River of Gods (39 page)

"Ms. Askarzadah, good morning to you. I assume that is when my
operatives will deliver this message to you. I trust you have a
refreshing walk, I do think exercise first thing in the morning
really does get the day off to the best possible start. I do wish I
could say that I still greet every dawn with the surya namaskar, but,
ah, the years. Anyway, my congratulations on the use to which you put
my last piece of information. You have exceeded my expectations; I am
quite, quite delighted. Therefore I have decided to entrust you with
another release of privileged data. You will pick it up from my
worker at midnight tonight, at the address which will follow on this
screen. This one will be of the utmost sensitivity, I don't think I
exaggerate when I say that it will transform the political shape of
this nation. All my previous
caveats
are repeated, and
amplified. Yet again, I'm sure we can rely on you. Thank you, bless
you."

Najia Askarzadah knows the address. She takes care to lock her palmer
in her room before joining her walking mates splashing in the blue
pool.

Go somewhere once and you will be there again sooner than you think.
The noise in the club is an assault. The scrap wood benches are
packed with men waving betting slips and roaring down on to the blood
spattered sand. Many are in uniform. All war is a bet. The
instructions on her palmer direct her down the stairs, into the pit.
The sound, the stink of sweat and spilled beer and oxidised perfume,
are overpowering. Najia pushes between the shouting, gesticulating
bodies. Through the forest of hands she can glimpse the fighting
microsabres held high by their owners, parading around the sand ring.
She wonders about the handsome, feral boy who caught her eye that
first night. Then the cats go down, the owners dive over the side of
the ring, and the crowd surges forward with a roar like a hymn. Najia
beats through to the satta booths. The bookies measure her with their
round, lilac glasses. A fat woman beckons her over.

"Sit, sit here beside me."

Najia squeezes on to the bench beside her. Her clothes smell of
burned ghee and garlic. "Have you something for me?"

The sattawoman ignores her, busy at her book. Her assistant, an old
thin man, claws in the cash and sends betting slips skittering across
the polished wooden desk. The barker leaps down from his high chair
and scuttles into the ring to announce the next bout. Tonight he is
dressed as a pierrot.

"No, but I do," a voice says sudden and close behind her.
She turns. The man leans over the pew-back. He is dressed in black
leather; Najia can smell it, smoky, sensual. The feral boy from the
Mercedes is beside him; same shirt same grin same string of pearls.
The man holds up a manila A4 envelope. "This is for you."
He has dark, liquid eyes, lovely as a girl's. You do not forget eyes
like that and Najia knows she has seen them before. But she hesitates
to take the envelope.

"Who are you?

"A paid operative," the man says. "Do you know what
this is?"

"I merely deliver. But I do know that everything in there is
real and can be verified."

Najia takes the envelope, opens it. Merc-boy's hand strikes over the
partition, staying hers.

"Not here," the man says. Najia slides the envelope into
her shoulder bag. When she turns back again the stall is empty. She
wants to ask that nagging question:
why me
? But the man with
lovely eyes would have no answer to that either. She slips her bag
over her shoulder and weaves through the crowd as the barker stalks
the killing floor, blasting his air-horn and bellowing bet! bet! bet!
She remembers where she knows those eyes from. They met across this
perspective, her by the balcony rail, he in the satta pit.

Back on the moped, out in the traffic. The city seems close tonight,
threatening, knife-bearing. The cars and trucks want her under their
wheels. The street jams up around a cow taking a long luxurious piss
in the middle of the road. Najia opens the manila envelope, slides
out the top third of the first photograph. She pulls out half. Then
the whole. Then she takes out the next photograph. Then the next.
Then the next.

The cow has wandered on. Vans are hooting, drivers shouting, waving,
issuing vivid curses at her.

And the next. And the next. That man. That man is. That man, she
recognises him though his is a face that has concealed itself well
from the cameras. That man is said to be the will behind Sajida Rana.
Her private secretary. Giving money. Wads of cash. To a nute. In a
club. Shaheen Badoor Khan.

