River of Gods

16: SHIV

A boyz always got his mother.

It had been almost a homecoming, walking through the narrow galis between the shanties, ducking under the power cables, keeping the good shoes on the cardboard paths because even in the driest of droughts the alleys of Chandi Basti were piss-mud. The runways constantly realigned themselves as shanties collapsed or additions were build on, but Shiv steered by landmarks: Lord Ram Indestructible Car Parts where the brothers Shasi and Ashish were taking a VW apart into tiny parts; Mr. Pilai’s Sewing Machine under its umbrella; Ambedkar the child-buyer’s agent sitting on his raised porch of forklift pallets, smoking sweet ganja. Everywhere, people looking, people stepping aside, people making gestures to ward off the eye, people following him with their gaze because they had seen something from outside their existence, something with taste and class and great shoes, something that was something. Something that was a man.

His mother had looked up at his shadow across her doorway. He pushed money on her, a wad of grubby rupees. He had a little cash in hand from the man who hauled away the remains of the Merc. It left him short, but a son should repay some of the debt he owes his mother. She pretended to tsk it away, but Shiv saw her tuck it behind the brick by the fire.

He’s back. It’s only a charpoy in the corner but there’s a roof and a fire and dal twice a day and the secure knowledge that no one, no thing, no killing machine with scimitars for hands will find Shiv here. But there is a danger here, too. It would be easy to sink back into the routine of a little eating, a little sleep in the noon-day sun, a little thieving, a little hanging around with your friends, talking this and that and looking at the girls and that is a day, a year, a life gone. He must be thinking, talking, pulling in his debts and his favours. Yogendra goes out running through basti and city, listening to what the streets are saying about Shiv, who has turned his collar against him, who still has a thread of honour.

And then there is his sister.

Leela is a reminder that a son and brother should not leave it from Diwali to Guru Poornima to see his family. What had been a nice-looking, quiet, shy but solid-minded seventeen-year-old—could have married up—has turned Bible Christian. She went out one night with a friend to a religious thing run by a cable television station and came back born again. But it is not enough that she has found the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone else must find him, too. Especially her baaaadest of baaaadmash brothers. So round she comes with her Bible with the whisper-thin paper that Shiv knows makes the very best spliffs and her little tracts and her cumbersome zeal.

“Sister, this is my time of rest and recreation. You disrupt it. If your Christianity means as much as you say, you would respect your brother. I think it says that somewhere, respect and honour your brother.”

“My brothers are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said that because of me, you will hate your mother and father, and your brother, too.”

“Then that is a very foolish religion. Which one of your brothers and sisters in Christ got you drugs when you were dying of tuberculosis? Which one of them rammed that rich man’s pharmacy? You are making yourself no one, nothing. No one will marry you if you are not properly Indian. Your womb will dry up. You will cry out for those children. I don’t like to say this, but no one else will tell you this truth but me. Mata won’t, your Christian friends won’t. You are making a terrible mistake, put it right now.”

“The terrible mistake is to choose to go to hell,” Leela says defiantly.

“And what do you think this is?” Shiv says. Yogendra bares his ratty teeth.

That afternoon Shiv has a meeting: Priya from Musst. Good times there are not forgotten.

Shiv watches the chai stall for fifteen minutes to be sure it is her and her alone. She is pain to his heart in her pants that cling to the curve of her ass and her wispy silk top and her amber shades and her pale pale skin and red red sucking lips that pout as she looks around impatiently for him, trying to pick his hair, his face, his walk out of the thronging, staring bodies. She is all the things he has lost. He must get out of here. He must raise himself up again. Be a raja again.

She bounces on her boot heels and gives little squeaks of delight to see him. He gets her tea, they sit on a bench at the metal counter. She offers to get the bill but he pays with some of his dwindling wad. Chandni Basti will not see a woman buy Shiv Faraji tea. Her legs are long and lean and urban. The men of Chandni Basri measure them with their eyes, then catch the hem of the leather coat on the man beside her. They go on their way then. Yogendra sits on an upturned plastic fertiliser barrel and picks at his teeth.

“So, are my women and bartender missing me?” He offers her a bidi, takes a light from the gas burner under the rattling water boiler.

“You are in such trouble.” She lights hers off his, a Bollywood kiss. “You know who Ahimsa Debt Collection Agency is?”

“Some gang of hoods.”

“The Dawood Gang. It’s a new line of work for them, buying debts. Shiv, you have the Dawoods after you. These are the men skinned Gurnit Azni alive in the back of his limo.”

“It’s all bargaining; they go in high, I go in low, we meet in the middle. That is the way men do business.”

“No. They want what you owe them. Not a rupee less.”

Shiv laughs, the free, mad laugh breaking up inside. He can see the blue around the edge of his field of vision again, the pure, Krishna blue.

“No one has that kind of money.”

“Then you are dead and I am very sorry.” Shiv lays his hand flat on Priya’s thigh. She freezes.

“You came here to tell me that? I was expecting something from you.”

“Shiv, there are a hundred big dadas like you on every street corner, all expecting.” Her sentence snaps off as Shiv seizes her jaw, pressing his fingers hard into the soft meat, rubbing his thumb over the bone. Bruises. He will leave bruises like blue roses. Priya yelps. Yogendra bares his incisors. Pain arouses that boy, Shiv thinks. Pain makes him smile. The people of Chandni Basti stare. He feels eyes all around him. Stare well.

“Raja,” he whispers. “I am a raja.”

He lets her go. Priya rubs her jaw.

“That hurt, madar chowd.”

“There’s something, isn’t there?”

“You don’t deserve it. You deserve the Dawoods to cut you up with a robot, behen chowd.” She flinches as Shiv reaches for her face again. “It’s a little thing but it could lead to more. A lot more. Just a drop off. But if you do it right, they say.”

