River of Gods (24 page)

He hits the lights. Vishram's blind for an instant, then he becomes
aware of a gaining glow from the window. He remembers a physics
student he once took home telling him that the retina can detect a
single photon and therefore the human eye can see on the quantum
scale. He leans forwards; the glow comes from a line of blue, sharp
as a laser; Vishram can see it curve off around the walls of the
tokamak. He presses his face to the glass.

"Uh oh, panda eyes," Deba says. "It throws off a lot
of UV."

"This is. another universe?"

"It's another space-time vacuum," Sonia Yadav says. She
stands close enough for Vishram to fully appreciate her
Arpege 27.
"It's been stable for a couple of months. Think of it as another
nothing, but with a vacuum energy higher than ours."

"And it's leaking into our universe."

"It's not much higher, we're only getting a two percent above
input return from it, but we hope to use this space to open an
aperture into a yet higher energy space, and so on, up the ladder
until we get a significant return."

"And the light."

"Quantum radiation; the virtual particles of this universe—we
call it Universe two-eight-eight—running into the laws of our
universe and annihilating themselves into photons."

Not it's not, Vishram thinks, looking into the light of another time
and space. And you know it's not, Sonia Yadav. It is the light of
Brahma.

A boyz always got his mother.

It had been almost a homecoming, walking through the narrow galis
between the shanties, ducking under the power cables, keeping the
good shoes on the cardboard paths because even in the driest of
droughts the alleys of Chandi Basti were piss-mud. The runways
constantly realigned themselves as shanties collapsed or additions
were build on, but Shiv steered by landmarks: Lord Ram Indestructible
Car Parts where the brothers Shasi and Ashish were taking a VW apart
into tiny parts; Mr. Pilai's Sewing Machine under its umbrella;
Ambedkar the child-buyer's agent sitting on his raised porch of
forklift pallets, smoking sweet ganja. Everywhere, people looking,
people stepping aside, people making gestures to ward off the eye,
people following him with their gaze because they had seen something
from outside their existence, something with taste and class and
great shoes, something that was
something
. Something that was
a
man
.

His mother had looked up at his shadow across her doorway. He pushed
money on her, a wad of grubby rupees. He had a little cash in hand
from the man who hauled away the remains of the Merc. It left him
short, but a son should repay some of the debt he owes his mother.
She pretended to tsk it away, but Shiv saw her tuck it behind the
brick by the fire.

He's back. It's only a charpoy in the corner but there's a roof and a
fire and dal twice a day and the secure knowledge that no one, no
thing, no killing machine with scimitars for hands will find Shiv
here. But there is a danger here, too. It would be easy to sink back
into the routine of a little eating, a little sleep in the noon-day
sun, a little thieving, a little hanging around with your friends,
talking this and that and looking at the girls and that is a day, a
year, a life gone. He must be thinking, talking, pulling in his debts
and his favours. Yogendra goes out running through basti and city,
listening to what the streets are saying about Shiv, who has turned
his collar against him, who still has a thread of honour.

And then there is his sister.

Leela is a reminder that a son and brother should not leave it from
Diwali to Guru Poornima to see his family. What had been a
nice-looking, quiet, shy but solid-minded seventeen-year-old—could
have married up—has turned Bible Christian. She went out one
night with a friend to a religious thing run by a cable television
station and came back born again. But it is not enough that she has
found the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone else must find him, too.
Especially her baaaadest of baaaadmash brothers. So round she comes
with her Bible with the whisper-thin paper that Shiv knows makes the
very best spliffs and her little tracts and her cumbersome zeal.

"Sister, this is my time of rest and recreation. You disrupt it.
If your Christianity means as much as you say, you would respect your
brother. I think it says that somewhere, respect and honour your
brother."

"My brothers are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said
that because of me, you will hate your mother and father, and your
brother, too."

"Then that is a very foolish religion. Which one of your
brothers and sisters in Christ got you drugs when you were dying of
tuberculosis? Which one of them rammed that rich man's pharmacy? You
are making yourself no one, nothing. No one will marry you if you are
not properly Indian. Your womb will dry up. You will cry out for
those children. I don't like to say this, but no one else will tell
you this truth but me. Mata won't, your Christian friends won't. You
are making a terrible mistake, put it right now."

