Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Oh, nothing you would be ashamed of. Just a few rows of things until we move out to the Cantonment and get a bungalow. I could grow those salad vegetables you need. It would save money, they fly them in from Europe and Australia—I’ve seen the labels. Would that be all right?”

“If you wish, my flower.”

Parvati claps her hands together in soft delight.

“Oh good. This is a bit cheeky, but I’d already arranged to go with Krishan to the seedsman.”

Mr. Nandha often questions what he has done, bringing his lovely wife into Varanasi’s rip-throat society, a country girl among cobras. The games among the Cantonment set—his colleagues, his social peers—appall him. Whispers and looks and rumours, always so sweet and well mannered, but watching, weighing, measuring. Virtues and vices in the most delicate of balances. For men it’s easy. Marry as well as you can—if you can. Mr. Nandha has married within jati—more than Arora, his superior at the Ministry, more than most of his contemporaries. A good solid Kayastha/Kayastha marriage but the old rigours no longer seem to matter in new Ranapur. That wife of Nandha’s. Would you listen to the accent? Would you look at those hands? Those colours she wears, and the styles. She can’t speak, you know. Not a word. Nothing to say. Opens her mouth and flies buzz out. Town and country, I say. Town and country. Still stands on the toilet bowl and squats.

Mr. Nandha finds his fists tight with rage at the thought of Parvati caught up in those terrible games of my husband this, my children that, my house the other. She does not need the Cantonment bungalow, the two cars and five servants, the designer baby. Like every modern bride, Parvati made her financial checks and genetic scans, but theirs was always a match of respect and love, not a desperate lunge for the first available wedding-fodder in Varanasi’s Darwinian marriage-market. Once the woman came with the dowry. The man was the blessed, the treasure. That was always the problem. Now after a quarter of a century of foetal selection, discreet suburban clinics and old-fashioned Kashi back stair car aerial joints, Bharat’s middle-class urban male population outnumbers the female fourfold.

Mr. Nandha feels a slight shift in acceleration. The train is slowing.

“My love, I’m going to have to go, we’re coming into Nawada now.”

“You won’t be in any danger, will you?” Parvati says, all wide-eyed concern.

“No, no danger at all. I’ve performed dozens of these.”

“I love you, husband.”

“I love you, my treasure.”

Mr. Nandha’s wife vanishes from inside his head. I’ll do it for you, he thinks as the rain draws him into his showdown. I’ll think of you as I kill it.

A handsome woman jemadar of the local Civil Defence meets Mr. Nandha with a sharp salute on the down line platform. Two rows of jawans hold onlookers back with lathis. Outriders fall in fore and aft as the convoy swings into the streets.

Nawada is a strip city, a name cast over the union of four cow-shit towns. Then out of the sky came a fistful of development grants, a slapped-down road grid, speed-built metal shed factories and warehouses, stuffed with call centres and data-farms. String together with cable and satellite uplinks, hook into the power grid and let it grind out crores of rupees. It’s among the corrugated aluminium and construction carbon go-downs of Nawada, not the soaring towers of Ranapur, that the future of Bharat is being forged. In the big heavy army hummer Mr. Nandha slips past the single unit stores and motor part workshops. He feels like a hired gun, riding into town. Scooters with country girls perched side-saddle on the pillion sway out of his path.

The outriders steer into an alley between spray-concrete go-downs, clearing a path for the hummer with their sirens. An electricity pylon slumps beneath illegal power-taps and siphons. Squatting women share chai and breakfast roti outside a huge windowless concrete box; the men gather as far from them as the geometry of the compound will allow, smoking. Mr. Nandha looks up at the outspread blessing hands of the Ray Power solar farm. Salutation to the sun.

“Turn off the sirens,” he orders the handsome jemadar, whose name is Sen. “The thing has at least animal-level intelligence. If it receives any advance warning, it will attempt to copy itself out.” Sen winds down the window and shouts orders to the escort. The sirens fall silent.

The hummer is a steel sweat-box. Mr. Nandha’s pants stick to the vinyl seat-covers but he’s too proud to squirm free. He slips his ’hoek over his ear, settles the bone transducer over the sweet spot on his skull and opens his box of avatars.

Ganesha, Lord of Auspicious Beginnings, Remover of Obstructions, throned upon his rat-vehicle, rears over the flat roofs and antenna farms of Nawada, vast as a thunderhead. In his hands are his qualities: the goad, the noose, a broken tusk, a rice flour dumpling, and a pot of water. His pot belly contains universes of cyberspace. He is the portal. Mr. Nandha knows the moves that summon each avatar by heart. His hand calls up flying Hanuman with his mace and mountain; Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, one foot away from universal destruction and regeneration; Durga the Dark One, goddess of righteous wrath, each of her ten arms bearing a weapon; Lord Krishna with his flute and necklace; Kali the disrupter, the belt of severed hands around her waist. In Mr. Nandha’s mindsight the aeai agents of the Ministry bend low over tiny Nawada. They are ready. They are eager. They are hungry.

The convoy turns into a service alley. A scatter of police tries to part a press of bodies to let the hummer through. The alley is clogged with vehicles down the entry; an ambulance, a cop cruiser, an electric delivery jeepney. There’s something under the truck’s front wheel.

“What is going on here?” Mr. Nandha demands as he walks through the scrum of police, Ministry warrant card held high.

“Sir, one of the factory workers panicked and ran out into the alley, straight under,” says a police sergeant. “He was shouting about a djinn; how the djinn was in the factory and was going to get all of them.”

You call it djinn, Mr. Nandha thinks, scanning the site. I call it meme. Non-material replicators; jokes, rumours, customs, nursery rhymes. Mind-viruses. Gods, demons, djinns, superstitions. The thing inside the factory is no supernatural creature, no spirit of flame, but it is certainly a non-material replicator.

“How many inside?”

“Two dead, sir. It was the night shift. The rest escaped.”

“I want this area cleared,” Mr. Nandha orders. Jemadar Sen flicks orders to her jawans. Mr. Nandha walks past the body with the leather jacket draped over its face and the shaking truck driver in the back of the police Maruti. He surveys the locus. This bent metal shed makes pasta-tikka. An emigrant family run it from Bradford. Bringing the jobs back home. That’s what places like Nawada are all about. Mr. Nandha finds the concept of pasta-tikka an abomination but British-Diaspora Asian cuisine is the thing this season. Mr. Nandha squints up at the telephone cable box.

“Have somebody cut that cable.”

While the rural police scramble for a ladder, Mr. Nandha locates the night shift line manager, a fat Bengali pulling nervously at the tag-skin beside his nails. He smells of what Mr. Nandha presumes must be pasta-tikka.

“Do you have a cellular base-port or a satellite uplink?” he asks.

“Yes, yes, a distributed internal cell network,” the Bengali says. “For the robots. And one of those things that bounces signals off meteor trails; to talk to Bradford.”

“Officer Sen, please have one of your men take care of the satellite dish. We may yet be in time to stop it out-copying.”