River of Gods (4 page)

"Minister, I don't know about you, but my people are thirsty
now," V. R. Srinavas says right into the eye of the news camera
peering like a vulgar street boy over the back of the seat row in
front. Shaheen Badoor Khan folds his hands, content that that line
will head every evening paper from Kerala to Kashmir. Srinavas is
almost as great a buffoon as Naipaul, but he's a stout man for a good
one-liner in a pinch.

The new, beautiful, state-of-the-market tilt-jet banks again, swivels
its engines into horizontal flight, and heads back for Bengal.

Also new, beautiful, and state-of-the matket is Daka's new airport,
and so is its recently installed air-traffic control system. This is
the reason a high-priority diplomatic transport is stacked for half
an hour and then put down on a stand way on the other side of the
field from the BharatAir airbus. An interface problem; the ATC
computer are Level 1 aeai, with the intellect, instinct, autonomy,
and morals of a rabbit, which is considerably more, as one of the
Bharat Times
press corps comments, than the average Daka
air-traffic controller. Shaheen Badoor Khan conceals a smile but no
one can deny that the Joint States of East and West Bengal are
technologically savvy, bold, forward-looking, sophisticated, and a
world player—all those things Bharat aspires to in the avenues
and atria of Ranapur, that the filth and collapse and beggary of
Kashi deny.

The cars finally arrive. Shaheen Badoor Khan follows the politicians
down on to the apron. Heat bounces from the concrete. The humidity
sucks out every memory of ice and ocean and cool. Good luck to them
with their island of ice, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks, imagining those
urgent Bangla engineers clambering around on the Amery berg in their
cold-weather parkas and fur-fringed hoods.

In the front seat of Minister Srinavas's car, Shaheen Badoor Khan
slips his 'hoek behind his ear. Taxiways, planes, airbridges, baggage
trains merge with the interface of his office system. The aeai has
winnowed his mail but there are still over fifty messages requiring
the attention of Sajida Rana's Parliamentary Private Secretaty. A
flick of the finger
yeses
that report on the Bharat's combat
readiness problem,
nos
that press release on further water
restrictions,
laters
that video conference request from N. K.
Jivanjee. His hands move like the mudras of a graceful Kathak dancer.
A curl of a finger; Shaheen Badoor Khan summons the notepad out of
thin air.
Keep me advised of developments re: Sarkhand Roundabout
,
he writes on the side of an Air Bengal airbus in virtual Hindi.
I
have a feeling about this one
.

Shaheen Badoor Khan was born, lives, and assumes he will die in Kashi
but still cannot understand the passion and wrath Hinduism's scruffy
gods command. He admires its disciplines and asceticisms but they
seem to him pledged to such poor security. Every day on his way to
the Bharat Sabha the government car whisks him past a little plastic
shelter on the junction of Lady Castlereagh Road where for fifteen
years a sadhu has held his left arm aloft. Shaheen Badoor Khan
reckons the man could not put this twig of bone and sinew and wasted
muscle down now even if his god willed it. Shaheen Badoor Khan is not
an overtly religious man, but these gaudy, cinematic statues,
brawling with arms and symbols and vehicle and attributes and
supporters as if the sculptor had to cram in every last theological
detail, offend his sense of aesthetics. His school of Islam is
refined, intensely civilised, ecstatic and mystical. It is not
painted day-glo pink. It does not wave its penis around in public.
Yet every morning thousands descend the ghats beneath the balconies
of his haveli to wash away their sins in the withered stream of
Ganga. Widows spend their last rupees that their husbands might burn
by the holy waters and attain Paradise. Every year young males fall
beneath the Puri Jagannath and are crushed—though nowhere near
as many as by the juggernaut of Puri rush hour. Armies of youths
storm mosques and take them to rubble with their bare hands because
they profane the honour of Lord Rama and still that man sits on the
kerb with his arm lifted like a staff. And on a traffic roundabout in
new Sarnath, a stained concrete statue of Hanuman not ten years old
is told it must relocate to make way for a new metro station and
there are gangs of youths in white shirts and dhotis punching the air
and banging drums and gongs. There will be deaths out of this, thinks
Shaheen Badoor Khan. Little things snowballing. N. K. Jivanjee and
his Hindu fundamentalist Shivaji party will ride this juggernaut to
death.