“Who says?”

“Nitish and Chunni Nath.”

“I don’t work for Brahmins.”

“Shiv.”

“It is a point of principle. I am a man of principle.”

“It’s principle to get chopped up into kabob by the Dawoods?”

“I do not take orders from children.”

“They aren’t children.”

“They are here.” Shiv cups his hand over his groin, jerks. “No, I will not work for the Naths.”

“Then you won’t need to go here.” She snaps open her little bag and slides a piece of paper across the greasy counter. There is an address, out in the industrial belt. “And you won’t need this car.” She parks a rental chitty beside the address slip. It’s for a Merc, a big Kali-black four-litre SUV Merc, like a raja would drive. “If you don’t need any of that, I guess I’ll go now and pray for your moksha.”

She scoops up her bag and slides off the high bench and pushes past Yogendra and strides off over the cardboard in those high heel boots that make her ass go wip-wop side-a-side.

Yogendra is looking at him. It’s that wise-kid look that makes Shiv want to smash his head against the tin counter until he hears things crack and go soft.

“You finished that?” He snatches the kid’s can of tea, splashes its contents over the ground. “You have now. We have better business.”

The kid is right in his fuck-you silence. He is as old as any Brahmin, inside there in the skull. Not for the first time Shiv wonders if he is a rich boy, a son and heir to some pirate lord, tumbled out of the limo under the neons of Kashi to learn how the world really works. Survive. Thrive. No other rules apply.

“You coming or what?” he shouts at Yogendra. Somewhere the kid has found himself a chew of paan.

Leela comes around again that night to help her mother make cauliflower puris. They are a treat for Shiv but the smell of hot ghee in the confined, dark house makes his skin crawl, his scalp itch. Shiv’s mother and sister squat around the little gas cooker. Yogendra sits with them draining the cooked puris, on crumpled newspaper. Shiv watches the boy, squatting with the women, scooping the smoking hot breads into their paper nests. This must have meant something to him once. A hearth, a fire, bread, paper. He looks at Leela clapping out the puris into little ovals and throwing them into the deep fat.

She says into the peace of the house, “I’m thinking of changing my name to Martha. It is from the Bible. Leela is from Leelavati who is a pagan goddess but is really a demon of Satan in hell. Do you know what hell is like?” She casually ladles cauliflower puris out on the chicken-wire scoop. “Hell is a fire that never goes out, a great dark hall, like a temple, only greater than any temple you have ever seen because it has to hold all the people who never knew the Lord Jesus. The walls and the pillars are tens of kilometres high and they glow yellow hot and the air is like a flame. I say walls, but there is no outside to hell, only solid rock going on forever in every direction, and hell is carved inside it, so that even if you could escape, which you can’t, because you’re chained up like a package, there would be nowhere else to go. And the space is filled with billions and billions of people all chained up into little bundles, piled on top of each other, a thousand deep and a thousand wide and a thousand high, a billion people in a pile, and a thousand of those piles. The ones in the centre cannot see anything at all but they can hear each other, all roaring. That is the only sound you hear in hell, this great roaring that never stops, from all the billions of people, chained and burning but never being burned up. That is the thing, burning in flame, but never eaten up.”

Shiv shifts on his charpoy. Hell is one thing Christians do well. His dick lifts in his pants. The torment, the screaming, the bodies heaped up in pain, the nakedness, the helplessness, have always stirred him. Yogendra sifts the drained puris into a basket. His eyes are dead, dull, his face animal.

“And the thing is, it goes on forever. A thousand years is not even a second. An age of Brahma is not even one instant in hell. A thousand ages of Brahma and you are still no nearer the end. You haven’t even begun. That is where you are going. You will be taken down by the demons and chained up and set on top of the pile of people and your flesh will begin to burn and you will try not to breathe in the flame but in the end you will have to and after that nothing will ever change. The only way to avoid Hell is to put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your personal Lord and Saviour. There is no other way. Imagine it: hell. Can you even begin to imagine what it will be like?”

“Like this?” Yogendra is fast as a knife in an alley. He grabs Leela’s wrist. She cries out but she cannot break his hold. His face is the same feral blank as he pushes her hand towards the boiling ghee.

Shiv’s boot to the side of his head knocks him across the room, scattering puris. Leela/Martha flees shrieking to the back room. Shiv’s mother flies back from the stove, the hot fat, the treacherous gas flame.

“Get him out of here, out of my house!”

“Oh, he’s going,” Shiv says as he crosses the room in two strides, lifts Yogendra by two fistfuls of T-shirt and drags him out into the gali. Blood wells from a small cut above his ear but Yogendra still wears that numb, animal smile. Shiv throws him across the alley and follows in with the boot. Yogendra doesn’t fight back, doesn’t try to defend himself, doesn’t try to run or curl into a ball, takes the kicking with a fuck-you smile on his face. It is like striking a cat. Cats never forgive. Fuck him. Cats you drown, in the river. Shiv kicks him until the blue is gone. Then he sits back against the shanty wall and lights a bidi. Lights another, passes it to Yogendra. He takes it. They smoke in the gali. Shiv grinds the butt out on the cardboard beneath the heel of his Italian shoe.

Raja of shit.

“Come on, we’ve got a car to pick up.”

17: LISA

Hand over hand, Lisa Durnau hauls herself up the tunnel into the heart of the asteroid. The shaft is little wider than her body, the vacuum suits are white and clinging, and Lisa Durnau cannot get the thought out of her head that she is a NASA sperm swimming up a cosmic yoni. She pulls herself up the white nylon rope after Sam Rainey’s receding gripsoles. The project director’s feet come to a halt. She pushes back against a knot on the rope and floats, halfway up a stone vagina, a quarter of a million miles from home. A robot manipulator arm squeezes past her on its way down from the core, outstretched and creeping on little manipulator fingers. Lisa flinches as it brushes past her compression suit. Japanese King Crabs are a childhood horror; things chitinous and spindly. She used to dream of pulling back the bed cover and finding one lying there, pincers weaving up towards her face.

