Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Lull and Aj descend among the families and luggage onto the platform. The noise is like a mugging. Timetable announcements are inaudible blasts of public address roar. Porters converge on the white faces; twenty hands reach for their bags. A skinny man in a red MarathaRail high-collar jacket lifts Aj’s bag. Quick as a knife, her hand stabs out to arrest him. She tilts her head, looks into his eyes.

“Your name is Dheeraj Tendulkar, and you are a convicted thief.” The ersatz porter recoils as if snake-bit.

“We’ll carry our own.” Thomas Lull takes Aj by the elbow, guides her like a bride through the press of faces and smells. Her gaze darts from face to face to face in the torrent of people.

“The names. All the names; too many to read.”

“I still can’t understand this gods thing,” he says.

The red-jackets have gathered around the rogue. Raised voices, a cry.

There is an hour’s wait until the Varanasi shatabdi. Thomas Lull finds haven in a global coffee franchise. He pays Western prices for a cardboard bucket with a wooden stirrer. There is a tightening in his chest, the asthmatic’s somatic reaction to this claustrophobic, relentless city beneath a city. Through the nose. Breathe through the nose. The mouth for talking.

“This is very bad coffee, don’t you think?” Aj says.

Thomas Lull drinks it and says nothing and watches the trains come and go and the people mill through on their pilgrimages. Among them, a man bound for the last place a man of his age and sentiments should go, a dirty little water war. But it’s mystery, allure, it’s mad stuff and reckless deeds when all you expect to feel is the universal microwave background humming through your marrow.

“Aj, show me that photograph again. There’s something I need to tell you.”

But she is not there. Aj moves through the crowd like a ghost. People part around her, staring. Thomas Lull throws cash on the table, dives after her, waving down a couple of porters to heft the bags.

“Aj! Our train is over here!”

She moves on, unhearing. She is the Madonna of Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. A family sits on a dhuri underneath a display board drinking tea from thermos flasks: mother, father, grandmother, two girls in their early teens. Aj walks towards them, unhurried, unstoppable. One by one they look up, feeling the whole attention of the station turned upon them. Aj stops. Thomas Lull stops. The porters trotting behind him stop. Thomas Lull feels, at some quantum level, every train and luggage van and shunter stop, every passenger and engineer and guard freeze, every signal and sign and notice board halt between the flip and the flop. Aj squats down before the frightened family.

“I have to tell you, you are going to Ahmedabad, but he will not be there to meet you. He is in trouble. It is bad trouble, he has been arrested. The charge is serious; theft of a motorbike. He is being held in Surendranagar District police station, number GBZ16652. He will require a lawyer. Azad and Sons is one of the most successful Ahmedabad criminal law practices. There is a quicker train you can catch in five minutes from Platform Nineteen. It requires a change at Surat. If you hurry you can still catch it. Hurry!”

Lull seizes her arm. Aj turns; he sees emotions in her eyes that frighten him but he has broken the moment. The terrified family are in various states of alarm; father fight, mother flight, grandmother hands raised in praise, daughters trying to gather up the tea things. A hot wet stain of spilled chai spreads across the dhuri.

“She is right,” Thomas Lull calls as he drags Aj away. Now she is unresisting, leaden, like the ones he would escort from the beach parties, stumbling over the sand, the ones on the evil trips. “She’s always right. If she says go, you go.”

Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus exhales and resumes its constant low-intensity scream.

“What the fuck were you thinking of?” Lull says, hurrying Aj to Platform Five where the Mumbai-Varanasi Raj shatabdi has been called, a long scimitar of green and silver glistening in the station floods. “What did you tell those people? You could have started anything, anything at all.”

“They were going to see their son but he is in trouble,” she says faintly. He thinks she might collapse on him.

“This way sir, this way!” The porters escort them through the crowd. “This car, this car!” Thomas Lull overpays them to take Aj to her seat. It’s a reserved two-person carrel, lamp-lit, intimate. Leaning into the cone of light, Thomas Lull says, “How do you know this stuff?”

She will not look at him, she turns her head into the padded seatback. Her face is ash. Thomas Lull is very afraid she is going to have another asthma attack.

“I saw it, the gods.”

He lunges forward, takes her heart-shaped face between his two hands, turns it to look at him.

“Don’t lie to me; nobody can do this.”

She touches his hands and he feels them fall away from her face.

“I told you. I see it like a halo around people. Things about them; who they are, where they’re going, what train they’re on. Like those people going to see their son, only he wouldn’t be there for them. All that, and they wouldn’t have known, and they would have been waiting and waiting and waiting at the station and trains would come and trains would go and still he wouldn’t come and maybe the father would go to his address but all they would know is that he went out that morning to work and that he’d said he would meet them all at the station and they’d go to the police and find out that he’d been arrested for stealing a motorbike and they would have to bail him and they wouldn’t know who to go to get him out.”

Thomas Lull slumps in his seat. He is defeated. His anger, his blunt Yankee rationalism fail before this girl’s pale words.

“This son, this prodigal, what’s his name?”

“Sanjay.”

Automatic doors close. Up the line a whistle shrills over the station roar.

“Have you got that photograph? Show me that photograph, the one you showed me down by the backwater.”

Silently, smoothly, the train begins to move, Station wallahs and well-wishers keep pace for a last chance sale or farewell. Aj unfolds the palmer on the table.

“I didn’t tell you the truth,” Thomas Lull says.

“I asked you. You said: ‘Just other tourists on the trip. They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same.’ That was not the truth?”

The fast electric train rocks over points; picking up speed with every metre it dives into a tunnel, eerily lit by flashes from the overhead lines.

“It was a truth. They were tourists—we all were, but I know these people. I’ve known them for years. We were all travelling together in India, that’s how well we knew each other. Their names are Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau; they’re Artificial-life theoreticians from the University of Strasbourg. He’s French, she’s Indian. Good scientists. The last time I heard from them they were thinking of moving to the University of Bharat—all the closer to the sundarbans. That was where they thought the real cutting research was being done, unhampered by the Hamilton Acts and the aeai licensing laws. Looks like they did, but they are not your real parents.”

“Why is that?” Aj asks.

“Two things. First, how old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? They didn’t have a child when I knew them four years ago. But that all falls at the second. Anjali was born without a womb. Jean-Yves told me. She could never have children, not even in vitro. She cannot be your natural mother.”

The shatabdi bursts out from the undercity into the light. A vast plane of gold slants through the window across the small table. Mumbai’s photochemical smog has blessed it with Bollywood sunsets. The perpetual brown haze renders the ziggurats of the projects ethereal as sacred mountains. Power gantries strobe past; Thomas Lull watches them flicker over Aj’s face, trying to read emotions, reactions in the dazzling mask of gold. She bows her head. She closes her eyes. Thomas Lull hears an intake of breath. Aj looks up.