Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Past the burning ghat and the Siva temple capsizing slowly, tectonically, into the Varanasi silts, the river shifts east of north. A third set of bridge piers stirs the water into cats’ tongues. Lights ripple, the lights of a high-speed shatabdi crossing the river into Kashi Station. The streamlined express chunks heavily over the points as the dead woman shoots the rail bridge into clear war.

There is a third Varanasi beyond Kashi and New Varanasi. New Sarnath , it appears on the plans and press releases of the architects and their PR companies, trading on the catchet of the ancient Buddhist city. Ranapur to everyone else; a half-built capital of a fledgling political dynasty. By any name, it is Asia’s biggest building site. The lights never go out. The labour never ceases. The noise appalls. One hundred thousand people are at work, from chowkidars to structural engineers. Towers of great beauty and daring rise from cocoons of bamboo scaffolding, bulldozers sculpt wide boulevards and avenues shaded by gene-mod ashok trees. New nations demand new capitals and Ranapur will be a showcase to the culture, industry, and forward-vision of Bharat. The Sajida Rana Cultural Centre. The Rajiv Rana conference centre. The Ashok Rana telecom tower. The museum of modern art. The rapid transit system. The ministries and civil service departments, the embassies and consuls, and the other paraphernalia of government. What the British did for Delhi, the Ranas will do for Varanasi. That’s the word from the building at the heart of it all, the Bharat Sabha, a lotus in white marble, the Parliament House of the Bharati government, and Sajida Rana’s prime-ministership.

Construction floods glint on the shape in the river. The new ghats may be marble but the river kids are pure Varanasi. Heads snap up. Something here. Something light, bright, glinting. Cigarettes are stubbed. The shore kids dash splashing into the water. They wade thigh-deep through the shallow, blood-warm water, summoning each other by whistles. A thing. A body. A woman’s body. A naked woman’s body. Nothing new or special in Varanasi but still the water boys drag the dead woman in to shore. There may be some last value to be had from her. Jewellery. Gold teeth. Artificial hip joints. The boys splash through the spray of light from the construction floods, hauling their prize by the arms up on to the gritty sand. Silver glints at her throat. Greedy hands reach for a trishul pendant, the trident of the devotees of Lord Siva. The boys pull back with soft cries.

From breastbone to pubis, the woman lies open. A coiled mass of gut and bowel gleams in the light from the construction site. Two short, hacking cuts have cleanly excised the woman’s ovaries.

In his fast German car, Shiv cradles a silver flask, dewed with condensation, as Yogendra moves him, through the traffic.

Mr. Nandha the Krishna Cop travels this morning by train, in a first-class car. Mr. Nandha is the only passenger in the first-class car. The train is a Bharat Rail electric shatabdi express: it piles down the specially constructed high-speed line at three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, leaning into the gentle curves. Villages roads fields towns temples blur past in the dawn haze that clings knee-deep to the plain. Mr. Nandha sees none of these. Behind his tinted window his attention is given over to the virtual pages of the Bharat Times . Articles and video reports float above the table as the lighthoek beats data into his visual lobes. In his auditory centre: Monteverdi, the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin performed by the Camerata of Venezia and the Choir of St. Mark’s.

Mr. Nandha loves very much the music of the Italian renaissance. Mr. Nandha is deeply fascinated with all music of the European humanist tradition. Mr. Nandha considers himself a Renaissance man. So he may read news of the water and the maybe war and the demonstrations over the Hanuman statue and the proposed metro station at Sarkhand Roundabout and the scandal and the gossip and the sports reviews, but part of his visual cortex the lighthoek can never touch envisions the piazzas and campaniles of seventeenth-century Cremona.

Mr. Nandha has never been to Cremona. He has never visited Italy. His imaginings are Planet History Channel establishing shots cut with his own memories of Varanasi, the city of his birth, and Cambridge, the city of his intellectual rebirth.

The train slams past a rural brickworks; kiln smoke lying on top of the mist. The ranks of stacked bricks are like the ruins of an unborn civilization. Kids stand and stare, hands raised in greeting, dazed by the speed. After the train has passed, they scramble up on to the track and look for paisa coins they have wedged into the rail joints. The fast trains smear them flat into the rail. There’s stuff you could buy with those coins but none would be as good as seeing them become stains on the high-speed express line.

The chai-wallah sways down the carriage.

“Sahb?”

Mr. Nandha hands him a tea bag, dangling from a string. The steward bows, takes the bag, drapes it over a plastic cup, and releases boiling water from the biggin. Mr. Nandha sniffs the chai, nods, then hands the wallah the wet, hot bag. Mr. Nandha suffers badly from yeast infections. The chai is Ayurvedic, made to his personal prescription. Mr. Nandha also avoids cereals, fruit, fermented foods including alcohol, many soy goods, and all dairy produce.

The call had come at four AM. Mr. Nandha had just fallen asleep after enjoyable sex with his beautiful wife. He tried not to disturb her but she had never been able to sleep when he was awake and she got up and fetched her husband’s Away Bag which she had the dhobi-wallah keep fresh, changed, and folded. She saw him off into the Ministry car. The car bypassed the station approach crowded with phatphats and rickshaws waiting on the Agra sleeper and brought Mr. Nandha through the marshalling yards on to the platform where the long, sleek electric train waited. A Bharat Rail official showed him to his reserved seat in his reserved carriage. Thirty seconds later the train ghosted out of Kashi Station. All three hundred metres of it had been held for the Krishna Cop.

Mr. Nandha thinks back to that sex with his wife and calls her up on the palmer. She appears in his visual cortex. He’s not surprised to find her on the roof. Since the work on the garden began, Parvati has spent increasing amounts of time on top of the apartment block. Behind the concrete mixer and the piles of blocks and sacks of compost and pipes for the drip irrigator, Mr. Nandha can see the early lights in the windows of the tenements leaning close across the narrow streets. Water tanks, solar panels, satellite dishes, rows of potted geraniums are silhouettes against a dull, hazy sky. Parvati tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, squints into the bindi cam.

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine. I will arrive in ten minutes. I just wanted to call you.” She smiles. Mr. Nandha’s heart frays.

“Thank you, it’s a lovely thought. Are you worried about it?”

“No, it’s a routine excommunication. We want to nip it before panic spreads.” Parvati nods, sucking in her lower lip in that way she does when she thinks about issues. “So what are you doing today?”

“Well,” she says, with a turn of her body indicating the nascent garden. “I’ve had an idea. Please don’t be cross with me, but I don’t think we need so many shrubs. I’d like some vegetables. A few rows of beans, some tomatoes and peppers—they’d give lots of cover—maybe even some bhindi and brinjal. Herbs—I’d love to grow herbs, tulsi and coriander and hing.”

In his reserved first-class seat, Mr. Nandha smiles. “A proper little urban farmer.”