River of Gods

9: VISHRAM

Until thirty minutes ago, Vishram Ray had boasted that he had never owned a suit. He has always recognised that some day he might need one and that when he did he really would so he keeps a set of measurements with a family of Chinese tailors in Varanasi together with choice of fabric, cut, lining, and two shirts. He’s wearing that suit now in his seat at the teak boardroom table of Ray Power. It arrived at the Shanker Mahal half an hour ago by bicycle courier. Vishram was still adjusting the collar and cuffs as the flotilla of cars arrived at the steps. Now he’s on the twentieth floor of the Ray tower with Varanasi a smoggy brown stain at his feet, the Ganga a distant curl of sullied silver, and still no one will tell him what the hell this is about.

Those Chinese really understand fabric. The collar fit is perfect. He can hardly see the stitches.

The boardroom doors open. Corporate lawyers file in. Vishram Ray wonders what the collective noun is for corporate lawyers. A fleece? A fuckover? Last in line is Marianna Fusco. Vishram Ray can feel his mouth sag open. Marianna Fusco gives him the smallest of smiles, certainly less than you would expect from someone you (a) had first-class sex with and (b) embroiled in a street riot, and sits down opposite him. Under the teak table, Vishram flicks on his palmer and types invisible text.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?

The staff open the double doors to now admit the board members.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS A FAMILY BUSINESS MATTER.

Marianna’s message appears to Vishram to be hovering over her breasts. She’s in that great and eminently practical suit.

But he’s not so bad himself. The bankers and representatives from the credit unions and grameen banks take their sears. Many of the members from the rural micro-credit banks have never been so far off the ground in their lives. As Vishram coolly pours himself a water with his left hand while his right texts IS THIS A GAME? his father enters the room. He wears a simple round-collared suit, the length of the jacket his only concession to fashion, but he turns every head. There is a look on his face Vishram hasn’t seen since he was a boy when his father was setting up the company, the determined serenity of a man certain he is doing right. Behind him is Shastri, his shadow.

Ranjit Ray goes to the head of the table. He doesn’t take his seat. He salutes his board and guests. The big wooden room hums with tension. Vishram would give anything to make an entrance like that.

“Colleagues, partners, honoured guests, my clear family,” Ranjit Ray begins. “Thank you all for coming today, many of you at considerable inconvenience and expense. Let me say at the outset that I would not have asked you to come if I did not feel it was a matter of the utmost importance to this company.”

Ranjit Ray’s voice is a soft, deep prayer that carries to every part of the big room without loss. Vishram recalls that he has never heard it raised.

“I am sixty-eight years old, three years past what Westerners consider in their business ethos the end of economically useful life. In India it is a time for reflection, for the contemplation of other paths that might have been taken, that yet might be taken.” A sip of water.

“In the final year of my engineering degree at the Hindu University of Varanasi I realised that the laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe. I realised that I was not just an engineer, I was a Hindu engineer. From these understandings I concluded that if I was to use my abilities to help India become a strong and respected nation, I must do it in an Indian way. I must do it in a Hindu way.”

He looks at his wife and sons.

“My family has heard this many times, I trust they’ll forgive one more. I went on a year of pilgrimage. I followed bhakti and did puja at the seven sacred cities, I bathed in the holy rivers and sought the councils of swamis and sadhus. And of each of them, at each temple and holy site, I asked this same question.”

How may this engineer lead the right life? Vishram says to himself. He has indeed heard this homily more times than he cares to remember: how this Hindu engineer used a crore of rupees from a micro-credit union to build a low-cost, no-maintenance domestic-scale carbon nanotube solar power generator. Fifty million units later, plus alcohol fuel refineries, biomass plants, wind farms, ocean current thermal generators, and an R&D division pushing Indian— Hindu — minds into the void of zero-point energy, Ray Power is one of Bharat’s—India’s—leading companies. One that has done it the Indian way, sustainably, treading lightly on the earth, obeying the wheel. A company that steers resolutely around the maelstrom of the international markets. A company that commissions exciting new Indian architectural talent to build a corporate headquarters from sustainable wood and glass and still welcomes Dalits into its boardroom. It is a great and inspiring story, but Vishram’s attention is wandering all over Marianna Fusco’s stretch-brocaded breasts. A message appears cross them in cheeky lilac. PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR FATHER!

BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP he thumbs back.

PUNS ARE THE LOWEST FORM OF COMEDY, she returns.

WELL EXCUSE ME, I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS SARCASM, he emblazons in quick-riposte blue across the lapels of his really fast suit. Which is how he almost misses the punch line.

“That is why I have decided it is time to once again take up that inquiry into how the right life may be lived.”

Vishram Ray looks up, nerves electric.

“At midnight tonight, I will resign my directorship of Ray Power. I will give up my wealth and influence, my prestige and responsibilities. I will leave my house and family and once again take up the sadhu’s staff and bowl.”

The boardroom of Ray Power could not be any more quiet or still if it had been nerve gassed. Ranjit Ray smiles, trying to reassure. It doesn’t work.

“Please understand that this is not a decision I undertake lightly. I have discussed this at length with my wife and she is in agreement with me. Shastri, my aide and help of more years than I care to remember, will be joining me on this journey, not as a servant, for all such distinctions end tonight, but as a fellow seeker after right life.”

The shareholders are on their feet, shouting, demanding. A Dalit woman bellows in Vishram’s ear about her clients, her sisters, but Vishram finds himself cool, detached, anchored to his seat by sense of inevitability. It is as if he knew from the moment the ticket arrived on his Glasgow doorstep this would happen. Ranjit Ray quiets the board.

“My friends, please do not think I have abandoned you. The first requirement of the man who would follow the spiritual life is that he leaves the world responsibly. As you know, other corporations seek to buy this company but Ray Power is first and last a family business and I will not give it to alien and immoral systems of management.”

Don’t do it, Vishram thinks. Don’t say it.

“Therefore, I am passing control of the company to my sons Ramesh, Govind, and Vishram.” He turns to each of them, hands held out as if blessing. Ramesh looks freshly shot. His big veiny hands are flat on the table like flayed animals. Govind fluffs himself up and looks around the table, already dividing the room into allies and enemies. Vishram is numb, a player caught up in a script.

“I have appointed trusted advisors to guide you through the transitional period. I have put great trust in you. Please try to be worthy of it.”

Marianna Fusco leans across the wide table, hand extended. A sheaf of ribbon-bound papers rests on the polished surface beside her. Vishram can see the dotted lines at the bottom of the page, awaiting his signatures.

“Congratulations, and welcome to Research and Development, Mr. Ray.” He takes the hand he remembers so firm and dry and soft around his dick. Suddenly he knows this script. “Lear,” he breathes.

10: SHIV

Yogendra leaves the SUV in the middle of the street outside Musst. Police and thieves alike recognise a raja’s parking space is where he leaves his motor. Yogendra opens the door for Shiv. Cycle rickshaws detour around him, bells jingling.

MUSST, feat. TALV announces the neon. Now everyone’s got personalised aeai DJs and grooves to their own mix, clubs sell themselves by their barmen. It’s too early in the week for the salary-men, wife hunting, but the girls are in. Shiv slips on to his stool. Yogendra takes the seat behind him. Shiv sets the flask of ovaries on the bar. The subsurface lighting turns it into some alien artefact in a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Barman Talv slides a glass dish of paan over the plane of fluorescent plastic. Shiv pops a pinch, rolls it round inside his cheek, lets the bhang percolate through him.

“Where’s Priya?”

“Down the back.”

Girls in knee boots and short skirts and cling-silk tops cluster bound a table where the club polychrome begins. At the centre, haloed by cocktail glasses, is a ten-year-old boy.

“Fuck, Brahmins,” Shiv says.

“Contrary to appearances, he is legal age,” Talv says, pouring two glasses from a shaker that looks treacherously similar to Shiv’s stainless steel prize.

“There’s good men out there, give a woman everything she wants, good home, good prospects—she’d never have to work—good family, children, a place up the ladder, and they hang off that ten-year-old like a calf from a teat,” Shiv says. “I’d shoot the lot of them. It’s against nature.” Yogendra helps himself to paan.

“That ten-year-old could buy and sell this place ten times over. And he’ll be bouncing around long after you and me’ve gone to the ghats.”

The cocktail is cool and blue and deep and chases the red paan into the deep dark places. Shiv scans Club Musst. None of his girls will catch his eye tonight. Those who aren’t laughing with the Brahmin are fixed intently on the tabletop tivi.

“What got them so wrapped up?”

“Some fashion thing,” Talv says. “They’ve brought this Russian model in, some nute, Yuri, something like that.”

“Yuli,” Yogendra says. His gums are scarlet from paan. The light is blue and the string of pearls he always wears knotted around his neck glows like souls. Red, white, blue. American grin. As long as Shiv has worked with him he has always worn those pearls.

“I’d shoot them, too,” Shiv says. “Deviates. I mean Brahmins; okay, they fuck around with the genes, but they are men and women.”

“I read the nutes are working on ways to get cloned,” Talv says mildly. “They’d pay normal women to carry their kids.”

“Now that is just plain disgusting,” Shiv says and when he turns back to set down his empty glass there’s a slip of paper on the luminous blue bar.

“What is this?”

“This is what they call a bill,” Talv says.

“I beg your pardon? Since when have I paid for drinks in this establishment?” Shiv unfolds the little docket, glances over the number. Double takes.

“No. What the fuck is this? Is my credit no good here? Is this what you’re saying, Shiv Faraji, we don’t trust him any more?”

The tivi girls look up at a raised voice, lit blue like devis. Talv sighs. Then Salman’s there. He’s the owner, he has connections Shiv doesn’t. Shiv holds up the bar tab like a charge sheet.

“I was telling your star here.”

“I’ve been hearing things about your bankability.”

“My friend, I have status all over this city.”

Salman lays a cold finger on the cold canister.

“Your stock is no longer as ascendant as it used to be.”

“Some fucker is undercutting me? I’ll have his balls in dry ice.”

Salman shakes his head.

“This is a macroeconomic issue. Market forces, sir.”

And Musst Club Bar goes into long zoom, so that its walls and corners seem to rush away from Shiv except the Brahmin’s head, which is huge and inflated and rocking like a painted helium balloon at a festival, laughing at him like a rocking fool.

Some see the red haze. For Shiv it has always been blue. Deep, vibrant, intense blue. He snatches up the plate of paan, smashes it, pins Talv’s hand to the bar-top, a long blade of glass poised over his thumb like a guillotine.

“Let’s see him shake and make with no thumbs,” Shiv hisses. “Bar. Star.”

“Shiv; now,” Salman says very slowly and remorsefully and Shiv knows that it’s the hiss of the cobra, but it’s blue, all blue, quivering blue. A hand on his shoulder. Yogendra.

“Okay,” Shiv says, not looking at anyone or anything. He sets the sliver down, puts his hands up. “It’s okay.”

“I will overlook this,” Salman says. “But I do expect payment, in full, sir. Thirty days. Standard business terms.”

“Okay, there is something very wrong here,” Shiv says, backing away. “I will find out what it is and I will be back for your apology.”

He kicks over his bar stool but doesn’t forget the body parts. At last, the girls are looking at him.

The Ayurvedic restaurant closes promptly at eight because its philosophy dictates you should eat no later. From the scene in the alley, Shiv guesses that it won’t be opening again. There’s a hire van, two pony carts, three delivery trikes, and a gaggle of pay-by-the-hour gundas running cardboard boxes in a chain out the door. Headwaiter Videsh, dismantling tables, barely looks up as Shiv and boy wonder storm in. Madam Ovary is in the office cherry-picking the filing cabinet. Shiv bangs the vacuum flask down on the battered metal.

“Going somewhere?”

“One of my laddies is on his way to your lodgings as we speak.”

“I was taken away. On business. I have got one of these, you know?” Shiv flips out his palmer. “Shiv, nonsecure communications. No.”

Madam Ovary is a small, fat, almost globular Malayam and wears a greasy pigtail down to the small of her back that hasn’t been released from its bonds in twenty years. She is Ayurvedic Mother to her laddies and plies them with tinctures and papers of powder. Those who believe credit her with genuine healing powers. Shiv gives his to Yogendra, who hawks them to tourists coming off the riverboats. Her restaurant has an international reputation, especially among Germans. The place is always full of pale Northern Euros with that gauntness of facial features you get from thirty days of constant gastro problems.

Shiv says, “Explain then: you’re firing everything into handcarts and all of a sudden this”—his cool, stainless flask—“has got leprosy in it.”

Madame Ovary consigns a few balance sheets to her plastic briefcase. No leather, no animal produce at all. Human products for human consumption, that is Ayurvedically sound. That includes embryonic stem cell therapy.

“What do you know about nonblastular stem cell technology?”

“Same as our normal foetal stem cell technique except they can use any cell in the body to grow spare parts and not embryos. Only they can’t get it to work.”

“It’s been working perfectly since eleven AM Eastern US Standard Time. What you have in there isn’t even worth the flask.”

Shiv sees again the body caught by the stream. He sees the woman’s sari bubble up behind her. He sees her on the scrubbed enamel tabletop in the All-Asia Beauty plastic surgery clinic, open under the lights. Shiv hates waste. He especially hates it when an inexperienced surgeon turns a routine egg-harvest into a bloodbath.

“There’re always going to be people can’t afford American technology. This is Bharat.”

“Laddie, do you know the first rule of business? Know when to cut your losses. My overheads are enormous: doctors, couriers, policemen, customs officials, politicians, city councillors, all with their hands out. The crash is coming. I do not intend to be underneath it.”

“Where are you going?” Shiv asks.

“I’m certainly not telling you. If you’ve any sense, you’ll have diversified your assets long before now.”

Shiv has never had that luxury. At every stage of his journey from Chandi Basti to this Ayurvedic restaurant, there was only ever one choice to make. Morality was for those who lived somewhere else than the basti. There had been one choice that night he raided the pharmacy. Any badmash could get a gun in the years of the Separation, but even then Shiv Faraji had been a man of style. A stylist uses a stolen Nissan SUV, rammed through the pharmacy steel shutter. His sister had recovered from the tuberculosis. The stolen antibiotics had saved her life. He had done what his father would not, could not. He had shown them what a man of courage and determination could achieve. He had not touched a paisa of the pharmacist’s money. A raja takes only what he needs. He had been twelve. Two years younger than his lieutenant Yogendra. Every step, the only step. It’s the same now the ovaries have come apart in his fingers. An action will present itself to him. He will take it. It will be the only action he can take. The one thing he will not do is run. This is his city.

Madam Ovary snaps shut her valise.

“Make yourself useful. Give me your lighter.”

It’s an old US Army model from the time they went into Pakistan. The days when they sent soldiers who smoked rather than machines. Madam Ovary applies fire. The papers catch and burn.

“I’m done here now,” she says. “Thank you for your work. I wish you well, but do not try to contact me, ever. We will not meet again, so good-bye for this life.”

In the car Shiv slaps on the radio. Jabber. All these DJs do: jabber, as if only way to tell them from aeais is by the constant flow of garbage from their mouths. Like the Ganga; this constant flow of shit. You’re a DJ, you play music. Music people want to hear, that makes them feel good or think of someone special or cry.

He leans against the window. By the dash glow he sees his face in half profile, ghosted over the people in the street. But it is as if every one of those people over whom his image falls takes ownership of part of him.

Fucking jabber.

“Where are you taking me, boy?”

“Fighting.”

He’s right. There’s nowhere else to go where it comes down. But Shiv doesn’t like the boy being that close, watching, observing, second-guessing.

Fight! Fight! is thumping. Shiv walks down the shallow steps and straightens his cuffs and the smell of blood and money and raw wood and the adrenaline kicks in under his breastbone. He loves this place above all places on earth. He checks the clientele. Some new faces. That girl, up by the rail in the balcony, the one with the Persian nose, trying to look so cool. Shiv catches her eye. She holds him, long enough. Some other night. Now the barker is calling the next bout and he goes down to the bookies’ table. Down on Sonarpur Road fire engines are putting out a restaurant blaze started in a filing cabinet while something with the anatomy of a ten-year-old boy and appetites twice that is sliding chubby fingers towards the shakti yoni of his girl and a woman dead without profit drifts in the Ganga flow towards moksha, but here are people and movement and light and death and chance and fear and a girl parading a superb silver tabby battle cat around a sand ring. Shiv flips his crocodile wallet out of his jacket, fans notes, and lays them out on the table. Blue. He’s still seeing that blue.

“One lakh rupees,” Bachchan says. Beyond which there are no more, nor hope of more. Bachchan’s scribe counts the cash and writes the docket. Shiv takes his place by the pit and the barker calls fight! fight! The crowd roars and rises and Shiv with them, pressing against the wooden rail to hide his hard on. Then he is out of the deep blue with the silver tabby microsabre meat on the sand and his one hundred thousand notes scraped into the sattaman’s leather satchel. He wants to laugh. He realises the truth of the sadhus: there is blessing in having nothing.

In the car the laughter breaks out of him. Shiv beats his head against the window again and again. Tears run down his face. Finally he can breathe. Finally he can talk.

“Take me to Murfi’s,” Shiv orders. He is ravenously hungry now.

“What with?”

“There’s change in the glovebox.”

Tea Lane embraces its smokes and miasmas under domed umbrellas. They serve no meteorological purpose: Murfi claims his protects him from moonlight, which he feels to be baleful. Murfi has many claims, not the least of which is his name. Irish, he says. Irish as Sadhu Patrick.

Tea Lane has grown up to serve the men who build Ranapur. Behind the ranks of hot food and spice and fruit sellers, the original chai-houses open their wooden shutters on to the street and spill their tin tables and folding chairs on to the road. Over the gentle roar of gas burners and wind-up radios pushing Hindi Hits, a never-ending surf of soapi dialogue plays from hundreds of wall-screen televisions. Ten thousand calendars of soapi goddesses hang from drawing pins.

Shiv leans our the window counting loose change into Murfi’s monkey hand.

“And some of those pizza pakoras for him.” Shiv regards these as he would monkey turd pakora, but Yogendra has this idea they are the epitome of Western snack cool. “Murfiji, you say you pakora anything. Try these.”

Murfi unscrews the top of the flask, waves away the clouds of dry ice, tries to scry inside. “Eh, what you got in there?”

Shiv tells him. Murfi screws up his face, thrusts the flask back at Shiv.

“No, you keep ’em. You never know someone may get the taste.”

It is no comment on Murfi’s cooking but between one bite and the next, Shiv’s appetite vanishes. The people are all looking in the same direction. Behind Shiv. Shiv drops his newspaper of fried things. Street dogs descend on it. He snatches Yogendra’s dung from him.

“Leave that shit and get me away.”

Yogendra boots the pedal, wheel-spins into the suddenly empty street as something comes down on the roof so hard it bows the Merc to the axles. A shock absorber detonates like a grenade, there’s a flash of blue and a smell of burning electrics. The car rocks on its remaining three suspension points. Something moves up there. Yogendra flogs and flogs and flogs the engine but it will not catch.

“Out,” Shiv commands as the blade comes down through the roof. It is long, scimitar curved, serrated, bright as a surgeon’s steel and stabs the Merc from roof plate to transmission tunnel. As Shiv and Yogendra tumble out into Tea Lane, it rips forward and guts pressed steel like a sacrificial kid.