“What’s the delay?”

“There’s a turning hollow. From here on, you’ll begin to feel the effects of gravity. You don’t want to be heading facedown.”

“This Tabernacle doofus has its own gravity field?”

Sam Rainey’s feet tuck up, he vanishes into the gloom between the lume tubes. Lisa sees vague whiteness tumbling and manoeuvring, then his face looks through its visor into hers.

“Just be careful not to get your arms trapped where you can’t use them.”

Lisa Durnau gingerly draws herself up into the turning space. It’s just wide enough to fit a hunched body in a vacuum suit and, as Sam warns, get yourself inextricably trapped. She grimaces at the rock grating on her shoulders.

It’s all been cramming and jamming and slamming since she was excreted through the pressure lock into Darnley 285 Excavation Headquarters. If ISS had smelled rancid, Darnley Base was that distilled and casked for a year. Darnley was an unstable trinity of space scientists, archaeologists, and oil rats from the Alaska north slope. Darnley’s greatest surprise was what the drill-crews discovered when their bits punched through raw rock and the spycams were lowered in. It was not a propulsion system, a mythical space-drive. It was altogether other.

The suit she had been given was a tight-fitting skin, a microweave smaller than a molecule of oxygen, flexible enough to move in the confined spaces of Darnley’s interior, yet with the strength to maintain a human body against vacuum. Lisa had clung, still vertiginous from the transfer from the shuttle, to a handhold in the pressure lock as she felt the white fabric press ever-tighter against her skin and one by one the crew upended themselves and dived down the rabbit hole that was the entrance to the rock. Then it was her turn to fight the claustrophobia and go down into the shaft. Clocks were ticking. She had forty-five minutes to get in, get done with whatever it was dwelt in the heart of Darnley 285, get out, and get on to Captain Pilot Beth’s shuttle before she made turnaround.

In the gullet of the asteroid, Lisa Durnau folds her arms across her chest, pulls up her legs, and neatly somersaults. Pushing herself down the rope she feels a little extra assistance pulling at her feet. Now there is a distinct sensation of down and up and her stomach starts to gurgle as it reverts to its natural orientation. She glances between her feet. Sam Rainey’s head fills the shaft; around it is a halo. There’s light down there.

A few hundred knots downshaft and she can kick off and glide in hundred-metre swoops. Lisa whoops. She finds microgee more exhilarating and liberating than bloated, nauseous free fall.

“Don’t forget, you have to come back up again,” Sam says.

Five more minutes down and the light is a bright silver shine. Lisa’s body says half a gravity and getting stronger by the metre. Her mind rebels at the outrage of weight in absolute vacuum. Suddenly Sam’s head vanishes. She clings fingers and toes to the wall and squints through her feet into a disk of silver light. She thinks she sees a spider web of ropes and cables.

“Sam?”

“Climb down until you see a rope ladder. Grab a good hold of that, you’ll see me.”

Feet first, in a too-tight sperm-suit, Lisa Durnau enters the central cavity of Darnley 285. Beneath her feet is the web of cables and ratlines strung around the roof of the cavern. Clinging to the guy ropes, Lisa catwalks across the net towards Sam Rainey, who lies prostrate on the netting.

“Don’t look down,” Sam warns. “Yet. Come over here and lie beside me.” Lisa Durnau eases herself prone on to a sling of webbing and looks down into the heart of the Tabernacle.

The object is a perfect sphere of silver grey. It is the size of a small house and hangs perfectly at the centre of gravity of the asteroid twenty metres beneath Lisa Durnau’s faceplate. It gives off a steady, dull, metallic light. As her eyes become accustomed to the chromium glow she becomes aware of variations, ripples of chiaroscuro on the surface. The effect is subtle but once she has the eye for it, she can see patterns of waves clashing and merging and throwing off new diffraction patterns, grey on grey.

“What happens if I drop something into it?” Lisa Durnau asks.

“Everyone asks that one,” says Sam Rainey in her ear.

“Well, what does happen?”

“Try it and find out.”

The only safely removable object Lisa Durnau can find is one of her nametags. She unvelcroes it from the breast of her suit, drops it through the web. She had imagined it would flutter. It falls straight and true through the tight vacuum inside Darnley 285. The tag is a brief silhouette against the light, then it vanishes into the grey shimmer like a coin into water. Ripples race away across the surface to clash and meld and whirl off brief vortices and spirals. It fell faster than it should, she thinks. Another thing she noticed: it did not pass through. It was annihilated as it intersected the surface. Taken apart.

“The gravity increases all the way down,” she observes.

“At the surface it’s about fifty gees. It’s like a black hole. Except…”

“It’s not black. So. stupid obvious question here. what is it?”

She can hear Sam’s intake of breath through his teeth on her suitcom.

“Well, it gives off EM in the visible spectrum, but that’s the only information we get from it. Any remote sensing scans we perform just die. Apart from this light, in every other respect, it is a black hole. A light black hole.”

Except it isn’t, Lisa Durnau realises. It does to your radar and X-rays what it did to my name. It takes them apart and annihilates them. But into what? Then she becomes aware of a small, beautiful nausea in her belly. It isn’t the embrace of gravity or the worm of claustrophobia or the intellectual fear of the alien and unknown. It’s the feeling she remembers from the women’s washroom in Paddington Station: the conception of an idea. The morning sickness of original thought.

“Can I get a closer look at it?” Lisa Durnau asks.