There is further confusion at the VIP reception centre. It seems two
very important parties are both booked into the business section of
BH137. The first Shaheen Badoor Khan knows of it is a tussle of
reporters and sound booms and free-fly mikes outside the executive
lounge. Minister Srinavas preens himself but the lenses are looking
elsewhere. Shaheen Badoor Khan forces himself politely through the
crowd to the dispatcher, credentials held high.

"What is the problem here?"

"Ah, Mr. Khan, there seems to be some mix-up."

"There is no mix-up. Minister Srinavas and party are returning
to Varanasi on your flight. Why is there any reason for confusion?"

"Some celebrity."

"Celebrity," Shaheen Badoor Khan says with scorn that would
wither an entire harvest.

"A Russian, a model," says the dispatcher, flustered now.
"A big name model. There's some show in Varanasi. I apologise
for the mix-up, Mr. Khan." Shaheen Badoor Khan is already
motioning his own staff down to the gate.

"Who?" Minister Srinavas says as he passes the scrum.

"Some Russian model," Shaheen Badoor Khan says in his soft,
precise voice.

"Ah!" says Minister Srinavas, eyes widening. "Yuli."

"I'm sorry?"

"Yuli," Srinavas says, craning for a look at the celeb.
"The nute."

The word is like the toll of a temple bell. The crowd parts. Shaheen
Badoor Khan sees clear and true into the executive lounge. And he is
transfixed. He sees a tall figure in a long, beautifully cut coat of
white brocade. It is worked with patterns of dancing cranes, beaks
intermeshing. The figure has its back to him, Shaheen Badoor Khan
cannot make out a face but he sees curves of pale skin; long hands
delicately moving; an elegantly curved nape, a smooth perfect curve
of hairless scalp.

The body turns towards him. Shaheen Badoor Khan sees a line of jaw,
an edge of cheekbone. A gasp goes out of him, unheard in the press
corps tumult. The face. He must not look at the face, he would be
lost, damned, stone. The crowd shifts again, the bodies close across
the vision. Shaheen Badoor Khan stands, paralysed.

"Khan." A voice. His Minister. "Khan, are you all
right?"

"Ah, yes, Minister. Just a little dizzy; the humidity."

"Yes, these bloody Banglas need to get their air-conditioning
sorted."

The spell is broken but as Shaheen Badoor Khan ushers his Minister
down the airbridge, he knows he will never know peace again.

The gate controller has gifts for all from Minister Naipaul; vacuum
flasks bearing the crest of the Joint States of East and West Bengal.
When he is belted in and the curtains are closed on economy and the
BharatAir airbus is bumping out over the uneven concrete, Shaheen
Badoor Khan uncaps his flask. It contains ice: glacier cubes for
Sajida Rana's gin slings. Shaheen Badoor Khan caps the flask. The
airbus makes its run and as its wheels leave Bengal, Shaheen Badoor
Khan presses the flask to him as if the cold might heal the wound in
his belly. It can't. It never will. Shaheen Badoor Khan looks out the
window at the steadily greying land as the airbus heads west to
Bharat. He sees the white dome of a skull; the sweep of a neck; pale,
lovely hands elegant as minarets, cheekbones turning towards him like
architecture. Cranes dancing.

So long he had thought himself safe. Pure. Shaheen Badoor Khan hugs
his glacier ice to him, eyes closed in silent prayer, heart luminous
with ecstasy.

Lal Darfan, number one soap star, grants interviews in the howdah of
an elephant-shaped airship navigating the southern slopes of the
Nepali Himalayas. In a very good shirt and loose pants he reclines
against a bolster on a low divan. Behind him banners of high cloud
stripe the sky. The mountain peaks are a frontier of jagged white, a
wall across the edge of sight. The tasselled fringe of the howdah
ripples in the wind. Lal Darfan, Love God of Indiapendent
Production's biggest and brightest soap,
Town and Country
, is
attended by a peacock that stands by the head of his divan. He feeds
it ftagments of rice cracker. Lal Darfan is on a low-fat diet. It's
all the talk in the gossip chati magazines.

The diet, Najia Askarzadah thinks, is a fine conceit for a virtual
soapi star. She takes a deep breath and opens the interview.

"In the West we find it hard to believe that
Town and Country
can be so incredibly popular. Yet here there's maybe as much interest
in you as an actor as in your character, Ved Prekash."