Now Shiv can see what’s hit the roof of his sixty million rupees of German trash metal and though it is the absolute death of him, he’s as paralysed by the sheer spectacle as any of the frozen people on Tea Lane. The windscreen shatters as the fighting robot’s blade completes the first pass. The lower grasping arms seize the raw edges and peel the roof open. The blunt phallus of the E-M gun seeks Shiv out on the street, fixes him with its monocular stare. That can’t hurt him. Shiv is transfixed by the big blade as it withdraws from the wreck formerly known as a Series 7 Mercedes and swivels into horizontal slash. The fighting machine rises up on its legs and steps towards him. It still has the serial number and little stars and stripes on its side but Shiv knows that the pilot will not be some late-teen with game-boy reactions and a methamphetamine habit wired twenty levels under Plains States America. This will be someone in the back of that panel van down by the twenty-four-hour cinema, smoking a bidi and weaving his hands through cyberspace in the dance of Kali. Someone who knows him.

Shiv does not try to run. These things can hit one hundred kph in a gallop and once they have the scent of your DNA, that blade will cut through any obstacle until it meets the soft flesh of your belly. The Urban Combat Robot rears over him. The vile little mantis head lowers, sensor rigs swivelling. Now Shiv relaxes. This is a show for the street.

“Mr. Faraji.” Shiv almost laughs. “For your information; as of this moment, all debts and fiscal encumbrances owed to Mr. Bachchan have been assigned to Ahimsa Collections Agency.”

“Bachchan is calling in my account?” Shiv shouts, looking at the remains of his last vestige of value, gutted on the street, bleeding alcofuel.

“That is correct, Mr. Faraji,” the hunter-killer robot says. “Your account with Bachchan Betting currently stands at eighteen million rupees. You have one week from today to settle this account or action for recovery will ensue.”

The machine spins on its hind heels, gathers itself, and leaps over the tea-vendors, cows, and hookers towards the intersection.

“Hey!” Shiv calls after it. “What’s wrong with an invoice?” He picks up shards and orts of German precision engineering and shies them after the debt collector.

11: LISA, LULL

“So, Ms. Durnau, your best idea,” Thomas Lull said across the wide desk with her CV and presentation file on it and beyond the picture window, wider Kansas in the hottest June this century.

“Where were you when it came to you?”

(She flashbacks to this, twenty-two hours out from ISS, twenty-six to Darnley 285, stuffed full of flight drugs and zipped up in a bag velcroed to the wall of the transfer pod so she doesn’t get in the way of Captain Pilot Beth who has a slightly blocked right nostril and whose breath whistles rhythmically until it is the biggest thing in Lisa Durnau’s universe.)

No one had known a June like it; the airport staff, the car rental girl, the university security man she asked for directions. This was more than hot water off the coast of Peru or the dying thrash of the Gulf Stream. Climatology had run into the white zone where nothing could be predicted any more. Thomas Lull had flipped through her CV, glanced at the first page of her presentation and when she flashed up the first slide, stopped her with that curve-ball question.

Lisa Durnau can still recall the surge of anger. She pressed her hands palm-down on to the thighs of her good pant suit to push the rage down. When she lifted them she had left two palm-shaped sweat marks like warnings against the evil eye.

“Professor Lull, I’m trying to be professional here and I think you owe me the professional courtesy of your attention.”

She could have stayed in Oxford. She had been happy in Oxford. Carl Walker would have sold body parts to keep her at Keble. Better doctorates than hers had returned shattered from this cow town where the schools by law still taught Intelligent Design. If the world’s preeminent centre for cyberlife research sar on a hill in the Bible Belt, Lisa Durnau would come to that hill. She had rejected her father’s Christian universe before he and her mother separated, but Presbyterian stubbornness and self-reliance were twined around her DNA. She would not let this man shake her. He said, “You can earn my attention by answering my question. I want to know about your inspiration. Those moments when it hit you like lightning. Those moments when you ran for seventy hours on coffee and Dexedrine because if you ler go of it, even for an instant, you’d lose it. The moments when it came out of the void and was all there, perfect and entire. I want to know how and when and where it hit you. Science is creation. Nothing else interests me.”

“Okay,” Lisa Durnau said. “It was the women’s toilet in Paddington Station in London, England.”

Professor Thomas Lull beamed and settled back in his chair.

The Cognitive Cosmology group met twice monthly in Stephen Sanger’s office at Imperial College London. It was one of those things that Lisa Durnau knew she should get round to some time but probably never would, like balancing her cheque book or having children. Carl Walker would cc. her its notes and abstracts. It was intellectually thrilling and she had no doubt that membership of the group would advance her name and career, but theirs was a quantum informational approach and Lisa’s thoughts moved in topological curves. Then the bimonthly reports began to stray from quantum informational judder into speculation that Artificial Intelligence could indeed be a parallel universe mapped out in computing code as Oxford’s cloisters and choristers were in elementary particles and DNA. This was her bailiwick. She resisted for a month, then Carl Walker took her our for a Friday lunch that ended up in a Jamaican restaurant at midnight drinking Triple-X Guinness and swaying to the towers of dub. Two days later she was in a fifth-floor conference room breakfasting on chocolate croissants and smiling too much at the country’s leading thinkers on the place of mind in the structure of the universe.

Everyone recharged coffee cups and the discourse began. The speed of debate left Lisa slipstreamed and breathless. The transcripts gave no indication of the breadth and diversity of discussion. She felt like a fat kid at a basketball match, clutching and darting too late, too slow. By the time Lisa got to speak she was responding to things said three ideas ago and the climate of the conversation had raced on. The sun moved across Hyde Park and Lisa Durnau felt herself settling into despair. They were fast and quick and dazzling and they were wrong wrong wrong but she couldn’t get a word in to tell them. They were already becoming bored with the subject. They had milked it for what they thought it could yield and were moving on. She was going to lose it. Unless she told them. Unless she spoke now. Her right forearm lay flat on the oak table. She slowly raised her hand to the vertical. Every eye followed it. There was a sudden, terrible hush.

“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them, too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She railed off into an apologetic mumble.

“Thank you for that,” Stephen Sanger said. “There are a lot of interesting ideas in there.”

They did not even let him finish his sentence. Chris Drapier from the Level Three Artificial Intelligence Unit at Cambridge sprang first. He had been the rudest and loudest and most pedantic and Lisa had caught him trying to size up her ass in the queue for the coffee flask. There was no reason to invoke some deus ex machina argument when quantum computation had the whole thing sewn up pretty nicely. This was vitalism—no, this was mysticism. Next up was Vicki McAndrews from Imperial. She picked a loose theoretical thread in her modelling, tugged it, and the whole edifice unravelled. Lisa didn’t have a topological model of the space or even a mechanism for describing this universe that thought. All Lisa could hear was that high-pitched whine behind her eyes that is the sound when you want to cry but must not. She sat, annihilated among the coffee cups and chocolate croissant smears. She knew nothing. She had no talent. She was arrogant and stupid and shot her mouth off when any sensible postgrad would have sat and nodded and kept everyone’s coffee cups filled and the cookies coming round. Her star was at its absolute nadir. Stephen Sanger passed some encouragement as Lisa crept out, but she was destroyed. She cried her way back across Hyde Park, up through Bayswater to Paddington Station. She downed a half bottle of dessert wine in the station restaurant as that seemed the menu item that would get her whacked really quickly. She sat at her table shuddering with shame and tears and the certainty that her career was over, she could not do this thing, she didn’t know what they meant. Her bladder called ten minutes before her train. She sat in the cubicle, jeans around her knees, trying not to sob out loud because the acoustics of London station toilets would take it and amplify it so everyone could hear.

And then she saw it. She could not say what it was she saw, staring at the cubicle door, there was no shape, no form, no words or theorems. But it was there, whole and unimaginably beautiful. It was simple. It was so simple. Lisa Durnau burst from the cubicle, rushed to the Paperchase store, bought a pad and a big marker. Then she ran for her train. She never made it. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth carriages, it hit her like lightning. She knew exactly what she had to do. She knelt sobbing on the platform while her shaking hands tried to jam down equations. Ideas poured through her. She was hardwired to the cosmos. The evening shift detoured around her, not staring. It’s all right, she wanted to say. It’s so all right.

M-Star Theory. It was there all along, right in front of her. How had she not seen it? Eleven dimensions folded into a set of Calabi-Yau shapes, three extended, one time-like, seven curled up at Planck length. But the handles, the holes in the shapes, dictated the winding energies of the superstrings, and thus the harmonics that were the fundamental physical properties. All she had to do was model CyberEarth as a Calabai-Yau space and show its equivalence to a physical possibility in M-Star theory. It was all in the strucrure. Out there was a universe with its onboard computer built in. Minds were part of the fabric of reality there, not shelled in evolved carbon as they were in this bubble of the polyverse. Simple. So simple.

She cried with joy all the way home in the train. A young French tourist couple sat across the table, nervously touching every time Lisa shuddered to a new attack of bliss. Joy bursts would send her wandering out of her room and through Oxford in the week she wrote up her insights. Every building, every street, every shop and person filled her with fierce delight at life and humanity. She was in love with every last thing. Carl Walker had flicked through the draft, grin growing wider with every page. Finally he said, “You’ve got them. Fuckers.”

Sitting in Thomas Lull’s over-air-conditioned office, Lisa Durnau could still catch the emotional afterglow of that outburst, like the microwave echo of the fires of the big bang. Thomas Lull swivelled his chair, leaned towards her.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, two things you should know about this place. It’s got a fucking awful climate, but the people are mighty friendly. Be polite to them. You may need them.”

For Thomas Lull’s amusement today, Dr. Darius Ghotse has a set of recordings of the English comedy classic “It’s That Man Again” in the boot of the tricycle that he labours along the sand tracks of Thekkady. He is anticipating slipping the file into Professor Lull’s machine and the plummy voice blaring out the signature tune. “One hundred and five years old!” he will say. “When the bombs were falling on London, this was what they were listening to in their underground railway tunnels!”

Dr. Ghotse collects antique radio programmes. Most days he calls around for breakfast with Thomas Lull on his boat and they sit under the palm-thatch awning to sip chai and listen to the alien humour of the Goons or the hyperreal comedy of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam. Dr. Ghotse has a particular fondness for BBC Radio. He is a widower and former paediatrician but in his heart of hearts, he is an Englishman. He wishes Thomas Lull could understand cricket. He could then share his classic Aggers and Johnners Test commentaries with him.

He rattles down the rutted lane that runs beside the backwater, kicking at chickens and insolent dogs. Without braking, he swerves the aged red trike off the track, up the gangplank, and on to a long, mat-roofed kettuvallam. It is a manoeuvre he has performed many times. It has never yet ended him in the water.

Thomas Lull has Tantric symbols painted on his coconut thatch and a name on the hull in white: Salve Vagina. They offend local Christians mightily. The priest has informed him thus. Thomas Lull counterinformed him that he (priest) could criticise him (Lull) when he could do so in as good Latin as his boat title. A small high-power satellite dish is gaffer-taped to the highest point of the sloped roof-mats. An alcohol generator purrs in the stern.

“Professor Lull, Professor Lull.” Dr. Ghotse ducks under the low eave, fileplayer held high. As usual, the houseboat smells of incense, alcohol, and stale cooking. A Schubert quintet plays, mid-volume. “Professor Lull?”

Dr. Ghotse finds Thomas Lull in his small, neat bedroom that is like a wooden shell. His shirts and shorts and socks are laid our on pristine cotton. He folds his T-shirts the proper way, sides to the middle, then triple-crease. A lifetime spent among suitcases has made this second nature.

“What has happened?” Dr. Ghotse asks. “Time to move on,” Thomas Lull says.

“A woman, then?” Dr. Ghotse asks. Thomas Lull’s appetite for, and success with, the girlis from the beach circuit has always baffled him. Men should be self-contained in later life, without attachments.

“You could say. I met her last night at the club. She had an asthma attack. I saved her. There’s always someone frying their coronary arteries on salbutamol. I offered to teach her some Bureyko tricks and she turned round and said, I will see you tomorrow, Professor Lull. She knew my name, Darius. Time to go.”

When Dr. Ghotse met Thomas Lull, Lull had been working in an old record shop, a beach bum among the ancient compact discs and vinyls. Dr. Ghotse had been a recently bereaved pensioner, chipping away at his grief laugh by antique laugh. He found a kindred soul in this sardonic American. Afternoons passed in conversation, recordings shared. But it was still three months before Dr. Ghotse invited the man from the record shop for afternoon tea. Five visits later, when the afternoon tea turned into evening gin watching the astonishing sunsets behind the palms, Thomas Lull confided his true identity. At first Dr. Ghotse felt sullied, that the man at the record shop he had got to know was an effigy of lies. Then he felt burdened: he did not wish to be the receptor of this man’s loss and rage. Then he felt privileged; owner of a world-class secret that could have netted him a fortune from the news channels. He had been entrusted. In the end, he realised that he had approached Thomas Lull with the same agenda, for someone to entrust and listen.

Dr. Ghotse slips the file player into his jacket pocket. No ITMA today. Or any other day, it seems. Thomas Lull picks up the hardback copy of Blake that has sat beside every bed he has ever made home. He weighs it in his hands, then puts it into the case.

“Come on, I’ve coffee on the go.”

The rear of the boat opens in an impromptu veranda, sheltered by the ubiquitous coir matting. Dr. Ghotse lets Thomas Lull pour two coffees, which he does not much like, and follows him out to the two accustomed seats. Swimming kids splash in water two degrees lighter and cooler than the coffee.

“So,” Dr. Ghotse says. “Where you will go?”

“South,” Thomas Lull says. Until he said it he hadn’t an idea of a destination. From the day he had moored the old rice-kettuvallam to the backwater shore, Thomas Lull has made it clear he was only here until the wind blew him on. The wind blew, the palms beat, the clouds passed and dropped no rain, and Thomas Lull remained. He had come to love the boat, the sense of beachcombing rootlessness that would never have to prove itself. But she knew his name. “Lanka, maybe.”

“Island of demons,” Dr. Ghotse says.

“Island of beach bars,” Thomas Lull says. Schubert reaches his allotted end. The waterkids dive and splash, drops clinging to their dark grinning faces. But the idea is in his head now and will not leave. “Maybe even get a boat over to Malaysia or Indonesia. There’re islands there where no one will ever know your face. I could open a nice little dive school. Yeah. I could do that. Hell, I don’t know.”

He turns. Dr. Ghotse feels it too. Living on water makes you as sensitive to vibrations as a shark. Salve Vagina rocks subtly to a tread on the gangplank. Someone has come aboard. The kettuvallam shifts as a body moves through it.

“Hello? It is very dark in here.” Aj ducks our from under the coir awning on to the rear deck. She is dressed in the same loose, flowing grey of the night before. Her tilak is even more prominent in the daylight. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ghotse is with you, I can come back later.”

Say it, Thomas Lull thinks. Her gods have given you this one chance, send her away and disappear and never look back. But she knew his name without meeting him, and she knows Dr. Ghotse’s name and Thomas Lull has never been able to walk away from a mystery.

“No no, you stay, there’s coffee.”

She is one of those people whose smile transforms their entire face. She claps her hands in small delight.

“I’d love to, thank you.”

He’s lost now.

The hour clicks over to thirty and Lisa Durnau bubbles up from deep memory. Space, she decides, is the dimension of the stoned.

“Hey,” she croaks. “Any chance of some water?” Her muscles are beginning to twist and wither.

“Tube to your right,” Pilot Captain Beth says without looking up from her board. Lisa cranes round to suck warm, stale distilled water. The woman pilot’s men friends back on the station are chattering and flirting. They’re never done talking and flirting. Lisa wonders if they ever get round to anything, or are they so frail and attenuated that anything approaching a fuck would snap them in two? New memory steals up on Lisa.

She was back in Oxford again, running. It was a city she loved to run in. Oxford was generous with paths and green spaces and the students had a culture of physical activity. It was an old route from her Keble time, along the canal path, through the meadows of Christ Church, up Bear Lane on to the High and then dodge pedestrians to the gate of All Souls and through on to Parks Road. It was good, physically secure, familiar to the foot. Today she turned right past the back of Merton through the Botanic gardens to Magdalen where the conference was being held. Oxford wore summer well. Groups of students were encamped on the grass. The flat thump and yell of soccer carried over the field, a sound she missed at KU. She missed the light also, that peculiar English gold of early evening with its promise of seductive night. Set in her evening were a shower, a quick squint at the completely unsuspected mass extinction in Alterre’s marine biosphere, and dinner at High Table, a formal thing of frocks and jackets to conclude the conference. Much better to be out in the streets and people places with the gold light moth-soft against bare skin.

Lull was waiting in her room.

“See you, L. Durnau,” he said. “See you in those ridiculous, clingy little lycra shorts and that tiny tiny top and your bottle of water in your hand.” He stepped towards her. She was glossy and stinking with woman sweat. “I am going to take those ridiculous little shorts right off of you.”

He seized two fistfuls of elastic waistband and jerked down shorts and panties. Lisa Durnau gave a small cry. In one motion she peeled off her running top, kicked off her shoes, and jumped him, legs around waist. Locked together, they reeled back into the shower. While he struggled with his clothing and cursed his clinging socks, she showered down. He barged in, pinned her against the tiled wall. Lisa swivelled her hips, wrapped her legs around him again, trying to find his cock with her vulva. Lull took a step back, pushed her gently away. Lisa Durnau flipped back into a handstand, locked her legs around his torso. Thomas Lull bent down, went in with the tongue. Half drowned, half ecstatic, Lisa wanted to scream but fought it. More enjoyable to fight it, half asphyxiated, inverted, drowning. Then she pinned Lull again with her thighs and he took her dripping and wrapped round him, threw her on to her bed, and fucked her with the quad bells ringing curfew.

At High Table she sat next to a Danish postgrad, starry eyed at actually talking to an originator of the Alterre project. At the centre of the table Thomas Lull debated the social Darwinism of geneline therapy with the Master. Other than glancing up at his words, “kill the Brahmins now, while there aren’t that many of them,” Lisa did not acknowledge him.

Those were the rules. It was a thing of conferences. It had begun at one, it found its fullest expression at them. When it came to its allotted end, the rules and terms of disengagement would be drawn up between conference items. Until then, the sex was glorious.

Lisa Durnau had always thought of sex as something that was all right for other people but was never part of her lifescript. It wasn’t that fantastic. She could live pretty happily without it. Then, with the most unexpected of people, in the most inconvenient relationship, she discovered a sexuality where she could bring her own natural athleticism. Here was a partner who liked her sweaty and salt-flavoured in her beloved running gear, who liked it al fresco and al dente and seasoned with the things she had locked up in her libido for almost twenty years. Pastor Durnau’s sporty daughter didn’t do things like play-rape and Tantra. At the time her confidante was her sister Claire in Santa Barbara. They spent evenings on the phone going into all the dirty details, whooping with laughter. A married man. And her boss. Claire’s theory was because the relationship was so illicit, so secret, Lisa could unfold her own fantasy.

