Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Yeah,” Najia Askarzadah stammers. Of course, anything. I owe you. Because you do not know it, but I am your torturer.

“Thank you. Thank you indeed.” Shaheen Badoor Khan looks up at the bleeding sky, squints at the thin, sour rain. “Ah, I have never known worse times. And please believe me, if I thought what you have given me would make it worse for Bharat. There is nothing I can do for my Prime Minister, but at least there is something I may yet do for my country.” He stands up briskly, looks out over the sodden marshland. “We have a way to go yet before any of us are safe.”

He shakes hands, firmly, grimly, again and returns to his car. He and Tal exchange the briefest of glances.

“That the politician?” the taxi-wallah asks as he reverses up to let the Mercedes pass.

“That was Shaheen Badoor Khan,” Tal says, wet in the back seat beside Najia. “Private Secretary to the late Sajida Rana.”

“Hot damn!” the driver exclaims as he tailgates Shaheen Badoor Khan, hooting at early bullock carts on the country back road. “Don’t you love Bharat!”

Jamshedpur Grameen Bank is a dozen rural sathin women running microcredit schemes in over a hundred villages, most of whom have never left backcountry Bihar, some of whom have never physically met each other but they hold fifty lakh ordinary shares in Ray Power. Their aeai agent is a homely little 2.i bibi, chubby and smiling, with a life-creased face and a vivid red bindi. She would not look out of place as a rural auntie in an episode of Town and Country . She namastes in Vishram’s ’hoek-vision.

“For the resolution,” she says sweetly, like your mama would, and vanishes.

Vishram’s done the mental calculation before Inder can render it up on his in-eye graphic. KHP Holdings is next on the list with its eighteen percent stock, by far the biggest single shareholder outside the family. If Bhardwaj votes yes, it is game to Vishram. If he votes no, then Vishram will need eleven of the remaining twenty blocks to win.

“Mr. Bhardwaj?” Vishram asks. His hands are flat on the table. He cannot lift them. They will leave two palm-sized patches of misty sweat.

Bhardwaj takes off his hard, titanium framed glasses, rubs at a tactical spot of grease with a soft felt polishing cloth. He exhales loudly through his nose.

“This is a most irregular procedure,” he says. “All I can say is that, under Mr. Ranjit Ray, this would never have happened. But the offer is generous and cannot be ignored. Therefore I recommend it and vote for the resolution.”

Vishram allows his fist and jaw muscles a little mental spasm, a little yes. Even on that night when he took the Funny Ha! Ha! contest, there was never an audience kick like the murmur that runs around the board table that says they’ve all done their sums too. Vishram feels Marianna Fusco’s hosiery-clad thigh press briefly against his under the transparent plane of nanodiamond. A movement of the edge of his peripheral vision make him look up. His mother slips out.

He hardly hears the formalities of the remainder of the vote. He numbly thanks the shareholders and board members for their faith in the Ray name and family. Thinking: Got it. Got it. Fucking got it. Telling the table that he will not let them down, that they have assured a great future for this great company. Thinking: I’m going to take Marianna Fusco to a restaurant, whatever is the very best you can get in the capital of an invaded country that’s just had its Prime Minister assassinated. Inviting: everyone to make their way down the corridor and then we’ll see exactly the future you’ve voted for. Thinking: a softly knotted silk scarf.

IT’S LIKE HERDING CALVES, Marianna Fusco messages as Ray Power staffers try to usher board members, researchers, guests, strays, and those second-string journalists who can be spared from the Day’s Big Story down the Ramayana marquetry maple floors. The whorl of bodies brings Vishram and Ramesh, a head taller, into orbit.

“Vishram.” Big Brother smiles, broad and honest. It looks alien. Vishram recalls him always serious, puzzled, head bowed. His handshake is firm and long. “Well done.”

“You’re a rich man now, Ram.”

Typically Ramesh is the tilt of the head, the roll of the eyes upwards, looking for answer in heaven.

“Yes, I suppose I am, quite obscenely so. But you know, I don’t actually care. One thing you can do for me: find me something to do on this zero-point thing. If it’s what you say, I’ve spent my professional life looking in the wrong direction.”

“You’ll come to the demonstration.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Or I suppose I should say, universe.” He laughs nervously. Third rule of comedy, Vishram Ray thinks. Never laugh at your own jokes. “I think Govind needs a word with you.”

He’s rehearsed this so many different ways, so many different voices, so many nuances and stances and they all fall from him in the moments it takes to pick Govind out of the crowd. He can’t turn his weaponry on this chubby, shyly smiling, sweating man in the too-small suit.

“Sorry,” he says, extending the hand. Govind shakes his head, takes the hand.

“And that is why, brother, you will still never make it in business. Too soft. Too polite. You won today, you engineered a great victory, enjoy it! Press it home. Gloat. Have your security escort me from the building again.”

“You’ve seen that routine already.”

Ray Power’s PR crew has chivvied the herd onwards; Vishram and Govind are alone in the corridor. Govind’s grip on Vishram’s hand is tight.

“Our father would be proud but I still maintain that you will run this company into the ground, Vishram. You have flash, you have charisma, you have showbiz and there is a place for that, but that is not how you run a business. I have a proposal. Ray Power, like the Ray family, was never meant to be a house divided. I have verbal agreements with outside investors but nothing is drawn up, nothing is signed.”

“A remerger,” Vishram says.

“Yes,” says Govind. “With me running the operational side.” Vishram cannot read this audience.

“I’ll give you an answer in time,” he says. “After the demonstration. Now, I’d like you to see my universe.”

“One thing,” Govind asks as their leather soles click softly on the inlaid maple. “Where did the money come from, eh?”

“An old ally of our father’s,” Vishram says and as he subliminally hears that most feared of sounds to a comedian—his own footsteps walking off—he realises that in the scripts he rehearsed and never used, there was never one for what he would do if he had stood up behind that diamond table and died the death.

They find a small space on the floor by the door, beneath the carriage attendant’s pull-down berth. Here they barricade themselves in with the blue impact-resistant suitcases and huddle against each other like children. The doors are sealed, all Parvati can see through its tiny, smoked glass porthole is sky the colour of its own rain. She sees through the partition door into the next car. The bodies are pressed up against the tough plastic, disturbingly flattened. Not bodies; people, lives like hers that cannot continue in any meaningful way back in that city. The voices drowns out the hum of the traction engines, the rattle of the rails. She finds it amazing that anything so monstrously overloaded can move at all but the tug of acceleration in the well of her belly, the small of her back against the ribbed plastic wall, tells her the Raipur Express is picking up speed.

There is no staff anywhere to be found on this train, no ticket collector in her smart white sari with the wheel of Bharat Rail on her shoulder of the pallav; no clanking chai-wallah, no cabin attendant cross-legged on the bunk above them. The train runs fast now, power pylons blur past the tiny rectangle of smoky sky and Parvati panics for an instant that this is not the train, this is not the track. Then she thinks, What does it matter? Anywhere is away .