River of Gods (35 page)

"Hopefully not in London, the shopping's gone to hell. But the
Americans."

"We're thinking the same thought, Prime Minister. The Special
Relationship."

"Is nowhere near as reciprocal as the Brits like to think. I'll
tell you one thing gives me joy out of this whole mess, Khan. We
stuck it up that chuutya Jivanjee. He thought he was so clever,
leaking those photographs of his Holy Shopping Trolley; well, now
he's the one running back home with his balls in his mouth."

"Still, Prime Minister, he hasn't gone away, you know. I think
we shall be hearing from Mr. Jivanjee if we get our peace
conference."

"When, Khan."

Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head in acquiescence. But he knows that
there is no science in this thing. He, his government, and his nation
have been lucky thus far. Sajida Rana picks a badly sewn seam in her
combat pants, slouches down in her seat, and asks, "Anything
about me yet?" Shaheen Badoor Khan flips on his palmer and scans
the news channels and agency services. Phantom pages appear before
his field of vision. News breaks around him in soft, colourful
detonations.

"CNN, BBC, and News International are running it as breaking
news. Reuters is just copying to the US Press."

"What's the Great Satan's general tenor?"

Shaheen Badoor Khan flicks through leader articles from Boston to San
Diego.

"Mild scepticism to outright rejection. The conservatives are
calling for our withdrawal, then maybe negotiations."

Sajida Rana tugs gently at her bottom lip, a private gesture known
only to intimates, like her fabulously dirty mouth.

"At least they aren't sending the marines. But then it's only
water, not oil. Still, it's not Washington we're at war with.
Anything from Delhi?"

"Nothing on the online channels."

Prime Minister Rana drags the lip a little lower.

"I don't like that. They've got other headlines written."

"Our satellite data show Awadhi forces still holding position."

Sajida Rana lets go her lip, sits up in her seat.

"Fuck them. This is a great day! We should rejoice! Shaheen."
The first name. "In confidence: Chowdhury, what do you think of
him?"

"Minister Chowdhury is a very able constituency member."

"Minister Chowdhury is a hijra. Shaheen, there's an idea I've
been pushing around the back of my head. Deedarganj will be up for
by-election some time in the next year, Ahuja's putting a brave face
on it but that tumour's eating him from the inside out, poor bastard.
It's a good staunch seat; hell, they'd elect James F. McAuley if he
waved a bit of incense at Ganesha."

"With respect Prime Minister, President McAuley is not a
Muslim."

"Well fuck it, Khan, you're hardly Bin Laden. What are you,
Sufi, something like that?"

"I come from a Sufi background, that's correct."

"Well, that's my point exactly. Look, truth of it is, you've
played a good chukka on this one and I need your abilities out in the
open. You'd have to serve out your apprenticeship on the backbenches,
but I'd certainly be fast-tracking you for a ministerial portfolio."

"Prime Minister, I don't know what to say."

"Well, you could start with thank you, you fucking parsimonious
Sufi. Strictest, of course."

"Of course, Prime Minister."

Deprecating, bowing, acquiescing; a mere civil servant; but Shaheen
Badoor Khan's heart leaps. There was a time at Harvard after the
freshman results when the tension burst and the summer opened free
and wide and he forgot both business school virtues and the
disciplines of his school of Islam. Under the lengthy guidance of a
liquor store owner he had bought himself a bottle of imported
Speyside single malt whisky and, in the shafts of dusty light through
his room window, toasted his success. Between the creak of the cork
in the bottle-neck and the dry retching in the purple twilight there
had been a distinct period when he felt embedded in joy and radiance
and confidence and that the world was his without limit or bar. He
had gone to his window, bottle in hand, and roared at the planet. The
hangover, the spiritual guilt, had been worth it for that one,
charged burn of epiphany. Now strapped in beside his Prime Minister
in an army tilt-jet, he knows it again. Cabinet Minister. Him. He
tries to look at himself, imagine a different seat at the table in
the beautiful, luminous council room; imagine himself rising to his
feet under the dome of the Sabha. The Honourable Member for
Deedarganj. And it will be right. It is his just reward, not for his
diligent, unstinting service, but for his ability. He deserves this.
Deserves it, will have it.