Sam Rainey rolls across the mesh of webbing to the technicians huddled together in a rickety nest of old flight chairs and impact strapping around battered instrument cases. A figure with a woman’s shoulders and the name Daen on an androgynous breast passes an image amplifier to Director Sam. He hooks it over Lisa Durnau’s helmet and shows her how to thumb up the tricky little controls. Lisa’s brain reels as she zooms in and out, in and out. There’s nothing to focus on here. Then it swims into vision. The skin of the Tabernacle fizzes with activity. Lisa remembers elementary school lessons where you popped a slide of pond water under the video camera and it was abuzz with microbeasts. She ratchets up the scale until the jittering, Brownian motion resolves into pattern and action. The silver is the newsprint grey of atoms of black and white, constantly changing from one to the other. The surface of the Tabernacle is a boil of patterns on fractal scales, from slow wave-trains to fleeting formations that scuttle together and annihilate each other or merge into larger, briefer forms that decay like trails in a bubble chamber into exotic and unpredictable fragments.

Lisa Durnau ratchets the vernier up until the graphic display says X1000. The grainy blur expands into a dazzle of black and white, flickering furiously, throwing off patterns like flames hundreds of times a second. The resolution is maddeningly short of clarity but Lisa knows what she would find at the base of it if she could go all the way in; a grid of simple black and white squares, changing from one to the other.

“Cellular automata,” whispers Lisa Durnau, suspended above the fractal swirls of patterns and waves and demons like Michelangelo in the Sistine, inverted. Life, as Thomas Lull would know it.

Lisa Durnau has lived most of her life in the flickering black and white world of cellular automata. Her Grandpa Mac—geneful of Scots-Irish contrariness—had been the one to first awaken her to the complexities that lay in a simple pattern of counters across an Othello board. A few basic rules for colour conversion based on the numbers of adjacent black and white tokens and she had baroque filigree patterns awaken and grow across her board.

On-line she discovered entire bestiaries of black-on-white forms that crawled, swam, swooped, swarmed, over her flatscreen in eerie mimicry of living creatures. Downstairs in his study lined with theological volumes, Pastor David G. Durnau constructed sermons proving the earth was eight thousand years old and that the Grand Canyon was carved by waters from the Flood.

In her final High School year, while girlfriends deserted her for Abercrombie, Fitch and skaterboyz, she concealed her social gawkiness behind glitterball walls of three-dimensional cellular automata. Her end-of-year project relating the delicate forms in her computer to the baroque glass shells of microscopic diatoms had boggled even her math teacher. It got her the university course she wanted. So she was a nerd. But she could run fast.

By her second year she was running ten kay a day and probing beneath the surface dazzle of her black-and-white virtual world to the bass-line funk of the rules. Simple programmes giving rise to complex behaviour was the core of the Wolfram/Friedkin conjecture. She had no doubt the universe communicated with itself but she needed to know what it was in the fabric of space-time and energy that called the counterpoint. She wanted to eavesdrop on the Chinese whisper of God. The search spun her off the chequerboard of Artificial Life into airy, dragon-haunted realms: cosmology, topology, M-theory and its heir, M-Star theory. She held universes of thought in either hand, brought them together, and watched them arc and burn.

Life. The game.

“We’ve got a few theories,” Sam Rainey says. Thirty-six hours of drugged sleep later, Lisa Durnau is back on ISS. She, Sam, and G-woman Daley form a neat, polite trefoil up in the free-gee, an unconscious recapitulation of the steel symbol pointing the way to the heart of Darnley 285. “Remember when you dropped your name badge.”

“It’s a perfect recording medium,” Lisa says. “Anything it interacts with physically is digitised to pure information.” Her name is now part of it. She isn’t sure how she feels about that. “So, it takes stuff in; has it ever given anything out? Any kind of transmission or signal?”

She catches a transmission or signal between Sam and Daley. Daley says, “I will address that momentarily, but first Sam will brief you on the historical perspective.”

Sam says, “She says historical; it’s actually archaeological. In fact even that’s not close. It’s the cosmological perspective. We’ve done isotope tests.”

“I know palaeontology, you won’t blind me with science.”

“Our table of U238 decay products gives it an age of seven billion years.”

Lisa Durnau’s a clergy child who doesn’t like to take the Lord’s name in vane but she says a simple, reverent, “Jesus.” Alterre’s aeons that pass like an evening gone have given here a feel for Deep Time. But the decay of radioactive isotopes opens on the deepest time of all, an abyss of past and future. Darnley 285 is older than the solar system. Suddenly Lisa Durnau is very aware that she is a mere chew of gristle and nerve rattling round inside a coffee can in the middle of nothing.

“What is it,” Lisa Durnau says carefully, “that you wanted me to know this before?”

Daley Suarez-Martin and Sam Rainey look at each other and Lisa Durnau realises that these are the people her country must rely on in its first meeting with the alien. Not super-heroes, not super-scientists, not super-managers. Not super-anything. Workaday scientists and civil servants. Working through, making it up as they go along. The ultimate human resource: the ability to improvise.

“We’ve been videoing the surface of the Tabernacle more or less since day one,” Sam Rainey says. “It took us some time to realise we had to run the camera at fifteen thousand frames per second to isolate the patterns. We’re having them analysed.”

“Trying to pick out the rules behind the automaton.”

“I don’t think I’m betraying any secrets, but we don’t have the capacity in this country.”

This country, thinks Lisa Durnau, orbiting at the L-5 stable point. Screwed by your own Hamilton Act. She says, “You need high-level pattern-recognition aeais; what, 2.8, higher?”

“There are a couple of decrypting and pattern-recognition specialists out there,” Daley Suarez-Martin says. “Regrettably, they aren’t in the most politically stable of locations.”

“So you don’t need me to try and find your Rosetta Stone. What do you need me for?”

“On occasions we have received an incontrovertible, recognisable pattern.”

“How many occasions?”

“Three, on three successive frames. The date was July third, this year. This is the first.”