The entire street is looking at her. A policeman advances waving his
lathi. Najia Askarzadah rams the pictures back into the envelope,
heart hammering, twists the throttle, revs away, her little alcohol
engine going putty-putter-putt. Shaheen Badoor Khan. Shaheen Badoor
Khan
. She's driving by amygdala alone through the blaring,
poisonous traffic, seeing the money, seeing the riverside apartment
in New Sarnath, seeing the noo clowthz and holidaze and champagne
that isn't Omar Khayyam and interviews and the name on the banner
headlines Bharat-wide India-wide Asia-wide Planet-wide and in far
cool nice Sweden her parents opening the
Dagens Nyheter
and
it's their darling daughter's photograph under the foreign news
leadline.

She stops. Her heart is beating arrhythmically, fluttering, wowing.
Caffeine does it shock does it big sex does it joy does it. Getting
everything you ever wanted does it. She can see. She can hear. She
can sense. A gyre of noise and colour confronts her. No other place
her preconsciousness could bring her than to the heart of Bharat's
madness and contradiction. Sarkhand Roundabout.

Nothing with wheels and an engine is getting through this
intersection. The radiating roads have swollen like diseased arteries
into rent cities and truck laagers, glossy with yellow streetlight
and the glow of sidewalk shrines. Najia sets her feet on the ground
and walks her little bike into the fringes, drawn to the magnificent
chaos. The spinning wall of colour, glimpsed through the mess of
trucks and plastic sheeting, is a wheel of people, loping and
chanting as they orbit the gaudily painted concrete statue of
Ganesha. Some carry placards, some hold lathis by the tips, the ends
swaying and bobbing over their heads like a forest of cane in a
premonsoon wind. Some wear dhotis and shirts, some are in Western
pants, even suits. Some are naked, ash-smeared sadhus. A group of
women in red, devotees of Kali, rush past. All have fallen into
unconscious lockstep and perfect rhythm. Individuals spin in, spin
out, but the wheel turns endlessly. The cylinder of air between the
facing buildings throbs like a drum.

A massive red and orange object lumbers into Najia's field of vision:
rath yatra, like the one she saw on Industrial Road. Perhaps that
same one. N. K. Jivanjee's Chariot of Siva. She walks her bike
inward. The syncopated chanting is a mad, joyful hymn. She can feel
her breath and pulse fall into rhythm with the dance, feel her womb
tighten, her nipples harden. She is part of this insanity. It defines
her. It is all the danger and madness she has sought as the antidote
to her sane Swedishness. It tells her it is still a life of
surprises, worth enduring.
Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers!
declares a large yellow advertising sign above the crazy mela.

A buck-toothed karsevak thrusts a sheet of A5 at her.

"Read read! Demons attack us, sex-crazed violators of children!"
he shouts. The flyer is printed front Hindi, back English. "Our
leaders are in thrall to Bible Christians and Demonic Mohammedans!
Mata Bharat founders! Read this paper!"

The leaflet features a large cartoon of Sajida Rana as a shadow
puppet, dancing in her designer combat fatigues, her sticks held by a
hook-nosed caricature Arab in a red and white
shumagg
. His
ogal
reads
Badoor-Khan
. She points the way for an American
televangelist who sits at the controls of a big bulldozer, cigar
erect in mouth, advancing on a Hindu mother and child cowering in the
shadow of the rat-vahana of an enraged Ganesha, trunk uplifted, axe
drawn back to strike.

Child-raping paedophile Muslims plan capitulation to Coca-Cola
Kultur! First they steal the waters of Mother Ganga, then Sarkhand,
then Holy Bharat. Your nation, your soul, are at risk!

They hate him, thinks Najia Askarzadah, still trembling from the
accreted human energy. They hate him worse than anything I can
imagine. And I can deliver him to them. I can give them what they
want, the highest, hardest fall. Child-raping paedophile? No, much
much worse: a lover of things not male, not female. Monsters. Nutes.
An un-man. A glare of light, a bloom of yellow flame and a thunder of
approval from the jogging crowd. A burning Awadhi flag twists into
her view, writhing like a soul in fire. She can lift a finger and
send all these futures spinning off into unknown dimensions. She has
never felt so alive, so potent, so powerful and capricious. All her
life she has been the outsider, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the
Afghan Swede; wanting to be part, the whole, the core, the blood. She
feels a delirious rub of warm damp against the vinyl of the bike
saddle.