It had begun in Paris in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle Terminal 4. The flight to O’Hare was delayed. A fault in Brussels air traffic control had backed up planes as far out as the East Coast. BAA142 was on the board with a four-hour delay. Lisa and Lull had come off an intellectually gruelling week defending the Lullite argument that real and virtual were meaningless chauvinisms against heavy attack from a cadre of French neorealists. By now Lisa Durnau just wanted to climb her porch steps and check if Mr. Cheknavorian next door had watered the herbs. The board clicked over to six hours delay. Lisa groaned. She had done the e-mail. She had updated her finances. She had looked in on Alterre, going through a quiescent phase between bursts of punctuated evolution. It was three o’clock in the morning and in the boredom and the tiredness and the dislocation of the limbo of the brightly lit lounge between nations, Lisa Durnau leaned her head against Thomas Lull’s shoulder. She felt his body move against hers and she was kissing him. Next thing they were sneaking into the airport showers, with the attendant handing them two towels and whispering vive le sport.

She liked to be round Thomas Lull. He was fun, he could talk, he had a sense of humour. They had things in common; values, beliefs. Movies, books. Food; the legendary Mexican Friday lunches. All that was a long way from fucking doggie style on the wet tiles of a Terminal 4 shower cubicle, but in a sense not so far. Where else does love start but next door? You fancy what you see every day. The boy across the fence. The water-cooler colleague. The opposite-sex friend you’ve always been especially close to. She knew she had always felt something for Thomas Lull; she had just never been able to give it a name or an action until exhaustion and frustration and dislocation took her out of her Lisa Durnau-ness.

He’d had them before. She knew all the names and many of the faces. He’d told her about them when the others went back to their partners and families and it was just the two of them with the jug of margarita and the oil lamps burning down. Never student flings, his wife was too well known on campus. Usually one nighters on the conference circuit, once an e-mail affair with a woman writer from Sausalito. And now she was a notch on the bedpost. Where it would end she could not say. But they still kept the thing about the showers.

After the dinner and the drinks reception they extricated themselves from the knot of conversation and headed over the Cherwell bridges to the cheaper end of town. Here were student bars that had not succumbed to corporatisation. One pint turned into two, then three because they had six guest real ales.

Halfway down the fourth he stopped and said, “L. Durnau.” She loved his name for her. “If anything should happen to me, I don’t know what, whatever happens when people say, ‘should something happen’: would you look after Alterre?”

“Jesus, Lull.” Her name for him. Lull and L. Durnau. Too many Ls and Us. “Are you expecting something? You haven’t got. anything?”

“No no no. Just, looking ahead, you never know. I could trust you to look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on the clouds.”

They never made it through the rest of the guest ales. As they walked back to the halls through the warm, noisy night, Lisa Durnau said, “I will, yes. If you can swing the faculty, I will look after Alterre.”

Two days later they came in to Kansas City on the last flight of the night and the staff closed up the airport behind them. It was only jet lag that kept Lisa Durnau awake on the drive to the university. She dropped Thomas Lull at his sprawling green place out in the burbs.

“See ya,” she whispered. She knew better than to expect a kiss even at three in the morning. By the time she got up her steps and through her screen door and dumped her bag in the hall the accumulated bodyshock rolled over her like a semi. She aimed herself for the big bed. Her palmer called. She thought about not answering it. Lull.

“Could you come over? Something’s happened.”

She had never, ever heard his voice sound like that before. Terrified, she drove through the greying predawn. At every intersection her imagination cranked up a new level of dreads and possibilities but back of them all was the master fear; they had been found out. The lights were all on and the doors stood open.

“Hello the house?”

“In here.”

He sat on the old rollback leather sofa she knew from faculty barbecues and Sunday sports days. It and two tall bookcases were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The rest had been stripped. The floor was bare, the walls carried picture-hooks like hanging Spanish question marks.

“Even the cats,” Thomas Lull said. “Right down to the toy mice. Can you believe it? Toy mice.

You should see the den. She took her time over that one. She went through every single book and disk and file. I suppose it’s not so much losing a wife as getting rid of a collection of Italian opera favourites.”

“Had you?”

“Any idea? No. I walked in and all was as you see it. There was this.” He held up a piece of paper. “The usual stuff, hadn’t been working, sorry, but it was the only way. Don’t try to get in touch. You know, she has the gumption to get up and lift everything without a word of warning, but when it comes to the fond farewell, she comes out with every fucking cliche in the book. That is so her. That is so her.”

He was shaking now.

“Thomas. Come on, you can’t stay here. Come on back to mine.” He looked puzzled then nodded. “Yes, thank you, yes.”

Lisa picked up his bag as she steered him to her car. He suddenly seemed very old and uncertain. At her house she made him hot tea which he drank while she made up the spare bed, out of sensitivity.

“Would you mind?” Thomas Lull asked. “Could I come in with you? I don’t want to be on my own.”

He lay with his back to Lisa Durnau, folded in on himself. Photosharp images of the desecrated room and Lull tiny as a boy on his big man’s sofa startled Lisa awake each time she approached the drop into sleep. In the end she did sleep, as the grey of predawn filled up her big bedroom.

Five days later, after everyone telling him she was a cow and how well he was doing and he would get over it and he would be happy again and there’s always your work/friends/self, Thomas Lull walked out of the worlds real and virtual without a word, without a warning. Lisa Durnau never saw him again.

“You’ll forgive me, but this seems a somewhat unorthodox way of curing asthma,” says Dr. Ghotse. Aj’s face is red, her eyes bulge, her fingers twitch. Her tilak seems to throb.

“Couple of seconds longer,” Thomas Lull says. He waits until she can take no more, and one second beyond. “Okay, and in.” Aj opens her mouth in an ecstatic, whooping inhalation. Thomas Lull clamps his hand over it. “Through the nose. Always through the nose. Remember, the nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.”

He removes his hand, watches the slow belling out of her little round belly.

“Would it not be simpler taking medication?” Dr. Ghotse opines. He holds a little coffee cup very delicately in his two hands.

“The whole point of this method,” says Thomas Lull, “is that you don’t need medication, ever again. And hold.”

Dr. Ghotse studies Aj as she again empties her lungs in a long, whistling exhalation through her nostrils and holds.

“This is very like a pranayama technique.”

“It’s Russian; from the days when they had no money to buy anti-asthma drugs. Okay, and out.” Thomas Lull watches Aj exhale. “And hold again. It’s a very simple theory if you accept that everything you’ve been taught about how to breathe is dead wrong. According to Dr. Buteyko, oxygen is poison. We rust from the moment we’re born. Asthma is your body’s reaction to try to stop you taking in this poison gas. But we go around like big whales with our mouths open taking great searing lungfuls of O2 and tell ourselves it’s doing us good. The Buteyko method is simply balancing your O₂, and your CO₂, and if that means you have to starve your lungs of oxygen to build up a healthy supply of carbon dioxide, then you do what Aj here is doing. And in.” Aj, face pale, throws her head back and expands her belly as she inhales. “Okay, breathe normally, but through the nose. If you feel panicky, do a couple of rounds of breath retention, but don’t open your mouth. The nose, always the nose.”

“It seems suspiciously simple,” Dr. Ghotse says.

“The best ideas are always the simplest,” Thomas Lull says, the Barnum of breathology.

After he has seen Dr. Ghotse creaking off on his tricycle, Thomas Lull walks Aj back to her hotel. Trucks and Maruti micro-buses roll along the straight white road tootling their multiple horns. Thomas Lull raises a hand to the drivers he recognises. He should not be here. He should have sent her off with a wave and a smile and when she was out of sight taken his bag straight to the bus station. And why does he say, “You should come back tomorrow for another session. It takes a while to get the technique right.”

“I don’t think so, Professor Lull.”

“Why?”

“I do not think you will be here. I saw the case on your bed, I think you will be leaving today.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I found you.”

Thomas Lull says nothing. He thinks, can you read my mind? A dug-out carrying neatly dressed schoolchildren crosses the backwater to the landing, alcofuel engine burbling.

“I think you want to know how I found you,” Aj says mildly. “You do?”

“Yes, because it would always have been easier for you to leave, but you are still here.” She stops, head following a dagger-billed, wild-eyed bird that glides down from the pastel blue Church of St. Thomas through the palms, their trunks handed red and white to warn traffic, to settle at the edge of a raft of copra husks softening in the water. “Paddy-bird, Indian pond-heron, Ardeola greyii,” she says, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Hm.” She moves on.

“You obviously want me to ask,” says Thomas Lull.

“If that is a question, the answer is, I saw you. I wanted to find you but I did not know where you were, so the gods showed me you here in Thekaddy.”

“I’m in Thekkady because I don’t want to be found by gods or anyone.”

“I am aware of that, but I did not want to find you because of who you were, Professor Lull. I wanted to find you because of this photograph.”

She opens her palmer. The sunlight is very strong even through the palm-dapple, the picture is washed-out. It is taken on a day as bright as this, three Westerners squinting in front of the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram. There is a slight sallow-skinned man and a South Indian woman. The man’s arm is around the woman’s waist. The other is Thomas Lull, grinning in Hawaiian shirt and terrible shorts. He knows the picture. It was taken seven years ago, after a conference in New Delhi when he took a month to travel the states of newly sundered India, a landmass that had always fascinated, appalled, and attracted him in equal measures. Kerala’s contradictions held him a week longer than planned; its perfume of dust, musk, and sun-seared coconut matting, its sense of ancient superiority to the caste-ridden north, its dark, fetid chaotic gods and their bloody rituals, its long and successful realisation of the political truth that Communism was a politics of abundance not scarcity; its ever-shifting flotsam of treasures and travellers.

“Can’t deny it, that’s me,” Thomas Lull confesses.

“The other couple, do you recognise them?”

Thomas Lull’s heart kicks.

“Just tourists,” he lies. “They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same. Should I?”

“I believe they may be my natural parents. It is them I am trying to find; it is because of them that I asked the gods to show me you, Professor Lull.”

Now Thomas Lull stops up short. A truck decorated with images of Siva and his wife and sons rolls past in a wave of dust and Chennai filmi music.

“How did you come by this photograph?”

“It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday by a firm of lawyers in Varanasi, in Bharat.”

“And your adoptive parents?”

“They are from Bangalore. They know what I am doing. They gave me their blessing. I always knew I had been adopted.”

“Have you any photographs of them?”

She scrolls up an image of a coltish teen sitting on a verandah step, knees pressed chastely together, hands wrapped around shins, barricading virginity. She doesn’t wear the Vishnu tilak. Behind her stand a South Indian man and woman in their late forties, dressed in the Western style. They look like people who would be always open and honest and Western with their daughter and never try to interfere with her journey of self-discovery. He thumbs back to the temple photograph.

“And these you say are your natural parents?”

“I believe so.”

Impossible, Thomas Lull wants to say. He keeps silent, though silence binds him in lies. No, you bind yourself in lies wherever you turn, Thomas Lull. Your life is all lies.

“I have no recollection of them,” Aj says. Her voice is flat and neutral, like the shade she wears. She might be describing a tax return. “When I received the photograph, I felt nothing. But I do have one memory; so old it is almost like a dream. It is of a white horse galloping. It comes to me and then it rears up with its hooves in the air, as if it is dancing, just for me. Oh, I can see it. I love that horse very much. I think it is the only thing I have from that time.”

“No explanation from these lawyers?”

“That is correct. I had hoped that you could help me. But it seems you cannot, so I will go now to Varanasi and find these lawyers.”

“They’re about to start a war up there.”

Aj frowns. Her tilak creases. Thomas Lull feels his heart turn.

“Then I shall trust the gods to keep me safe from harm,” she declares. “They showed me where you were from this photograph, they will guide me in Varanasi.”

“These are mighty handy gods.”

“Oh yes, Professor Lull. They have never failed me yet. They are like an aura around people and things. Of course, it took some time before I realised that not everyone could see them. I just thought it was manners that they had all been taught not to say what they knew, and that I was a very rude and unmannerly girl, who blurted out everything she saw. Then I understood that they couldn’t see and didn’t know.”

As a ragged-assed seven-year-old William Blake had seen a London plane tree churning with angels. Only his mother’s intercession prevented a thrashing from his father. Presumptions and lies. A lifetime later the visionary had looked into the eye of the sun and seen an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty . Thomas Lull had squinted at the Kansas sun every morning of his working life and seen nothing but nuclear fusion and the uncertainties of quantum theory. Tension coils at the base of Thomas Lull’s stomach but it is not the old serpent of sexual anticipation he knows from the affairs and the sun-warmed backpacker girls. It is something other. Fascination. Fear.

“Any person or thing?” Aj cocks her head, a gesture between a Western nod and an Indian head-roll. “Who’s that, then?” Thomas Lull points to the tin toddy-stall where Mr. Sooppy sits waving away flies with a tattered copy of the Thiruvananthapuram Times.

“That is Sandeep Sooppy. He is a toddy-seller and he lives at number 1128 Joy of the People Road.”

Thomas Lull feels his scrotum slowly contract in fear. “And you’ve never met him before in your life.”

“I have never met him at all. I never met your friend Dr. Ghotse before, either.”

A green and yellow bus rolls past. Aj does the head-cock thing again, frowning at the hand-painted licence number. “And that bus belongs to Nalakath Mohanan, but it could be someone else driving. The bus is well past its service date. I would not recommend riding on it.”

“It’ll be Nalakath,” Thomas Lull says. His head is wheeling as if he had taken an eighth of the Nepali that Mr. Sooppy sells out the back of his toddy stand. “So, how come these gods of yours can tell the state of Nal’s brakes just by glancing at his licence-plate, but they can’t tell the first thing about these people you say are your natural parents?”

“I can’t see them,” Aj says. “They are like a blind spot in my vision, every time I look at them, everything closes up around them, and I can’t see them.”

“Whoa,” says Thomas Lull. Magic is spooky, but a hole in the magic; that’s scary. “What do you mean, you can’t see them?”

“I can see them as human beings but I can’t see the aura around them, the gods, the information about them and their lives.”

A rising wind rattles the palm blades, rattles Thomas Lull in his spirit. Forces are drawing around him, penning him inside a mandala of lives and coincidences. Blow on, away out of here, man. Don’t get involved in this woman and her mysteries. You’ve lied to her, what you could not bear is if she is not lying to you.

“I can’t help you,” Thomas Lull says. They are at the gate of the Palm Imperial. He can hear the satisfying crisp twang of a tennis rally. The wind confesses in the bamboo, the surf is high again. He will hate to leave this place. “I’m sorry your trip has been wasted.”

Lull leaves her in the lobby. When she has gone to her room he calls in a long-term favour from Achuthanandan the hotel manager and pulls her account details from the register. Ajmer Rao. 385 Valahanka Road, Silver Oak Development, Rajankunte, Bangalore. Eighteen years young. Paid for with an industrial-grade Bank of Bharat black card. A high-calibre financial weapon for a girl working the Kerala Bhati-club circuit. Bank of Bharat. Why not First Karnatic or Allied Southern? A small mystery among the hosts of luminous gods. He tries to spy them as he trails back the straight white road to his home, catch them out of the corner of his eye, fix them in his fleeting vision like floaters. The trees remain trees, the trucks obdurately trucks, and the Indian pond-heron stalks among the floating coir husks.

Aboard Salve Vagina Thomas Lull swiftly sets a stack of folded beach-shirts on top of Blake and closes the bag. Leave and don’t look back. The ones who look back are turned to salt. He leaves a note and some money for Dr. Ghotse to find a local woman and pack the rest into boxes. When he arrives where he’s meant to be he’ll send for his stuff.

On the road he flags down a phatphat and rides in to the bus station, bag clutched on his lap. Bus station is a generosity: the battered Tatas use a wide spot in the road as a turning circle, which they do without regard for buildings, pedestrians, or any other road user. The gaudily decorated buses lounge beside sewing repair stalls and hot snack vendors and the ubiquitous toddy-men. Marutis with interior fans rattling and open-back Mahindra pickups honk their way through the bustle. Five bus sound-systems compete with hits from the movies.

The bus for Nagercoil won’t leave for an hour so Thomas Lull buys himself a toddy and squats on the oily soil under the seller’s umbrella to watch the driver and conductor argue with their passengers and grudgingly wedge their luggage on to the roof rack. The Palm Imperial’s microbus arrives at its usual breakneck speed. The side door slams open and Aj steps out. She has a small, grey bag with her and wears shades and a wrap-round over her pants. Boys mob her, clutching at her bag; informal porters. Thomas Lull gets up from under his shady umbrella, strolls over to her, and lifts her bag.

“All connections to Varanasi this way, ma’am.”

The Nagercoil bus driver sounds his horn. Last call for the south. Last call for peace and dive schools. Thomas Lull steers Aj through the skinny boys towards the Thiruvananthapuram express coach, firing up its biodiesels.

“You have changed your mind?”

“Gentleman’s prerogative. And I’ve always wanted to see a war close up.”

He jumps up on to the steps, pulls Aj up after him. They squeeze down the aisle, find the back seat. Thomas Lull puts Aj by the window grille. Shadows bar her face. The heat is incredible.

The driver sounds his horns a last time, then the bus for the north draws away.

“Professor Lull, I do not understand.” Aj’s short hair stirs as the bus picks up speed.

“Nor do I,” Thomas Lull says, looking at the cramped bus seat with distaste. A goat squirms against him. “But I do know if sharks ever stop moving they drown. And sometime gods are not enough to keep you right. Come on.”

“Where are you going?” Aj says.

“I’m not spending five hours cooped up in here on a day like this.” Thomas Lull raps on the driver’s glass partition. He rolls his paan into his left cheek, nods, stops the bus. “Come on, and bring your bag. They’ll have everything out of it.”

Thomas Lull climbs the roof ladder, extends a hand down to Aj.

“Throw that up here.”

Aj slings the bag up. Two roof-rider boys grab it and stash it safe among the bales of sari fabric. One hand holding her dark glasses in place, Aj scrambles up on to the roof and sits down beside Thomas Lull.

“Oh, this is wonderful!” she exclaims. “I can see everything!”

Thomas Lull bangs on the roof. “To the north!” With a fresh gust of bio-diesel smoke, the driver draws off. “Now, Buteyko method, advanced class.”

Lisa Durnau’s not sure how many times Captain Pilot Beth’s called her But the board is lit up, there’s chatter on the com channels and an air of imminence in the atmosphere.

“Are we coming in?”

“Final approach adjustments,” the little shave-headed woman says. Lisa feels a soft nudge; the attitude jets burping.

“Can you patch this up on my ’hoek?” She’s not going in blind to a rendezvous with a certified, genuine Mysterious Alien Artefact. Captain Pilot Beth hooks the device behind the immobilised Lisa’s ear, seeks the sweet spot in the skull, then touches a few lighted panels on the board. Lisa Durnau’s consciousness explodes into space. Under full prope, the sensation that her body is the ship, that she is flying skin to vacuum, is overwhelming. Lisa Durnau hovers like an angel in the midst of a slowly rotating ballet of space engineering: the laddered wings of a solar power array, a rosette of film-mirrors like a halo of miniature suns; a high-gain antenna loops over her head, an outbound shuttle flashes past. The whole array basks in baking light, webbed by cable to the spider at the dark heart, Darnley 285. Millions of years of accumulated dust have coloured the asteroid only a shade less black than space itself. Then the mirrors shift and Lisa Durnau gasps as a rayed trefoil blazes silver on the surface. Astonishment turns to laughter; someone has stuck a Mercedes logo on a space rock.

