River of Gods (47 page)

"Maybe there is another way," Aj says softly. "Maybe
there doesn't have to be a war."

Thomas Lull feels a stir of wind on his face, a distant tiger-purr of
thunder. It is coming.

"Wouldn't that be something?" he says. "Wouldn't that
be a first? No no, this is the Age of Kali." He stands up, dusts
wind-blown sand and human ashes from his clothes. "Come on
then." He extends a hand to Aj. "I'm going to the Computer
Science department at the University of Varanasi."

Aj tilts her head to one side.

"Professor Naresh Chandra is in today but you will have to
hurry. You will forgive me if I do not accompany you, Lull."

"Where are you going?" Spoken like a piqued boyfriend.

"The Bharati National Records Office on Raja Bazaar Road is open
until five o'clock. As other methods have failed, I feel a
mitochondrial DNA profile will tell me who my real parents are."

The rising wind ruffles her boy-short hair, flaps Thomas Lull's pant
legs like flags. Down on the suddenly choppy water rowboats swarm for
shore.

"Are you sure about this?"

Aj turns her ivory horse over and over in her fingers. "Yes. I
have thought about it and I have to know."

"Good luck then." Without thought, against will, Thomas
Lull hugs her. She is slight and bony and so so light that he fears
he might snap her like glass rods.

Thomas Lull prides himself on possessing the male gift for visiting
somewhere once and forever after being able to navigate infallibly
around it. Which is how he is lost within two minutes of stepping out
of the phatphat onto the dense green lawns of the University of
Bharat Varanasi. It had been eighty percent building site when Thomas
Lull delivered his lecture to the nascent Computer Science
department.

"Excuse me," he asks a mali inexplicably wearing gumboots
in the greatest drought in Bharat's brief history. The clouds pile
deep and dark behind the light, airy faculty buildings, flickering
with edges of lightning. The hot wind is strong now, the electric
wind. It could sweep this frail university up into the clouds. Let it
rain let it rain let it rain, Thomas Lull prays as he runs up stairs
past the chowkidar and through the double doors into the department
office where eight young men and one middle-aged woman fan themselves
with soapi magazines. He picks the woman.

"I'd like to see Professor Chandra."

"Professor Chandra is unavailable at present."

"Oh, I have it on the highest authority that he is sitting there
in his office. If you could just buzz him."

"This is most irregular," the secretary says. "Appointments
must be made in advance through this office and written into the
appointments diary before ten am on a Monday."

Thomas Lull parks his ass on the desk. He's getting his thunder-head
on him but knows that the only ways to deal with Indian bureaucracy
are patience, bribery, or rank. He leans over and palms on all the
intercom buttons at once.

"Would you be so good as to tell Professor Chandra that
Professor Thomas Lull needs to talk to him?"

Up the corridor a door opens.

It had started at the railway station. The porters were thieves and
gundas, the security checks a gross discourtesy to a respectable
widow from a loyal village in a peaceable district, the taxi driver
had banged her case manhandling it into the boot and when he did
drive took the longest route and drove fast and dodged in and out of
the buses to terrify an old woman up from the country and then after
half frightening her to death demanded an extra ten rupees to carry
her bag up all those stairs and she had to give it to him, she could
never have managed with the lungs half-coughed out of her with the
terrible fumes in this city. And now the chai the cook has given her
has a sour tang; there is never good clean water in this city.

Parvati Nandha shoos the sullen cook away, greets her mother with
proper daughterly fervour, and has the sweeper carry her bags to the
guest room and make all ready.

"I will make you a proper cup of chai, and then we will go up on
to the roof."

Mrs. Sadurbhai softens like a ghee sculpture at a mela.

The sweeper announces that the room is ready. As her mother goes to
inspect and unpack, Parvati busies herself with the kettle and wipes
and tidies and neatens any lingerings of her humiliation at the
cricket match.

"You should not have to do that," Mrs. Sadurbhai says,
pushing in beside Parvati at the kettle. "The very least you
should expect from a cook is that she can make a cup of chai. And
that sweeper is cheating you. An exceedingly lazy girl. The dust
rabbits I found under the bed. You must be firm with staff. Here."
She sets a garish packet of tea on the worktop. "Something with
real flavour."

