Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“I beg your pardon?” the dapper man said.

“Tranh. Tranh. Is yt here?”

The man looked nonplussed, then plucked a banana from the fist beside his head. He offered it to Tal.

“I’m looking for someone,” Tal said.

“Who is this?” the man said, again offering the bananna. Tal brushed it away with yts hand. “Tranh. Have you? No.” Tal was already walking away.

“Please!” the man called after yt, clutching the banana between yts fingers like a linga. “Do stay, and talk, just talk.”

Then yt saw. Even in the flicker-lit shadows beneath the balcony, there was no mistaking the profile, the angle of the cheekbones, the way yt leaned forward to talk animatedly, the play of the hands in the lantern light; the laughter like a temple bell.

“Tranh.”

Yt did not look up from yts intent conversation with yts friends, all huddled over the low table, deep in shared memory.

“Tranh.” This time, yt was heard. Tranh looked up. The first thing Tal read on yts face was blank incomprehension. I do not know who you are. Then, recognition, then remembrance, then surprise, shock, displeasure. Last: embarrassment.

“Sorry,” Tal said, stepping back from the alcove. All the faces were looking at yt. “I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake.” Yt turned and fled, discreetly. A need to cry pumped through Tal’s skull. The shy man still stood in the greenery. Feeling enemy eyes still on yt, Tal took the banana from his soft fist, peeled it, bit deep. Then the pharm piled in and Tal felt the dimensions of the courtyard inflate to infinity around yt. Yt offered the strange fruit to the man.

“No, thank you,” he stammered but Tal had him by the arm and was marching him to a vacant sofa dock. Yt could still feel those eyes hot on the back of yts skull.

“So,” Tal said, sitting sideways on the low sofa and draping yts thin hands over yts folded knees. “You want to talk to me, so let’s talk.” A glance back. They were still looking. Yt finished the banana and the fluttering lanterns opened up and yt fell into their gravity and yts next clearly focused thought was of the facade of a Kurdish restaurant. A waiter whisked yt past tables of startled customers to a small booth at the back partitioned by a fragrant carved cedar screen.

The blind woman’s bananas, like good guests, came promptly and departed early. Tal felt the carved geometric patterns on the wooden screens rush in from celestial distance to claustrophobia. The restaurant was hot and every customer voice, kitchen noise, and street sound was intolerably sharp and close.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing you here, but I don’t like it back there,” the man was saying. “It’s no place to talk, really talk. But it’s discreet here; the owner is in my debt.” Mezze were brought, and a bottle of clear liquor with a jug of water. “Arak,” the man said, pouring a measure. “I don’t drink myself, but I’m told it is a great instiller of courage.” He added water. Tal marvelled as the clear liquid turned to luminous milk. Tal took a sip, recoiled at the alien aniseed, then had a slower, more considered measure.

“Yt’s a chuutya,” Tal declared. “Tranh. “Yt’s a chuutya. Yt wouldn’t even look at me; just sat mooning all over yts friends. I wish I’d never come now.”

“It’s so hard to find someone to listen to,” the man said. “Someone who doesn’t have an agenda, who isn’t asking me for something of trying to sell me something. In my work everyone wants to hear what I have to say, what my ideas are, every word I say is treated like gold. Before I met you, I was at a durbar in the Cantonment. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say, everyone wanted something from me, except this one man. He was a strange man and he said a strange thing; he said that we are a deformed society. I listened to that man.”

Tal sipped yts arak.

“Cho chweet, we nutes have always known that.”

“So tell me the secrets you know. Tell me what you are. I’d like to hear how you came to be.”

“Well,” Tal said, conscious of every scar and implant under the man’s attentive gaze, “my name’s Tal, and I was born in Mumbai in 2019 and I work in Indiapendent on the metasoap design team for Town and Country .”

“And in Mumbai,” the man said, “in 2019 when you were born, what.” Tal laid a finger to his lips.

“Never,” yt whispered. “Never ask, never tell. Before I Stepped Away, I was another incarnation. I am only alive now, do you understand? Before was another life, and I am dead and reborn.”

“But how.” the man asked. Again, Tal laid its soft, pah finger against the man’s lips. Yt could feel them trembling, the flutter of warm, sweet breath.

“You said you wanted to listen,” Tal said and gathered yts shawl around yt.

“My father was a choreographer in Bollywood, one of the top. Did you ever see Rishta ? The number where they’re dancing across the roofs of the cars in the traffic jam? That was him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t much care for films,” the man says.

“It got too camp in the end. Too self-referential, too knowing. It always gets like that, things become superexaggerated, then they die. He met my mother on the set of Lawyers in Love. She’s Italian, she was a hovercam trainee—at the time, Mumbai was the best, even the Americans were sending people out here to learn technique. They met, they married, six months later, me. And before you ask, no. An only. They were the toast of Chowpatty Beach, my parents. I got to all the parties; I was a real accessory. I was a gorgeous kid, baba. We were never out of the filmi mags and the gossip rags; Sunny and Costanza Vadher, with their beautiful child, shopping on Linking Road, on the set of Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage, at the Chelliah’s barbecue. They were the most incredibly selfish people I think I have ever met—but they were totally unselfconscious about it. That’s what Costanza accused me of when I Stepped Away; how incredibly selfish I was. Can you believe it? Where did she think I learned it?

“They weren’t stupid. They might have been selfish, but they weren’t stupid, they must have known what was going to happen when they started to bring in the aeais. It was the actors first—one day Chati and Bollywood Masala and Namaste! are full of Vishal Das and Shruti Rai at an opening at Club 28, next Filmfare’s running centre page triple pullouts without a single cubic centimetre of living flesh. It really was that quick.”

The man murmurs polite amazement.

“Sunny could have a hundred people dancing on a giant laptop, but now it was one touch and you’d have them dancing from here to the horizon, all in perfect synch. They could get a million people dancing on clouds, just with one click. It hit him hardest first. He got bad, he get ratty, he would take it out on people around him. He was mean when it turned against him. I think that’s maybe why I wanted to get into soapi; to show him there was something he could have done, if he’d tried, if he hadn’t been so strung up by his own image and status. Then again, maybe I just don’t care enough. But it hit Costanza soon after, too; you don’t need actors or dancers, you don’t need cameras, either. It’s all in the box. They would fight: I must have been ten, eleven, I could hear them screaming so loud the neighbours would come banging on the door. Two of them in that apartment all day, both of them needing work, but jealous as hell in case the other actually got something. In the evenings they’d go to the same old parties and durbars to schmooze. Please, a job . Costanza coped better. She adjusted, she got a different job in the industry in script development. Sunny, he couldn’t. Walked right out. Fuck him. Fuck him. He was a waste anyway.”