River of Gods (21 page)

"I'm looking for someone. Tranh."

The old woman's black eyes hunted over Tal's face.

"Tranh. Lovely thing. No, Tranh is not here, yet. But Tranh will
be, sometime." The old woman clasped her hands together in joy.
Then the banana kicked in and Tal felt a relaxed warmth spread down
from yts agnya chakra and yt hooked up yts music and explored the
strange club. The balconies held low divans and sofas, arranged
intimately around conversation tables. For those who did not do
bananas there were elegant brass hookahs. Tal drifted past a knot of
nutes, slo-moed in smoke. They inclined their heads towards yt. There
were a lot of gendered. In the corner alcove a Chinese woman in a
beautiful black suit was kissing a nute. She had the nute down yts
back on the divan. Her fingers played with the hormonal gooseflesh on
yts forearm. Somewhere Tal reasoned yt should be leaving, really, but
all yt felt was a warm dislocation. Another banana, yt thought, would
be good.

The crop from the far left pillar gave a short, sharp rush of
well-being. Tal stepped carefully to the edge of the pool to look up
at the tiered balconies. The higher you went, the fewer clothes you
needed, yt concluded. That was all right. Everything was all right.
The blind woman had said.

"Tranh?" Tal asked of a knot of bodies gathered around a
fragrant hookah. An achingly young and lovely nute with fine East
Asian features peered out of a press of male bodies. "Sorry,"
Tal said and drifted on. "Have you seen Tranh?" yt asked a
nervous looking woman standing by a sofa of laughing nutes. They all
turned to stare at yt, "Is Tranh here yet?" The man stood
by the third magic banana vine. He was soberly dressed in a
semiformal evening suit; Jayjay Valaya, Tal guessed from the cut. A
smart man, thin, middle-aged but took care of his flesh. Fine,
aesthetic features, thin-lipped, a look of intelligence in his
darting eyes. The eyes, the face, were nervous. His hands, Tal
observed through the marvellous power of the banana that put
everything into significant focus, were well manicured, and shaking.

"I beg your pardon?" the dapper man said.

"Tranh. Tranh. Is yt here?"

The man looked nonplussed, then plucked a banana from the fist beside
his head. He offered it to Tal.

"I'm looking for someone," Tal said.

"Who is this?" the man said, again offering the bananna.
Tal brushed it away with yts hand. "Tranh. Have you? No."
Tal was already walking away.

"Please!" the man called after yt, clutching the banana
between yts fingers like a linga. "Do stay, and talk, just
talk."

Then yt saw. Even in the flicker-lit shadows beneath the balcony,
there was no mistaking the profile, the angle of the cheekbones, the
way yt leaned forward to talk animatedly, the play of the hands in
the lantern light; the laughter like a temple bell.

"Tranh."

Yt did not look up from yts intent conversation with yts friends, all
huddled over the low table, deep in shared memory.

"Tranh." This time, yt was heard. Tranh looked up. The
first thing Tal read on yts face was blank incomprehension. I do not
know who you are. Then, recognition, then remembrance, then surprise,
shock, displeasure. Last: embarrassment.

"Sorry," Tal said, stepping back from the alcove. All the
faces were looking at yt. "I'm sorry, I've made a mistake."
Yt turned and fled, discreetly. A need to cry pumped through Tal's
skull. The shy man still stood in the greenery. Feeling enemy eyes
still on yt, Tal took the banana from his soft fist, peeled it, bit
deep. Then the pharm piled in and Tal felt the dimensions of the
courtyard inflate to infinity around yt. Yt offered the strange fruit
to the man.

"No, thank you," he stammered but Tal had him by the arm
and was marching him to a vacant sofa dock. Yt could still feel those
eyes hot on the back of yts skull.

"So," Tal said, sitting sideways on the low sofa and
draping yts thin hands over yts folded knees. "You want to talk
to me, so let's talk." A glance back. They were still looking.
Yt finished the banana and the fluttering lanterns opened up and yt
fell into their gravity and yts next clearly focused thought was of
the facade of a Kurdish restaurant. A waiter whisked yt past tables
of startled customers to a small booth at the back partitioned by a
fragrant carved cedar screen.