Someone not human. The triskelion is vast, two hundred metres along an arm. The huge waltz slows as Pilot Captain Beth matches rotation with the rock and Lisa Durnau forces a mental reorientation. She no longer drifts face-forward towards a crushing dark mass. The asteroid is under her feet and she settles like an angel on to it. Half a kilometre off touchdown, Lisa picks out the clusters of lights of the human base. The domes and converted drop-off tanks are coated in a thick layer of dust attracted by the static thrown up by the construction. The alien triskelion alone shines clear. The shuttle settles towards a cross-target of red navigation beacons. A procession of manipulator arms works diligently dusting the lamps and the launch laser lens. Looking up, she can see them marching hand-over-hand up and down the power and com cables. Preacherman’s daughter Durnau thinks of Bible stories of Jacob’s ladder.

“Okay, I’m going to shut you down now,” the voice of Captain Pilot Beth says. There is a moment of dislocation and she is back and blinking in the cramped cockpit of the transfer boat. Counters scroll down to zero, Lisa feels the lightest of touches, and they are down. Nothing happens for quite a long time. Then there are clanks and clunks and hissings, Pilot Captain Beth unzips her, and Lisa Durnau tumbles out in a wash of cramps and truly astonishing body odour. Darnley 285 possesses insufficient gravity to pull, but enough to give Lisa a sense of direction. This is down. This is left and right and forwards and backwards and up. Another mental reorientation. She is hanging head-down like a bat. Down, in front of her face, the hatch dogs spin and opens out into a short tube narrow as a birth canal. A further hatch rotates and opens. A chunky, crew-cut man sticks his head and shoulders through. His nose and eyes hints at Polynesian genes not too many branches down his family tree and the suit-liner shoulder flashes say US Army. But he has a great smile as he reaches a hand out to Lisa Durnau.

“Dr. Durnau, I’m Sam Rainey, project director. Welcome to Darnley 285, or as our archaeological friends like to call her, the Tabernacle.”

12: MR. NANDHA, PARVATI

The traffic is worse than ever now the karsevaks have a permanent encampment around the imperilled Ganesha statue and Mr. Nandha the Krishna Cop’s yeast infections are punishing him. Worst, he has a briefing with Vik in Information Retrieval. Everything about Vik irritates Mr. Nandha, from his self-crowned nickname (what is wrong with Vikram, a fine, historical name?) to his MTV fashion sense. He is the inverse of the fundamentalists camped out on the roundabout. If Sarkhand is atavistic India, Vik is a victim of the contemporary and fleeting. But what has set Mr. Nandha’s day foul was the almost-argument with Parvati.

She had been watching breakfast television, laughing in her apologetic, hand-lifting way at the hosts gushing over their chati, soapi, celebriti guests.

“This invoice. It seems, it is, quite a lot.”

“Invoice?”

“Ah, the drip irrigation.”

“But it is necessary. You cannot hope to grow brinjal without irrigation.”

“Parvati, there are people do not have water to cook their rice.”

“Exactly, that is why I went for the drip irrigation. It’s the most efficient way. Water conservation is our patriotic duty.”

Mr. Nandha held the sigh until he was out of the room. He authorised payment through his palmer and his aeai informed him that Vik had requested a meeting and gave him a new, unfamiliar route to work avoiding Sarkhand Roundabout. He returned to bid Parvati good-bye and found her watching the top-of-the-hour news.

“Have you heard?” she said. “N. K. Jivanjee says he will get up a rath yatra and ride across the country like Rama until a million peasants march on Sarkhand Roundabout.”

“That N. K. Jivanjee is a rabble-rouser, and his party, too. What we need is national unity against Awadh, not a million karsevak louts marching on Ranapur.”

He kissed Parvati on her forehead. The day’s ills sweetened.

“Good-bye, my bulbul. You will be working on the garden?”

“Oh yes, Krishan will be here at ten. Have a good day. And don’t forget to pick up your suit from the laundry, we’ve that durbar at the Dawars tonight.”

Now Mr. Nandha rides up the outside of the Vajpayee tower in a glass elevator. Stomach acid gnaws at him. He imagines it dissolving him from within, cell by cell.

“Vikram.”

Vikram is not particularly tall nor particularly well shaped but he has not let these deter his fashion sense. The style being: baggy sleeveless T with random text messages flashing up on the smart fabric—they achieve the condition of accidental Zen, so the doctrine goes—squarecut below-the-knee ketchies with athletic tights worn underneath. Finish with Nike Predators at the equivalent of the monthly salary of the upright Sikh on the front door. To Mr. Nandha this looks merely undignified. What he cannot tolerate is the strip of beard from lower lip to Adam’s apple.

“Coffee?”

Vik always has one, in a never-cool cup. Mr. Nandha cannot drink coffee. His acid reflux hates it. He gives his Ayurvedic tea bag to Vikram’s quiet assistant, whose name Mr. Nandha can never remember. The processor unit stands on Vik’s desk. It’s an industry-standard translucent blue cube, charred inside from Mr. Nandha’s EMP assault. Vik has it hooked into an array of probes and monitors.

“Okay,” he says and cracks his fingers. Theater of Bludd whispers from the speakers, muted from its usual thunder out of respect for Monteverdi-loving Mr. Nandha. “It would be a lot easier if you occasionally left us something to work on.”

“I perceived a clear and present danger,” Mr. Nandha says and is struck by revelation. Vik, cool Vik, technological Vik, trance-metal Vik, is jealous of him. He wants the missions, he wants the reserved first-class bogies and the well-cut Ministry suits and the gun that can kill two ways and the pocketful of avatars.

“You left even less than usual,” says Vik, “but there was enough to get a few nanoprobes in and unravel what’s been going on. I presume the programmer.”

“He was the first victim.”

“Aren’t they always? Would have been nice if he could have told us exactly why his home-brew satta aeai was running a background programme buying and selling on the international ventures market.”

“Please clarify,” says Mr. Nandha.

“Morva up in Fiscal will explain it better, but it looks like Pasta-Tikka was unconsciously trading crores of rupees for a venture capital company called Odeco.”

“I shall indeed speak with Morva,” Mr. Nandha decides.

“One thing I can tell you right off.” Vik stabs a line of code on his thin blue screen with his forefinger.

“Ah” says Mr. Nandha with a thin smile. “Our old friend Jashwant the Jain.”

Parvati Nandha sits in a bower of amaranthus on the roof of her housing block. She shields her eyes with her hand to watch another military transport slide in from the east and disappear over New Varanasi’s corporate towers. They and the high-circling black kites are the only interruptions of the peace of her garden in the heart of the city. Parvati goes to the edge, peers over the parapet. Ten stories down the street is thick with people as an arm with blood. She crosses the tiled patio to the raised bed, gathers her sari around her as she stoops to inspect the marrow seedlings. The plastic evaporation tent is opaque with moisture. Already the air on the roof is thirty-seven degrees and the sky is heavy, impenetrable, close, caramel yellow from the smog. Peering between the sheeting and the soil, Parvati inhales the smell of soil and mulch and moisture and growing.

“Let them get on with it themselves.”

Krishan is a big man who can move very quietly, as many big men can, but Parvati felt the cool of his shadow on the soft hairs on the nape of her neck, like the dew on the marrow leaves.

“Oh, you gave me a shock!” she says, demure and flustered, which is a game she likes to play with him.

“Forgive me, Mrs. Nandha.”

“So?” Parvati says.

Krishan takes his wallet and hands Parvati a hundred rupee note. “How did you guess?”

“Oh, it’s obvious,” Parvati says. “It has to be Govind, otherwise why would he track her down to that bad house in Brahmpur East just to mock and deride her? No no no, only a true husband would find his wife, no matter what she had done, and forgive her and bring her home. I knew it was him from the moment he turned up on the doorsteps of that Thai Massage house. That airline pilot disguise did not fool me. Her family may cast her out, but a true husband, never. Now, all he has to do is get his revenge on the director of that SupaSingingStar Show.”

“Khursheed.”

“No, he runs the restaurant. Arvind is the director. Govind will get his revenge, if the Chinese do not get him first about the casino project.”

Krishan throws his hands up in surrender. He is no devotee of Town and Country but he will watch and bet on its improbably complex plot lines if it makes his client happy. It is a strange commission; this farm on top of a downtown apartment block. It hints at compromises. They can be hard, these town and country marriages.

“I will have cook fetch you chai,” Parvati says. Krishan watches her call down the stairs. She has the grace of the country. The city for gloss, the village for wisdom. Krishan wonders about her husband. He knows that he is a civil servant and that he settles his accounts promptly and without argument. With only half a picture, all Krishan can do is speculate on the relationship, the attraction. Not such a speculation,the attraction. He sometimes wonders how he can ever find a wife for himself when even a low-caste girl can catch herself a solid middle-class husband with a glance and a turn of the hand. Garden well. Make money, plant it, grow it into more money. Buy a Maruti and move out to Lotus Gardens. You will marry as well as you can, out there.

“Today,” Krishan announces when he has finished his chai and set the glass down on the wooden wall of the raised bed, “I am thinking, perhaps beans and peas there, to give some kind of screen. You’re open on the left. And here, a quarterbed for Western-style salad vegetables. Western-style salad is the thing at dinner parties; when you entertain, cook can cut fresh.”

“We do not entertain,” Parvati says. “But there is a big reception out at the Dawar house tonight. It will be quite an occasion. It is so lovely out there. So many trees. But Mr. Nandha says it’s inconvenient, too far out. Too much driving. I can have everything here they have out there, and so much more convenient.”

It takes two runs down to the street for Krishan to bring up the old wooden railway sleepers he uses to build the retaining walls for the beds. He lays them out in rough order, then cuts and moulds the damp-proof sheet and lays it in position. Parvati Nandha sits on the rim of the tomato and pepper bed.

“Mrs. Nandha, are you not missing Town and Country?” Krishan asks.

“No no, it is delayed until eleven thirty today, it’s the final day of the test against England.”

“I see,” says Krishan, who adores cricket. When she goes, he might bring up the radio.

“Well, don’t mind me.” He sets to drilling the drain holes in the sleepers but all the time he is aware that Mrs. Nandha is still perched there, watching.

“Krishan,” she says after a time.

“Yes, Mrs. Nandha?”

“It’s just, it’s such a lovely day, and when I’m down there, I hear all the dragging and bumping and hammering up here, but I never see it until it’s finished.”

“I understand,” Krishan the mali says. “You won’t disturb me.”

But she has, and she does.

“Mrs. Nandha,” he says as he bolts the last railway sleeper into place, “I think you are missing your programme.”

“Am I?” Parvati Nandha says. “Oh, I never noticed the time. Not to worry, I can catch the early evening repeat.”

Krishan hefts a sack of compost, slashes it open with his gardening knife, and sprinkles rich brown earth food down through his fingers on to the rooftop.

The burning dog gives off a vile oily smoke. Jashwant the Jain, his broom-boy before him, stands eyes closed. Whether they are closed in prayer or outrage Mr. Nandha cannot say. Within moments the dog is a small intense fireball. The other dogs still surge yipping around Mr. Nandha’s feet, too stupid in their small programmed obsessions to recognise danger.

“You are a vile, cruel man,” says Jashwant the Jain. “Your soul is black as anthracite, you will never attain the light of moksha.”

Mr. Nandha purses his lips and levels his gun at a fresh target, a cartoon scoobi with lugubrious eyes and yellow/brown Friesian-patterned fur. Sensing attention, the thing wags its tail and waddles towards Mr. Nandha through the frenzied sea of robor dogs, tongue lolling. Mr. Nandha considers Animal Welfare charities a ludicrous social affectation. Varanasi cannot feed its children, let alone its abandoned cats and dogs. Sanctuaries for cyberpets occupy an altogether higher level of scorn.

“Sadhu,” Mr. Nandha says. “What do you know of a company called Odeco?”

It is not the first time the Ministry has called on the Mahavira Compassion Home for Artificial Life. It is an ongoing debate in Jainism whether cyberpets and artificial intelligences are soul or non-soul. But Jashwant is old school, a Digambara. All things that live, move, consume, and reproduce are jiva, and so when the kids have tired of the cyberscoobi and the Faithful Friend cyberguard-dog calls the cops out eighteen times a night, there’s a place other than the rubbish piles of Ramnagar to go. More than the occasional harried aeai finds shelter there, too. Mr. Nandha and his avatars have been here twice in the past three years to carry out mass excommunications.

Jashwant had been waiting outside the scruffy Janpur business district pressed-aluminium warehouse to greet him. Someone or thing had tipped him off. There would be nothing here for Mr. Nandha. As Jashwant walked forward to greet the man from the Ministry, his sweeper, a ten-year-old boy, doggedly brushed insects and crawling things from the holy man’s path with a long-handled besom. A Digambara, Jashwant did not wear clothes. He was a big man, heavy with fat around his middle body and constantly flatulent from his holy high-carb diet.

“Sadhu, I am investigating a fatal incident involving an unlicensed aeai. Our research indicates it was downloaded from a transfer point on these premises.”

“Indeed? I find that hard to believe; but, as you are entitled, feel at liberty to check our system. I think you will find all is in legal order. We are an animal welfare charity, Mr. Nandha, not a sundarban.”

Broom boy led the way. He wore only a very brief dhoti and his skin seemed to shine, as if it had been rubbed over with oil flecked with gold. There had been similar boys on his previous visits. All with those dull eyes and too much skin.

Inside the warehouse, the din was as Mr. Nandha remembered, and then some. The concrete floor heaved with thousands of cyberdogs, constantly circling from charge point to charge point. The metal shell rang to their creaking, yapping, humming, singing.

“More than a thousand in the past month,” Jashwant said. “I think is is fear of a war. In sinful times, people reconsider their values. Much is cast off as worthless encumbrance.”

Mr. Nandha drew his gun and aimed it at a stumpy little lap dog sitting up on its back legs, front paws and tail waving, pink plastic tongue waggling. He shot the dog. Now Indra the Thunderer has the slowly advancing scoobi-pet in his sights.

“Sadhu, did you supply an unlicensed Level One Artificial Intelligence to Pasta-Tikka of Nawada?”

Jashwant twists his head in pain but that is not the correct answer. The em-bolt sends the cartoon dog a metre and a half into the air. It lands on its back, thrashes once, and starts to smoke.

“Bad, evil man!”

The sweeper has his little besom raised, as if he might whisk Mr. Nandha and his sin away. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there are infected needles among the bristles. Mr. Nandha scares the catamite down.

“Sadhu.”

“Yes!” Jashwant says. “Of course I did, you know that. But it was only resting in our network.”

“Where did it come from, sadhu?” Mr. Nandha says, raising his weapon. He draws aim on a waddling steel dachshund, all smiles and clog-feet, then swings the barrel to bear on a beautiful, top-end cyber-collie, indistinguishable from the flesh right down to the live-plastic coat and fully interactive eyes. Jashwant the Jain lets slip a small squeak of spiritual anguish.

“Sadhu, I must insist.”

Jashwant works his mouth.

Indra targets, aims, and fires in one flick of Mr. Nandha’s intention. The cybercollie lets out a long, shrieking keen that silences every other yap and wuff in the warehouse, snaps head to tail in an arc that would crack any flesh dog’s spine, and spins on its side on the concrete.

“Well, sadhu?”

“Stop it stop it stop it, you will go to hell!” Jashwant shrills.

Mr. Nandha levels the gun and one shot puts the thing out of its misery. He picks a gorgeous tiger-stripe vizla.

“Badrinath!” Jashwant screams. Mr. Nandha clearly hears him fart in fear. “Badrinath sundarban!”

Mr. Nandha slides his gun into his jacket pocket.

“You have been of great assistance. Radhakvishna. Most interesting. Please do not attempt to leave the premises, police officers will arrive shortly.”

As he departs, Mr. Nandha notices that the broom boy is also quite quick with the fire extinguisher.

Ram Sagar Singh, Bharat’s Voice of Cricket, burbles the tail-end batting order on the solar-powered radio. Dozing in the shade of the hibiscus-trellis, Krishan is lulled into memory. All his life, that slow voice has spoken to him, closer and wiser than a god.

It was a school day but his father had woken him before light.

“Naresh Engineer bats today at ul-Huq.”

Neighbour Thakur was taking a load of shoe leather up to his buyer in Patna and had been only too happy to give Kudrati father and son a ride in his pickup. A low-caste lift, but this was in all likelihood the last time Naresh Engineer would ever rake the bat.

The Kudrati land had come from the hands of Gandhi and Nehru; taken from the zamindar and given to the tillers of Biharipur. Its histore was his pride, not just the Kudrati inheritance but the heritage of the nation itself; its name was India, not Bharat, not Awadh or Maratha or States of Bengal. That was why Krishan’s father must see the greatest batsman India had produced in a generation step to the crease; for the honour of a name.

Krishan was eight years old and his first time in a city. The StarAsia sports channels were no preparation for the crowds outside the Moin ul-Huq stadium. He had never seen so many people in one place. His father led him surely through the crowd that swirled, patterns within patterns, like printed fabric.

“Where are we going?” Krishan asked, aware that they were moving against a general gyre towards the turnstiles.

“My cousin Ram Vilas, your grandfather’s nephew, has tickets.”

He remembers looking around at the hive of faces, felt his father’s sure tug on his hand. Then he realised that the crowd was bigger than his father had imagined. Dreaming wide green spaces, stands in the distance, polite applause, he had forgotten to arrange a meeting place with cousin Ram Vilas. Now he was going to spiral his way around the ul-Huq ground, if necessary checking every face.

After an hour in the heat the crowd was thin but Krishan’s father ploughed on. Inside the concrete oval bursts of loudspeaker cackle introduced the players; the Indians greeted them with bursts of applause and cheering. Father and son both knew now that his grandfather’s nephew had never been here. There never were any tickets. In the sloping shadow of the main stand was a nimki seller. Mr. Kudrati seized his son’s hand again and hauled him across the concrete. When they got within smelling distance of the rancid, hot oil, Krishan saw what had galvanised his father. Balanced on the glass display counter was a radio, blatting stupid pop.

“My son, the test match,” his father gibbered at the vendor. He thrust a flutter of rupees at the hot snack seller. “Tune, tune, retune! And some of those pappadi, too.”

The vendor reached in to the hot eats with a cone of newspaper.

“No no no!” Krishan’s father almost screamed with frustration. “First, retune. Then the food. 97.4.” Ram Sagar Singh came through in his BBC Received Pronunciation and Krishan sat down with the paper cone of hot pappadi, back against the warm steel cart to listed to the match. And that is how he remembers Naresh Engineer’s last innings, sitting by a nimki vendor’s cart outside the Moin ul-Huq cricket ground, listening to Ram Sagar Singh and the faint, half-imagined crack of the bat, and then the rising roar of the crowd behind him; all day as the shadows moved across the concrete car park.

Krishan Kudrati smiles in his doze under the climbing hibiscus. A darker shadow moves across his closed eyelids, a waft of cool. He opens his eyes. Parvati Nandha stands over him, looking down.

“I should really be telling you off, sleeping on my time.”