"The terrible mistake is to choose to go to hell," Leela
says defiantly.

"And what do you think this is?" Shiv says. Yogendra bares
his ratty teeth.

That afternoon Shiv has a meeting: Priya from Musst. Good times there
are not forgotten.

Shiv watches the chai stall for fifteen minutes to be sure it is her
and her alone. She is pain to his heart in her pants that cling to
the curve of her ass and her wispy silk top and her amber shades and
her pale pale skin and red red sucking lips that pout as she looks
around impatiently for him, trying to pick his hair, his face, his
walk out of the thronging, staring bodies. She is all the things he
has lost. He must get out of here. He must raise himself up again. Be
a raja again.

She bounces on her boot heels and gives little squeaks of delight to
see him. He gets her tea, they sit on a bench at the metal counter.
She offers to get the bill but he pays with some of his dwindling
wad. Chandni Basti will not see a woman buy Shiv Faraji tea. Her legs
are long and lean and urban. The men of Chandni Basri measure them
with their eyes, then catch the hem of the leather coat on the man
beside her. They go on their way then. Yogendra sits on an upturned
plastic fertiliser barrel and picks at his teeth.

"So, are my women and bartender missing me?" He offers her
a bidi, takes a light from the gas burner under the rattling water
boiler.

"You are in such trouble." She lights hers off his, a
Bollywood kiss. "You know who Ahimsa Debt Collection Agency is?"

"Some gang of hoods."

"The Dawood Gang. It's a new line of work for them, buying
debts. Shiv, you have the Dawoods after you. These are the men
skinned Gurnit Azni alive in the back of his limo."

"It's all bargaining; they go in high, I go in low, we meet in
the middle. That is the way men do business."

"No. They want what you owe them. Not a rupee less."

Shiv laughs, the free, mad laugh breaking up inside. He can see the
blue around the edge of his field of vision again, the pure, Krishna
blue.

"No one has that kind of money."

"Then you are dead and I am very sorry." Shiv lays his hand
flat on Priya's thigh. She freezes.

"You came here to tell me that? I was expecting something from
you."

"Shiv, there are a hundred big dadas like you on every street
corner, all expecting." Her sentence snaps off as Shiv seizes
her jaw, pressing his fingers hard into the soft meat, rubbing his
thumb over the bone. Bruises. He will leave bruises like blue roses.
Priya yelps. Yogendra bares his incisors. Pain arouses that boy, Shiv
thinks. Pain makes him smile. The people of Chandni Basti stare. He
feels eyes all around him. Stare well.

"Raja," he whispers. "I am a raja."

He lets her go. Priya rubs her jaw.

"That hurt, madar chowd."

"There's something, isn't there?"

"You don't deserve it. You deserve the Dawoods to cut you up
with a robot, behen chowd." She flinches as Shiv reaches for her
face again. "It's a little thing but it could lead to more. A
lot more. Just a drop off. But if you do it right, they say."

"Who says?"

"Nitish and Chunni Nath."

"I don't work for Brahmins."

"Shiv."

"It is a point of principle. I am a man of principle."

"It's principle to get chopped up into kabob by the Dawoods?"

"I do not take orders from children."

"They aren't children."

"They are here." Shiv cups his hand over his groin, jerks.
"No, I will not work for the Naths."

"Then you won't need to go here." She snaps open her little
bag and slides a piece of paper across the greasy counter. There is
an address, out in the industrial belt. "And you won't need this
car." She parks a rental chitty beside the address slip. It's
for a Merc, a big Kali-black four-litre SUV Merc, like a raja would
drive. "If you don't need any of that, I guess I'll go now and
pray for your moksha."

She scoops up her bag and slides off the high bench and pushes past
Yogendra and strides off over the cardboard in those high heel boots
that make her ass go wip-wop side-a-side.

Yogendra is looking at him. It's that wise-kid look that makes Shiv
want to smash his head against the tin counter until he hears things
crack and go soft.

"You finished that?" He snatches the kid's can of tea,
splashes its contents over the ground. "You have now. We have
better business."