Lal Darfan smiles. His teeth are as improbably and gloriously white
as the tivi chat channels say.

"More," he says. "But I think what you're asking is
why an aeai character needs an aeai actor. Illusions within
illusions, is that it?"

Najia Askarzadah is twenty-two, freelance and fancy-free, four weeks
in Bharat and has just landed the interview she hopes will seal her
career.

"Suspension of disbelief," she says. She can hear the hum
of the airship engines, one in each elephant foot.

"It is simply this. The role is never enough. The public have to
have the role behind the role, whether that is me"—Lal
Darfan touches his hands self-deprecatingly to his going-to-bulge
midriff—"or a flesh and blood Hollywood actor, or a pop
idol. Let me ask you a question. What do you know about, say, some
Western pop star like Blochant Matthews? What you see on the
television, what you read in the soap magazines and the chati
communities. Now, what do you know about Lal Darfan? Exactly the
same. They are no more real to you than I am, and therefore no less
real, either."

"But people can always bump into a real celebrity or catch a
glimpse at the beach or the airport, or in a shop."

"Can they? How do you know anyone has had these glimpses?"

"Because I've heard. . . Ah."

"You see what I mean? Everything comes through one medium or
another. And, with respect, I am a real celebrity, in that my
celebrity is indeed very real. In fact these days, I think it's only
celebrity that makes anything real, don't you agree?"

Half a million person-hours have gone into Lal Darfan's voice. It's a
voice calculated to seduce and it is laying orbits around Najia
Askarzadah. It says, "Might I ask you a personal question? It's
very simple; what is your earliest memory?"

It's never far, that night of fire and rush and fear, like a
geological iridium layer in her life. Daddy scooping her out of her
bed, the paper all over the floor and the house full of noise and the
lights waving across the garden. That she remembers most; the cones
of torchlight weaving over the rose bushes, coming for her. The
flight across the compound. Her father cursing under his breath at
the car engine as it turned and turned and turned. The flashlights
darting closer, closer. Her father, cursing, cursing, polite even as
the police came to arrest him.

"I'm lying in the back of a car," Najia says. "I'm
lying flat, and it's night, and we're driving fast through Kabul. My
Dad's driving and my Mum's beside him, but I can't see them over the
backs of the seats. But I can hear them talking, and it sounds like
they're very far away, and they've got the radio on; they're
listening for something but I can't make the voices out." The
news of the raid on the women's house and the issue of their arrest
warrants, she knows now. When that bulletin came, they knew they
would have only minutes before the police closed the airport. "I
can see the streetlights passing over me. It's all very regular and
exact, I can see the light start, go over me, and then up the back of
the rear seat and out the window."

"That's a powerful image," Lal Darfan says. "How old
would you have been, three, four?"

"Not quite four."

"I, too, have an earliest memory. This is how I know I am not
Ved Prekash. Ved Prekash has scripts, but I remember a paisley shawl
blowing in the wind. The sky was blue and clear and the edge of the
shawl was blowing in from the side—it was like a frame, with
the action out of shot. I can see it quite clearly, it's flapping.
I'm told it was on the roof of our house in Patna. Mama had taken me
up to get away from the fumes down at the ground level, and I was on
a blanket with a parasol over me. The shawl had been washed and was
hanging on the line; odd, it was silk. I can remember it as clear as
anything. I must have been two at the most. There. Two memories Ah,
but you will say, yours is manufactured but mine is experience. How
do you know? It could be something you've been told that you've made
into a memory, it could be a false memory, it could have been
artificially manufactured and implanted. Hundreds of thousands of
Americans believe they've been spirited away by grey aliens who stick
machines up their rectums; utter fantasy, and undoubtedly false
memories each and every one, but does that make them fake people? And
what are our memories made of anyway? Patterns of charge in protein
molecules. We are not so different there, I think. This airship, this
silly elephant gimmick I've had built for me, the idea that we're
floating along over Nepal; to you it's just patterns of electrical
charge in protein molecules. But so is everything. You call this
illusion, I'd call it the fundamental building blocks of my universe.
I imagine I see it very differently from you, but then, how would I
know? How do I know what I see as green looks the same to you? We're
all locked up inside our little boxes of self; bone or plastic,
Najia; and none of us ever get out. Can any of us trust what we think
we remember?"