"How long have we worked together?" Sajida Rana asks.

"Seven years," Shaheen Badoor Khan replies. He thinks, and
three months twenty-two days. Sajida Rana nods. Then she does the
thing with the lip again.

"Shaheen."

"Yes, Prime Minister?"

"Is everything all right?"

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, Prime Minister."

"It's just, well, you've seemed distracted recently. I've heard
a rumour."

Shaheen Badoor Khan feels his heart stop, his breath freeze, his
brain crystallise. Dead. He is dead. No. She would not have offered
him everything she has in this high, private place only to rip it
away from him for a trifle of madness. But it is not madness, Shaheen
Badoor Khan. It is how you are. Thinking you can deny it, hide it, is
the madness. He moistens his lips with his tongue. There must be no
faltering, no dryness or failure in these words he has to say.

"Government is the province of rumours, Prime Minister."

"I'd just heard you'd left some do in the Cantonment early."

"I was tired, Prime Minister. That was the day." He is not
safe yet.

"Of the briefing, yes, I remember. What I heard, and doubtless
it's gross slander, is that there was a bit of. tension between you
and Begum Bilquis. I know it's bloody cheek, Shaheen, but is
everything all right at home?"

Tell her, Shaheen Badoor screams at himself. Better she finds out now
than from some party tout, or, God preserve us, N. K. Jivanjee. If
she does not know already, if this is not some test of honesty and
loyalty. Tell her where you went, who you met, what you almost did
with him.
Yt
. Tell her. Hand it over to the mother of the
nation, let her manage it and spin it and massage it for the cameras,
all those things he has done so long, so loyally, for Sajida Rana.

He cannot. His enemies within and without the party hate him enough
as a Muslim. As a pervert, a wife-abandoner, a lover of things most
of them cannot even regard as human, his career would be over. The
Rana government could not survive. Before everything, Shaheen Badoor
Khan is a civil servant. The administration must stand.

"May I be frank, Prime Minister?"

Sajida Rana leans across the narrow aisle.

"That's twice in one conversation, Shaheen."

"My wife. Bilquis. well, recently, we've been going through a
cold period. When the boys left for university, well, we'd never had
that much apart from them to talk about. We live independent lives
now—Bilquis has her column and women's forum. But you can be
assured that we won't let that get in the way of our public duties.
We won't embarrass you that way again."

"No embarrassment," Sajida Rana murmurs, then the military
pilot makes a terse announcement about landing at Nabha Sparasham Air
Force Base in ten minutes and Shaheen Badoor Khan uses the
distraction to look out of the window at the great brown stain of
Varanasi's monstrous bastis. He allows himself a small twitch of a
smile. Safe. She doesn't know. He has spun it. But there are tasks he
has to do now. And there, along the very southern edge of the
horizon, is that a dark line of cloud?

It was only after his father died that Shaheen Badoor Khan understood
how much he hated the house by the river. It is not that the haveli
is ugly or overbearing—it is the contrary of all of those
things. But its airy cloisters and verandahs and spacious,
high-ceilinged white rooms are heavy with history, generation, duty.
Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot go up the steps and pass under the great
brass lantern in the porch and enter the hall with its twin
spiralling staircases, the men's and the women's, without remembering
himself as a boy, hiding behind a pillar as his grandfather Sayid
Raiz Khan was carried out to the burying ground by the old hunting
lodge in the marshes, and again, walking behind his own father as he
made that same, swift journey through the teak doors. He will make
that journey himself, through his fine teak double doors. His own
sons and grandsons will bear him through. The haveli is crowded with
lives. There is no cranny away from relatives and friends and
servants. Every word, deed, intention is visible, transparent. The
concept of
place apart
is one he remembers with tight pleasure
from Harvard. The concept of privacy, the New England reserve:
reserve, a thing set aside, for another use.

He crosses the mezzanine to the women's half of the house; as always,
he hesitates at the door of the zenana. Purdah had been abolished in
haveli Khan in his grandfather's time but Shaheen Badoor Khan had
always felt a sense of shame of the women's apartments; things here,
stories in the walls, ways of living that had nothing to do with him.
A house divided, like the hemispheres of the brain.