The kid is right in his fuck-you silence. He is as old as any
Brahmin, inside there in the skull. Not for the first time Shiv
wonders if he is a rich boy, a son and heir to some pirate lord,
tumbled out of the limo under the neons of Kashi to learn how the
world really works. Survive. Thrive. No other rules apply.

"You coming or what?" he shouts at Yogendra. Somewhere the
kid has found himself a chew of paan.

Leela comes around again that night to help her mother make
cauliflower puris. They are a treat for Shiv but the smell of hot
ghee in the confined, dark house makes his skin crawl, his scalp
itch. Shiv's mother and sister squat around the little gas cooker.
Yogendra sits with them draining the cooked
puris,
on crumpled
newspaper. Shiv watches the boy, squatting with the women, scooping
the smoking hot breads into their paper nests. This must have meant
something to him once. A hearth, a fire, bread, paper. He looks at
Leela clapping out the puris into little ovals and throwing them into
the deep fat.

She says into the peace of the house, "I'm thinking of changing
my name to Martha. It is from the Bible. Leela is from Leelavati who
is a pagan goddess but is really a demon of Satan in hell. Do you
know what hell is like?" She casually ladles cauliflower puris
out on the chicken-wire scoop. "Hell is a fire that never goes
out, a great dark hall, like a temple, only greater than any temple
you have ever seen because it has to hold all the people who never
knew the Lord Jesus. The walls and the pillars are tens of kilometres
high and they glow yellow hot and the air is like a flame. I say
walls, but there is no outside to hell, only solid rock going on
forever in every direction, and hell is carved inside it, so that
even if you could escape, which you can't, because you're chained up
like a package, there would be nowhere else to go. And the space is
filled with billions and billions of people all chained up into
little bundles, piled on top of each other, a thousand deep and a
thousand wide and a thousand high, a billion people in a pile, and a
thousand of those piles. The ones in the centre cannot see anything
at all but they can hear each other, all roaring. That is the only
sound you hear in hell, this great roaring that never stops, from all
the billions of people, chained and burning but never being burned
up. That is the thing, burning in flame, but never eaten up."

Shiv shifts on his charpoy. Hell is one thing Christians do well. His
dick lifts in his pants. The torment, the screaming, the bodies
heaped up in pain, the nakedness, the helplessness, have always
stirred him. Yogendra sifts the drained puris into a basket. His eyes
are dead, dull, his face animal.

"And the thing is, it goes on forever. A thousand years is not
even a second. An age of Brahma is not even one instant in hell. A
thousand ages of Brahma and you are still no nearer the end. You
haven't even begun. That is where you are going. You will be taken
down by the demons and chained up and set on top of the pile of
people and your flesh will begin to burn and you will try not to
breathe in the flame but in the end you will have to and after that
nothing will ever change. The only way to avoid Hell is to put your
trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your personal Lord
and Saviour. There is no other way. Imagine it: hell. Can you even
begin to imagine what it will be like?"

"Like this?" Yogendra is fast as a knife in an alley. He
grabs Leela's wrist. She cries out but she cannot break his hold. His
face is the same feral blank as he pushes her hand towards the
boiling ghee.

Shiv's boot to the side of his head knocks him across the room,
scattering puris. Leela/Martha flees shrieking to the back room.
Shiv's mother flies back from the stove, the hot fat, the treacherous
gas flame.

"Get him out of here, out of my house!"

"Oh, he's going," Shiv says as he crosses the room in two
strides, lifts Yogendra by two fistfuls of T-shirt and drags him out
into the gali. Blood wells from a small cut above his ear but
Yogendra still wears that numb, animal smile. Shiv throws him across
the alley and follows in with the boot. Yogendra doesn't fight back,
doesn't try to defend himself, doesn't try to run or curl into a
ball, takes the kicking with a fuck-you smile on his face. It is like
striking a cat. Cats never forgive. Fuck him. Cats you drown, in the
river. Shiv kicks him until the blue is gone. Then he sits back
against the shanty wall and lights a bidi. Lights another, passes it
to Yogendra. He takes it. They smoke in the gali. Shiv grinds the
butt out on the cardboard beneath the heel of his Italian shoe.