes his board and guests. The big wooden room hums with
tension. Vishram would give anything to make an entrance like that.

"Colleagues, partners, honoured guests, my clear family,"
Ranjit Ray begins. "Thank you all for coming today, many of you
at considerable inconvenience and expense. Let me say at the outset
that I would not have asked you to come if I did not feel it was a
matter of the utmost importance to this company."

Ranjit Ray's voice is a soft, deep prayer that carries to every part
of the big room without loss. Vishram recalls that he has never heard
it raised.

"I am sixty-eight years old, three years past what Westerners
consider in their business ethos the end of economically useful life.
In India it is a time for reflection, for the contemplation of other
paths that might have been taken, that yet might be taken." A
sip of water.

"In the final year of my engineering degree at the Hindu
University of Varanasi I realised that the laws of economics are
subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern
this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an
upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our
knowledge of the universe. I realised that I was not just an
engineer, I was a Hindu engineer. From these understandings I
concluded that if I was to use my abilities to help India become a
strong and respected nation, I must do it in an Indian way. I must do
it in a Hindu way."

He looks at his wife and sons.

"My family has heard this many times, I trust they'll forgive
one more. I went on a year of pilgrimage. I followed bhakti and did
puja at the seven sacred cities, I bathed in the holy rivers and
sought the councils of swamis and sadhus. And of each of them, at
each temple and holy site, I asked this same question."

How may this engineer lead the right life? Vishram says to himself.
He has indeed heard this homily more times than he cares to remember:
how this Hindu engineer used a crore of rupees from a micro-credit
union to build a low-cost, no-maintenance domestic-scale carbon
nanotube solar power generator. Fifty million units later, plus
alcohol fuel refineries, biomass plants, wind farms, ocean current
thermal generators, and an R&D division pushing Indian—
Hindu —
minds into the void of zero-point energy, Ray
Power is one of Bharat's—India's—leading companies. One
that has done it the Indian way, sustainably, treading lightly on the
earth, obeying the wheel. A company that steers resolutely around the
maelstrom of the international markets. A company that commissions
exciting new Indian architectural talent to build a corporate
headquarters from sustainable wood and glass and still welcomes
Dalits into its boardroom. It is a great and inspiring story, but
Vishram's attention is wandering all over Marianna Fusco's
stretch-brocaded breasts. A message appears cross them in cheeky
lilac. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR FATHER!

BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP he thumbs back.

PUNS ARE THE LOWEST FORM OF COMEDY, she returns.

WELL EXCUSE ME, I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS SARCASM, he emblazons in
quick-riposte blue across the lapels of his really fast suit. Which
is how he almost misses the punch line.

"That is why I have decided it is time to once again take up
that inquiry into how the right life may be lived."

Vishram Ray looks up, nerves electric.

"At midnight tonight, I will resign my directorship of Ray
Power. I will give up my wealth and influence, my prestige and
responsibilities. I will leave my house and family and once again
take up the sadhu's staff and bowl."

The boardroom of Ray Power could not be any more quiet or still if it
had been nerve gassed. Ranjit Ray smiles, trying to reassure. It
doesn't work.

"Please understand that this is not a decision I undertake
lightly. I have discussed this at length with my wife and she is in
agreement with me. Shastri, my aide and help of more years than I
care to remember, will be joining me on this journey, not as a
servant, for all such distinctions end tonight, but as a fellow
seeker after right life."

The shareholders are on their feet, shouting, demanding. A Dalit
woman bellows in Vishram's ear about her clients, her sisters, but
Vishram finds himself cool, detached, anchored to his seat by sense
of inevitability. It is as if he knew from the moment the ticket
arrived on his Glasgow doorstep this would happen. Ranjit Ray quiets
the board.

"My friends, please do not think I have abandoned you. The first
requirement of the man who would follow the spiritual life is that he
leaves the world responsibly. As you know, other corporations seek to
buy this company but Ray Power is first and last a family business
and I will not give it to alien and immoral systems of management."

Don't do it, Vishram thinks. Don't say it.

"Therefore, I am passing control of the company to my sons
Ramesh, Govind, and Vishram." He turns to each of them, hands
held out as if blessing. Ramesh looks freshly shot. His big veiny
hands are flat on the table like flayed animals. Govind fluffs
himself up and looks around the table, already dividing the room into
allies and enemies. Vishram is numb, a player caught up in a script.

"I have appointed trusted advisors to guide you through the
transitional period. I have put great trust in you. Please try to be
worthy of it."

Marianna Fusco leans across the wide table, hand extended. A sheaf of
ribbon-bound papers rests on the polished surface beside her. Vishram
can see the dotted lines at the bottom of the page, awaiting his
signatures.

"Congratulations, and welcome to Research and Development, Mr.
Ray." He takes the hand he remembers so firm and dry and soft
around his dick. Suddenly he knows this script. "Lear," he
breathes.

Yogendra leaves the SUV in the middle of the street outside Musst.
Police and thieves alike recognise a raja's parking space is where he
leaves his motor. Yogendra opens the door for Shiv. Cycle rickshaws
detour around him, bells jingling.

MUSST, feat. TALV
announces the neon. Now everyone's got
personalised aeai DJs and grooves to their own mix, clubs sell
themselves by their barmen. It's too early in the week for the
salary-men, wife hunting, but the girls are in. Shiv slips on to his
stool. Yogendra takes the seat behind him. Shiv sets the flask of
ovaries on the bar. The subsurface lighting turns it into some alien
artefact in a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Barman Talv slides a glass dish
of paan over the plane of fluorescent plastic. Shiv pops a pinch,
rolls it round inside his cheek, lets the bhang percolate through
him.

"Where's Priya?"

"Down the back."

Girls in knee boots and short skirts and cling-silk tops cluster
bound a table where the club polychrome begins. At the centre, haloed
by cocktail glasses, is a ten-year-old boy.

"Fuck, Brahmins," Shiv says.

"Contrary to appearances, he is legal age," Talv says,
pouring two glasses from a shaker that looks treacherously similar to
Shiv's stainless steel prize.

"There's good men out there, give a woman everything she wants,
good home, good prospects—she'd never have to work—good
family, children, a place up the ladder, and they hang off that
ten-year-old like a calf from a teat," Shiv says. "I'd
shoot the lot of them. It's against nature." Yogendra helps
himself to paan.

"That ten-year-old could buy and sell this place ten times over.
And he'll be bouncing around long after you and me've gone to the
ghats."

The cocktail is cool and blue and deep and chases the red paan into
the deep dark places. Shiv scans Club Musst. None of his girls will
catch his eye tonight. Those who aren't laughing with the Brahmin are
fixed intently on the tabletop tivi.

"What got them so wrapped up?"

"Some fashion thing," Talv says. "They've brought this
Russian model in, some nute, Yuri, something like that."

"Yuli," Yogendra says. His gums are scarlet from paan. The
light is blue and the string of pearls he always wears knotted around
his neck glows like souls. Red, white, blue. American grin. As long
as Shiv has worked with him he has always worn those pearls.

"I'd shoot them, too," Shiv says. "Deviates. I mean
Brahmins; okay, they fuck around with the genes, but they are men and
women."

"I read the nutes are working on ways to get cloned," Talv
says mildly. "They'd pay normal women to carry their kids."

"Now that is just plain disgusting," Shiv says and when he
turns back to set down his empty glass there's a slip of paper on the
luminous blue bar.

"What is this?"

"This is what they call a bill," Talv says.

"I beg your pardon? Since when have I paid for drinks in this
establishment?" Shiv unfolds the little docket, glances over the
number. Double takes.