Shiv and Yogendra ride up through a cylinder of sound.
Construxx
boasts a crew of architectural surveyors who cruise Varanasi and
Ranapur's construction zone jungles looking for the best pre- and
post-industrial sites.
Construxx's
niche is the dips in the
cash flow charts. Last month it was the penthouse levels of the
Narayan Tower in west Varauna: eighty-eight floors of rentable
flexform office space; tenants four. This month it is the vast
concrete shaft that, when the money comes on line again after the
war, will be University metro station.
Construxx
boasts mighty
architecture and word-of-mouth PR. If you want to find it, you must
ask the right people in the right places.

Location of
Construxx
August 2047 Site. Take the metro to
Panch Koshi Station, last stop on the new South Loop line, all chrome
and glass and that concrete that looks oily to the touch. At the end
of the platform is a temporary wooden staircase down onto the tracks.
This section of the line is deactivated. Follow the tunnel until you
see a small circle of flickering light. Two dark shapes will emerge
on either side of the expanding circle: they are security. You must
either impress them with your looks, your style, your celebrity, or
your status. Or be an invited guest of Nitish and Chunni Nath.

Construxx
August 2047 Site: for best effect, look up. Blue
spots swing and dash down from a lighting gantry rigged under the
temporary plastic roof. Catwalks, platforms, rigging wires, steel
grilles and meshes shatter the light into a net of shadow and aqua.
Moving shadows are bodies, dancing, grooving to the personalised
tunes coming through their palmers. The DJ box is halfway up the
wall, a rickety raft of scaffolding rods and construction mesh. Here
a two-human, fifteen-aeai crew pump out a customised channel of
Construxx
August 2047 mix for every dancer out there on the
platforms.

Construxx
August 2047 Site obeys a strict and simple vertical
hierarchy. Shiv and Yogendra ride the service elevator up through the
new meat and the office grrrls who've saved all month for this one
night of notoriety and the soapi wannabes and the fine young
criminals and the sons and daughters of
something,
all arrayed
on their appropriate platforms. The elevator drags them up red
spray-bomb letters, each ten metres high: the dogma of
Construxx,
filling half the orbit of the concrete shaft:
Art Empire Industry
.
Shiv flicks away his dead bidi. It rolls through the steel grating
beneath his feet and falls into the throbbing blue, shedding sparks.
The main bar and crush zone is on what will be the ticket concourse.
The true gods are up on the vip levels, stacked out over the drop
like a fan of playing cards. Shiv moves towards the security. They
are two big blonde Russian women in orange coveralls bearing the
Construxx
mantra and bulges that speak of concealed yet easily
accessible firepower. While they scan his invitation, Shiv checks out
the action up on the vip level. The Naths are two small figures
dressed in gold, like images of gods, giving darshan to their
supplicants. A Russia grrrl waves Shiv over to the bar. He is far
down the social order.

Drinks are served from the ticket counters. Ranks of cocktail-wallahs
mix, shake, chill, and pour in a rhythm part dance, part martial art.
Cocktail of the night seems to be something called Kunda Khadar. Drop
an ice bubble into neat vodka. Ice cracks, seeps a clear liquid that
turns red in contact with the alcohol. The blood of Holy Bharat shed
on the waters of Mother Ganga. Shiv wouldn't mind trying one,
wouldn't mind anything with a shot of grain in it to steady his nerve
but he can't even afford the house water. Someone will buy him one.
The only eyes that will hold his belong to a girl by the railing,
alone, on the edge of the spirals of talk. She is red: short soft
terracotta leather skirt, a fall of long, straight crimson hair. An
opal nestles in her navel. She has garial skin boots with feathers
and bells swinging from the straps, a new look Shiv must have missed
in his exile in Shit City. One two three seconds she looks at him
then turns away to gaze down into the pit. Shiv leans on the rail and
looks out into the motion and light.

"It's bad luck, you know."

"What's bad luck?" the girl asks. She has a lazy, city
drawl.

"This." He taps her belly jewel. She flinches but does not
recoil. She balances her gyroscopic cocktail glass on the rail and
turns to face him. Red tendrils spiral through the clear alcohol.
"Opals. Bad luck jewels. That is what the English Victorians
believed."