Daley floats a big thirty by twenty glossy through the ait to Lisa Durnau. Etched in the grey on grey is a woman’s face. The cellular automaton’s resolution is high enough to show her slight, puzzled frown, her mouth slightly open, even the hint of her teeth. She is young, pretty, racially indeterminate and the scuttling blacks and whites, frozen in time, have caught a tired frown.

“Do you know who she is?” she asks.

“As you can imagine, determining that is a primary priority,” Daley says. “We’ve already interrogated FBI, CIA, IRS, Social Security, and passport databases. No matches.”

“She doesn’t have to be American,” Lisa Durnau says.

Daley seems genuinely surprised by that. She skims the next glossy to Lisa face down. Lisa Durnau turns over the sheet of paper and reaches instinctively for something not falling to cling to. But everything falls here, all together, all the time.

He’s changed his glasses, trimmed the beard to a rim of stubble; he’s grown out his hair and lost a pile of weight, but the little grey cells have captured the sardonic, self-conscious, get-that-camera-away-from-me look. Thomas Lull.

“Oh my good God,” she breathes.

“Before you say anything, please look at this last image.”

Daley Suarez-Martin sets the final photograph floating, framed in space.

Her. It is her face, drawn in silver but clear enough to make out the love spot on her cheek, the laugh-lines around the eyes, a shorter, sportier haircut, the open-mouthed, eyes-wide, muscle-straining expression she cannot quite read: Fear? Anger? Horror? Ecstasy? It is impossible and unbelievable and mad; it is mad beyond madness, and it is her. Lisa Leonie Durnau.

“No,” Lisa says slowly. “You’re making this up, it’s the drugs, isn’t it? I’m still on the shuttle. This is out of my head, isn’t it? Come on, tell me.”

“Lisa, can I assure you that you are not suffering from any post-flight delusions. I’m not showing you fakes or mock-ups. Why should I? Why bring you all the way up here to show you fake photographs?”

That soothing tone. That G-woman MBA-speak. Peace. Be calm. We are in control here. Be reasonable, in the face of the most unreasonable thing in the universe. Clinging with one hand to a webbing strap on the quilted wall of ISS’s hub, Lisa Durnau understands that it has all been unreasonable, a chain of ever larger and heavier links, from the moment the people in suits turned up in her office. From before; from the moment her face swirled out of the seethe of cells, without her knowledge, without her permission, the Tabernacle chose her. It has all been foreordained by this thing in the sky.

“I don’t know!” Lisa Durnau shouts. “I don’t know why. it throws up nothing and then comes up with my face. I don’t know, right? I didn’t ask it to, I didn’t want it to, it has nothing to do with me, do you understand me?”

“Lisa.” Again, the gentling tone.

It is her, but a her she has never seen. She’s never worn her hair like that. Lull has never looked like that. Older freer guiltier. No wiser. And this girl; she has never met her, but she will, she knows. This is a snapshot of her future taken seven billion years ago.

“Lisa,” Daley Suarez-Martin says a third time. The third time is Peter’s time. The betraying time. “I’m going to tell you what we need you to do.”

Lisa Durnau takes a deep breath.

“I know what it is,” she says. “I’ll find him. I can’t do anything else, can I?”

The earth has the little lightbody firmly in its grip. It’s three minutes—Lisa’s been counting seconds—since the roll jets last fired. The aeai has made its mind up, it is all now in the hands of velocity and gravity. Back-first, Lisa Durnau screams along the edge of the atmosphere in a thing that still looks like an over-gymmed orange squeezer, only now, with the hull temperature climbing towards three thousand cee, it’s not as funny as it was down in Canaveral. One digit out either way and thin air becomes a solid wall that ricochets you off into space and no one to catch you before your airco runs flat, or you fireball out and end as a sprinkle of titanium ions with a seasoning of charred carbon.

When she was a teen in her college hall room, Lisa Durnau had given herself one of the great scares of her life, alone in the dark among the noisy plumbing, by imagining what it will be like when she dies. The breath failing. The rising sense of panic as the heart fights for blood. The black drawing in from all sides. The knowledge of what is happening, and that you are unable to stop any of this and that after this meagre, unworthy last instance of consciousness, there will be nothing. And that this will happen to Lisa Durnau. No escape. No let-off. The death sentence is incommutable. She had woken herself up, frozen cold in her stomach, heart sick with certainty. She had stabbed on her light and tried to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, thoughts about guys and running and what she would do for that term paper and where the girls could go for Friday lunch club, but her imagination kept returning to the awful, delicious fear, like a cat to vomit.

Reentry is like that. She tries to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, but all she has is a pick of evils and the worst is out there, heating the hull beyond that padded mesh wall to cremation temperatures. It burns through the drugs. It burns through everything. You are the woman who fell to earth. The lightbody jolts. Lisa gives a small cry.

“It’s okay, it’s routine, just an asymmetry in the plasma shield.” Sam Rainey is strapped in the number two acceleration couch. He’s an old hand, been up and down a dozen times but Lisa Durnau smells bullshit. Her fingers have cramped around the armrest; she frees them, touches her heart for brief reassurance. She feels the flat square object in the pocket with her name written on it.

When she finds Thomas Lull she is to show him the contents of her right breast pocket. It is a memory block containing everything known or speculated about the Tabernacle. All she has to do then is persuade him to join the research project. Thomas Lull was the most prominent, eclectic, visionary, and influential scientific thinker of his day. Governments and chat-show hosts alike heeded his opinions. If anyone has an idea, a dream, or a vision of what this thing is, spinning in its stone cocoon, if anyone has a way of unravelling its message and meaning, it will be Thomas Lull.