"Bilquis." His wife has set up her office in the screened
balcony with its view over the teeming, tumultuous ghats and the
still river. Here she writes her articles and radio speeches and
essays. In the bird garden beneath she entertains her clever,
disenfranchised friends as they drink coffee and make whatever plans
clever, disenfranchised women make.

We are a deformed society,
the music-loving civil servant had
said as Mumtaz Huq took the stage.

"Bilquis."

Footsteps. The door opens, the face of a servant—Shaheen Badoor
Khan cannot remember which one—peeps out.

"The Begum is not here, sahb."

Shaheen Badoor Khan slumps against the sturdy doorframe. The one time
he would cherish a few sentences snatched between busy lives. A word.
A touch. For he is tired. Tired of the relentlessness. Tired of the
appalling truth that even if he sat down and did nothing like the
sadhu on a street comer, events he has set in motion will swell
behind him, one feeding the other, into a drown-wave. He must always
run those few steps ahead. Tired of the mask, the face, the lie. Tell
her. She will know what to do.

"Always out, yes."

"Mr. Khan?"

"It doesn't matter."

The door closes on the sliver of face. For the first time in memory,
Shaheen Badoor Khan is lost in his own house. He cannot recognise the
doors, the walls, the hallways. He is in a bright room now,
overlooking the river, a white room with the mosquito nets tied up in
big, soft knots, a room filled with slants of light and dust and a
smell that calls him back to himself. Smell is the key of memory. He
knows this room, he loved this room. It is the old nursery; his boys'
room. His room, high over the water. Here he would wake every morning
to the salutations of the Brahmins to the great river. The room is
clean and pale and bare. He must have ordered it cleared after the
boys left the house for university but he cannot remember instructing
it so. Ayah Gul died ten years ago but in the wooden slats, the
draped curtains he can smell the perfume of her breast, the spice of
her clothing though Shaheen Badoor Khan realises with a start that it
is decades since he entered this room. He squints up into the light.
God is the light of the Heavens and of the Earth... It is light
upon light. God guideth whom He will to His light, and God seteth
forth parables to men, for God knoweth all things
. The sura curls
like smoke in Shaheen Badoor Khan's memory.

It is only because, for the first time in long memory, he feels there
are no eyes watching, that Shaheen Badoor Khan can do what he does
now. He reaches his arms out at his side and starts to spin, slowly
at first, feet feeling fot balance. The Sufi spinning dance, that
whirled the dervishes into the God-consciousness within. The dhikr,
the sacred name of God, forms on his tongue. A bright flash of
child-memory, his grandfather holding perfectly in place on the
geometric tiled floor of the iwan as the qawwals play. A Mevlevi had
come from Ankara to teach Indian men the sema, the great dance of
God.

Spin me out of this world, God-within.

The soft mat rucks beneath Shaheen Badoor Khan's feet. The
concentration is intense, every thought on the motion of the feet,
the turning of the hands, down to bless, up to receive. He spins back
through his memories.

That crazy New England summer when high pressure moored over Puritan
Cambridge and the temperature climbed and stuck and everyone opened
their doors and windows and went out into the streets and parks and
greens or just sat in their doorways and balconies, when Shaheen
Badoor Khan, in his sophomore year, forgot what it was to be cold and
restrained. Out with friends, coming back late from a music festival
in Boston. Then it came, out of the soft, velvet, scented night and
Shaheen Badoor Khan was paralysed, fixed like a northern star as he
was to be a quarter of a century later in Dhaka airport by a vision
of the unearthly, the alien, the unobtainable beauty. The nute
frowned at the rush of noisy undergraduates as it tried to sidestep.
It was the first Shaheen Badoor Khan had ever seen. He had read, seen
pictures, been intrigued, tantalised, tormented by this dream of his
childhood incarnate. But this was flesh: real, no legendary beast. He
had fallen in love on that Harvard green. He had never fallen out
again. Twenty-five years, carrying a thorn in the heart.

Feet move, hands weave, lips shape the mantra of the dhikr. Spinning
back.