The blind woman's bananas, like good guests, came promptly and
departed early. Tal felt the carved geometric patterns on the wooden
screens rush in from celestial distance to claustrophobia. The
restaurant was hot and every customer voice, kitchen noise, and
street sound was intolerably sharp and close.

"I hope you don't mind me bringing you here, but I don't like it
back there," the man was saying. "It's no place to talk,
really talk. But it's discreet here; the owner is in my debt."
Mezze were brought, and a bottle of clear liquor with a jug of water.
"Arak," the man said, pouring a measure. "I don't
drink myself, but I'm told it is a great instiller of courage."
He added water. Tal marvelled as the clear liquid turned to luminous
milk. Tal took a sip, recoiled at the alien aniseed, then had a
slower, more considered measure.

"Yt's a chuutya," Tal declared. "Tranh. "Yt's a
chuutya. Yt wouldn't even look at me; just sat mooning all over yts
friends. I wish I'd never come now."

"It's so hard to find someone to listen to," the man said.
"Someone who doesn't have an agenda, who isn't asking me for
something of trying to sell me something. In my work everyone wants
to hear what I have to say, what my ideas are, every word I say is
treated like gold. Before I met you, I was at a durbar in the
Cantonment. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say, everyone
wanted something from me, except this one man. He was a strange man
and he said a strange thing; he said that we are a deformed society.
I listened to that man."

Tal sipped yts arak.

"Cho chweet, we nutes have always known that."

"So tell me the secrets you know. Tell me what you are. I'd like
to hear how you came to be."

"Well," Tal said, conscious of every scar and implant under
the man's attentive gaze, "my name's Tal, and I was born in
Mumbai in 2019 and I work in Indiapendent on the metasoap design team
for
Town and Country
."

"And in Mumbai," the man said, "in 2019 when you were
born, what." Tal laid a finger to his lips.

"Never," yt whispered. "Never ask, never tell. Before
I Stepped Away, I was another incarnation. I am only alive now, do
you understand? Before was another life, and I am dead and reborn."

"But how." the man asked. Again, Tal laid its soft, pah
finger against the man's lips. Yt could feel them trembling, the
flutter of warm, sweet breath.

"You said you wanted to listen," Tal said and gathered yts
shawl around yt.

"My father was a choreographer in Bollywood, one of the top. Did
you ever see
Rishta
? The number where they're dancing across
the roofs of the cars in the traffic jam? That was him."

"I'm afraid I don't much care for films," the man says.

"It got too camp in the end. Too self-referential, too knowing.
It always gets like that, things become superexaggerated, then they
die. He met my mother on the set of
Lawyers in Love.
She's
Italian, she was a hovercam trainee—at the time, Mumbai was the
best, even the Americans were sending people out here to learn
technique. They met, they married, six months later, me. And before
you ask, no. An only. They were the toast of Chowpatty Beach, my
parents. I got to all the parties; I was a real accessory. I was a
gorgeous kid, baba. We were never out of the filmi mags and the
gossip rags; Sunny and Costanza Vadher, with their beautiful child,
shopping on Linking Road, on the set of
Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne
Lage,
at the Chelliah's barbecue. They were the most incredibly
selfish people I think I have ever met—but they were totally
unselfconscious about it. That's what Costanza accused me of when I
Stepped Away; how incredibly selfish I was. Can you believe it? Where
did she think I learned it?

"They weren't stupid. They might have been selfish, but they
weren't stupid, they must have known what was going to happen when
they started to bring in the aeais. It was the actors first—one
day
Chati
and
Bollywood Masala
and
Namaste!
are
full of Vishal Das and Shruti Rai at an opening at Club 28, next
Filmfare's
running centre page triple pullouts without a single
cubic centimetre of living flesh. It really was that quick."

The man murmurs polite amazement.

"Sunny could have a hundred people dancing on a giant laptop,
but now it was one touch and you'd have them dancing from here to the
horizon, all in perfect synch. They could get a million people
dancing on clouds, just with one click. It hit him hardest first. He
got bad, he get ratty, he would take it out on people around him. He
was mean when it turned against him. I think that's maybe why I
wanted to get into soapi; to show him there was something he could
have done, if he'd tried, if he hadn't been so strung up by his own
image and status. Then again, maybe I just don't care enough. But it
hit Costanza soon after, too; you don't need actors or dancers, you
don't need cameras, either. It's all in the box. They would fight: I
must have been ten, eleven, I could hear them screaming so loud the
neighbours would come banging on the door. Two of them in that
apartment all day, both of them needing work, but jealous as hell in
case the other actually got something. In the evenings they'd go to
the same old parties and durbars to schmooze. Please,
a job
.
Costanza coped better. She adjusted, she got a different job in the
industry in script development. Sunny, he couldn't. Walked right out.
Fuck him. Fuck him. He was a waste anyway."

