Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“So, are my women and bartender missing me?” He offers her a bidi, takes a light from the gas burner under the rattling water boiler.

“You are in such trouble.” She lights hers off his, a Bollywood kiss. “You know who Ahimsa Debt Collection Agency is?”

“Some gang of hoods.”

“The Dawood Gang. It’s a new line of work for them, buying debts. Shiv, you have the Dawoods after you. These are the men skinned Gurnit Azni alive in the back of his limo.”

“It’s all bargaining; they go in high, I go in low, we meet in the middle. That is the way men do business.”

“No. They want what you owe them. Not a rupee less.”

Shiv laughs, the free, mad laugh breaking up inside. He can see the blue around the edge of his field of vision again, the pure, Krishna blue.

“No one has that kind of money.”

“Then you are dead and I am very sorry.” Shiv lays his hand flat on Priya’s thigh. She freezes.

“You came here to tell me that? I was expecting something from you.”

“Shiv, there are a hundred big dadas like you on every street corner, all expecting.” Her sentence snaps off as Shiv seizes her jaw, pressing his fingers hard into the soft meat, rubbing his thumb over the bone. Bruises. He will leave bruises like blue roses. Priya yelps. Yogendra bares his incisors. Pain arouses that boy, Shiv thinks. Pain makes him smile. The people of Chandni Basti stare. He feels eyes all around him. Stare well.

“Raja,” he whispers. “I am a raja.”

He lets her go. Priya rubs her jaw.

“That hurt, madar chowd.”

“There’s something, isn’t there?”

“You don’t deserve it. You deserve the Dawoods to cut you up with a robot, behen chowd.” She flinches as Shiv reaches for her face again. “It’s a little thing but it could lead to more. A lot more. Just a drop off. But if you do it right, they say.”

“Who says?”

“Nitish and Chunni Nath.”

“I don’t work for Brahmins.”

“Shiv.”

“It is a point of principle. I am a man of principle.”

“It’s principle to get chopped up into kabob by the Dawoods?”

“I do not take orders from children.”

“They aren’t children.”

“They are here.” Shiv cups his hand over his groin, jerks. “No, I will not work for the Naths.”

“Then you won’t need to go here.” She snaps open her little bag and slides a piece of paper across the greasy counter. There is an address, out in the industrial belt. “And you won’t need this car.” She parks a rental chitty beside the address slip. It’s for a Merc, a big Kali-black four-litre SUV Merc, like a raja would drive. “If you don’t need any of that, I guess I’ll go now and pray for your moksha.”

She scoops up her bag and slides off the high bench and pushes past Yogendra and strides off over the cardboard in those high heel boots that make her ass go wip-wop side-a-side.

Yogendra is looking at him. It’s that wise-kid look that makes Shiv want to smash his head against the tin counter until he hears things crack and go soft.

“You finished that?” He snatches the kid’s can of tea, splashes its contents over the ground. “You have now. We have better business.”

The kid is right in his fuck-you silence. He is as old as any Brahmin, inside there in the skull. Not for the first time Shiv wonders if he is a rich boy, a son and heir to some pirate lord, tumbled out of the limo under the neons of Kashi to learn how the world really works. Survive. Thrive. No other rules apply.

“You coming or what?” he shouts at Yogendra. Somewhere the kid has found himself a chew of paan.

Leela comes around again that night to help her mother make cauliflower puris. They are a treat for Shiv but the smell of hot ghee in the confined, dark house makes his skin crawl, his scalp itch. Shiv’s mother and sister squat around the little gas cooker. Yogendra sits with them draining the cooked puris, on crumpled newspaper. Shiv watches the boy, squatting with the women, scooping the smoking hot breads into their paper nests. This must have meant something to him once. A hearth, a fire, bread, paper. He looks at Leela clapping out the puris into little ovals and throwing them into the deep fat.

She says into the peace of the house, “I’m thinking of changing my name to Martha. It is from the Bible. Leela is from Leelavati who is a pagan goddess but is really a demon of Satan in hell. Do you know what hell is like?” She casually ladles cauliflower puris out on the chicken-wire scoop. “Hell is a fire that never goes out, a great dark hall, like a temple, only greater than any temple you have ever seen because it has to hold all the people who never knew the Lord Jesus. The walls and the pillars are tens of kilometres high and they glow yellow hot and the air is like a flame. I say walls, but there is no outside to hell, only solid rock going on forever in every direction, and hell is carved inside it, so that even if you could escape, which you can’t, because you’re chained up like a package, there would be nowhere else to go. And the space is filled with billions and billions of people all chained up into little bundles, piled on top of each other, a thousand deep and a thousand wide and a thousand high, a billion people in a pile, and a thousand of those piles. The ones in the centre cannot see anything at all but they can hear each other, all roaring. That is the only sound you hear in hell, this great roaring that never stops, from all the billions of people, chained and burning but never being burned up. That is the thing, burning in flame, but never eaten up.”

Shiv shifts on his charpoy. Hell is one thing Christians do well. His dick lifts in his pants. The torment, the screaming, the bodies heaped up in pain, the nakedness, the helplessness, have always stirred him. Yogendra sifts the drained puris into a basket. His eyes are dead, dull, his face animal.

“And the thing is, it goes on forever. A thousand years is not even a second. An age of Brahma is not even one instant in hell. A thousand ages of Brahma and you are still no nearer the end. You haven’t even begun. That is where you are going. You will be taken down by the demons and chained up and set on top of the pile of people and your flesh will begin to burn and you will try not to breathe in the flame but in the end you will have to and after that nothing will ever change. The only way to avoid Hell is to put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your personal Lord and Saviour. There is no other way. Imagine it: hell. Can you even begin to imagine what it will be like?”

“Like this?” Yogendra is fast as a knife in an alley. He grabs Leela’s wrist. She cries out but she cannot break his hold. His face is the same feral blank as he pushes her hand towards the boiling ghee.

Shiv’s boot to the side of his head knocks him across the room, scattering puris. Leela/Martha flees shrieking to the back room. Shiv’s mother flies back from the stove, the hot fat, the treacherous gas flame.

“Get him out of here, out of my house!”

“Oh, he’s going,” Shiv says as he crosses the room in two strides, lifts Yogendra by two fistfuls of T-shirt and drags him out into the gali. Blood wells from a small cut above his ear but Yogendra still wears that numb, animal smile. Shiv throws him across the alley and follows in with the boot. Yogendra doesn’t fight back, doesn’t try to defend himself, doesn’t try to run or curl into a ball, takes the kicking with a fuck-you smile on his face. It is like striking a cat. Cats never forgive. Fuck him. Cats you drown, in the river. Shiv kicks him until the blue is gone. Then he sits back against the shanty wall and lights a bidi. Lights another, passes it to Yogendra. He takes it. They smoke in the gali. Shiv grinds the butt out on the cardboard beneath the heel of his Italian shoe.