Krishan glances at the clock on his radio. He still has ten minutes of his time but he sits up and flicks the radio off. The players are on lunch and Ram Sagar Singh is trawling through his compendious tallboy of cricket facts.

“I just wanted to see what you thought of my new bracelets for the reception tonight,” Parvati says, one hand on hip like a dancer, the other weaving in front of him.

“If you held it still, I might actually see it.”

Metal catches light, dazzling Krishan. Instinctively, he reaches out. Without thought, his hand is around her wrist. Realisation paralyses him for a moment. Then Krishan releases his grasp.

“That’s very fine,” he says. “Is it gold?”

“Yes,” Parvati says. “My husband likes to buy me gold.”

“Your husband is very good to you. You will be number one star attraction at this party.”

“Thank you.” Parvati ducks her head, now ashamed at her forwardness, “You are most kind.”

“No, I am just speaking the simple truth.” Made bold by the sun and the heavy scent of soil, Krishan dares: “Forgive me, but I don’t think you get to hear that as much as you should.”

“You are a very forward man!” Parvati scolds, then, gently, “Is that the cricket you are listening to?”

“The second test from Patna. We are two hundred and eight for five.”

“Cricket is not a thing I understand,” Parvati says. “It seems very complex and hard to win.”

“Once you understand the rules and the strategies, it is the most fascinating of sports,” Krishan says. “It is the nearest the English come to Zen.”

“I should like to know about it. It’s all the talk at these social events. I feel stupid, standing there not able to say anything. I might not know about politics or the economy, but I might be able to learn cricket. Perhaps you could teach me?”

Mr. Nandha drives through New Varanasi to Dido and Aeneas, English Chamber Opera recording, which Mr. Nandha notes for its rough approach to the English Baroque. On the edge of his sensory envelope, like a rumour of monsoon, is this evening’s durbar at the Dawars. He would welcome an excuse not to go. Mr. Nandha fears Sanjay Dawar will announce the happy conception of an heir. A Brahmin, he suspects. That will start Parvati again. He has repeatedly made his position clear, but all she hears is a man telling her he will not give her babies. This depresses Mr. Nandha.

A discord in his auditory lobes: a call from Morva, in Fiscal. Of all of his people in the Ministry, Morva is the only one for whom Mr. Nandha has any respect. There is a beauty and elegance to the paper trail. It is detection at its purest and holiest. Morva never has to leave his office, never faces the streets, never threatens violence or carries a weapon, but his thoughts go out from his desk on the twelfth floor across the whole wide world with a few gestures of his hand and blinks of the eye. Pure intellect, disembodied as he flits from shell company to tax haven, off-shore datahaven to escrow account. The abstraction of his work excites Mr. Nandha: entities with no physical structure at all. Pure flow; the movement of intangible money through minute clusters of information.

He has chased down Odeco. It is a secretive investment company sheltered in a Caribbean tax haven, much given to throwing megadollars into blue sky. Its investments in Bharat include the Artificial Intelligence unit at the University of Bharat, Varanasi; Ray Power Research and Development division, and a number of Darwinware hothouses hovering on the edge of legality breeding low-level aeais. Not the aeai that leaped out of the backyard betting scheme in Pasta-Tikka and ran amok, Mr. Nandha thinks. Even a high-risk venture company like Odeco would not risk dealing with the sundarbans.

Americans fear these jungle places as they fear everything outside their own borders and co-opt Mr Nandha and his kind to wage their unending war against the wild aeais, but much of Mr. Nandha admires the datarajas. They have energy and enterprise. They have pride and a name in the world. The sundarbans of Bharat and the States of Bengal, Bangalore and Mumbai, New Delhi and Hyderabad resound globally. They are the abodes of the mythical Generation Threes, aeais sentient beyond sentience, as high over human intelligences as gods.

The Badrinath sundarban physically occupies a modest fifteenth-floor apartment on Vidyapeeth. Dataraja Radhakrishna’s neighbours doubtless never suspect that next door live ten thousand cybernetic devis. As he hoots his way in to park through the mopeds Mr. Nandha summons his avatars. Jashwant had been warned. Datarajas have so many feelers, trembling to the vibrations in the global web, that is almost as if they are prescient. As he locks the car Mr. Nandha watches as the streets and skyline fill with gods, huge as mountains. Siva scans the wireless traffic, Krishna the extra- and intranet, Kali raises her sickle above the satellite dishes of New Varanasi to reap anything copying itself out of Badrinath. Harm’s our delight and mischief all our skill, sings the English Chamber Orchestra Chorus.

And it all goes white. A shout of static. The gods are wiped from the skyline. Dido and Aeneas shorts in mid-continuo. Mr. Nandha rips the ’hoek from his ear.

“Make way, make way!” he shouts at the pedestrians. In his first week with the Ministry Mr. Nandha experienced firsthand a full-strength EM pulse. There is no mistaking its signature. As he sprints up the steps to the foyer, thumbing for police support on his sputtering palmer, he thinks he sees a something, too big for a bird, too small for an aircraft, loop away from the apartment building and vanish into the Varanasi sky-glow. Seconds later the fascia of the fifteenth-floor apartment explodes in a gout of flame.

“Run, flee!” Mr. Nandha shouts as the smoking debris rains down on the gawpers but the one, huge, gagging thought in his head is that he won’t get his suit from Mukherjee’s now.

13: SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN, NAJIA

Prime Minister Sajida Rana wears gold and green today. Her cabinet knows to expect matters of national pride when she is dressed in the flag. She stands at the east end of the long teak table in the luminous marble cabinet room of the Bharat Sabha. Gilt framed oils of forebears and political inspirations line the long wall. Her father, Diljit Rana, in his judge’s robes, father of the nation. Her grandfather, Shankar Rana, in his English Queen’s Counsel silk. Jawarhalal Nehru, aloof and vaguely fearful in his sweetly cut suit, as if he had seen the price future generations would pay for the quick, dirty deal he did with Mountbatten. The Mahatma, father of all, with his bowl and wheel. Lakshmi Bai, warrior Rani, standing in the stirrups of her Maratha cavalry horse commanding the charge on Gwalior. And the autocrats of that other mighty Indian dynasty to share the name Gandhi, Sonia; assassinated Rajiv; Indira the martyr, Mother India.

The marble walls and ceiling of the cabinet chamber have been worked into an intricate filigree of Hindu mythology. Yet the acoustic is dry and resonant. Even whispers ring and carry. Sajida Rana places her hands on the polished teak, rests her weight on them, a fighter’s stance.

“Can we survive if we strike at Awadh?”

V. S. Chowdhury, Defence Minister, turns his hooded, hawk eyes to his leader. “Bharat will survive. Varanasi will survive. Varanasi is eternal.” There is no doubt in the echoing hall what he means.

“Can we beat them?”

“No. Not a hope. You saw Shrivastava on the White House shaking hands with McAuley on his Most Favoured Nation status.”

“It’ll be the Shanker Mahal next,” says Energy Secretary Vajubhai Patel. “The Americans have been sniffing around Ray Power. The Awadhis won’t need to invade, they can just buy us up. Last I heard, old Ray was down at Manikarna ghat doing his surya namaskar.”

“Then who’s running the bloody shop?” Chowdhury asks.

“An astrophysicist, a packaging salesman, and a self-styled comedian.”

“Gods save us, we should surrender right now,” Chowdhury mutters.

“I cannot believe what I am hearing around this table,” says Sajida Rana. “Like old women around a pump. The people want a war.”

“The people want rain,” says Biswanath, Minister of Environmental Affairs, stiffly. “And that is all they want. A monsoon.”

Sajida Rana turns now to her most trusted aide. Shaheen Badoor Khan is lost in marble, his attention seduced by vulgar pagan deities scrambling over each other’s bodies, up the walls and across the roof. Then he mentally erases the grosser contours, the sculpted cones of the breasts, the crude jut of the linga, reduces them to an androgynous blur of marble flesh, flowing into and through and out of itself. Vision jumps to an angle of cheekbone, an elegantly curved nape, a smooth perfect curve of hairless scalp glimpsed in an airport corridor.

“Mr. Khan, what did you get from Bengal?”

“It is fantasy,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says. “As always, the Banglas want to demonstrate they can engineer, a high-tech solution to a problem. The iceberg is a PR stunt. They are almost as thirsty as we are.”

“This is it precisely.” Interior Minister Ashok Rana speaks now. Shaheen Badoor Khan has no issue with nepotism, but it should at least aspire to fitting the man to the job. In pretence of making a point, Ashok will deliver a short speech in support of his sister’s policy, whatever it is. “What the people need is water and if that takes a war.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan gives the slightest of sighs, enough for the brother to catch. Defence Minister Chowdhury chimes in. He has a high and querulous voice that strikes unpleasant harmonics from the squabbling marble apsaras.

“The Land Forces Strategic Development Unit’s best model involves a preemptive strike on the dam itself. Send a small commando force in by air, take the dam, hold it until the last moment, and then withdraw across the border. Meanwhile we press the United Nations for an international peace-keeping force on the dam.”

“If the Americans do nor call for sanctions first,” Shaheen Badoor Khan comments. A murmur of agreement rolls around the long dark table.

“Withdraw?” Ashok Rana is incredulous. “Our brave jawans strike a mighty blow against Awadh and they turn tail and run? How will that look on the streets of Patna? This Strategic Development Unit, have they no izzat?”

Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the climate in the room change. This balls-talk of pride and brave soldiers and cowardice is stirring them. “If I might offer an opinion,” he says into the perfect, resonant silence.

“Your opinions are always welcome here,” Sajida Rana says.

“I believe that the greatest threat this government faces comes from the orchestrated demonstrations at Sarkhand Roundabout, not our dam dispute with Awadh,” he says carefully. Voices on every side of the table raise objection. Sajida Rana lifts her hand and there is quiet.

“Continue, Secretary Khan.”

“I am not saying there will not be war, though I think my position on agression towards Awadh is clear to everyone by now.”

“Woman’s position,” Ashok Rana says. Shaheen hears Ashok whisper to his aide, “Muslim’s position.”

“I am talking about threats to this government and clearly, the biggest threat we face is internal division and civil unrest fomented by the Shivaji. As long as our party enjoys mass popular support for any military action against Awadh, any diplomatic negotiations will come through this cabinet. And we are agreed that military force is purely a tool to get the Awadhis to the negotiating table, despite Ashok’s high regard for our military prowess.” Shaheen Badoor Khan holds Ashok Rana’s eyes long enough to tell him he is a fool appointed above his competence. “However, if the Awadhis and their American patrons see a political alternative with wide popular support in Bharat, then N. K. Jiwanjee will set himself up as peacemaker. The man who stopped the war, made the Ganga run again, and brought down the proud Ranas who shamed Bharat. We will not see the inside of this room for a generation. This is behind that play-acting over Sarkhand Roundabout. It is not the moral outrage of the Honest Hinduvavadi of Bharat. Jivanjee plans to raise the mob against us. He is going to ride that Chariot of Jaggarnath right up Chandni Boulevard into this room.”

“Is there anything we can arrest him on?” Foreign Minister Dasgupta asks.

“Back taxes?” Vipul Narvekar, Ashok Rana’s PA, suggests to a murmur of laughter.

“I have a suggestion,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says. “Let N. K. Jivanjee have what he wants, but only when we want him to have it.”

“Explain please, Mr. Khan.” Prime Minister Rana leans forward now.

“I say, give him his head. Let him call up his million staunch believers. Let him ride his war chariot with his Shivaji dancing behind him. Let him be the voice of Hindutva, let him make the war-mongering speeches and stir up the offended Bharati pride. Let him drive the country into war. If we show ourselves to be doves, then he will become the hawk. We know he can stir a mob to violence. That could be directed against Awadhis in the border towns. They’ll appeal to Delhi to protect them, the whole thing will escalate. Mr. Jivanjee needs no persuasion to ride his rath yatra right up to the Kunda Khadar dam. The Awadhis will strike back; then we move in as the injured party. The Shivaji are discredited as the ones who started the whole thing; the Awadhis are on the back foot with their Americans; and we go to the negotiating table as the party of reason, sanity, and diplomacy.”

Sajida Rana stands upright.

“Subtle as ever, Secretary Khan.”

“I am a mere civil servant.” Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head obediently but catches Ashok Rana’s eye. He is furious. Chowdhury speaks up.

“With respect, Secretary Khan, I think you underestimate the will of the Bharati people. There is more to Bharat than Varanasi and problems with its Metro stations. I know that in Patna we are simple, patriotic people. There, everyone believes a war will unite popular opinion and marginalise N. K. Jivanjee. It is a dangerous tactic, playing subtle games at times of national danger. The same Ganga flows through us as flows through you, you are not the only thirsty ones here. As you say, Prime Minister, the people need a war. I do not want to go to war, but I believe we must, and strike fast and strike first. Then we negotiate from a position of strength and when there is water in the pumps, that is when Jivanjee and his karsevaks will be seen as the rabble they are. Prime Minister, when have you ever misjudged the mood of the people of Bharat?”

Nods, grunts. The climate is shifting again. Sajida Rana stands at the head of her table of ministers, looking over her ancestors and influencers as Shaheen Badoor Khan has seen at so many cabinet meetings before, calling on them to sanctify the decision she is about to make for Bharat.

“I hear you, Mr. Chowdhury, but there is merit in Mr. Khan’s proposal. I am minded to try it. I will let N. K. Jivanjee do our work for us, but keep the army on three-hour standby. Gentlemen, reports to my office mail by sixteen hundred today, I will circulate directives by seventeen hundred. Thank you, this meeting is closed.”

Cabinet and advisors rise as Sajida Rana turns and strides out in a furl colours, her secretarial staff falling in behind her. She is a tall, thin, striking woman, no trace of grey in her hair despite a first grandchild imminent. Shaheen Badoor Khan catches a ghost of Chanel as she sweeps past. He glances once at the sex divinities crawling all over the walls and roof, suppresses a shudder.

In the corridor, a touch at his cuff: the Defence Minister. “Mr. Khan.”

“Yes, how can I help you, Minister?”

Chowdhury draws Shaheen Badoor Khan into a window alcove. Minister Chowdhury leans towards him, says quietly and without inflection, “A successful meeting, Mr. Khan, but might I remind you of your own words? You are a mere civil servant.”

He tucks his briefcase under his arm and hurries on down the corridor.

Hungover on blood, Najia Askarzadah wakes late in her backpackers’ berth at the Imperial International. She staggers into the communal kitchen in search of chai, steers past Australians complaining about how flat the landscape is and that they can’t get decent cheese, makes a glass and gets back to her room, mobbed by horrors. She remembers how the microsabres leaped for each other and she had risen with the crowd with the blood roar in her throat. It’s a viler and dirtier feeling than she ever had from any drugs or sex but she’s addicted.

Najia has thought much about her attraction to danger. Her parents had brought her up a Swede, permissively educated, sexually liberal, Westward-looking. They brought no photographs into their exile, no souvenirs, no words or language or sense of geography. The only Afghan thing about Najia Askarzadah is her name. Her parents’ opus was so complete that it was not until her first term at university, when her tutor had suggested she research an essay on post-Civil War Afghan politics that Najia understood that she had an entire, buried identity. That identity opened up beneath Najia Askarzadah the little liberal arts Scandinavian poly-sexual and swallowed her for three months in which the essay became the foundation of the work that would become her final thesis. There is a life she could have led and her career so far has been foreplay with it. Bharat on the edge of water war is the preparation for her return to Kabul.

She sits on the cool cool veranda of the Imperial and checks her mail The magazine likes the story. Likes the story a lot. Wants to pay her eight hundred dollars for the story. She thumbs agreement to the contract through to the United States. One step on the path to high Kabul, but only one step. She has a next story to plan. It will be a politics story. Her next interview will be Sajida Rana. Everyone’s after Sajida Rana. What’s the angle? It’s woman to woman. Prime Minister Rana, you are a politician, a leader, a dynastic figure in a country divided over a traffic roundabout, where men are so desperate to marry they pay the the dowry, where monster children who age half as fast as baseline humanity assume the privileges and tastes of adults before they are biologically ten, that is dying of thirst and about to start a war because of it. But before any of that, you are a woman in a society where women of your class and education have vanished behind a new purdah. What was it that enabled you, virtually alone, to escape that silk cage of cherishing?

Not a bad line that. Najia flips her palmer open. As she is about to thumb it in her palmer chirps. It’ll be Bernard. Not very Tantra, going to a fighting club. Not very Tantra, going with another man. Not that he’s possessive, so he doesn’t need to forgive her, but what she needs to ask herself is, is this going to advance me down the path to samadhi?

“Bernard,” says Najia Askarzadah, “fuck off and stay fucked off. I thought you didn’t do jealousy or is that just another thing you tell women like the Tantric thing with your dick?”

“Ms. Askarzadah?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were something else.” She’s listening to a lot of air noise. “Hello? Hello?”

Then: “Ms. Askarzadah. Be at the Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road, within the next half hour.” An educated voice, lightly accented.

“Hello? Who are you, look, I’m sorry about.”

“The Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road.”

And he’s gone. Najia Askarzadah looks at the palmer as if it is a scorpion in her hand. No call back, no explanation, no identification. She taps in the address the voice gave her, the palmer displays a route map. She’s out the gate on her moped within the minute. Deodar Electrical is part of the old Town and Country studio lot, broken up into small businesses when the series went virtual and moved into Indiapendent’s Ranapur headquarters. The map leads her to the huge double doors of the main studio, where a teen in a long kurta and waistcoat sits at a table listening to cricket on the radio. Najia notices he wears a Shivaji trident medallion, like the one she had seen around Satnam’s neck.

“Someone called me, told me to come here. I’m Najia Askarzadah.” The youth looks her up and down. He has an attempted moustache. “Ah. Yes, we were told to be expecting you.”

“Told? By who?”

“Please come with me.”

He opens a small access door in the gates. They duck through. “Oh, wow,” says Najia Askarzadah.

The rath yatra stands fifteen metres high under the studio floods, a red and gold pyramid of tiers and parapets, riotous with gods and adityas. It is a mobile temple. At its apex, almost touching the studio girders is a plexiglass cupola containing an effigy of Ganesha, throned, the people’s god, claimed by the Shivaji. The base, a wide balcony for party workers and PR, rests on the backs of twin flatbeds.

“The trucks are ganged together,” the guide says enthusiastically. “They will always move in tandem, see? We will fit ropes if people want to be seen pulling, but Shivaji is not about exploiting anyone.”

Najia’s never seen a space launch, never even been close to rocketry, but she imagines the launcher assembly buildings share this buzz and industry: embraced in cranes and gantries, workers in coveralls and spray masks working up and down the golden flanks, light joinery robots poking their glue-gun probosces into crannies and corners. The air is dopey with paint and glass fibre fumes, the steel shed rings with power staplers, drills, and buzz saws. Najia watches a Vasu go up on a hoist. Two workers with Shivaji stickers on their coveralls glue it into position at the centre of a rosette of dancing attendants around a throned Vishnu. And at the centre, the golden ziggurat of the holy vessel. The chariot of Jaggarnath. The juggernaut itself.

“Please, feel free to take photographs,” the teen aide says. “There is no charge.” Najia’s hands shake as she calls up the camera on the palmer. She goes in among the workers and machines and clicks until her memory is full.

