River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘No!’ he shouts, and draws his gun. Indra targets, aims, fires. The pulse momentarily overloads even his ’hoek. The world goes flash-blind. The robot freezes, spasms, goes down in fat yellow sparks. Its legs twitch, its eye booms slide out. It goes still and quiet. Smoke wisps from its vents. Mr Nandha is not yet satisfied. He stands over the dead aeai, then kneels down and hooks the Avatar Box into its hotwire socket. Ganesha interfaces with the operating system: Kali stands by, swords raised.

  It’s dead. Excommunicated. Mr Nandha stands up, dusts himself down. He tucks his gun away. Messy one. Unsatisfactory. Questions left hanging. Many will be answered when the Fifteenth Floor Gang open up the server, but a man does not become a Krishna Cop without sensitivities and Mr Nandha’s are telling him this tangle of metal and plastic is the opening letter of a new and long story. He will say that story, he will unravel its intricacies and characters and events and bring it to its right conclusion, but at this moment, his most pressing problem is how to get the stink of burned tikka-pasta out of his suit.

  SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

  Shaheen Badoor Khan looks down on to the Antarctic ice. From two thousand metres it is less ice than geography, a white island, Sri Lanka gone rogue. The ocean-going tugs hired from the Gulf are the biggest and strongest and newest but they look like spiders tackling a circus big top, hauling away at silk thread guy ropes. Their role is supervisory now; the Southwest Monsoon Current has the berg and the whole performance is running north-by-north east at five nautical miles per day. Out here on the ocean five hundred kilometres south of the delta the only visual referents are ice and sky and the dark blue of deep water, nothing that gives any sense of motion. How long and hard must those tugs pull to bring it to a stop? Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. He imagines the berg rammed deep into the Gangasagar, the mouth of the holy river, ice cliffs rising sheer from mangroves.

  With a manifest of Bengali politicians and their diplomatic guests from neighbour and erstwhile rival Bharat, the States of Bengal tilt-jet lurches in the chill microclimate spiralling up from the ice floe. Shaheen Badoor Khan notices that the surface is grooved and furrowed with crevasses and ravines. Torrent water glitters; ice-melt has gouged sheer canyons in the ice walls, spectacular waterfalls arc from the berg’s cliff edges.

  ‘It’s constantly shifting,’ says the energetic Bangla climatologist across the aisle. ‘As it loses mass, the centre of gravity moves. We have to maintain equilibrium, a sudden shift close in could prove catastrophic.’

  ‘You do not need another tidal wave in your delta,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan says.

  ‘If it ever makes it,’ says Bharat’s Water and Energy Minister, nodding at the ice. ‘The rate it’s melting . . .’

  ‘Minister,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan says quickly, but Bengal’s official climatologist snaps up the opportunity to shine.

  ‘It has all been worked out to the last gram,’ he says. ‘We are well within the parameters for microclimatic shift.’ This with a flash of expensively-dentistried teeth, and a precision purse of thumb and forefinger. Flawless. Shaheen Badoor Khan feels deep shame when one of his ministers opens his mouth and lets his ignorance walk out in public, especially before the smooth Banglas. He long ago understood that politics needs no extraordinary talent, skill or intelligence. That’s what advisors are for. The skill of a politician is to take that advice and make it look as if he made it up himself. Shaheen Badoor Khan hates that someone might think he has not properly briefed his charges. Go with them, Shah, Prime Minister Sajida Rana had asked. Stop Srinavas making a tit of himself.

  The Bengali Minister With Iceberg lumbers up the aisle smiling his big bear smile. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows from his sources of the territory wars between Bengal’s government departments over whose bailiwick ten-kilometre chunks of Amery ice shelf fall into. Tension between the joint capitals is always something that can be worked to Bharat’s advantage. Environmental Affairs gave way in the end to Science and Technology, with a little help from Development and Industry to secure the contracts and now its Minister stands in the aisle, arms braced on the seat backs. Shaheen Badoor Khan can smell his breath.

  ‘So, eh? And all our own work too, we didn’t run to the Americans to sort out our water supply, like those ones in Awadh, and their dam. But you’d know all about that.’

  ‘The river used to make us one country,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan observes. ‘Now we seem to be the squabbling children of Mother Ganga; Awadh, Bharat, Bengal. Head, hands and feet.’

  ‘There are a lot of birds,’ Srinavas says, peering out the window. The berg trails a pale plume like smoke from a ship’s stack: flocks of seabirds, thousands strong, hurling themselves into the water to hunt silver sardine.

  ‘That just proves the cold current gyratory is working,’ says the climatologist, trying to make himself seen past his Minister. ‘We’re not so much importing an iceberg as a complete ecosystem. Some have followed us all the way from Prince Edward Island.’

  ‘The Minister is curious about how soon you expect to see benefits,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan inquires.

  Naipaul starts to bluster and blow about the daring and reach of Bengali climatic engineering but his weather wizard cuts him off. Shaheen Badoor Khan blinks at the unforgivable interruption. Have these Banglas no protocol at all?

  ‘The climate is not an old cow to be driven where you will,’ the climatologist, whose name is Vinayachandran, says. ‘It is a subtle science, of tiny shifts and changes that over time build to vast, huge consequences. Think of a snowball rolling down a mountain. A half-degree temperature drop here, a shift in the ocean thermocline by a handful of metres, a pressure shift of a single millibar . . .’

  ‘No doubt, but the Minister is wondering how long before these little effects from this . . . snowball . . .’ Shaheen Badoor Khan asks.

  ‘Our simulations show a return to climate norms within six months,’ Vinayachandran says.

  Shaheen Badoor Khan nods. He has given his Minister all the clues. He can draw his own conclusion.

  ‘So all this,’ Bharati Water and Energy Minister Srinavas says with a wave of the hand at the alien ice out there in the Bay of Bengal, ‘All this will come too late. Another failed monsoon. Maybe if you were to melt it and send it to us by pipeline, it might do some good. Can you make the Ganga flow backwards? That might help us.’

  ‘It will stabilise the monsoon for the next five years, for all of India,’ Minister Naipaul insists.

  ‘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 market 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 K
han 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 Secretary. 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.

  NAJIA

  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 fragments 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 Blóchant Matthews? What you see on the television, what you read in the soap magazines and the ch
ati 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?’