The block is also guru. Its special power is that it can scan any public or security camera system for recognised faces. It’s such a piece of gear that if it’s away from Lisa Durnau’s personal body odour for more than an hour, it will decompose into a smear of protein circuitry. Be careful with the showers, swims, and keep it close by you when you’re in bed, is the instruction. Her one lead is a semiconfirmed sighting of Thomas Lull three and a half years ago in Kerala, South India. The revelation of the Tabernacle hangs from a single, uncorroborated old backpacker story. The embassies and consuls are on Render-All-Assistance alert. A card has been authorised for expenses; it is limitless, but Daley Suarez-Martin, who will always be Lisa Durnau’s handler, in orbit or earthbound, would like some record of outgoings.

The little lightpusher hits the air hard, a fist of gravity shoves Lisa Durnau deep into her gel couch and everything is jolting and rattling and shaking. She is more afraid than she has ever been and there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can hold on to. She reaches out a hand. Sam Rainey takes it. His gloved hand is big and cartoonish and one tiny node of stability in a falling, shuddering universe.

“Some time!” Sam shouts, voice shaking. “Some time! When we! Get down! How about! We go out! For a meal! Somewhere?”

“Yes! Anything!” Lisa Durnau wails as she hurtles Kennedy-wards, drawing a long, beautiful plasma trail across the tall-grass prairies of Kansas.

18: LULL

How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation. Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all India’s many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing over this vast diamond of land. All is riverrun, meeting, a brief journey together, then dissolution.

Western thought rebels against this. Western thought is car thought. Freedom of movement. Self-direction. Individual choice and expression and sex on the back seat. The great car society. Throughout literature and music, trains have been engines of fate, drawing the individual blindly, inexorably towards death. Trains ran through the double gates of Auschwitz, right up to the shower sheds. India has no such understanding of trains. It is not where the unseen engine is taking you; it is what you see from the window, what you say to your fellow travellers for you all go together. Death is a vast, crowded terminus of half-heard announcements and onward connections on new lines, new journeys. Changing trains.

The train from Thiruvananthapuram moves through a wide web of lines into the great station. Sleek shatabdis weave over the points on to the fast uplines. Long commuter trains whine past festooned with passengers hanging from the doors, riding the boarding steps, piled onto the roofs, arms thrust through the barred windows, prisoners of the mundane. Mumbai. She has always appalled Thomas Lull. Twenty million people live on this onetime archipelago of seven scented islands and the evening rush is upon her. Downtown Mumbai is the world’s largest single building; malls and housing projects and office and leisure units fused together into a many-armed, many-headed demon. Nestled at the heart of it is Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, a bezoar of Victorian excess and arrogance, now completely domed over with shopping precincts and business units, like a toad entombed in a nodule of limestone. There is never a moment when Chattrapati Shivaji is still or silent. She is a city within a city. Certain castes boast they are unique to it; families claim to have raised generations among the platforms and tracks and red brick piers who have never seen daylight. Five hundred million pilgrim feet pass over the Raj marble each year, tended to by citiesful of porters, vendors, shysters, insurance sellers, and janampatri readers.

Lull and Aj descend among the families and luggage onto the platform. The noise is like a mugging. Timetable announcements are inaudible blasts of public address roar. Porters converge on the white faces; twenty hands reach for their bags. A skinny man in a red MarathaRail high-collar jacket lifts Aj’s bag. Quick as a knife, her hand stabs out to arrest him. She tilts her head, looks into his eyes.

“Your name is Dheeraj Tendulkar, and you are a convicted thief.” The ersatz porter recoils as if snake-bit.

“We’ll carry our own.” Thomas Lull takes Aj by the elbow, guides her like a bride through the press of faces and smells. Her gaze darts from face to face to face in the torrent of people.

“The names. All the names; too many to read.”

“I still can’t understand this gods thing,” he says.

The red-jackets have gathered around the rogue. Raised voices, a cry.

There is an hour’s wait until the Varanasi shatabdi. Thomas Lull finds haven in a global coffee franchise. He pays Western prices for a cardboard bucket with a wooden stirrer. There is a tightening in his chest, the asthmatic’s somatic reaction to this claustrophobic, relentless city beneath a city. Through the nose. Breathe through the nose. The mouth for talking.

“This is very bad coffee, don’t you think?” Aj says.

Thomas Lull drinks it and says nothing and watches the trains come and go and the people mill through on their pilgrimages. Among them, a man bound for the last place a man of his age and sentiments should go, a dirty little water war. But it’s mystery, allure, it’s mad stuff and reckless deeds when all you expect to feel is the universal microwave background humming through your marrow.

“Aj, show me that photograph again. There’s something I need to tell you.”

But she is not there. Aj moves through the crowd like a ghost. People part around her, staring. Thomas Lull throws cash on the table, dives after her, waving down a couple of porters to heft the bags.

“Aj! Our train is over here!”

She moves on, unhearing. She is the Madonna of Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. A family sits on a dhuri underneath a display board drinking tea from thermos flasks: mother, father, grandmother, two girls in their early teens. Aj walks towards them, unhurried, unstoppable. One by one they look up, feeling the whole attention of the station turned upon them. Aj stops. Thomas Lull stops. The porters trotting behind him stop. Thomas Lull feels, at some quantum level, every train and luggage van and shunter stop, every passenger and engineer and guard freeze, every signal and sign and notice board halt between the flip and the flop. Aj squats down before the frightened family.

“I have to tell you, you are going to Ahmedabad, but he will not be there to meet you. He is in trouble. It is bad trouble, he has been arrested. The charge is serious; theft of a motorbike. He is being held in Surendranagar District police station, number GBZ16652. He will require a lawyer. Azad and Sons is one of the most successful Ahmedabad criminal law practices. There is a quicker train you can catch in five minutes from Platform Nineteen. It requires a change at Surat. If you hurry you can still catch it. Hurry!”

