Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“What the. ?” They’ve started a war while he was in immigration. The driver points to the street across the intersection to a street of neon shop fronts and glowing umbrellas where a man in dark, expensive clothing yells imprecations at the departing machine. Behind him are two fillets of Mercedes SUV. The man picks up lumps of circuitry and metal and shies them after the battle-bot. “I still don’t.”

“Sahb,” the driver says as he engages drive. “Have you been so long gone you have forgotten Varanasi?”

The journey to Marianna Fusco’s hotel is in grim silence. She thanks him politely, the Rajput doorman salutes and lifts her bag, and she goes up the steps without a look back.

Not looking good for a follow-up fuck, then.

The battered limo turns into the gates between the motor parts shop and the IT school through the screen of ashok trees. At once he is in a different world. The first thing money buys in India is privacy. The street roar is hushed to a pulse. The insanity of his city is shut out.

The house staff has lit naphtha flares all along the drive to welcome the returned prodigal. Drummers greet Vishram Ray with a tattoo and escort the car, and there is the house, wide and proud and unbelievably white in the floods. Vishram finds uninvited tears in his eyes. When he was beneath its roof he had always been ashamed to acknowledge that he lived in a palace, cringing at its pillars and pediments and wide portico screened with honeysuckle and hibiscus, its bloody whiteness, its interior of swept marble and old quaint, pornographic wood carvings and ceilings painted in the Nepali style. A family of merchants had built it in the British days in a style to remind them of home. The Shanker Mahal, they named it. Now that adolescent contempt, that embarrassment at being privileged, is swept away as he steps out and the house assails him with the old remembered smells of dust and neem trees and the musk of the rhododendrons and the faint reek of the sewage system that never really worked.

They await him on the steps. Old Shastri, on the lowest rung, already namasteing. Flanking him, the house staff, in two wings, the women to his left, the men to the right. Ram Das the venerable gardener is still there, an incredible age now but still zealous as ever, Vishram doesn’t doubt, in his eternal war against the monkeys. On the middle rank, his brothers. Eldest Ramesh seems taller and thinner than ever, as if the gravity of the interstellar objects he studies is drawing him into the sky, spinning him into a rope of inquiry. Still no significant female. Even in Glasgow, Vishram heard Bharati diaspora rumours about weekend specials to Bangkok. Next, perfect brother, Govind. Perfect suit perfect wife perfect twin heirs Runu and Satish. Vishram sees the middle body fat piling around his chest. The stellar DiDi, former breakfast-tivi presenter and trophy bride, is at his side. At her side the aya cradles the latest line in the dynasty. A girl. How 2047. Vishram coos and chuckles little Priya but something about her gives him the idea that she’s a Brahmin. Something primal, pheromonal, a shift in the body chemistry.

His mother holds the top step; superior in her deference, as Vishram always remembers her. A shadow among the pillars. His father is not present.

“Where’s Dadaji?” Vishram asks.

“He will meet us tomorrow at the head office,” is all his mother will say.

“Do you know what this is about?” Vishram asks Ramesh when the greetings and cryings and look-at-you-haven’t-you-got-bigs? are done. Ramesh shakes his head as Shastri motions with a finger for a porter to carry Vishram’s case up to his room. Vishram doesn’t want to answer questions about the limo, so he begs jet lag and takes himself off to bed. He’d expected to be given his old room, but the porter guides him to a guest bedroom on the sunrise side of the house. Vishram is affronted at being treated as a stranger and sojourner. Then, as he settles his few things in the huge mahogany wardrobes and tallboys, he is glad not to have his childhood possessions watching him as he returns from his life beyond them. They would drag him back, revert him to teenage again. The old place never had air-conditioning worth a damn so he lies naked on the sheets, appalled by the heat, reading faces in the foliage of the painted ceiling, and listening to the rattle of monkey hands and feet in the vines outside his window. He lies on the edge of sleep, slipping towards unconsciousness and reawakening with a start as some half-forgotten sound breaks through from the city beyond. Conceding defeat, Vishram goes naked on to the iron balcony. The air and the perfume of the city of Siva powder his skin. Clusters of winking aircraft lights move over the hazy yellow skyline. The soldiers who fly in the night. He tries to imagine a war. Robot killing machines running through the alleys, titanium blades in all four hands, avatars of Kali. Aeai gunships piloted by warriors half a planet away coming in across the Ganga on strafing runs. Awadh’s American allies fight in the modern manner, without a single soldier leaving home, without a single body bag. They kill from continents away. He fears that strange tableau he had seen enacted on the streets was prophecy. Between the water and the fundamentalists, the Ranas have run out of choices.

A crunch of gravel, a movement on the silver lawns. Ram Das appears from the moon shadows under the harsingars. Vishram freezes on his balcony. Another Western way he has slipped into: casual nakedness. Ram Das steps on to the shaved lawn, parts his dhoti, and takes a piss by the lazy moon of India, lolling on its side like a temple gandava. He cleans himself, then turns around and waggles his head slowly at Vishram, a salutation, a blessing. He goes on his way. A peacock shrieks.

Home at last.

Until thirty minutes ago, Vishram Ray had boasted that he had never owned a suit. He has always recognised that some day he might need one and that when he did he really would so he keeps a set of measurements with a family of Chinese tailors in Varanasi together with choice of fabric, cut, lining, and two shirts. He’s wearing that suit now in his seat at the teak boardroom table of Ray Power. It arrived at the Shanker Mahal half an hour ago by bicycle courier. Vishram was still adjusting the collar and cuffs as the flotilla of cars arrived at the steps. Now he’s on the twentieth floor of the Ray tower with Varanasi a smoggy brown stain at his feet, the Ganga a distant curl of sullied silver, and still no one will tell him what the hell this is about.

Those Chinese really understand fabric. The collar fit is perfect. He can hardly see the stitches.

The boardroom doors open. Corporate lawyers file in. Vishram Ray wonders what the collective noun is for corporate lawyers. A fleece? A fuckover? Last in line is Marianna Fusco. Vishram Ray can feel his mouth sag open. Marianna Fusco gives him the smallest of smiles, certainly less than you would expect from someone you (a) had first-class sex with and (b) embroiled in a street riot, and sits down opposite him. Under the teak table, Vishram flicks on his palmer and types invisible text.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?

The staff open the double doors to now admit the board members.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS A FAMILY BUSINESS MATTER.

Marianna’s message appears to Vishram to be hovering over her breasts. She’s in that great and eminently practical suit.

But he’s not so bad himself. The bankers and representatives from the credit unions and grameen banks take their sears. Many of the members from the rural micro-credit banks have never been so far off the ground in their lives. As Vishram coolly pours himself a water with his left hand while his right texts IS THIS A GAME? his father enters the room. He wears a simple round-collared suit, the length of the jacket his only concession to fashion, but he turns every head. There is a look on his face Vishram hasn’t seen since he was a boy when his father was setting up the company, the determined serenity of a man certain he is doing right. Behind him is Shastri, his shadow.