Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“So that crossed the boundary in the air, so that makes it?”

“A six!” Parvati exclaims, clapping her hands together.

The crease is a line in gardener’s chalk, the wicket, a ply seedling box with three sides knocked off, stood on its heel. Krishan leans on his bat; a spade.

“A six is technically a weak shot,” he says. “The batsman has to get under it and he’s got no real control over where it’s going. Too easy for the fielders to get an eye on it and make the catch. The real enthusiast will always applaud a four more than a six. It’s a much more controlled stroke.”

“Yes, but it looks so much more bold,” Parvati says, then her hands fly to her mouth to suppress giggles. “Sorry, I was just thinking, someone down there. and they haven’t done anything, but all of a sudden they’re covered in apricot. and they think, what’s going on? Apricots are falling out of the sky. It’s the Awadhis! They’re bombing us with fruit!” She folds over in helpless laughter. Krishan does not understand the joke but he feels the infection of laughing tug at his rib cage.

“Again again!” Parvati picks up a fresh apricot from the folded cloth, hitches her sari, makes her short run, slings the fruit side-arm. Krishan slices the apricot down into a skittering roll towards the parapet drain slits. Shattered flesh sprays up in his face.

“Four!” Parvati calls, pressing four fingers to her arm.

“Properly, it’s a no-ball because it was thrown, not bowled.”

“I can’t do that overarm thing.”

“It’s not hard.”

Krishan bowls a handful of apricots one at a time, slow up the back, accelerating into the downswing, counterbalancing with his free arm. The soft fruit go bouncing into the shrub rhododendron.

“Now, you try.”

He tosses Parvati an underripe apricot. She catches it sweetly, bares the sleeve of her choli. Krishan watches the play of her muscles as she tries to make the run and step and swing in her cumbersome, elegant clothing. The apricot slips from her grasp, drops behind her. Parvati rounds on it, teeth bared in exasperation.

“I cannot do it!”

“Here, let me help you.”

The words are spoken before Krishan can apprehend them. Once as a boy in a school lesson he read on the school web that all consciousness is written in the past tense. If so, then all decisions are made without conscience or guilt and the heart speaks truly but inarticulately. His path is already set. He steps up behind Parvati. He rests one hand on her shoulder. With the other he takes her wrist. She catches her breath but her fingers remain curled around the ripe apricot.

Krishan moves her arm back, down, turns the palm upwards. He guides her forward, forward again, pressing the left shoulder down, moving the right arm up. “Now pivot on to the left foot.” They hang a precarious moment in their dance, then Krishan sweeps her wrist to the zenith. “Now, release!” he commands. The cloven apricot flies from her fingers, hits the wooden decking, bursts.

“A fine pace delivery,” Krishan says. “Now, try it against me.” He takes up his position at the crease, sights with his spade-bat, affording Parvati all the sporting courtesies. She retreats beyond the further chalk line, adjusts her clothing, makes her run. She lunges forward, releases the fruit. It hits the deck cleavage first, bounces crankily, spinning. Krishan steps forward with his spade, the apricot hits the top, skips and splatters against the wicket. The flimsy plywood falls. Krishan tucks his spade beneath his arm and bows.

“Mrs. Nandha, you have clean bowled me.”

The next day Parvati introduces Krishan to her friends the Prekashs, the Ranjans, the Kumars, and the Maliks. She lays out the magazines like dhuris on the sun-warmed decking. The air is as still and heavy as poured metal this morning, pressing the traffic din and smoke down under a layer of high pressure. Parvati and her husband fought last night. They fought his way, which consists of him making statements and then defending them with lofty silence, sniping down her sallies with looks of high disdain. It was the old fight: his tiredness, her boredom; his remoteness, her need for society; his growing coldness, her ticking ovaries.

She opens the chati mags to the full colour centre spreads. Perfect courtships; glossy weddings; centrefold divorces. Krishan sits in the tailor-position, toes clasped in his hands.

“This is Sonia Shetty, she plays Ashu Kumar. She was married to Lal Darfan—in real life, not in Town and Country —but they divorced back in the spring. I was really surprised about that, everyone thought they were together forever, but she’s been seen around with Roni Jhutti. She was at the premiere of Prem Das , in a lovely silver dress, so I think it’s only a matter of time before we get an announcement. Of course, Lal Darfan’s been saying all kinds of things about her, that she is slack and a disgrace. Isn’t it strange how actors can be nothing like their characters in Town and Country ? It’s quite changed the way I think about Dr. Prekash.”

Krishan flips the thick, shiny pages, aromatic with petrochemicals.

“But they aren’t real, either,” he says. “This woman wasn’t married to anyone in real life, she wasn’t at any premiere with any actor. They’re just software that believes it’s another kind of software.”

“Oh, I know that,” Parvati says. “No one believes they’re real people. Celebrity has never been about what’s real. But it’s nice to pretend. It’s like having another story on top of Town and Country , but one that’s much more like the way we live.”

Krishan rocks gently.

“Forgive me, but do you miss your family very much?” Parvati looks up from her chati glamshots. “Why do you ask?”

“It just strikes me that you treat unreal people like family. You care about their relationships, their ups and downs, their lives, if you can call them that.”

Parvati pulls her dupatta over her head to protect it from the high sun.

“I think about my family, my mother every day. Oh, I wouldn’t go back, not for a moment, but I thought with so many people, so much going on, to be in the capital, I would have a hundred worlds to move through. But it is easier to be invisible than it ever was in Kotkhai. I could disappear completely here.”

“Kotkhai, where is that?” Krishan asks. Above him aircraft contrails merge and tangle, spyship and killer, hunting each other ten kilometres above Varanasi.

“In Kishanganj District, in Bihar. You have just made me realise a strange thing, Mr. Kudrati. I mail my mother every day and she tells me about her health and how Rohini and Sushil and the boys are and all the people I know from Kotkhai, but she never tells me about Kotkhai.”

So she tells him of Kotkhai, for in telling she tells herself. She can go back to clutches of cracked mud-brick houses gathered around the tanks and pumps; she can walk again down the gently sloping main street of shops and corrugated iron awnings sheltering the stonecutters’ workshops. This was the men’s world, of drinking tea and listening to the radio and arguing politics. The women’s world was in the fields, at the pump and the tanks, for water was the women’s element, and the school where the new teacher Mrs. Jaitly from the city ran evening classes and discussion groups and a micro—credit union funded on egg money.

Then it changed. Trucks from Ray Power came and poured out men who put up a tent village so that for a month there were two Kotkhais as they built their wind turbines and solar panels and biomass generators and gradually webbed every house and shop and holy place together with sagging cables. Sukrit the battery seller cursed them that they had put a good man out of business and a good daughter to prostitution.