Tal snatched up the arak, took a bitter draft.

"It all ended. I'd say it was like a film, the credits roll, the
lights came up, and we were back in the real again, but it wasn't. It
didn't have a third act. It didn't have an
against-all-the-odds-happy-ever-after. It just got worse and worse
and then it just ended. It stopped, like the film snapped and I
wasn't living in a Manori Beach apartment and I wasn't at the John
Connon School and I wasn't going round the parties with all the stars
saying,
oh look, isn't it sweet and look how big it's getting
?
I was in a two-room apartment in Thane with Costanza, going to the
Bom Jesus Catholic School, and I hated it. I hated it. I wanted it
all back again, all the magic and the dancing and the fun and the
parties and this time I wanted it to go on after the credits rolled.
I just wanted everyone to look at me and say, wow. Just that. Wow."

Tal sat back, inviting admiration but the man looked afraid, and
something more Tal could not identify. He said, "You are an
extraordinary creature. Do you ever feel that you're living in two
worlds, and that neither of them is real?"

"Two worlds? Honey, there are thousands of worlds. And they're
as real as you want them to be. I should know; I've lived all my life
between them. None of them are real, but when you get into them,
they're all the same."

The man nodded, not in agreement with anything Tal had said, but at
some inner dialogue.

He summoned the bill, left a pile of notes on the little silver tray.
"It's getting late, and I do have affairs to attend to in the
morning."

"What sort of affairs?" The man smiled to himself.

"You are the second person to ask me that tonight. I work in
information management. Thank you for coming with me here and the
pleasure of your company; you really are an extraordinary human,
Tal."

"You didn't give me your name."

"No, I don't believe I did."

"That's so male," Tal said, sweeping along behind the man
on to the street where he was already waving down a taxi.

"You could call me Khan."

Something has changed, Tal thought as yt slid in to the back seat of
the Maruti. The man Khan had been nervous, shy, guilty at the Banana
Club. Even in the restaurant he had not been at ease. Something in
yts story had worked on his mind and mood.

"I don't go to White Fort after midnight," the driver said.

"I will pay you treble," Khan said.

"I'll get as close as I can"

Khan leaned his head against the greasy rest.

"You know, it really is an excellent little restaurant. The
owner came here about ten years ago in the last wave of the Kurdish
diaspora. I. helped him. He set the place up, he's doing well. I
suppose he's a man trapped between two worlds as well."

Tal was only half listening, curling up in the arak glow. Yt leaned
against Khan, for warmth, for solidity. Yt let yts inner arm roll
into the space between them. The row of buds were puckered like
bitch-nipples in the street glow. Tal saw the man start at the sight.
Then a hand was stabbing down the front of yts lounging pants, a face
loomed over yt, a mouth clamped over yts. A tongue pressed entrance
to yts body. Tal gave a muffled scream, Khan recoiled in shock, which
gave Tal space to push and shout. The phatphat bounced to a halt in
the middle of the highway. Tal had the door open and was out, shawl
flapping behind yt, before yt was fully conscious of what yt was
doing.

Tal ran.

Tal stops running. Yt stands, hands on thighs; panting. Khan is still
there, peering through the headlight blur, calling out futilely into
the traffic roar. Tal stifles a sob. Yt can still smell the
aftershave on yts skin, taste tongue in yts mouth. Shaking, yt waits
a safe few minutes before flagging in a cruising phatphat. DJ Aeai
plays MIX FOR A NIGHT TURNED SCARY.

New day, new array. Everyone from cleaners to Centre Director turned
out under the canopy of the Ranjit Ray Research Centre. They look
nervous.
Not nearly as nervous as your unexpected and unprepared
CEO,
Vishram Ray thinks as the car crunches sensuously up the
raked gravel drive. Vishram checks cuffs, tugs collar.