Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“I think you’d better find your friend quick,” she says. “This is Nandha. He’s a Krishna Cop.”

She flees from the house into the grey light. The rain falls on Scindia Basti. The bare feet of the women fetching water from the pumps have churned the alleys to fetid mud. The sewers overflow. The men also are about in the dawn, to buy and sell, maybe hire themselves to dig a ditch for a cable, maybe have a cup of chai, maybe see if there is anything left of the city.

They stare at the girl with the Vishnu tilak, shoving past them, running as if Kali rising is on her heels.

Eyes in the dark in the house by the pylon left’s foot. “We are poor people, we have nothing you can possibly want, please leave us in peace.” Then the scratch and flare of the match and the arc of light through the darkness as it moved to touch the wick of the little clay diya, the bud of light swelling and filling the clay-floored room. Then, the cries of fear.

Vehicles roar at her; metal looms huge, then recedes into the rain. Thundering voices, bodies pressing around her that seem the size of clouds. A river of motion and alcofueled peril. She is on the street and she does not know how. The certainties and divine guidances of the night have evaporated in the light. For the first time there is no clear distinction between god and human. She is not sure she can find her way back to the hotel.

Aid me.

The skyline crawls with the chaotic moire patterns of gods meshing, blurring, flowing, breeding into strange new configurations.

“ What are you doing in this house ?” She cries out, claps her hands to her ears as the remembered voice speaks again in her skull. The women’s faces in the glow of the grease lamp, one old, one younger, one youngest. A wail had gone up from the old woman; like something long and fragile tearing inside.

“What are you doing here? You have no place here!” A hand, held in a mudra against the evil eye. The youngest’s eyes wide with fear, wet with tears. “Get out of this house, there is no place for you here. Don’t be deceived. See her, see her? See what they have done? Ah, this is an evil thing, a djinn, a demon!” The old woman rocking now, eyes closed, moaning. “Away from us! This is not your home, you are not our sister!”

Entreaties never offered. Answers never spoken. Questions never worded. And the old woman, the old woman; her mother, her hand in front of her eyes as if Aj blinded her, as if she burned with a fire that could not be looked upon. On the street, underneath the monsoon rain, she cries out, a long, thin wail torn out of the heart of her. She understands now.

Fear: that is white, without surface or texture or anything you can lay a hand on to move or manipulate and it feels like rot in the base of you and you want to roll up and ask it to pass you over, like a rain-cloud, but it will never do that.

Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that the slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.

Abandonment, that tastes like sick in the back of your throat, always on the edge of coming up; it feels like dizzy, like walking along the edge of a high stone harbour over a sea that glimmers and moves so far below you cannot be certain where it is, but brown, brown; abandonment is empty dull brown.

Desperation: a universal background hum, grey noise, part drone part hiss, a stifling, blurring, smudging of everything into soft grey. Universal rain. Universal yielding, into which you can push beyond the reach of any of your limbs and still touch nothing. Universal insulation. That is desperation.

Yellow is the colour of uncertainty, sick yellow, yellow like bile, yellow like madness, yellow like flowers that open their petals around you and whirl and spin so you cannot decide which is best, which is most perfect, which has the most gorgeous, cloying scent; yellow like acid that eats away at everything you think you know until you stand on a rotted filigree of rust and you are at once smaller than the tiniest grain of yellow pollen and vast beyond vastness, containing cities.

Shock is a numb pressure trying to smear your brain over the back of your skull. Betrayal is translucent blue, so cold cold cold. Incomprehension feels like a hair on the tongue.

And anger is heavy like a hammer but so light it can fly with its own wings, and the darkest, darkest rust.

This is what it is to be human.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she shouts at the gods as the street breaks around her and rain falls on her upturned face.

And the gods answer: we never knew. We never thought . And again: now we understand . Then one by one they extinguish like diyas in the rain.

Shiv can’t place the smell. It’s sweet, it’s musky, it reminds him of things he can’t fully remember and it’s coming from the dataraja Ramanandacharya. He’s a fat bastard but they all are. Fat and quivering. Doesn’t look so cool in those robes and gowns now. Shiv particularly hares the old-school Mughal-style moustaches. He’d love to cut them off but Yogendra needs to keep the hooked tip of the big knife at Ramanandacharya’s groin. One small wrist movement there will sever the femoral artery. Shiv knows the surgery. The raja will bleed out in under four minutes.

They walk up the sloping wet cobbles from the Hastings Pavilion to the Temple, close as lovers or drunks.

“How many have you got there?” Shiv whispers, nudging Ramanandacharya with his shoulder. “Back there, how many women, huh?”

“Forty,” says Ramanandacharya. Shiv cuffs him with the back of his hand. He knows it’s the pills, making him impatient, bolder than a clever man should be, but he likes the feel of it.

“Forty women? Where you get them from, huh?” Nudge.

“All over, Philippines, Thailand, Russians, anywhere cheap, you know?” Again, the rap with the back of the hand. Ramanandacharya cringes. They pass the sentry robot, crouched down on its steel hams.

“Any good Bharati women in there?”

“Couple from the village. ah!” Shiv cuffs harder now, Ramanandacharya rubs his ear. Shiv takes a fold of rich gold-threaded silk between his fingers, feels the subtle weave, the skin-smoothness, the lightness.

“Do they like this, huh? All this Mughal shit?” He shoves Ramanandacharya with both hands. The dataraja stumbles on a step. Yogendra flicks the knife away. “Why couldn’t you have been a Hindu, huh?”

Ramanandacharya shrugs.

“Mughal Fort,” he offers weakly. Shiv hits him again.

“Mughal Fort fuck!” He slides in close to the ear. “So how often do you, you know? Every night?”

“Lunchtimes too.” The sentence vanishes into a sharp cry as Shiv hits Ramanandacharya hard on the side of the head.

“Fucking dirty chuutya!” He knows what the smell is now. That sweet, sour, musky, dark smell from Ramanandacharya’s robes and jewels: sex.

“Eh,” says Yogendra. The swarm of robots has left its orbit of the Lodi temple and streams across the courtyard towards the trio, a black, oily arrow. Plastic peds rattle on the cobbles. Their wet carapaces glint blackly. Ramanandacharya tuts and sighs and twists the ring on his left pinky. The swarms part like that sea in that Christian story, the kind American missionaries put into the heads of good young women to turn them into unmarriageable things that can never get proper husbands.

“They’d have had your feet down to the bones in twenty seconds,” Ramanandacharya says.

“Fuck up, fat boy.” Shiv smacks him again because he was scared by the scarab robots. Ramanandacharya takes a step, takes another. The ring of robots flows with him. Yogendra brushes the knife tip against Ramanandacharya’s groin.