River of Gods (9 page)

Then party dynamics opens a momentary corridor of clear eyeline and
in pure white polar bear shag and gold-tinted ski goggles Tal
glimpses the Star Ytself: YULI.

Tal can't speak. Yt is paralysed by the presence of celebrity. All
media pretensions and sophistications fly. Even before yt Stepped
Away, Tal idolised YULI: Superstar as a construct, a manipulation
like the cast of
Town and Country
. Now yt's here, in flesh and
clothes and Tal's awestruck. Yt has to be near Yuli. Yt has to hear
yt breathe and laugh and feel yts warmth. There are only two real
objects in the temple tonight. Guests, nutes, staff, music, all are
indeterminate, in the domain of Ardhanarisvara. Tal is behind Yuli
now, close enough to reach and touch and reify. The angle of the
cheekbone shifts. Yuli turns. Tal smiles, big dumb grin. Oh Gods, I
look like a drooling celebrity idiot, what am I going to say?
Ardhanarisvara god of the dilemma, help me. Gods; do I smell, I only
had a half bottle of water to wash in. Yuli's gaze washes over yt,
looks right through yt, annihilates yt, swings to focus on a figure
behind yt. Yuli smiles, opens yts arms.

"Darling!"

Yt sweeps past, a warm wash of fur and gold tan and cheekbones like
razors. The entourage follows. A hip jostles Tal, knocks the glass
from yts hand. It falls to the floor, teeters wildly before coming to
centre, spinning on its point. Tal stands stunned, stone as any of
the temple's alien sex statues.

"Oh, you seem to have lost your drink." The voice that
breaks through the wall of chatter is neither man's nor woman's.
"Can't have that dear, can we? Come on, they're a pack of bloody
bitches, sib, and we're just wallpaper."

Yt's a head shorter than Tal, dark skinned, a hint of epicanthine
fold: Assam or Nepali genes down in the mix. Yt carries ytself with
shy pride of those peoples. Yt's dressed in simple, fashion-denying
white, the shaved scalp dusted with gold-flecked mica the only
concession to contemporary style. As with all yts kind, Tal can't
begin to guess yts age.

"Tranh."

"Tal."

They curtsey and kiss in greeting. Yts fingers are long and elegant,
French manicured, unlike Tal's stubby, nail-bitten keypad-stabbers.

"Bloody awful thing, isn't it?" Tranh says. "Drink,
dear. Here!" It raps the bar. "Enough of that Non-Russian
piss. Give me gin. Chota peg, by two. Chin chin." After the
cloying, theatrical house cocktail, the pure clear glass with the
twist of lemon is very good and very pure and very cold and Tal can
feel it shooting up yts spinal column like cold fire straight to the
brain.

"Bloody marvellous drink," Tal says. "Built the Raj,
it did. All that quinine. Here!" This to the bar avatar. "Actor
wallah! Two more of these."

"I really shouldn't, I've got work in the morning and I've no
idea how I'm even getting back," Tal says but the nute slides
the dew-slick glass into yts hand and the music hits that perfect
beat and a flaw of wind runs through the half-ruined temple drawing
flames and shadows in its wake and everyone looks up at its touch,
wondering if it could be the first caress of the monsoon. It blows a
touch of mad into the terrible party and in its wake Tal finds ytself
dizzy and full of talk and life and wonder at finding ytself in a new
town, in a new job, in the eye of the social vortex with a small and
dark and beautiful nute.

It all runs like calligraphy in the rain then. Tal finds yt dancing
with no memory of how yt got out on the floor and there are a lot
more people standing around watching than dancing, in fact no one is
dancing, only Tal, alone dancing wonderfully, flawlessly, like all
the wind that blew through the temple gathered into one place and one
restlessness; like unaccustomed chota pegs, like light, like night,
like temptation, like a laser focused on Tranh, illuminating yt
alone, saying
I want I need I will, come on
, beckoning,
come on
, drawing Tranh out, step by step, yt smiling and shaking
yts head, I
don't do this sort of bloody thing dear
, but yts
being pulled into the circle by this play of shakti and purusha until
Tal sees Tranh shiver, as if something has come out of the night and
passed into yt, some possessing, abandoned thing, and Tranh smiles a
little, mad smile, and they come together in the circle of music a
hunter and the thing yt hunts and every eye is on them and from the
corner of one eye Tal sees YULI, brightest star in heaven, stalking
away with yts entourage. Upstaged.