“Can I, I mean, the papers?” she stammers at the Shivajeen, who seems to be the only person at the studio in any form of authority.

“Oh yes,” he says. “I am presuming that is why you were brought here.”

The palmer calls softly Again, an anonymous number. Najia answers carefully.

“Yes?”

It is not college-voice. It’s a woman.

“Hello, I have a call for you from N. K. Jivanjee.”

“Who? What? Hello?” Najia stammers.

“Hello, Ms. Askarzadah.” It’s him. It really is him. “Well, what do you think?” She has no words. She swallows, mouth dry. “It’s, um, impressive.”

“Good. It’s supposed to be. It cost a damn pile of money, too, but I do think the team has done an outstanding job, don’t you? A lot of them are ex-television set designers. But I’m glad you like it. I think a lot of people are going to be equally impressed. Of course, the only ones that really matter are the Ranas.” N. K. Jivanjee’s laugh is a deep, chocolate gurgle. “Now, Ms. Askarzadah. You do understand you’ve been given a highly privileged preview that will make you a goodly sum of money from the press? No doubt you’re asking, what’s this about? Simply that the party I have the honour to lead occasionally has information it does not wish to release through conventional channels. You will be this unconventional channel. Of course, you do realise that we may suspend this privilege at any time. My secretary has a short prepared statement that she will forward to your palmer. It’s a piece from me on the pilgrimage; my loyalty to Bharat, my intention that the pilgrimage be a focus for national unity in the face of a common enemy. It’s all checkable back to my press office. Can I expect to see something in the evening editions? Good. Thank you, Ms. Askarzadah, bless you.”

The prepared statement comes through with a discreet chime. Najia scans it. It is as N. K. Jivanjee said. She feels as if she has been hit across the front of the head with a big, soft, heavy bat. She hardly hears the Shivaji boy ask, “Was that him? Was it really him? I couldn’t make it all out, what was he saying?”

N. K. Jivanjee. Anyone can get Sajida Rana. But N. K. Jivanjee. Najia Askarzadah hugs herself with joy. Scoop! Exclusive! Pictures copyright Najia Askarzadah. They’ll be syndicated around the planet before the ink’s dry on the contract. She’s on the bike, course set for the Bharat Times office, swinging out through the wire gates into the path of an oncoming school bus before the thought penetrates the amazed numbness.

Why her?

Mumtaz Huq the ghazal singer will perform at ten. Shaheen Badoor Khan intends to be well away by then. It is not that he dislikes Mumtaz Huq. She features on several compilations on his car system, though her tone is not as pure as R. A. Vora. But he does dislike parties like these. He clutches his glass of pomegranate juice in two hands and clings to the shadows where he can peek at his watch unseen.

The Dawar garden is a cool, moist oasis of pavilions and canopies among sweet-smelling trees and precision-pruned shrubs. It speaks of money and bribes to the water department. Candle lanterns and oil torches provide barbarous illumination. Waiters in Rajput costume move among the guests with silver trays of eats and alcohol. Musicians saw and tootle to an electric bass from a pandal under a harsingar tree. Here Mumtaz Huq will perform and afterwards there will be fireworks. That is what Neelam Dawar has been telling all her guests. Ghazals and fireworks. Rejoice!

Bilquis Badoor Khan seeks her husband out in his place of concealment.

“Darling heart, at least try and make an effort.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan deals his wife a society kiss, one on each side.

“No, I’m staying here. Either they recognise me and all they want to talk about is war, or they don’t and it’s schools, share prices, and cricket.”

“Cricket—that reminds me.” Bilquis touches Shaheen’s sleeve lightly, an invitation into conspiracy. “Shaheen, this is priceless. I don’t know where Neelam gets them. Anyway, this terrible grubby little country wife, you know the sort of thing, straight off the Bihar bus, married up and everyone’s got to know about it. There she is, over there. Anyway, we’re standing around talking and she’s hovering, obviously wanting to get her two rupees in, poor thing. We get round to the cricket and Tandon’s century and she says, wasn’t it marvellous, on the eighth and final ball, just before tea. I mean to say. Eight balls an over. Just priceless!”

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks at the woman where she stands alone under a pipal tree, a beaker of lassi in hand. The hand around the silver mug is long and slender, patterned with henna. Her wedding ring is tattooed on her finger. The woman carries herself with country elegance, tall, refined in an unaffected, unsophisticated way. She looks unutterably sad to Shaheen Badoor Khan.

“Priceless, yes,” he says, turning away from his wife. “Ah, Khan! I thought you’d show your heathen face here.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan had tried to steer himself away from Bal Ganguly but the big man can smell news like a Luna moth. It is his purpose and passion as proprietor of Varanasi’s premier Hindi news site. Though he is never without his posse of unmarried stringers—the kind of parties he is invited to draws the kind of women they hope to marry—Ganguly is an obdurate bachelor. Only a fool works his life away building his own cage, he says. Shaheen Badoor Khan also knows that Ganguly is a big giver to the Shivaji.

“So, what’s the word from the Sabha? Shall I start digging a shelter or just stockpile rice?”

“I’m sorry to disappoint, but no war this week.” Shaheen Badoor Khan glances around for escape. The bachelors circle around him.

“You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if Rana declares war and half an hour later sends the bulldozers into Sarkhand Roundabout.” Ganguly laughs at his own joke. He has a big, gurgling, infectious laugh. Shaheen Badoor Khan finds himself smiling. The devotees compete for who laughs loudest. They check to see if any women are looking. “No, but come on, Khan. War is a serious matter. It sells serious amounts of advertising space.” The unattached women in their own private pavilion glance past their chaperone, smiling but shy of eye contact. Shaheen Badoor Khan’s attention is again on the country wife under the pipal tree. Between worlds. Neither one nor the other. That is the worst place to be.

“We won’t go to war,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says smoothly. “If five thousand years of military history has taught us anything, it’s that we aren’t good at wars. We like the pretence and the posturing, but when it comes to battle, we’d rather not. That’s how the British rolled right over us. We sat in our defence positions and they kept coming, and they kept coming and we thought, well; they’ll stop sometime soon. But they just kept coming, bayonets fixed. It was the same in ’oh-two and ’twenty-eight up in Kashmir, it will be the same at Kunda Khadar. We’ll pile our troops on our side of the dam, they’ll pile theirs on their side, we’ll exchange a few mortar rounds and then everyone can march away, izzat satisfied.”

“They weren’t dying of drought in ’twenty-eight,’” one of the paperboys says angrily. Ganguly pulls up, next witticism aborted. Bachelor reporters do not speak out of turn to Prime Ministerial Private Secretaries. Shaheen Badoor Khan uses the embarrassment to duck out of the conversation. The low-caste girls follow him with their eyes. Power has the same smell, town or country. Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head to them, but Bilquis is on an intercept course with her former lawyer friends. The Ladies Who Used to Litigate. Bilquis’s career, like a generation of educated working women, has vanished behind a veil of social functions and restrictions. No law, no imam, no caste tradition took them out of the workplace. Why work, when five men claw for every job and any educated, socially adept woman can marry into money and prestige? Welcome to the glass zenana.

The clever women are talking now about a widow of their acquaintance; an accomplished woman, a Shivaji activist, quite intelligent. No sooner back from the burning ghat and what do you know? Bankrupt. Not a paisa. Every last stick of furniture gone as surety. Twenty forty-seven, and still an educated woman can be turned out on to the streets. At least she hasn’t had to go to, you know. The “O” people. Has anyone heard from recently? Must look her up. Girls need to stick together. Solidarity, all that. Can’t trust men.

Musicians take up positions in their pandal, tuning, striking notes off each other. Shaheen Badoor Khan will make his getaway when Mumtaz Huq comes on. There is a tree near the gate, he can hide in it’s shadows and when the applause starts, slip out and call a taxi. Another has seen the opportunity, a man in a rumpled, civil servant’s suit holding a full flute of Omar Khayyam. His hands around the glass are quite refined, as are his features, but he carries a heavy five o’clock shadow. He has great dark, animal eyes, with animal fear in them, in the way that animals instinctively first fear everything.

“Do you not fancy the music?” Shaheen Badoor Khan says.

“I prefer classical,” the man says. He has an English-educated voice.

“I’ve always thought Indira Shankar very underrated myself.”

“No, I mean Classical; Western Classical. Renaissance, Baroque.”

“I’m aware of it but I don’t really have the taste for it. I’m afraid it all sounds like hysteria to me.”

“That’s the Romantics,” says the man with a private smile but he has decided Shaheen Badoor Khan shares some kindred feeling with him. “So, what line are you in yourself?”

“I am a civil servant,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says. The man gives his answer consideration.

“So am I,” he says. “Might I ask what area?”

“Information management,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says.

“Pest control,” the man says. “Congratulations then to our hosts.” He raises his glass and Shaheen Badoor Khan observes that the man’s suit is smudged with dust and smoke. “Yes, indeed,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says. “A fortunate child indeed.” The man grimaces.

“I cannot agree with you there, sir. I have considerable issues with geneline therapy.”

“Why so?”

“It is a recipe for revolution.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan starts at the vehemence in the man’s voice. He continues, “The last thing Bharat needs is another caste. They may call themselves Brahmins, but in fact they are the true Untouchables.” He remembers himself. “Forgive me, I know nothing about you, for all I know.”

“Two sons,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says. “The old way. Safely at university, God be praised, where no doubt they’re at things like this every night, prowling for wedding material.”

“We are a deformed society,” the man says.

Shaheen Badoor Khan wonders if this man is a djinn sent to to test him for everything he speaks is in Shaheen’s own heart. He was remembering a young married couple, their careers dazzling, their path luminous, the parents so proud, so delighted for their children. And, of course, the grandchildren, the grandsons. Everything you have, save this one thing, a son. A son and spare. Then the appointments with the doctors they had not asked to see, and the families poring over the results. Then the bitter little pills, and the bloody times. Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot count how many daughters he flushed away. His hands have twisted the limbs of Bharati society.

He would talk more with the man, but his attention is turned to the party. Shaheen follows his direction: the woman Bilquis had derided, the good-looking country woman, makes her way through the excited crowd. The arrival of the diva is imminent.

“My own wife,” the man says. “I am summoned. Do excuse me. A pleasure to have met you.” He sets his champagne down on the ground and goes to her. Applause as Mumtaz Huq arrives on the stage. She smiles and smiles and smiles to her audience. Her first song tonight will be a tribute to the generous hosts and a hope for joy, long life, and prosperity for their graced child. The players strike up. Shaheen Badoor Khan leaves.

Shaheen Badoor Khan’s raised hand fails to stop any of the infrequent taxis in this private-mobility suburb. A phatphat drums past, turn at a gap in the concrete central reserve, and pulls over to the verge. Shaheen Badoor Khan starts towards it but the driver twists the throttle and surges away. Shaheen Badoor Khan glimpses a shadowed figure in swathes of voluminous clothing beneath the plastic canopy. The phatphat again crosses the median strip, rattles towards Shaheen Badoor Khan. A face peeks out from the bubble, a face elegant, alien, fey. Cheekbones cast shadows. Light glints from the hairless, mica-dusted scalp.

“You are welcome to share my ride.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan reels back as if a djinn has called the secret name of his soul. “Not here, not here,” he whispers.

The nute blinks yts eyes, a slow kiss. The engine races, the little phatphat pulls into the night traffic. Streetlight catches on silver around the nute’s neck, a Siva trishul.

“No,” Shaheen Badoor Khan pleads. “No.”

He is a man of responsibilities. His sons have grown and left, his wife is all but a stranger to him these years but he has a war, a drought, a nation to care for. Yet the directions he gives to the Maruti driver who finally stops for him are not to the Khan haveli. They are to another place, a special place. A place he hoped he would never need go to again. Frail hope. The special place is down a gali too narrow for vehicles, overhung by intricately worked wooden jharokas and derelict air-conditioning units. Shaheen Badoor Khan opens the cab door and steps out into another world. His breath is tight and shallow and fluttering. There. In the brief light of a door’s opening and closing, two silhouettes, too slim, too elegant, too fey for mundane humanity.

“Oh,” he cries softly. “Oh.”

14: TAL

Tal runs. A voice calls yts name from the cab. Yt does not look. Yt does not stop. Yt runs, shawl pluming out behind it in a blue of ultra-blue paisleys. Horns blare, sudden looming faces yell abuse; sweat and teeth. Tal reels back from a near miss with a small fast Ford; music thud-thud-thuds. Yt spins, dodges the shocking blare of truck horns, slips between a rural pickup and a bus pulling out from a halt. Tal halts a moment on the median strip for a glance back. The bubble cab still purrs on the footpath. A figure stands there, glimpsed through the headlight glare. Tal plunges into the steel river.

Tal tried to hide that morning, behind work, behind huge wrap-round tilt-jet pilot shades, behind the Lord of the Hangovers, but everyone had to come and get the goss on the faaa bulous people at the faaa bulous party. Neeta was celebstruck. Even the cool guys circulated past Tal’s workstation, not of course asking direcrly, but accessing hints and suspicions. The goss-nets were full of it, the news channels, too, even the headline services were beaming pictures from the night to palmers all over Bharat. One of which was two nutes going at it on the floor and A-listers cheering and clapping.

Then a neural Kunda Khadar burst behind Tal’s eyes and it all came gushing back. Every. Little. Detail. The taxicab fumblings, the airport hotel mumblings and profanities. The morning light flat and grey with the promise of another merciless day of ultra-heat, and the card on the pillow. Non-scene.

“Oh,” Tal whispered. “No.” Yt crept home as early as the impending wedding of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala would permit, a shaking, paranoid wreck. Huddled up in the phatphat yt could feel the card in yt’s bag, heavy and untrustworthy as uranium. Get rid of it now. Let it flutter out the window. Let it slip down the seat lining. Lose and forget. But yt could not. Tal was terribly, terribly afraid yt had fallen in love and yt didn’t have a soundtrack for this one.

The women were on the stairs again, winding their way up and down with their plastic water carriers, their conversation dying as Tal squeezed past, mumbling apologies, then resuming in titters and low whispers. Every rattle, every snatch of radio seemed a weapon thrown at yt. Don’t think about it. In three months you will be out of here. Tal plunged into yts room, tore off yts stiff, smoke-reeking party clothes and dived naked into yts beautiful bed. Yt programmed two hours of non-REM sleep but yts agitation and heart-hurt and wonderful, mad bafflement defeated the subdermal pumps and yt lay watching the nibs of light cast by the window blind bindings move across the ceiling like slow worms and listening to the voiceless, choral roar of the city moving. Tal unfolded that last insane night again, smoothed out its creases. Yt hadn’t gone out to get involved. Yt hadn’t even gone out to get fucked. Yt had gone out for a simple mad time with famous people and a bit of glam. Yt didn’t want a lovely person. Yt didn’t want an entanglement. Yt didn’t want involvement, a relationship. And the last thing yt wanted was love at first sight. Love, and all those other dreadful things yt thought yt had left in Mumbai.

Mama Bharat was slow answering Tal’s knock. She seemed in pain, her hands uncertain on the door locks. Tal had washed in a cup of water, removing surface layers of sleep and grime but the smoke, drink, and sex were engrained. Yt could smell them off ytself as yt sat on the low sofa watching the turned-down cable news while the old woman made chai. She was slow about her making, visibly frail. Her aging scared Tal.

“Well,” Tal said. “I think I’m in love.”

Mama Bharat rocked back on her seat, swaying her head in understanding. “Then you must tell me everything about it.”

So Tal began yts tale, from stepping out of Mama Bharai’s front door to the card on the pillow in the numb morning.

“Show me this card,” Mama Bharat said. She turned it over in her leathery, monkey hand. She pursed her lips.

“I am not convinced about a man who leaves a card with a club address rather than a home address.”

“Yt’s not a man.”

Mama Bharat closed her eyes.

“Of course. Forgive me. But he is acting like a man.” Dust motes rose in the hot light slanting through the slatted wooden blind. “What is it you feel about him?”

“I feel I’m in love.”

“That is not what I asked. What do you feel about him? Yt.”

“I feel. I think I feel. I want to be with yt, I want to go where yt goes and see what yt sees and do what yt does, just to be able to know all those little, little things. Does that make any kind of sense?”

“Every kind of sense,” Mama Bharat said. “What do you think I should do?”

“What else can you do?” Tal stood up abruptly, hands clutched. “I will, then, I will.”

Mama Bharat rescued Tal’s discarded tea-glass from the rug before yt could flood it with hot, sweet chai in yts excited determination. Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, watched from his place on the tallboy, annihilating foot eternally raised.

Tal spent the remains of the afternoon in the ritual of going out. It was a formal and elaborate process that began with laying down a mix. STRANGE CLUB was yts mental title for yts venture to Tranh. DJ aeai sourced an assortment of late-chill grooves and Vier/Burmese/Assamesse sounds. Tal stripped off yts street clothes and stood in front of the mirror, raising yts arms over yts head, relishing yts round shoulders, child-slim torso, full, parted thighs free of any sexual organ. Yt held yts wrists up, studied in reflection the goose flesh of the subdermal control studs. Yt contemplated yts beautiful scars.

“Okay, play it.”

The music kicked in at floor-shaking volume. Almost immediately Paswan next door began banging on the wall and shouting about the noise and his shifts and his poor wife and children driven demented by freaks perverts deviates. Tal namasted ytself in the mirror, then danced to the wardrobe cubby and swept back the curtain in a balletic twirl. Swaying to the rhythm, Tal surveyed yts costumes, weaving permutations, implications, signs and signals. Mr. Paswan was beating on the door now, vowing he would burn yt out, see if he did not. Tal laid out yts combo on the bed, danced to the mirror, opened yts makeup boxes in strict right to left order and prepared to compose.

By the time the sun set in glorious polluted carmines and blood, Tal was dressed, made up and geared-in. The Paswans had given up hammering an hour ago and were now treating Tal to half-heard sobbing. Tal ejected the chip from yts player, slipped it into yts bag and was out into the wild wild night.

“Take me, here.”

The phatphat driver looked at the card and nodded. Tal hooked up yts mix and slumped back on to the seat in ecstasy.

The club was off an unprepossessing alley. In Tal’s experience, the best clubs usually were. The door was carved wood, grey and fibrous from years of heat and pollution. Tal guessed it had been there even before the British. A discreet camera bindi blinked. The door swung open to the touch. Tal unhooked yts mix to listen. Traditional dhol and bansuri.

Tal took a breath and walked in.

A great haveli had once lived here. Balconies in the same weathered grey wood rose five floors around the central courtyard garden now glassed over. Vines and climbing pharm bananas had been let run and ramble up the carved wooden pillars to spread across the ribs of the glass dome. Clusters of biolume lamps hung from the centre of the roof like strange fetid fruit; terracotta oil lanterns were arranged across the tiled floor. All was flicker and folded shadow. From the recesses of the wooden cloisters came low conversation and the musical burble of nute laughter. The musicians sat facing each other on a mat by the central pool, a shallow rectangle dappled with lilies, intent on their rhythms.

“Welcome to my home.”

The small, birdlike woman had appeared like a god in a film. She wore a crimson sari and a brahmin’s bindi and carried her head cocked to one side. Tal guessed her at sixty-five, seventy. The woman’s gaze darted over yts face.