Lull seizes her arm. Aj turns; he sees emotions in her eyes that frighten him but he has broken the moment. The terrified family are in various states of alarm; father fight, mother flight, grandmother hands raised in praise, daughters trying to gather up the tea things. A hot wet stain of spilled chai spreads across the dhuri.

“She is right,” Thomas Lull calls as he drags Aj away. Now she is unresisting, leaden, like the ones he would escort from the beach parties, stumbling over the sand, the ones on the evil trips. “She’s always right. If she says go, you go.”

Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus exhales and resumes its constant low-intensity scream.

“What the fuck were you thinking of?” Lull says, hurrying Aj to Platform Five where the Mumbai-Varanasi Raj shatabdi has been called, a long scimitar of green and silver glistening in the station floods. “What did you tell those people? You could have started anything, anything at all.”

“They were going to see their son but he is in trouble,” she says faintly. He thinks she might collapse on him.

“This way sir, this way!” The porters escort them through the crowd. “This car, this car!” Thomas Lull overpays them to take Aj to her seat. It’s a reserved two-person carrel, lamp-lit, intimate. Leaning into the cone of light, Thomas Lull says, “How do you know this stuff?”

She will not look at him, she turns her head into the padded seatback. Her face is ash. Thomas Lull is very afraid she is going to have another asthma attack.

“I saw it, the gods.”

He lunges forward, takes her heart-shaped face between his two hands, turns it to look at him.

“Don’t lie to me; nobody can do this.”

She touches his hands and he feels them fall away from her face.

“I told you. I see it like a halo around people. Things about them; who they are, where they’re going, what train they’re on. Like those people going to see their son, only he wouldn’t be there for them. All that, and they wouldn’t have known, and they would have been waiting and waiting and waiting at the station and trains would come and trains would go and still he wouldn’t come and maybe the father would go to his address but all they would know is that he went out that morning to work and that he’d said he would meet them all at the station and they’d go to the police and find out that he’d been arrested for stealing a motorbike and they would have to bail him and they wouldn’t know who to go to get him out.”

Thomas Lull slumps in his seat. He is defeated. His anger, his blunt Yankee rationalism fail before this girl’s pale words.

“This son, this prodigal, what’s his name?”

“Sanjay.”

Automatic doors close. Up the line a whistle shrills over the station roar.

“Have you got that photograph? Show me that photograph, the one you showed me down by the backwater.”

Silently, smoothly, the train begins to move, Station wallahs and well-wishers keep pace for a last chance sale or farewell. Aj unfolds the palmer on the table.

“I didn’t tell you the truth,” Thomas Lull says.

“I asked you. You said: ‘Just other tourists on the trip. They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same.’ That was not the truth?”

The fast electric train rocks over points; picking up speed with every metre it dives into a tunnel, eerily lit by flashes from the overhead lines.

“It was a truth. They were tourists—we all were, but I know these people. I’ve known them for years. We were all travelling together in India, that’s how well we knew each other. Their names are Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau; they’re Artificial-life theoreticians from the University of Strasbourg. He’s French, she’s Indian. Good scientists. The last time I heard from them they were thinking of moving to the University of Bharat—all the closer to the sundarbans. That was where they thought the real cutting research was being done, unhampered by the Hamilton Acts and the aeai licensing laws. Looks like they did, but they are not your real parents.”

“Why is that?” Aj asks.

“Two things. First, how old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? They didn’t have a child when I knew them four years ago. But that all falls at the second. Anjali was born without a womb. Jean-Yves told me. She could never have children, not even in vitro. She cannot be your natural mother.”

The shatabdi bursts out from the undercity into the light. A vast plane of gold slants through the window across the small table. Mumbai’s photochemical smog has blessed it with Bollywood sunsets. The perpetual brown haze renders the ziggurats of the projects ethereal as sacred mountains. Power gantries strobe past; Thomas Lull watches them flicker over Aj’s face, trying to read emotions, reactions in the dazzling mask of gold. She bows her head. She closes her eyes. Thomas Lull hears an intake of breath. Aj looks up.

“Professor Lull, I am experiencing a number of strong and unpleasant sensations. Let me describe them to you. Though I am at relative rest, I experience a sense of vertigo, as if I am falling; not in a physical sense, but inwards. I experience a sense of nausea and what I can only describe as hollowness. I experience unreality, as if this present is not happening to me and I am dreaming in my bed in the hotel in Thekkady. I experience a sense of impact, as if I have been struck without a physical blow being landed on me. I imagine that the physical substance of the world is frail and fragile like glass and that at any moment I will fall through into a void, yet at the same time I find a thousand different ideas rushing through my head. Professor Lull, can you explain my contradictory sensations?”

The swift sun of India is now setting, staining Aj’s face red like a devotee of Kali. The fast train blurs through Mumbai’s vast basti-lands. Thomas Lull says, “It’s what anyone feels when their life turns to lies. It’s anger and it’s betrayal and it’s confusion and loss and fear and hurt but those are only names. We have no language for emotions other than the emotion itself.”

“I feel tears starting in my eyes. This is most surprising.” Then Aj’s voice breaks and Thomas Lull helps her to the washroom to let the alien emotions work themselves out away from the stares of the passengers. Back at his seat he calls a steward and orders a bottle of water. He pours a glass, adds a high-grade tranq from his small but efficacious travelling apothecary, and marvels at the simple complexity of the ripple patterns on its surface transmitted from the steel beat of the wheels. When Aj returns he pushes the trembling glass across the table before any more of her questions can tumble out. He has enough of his own.

“All of it.”

The tranq is not long taking effect. Aj blinks at him like a drunk owl, curls up as cat-comfortable as she can in the seat. She is out. Thomas Lull’s hand moves to her tilak, stops. It would be a violation as monstrous as if he slipped his hand down the front of her loose grey tie-waist pants. And that is a thought he hadn’t verbalised until this second.

