Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Chuutya,” grunts Laxman into his Scotch.

“This’ll be no Muslim marriage to get out of,” Narvekar says. Ashok Rana toggles the screen to watch his wife and children sleeping against each other in the cheap seats. The clock reads oh four fifteen. Ashok Rana’s head aches, his feet and sinuses feel swollen, his eyes dusty and weary. All senses of time and space and perspective have vanished. He could be floating in space in this migraine-inducing light. Chowdhury is talking about Shaheen Badoor Khan: “That’s one Begum wishing the divorce thing ran the other way.”

The men laugh softly in the harsh directional light of the overhead halogens.

“You have to admit, he has rather receded into the background,” Narvekar says. “Twenty-four hours is a long time in politics.”

“Never trusted the fellow,” Chowdhury says. “Always felt there was something oily about him, too refined, too polite.”

“Too Muslim?” Narvekar asks.

“You said it; something not quite… manly. And I’m not so sure I agree with what you say about him vanishing into the background. You say twenty-four hours is a long time; I say, in politics nothing is unconnected. One loose pebble starts a landslide. For one horseshoe nail, the battle was lost. Butterfly in Beijing, all that. Khan is the root of it, for his own sake I hope he is out of Bharat.”

“Hijra,” Laxman comments. His ice clinks in the glass.

“Gentlemen,” Ashok Rana says, hearing his voice as if spoken by another at a great distance, “my sister is dead.” Then, after a grace-moment, he says, “So, our answer to Mr. Jivanjee?”

“He has his Government of National Salvation,” Secretary Narvekar says. “After the speech.”

The staffers in the second cabin speed-draft a revised speech. Ashok Rana skims the printout adding marginal marks in blue ink. Government of National Salvation. Extend Hand of Friendship. Unity in Strength. Through this Trying Time as One Nation. The Nation United Will Never Be Defeated.

“Prime Minister, it’s time,” Trivul Narvekar hints. He guides Ashok Rana to the studio at the front of Vayu Sena One. It is little bigger than an airline toilet; a camera, a boom microphone, a desk and chair and a Bharati flag draped from a pole, a vision mixer and sound engineer beyond the glass panel in the booth’s mirror image. The sound engineer shows Ashok Rana how the desk hinges up so he can slip behind it on to the chair. A seat belt is fitted in case of turbulence or an unexpected landing. Ashok Rana notices the cloying smell of scented furniture polish. A young woman he does not recognise from his press corps dresses him with a new tie, a pin bearing the spinning wheel of Bharat, and tries to do something with his hair and sweaty face.

“Forty seconds, Prime Minister,” Trivul Narvekar says. “The speech will autocue on screen in front of the camera.” Ashok Rana panics about what to do with his hands. Clasped? Bunch of bananas? Seminamaste? Gesturing?

The vision mixer takes over. “And satellite uplink is active and we’re counting down twenty, nineteen, eighteen, the red dot means the camera is live, Prime Minister, cue insert…Run VT. six, five, four, three, two. and cue.”

Ashok Rana decides what to do with his hands. He lays them loosely on the desktop. “My fellow Bharatis,” he reads. “It is with heavy heart that I address you this morning.”

In the garden, soaked through with rain. Rain penduluming the heavy leaves of the climbing, twining nicotianas and clematis and kiwi vine. Rain streaming from drain holes in the raised beds, black and foaming with loam; rain sheeting across the carved concrete paving slabs, chuttering in the grooves and channels, dancing in the drains and soakaways, leaping into the overloaded runnels and downpipes; rain cascading in waterfalls from the sagging gutters to the street below. Rain gluing the silk sari to Parvati Nandha’s flat belly, round thighs, small flat-nippled breasts. Rain plastering her long black hair to her skull. Rain running down the contours of her neck, her spine, her breasts and arms and wrists resting neatly, symmetrically on her thighs. Rain swirling around her bare feet and her silver toe rings. Parvati Nandha in her bower. The bag is at her feet, half empty, top folded to keep the rain out of the white powder.

Muted thunder rolls in from the west. She listens behind it for the sound from the streets. The gunfire seems further away now, fragmented, random; the sirens move from left to right, then behind her.

There is another sound she listens for.

There. Since she made the call she has been training herself to distinguish it from the strange new sounds in the city tonight. The rattle of the front door latch. She knew he would come. She counts in her head and as she had timed, he appears a black silhouette in the roof garden door. Krishan cannot see her in her dark bower, soaked by rain.

“Hello?” he calls.

Parvati watches him trying to find her. “Parvati? Are you there? Hello?”

“Over here,” she whispers. She sees his body straighten, tense.

“I almost didn’t make it. It’s insane out there. Everything is coming apart. There’s people shooting, stuff burning everywhere.”

“You made it. You’re here now.” Parvati rises from her seat and embraces him. “You’re soaking wet, woman. What have you been doing?”

“Tending to my garden,” Parvati says, pulling away. She lifts her fist, lets a trickle of powder fall. “See? You must help me, there is too much for me to do.”

Krishan intercepts the stream, sniffs a palmful.

“What are you doing? This is weedkiller.”

“It has to go, it all has to go.” Parvati walks away, sowing sprays of white powder over the raised beds and pots of drenched geraniums. Krishan makes to seize her hand but she throws the white powder in his face. He reels back. Lightning flares in the west; by its light he grasps her wrist.

“I don’t understand!” he shouts. “You call me in the middle of the night; come over, you say, I have to see you right away. They’ve got martial law out there, Parvati. Soldiers on the streets. They’re shooting everything… I saw. No, I don’t want to tell you what I saw. But I come over and I find you sitting in the rain, and this.” He holds her hand up. The rain has smeared the weedkiller to white streaks, a hennaed hand in negative. He shakes her wrist, trying to jerk sanity into this one piece of the world be can apprehend. “What is it?”

“It has to go.” Parvati’s voice is flat, childlike. “Everything must go. My husband and I, we fought and do you know? It wasn’t terrible. Oh, he was shouting but I wasn’t afraid because what he said made no sense. Do you understand? All his reasons; I heard them and they did not make any sense. And so I have to go now. From here. There’s nothing here. Away from here, away from Varanasi and everything.”

Krishan sits down on the wooden rim of a raised bed. A swirl in the microclimate brings a surge of anger from the city.

“Go?”

Parvati clasps his hands between hers.

“Yes! It is so easy. Leave Varanasi, leave Bharat, go away. He sent my mother away, did you know that? She is in a hotel somewhere; she rings and she rings and she rings but I know what she will say, it’s not safe out there, how could I abandon her in the middle of a dangerous city, I must come and rescue her, take her back. You know, I don’t even know what hotel she is in?” Parvati throws back her head and laughs at the rain. “There is nothing for me back in Kotkhai and there is nothing for me here in Varanasi; no, I can never be part of that world, I learned that at the cricket match, when they all laughed. Where can I go? Only everywhere; you see, it’s so easy when you think you have nowhere to go, because then everywhere becomes open to you. Mumbai. We could go to Mumbai. Or Karnataka—or Kerala. We could go to Kerala, oh, I’d love to go there, the palms and the sea and the water. I’d love to see the sea. I’d love to find out what it smells like. Don’t you see? It’s an opportunity, everything going mad around us; in the middle of it all we can slip away and no one will notice. Mr. Nandha will think I have gone to Kotkhai with my mother, my mother will think I am still at home, but we won’t be, Krishan. We won’t be!”