Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The body turns towards him. Shaheen Badoor Khan sees a line of jaw, an edge of cheekbone. A gasp goes out of him, unheard in the press corps tumult. The face. He must not look at the face, he would be lost, damned, stone. The crowd shifts again, the bodies close across the vision. Shaheen Badoor Khan stands, paralysed.

“Khan.” A voice. His Minister. “Khan, are you all right?”

“Ah, yes, Minister. Just a little dizzy; the humidity.”

“Yes, these bloody Banglas need to get their air-conditioning sorted.”

The spell is broken but as Shaheen Badoor Khan ushers his Minister down the airbridge, he knows he will never know peace again.

The gate controller has gifts for all from Minister Naipaul; vacuum flasks bearing the crest of the Joint States of East and West Bengal. When he is belted in and the curtains are closed on economy and the BharatAir airbus is bumping out over the uneven concrete, Shaheen Badoor Khan uncaps his flask. It contains ice: glacier cubes for Sajida Rana’s gin slings. Shaheen Badoor Khan caps the flask. The airbus makes its run and as its wheels leave Bengal, Shaheen Badoor Khan presses the flask to him as if the cold might heal the wound in his belly. It can’t. It never will. Shaheen Badoor Khan looks out the window at the steadily greying land as the airbus heads west to Bharat. He sees the white dome of a skull; the sweep of a neck; pale, lovely hands elegant as minarets, cheekbones turning towards him like architecture. Cranes dancing.

So long he had thought himself safe. Pure. Shaheen Badoor Khan hugs his glacier ice to him, eyes closed in silent prayer, heart luminous with ecstasy.

Lal Darfan, number one soap star, grants interviews in the howdah of an elephant-shaped airship navigating the southern slopes of the Nepali Himalayas. In a very good shirt and loose pants he reclines against a bolster on a low divan. Behind him banners of high cloud stripe the sky. The mountain peaks are a frontier of jagged white, a wall across the edge of sight. The tasselled fringe of the howdah ripples in the wind. Lal Darfan, Love God of Indiapendent Production’s biggest and brightest soap, Town and Country , is attended by a peacock that stands by the head of his divan. He feeds it ftagments of rice cracker. Lal Darfan is on a low-fat diet. It’s all the talk in the gossip chati magazines.

The diet, Najia Askarzadah thinks, is a fine conceit for a virtual soapi star. She takes a deep breath and opens the interview.

“In the West we find it hard to believe that Town and Country can be so incredibly popular. Yet here there’s maybe as much interest in you as an actor as in your character, Ved Prekash.”

Lal Darfan smiles. His teeth are as improbably and gloriously white as the tivi chat channels say.

“More,” he says. “But I think what you’re asking is why an aeai character needs an aeai actor. Illusions within illusions, is that it?”

Najia Askarzadah is twenty-two, freelance and fancy-free, four weeks in Bharat and has just landed the interview she hopes will seal her career.

“Suspension of disbelief,” she says. She can hear the hum of the airship engines, one in each elephant foot.

“It is simply this. The role is never enough. The public have to have the role behind the role, whether that is me”—Lal Darfan touches his hands self-deprecatingly to his going-to-bulge midriff—"or a flesh and blood Hollywood actor, or a pop idol. Let me ask you a question. What do you know about, say, some Western pop star like Blochant Matthews? What you see on the television, what you read in the soap magazines and the chati communities. Now, what do you know about Lal Darfan? Exactly the same. They are no more real to you than I am, and therefore no less real, either.”

“But people can always bump into a real celebrity or catch a glimpse at the beach or the airport, or in a shop.”

“Can they? How do you know anyone has had these glimpses?”

“Because I’ve heard… Ah.”

“You see what I mean? Everything comes through one medium or another. And, with respect, I am a real celebrity, in that my celebrity is indeed very real. In fact these days, I think it’s only celebrity that makes anything real, don’t you agree?”

Half a million person-hours have gone into Lal Darfan’s voice. It’s a voice calculated to seduce and it is laying orbits around Najia Askarzadah. It says, “Might I ask you a personal question? It’s very simple; what is your earliest memory?”

It’s never far, that night of fire and rush and fear, like a geological iridium layer in her life. Daddy scooping her out of her bed, the paper all over the floor and the house full of noise and the lights waving across the garden. That she remembers most; the cones of torchlight weaving over the rose bushes, coming for her. The flight across the compound. Her father cursing under his breath at the car engine as it turned and turned and turned. The flashlights darting closer, closer. Her father, cursing, cursing, polite even as the police came to arrest him.

“I’m lying in the back of a car,” Najia says. “I’m lying flat, and it’s night, and we’re driving fast through Kabul. My Dad’s driving and my Mum’s beside him, but I can’t see them over the backs of the seats. But I can hear them talking, and it sounds like they’re very far away, and they’ve got the radio on; they’re listening for something but I can’t make the voices out.” The news of the raid on the women’s house and the issue of their arrest warrants, she knows now. When that bulletin came, they knew they would have only minutes before the police closed the airport. “I can see the streetlights passing over me. It’s all very regular and exact, I can see the light start, go over me, and then up the back of the rear seat and out the window.”

“That’s a powerful image,” Lal Darfan says. “How old would you have been, three, four?”

“Not quite four.”

“I, too, have an earliest memory. This is how I know I am not Ved Prekash. Ved Prekash has scripts, but I remember a paisley shawl blowing in the wind. The sky was blue and clear and the edge of the shawl was blowing in from the side—it was like a frame, with the action out of shot. I can see it quite clearly, it’s flapping. I’m told it was on the roof of our house in Patna. Mama had taken me up to get away from the fumes down at the ground level, and I was on a blanket with a parasol over me. The shawl had been washed and was hanging on the line; odd, it was silk. I can remember it as clear as anything. I must have been two at the most. There. Two memories Ah, but you will say, yours is manufactured but mine is experience. How do you know? It could be something you’ve been told that you’ve made into a memory, it could be a false memory, it could have been artificially manufactured and implanted. Hundreds of thousands of Americans believe they’ve been spirited away by grey aliens who stick machines up their rectums; utter fantasy, and undoubtedly false memories each and every one, but does that make them fake people? And what are our memories made of anyway? Patterns of charge in protein molecules. We are not so different there, I think. This airship, this silly elephant gimmick I’ve had built for me, the idea that we’re floating along over Nepal; to you it’s just patterns of electrical charge in protein molecules. But so is everything. You call this illusion, I’d call it the fundamental building blocks of my universe. I imagine I see it very differently from you, but then, how would I know? How do I know what I see as green looks the same to you? We’re all locked up inside our little boxes of self; bone or plastic, Najia; and none of us ever get out. Can any of us trust what we think we remember?”