Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents’ house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky. And the gardener built the garden on the tower for the beautiful, solitary woman whose best friends were in stories and in so doing fell in love with her, though she was a powerful man’s wife. And now in a great storm she asks him to run away with her to another land where they live happily ever after. It is too big, too sudden. Too simple. It is Town and Country .

“What will we do for money? And we will need to get passports to get out of Bharat. Do you have a passport? I don’t, how will I get one? And what will we do when we get there, how will we live?”

“We will find a way,” Parvati Nandha says and those five words open up the night for Krishan. There are no rules for relationships, no plans for landscaping and planting and feeding and pruning. A home, a job, a career, money. A Brahmin baby, even. “Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

For an instant he thinks she has not heard or mistaken him for she makes no move, no response. Krishan scoops up two handfuls of the white powder from the sack of weedkiller. He hurls the dust up into the monsoon in a fountain of poison.

“Let it go!” he shouts. “There are other gardens to grow.”

On the back of the giant elephant flying three thousand metres above the foothills of the Sikkim Himalayas, N. K. Jivanjee namastes to Najia Askarzadah. He is seated on a traditional musnud, a throne of bolsters and cushions on a simple black marble slab. Beyond the brass rail, snow-capped peaks glint in afternoon sun. No haze, no smog-taint, no South Asian Brown Cloud, no monsoon gloom.

“Ms. Askarzadah, my sincerest apologies for the cheap sleight of hand but I thought it best to assume a form with which you were familiar.”

Najia feels high-altitude wind on her skin, the wooden deck shift beneath her feet as the elephant airship drifts in the air currents. She is in deep here. She settles cross-legged on a tasseled cushion. She wonders if it is one of Tal’s.

“Why, what form do you usually take?”

N. K. Jivanjee spreads his hands.

“Any and every. All and none. I do not wish to be gnomic but that is the reality of it.”

“So which are you, N. K. Jivanjee or Lal Darfan?”

N. K. Jivanjee dips his head as if in apology for an affront.

“Ah, you see, there you are again, Ms. Askarzadah. Both and neither. I am Lal Darfan. I am Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala—you have no idea how I look forward to the experience of marrying myself. I am every secondary character and minor character and walk-on and redshirt. I am Town and Country . N. K. Jivanjee is a role into which I seem to have fallen—or is it, had thrust upon me? This is a real face I have borrowed—I know how you must always have the body.”

“I think I get this riddle,” Najia Askarzadah, wiggling her toes inside her power walk trainers. “You are an aeai.”

N. K. Jivanjee claps his hands in delight.

“What you would call a Generation Three aeai. You are correct.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Town and Country —only India’s most popular television programme—is sentient?”

“You interviewed my Lal Darfan manifestation; you know something of the complexity of this production, but you didn’t even glimpse the tip of the iceberg. Town and Country is much bigger than Indiapendent, much bigger even than Bharat. Town and Country is spread across one million computers in every part of India from Cape Comorin to the shadow of the Himalayas.” He smiles disingenuously. “There are sundarbans in Varanasi and Delhi and Hyderabad running nothing but written-out aeai cast members, in case they’re ever brought back into the plot. We are everywhere, we are legion.”

“And N. K. Jivanjee?” But Najia Askarzadah can already see the short step from virtual soap celebrity to illusory politician. The art of politics has always been the control of information. In a climate of sound bites and image-ettes and thirty-second policy-stings it is easy to hide a fake persona in the chaff.

“I can see the similarity between soap and politics,” Najia says, thinking: this is a Gen Three, this is a squillion times smarter than you, girl reporter; this is a god. “It’s all about narratives and the willing suspension of disbelief and creating audience identity with characters. And the plots are equally unbelievable.”

“In politics the set decor is generally better,” says the aeai. “I tire of this gaudy flummery.” He raises his hand in a mudra and suddenly he on his musnud and Najia on her tasselled cushion arc in a screened wooden jharoka of the haveli in Brahmpur B overlooking the courtyard. It is night. It is dark. Rain rattles the wooden jali. Najia feels splashes on her skin where it penetrates the sandalwood screen. “The delight was to find that a politician can get away with being a lot less real than a soap star.”

“Did you give the order to have Tal killed? They shot Bernard’s place up. They had machine guns. Your man almost killed him at the station, I saved him. Did you know about that?”

“N. K. Jivanjee regrets this very much and he wishes to assure you that no silencing order was given by him or his office. Mob human dynamics are difficult to predict; alas, Ms. Askarzadah, in this respect politics is not soap. I wish I could guarantee your safety but once these things are out, it is nigh impossible to put them back in the box again.”

“But you—he—was behind the plot to expose Shaheen Badoor Khan.”

“N. K. Jivanjee had access to insider information.”

“Inside the Rana government?”

“Inside the Khan household. The informant was Shaheen Badoor Khan’s own wife. She has known for many years of his sexual preferences. She is also one of the most able members of my Law Circle policy group.”

Wind billows the sheet silk curtains into the marble floored room. Najia catches a stray of frankincense. She squirms in journalistic delight on her cushion in the draughty jharoka. This is going to make her the most famous writer in the world. “She was working against her own husband?”

“It seems so. You understand that as aeais our relationships are differently structured from yours; we have no analogue for sexual passion and betrayal; neither can you comprehend our hierarchical relationships with our manifestations. But this is one instance where I think soapi is an accurate guide to human behaviour.”

Najia Askarzadah has her next question unholstered.

“A Muslim, working for a Hindu fundamentalist party? What is the political reality of the Shivaji?”

Never forget you are on enemy territory, she tells herself.

“It has always been a party of opportunity. A voice for the voiceless. A strong arm for the weak. Since Bharat was founded, there have been disenfranchised groups; N. K. Jivanjee appeared at the right time to catalyse much of the women’s movement. This is a deformed society. In such a culture it is easy to build political might. My manifestation simply could not resist the futureward pressure of history.”

Why? Najia mouths but the aeai lifts its hand again and the Brahmpur B haveli is whirled away into a billow of orange and scarlet fabric and the smell of wood, fresh spray paint, fibreglass binder, and cheap off-cut timber. Gaudy god faces, tumbling devis and gopis and apsaras, fluttering silk banners: she has been transported to the rath yatra, the vahana of this entity behind N. K. Jivanjee. But so that Najia Askarzadah may appreciate the powers that entertain her, this is not the ramshackle soapi backlot construction she saw in the Industrial Road go-down. This is the chariot of a god, a true juggernaut looming hundreds of metres over the drought-stricken Ganga plain. The aeai has transported Najia Askarzadah to an opulently carved wooden balcony half way up the billowing face of the rath. Najia peers over the rail, reels back. What stuns her is not vertigo, but people. Villages of people, townsful of people, cities of people, a black mass of flesh dragging the monstrosity of wood and fabric and divinity on leather ropes along the dry riverbed of the Ganga. The appalling mass of the jagannath leaves the land ploughed into furrows; fifty parallel gouges stretching straight behind into the east. Forests, roads, railways, temples, villages, fields lie crushed in the rath yatra’s wake. Najia can hear the communal roar of the haulers as they struggle the monstrosity over the soft river sand, straining with zeal. From her high vantage she scries their ultimate destination; the white line, wide as the horizon, of the Kunda Khadar dam.