Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“There are other backers involved,” Sonia Yadav says. The inner hatch spins and they enter an unspectacular concrete office, headachingly lit with neon and flatscreen flicker. A young, bearded man rocks back on a chair, feet on the desk, reading the evening paper. He has an industrial thermos of chai and a Styrofoam cup; the computers bang out old-school bhangra from a Bengali station. He jumps up when he sees his late-night visitors.

“Sonia, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Deba, this is.”

“I know, pleased to meet you, Mr. Ray.” He has an overemphatic handshake. “So, you’ve come to take a look at our own little private universe?” Beyond a second door is a small concrete room into which the visitors fit like segments of an orange. A heavy glass panel is level with Vishram’s head. He squints but can make nothing out of it. “We only need numbers really, but some people have this atavistic urge to eyeball things,” Deba says. He’s brought his chai with him, he takes a sip. “Okay, we’re in an observation area beside the confinement chamber, which we in our humorous physicists’ way call the Holding Cell. It’s basically a modified tokamak torus—does this mean anything to you? No? Think of it as an inverse donut; it’s got an outside, but inside is the hardest vacuum you can imagine. It’s actually harder than any vacuum you can imagine, all there is in there is space-time and quantum fluctuation. And this.”

He hits the lights. Vishram’s blind for an instant, then he becomes aware of a gaining glow from the window. He remembers a physics student he once took home telling him that the retina can detect a single photon and therefore the human eye can see on the quantum scale. He leans forwards; the glow comes from a line of blue, sharp as a laser; Vishram can see it curve off around the walls of the tokamak. He presses his face to the glass.

“Uh oh, panda eyes,” Deba says. “It throws off a lot of UV.”

“This is. another universe?”

“It’s another space-time vacuum,” Sonia Yadav says. She stands close enough for Vishram to fully appreciate her Arpege 27. “It’s been stable for a couple of months. Think of it as another nothing, but with a vacuum energy higher than ours.”

“And it’s leaking into our universe.”

“It’s not much higher, we’re only getting a two percent above input return from it, but we hope to use this space to open an aperture into a yet higher energy space, and so on, up the ladder until we get a significant return.”

“And the light.”

“Quantum radiation; the virtual particles of this universe—we call it Universe two-eight-eight—running into the laws of our universe and annihilating themselves into photons.”

Not it’s not, Vishram thinks, looking into the light of another time and space. And you know it’s not, Sonia Yadav. It is the light of Brahma.

A boyz always got his mother.

It had been almost a homecoming, walking through the narrow galis between the shanties, ducking under the power cables, keeping the good shoes on the cardboard paths because even in the driest of droughts the alleys of Chandi Basti were piss-mud. The runways constantly realigned themselves as shanties collapsed or additions were build on, but Shiv steered by landmarks: Lord Ram Indestructible Car Parts where the brothers Shasi and Ashish were taking a VW apart into tiny parts; Mr. Pilai’s Sewing Machine under its umbrella; Ambedkar the child-buyer’s agent sitting on his raised porch of forklift pallets, smoking sweet ganja. Everywhere, people looking, people stepping aside, people making gestures to ward off the eye, people following him with their gaze because they had seen something from outside their existence, something with taste and class and great shoes, something that was something . Something that was a man .

His mother had looked up at his shadow across her doorway. He pushed money on her, a wad of grubby rupees. He had a little cash in hand from the man who hauled away the remains of the Merc. It left him short, but a son should repay some of the debt he owes his mother. She pretended to tsk it away, but Shiv saw her tuck it behind the brick by the fire.

He’s back. It’s only a charpoy in the corner but there’s a roof and a fire and dal twice a day and the secure knowledge that no one, no thing, no killing machine with scimitars for hands will find Shiv here. But there is a danger here, too. It would be easy to sink back into the routine of a little eating, a little sleep in the noon-day sun, a little thieving, a little hanging around with your friends, talking this and that and looking at the girls and that is a day, a year, a life gone. He must be thinking, talking, pulling in his debts and his favours. Yogendra goes out running through basti and city, listening to what the streets are saying about Shiv, who has turned his collar against him, who still has a thread of honour.

And then there is his sister.

Leela is a reminder that a son and brother should not leave it from Diwali to Guru Poornima to see his family. What had been a nice-looking, quiet, shy but solid-minded seventeen-year-old—could have married up—has turned Bible Christian. She went out one night with a friend to a religious thing run by a cable television station and came back born again. But it is not enough that she has found the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone else must find him, too. Especially her baaaadest of baaaadmash brothers. So round she comes with her Bible with the whisper-thin paper that Shiv knows makes the very best spliffs and her little tracts and her cumbersome zeal.

“Sister, this is my time of rest and recreation. You disrupt it. If your Christianity means as much as you say, you would respect your brother. I think it says that somewhere, respect and honour your brother.”

“My brothers are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said that because of me, you will hate your mother and father, and your brother, too.”

“Then that is a very foolish religion. Which one of your brothers and sisters in Christ got you drugs when you were dying of tuberculosis? Which one of them rammed that rich man’s pharmacy? You are making yourself no one, nothing. No one will marry you if you are not properly Indian. Your womb will dry up. You will cry out for those children. I don’t like to say this, but no one else will tell you this truth but me. Mata won’t, your Christian friends won’t. You are making a terrible mistake, put it right now.”

“The terrible mistake is to choose to go to hell,” Leela says defiantly.

“And what do you think this is?” Shiv says. Yogendra bares his ratty teeth.

That afternoon Shiv has a meeting: Priya from Musst. Good times there are not forgotten.

Shiv watches the chai stall for fifteen minutes to be sure it is her and her alone. She is pain to his heart in her pants that cling to the curve of her ass and her wispy silk top and her amber shades and her pale pale skin and red red sucking lips that pout as she looks around impatiently for him, trying to pick his hair, his face, his walk out of the thronging, staring bodies. She is all the things he has lost. He must get out of here. He must raise himself up again. Be a raja again.

She bounces on her boot heels and gives little squeaks of delight to see him. He gets her tea, they sit on a bench at the metal counter. She offers to get the bill but he pays with some of his dwindling wad. Chandni Basti will not see a woman buy Shiv Faraji tea. Her legs are long and lean and urban. The men of Chandni Basri measure them with their eyes, then catch the hem of the leather coat on the man beside her. They go on their way then. Yogendra sits on an upturned plastic fertiliser barrel and picks at his teeth.