“Please, make yourself at home. I have guests from every walk of society, from Varanasi and beyond.” She pulled a thumb-sized banana from its broad-leafed vine, peeled it open, and offered it to Tal, “Go, eat eat. They grow wild.”

“I don’t want to appear rude, but.”

“You want to know what it does. It will get you into the we are here. One to start, that is the way we do it. There are many varieties, but the ones by the door are the ones to start with. The rest you will discover on your journey. Relax, my lovely. You are among friends.” She offered the banana once again. As yt took it, Tal noticed the curl of plastic behind the aged woman’s right ear. That tilt of the head, that dodge of the eyes, were explained now. A blindhoek. Tal took a bite from the banana. It tasted of banana. Then yt became aware of the details in the woodcarving, the pattern of the tiles, the colours and weave of the dhuris. The individual parts of the music became distinct, stalking and twining around each other. A sharpness of focus. A lifting of awareness. A glow in the back of the head like an inner smile. Tal ate the rest of the banana in two bites. The old blind woman took the skin and deposited it in a small wooden bin already half-full of blackening, fragrant peels.

“I’m looking for someone. Tranh.”

The old woman’s black eyes hunted over Tal’s face.

“Tranh. Lovely thing. No, Tranh is not here, yet. But Tranh will be, sometime.” The old woman clasped her hands together in joy. Then the banana kicked in and Tal felt a relaxed warmth spread down from yts agnya chakra and yt hooked up yts music and explored the strange club. The balconies held low divans and sofas, arranged intimately around conversation tables. For those who did not do bananas there were elegant brass hookahs. Tal drifted past a knot of nutes, slo-moed in smoke. They inclined their heads towards yt. There were a lot of gendered. In the corner alcove a Chinese woman in a beautiful black suit was kissing a nute. She had the nute down yts back on the divan. Her fingers played with the hormonal gooseflesh on yts forearm. Somewhere Tal reasoned yt should be leaving, really, but all yt felt was a warm dislocation. Another banana, yt thought, would be good.

The crop from the far left pillar gave a short, sharp rush of well-being. Tal stepped carefully to the edge of the pool to look up at the tiered balconies. The higher you went, the fewer clothes you needed, yt concluded. That was all right. Everything was all right. The blind woman had said.

“Tranh?” Tal asked of a knot of bodies gathered around a fragrant hookah. An achingly young and lovely nute with fine East Asian features peered out of a press of male bodies. “Sorry,” Tal said and drifted on. “Have you seen Tranh?” yt asked a nervous looking woman standing by a sofa of laughing nutes. They all turned to stare at yt, “Is Tranh here yet?” The man stood by the third magic banana vine. He was soberly dressed in a semiformal evening suit; Jayjay Valaya, Tal guessed from the cut. A smart man, thin, middle-aged but took care of his flesh. Fine, aesthetic features, thin-lipped, a look of intelligence in his darting eyes. The eyes, the face, were nervous. His hands, Tal observed through the marvellous power of the banana that put everything into significant focus, were well manicured, and shaking.

“I beg your pardon?” the dapper man said.

“Tranh. Tranh. Is yt here?”

The man looked nonplussed, then plucked a banana from the fist beside his head. He offered it to Tal.

“I’m looking for someone,” Tal said.

“Who is this?” the man said, again offering the bananna. Tal brushed it away with yts hand. “Tranh. Have you? No.” Tal was already walking away.

“Please!” the man called after yt, clutching the banana between yts fingers like a linga. “Do stay, and talk, just talk.”

Then yt saw. Even in the flicker-lit shadows beneath the balcony, there was no mistaking the profile, the angle of the cheekbones, the way yt leaned forward to talk animatedly, the play of the hands in the lantern light; the laughter like a temple bell.

“Tranh.”

Yt did not look up from yts intent conversation with yts friends, all huddled over the low table, deep in shared memory.

“Tranh.” This time, yt was heard. Tranh looked up. The first thing Tal read on yts face was blank incomprehension. I do not know who you are. Then, recognition, then remembrance, then surprise, shock, displeasure. Last: embarrassment.

“Sorry,” Tal said, stepping back from the alcove. All the faces were looking at yt. “I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake.” Yt turned and fled, discreetly. A need to cry pumped through Tal’s skull. The shy man still stood in the greenery. Feeling enemy eyes still on yt, Tal took the banana from his soft fist, peeled it, bit deep. Then the pharm piled in and Tal felt the dimensions of the courtyard inflate to infinity around yt. Yt offered the strange fruit to the man.

“No, thank you,” he stammered but Tal had him by the arm and was marching him to a vacant sofa dock. Yt could still feel those eyes hot on the back of yts skull.

“So,” Tal said, sitting sideways on the low sofa and draping yts thin hands over yts folded knees. “You want to talk to me, so let’s talk.” A glance back. They were still looking. Yt finished the banana and the fluttering lanterns opened up and yt fell into their gravity and yts next clearly focused thought was of the facade of a Kurdish restaurant. A waiter whisked yt past tables of startled customers to a small booth at the back partitioned by a fragrant carved cedar screen.

The blind woman’s bananas, like good guests, came promptly and departed early. Tal felt the carved geometric patterns on the wooden screens rush in from celestial distance to claustrophobia. The restaurant was hot and every customer voice, kitchen noise, and street sound was intolerably sharp and close.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing you here, but I don’t like it back there,” the man was saying. “It’s no place to talk, really talk. But it’s discreet here; the owner is in my debt.” Mezze were brought, and a bottle of clear liquor with a jug of water. “Arak,” the man said, pouring a measure. “I don’t drink myself, but I’m told it is a great instiller of courage.” He added water. Tal marvelled as the clear liquid turned to luminous milk. Tal took a sip, recoiled at the alien aniseed, then had a slower, more considered measure.

“Yt’s a chuutya,” Tal declared. “Tranh. “Yt’s a chuutya. Yt wouldn’t even look at me; just sat mooning all over yts friends. I wish I’d never come now.”

“It’s so hard to find someone to listen to,” the man said. “Someone who doesn’t have an agenda, who isn’t asking me for something of trying to sell me something. In my work everyone wants to hear what I have to say, what my ideas are, every word I say is treated like gold. Before I met you, I was at a durbar in the Cantonment. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say, everyone wanted something from me, except this one man. He was a strange man and he said a strange thing; he said that we are a deformed society. I listened to that man.”

Tal sipped yts arak.

“Cho chweet, we nutes have always known that.”

“So tell me the secrets you know. Tell me what you are. I’d like to hear how you came to be.”

“Well,” Tal said, conscious of every scar and implant under the man’s attentive gaze, “my name’s Tal, and I was born in Mumbai in 2019 and I work in Indiapendent on the metasoap design team for Town and Country.”

“And in Mumbai,” the man said, “in 2019 when you were born, what.” Tal laid a finger to his lips.

“Never,” yt whispered. “Never ask, never tell. Before I Stepped Away, I was another incarnation. I am only alive now, do you understand? Before was another life, and I am dead and reborn.”

“But how.” the man asked. Again, Tal laid its soft, pah finger against the man’s lips. Yt could feel them trembling, the flutter of warm, sweet breath.

“You said you wanted to listen,” Tal said and gathered yts shawl around yt.

“My father was a choreographer in Bollywood, one of the top. Did you ever see Rishta ? The number where they’re dancing across the roofs of the cars in the traffic jam? That was him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t much care for films,” the man says.

“It got too camp in the end. Too self-referential, too knowing. It always gets like that, things become superexaggerated, then they die. He met my mother on the set of Lawyers in Love. She’s Italian, she was a hovercam trainee—at the time, Mumbai was the best, even the Americans were sending people out here to learn technique. They met, they married, six months later, me. And before you ask, no. An only. They were the toast of Chowpatty Beach, my parents. I got to all the parties; I was a real accessory. I was a gorgeous kid, baba. We were never out of the filmi mags and the gossip rags; Sunny and Costanza Vadher, with their beautiful child, shopping on Linking Road, on the set of Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage, at the Chelliah’s barbecue. They were the most incredibly selfish people I think I have ever met—but they were totally unselfconscious about it. That’s what Costanza accused me of when I Stepped Away; how incredibly selfish I was. Can you believe it? Where did she think I learned it?

“They weren’t stupid. They might have been selfish, but they weren’t stupid, they must have known what was going to happen when they started to bring in the aeais. It was the actors first—one day Chati and Bollywood Masala and Namaste! are full of Vishal Das and Shruti Rai at an opening at Club 28, next Filmfare’s running centre page triple pullouts without a single cubic centimetre of living flesh. It really was that quick.”

The man murmurs polite amazement.

“Sunny could have a hundred people dancing on a giant laptop, but now it was one touch and you’d have them dancing from here to the horizon, all in perfect synch. They could get a million people dancing on clouds, just with one click. It hit him hardest first. He got bad, he get ratty, he would take it out on people around him. He was mean when it turned against him. I think that’s maybe why I wanted to get into soapi; to show him there was something he could have done, if he’d tried, if he hadn’t been so strung up by his own image and status. Then again, maybe I just don’t care enough. But it hit Costanza soon after, too; you don’t need actors or dancers, you don’t need cameras, either. It’s all in the box. They would fight: I must have been ten, eleven, I could hear them screaming so loud the neighbours would come banging on the door. Two of them in that apartment all day, both of them needing work, but jealous as hell in case the other actually got something. In the evenings they’d go to the same old parties and durbars to schmooze. Please, a job. Costanza coped better. She adjusted, she got a different job in the industry in script development. Sunny, he couldn’t. Walked right out. Fuck him. Fuck him. He was a waste anyway.”

Tal snatched up the arak, took a bitter draft.

“It all ended. I’d say it was like a film, the credits roll, the lights came up, and we were back in the real again, but it wasn’t. It didn’t have a third act. It didn’t have an against-all-the-odds-happy-ever-after. It just got worse and worse and then it just ended. It stopped, like the film snapped and I wasn’t living in a Manori Beach apartment and I wasn’t at the John Connon School and I wasn’t going round the parties with all the stars saying, oh look, isn’t it sweet and look how big it’s getting? I was in a two-room apartment in Thane with Costanza, going to the Bom Jesus Catholic School, and I hated it. I hated it. I wanted it all back again, all the magic and the dancing and the fun and the parties and this time I wanted it to go on after the credits rolled. I just wanted everyone to look at me and say, wow. Just that. Wow.”

Tal sat back, inviting admiration but the man looked afraid, and something more Tal could not identify. He said, “You are an extraordinary creature. Do you ever feel that you’re living in two worlds, and that neither of them is real?”

“Two worlds? Honey, there are thousands of worlds. And they’re as real as you want them to be. I should know; I’ve lived all my life between them. None of them are real, but when you get into them, they’re all the same.”

The man nodded, not in agreement with anything Tal had said, but at some inner dialogue.

He summoned the bill, left a pile of notes on the little silver tray. “It’s getting late, and I do have affairs to attend to in the morning.”

“What sort of affairs?” The man smiled to himself.

“You are the second person to ask me that tonight. I work in information management. Thank you for coming with me here and the pleasure of your company; you really are an extraordinary human, Tal.”

“You didn’t give me your name.”

“No, I don’t believe I did.”

“That’s so male,” Tal said, sweeping along behind the man on to the street where he was already waving down a taxi.

“You could call me Khan.”

Something has changed, Tal thought as yt slid in to the back seat of the Maruti. The man Khan had been nervous, shy, guilty at the Banana Club. Even in the restaurant he had not been at ease. Something in yts story had worked on his mind and mood.

“I don’t go to White Fort after midnight,” the driver said.

“I will pay you treble,” Khan said.

“I’ll get as close as I can”

Khan leaned his head against the greasy rest.

“You know, it really is an excellent little restaurant. The owner came here about ten years ago in the last wave of the Kurdish diaspora. I. helped him. He set the place up, he’s doing well. I suppose he’s a man trapped between two worlds as well.”

Tal was only half listening, curling up in the arak glow. Yt leaned against Khan, for warmth, for solidity. Yt let yts inner arm roll into the space between them. The row of buds were puckered like bitch-nipples in the street glow. Tal saw the man start at the sight. Then a hand was stabbing down the front of yts lounging pants, a face loomed over yt, a mouth clamped over yts. A tongue pressed entrance to yts body. Tal gave a muffled scream, Khan recoiled in shock, which gave Tal space to push and shout. The phatphat bounced to a halt in the middle of the highway. Tal had the door open and was out, shawl flapping behind yt, before yt was fully conscious of what yt was doing.

Tal ran.

Tal stops running. Yt stands, hands on thighs; panting. Khan is still there, peering through the headlight blur, calling out futilely into the traffic roar. Tal stifles a sob. Yt can still smell the aftershave on yts skin, taste tongue in yts mouth. Shaking, yt waits a safe few minutes before flagging in a cruising phatphat. DJ Aeai plays MIX FOR A NIGHT TURNED SCARY.

15: VISHRAM

New day, new array. Everyone from cleaners to Centre Director turned out under the canopy of the Ranjit Ray Research Centre. They look nervous. Not nearly as nervous as your unexpected and unprepared CEO, Vishram Ray thinks as the car crunches sensuously up the raked gravel drive. Vishram checks cuffs, tugs collar.

“You should have worn a tie,” says Marianna Fusco. She is cool, immaculate, creases all geometrical.

“I’ve done my tie-wearing for this lifetime,” Vishram says, lick-slicking down hair in the vanity mirror in the chauffeur’s headrest. “Anyway, as any historian of costume will tell you, the sole purpose of the tie is to point to your dick. That’s not very Hindu business, that.”

“Vishram, everything points to your dick.”

Vishram thinks he hears the driver snigger as he opens the door.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Marianna Fusco whispers in Vishram’s ear as he walks purposefully up the steps. His ’hoek comes to life in his head. A moment’s visual blur as the aeai deletes the junk and filters the ads, then he is striding forwards to meet the director, hand held out in greeting. GANDHINAGAR SURJEET say the blue words hovering in front of him. D.O.B 21/02/2009. WIFE SANJUAY, CHILDREN: RUPESH (7); NAGESH (9). JOINED RAY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT 2043 FROM UNIVERSITY OF BANGALORE RENEWABLE RESOURCES RESEARCH DEPARTMENT. FIRST DOCTORATE. Vishram blinks off the supplementary information.

“Mr. Ray, you are very welcome to our division.”

“It’s a pleasure to be here, Dr. Surjeet.”

It’s all playing a role, really.

“You do find us in something of a state of unreadiness,” he says.

“Not half as unready as me.” The joke seems to go down well. But then they would laugh, wouldn’t they? Dr. Surjeet moves to his department heads.

INDERPAL GAUR, says the relentless palmer. 15/08/2011, CHANDIGARH. RESEARCH SUBDIVISION: BIOMASS. MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE. EMPLOYMENT HISTORY AT

RAY POWER: JOINED R&D 2034 FROM UNIVERSITY OF THE PANJAB, CHANDIGARH CAMPUS.

LET HIM DO THE INTRODUCTIONS, Marianna warns in lilac over Director Surjeet’s head. Dr. Gaur is a toothy, plump woman in traditional dress, through there is nothing old-fashioned about the anodised aluminium ’hoek curled against the side of her pigtail. He wonders what is her ’hoek graffiting about him? VISHRAM RAY: WASTER SON. FAILED LAWYER. ASPIRANT STAND-UP. THINKS HE’S PRETTY DAMN FUNNY.

“It’s a great honour,” she says, namasteing.

“All mine, I assure you,” Vishram says.

And on, down the row of department heads and senior researchers and team leaders and those who have had important papers published.

“I am Khaleda Husainy,” says a small, intense woman in a Western-style suit and a headscarf chador. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ray.” Her discipline is microgeneration. Parasitic power.

“What, people generate power just walking up and down?”

“Pumps in the pavement, yes” she enthuses. “There is immense energy being wasted out there, waiting for us to capture it. Everything you do and say is a source of power.”

“You should hook it up to our legal department.”

It gets a laugh.

“And what do you do to help make Ray Power A-Number One?” Vishram says to a young, almost-good-looking woman whose lapel badge identifies her as Sonia Yadav.

“Nothing,” she says with a smile.

“Ah,” Vishram says, moving on. Hands to shake. Faces to remember. She calls after him. “When I said nothing, I meant, energy from nothing. Endless free power.”

“You’ve got my attention now.”

“I’m taking you to the zero-point lab,” Sonia Yadav explains as she leads Vishram and his entourage to her research unit. She looks at him closely.

“Your eyeballs are moving. Is someone messaging you?”

Vishram shuts off Marianna Fusco’s silent commentary with a twist of a finger.

His father’s engineers have designed a building more furniture than architecture. All is wood and fabric, curved into bows and arches, translucent and airy. The place smells of sap and resin and sandalwood. The floors are strip maple inlaid with marquetry panels of scenes from the Ramayana. Sonia Yadav looks pointedly at Marianna’s heels. She slips them off and closes them in her bag. It feels right to Vishram to be barefoot here. It’s a holy place.

At first sight the zero-point lab disappoints Vishram. There are no humming machines or looping power conduits, just desks and glass partitions, paper piled unsteadily on the floor, whiteboards on the walls. The white boards are full of scrawls. They continue onto the walls. Every square centimetre of surface is crammed with symbols and letters wedged at crazy angles to each other, lassoed in loops of black felt marker, harpooned by long lines and arrows in black and blue to some theorem on the other side of the board. The brawling equations spread over desks, benches, any flat surface that will take felt marker. The mathematics is as unintelligible to Vishram as Sanskrit, but the cocoon of thought and theory and vision comforts him, like being inside a prayer.

“It may not look like much but the research team at EnGen would pay a lot of money to get in here,” Sonia Yadav says. “We do most of the hot stuff over on the University collider, or at the LHC in Europe, but this is where the real work gets done. The headwork.”

“Hot stuff?”

“We’re following two approaches, hot and cold, we call them. I won’t bore you with the theory but it’s to do with energy levels and quantum foam. Two ways of looking at nothing.”

“And you’re hot?” Vishram asks, studying the hieratic glyphs on the wall.

“Absolutely,” Sonia Yadav says.

“And can you do what you say; generate power from nothing?” She stands firm with a light of belief in her eyes. “Yes, I can.”

“Mr. Ray, we really should be moving on,” Director Surjeet urges.

As his party leaves, Vishram picks up a felt marker and quickly writes on the desktop: DNNR, 2NITE?

Sonia Yadav reads the invite upside down.

“Strictly professional,” Vishram whispers. “Tell me what’s hot and what’s not.” OK she writes in red. 8. PICK-UP HERE. She underlines the OK twice.

Immediately outside in the corridor is a sight that instantly detumesces Vishram’s good humour: Govind, in his too-tight suit, with his phalanx of lawyers, bowling down the corridor as if he owned the place. Govind spies his younger brother, opens his mouth to greet, damn, bless, chide—Vishram doesn’t care, never hears because he calls out, loudly,

“Mr. Surjeet, could you please call security.” Then, as the Director talks into his palmer, Vishram holds up one single, commanding finger in front of his brother and his crew. “You, say nothing. This is not your place. This is my place.” Security arrives; two very large Rajputs in red turbans. “Please escort Mr. Ray from the building and scan his face for the security system. He is not to return without my express, written permission.”