They sit in the semishade of the jasmine arbour. Mrs. Sadurbhai
studies the workmanship, then the neighbouring rooftops.

"You are a little overlooked here," she comments, pulling
her dupatta over her head. The evening rush has started, conversation
competes with car horns. A radio blasts chart hits from a balcony
across the street. "It will be nice when it grows up a little.
You will have more privacy then. Of course you cannot expect the kind
of privacy you would get out in the Cantonment with full-size trees,
but this will be quite pleasant of an evening, if you're still here."

"Mother," Parvati says, "why are you here?"

"A mother cannot visit her own daughter? Or is this some new
style in the capital?"

"Even in the country it's customary to give some warning."

"Warning? What am I, a flash flood, a plague of locusts, an air
raid? No, I came because I am worried about you, in this city, in
this current situation; oh you message me every day but I know what I
see on the television, all those soldiers and tanks and aeroplanes,
and that train burning, dreadful, dreadful. And I sit here, and I
look up and I see these things."

Aeaicraft patrol the edge of the monsoon, white wings catching the
westering light as they bank and turn kilometres above Varanasi. They
can stay up there for years, Krishan had told Parvati. Never touch
the ground, like Christian angels.

"Mother, they are there to keep us safe from the Awadhis."

She shrugs.

"Ach. That is what they want you to think, but I know what I
see."

"Mother, what do you want?"

Mrs. Sadurbhai hitches up the pallav of her sari.

"I want you to come home with me."

Parvati throws her hands up but Mrs. Sadurbhai cuts in and breaks her
protest.

"Parvati, why take needless risks? You say you are safe here and
maybe you are, but what if all these wonderful machines fail and the
bombs fall on your lovely garden? Parvati, it may only be a risk the
size of a grain of rice but why take any risk at all? Come back with
me to Kotkhai; the Awadhi fighting machines will never find you
there. It will only be for a little time, until this unpleasantness
is over."

Parvati Nandha sets down her chai glass. The low sun shines into her
face, and she must shade her eyes to read her mother's expression.

"What is this about really?"

"I'm not at all sure what you mean."

"I mean, you've never really thought my husband sufficiently
honours me."

"Oh, but I don't, I don't, Parvati. You married within jati and
that is a treasure beyond price. It just grieves me when ambitious
women—no, we are speaking as we find here this evening, so I
shall call them what they are, caste-jumpers: there, that's it
said—when caste-jumpers flaunt their wealth and husbands and
status to which they have less right than you. It hurts me, Parvati."

"My husband is a highly respected and important civil servant. I
know of no one who speaks of him with the slightest disrespect. I
want for nothing. See, this fine garden? This is one of the most
sought after government apartments."

"Yes, but government, Parvati. Government."

"I have no desire to move to Cantonment. I am content here. I
also have no desire to come with you to Kotkhai in some ruse to focus
my husband's attention on my needs because you do not think he
appreciates me enough."

"Parvati, I never."

"Oh, forgive me." The women fall silent at the third voice.
Krishan stands at the head of the stairs in his cricketing best. "I
need to, ah, check the drip irrigator."

"Mother, this is Krishan, my garden designer. All this is the
work of his hands."

Krishan namastes.

"A remarkable transformation," Mrs. Sadurbhai says
grudgingly.

"Often the finest gardens grow from the least promising soils,"
Krishan says and leaves to fiddle purposelessly with the pipes and
taps and regulators.

"I don't like him," Mrs. Sadurbhai whispers to her
daughter. Parvati catches Krishan's eye as he lights little
terra-cotta oil cups along the bed borders as day ebbs from the sky.
The tiny flames gutter and sway in the wind that has sprung up among
the rooftops. Thunder growls in the dark east. "He has a
familiar way with him. He gives looks. It is never good when they
give looks."

He has come to see me, Parvati thinks. He has followed me here to be
with me, to keep me safe from the tongues of the caste-jumping women,
to be strong for me when I am in need.

