Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Cabinet and advisors rise as Sajida Rana turns and strides out in a furl colours, her secretarial staff falling in behind her. She is a tall, thin, striking woman, no trace of grey in her hair despite a first grandchild imminent. Shaheen Badoor Khan catches a ghost of Chanel as she sweeps past. He glances once at the sex divinities crawling all over the walls and roof, suppresses a shudder.

In the corridor, a touch at his cuff: the Defence Minister. “Mr. Khan.”

“Yes, how can I help you, Minister?”

Chowdhury draws Shaheen Badoor Khan into a window alcove. Minister Chowdhury leans towards him, says quietly and without inflection, “A successful meeting, Mr. Khan, but might I remind you of your own words? You are a mere civil servant.”

He tucks his briefcase under his arm and hurries on down the corridor.

Hungover on blood, Najia Askarzadah wakes late in her backpackers’ berth at the Imperial International. She staggers into the communal kitchen in search of chai, steers past Australians complaining about how flat the landscape is and that they can’t get decent cheese, makes a glass and gets back to her room, mobbed by horrors. She remembers how the microsabres leaped for each other and she had risen with the crowd with the blood roar in her throat. It’s a viler and dirtier feeling than she ever had from any drugs or sex but she’s addicted.

Najia has thought much about her attraction to danger. Her parents had brought her up a Swede, permissively educated, sexually liberal, Westward-looking. They brought no photographs into their exile, no souvenirs, no words or language or sense of geography. The only Afghan thing about Najia Askarzadah is her name. Her parents’ opus was so complete that it was not until her first term at university, when her tutor had suggested she research an essay on post-Civil War Afghan politics that Najia understood that she had an entire, buried identity. That identity opened up beneath Najia Askarzadah the little liberal arts Scandinavian poly-sexual and swallowed her for three months in which the essay became the foundation of the work that would become her final thesis. There is a life she could have led and her career so far has been foreplay with it. Bharat on the edge of water war is the preparation for her return to Kabul.

She sits on the cool cool veranda of the Imperial and checks her mail The magazine likes the story. Likes the story a lot. Wants to pay her eight hundred dollars for the story. She thumbs agreement to the contract through to the United States. One step on the path to high Kabul, but only one step. She has a next story to plan. It will be a politics story. Her next interview will be Sajida Rana. Everyone’s after Sajida Rana. What’s the angle? It’s woman to woman. Prime Minister Rana, you are a politician, a leader, a dynastic figure in a country divided over a traffic roundabout, where men are so desperate to marry they pay the the dowry, where monster children who age half as fast as baseline humanity assume the privileges and tastes of adults before they are biologically ten, that is dying of thirst and about to start a war because of it. But before any of that, you are a woman in a society where women of your class and education have vanished behind a new purdah. What was it that enabled you, virtually alone, to escape that silk cage of cherishing?

Not a bad line that. Najia flips her palmer open. As she is about to thumb it in her palmer chirps. It’ll be Bernard. Not very Tantra, going to a fighting club. Not very Tantra, going with another man. Not that he’s possessive, so he doesn’t need to forgive her, but what she needs to ask herself is, is this going to advance me down the path to samadhi?

“Bernard,” says Najia Askarzadah, “fuck off and stay fucked off. I thought you didn’t do jealousy or is that just another thing you tell women like the Tantric thing with your dick?”

“Ms. Askarzadah?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were something else.” She’s listening to a lot of air noise. “Hello? Hello?”

Then: “Ms. Askarzadah. Be at the Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road, within the next half hour.” An educated voice, lightly accented.

“Hello? Who are you, look, I’m sorry about.”

“The Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road.”

And he’s gone. Najia Askarzadah looks at the palmer as if it is a scorpion in her hand. No call back, no explanation, no identification. She taps in the address the voice gave her, the palmer displays a route map. She’s out the gate on her moped within the minute. Deodar Electrical is part of the old Town and Country studio lot, broken up into small businesses when the series went virtual and moved into Indiapendent’s Ranapur headquarters. The map leads her to the huge double doors of the main studio, where a teen in a long kurta and waistcoat sits at a table listening to cricket on the radio. Najia notices he wears a Shivaji trident medallion, like the one she had seen around Satnam’s neck.

“Someone called me, told me to come here. I’m Najia Askarzadah.” The youth looks her up and down. He has an attempted moustache. “Ah. Yes, we were told to be expecting you.”

“Told? By who?”

“Please come with me.”

He opens a small access door in the gates. They duck through. “Oh, wow,” says Najia Askarzadah.

The rath yatra stands fifteen metres high under the studio floods, a red and gold pyramid of tiers and parapets, riotous with gods and adityas. It is a mobile temple. At its apex, almost touching the studio girders is a plexiglass cupola containing an effigy of Ganesha, throned, the people’s god, claimed by the Shivaji. The base, a wide balcony for party workers and PR, rests on the backs of twin flatbeds.

“The trucks are ganged together,” the guide says enthusiastically. “They will always move in tandem, see? We will fit ropes if people want to be seen pulling, but Shivaji is not about exploiting anyone.”

Najia’s never seen a space launch, never even been close to rocketry, but she imagines the launcher assembly buildings share this buzz and industry: embraced in cranes and gantries, workers in coveralls and spray masks working up and down the golden flanks, light joinery robots poking their glue-gun probosces into crannies and corners. The air is dopey with paint and glass fibre fumes, the steel shed rings with power staplers, drills, and buzz saws. Najia watches a Vasu go up on a hoist. Two workers with Shivaji stickers on their coveralls glue it into position at the centre of a rosette of dancing attendants around a throned Vishnu. And at the centre, the golden ziggurat of the holy vessel. The chariot of Jaggarnath. The juggernaut itself.

“Please, feel free to take photographs,” the teen aide says. “There is no charge.” Najia’s hands shake as she calls up the camera on the palmer. She goes in among the workers and machines and clicks until her memory is full.

“Can I, I mean, the papers?” she stammers at the Shivajeen, who seems to be the only person at the studio in any form of authority.

“Oh yes,” he says. “I am presuming that is why you were brought here.”

The palmer calls softly Again, an anonymous number. Najia answers carefully.

“Yes?”

It is not college-voice. It’s a woman.

“Hello, I have a call for you from N. K. Jivanjee.”

“Who? What? Hello?” Najia stammers.

“Hello, Ms. Askarzadah.” It’s him. It really is him. “Well, what do you think?” She has no words. She swallows, mouth dry. “It’s, um, impressive.”

“Good. It’s supposed to be. It cost a damn pile of money, too, but I do think the team has done an outstanding job, don’t you? A lot of them are ex-television set designers. But I’m glad you like it. I think a lot of people are going to be equally impressed. Of course, the only ones that really matter are the Ranas.” N. K. Jivanjee’s laugh is a deep, chocolate gurgle. “Now, Ms. Askarzadah. You do understand you’ve been given a highly privileged preview that will make you a goodly sum of money from the press? No doubt you’re asking, what’s this about? Simply that the party I have the honour to lead occasionally has information it does not wish to release through conventional channels. You will be this unconventional channel. Of course, you do realise that we may suspend this privilege at any time. My secretary has a short prepared statement that she will forward to your palmer. It’s a piece from me on the pilgrimage; my loyalty to Bharat, my intention that the pilgrimage be a focus for national unity in the face of a common enemy. It’s all checkable back to my press office. Can I expect to see something in the evening editions? Good. Thank you, Ms. Askarzadah, bless you.”