The Rajputs seize Govind, one on each arm. It gives Vishram’s heart a pile of pleasure to watch them march him at a fast trot down the corridor.

“Hear me, hear me!” Govind shouts back over his shoulder. “He will wreck it like he has wrecked everything else he has ever been given. I know him of old. The leopard cannot change his spots, he will ruin you all, destroy this great company. Don’t listen to him, he knows nothing. Nothing!”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Vishram says when the doors have sealed behind his still-protesting brother. “Anyway, shall we continue, or have I seen everything?”

It had begun at breakfast.

“Just what have I inherited?” Vishram asked Marianna Fusco through mouthfuls of kitchiri at his breakfast briefing on the east balcony.

“Basically, you’ve got the research and development division.” She laid out the documents around his greasy plate like tarot cards.

“So, no money and a pile of responsibility.”

“I don’t think this is something your father thought up on a whim.”

“How much did you know about this?”

“What, who, where, and when.”

“You’re missing a ‘w’ there.”

“I don’t think anyone understands that ‘w.’”

I can, Vishram thought. I know how good it is to walk away from expectations and obligations. I know how frightening and freeing it is to go our there with nothing but a begging bowl, chancing people’s laughter.

“You could have told me.”

“And breach my professional confidentiality?”

“You are a cold, hard woman, Marianna Fusco.”

He forked down another load of kitchiri. Ramesh wandered into the geometrical planting of English roses, now crisped and withering in their third year of alien drought. His hands were folded behind him, a posture as ancient and familiar as any other element of the Shanker Mahal. Vishram-aged-six had mocked his older brother, stalking after him, hands clamped behind back, lips sucked in in abstract concentration, head up looking around for wonder in the world.

What about those East Asian trips? he wondered. Those Bangkok girls who could do and be anything you imagined. He felt a small stirring beneath his navel, a twitch of hormone. But it would be too easy No hunt there, no play, no testing of the will and wit, no unspoken contract of mutual recognition that both were engaged on a game with its ploys and stages and rules. A warm wind with the smell of the city on it tugged at the documents of incorporation. Vishram deployed cups and saucers and cutlery to hold them in their proper places. Ramesh, who had been trying to smell the desiccated roses, looked up at the warm touch on his face and was genuinely surprised to see his kid brother and his lady lawyer on the terrace.

“Ah, there you are, I was hall-hoping to find you.”

“Wretched coffee?”

“Oh, please, yes. And there wouldn’t be any more of that, would there?”

Vishram nodded to the servant. Wonderful, how quickly you settle back into the way of service. Ramesh poked at his plate of kitchiri with his fork. “Why did he give it to me?” he said abruptly. “I don’t want it, I don’t even understand it. I never did. Govind was always the one with the head for business; still is. I’m an astrophysicist; I know deep space organic molecular clouds. I do not know electricity generating.”

The split was clever, Shakespearean. Ramesh would have wanted the unworldliness of blue-sky thinking. He had been given the meat and muscle of the generating division.

Govind’s ambitions would have been for the core infrastructure. Instead he had been handed control of the distribution network. Wires and cables and pylons. And Number Three Son, the attention seeker, the grab-ass, had gear so arcane he didn’t even know if it did anything. Casting against type. Evil old sadhu.

The old man had left before the dawn. His clothes were neatly hangered in the wardrobe. His palmer and ’hoek sat square on the pillow with his wallet and his universal card beside them. His shoes, well polished, were arranged toe-to-footboard at a perfect right angle. His silver-backed hairbrush and comb were caught together in their final kiss on the dressing table. Kukunoor, khidmutgar now Old Shastri had left on the pilgrim path, showed all this to Vishram with the same dispassionate sense of disposable history he had seen in Scotland’s historic homes and castles. He did not know where his master had gone. Their mother did not know, either, though Vishram suspected some secret conduit of communication to monitor his legacy. The company would always be the company.

“What are you telling me, Ram?”

“It’s not for me.”

“What do you want, Ram?”

He toyed with his fork.

“Govind has made me an offer.”

“He didn’t waste much time.”

“He thinks it’s disastrous, splitting generation from transmission. The Americans and Europeans have been competing for years to get their hands on Ray Power. Now we are divided and weak and it’s only a matter of time before someone approaches one of us with an irresistible offer.”

“I’m sure he made a very convincing case. I can’t help but wonder where his money’s coming from for this great display of fraternal solidarity.”

Marianna Fusco’s palmer was already open.

She said, “His annual reports are filed with Companies House but his profits are down for the fifth quarter in a row and his bankers are getting edgy. I would say he’s looking at protective bankruptcy in the next couple of years.”

“So if it’s not Govind’s, I think you have to ask yourself, whose money is it?” Ramesh pushed the plate of kitchiri away from him. “Could you buy me out?”

“Govind at least has a company and a credit rating. I have a jokebook and pile of unopened envelopes with little cellophane windows.”

“What can we do?”

“We will run the company. It’s a strong company. It’s Ray Power, we’ve grown up with it, we know it like we know this house. But I’ll tell you one thing, Ram; I will not let you blame me for what happens. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got employees to meet.”

Marianna Fusco rose with him, nodded to Ramesh as they entered the cool dark of the house. Monkeys came skirling down the trees hungry for leftover kitchiri.

Vishram smelled Govind before he saw him reflected in the vanity mirror.

“You know, I could have got you any God’s amount of decent aftershave from London duty free. You still on that Arpal stuff? Is it some national loyalty thing, the national smell of Bharat?”

Govind slid into the reflection beside Vishram as he adjusted the hang of his cuffs. Good suit. Looking better than you, fat boy.

“And since when did we start to walk in without knocking?” Vishram added. “Since when has family needed to knock?”

“Since they all became big businessmen. And by the way, I won’t be staying here tonight. I’m moving out to a hotel.” Cuffs right. Lapels right. Collar right. Bless those Chinese tailors. “So, make your offer.”

“Ramesh has spoken to you, then.”

“Did you really think he wouldn’t? I hear you’ve a liquidity problem.”

Uninvited, Govind seated himself on the edge of the bed. Vishtam noticed in the mirror that his brother’s feet did not quite reach the ground.

“You may find this hard to believe, but all I want to do is keep the company together.”

“You’re right.”

Still Vishram kept his back turned.

“EnGen have made no secret that they want Ray. Even when our father was CEO, they had made approaches. They will have it, sooner or later. We cannot hope to stand against the Americans. They will have us in the end, and what we, between us, have to decide is if they pick us off one by one, or take us in one big mouthful. I know what I prefer. I know what is better for the company our father built. There is strength in unity.”

“Our father built an Indian business in an Indian way.”

“My brother, the social conscience?” In those five words Vishram knew that he and his brother were eternal enemies. Rama and Ravanna. “Those old women and Grameen bankers will be the first to turn on you when the offers come in,” Govind continued. “They speak fine and noble but offer then a purseful of dollars and see the solidarity of the poor then. They know business better than you, Vishram.”

“I don’t think so,” Vishram said softly. His brother frowned.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“I said, I don’t think so. In fact, you can say whatever you like now, and I will go against you. That’s the way it’s going to be from now on. Whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever offer you make or deal you strike, I will oppose it. You may be wrong, you may be right, it may make me a billion dollars, but I am going to oppose it. Because now I can, and now you can’t do anything or run to anyone or issue any older-brother orders, because I will still own one-third of Ray Power. Now, you’re in my bedroom and you didn’t knock and you’re certainly not here by invitation, but I’m going to overlook it because this is the last night I stay in this room, in this house and I have work to do now.”

It was only as he settled into the airco-cooled leather of the car that Vishram noticed the little crescents of blood in his palms; the stigmata of clenched nails.

It’s a dire Italian but it’s the only Italian. Nostalgic already for the cooking of the Glasgow Italians, a mighty race, Vishram had lit upon the prospect of pasta and ruffino before he remembered that Varanasi has no rooted Italian community, has no Italian in its genes at all. The staff is all local. The music is compiled from the charts. The wine is overheated and tired from the long drought. There is something on the menu called pasta-tikka.

“I’m sorry it’s so terrible,” he apologises to Sonia Yadav.

She struggles with overcooked spaghetti.

“I’ve never eaten Italian before.”

“You’re not eating Italian now.”

She has made an effort for this dire dinner. She has done something with her hair, hung a little gold and amber around her. Arpege 27: that’ll have been some European duty-free somewhere. He likes it that she has worn a business sari and not an ugly Western-style suit. Vishram sits back in his chair, touches his fingertips together, then realises he looks too much like a James Bond villain and unfolds.

“How much could you reasonably expect a liberal arts boy to understand about zero-point power?”

Sonia Yadav pushes her plate away from her with evident relief.

“Okay, well for starters, it’s not strictly zero-point as most people think of it.” Sonia Yadav has a slight pucker between the eyes when she is saying or thinking or contemplating something difficult. It’s very cute. “Do you remember what I said back in the lab about cold and hot? The classic zero-point theories are cold theories. Now, our theories suggest they won’t work. Can’t work: there’s a ground-state wall you just can’t get around. You don’t beat the second law of thermodynamics.”

Vishram lifts a breadstick, breaks it theatrically in two. “I got the cold and hot bit.”

“Okay. I’ll try. And by the way, I saw that thing with the breadstick in the remake of the Pyar Diwana Hota Hai.”

“Little more wine, then?”

She takes the refill but doesn’t touch it. Wise woman. Vishram settles back with the traumatised Chianti in the ancient ritual of listening to a woman tell a story.

It’s a strange and magical tale as full of contradictions and impossibilities as any legend from the Mahabharata. There are multiple worlds and entities that can be two contradictory things at the same time. There are beings that can never be fully known or predicted, that once entangled remain linked though they be removed to opposite ends of the universe so that what happens to one is instantly felt by the other. Vishram watches Sonia’s demonstration of the double-slit experiment with a fork, two capers, and ripples in the tablecloth and thinks, what a strange and alien world you inhabit, woman. The quantum universe is as capricious and uncertain and unknowable as the triple world that rested on the back of the great turtle, ruled by gods and demons.

“Because of the uncertainty principle, there are always virtual particle pairs being born and vanishing again at all possible energy levels. So, in effect, in every cubic centimetre of empty space, there is theoretically an infinite amount of energy, if we can just stop the virtual particles disappearing.”

“I have to tell you, this liberal arts boy doesn’t understand a word of this.”

“No one does. Not deep down; understand as we understand understanding. All we have is a description of how it works, and it works better than any theory we’ve ever come up with, and that’s including M-Star theory. It’s like the mind of Brahma; no one can understand the thoughts of a creator deity, but that doesn’t mean that there is no creation.”

“For a scientist, you use a lot of religious metaphors.”

“This scientist believes we live in a Hindu universe.” Sonia Yadav presses her point. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not like those Christian fundamentalist creation scientists—that’s not science; it denies empiricism and the very fact the universe is knowable. Creationists adapt the empirical evidence to suit their particular scriptural interpretation. I think what I think because of the empirical evidence. I’m a rational Hindu. I’m not saying I believe in actual gods, but quantum information theory and M-Star theory teach you the connectedness of all things and how properties emerge that can never be predicted by any of the constituent elements and that the very large and the very small are two sides of the same superstring. Do I need to tell a Ray about Hindu philosophy?”

“Maybe this Ray. So you’ll not be pulling N. K. Jivanjee on his rath yatra.” He’d seen the photographs on the evening news. Hell of a scoop.

“I’ll not be pulling, but I might be in the crowd. And anyway, it’s got a biodiesel engine in it.”

Vishram sits back in his chair, pulls at his lower lip as he does when observations and turns of phrase come flocking and cawing into a comedy routine.

“So tell me; you haven’t got a bindi and you’re out without a chaperone; how does this all sit with N. K. Jivanjee and the mind of Brahma?”

Sonia Yadav does the pucker again.

“I will say this straight and simple. Jati and varna have benighted our nation for three thousand years. Caste was never a Dravidian concept—it was those Aryans and their obsession with division and power. That’s why the British loved it here—they’re still fascinated with anything to do with this country. The class divide is their national narrative.”

“Not the bit of Britain I was in,” Vishram asides.

“For me, N. K. Jivanjee is about national pride, about Bharat for Bharat, not sold by the kilo to the Americans. About Hindu zero-point energy. And in the twenty first century, no woman needs a chaperone; and anyway, my husband trusts me.”

“Ah,” Vishram says, hoping his crestfallenness doesn’t carry. “So, M-Star theory?”

As far as he can get it, it’s like this. First there was string theory, which Vishram has heard of, something to do with everything being notes from vibrating strings. Very pretty. Very musical. Very Hindu. Then there was M-theory, which attempted to resolve the contradictions of string theory but which reached in different directions, like the legs of a starfish. The theoretical centre arrived last, in the late twenties in the shape of M-Star theory.

“I can see the star, but what’s the M for?”

“That’s a mystery,” Sonia Yadav smiles. They’re on Stregas now. The liqueur holds up well against the climate.

In M-Star theory the wrappings and foldings of the primal strings in eleven dimensions into membranes create the polyverse of all possible universes, all with fundamental properties differing from those experienced by humans.

“Everything is there,” says Sonia Yadav. “Universes with an extra time dimension, two-dimensional universes—there’s no gravity in two-dimensional universes. Universes where self-organisation and life is a basic property of space-time. An infinite number of universes. And that’s the difference between cold and hot zero-point theory.”

Vishram calls for another round of Stregas. He doesn’t know if it’s the Sip that Charms or the physics, but his brain is at the Swaddled in Cottonwool stage.

“What stops cold zero-point theory in its tracks is the second law of thermodynamics.” The waiter serves the second round. Vishram studies Sonia Yadav through the gold in the little bubble glass. “Stop that, and pay attention! To be useful, energy has to go somewhere. It’s got to flow from higher to lower, hot to cold, if you like. But in our universe the zero point, the quantum fluctuation, is the ground state. There’s nowhere for the energy to flow; it’s all uphill. But in another universe.”

“The ground state, whatever you call it, might be higher.” Sonia Yadav claps her hands together in a silent namaste.

“Exactly! Exactly! It would naturally flow from higher to lower. We could tap that infinite energy.”

“First find your universe.”

“Oh, we found one a long time ago. It’s a simple manifold of the M-Star theoretical structure of our own universe. Gravity is more powerful there; so is the expansion constant, so there’s a lot more vacuum energy tied up in the stressed space-time. It’s quite a small universe, and not too far away.”

“I thought you said the universes were all inside and outside each other.”

“They are, topologically. I’m talking about energy distance, how much we need to warp our ’branes to the geometry of that one. In physics, ultimately, everything is energy.”

Warped brains, all right.

Sonia Yadav sets her empty glass firmly on the gingham tablecloth, leans forwards, and Vishram cannot refuse the physical energy in her eyes, her face, her body.

“Come with me,” she says. “Come and see it.”

After Glasgow, the University of Bharat Varanasi at night is unusually well mannered. No discarded polystyrene trays of rain-soaked chips or dropped beer glasses or vomit pizzas to dodge in the brownout. No sounds of coitus from the halls or urination from the shrubberies. No sinister drunk reeling out of the peripheral vision with a racial curse. No gangs of half-naked girls arm in arm streeling across the dusty, withered lawns. What there is is a lot of heavy security, a few dons on big clunky bicycles with no lights, the rattle of a solitary night-radio and a sense from the shut-up faculty buildings and student residences of curfew.

The driver heads towards the only light. The experimental physics building is an orchidlike confection of luminous plastic sheeting and pylons, daring and delicate. The name on the marble plinth is the Ranjit Ray Centre for High Energy Physics. Buried beneath the delicate, flowery architecture is a grunt engineering pulse laser particle collider.

“He seems to have been a man of many parts, my father,” Vishram says as the night security nods them through the lobby. His face is known now.

“He’s not dead,” Sonia Yadav says and Vishram starts.

An elevator bank at the end of the lobby takes them down a tube to the root of the beast. It is a mythological creature indeed, a world-devouring worm curled in a loop beneath Sarnarh and Ganga. Vishram looks through the glass observation window at electrical devices each the size of a ship engine and tries to imagine particles forced into strange and unnatural liaisons.

“When we run it to full power to open an aperture, those containment magnets put out a field strong enough to suck the haemoglobin out of your blood,” Sonia Yadav says.

“How do you know this?” Vishram asks.

“We tried it with a goat, if you really want to know. Come on.”

Sonia Yadav leads the way down a long flight of concrete steps to an air-lock door. The security panel eyeballs her, opens into an airlock.

“Are we going into space or something?” Vishram asks as the lock cycles. “It’s just a containment device.”

Vishram decides he doesn’t want to know what’s being contained, so he fluffs, “I know my father’s rich—was rich—and there’s rich buys private jets, rich buys private islands, but rich that buys private particle colliders.”

“There are other backers involved,” Sonia Yadav says. The inner hatch spins and they enter an unspectacular concrete office, headachingly lit with neon and flatscreen flicker. A young, bearded man rocks back on a chair, feet on the desk, reading the evening paper. He has an industrial thermos of chai and a Styrofoam cup; the computers bang out old-school bhangra from a Bengali station. He jumps up when he sees his late-night visitors.

“Sonia, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Deba, this is.”

“I know, pleased to meet you, Mr. Ray.” He has an overemphatic handshake. “So, you’ve come to take a look at our own little private universe?” Beyond a second door is a small concrete room into which the visitors fit like segments of an orange. A heavy glass panel is level with Vishram’s head. He squints but can make nothing out of it. “We only need numbers really, but some people have this atavistic urge to eyeball things,” Deba says. He’s brought his chai with him, he takes a sip. “Okay, we’re in an observation area beside the confinement chamber, which we in our humorous physicists’ way call the Holding Cell. It’s basically a modified tokamak torus—does this mean anything to you? No? Think of it as an inverse donut; it’s got an outside, but inside is the hardest vacuum you can imagine. It’s actually harder than any vacuum you can imagine, all there is in there is space-time and quantum fluctuation. And this.”

He hits the lights. Vishram’s blind for an instant, then he becomes aware of a gaining glow from the window. He remembers a physics student he once took home telling him that the retina can detect a single photon and therefore the human eye can see on the quantum scale. He leans forwards; the glow comes from a line of blue, sharp as a laser; Vishram can see it curve off around the walls of the tokamak. He presses his face to the glass.

“Uh oh, panda eyes,” Deba says. “It throws off a lot of UV.”

“This is. another universe?”

“It’s another space-time vacuum,” Sonia Yadav says. She stands close enough for Vishram to fully appreciate her Arpege 27. “It’s been stable for a couple of months. Think of it as another nothing, but with a vacuum energy higher than ours.”

“And it’s leaking into our universe.”

“It’s not much higher, we’re only getting a two percent above input return from it, but we hope to use this space to open an aperture into a yet higher energy space, and so on, up the ladder until we get a significant return.”

“And the light.”

“Quantum radiation; the virtual particles of this universe—we call it Universe two-eight-eight—running into the laws of our universe and annihilating themselves into photons.”

Not it’s not, Vishram thinks, looking into the light of another time and space. And you know it’s not, Sonia Yadav. It is the light of Brahma.