Ian McDonald: River of Gods

Naipaul starts to bluster and blow about the daring and reach of Bengali climatic engineering but his weather wizard cuts him off. Shaheen Badoor Khan blinks at the unforgivable interruption. Have these Banglas no protocol at all?

“The climate is not an old cow to be driven where you will,” the climatologist, whose name is Vinayachandran, says. “It is a subtle science, of tiny shifts and changes that over time build to vast, huge consequences. Think of a snowball rolling down a mountain. A half-degree temperature drop here, a shift in the ocean thermocline by a handful of metres, a pressure shift of a single millibar.”

“No doubt, but the Minister is wondering how long before these little effects from this. snowball.” Shaheen badoor Khan asks.

“Our simulations show a return to climate norms within six months,” Vinayachandran says.

Shaheen Badoor Khan nods. He has given his Minister all the clues. He can draw his own conclusion.

“So all this,” Bharati Water and Energy Minister Srinavas says with a wave of the hand at the alien ice out there in the Bay of Bengal, “All this will come too late. Another failed monsoon. Maybe if you were to melt it and send it to us by pipeline, it might do some good. Can you make the Ganga flow backwards? That might help us.”

“It will stabilise the monsoon for the next five years, for all of India,” Minister Naipaul insists.

“Minister, I don’t know about you, but my people are thirsty now,” V. R. Srinavas says right into the eye of the news camera peering like a vulgar street boy over the back of the seat row in front. Shaheen Badoor Khan folds his hands, content that that line will head every evening paper from Kerala to Kashmir. Srinavas is almost as great a buffoon as Naipaul, but he’s a stout man for a good one-liner in a pinch.

The new, beautiful, state-of-the-market tilt-jet banks again, swivels its engines into horizontal flight, and heads back for Bengal.

Also new, beautiful, and state-of-the matket is Daka’s new airport, and so is its recently installed air-traffic control system. This is the reason a high-priority diplomatic transport is stacked for half an hour and then put down on a stand way on the other side of the field from the BharatAir airbus. An interface problem; the ATC computer are Level 1 aeai, with the intellect, instinct, autonomy, and morals of a rabbit, which is considerably more, as one of the Bharat Times press corps comments, than the average Daka air-traffic controller. Shaheen Badoor Khan conceals a smile but no one can deny that the Joint States of East and West Bengal are technologically savvy, bold, forward-looking, sophisticated, and a world player—all those things Bharat aspires to in the avenues and atria of Ranapur, that the filth and collapse and beggary of Kashi deny.

The cars finally arrive. Shaheen Badoor Khan follows the politicians down on to the apron. Heat bounces from the concrete. The humidity sucks out every memory of ice and ocean and cool. Good luck to them with their island of ice, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks, imagining those urgent Bangla engineers clambering around on the Amery berg in their cold-weather parkas and fur-fringed hoods.

In the front seat of Minister Srinavas’s car, Shaheen Badoor Khan slips his ’hoek behind his ear. Taxiways, planes, airbridges, baggage trains merge with the interface of his office system. The aeai has winnowed his mail but there are still over fifty messages requiring the attention of Sajida Rana’s Parliamentary Private Secretaty. A flick of the finger yeses that report on the Bharat’s combat readiness problem, nos that press release on further water restrictions, laters that video conference request from N. K. Jivanjee. His hands move like the mudras of a graceful Kathak dancer. A curl of a finger; Shaheen Badoor Khan summons the notepad out of thin air. Keep me advised of developments re: Sarkhand Roundabout , he writes on the side of an Air Bengal airbus in virtual Hindi. I have a feeling about this one .

Shaheen Badoor Khan was born, lives, and assumes he will die in Kashi but still cannot understand the passion and wrath Hinduism’s scruffy gods command. He admires its disciplines and asceticisms but they seem to him pledged to such poor security. Every day on his way to the Bharat Sabha the government car whisks him past a little plastic shelter on the junction of Lady Castlereagh Road where for fifteen years a sadhu has held his left arm aloft. Shaheen Badoor Khan reckons the man could not put this twig of bone and sinew and wasted muscle down now even if his god willed it. Shaheen Badoor Khan is not an overtly religious man, but these gaudy, cinematic statues, brawling with arms and symbols and vehicle and attributes and supporters as if the sculptor had to cram in every last theological detail, offend his sense of aesthetics. His school of Islam is refined, intensely civilised, ecstatic and mystical. It is not painted day-glo pink. It does not wave its penis around in public. Yet every morning thousands descend the ghats beneath the balconies of his haveli to wash away their sins in the withered stream of Ganga. Widows spend their last rupees that their husbands might burn by the holy waters and attain Paradise. Every year young males fall beneath the Puri Jagannath and are crushed—though nowhere near as many as by the juggernaut of Puri rush hour. Armies of youths storm mosques and take them to rubble with their bare hands because they profane the honour of Lord Rama and still that man sits on the kerb with his arm lifted like a staff. And on a traffic roundabout in new Sarnath, a stained concrete statue of Hanuman not ten years old is told it must relocate to make way for a new metro station and there are gangs of youths in white shirts and dhotis punching the air and banging drums and gongs. There will be deaths out of this, thinks Shaheen Badoor Khan. Little things snowballing. N. K. Jivanjee and his Hindu fundamentalist Shivaji party will ride this juggernaut to death.

There is further confusion at the VIP reception centre. It seems two very important parties are both booked into the business section of BH137. The first Shaheen Badoor Khan knows of it is a tussle of reporters and sound booms and free-fly mikes outside the executive lounge. Minister Srinavas preens himself but the lenses are looking elsewhere. Shaheen Badoor Khan forces himself politely through the crowd to the dispatcher, credentials held high.

“What is the problem here?”

“Ah, Mr. Khan, there seems to be some mix-up.”

“There is no mix-up. Minister Srinavas and party are returning to Varanasi on your flight. Why is there any reason for confusion?”

“Some celebrity.”

“Celebrity,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says with scorn that would wither an entire harvest.

“A Russian, a model,” says the dispatcher, flustered now. “A big name model. There’s some show in Varanasi. I apologise for the mix-up, Mr. Khan.” Shaheen Badoor Khan is already motioning his own staff down to the gate.

“Who?” Minister Srinavas says as he passes the scrum.

“Some Russian model,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says in his soft, precise voice.

“Ah!” says Minister Srinavas, eyes widening. “Yuli.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yuli,” Srinavas says, craning for a look at the celeb. “The nute.”

The word is like the toll of a temple bell. The crowd parts. Shaheen Badoor Khan sees clear and true into the executive lounge. And he is transfixed. He sees a tall figure in a long, beautifully cut coat of white brocade. It is worked with patterns of dancing cranes, beaks intermeshing. The figure has its back to him, Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot make out a face but he sees curves of pale skin; long hands delicately moving; an elegantly curved nape, a smooth perfect curve of hairless scalp.