The meeja all expect them to kiss and make the drama perfect, but,
despite the cascade of erotic sculpture tumbling from every pillar
and buttress, they are Indian nutes, and the time and place for the
kiss is not here, not now.

Then they're in a taxi and Tal doesn't know how or where but the dark
is very big and yts ears are humming from the music and yts head is
thudding from the chota pegs but things are gradually becoming more
broken up and discrete. Tal knows what yt wants now. Yt knows what's
going to happen. The certainty is a dull, crimson throb at the base
of yts belly.

On the back seat of the jolting phatphat, Tal lets yts forearm fall,
soft inner flesh upwards, on Tranh's thigh. A moment's hesitation,
then Tranh's fingers stroke yts sensitive, hairless flesh, seek out
the buried studs of the hormone control system beneath the skin and
delicately tap out the arousal codes. Almost immediately, Tal feels
yts heart kick, yts breath catch, yts face flush. Sex strums yts body
like a sitar, every cord and organ ringing in its harmonic. Tranh
offers yts arm to Tal. Yt plays the subdermal inputs, tiny and
sensitive as goose flesh. Yt feels Tranh stiffen as the hormone rush
hits. They sit side by side in the back of the jolting taxi, not
touching but shivering with lust, incapable of speech.

The hotel is by the airport, comfortable, anonymous, internationally
discreet. The bored receptionist hardly looks up from her romantic
magazine. The night porter stirs, then identifies these guests and
hides behind the cricket highlights on the television. A glass
elevator takes them up the side of the hotel to their fifteenth-floor
room, the patterned airport lights spreading themselves ever wider
around them, like jewelled skirts. The sky is mad with stars and the
navigation lights of troopships, flying in to support the state of
heightened vigilance. All in heaven and earth tonight is trembling.

They fall into the room. Tranh reaches for yt, but Tal slips away,
teasing. There is one thing necessary; Tal finds the room system and
plugs in a chip. FUCK MIX. Nina Chandra plays and Tal sways and
closes yts eyes and melts. Tranh comes towards yt, moving into the
rhythm, stepping out of the shoes, slipping off the pure white coat,
the linen suit, the Big Name Label mesh underwear. Yt offers yts arm.

Tal runs yts fingers over the orgasm keys. Everything is soundtrack.

The ghost of departing chota pegs wakes Tal and sends yt to the
bathroom for water. Yt stares, still drunk, vertiginous with what has
happened, at the never-ending stream from the mixer tap. There is a
grey predawn light in the room. Tranh looks so very small and
breakable on the bed. The aircraft never stop. Something in this
morning lights makes every surgical scar on Tranh's body stand out.
Tal shakes yts head, suddenly needing very much to cry, but slips in
beside Tranh and shivers when yt feels the other nute move in yts
sleep and fold an arm around yt. Tal dozes and only wakes to the
chambermaid banging on the door wondering if she can service the
room. It's ten o'clock. Tal has a wretched hangover. Tranh is gone.
Yts clothes, yts shoes, yts shredded underwear. Yts gloves. Gone. In
yts place is a card, with a street name, an address and two words:
non-scene.

The compere has the audience really laughing now. Down in the green
room, Vishram can feel it like waves on a shore. Deep laughter.
Laughter you can't help, you can't stop even though it hurts you.
Best sound in the world. Hold that laugh for me, people. You can tell
audience by the sound of its laugh. There are the thin laughs down
south and the flat laughs from the Midlands and the resonant laughing
that's like church singing from way up in the islands, but that's a
good Glasgow laugh out there. A home crowd laugh. Vishram Ray taps
his feet and puffs out his cheeks and reads the yellow reviews tacked
to the green room wall. He's within
this
of a cigarette.

You know your stuff. You can do this material forwards and backwards,
in English, in Hindi, on your head, dressed as a lettuce. You know
the hook points and the builds, you've got your three topical
referents, you know where you can improv and then on-ramp without
shifting gear. You can take out a heckler with a single shot. They'd
laugh at a cat up behind the mike tonight so why do you feel like
there's a fist up your ass slowly hauling your guts out? Home crowds
are always hardest and tonight they have the power. Thumbs-up, thumbs
down, vote with your throat in the Glasgow region heat of the Funny
Ha-Ha contest. It's the first hurdle to Edinburgh and a Perrier
Award, but it's the first one trips you up.