The garden is transformed into a constellation of lamps. Krishan bows
to the ladies of the house.

"I'll bid you a good night and I hope to find you well in the
morning."

"You should have him pick up those apricot stones," Mrs.
Sadurbhai throws after Krishan as he goes down the stairs. "They
will only attract monkeys."

Marianna Fusco really does have the most magnificent nipples, Vishram
thinks as she heaves herself out of the pool and drips across the
tiles to the sunlounger. He traces them through wet lycra; round and
hand-filling, pores puckered into little subnipples, textured,
satisfying.

The cold water has brought them up like champagne corks.

"Ah God, that's great," Marianna Fusco declares, shaking
out her wet hair and knotting a silk wrap around her waist. She flops
weightily into the chair beside Vishram, leans back, slides on
shades. Vishram motions for the waiter to pour coffee.

He hadn't meant to move into the same hotel as his legal advisor. War
had put suites at a premium; every hotel parking lot in Varanasi was
full of satellite uplink vans, every bar full of foreign
correspondents catching up on the boring bits between conflicts. He
had not even realised it was the same hotel at which he had left her
after the disastrous first night limo ride until he saw her
descending in an elevator through the glass atrium. He knew the cut
of that suit anywhere.

The suite is unexceptionably comfortable but Vishram can't sleep in
it. He misses the hypnagogic tendril patterns of his bedroom's
painted roof. He misses the morning-glory comfort of Shanker Mahal's
erotic carvings. He misses sex. Vishram watches the sweat bead
Marianna's arm before the water drops have even dried.

"Vish." She's never called him that before. "I
mightn't be staying for much longer." Vishram sets his coffee
cup down carefully so no rattle may betray his dismay. "Is it
the war?"

"I've had calls from head office; the Foreign Office advice is
for nonessential British passport holders to leave, and my family's
worried too, especially after the rioting." Her family, that
brawling constellation of partnerships and remarriages among five
different races across the red brick terracelands of South London.
The front of her swimsuit has dried in the sun but it's still damp
and bodyhugging next to the chair. Vishram has always had a notion
for onepieces. Conceal to appeal. Its wet cling emphasises the
muscled curve of Marianna Fusco's lower back. Vishram feels his cock
stir in his Varanasi silk trunks. He would love to take her there and
then down into the pool, legs hooked over in the lapping water with
the roar of the morning rush hour bouncing over the wall from the
street beyond.

"I have to tell you, Vish, I didn't really want this brief. I
had projects I was working on."

"It's not really my idea of a gig either," Vishram says. "I
had a good career going as a stand-up comedian. I was funny. I made
people laugh. That's not a thing to brush off: oh, Vishram, what
silliness are you up to now? Well stop it right now and come here,
there's important stuff for you to do. And do you know what the worst
part of it is, the part that really makes me choke? I love it. I
fucking love it. I love this corporation and the people who work for
it and what they're trying to do and the things they've got out at
that research place. That's what really annoys me, the bastard didn't
give a fuck about my feelings but he was right all along. I will
fight to save this company and that's with or without you and if it's
going to be without you, if you are going to leave me, I need to
clear a couple of things with you and the first is that I adore the
sight of your nipples through that swimsuit and the second is there
is not a moment at a meeting or a briefing or at the desk or on the
phone that I do not think about sex with you in the pointy end of a
BharatAir 375."

Marianna Fusco's hands are flat on the armrests. She looks dead
ahead, eyes invisible behind her Italian shades.

"Mr. Ray."

Oh fuck.

"Come on then."

Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the
size of Vishram's penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking
with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the
gentleman's way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk
sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent
fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a
thugee. The stretchy swimsuit fabric takes some ripping but it's what
she wants and Vishram is only too eager to oblige and he loves the
feel of it in his fists, tearing apart, exposing her. He tries to
push into her vagina, she rolls away saying
no no no, I'm not
letting that thing in there
. She lets him get three fingers in
both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of
the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot
up inside her and she straddles him, big nipples silhouetted against
the yellow storm-light, handing him until he comes and after he's
come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the
ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists
off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps
the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out,
each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and full-body thrash.