Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Not as slow as this old crock,” the driver jokes. The Sikh suppresses a smile and bends down to glance in at the passenger. Tal hastily shuts off the bpm. Yt sits very still, very upright, heart betrayingly loud.

“And you sir? Madam?”

His soldiers titter. The Sikh has been eating onions. Tal thinks yt might pass out from the reek and the tension. Yt opens yts evening bag, slips out the thick, gilt-scallop-edged invitation. The Sikh looks at it as if it could be grounds for a full body-cavity search, then snaps it back to Tal.

“You’re lucky we’re out here tonight. You missed your turn a couple of kilometres back. You must be about the seventh or eighth. Now, what you do is.”

Tal breathes again. As the driver turns the cab Tal can clearly hear the soldiers’ nasty laughter over the purr of the alcohol motor.

Hope there are slow missiles a-creeping up on you, Tal thinks.

The half-ruined Ardhanarisvara temple stands among trees on a country track that strikes right from the main road. The party organisers have lit the drop-off zone with biolume patches. The green light draws faces from the tree trunks, spook-lights the slumped statues and yakshis, bedded in the ancient soil. The reception is themed around polar opposites: sakti and purusa; female and male energies; sattva and tamas; spiritual intelligence and earthy materialism. The yoni-shaped tanks have been extravagantly flooded. Tal thinks of yts party preparations, a frugal lick-wash with a bottle of warmed mineral water. The mains water in the White Fort—the mammoth agglomeration of housing projects where Tal has yts two-room apartment—has not been working for two months now. Day and night a procession of women and children carry water cans up and down the stairs past yts front door.

Gas flames blaze from nozzles in the centres of the yoni tanks. Tal studies the twin temple guardian dvarapalas while the taxi driver runs yts card through his reader. The ruined arcade is dominated by the image of Ardhanarisvara; half male, half female. A single full breast, an erect penis sliced down the middle, a mono testicle, a curl of labius, a hint of a slit. The torso has a man’s broadness of shoulder, a woman’s fullness of hip, the hands sensitively held in ritual mudras but the features are genetic, androgynous. The third eye of Siva is closed on the forehead. Inside, the music is banging. Invitation clutched in hand, Tal passes between the guardian deities, into the party of the season.

Even when Tal showed them the invitation, the department told yt yt had faked it. It was an automatic supposition to make in a section designing visual wallpaper for the fake lives of the aeai actors of India’s favorite soapi. Tal hadn’t believed it ytself when yt found the thick, creamy wafer card resting in yts intray.

FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS on behalf of MODE ASIA invites TAL, 27 Corridor 30, 12th Floor, Indira Gandhi Apartments (as White Fort was known only to the post office, the tax department, and the bailiffs) to a RECEPTION to welcome YULI to Varanasi for BHARAT FASHION WEEK. LOCATION: Ardhanarisvara Temple, Mirza Murad District CELEBRATION: 22 bells. NATION: NuTribe. RSVP.

The card felt warm and soft as skin. Tal had shown it to Mama Bharat, the old widow woman whose front door shared yts stair head. She was a soft soul incarcerated by her family in a silk prison. The modern way: an independent old age. Three months ago Tal had moved in an become Mama Bharat’s family. No one would talk to yt, either. Tal accepted the daily chai and snack visits and twice weekly cleaning calls and never asked what kind of family yt was to her, daughter or son.

The aged aged woman ran her fingers over the invitation, stroking and cooing softly, like a lover.

“So soft,” she said. “So soft. And will they all be like you?”

“Nutes? Most. We’re a theme.”

“Ah, a great great honour, the best in the city, and all the tivi people.” Yes, Tal had thought. But why this one?

Tal walks through the shadowy temple mandapa lit by flambeaux held by four armed Kali avatars and feels a little gnaw of awe in yts nadi chakra. There is a Big Name Film Director talking rather uncomfortably to a Well Respected New Young Woman Writer underneath startlingly pornographic statue. Here is an international circuit tennis star looking relieved to have found not just a Big Pro golfer, but an All-India League footballer and his radiant wife so they can all talk strokeplay and handicaps. And that’s Mr. Interstellar Pop Promoter Man and he’s his latest piece of pop engineering with a debut song bound to go to Number One on prerelease bookings already while the girl in the too-short skirt clutching the cocktail a little too hard and laughing a little too loud has to be FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS PR. That’s not counting the three under-twenty-five wetware rajas, the two edgy games designers, and the deeply shady Lord of the Sundarbans, the Cyberjungle entrepreneur of the Darwinware hot zone, all on his ownio, at ease and sleekly tigerish as only a man with his own pandava legion of aeai bodyguards can. Plus the overdressed overmouthed faces Tal doesn’t recognise but who advertise their fashion magazine origins, the fortysomething tivi commissioning editors looking sweaty and over-familiar with each other, the gossip journos with the very wide and active peripheral vision, and the Varanasi society have-to-haves, ruffled and sullen at being outshone by a gaggle of nutes . There are even a couple of generals, gorgeous as parakeets in their full dress. Army is tres tres hip in this time of edge-play with Awadh. Not forgetting that clutch of sullen seeming-ten-year-olds looking daggers over the tops of their gyro-stabilised cocktail glasses: the Golden, the Brahmin sons and daughters.

Tal’s been given a checklist by Neeta, boss Devgan’s PA. Most of the metasoap unit find Neeta’s perfect vacuity oppressive but Tal likes her. Her unfeigned banality throws up unexpected, Zen-like juxtapositions. She wanted to know what yt was wearing, what makeup yt was going to put on, where yt was going for pre-club drinks and the after-party bash. You have to make an effort for the biggest brashest celeby gotta-go bash of the season. Along the colonnade yt clicks thirty Big Names off Neeta’s list.

Two rakshasas guard the entrance to the sanctuary and the free bar. The groove is Adani, Biblical Brothers remix. Scimitars swing down. The actors are flesh but the lower set of arms is robotic. Tal admires the full-body makeup. It really is seamless. They scan the invitation. The swords go up. Tal steps into wonderland. Every nute in the city has turned out. Tal notes that yts ankle-length shag-fibre optical shatter coat is still the thing, but since when have ski goggles pushed high on the forehead become the accessory? Tal hates missing a move. Heads turn as yt progresses to the bar, then bend together. Yt can feel the wave of gossip spread behind yt like a wake: Who’s that nute, yt’s new, where’s yt been hiding ytself, Stepped Away or stepped in?

I disregard your regard, Tal declares to ytself. Tal is here for stardom. Yt stakes a pitch at the end of the curving luminous plastic bar and scans the talent. Four-armed barmen shake acrobatic cockrails. Tal admires the dexterity of their robotics. “What’s this?” yt asks of the fluorescent cone of golden ice balanced on its point on the bar.

“Non-Russian,” says the barman as his lower arms lift another glass and scoop up ice. Tal sips cautiously. Vodka-based something vanilla-syrupy, a fistful of crush and a slash of German cinnamon schnapps, flakes of gold foil drifting down through the interstices in the ice. The thrum of the microgyros tickle Tal’s fingers.

Then party dynamics opens a momentary corridor of clear eyeline and in pure white polar bear shag and gold-tinted ski goggles Tal glimpses the Star Ytself: YULI.