Compere is doing the slow build up now. People on the right put your
hands together. People on the left do the really penetrating
two-finger whistles. People in the balcony start a titanic roar. For.
Mr. Vishram! Raaaaayyyl And he's out of the blocks, running for the
bright stage lights, the roar of the audience and his metal mistress,
the slim, steel torso of the lone microphone.

With his party eye he glimpses her leave her coat at the club check
and decides, I'll have a crack at that. Meerkatting. Head up high,
looking left right, all over. She heads for the bar clockwise around
the room. He heads widdershins, tracking her through the jungle of
bodies. She has the gang of friends, the scary professional one, the
one who's into her body but you try touching, the dumpy one who'll go
with anything. He can cut her out, round her up. Vishram times his
run and gets to the bar that split second before she does. The bar
girl does a double take, left, right.

"Oh, sorry, go ahead there," Vishram yells.

"No, you were here."

"No no, you go on."

Glasgow accent. Always good to go native. She wears a strap-back
V-top and hipsters so low cut he sees the twin curves of her fit
nates as she bends over the bar to roar an order at the bar gi
^rL

"Here I'll get this." To the bar girl: "Throw in a
vodka black dog."

"We should be buying you." she shouts in his ear. He shakes
his head, chancing a glance round to see if his mates are looking.
They are.

"My shout. I'm feeling flush."

The bottles come. She hands them round to her mates, arrayed behind
her, and clinks with him.

"Congratulations. So, is that you through?"

"To the Edinburgh final, yes. After that, fame, fortune, my own
sitcom." Time for manoeuvre one. "Listen, I can't hear
myself think, let alone attempt witty and scintillating conversation.
Can we move away from the speakers?"

The corner by the cigarette machine under the balcony is not
signifiantly quieter than anywhere else at the party, but it's away
from her friends and dark.

She says, "You got my vote."

"Thank you. I owe you that drink then. Sorry, I didn't catch
your name."

"I didn't throw it," she says. "Anye."

"Anye, good."

"Gallic."

"Yeah, Gallic name. Good Gallic solidity."

"Thank my parents for that. Good solid Galls, the pair of them.
You know, I think Bharat and Scotland have a lot in common. New
nations, all that."

"I still think we've got you beat when it come to good
old-fashioned religious violence."

"You clearly haven't seen an Old Firm game."

While Anye talks Vishram has been moving his body around, closing off
her access to the dance floor, her friends. Manoeuvre two— the
isolation—complete, he moves on to manoeuvre three. He pretends
to recognise the music.

"I like this one." He detests it but it's a good solid 115.
"You fancy a wee boogie?"

"I fancy a wee boogie very much," she says, coming out of
the corner at him with a low light in her eyes. The regulation five
dances later, he's found out that she's a Law Major at Glasgow U, an
SNP party worker and likes mountains, new nations, going out with her
mates, and coming home without them. This sounds flawless to Vishram
Ray, so he buys her another— her friends have receded into a
glum huddle at the end of the bar nearest the women's toilets—necks
it quick and dirty and hauls her out for another couple on the floor.
She dances heavy but enthusiastic, all limbs. He likes them meaty.
Halfway through the mid-tempo shift-of-pace number his hip pocket
starts calling his name. He ignores it.

"Aren't you going to answer that?"

He hauls out the palmer hoping it'll be someone wanting to talk to
him about comedy. It's not.
Vishram, it's Shastri
. Not now,
old servant. Absolutely not now.

But he's getting bored with the party. Cut to manoeuvre four.

"Do you want to stay here, or shall we go on somewhere else?"

"I'm easy," she says.

Right answer.

"Do you fancy coming back to mine, wee coffee?"

"Aye," she says. "I would."

Outside on Byres Road there's still lingering magic hour blue over
the rooftops. The car lights look unnatural, theatrical, a scene shot
day for night. The taxi slo-mos through a midnight twilight. Anye
sits close on the big leather seat. Vishrani slips the hand. She
slides back on the seat to open up the front of her hipsters. He
hooks panty elastic. Manoeuvre five.

"Funny man," she says, guiding his fingers.

The golden stone of the tenements seem to glow in the half dark.
Vishram can feel the stored warmth from the stonework on his face.
There's still a smell of cut grass from the park.