Ian McDonald - River of Gods

New Varanasi runs into old Kashi in a series of discontinuities and juxtapositions. Streets begin in one millennium and end in another. Vertiginous corporate spires lean over shambles of alleys and wooden houses unchanged in four centuries. Metro viaducts and elevated expressways squeeze past the sandstone linga of decaying temples. The cloy of rotting petals permeates even the permanent jizz of alcohol-engine fumes, dissolving into an urban perfume that cities dab behind their cloacal bits. Bharat Rail employs sweepers with besoms to keep flower petals off the track. Kashi generates them by the billion and the steel wheels can’t cope. The phatphat turns down a dark laneway of clothing shops; pale plastic dummies, armless and legless but smiling nevertheless, swing from racks overhead.

“Am I allowed to ask where you’re taking me?” Satnam says.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Truth is, Najia Askarzadah has never been, but ever since she heard the Australians crowing about how bold they were in going to it and they weren’t grossed out, not at all, she’s looked for an excuse to find this back-of-backstreet club. She has no idea where she is, but she reckons the driver is taking her in the right direction when dangling shop dummies give way to hookers in open storefronts. Most have adopted the Western standard uniform of lycra and overemphatic footwear, a few cling to tradition, in the steel cages.

“Here,” says the phatphat driver. The little wasp-coloured plastic bubble rocks on its suspension.

Fight! Fight! exclaim the alternating neons above the tiny door between the Hindu icon shop and the hookers drinking Limka at the chai stall. A cashier sits in a tin cubby by the door. He looks thirteen, fourteen, and already he’s seen everything from under his Nike beanie. Beyond him, stairs lead up into stark fluorescent light.

“One thousand rupee,” he says, hand out. “Or five dollar.”

Najia pays local.

“This isn’t exactly what I imagined for a first date,” Satnam says.

“Date?” Najia says as she leads him up the stairs that climb, turn, dip, turn again, and finally empty on the balcony over the pit.

The large room had once been a warehouse. Sick green paint, industrial lamps and conduiting, louvred skylights all tell its history. Now it’s an arena. Ranged around a five-metre hexagon of sand are ranks of wooden pews, tiered as steeply as a lecture hail. Everything’s new built from construction timber stolen from the cash-starved Varanasi Area Rapid Transit. The stalls are faced with packing case panels. When Najia lifts her hand from the railing it comes away sticky with resin.

The warehouse is heaving, from betting booths and fighters’ stalls down at the ringside to the back row of the balcony where men in check workshirts and dhotis stand on their benches for a better look. The audience is almost entirely male. The few women are dressed to please.

“I don’t know about this,” Satnam says but Najia has the scent of close packed bodies, sweat, primal fluids. She pushes to the front and peers down into the pit. Money changes owners over the betting table in a blur of soft, worn notes. Fists wave fans of rupees and dollars and euros; the sattamen keep track of every paisa. All eyes are on the money, except for one man, diagonally opposite her on the ground floor, who looks up as if he has felt the weight of her regard. Young, flashy. Obvious Hood, thinks Najia. Their eyes meet.

The barker, a five-year-old boy in a cowboy suit, stalks the pit hyping up the audience as two old men with rakes turn the bloody sand into a Zen garden. He has a bindi mike on his throat; his weird little voice, at once old and young, rattles from the sound system through a wash of tabla-and-mix anokha. From his tone of innocence and experience, Najia wonders if he might be a Brahmin. No: that’s the Brahmin in the front row booth, a seeming ten-year-old dressed twentysomething flanked by tivi-wannabe girlis. The barker is just another street boy. Najia finds she’s breathing fast and shallow. She no longer knows where Satnam is.

The din, already staggering, ratchets up a level as the teams go out on the sand to parade their fighters. They hold them high over their heads, stalking around the ring, making sure everyone can see where their money is going.

The microsabres are appalling creatures. A small California gentech company owned the original patent. Cut standard Felis domesticus with reconstructed fossil DNA from Smilodon fatalis . Result: bonsai sabretooth, something the size of a large Maine Coon with Upper Palaeolithic dentistry and manners to match. They enjoyed a brief star-pet celebrity until their owners found them taking out their and their neighbours’ cats, dogs, Guatemalan domestics, babies. The engineering company filed for bankruptcy before the writs took to the air, but the patent had already been massively infringed in the battle clubs of Manila and Shanghai and Bangkok.

Najia watches an athletic girl in cropped muscle top and parachute baggies parade her champion head-high around the ring. The cat is a big silver tabby, built like a strike aircraft.

Killing genes, gorgeous monster. Its fangs are sheathed in leather scabbards. Najia sees the girl’s pride and love, the crowd’s roaring admiration redirected on to her. The barker retires to his commentary podium. The bookies issue a rush of slips. The competitors slide back into their boxes.

Muscle-top girl jabs a needle of stimulant into her cat while her male colleague waves a bottle of poppers under its nose. They hold their hero. They hold their breaths. Their opponents drug up their contender, a low lean black microsabre, mean as midnight. There is absolute silence in the arena. The barker gives a blast on his air horn. The combatants let slip the leather guards and throw their battle cats into the pit.

The crowd rises in one voice and one blood. Najia Askarzadah howls and raves with them. All Najia Askarzadah knows is two fighting cats leaping and slashing at each other down in the pit as the blood surges in her eyes and ears.

It’s terrifyingly fast and bloody. Within seconds the beautiful silver tabby has one leg hanging from a rope of gristle and skin. Blood jets from the open wound, but it screams defiance at its enemy, tries to dodge and dart on the flapping triangle of meat; slashing with its terrible, killing teeth. Finally it’s down and spinning spastically on its back, ploughing up a wave of bloody sand. The victors have already hooked their champion with a neck loop and are wrestling the furious, shrieking thing towards the pen. The silver tabby wails and wails until someone from the judge’s pew walks over and drops a concrete breeze-block on its head.

Muscle-top girl stands staring sullenly as the mashed, twitching thing is shovelled away. She bites her bottom lip. Najia loves her then, loves the boy whose glance she caught, loves everyone, everything in this wooden arena. Her heart is quivering, her breath burning, her fists clenched and trembling, her pupils dilated, and her brain blazing. She is eight hundred percent alive and holy. Again she makes eye contact with Obvious Hood. He nods but she can see he has had a heavy loss.

The victors step into the ring to receive the adulation of the crowd. The barker screams into the sound system and on the bookies’ bench hands push money money money. This is what you came to Bharat for, Najia Askarzadah, she tells herself. To feel this way about life, about death, about illusion and reality. To have something burn through bloody reasonable, sane, tolerant Sweden. To taste the insane and raw. Her nipples are hard. She knows she’s damp. This war, this war for water, this war that she denies brought her here, this war that everyone fears will come. She doesn’t fear it. She wants that war. She wants it very much.