Strange girl, curled up like a gangly ten-year-old in her seat. He told her truths to scarify any heart and she treated them like propositions in philosophy. As if they were strange to her, new. Alien. Why had he told her? To break her illusion or because he knew how she would react? To see the look on her face as she fought to comprehend what her body was experiencing? He knows that fearful bafflement from the faces of the beach-club kids when emotions brewed up in the protein processor matrices of the cyberabads hit them. Emotions for which their bodies have no needs or analogues; emotions they experience but cannot understand. Alien emotions.

He has much work to do. As the fast train plunges past the empty, stepped reservoirs of the purifying Narmada, hurling itself into the night past the villages and towns and drought-blighted forests, Thomas Lull goes far-fetching. An old down-home expression of Lisa Durnau’s for blue-skying; sitting back and letting your mind roam the furthest bounds of possibility. It is the work he loves best and the closest heathen old Thomas Lull comes to spirituality. It is, he thinks, all of spirituality. God is our selves, our true, preconscious selves. The yogis have had it right all these millennia. The working out of the idea is never as thrilling as the burn of creation, the moment of searing insight when all at once, you know absolutely.

He studies Aj as ideas tumble and collide and shatter and are drawn together again by intellectual gravity. In time they will coalesce into a new world, but there is enough for Thomas Lull to guess its future nature. And he is afraid. The train ploughs on, peeling a bow-wave of night from its streamlined prow as it eats two hundred and eighty kilometres of India every hour. Exhaustion struggles with intellectual excitement and eventually subdues it. Thomas Lull sleeps. He wakes only at the brief halt at Jabalpur as Awadhi customs make a perfunctory border check. Two men in peaked caps glance at Thomas Lull. Aj sleeps on, head cradled on arm. White man and Western woman. Unimpeachable. Thomas Lull dozes again, waking once to shiver with an ancient, childhood pleasure at the rumble of the wheels beneath him. He falls into a long and untroubled sleep terminated by an untimetabled jolt that throws him out of unconsciousness hard against the table.

Luggage crashes from the overhead racks. Passengers in the aisles fall. Voices cry, merge into a jabber of panic. The shatabdi jars hard, jars again; comes to a screaming, shuddering halt. The voices peak and fall silent. The train sits motionless. The com crackles, goes dead. Thomas Lull cups his hands around his face, peers out of the window. The rural dark is impenetrable, enfolding, yonic. He thinks he sees distant car headlights, bobbing lights like torches. Now the questions start, everyone asking at once is everyone all right what happened?

Aj mumbles, stirring. The tranqs are more effective than Thomas Lull thought. Now he is aware of a wall of voices advancing down the train and with it a stench of burning polycarbon from the air-conditioning ducts. With one hand he snatches up Aj’s bag, with the other he drags her upright. Aj blinks thickly at him.

“Come on, sleeping beauty. We’re making an unscheduled disembarkation.” He pulls her, still quasi-conscious, into the aisle, seizes the bags, and pushes her towards the rear sliding doors. Behind him the black picture window explodes in a spray of glass-sugar as a concrete block trailing a sling-rope bursts through. It bounces off the table, strikes a woman in the seat across the aisle. She goes down, spraying blood from a smashed knee. The press of fleeing passengers trip over her and fall. She is dead, Thomas Lull realises with a terrible, intimate chill. The woman, or anyone else who goes down in this surge.

“Get the fuck moving!” Thomas Lull bounces the dazed Aj down the aisle with slaps of his hands to her back. He glimpsed flames through the empty window; flames and faces. “Go go go.” Behind them the jam is hideous. Low vanguards of smoke steal from the vents and under the uptrain carriage door. The voices rise to a chorus of dread.

“To me! To me!” roars a Sikh steward in railway livery standing on a table by the inner carriage door. “One at a time, come on, there is plenty of time. You. Now, you. You.” He uses his passkey to turn the sliding door into a people-lock. One family at a time.

“What the hell is going on?” Thomas Lull asks as he takes his place at the head of the line.

“Bharati karsevaks have fired the train,” the steward says quietly. “Say nothing. Now, you go.”

Thomas Lull shoves Aj into the door section, blinks into the dark outside.

“Fucking hell.” A ring of fire encircles the small encampment of dazed, fearful passengers and their goods. Decades of working with the digits of cellular automata have made Thomas Lull skilled at estimating number from a single glance. There must be five hundred of them out there, holding burning torches. Sparks blow back from the front of the train; orange smoke, luminous in half light, is a sure signifier of burning plastics. “Change of plan. We’re not getting off here.”

“What’s going on, what’s happening?” Aj asks as Thomas Lull forces open the doors to the next carriage. It is already half empty.

“The train’s been stopped, some Shivaji protest.”

“Shivaji?”

“I thought you knew everything. Hindu fundamentalists. Who are pretty pissed with Awadh right now.”

“You’re very glib,” Aj says and Thomas Lull cannot tell if it is the end of the tranqs or the start of her weird wisdom. But the glow from outside grows stronger and he can hear the slam and shatter of objects hurled against the carcass of the train.

“That’s because I’m very very scared,” Thomas Lull says. He pushes Aj past the next door open on to the night. He does not want her to register the screams and the sounds he recognises as small-arms fire. The bogies are almost empty now, they plough their way through one, two, three, then the car staggers sending Thomas Lull and Aj reeling as a deep boom rocks the train. “Oh Jesus,” Thomas Lull says. He guesses that a power car has exploded. A roar of acclamation goes up from the mob outside. Thomas Lull and Aj press on. Four carriages back they meet a wide-eyed Marathi ticket inspector.

“You cannot go on, sir.”

“I am going on whether it’s past, over, or through you.”

“Sir, sir, you do not understand. They have fired the other end, too.”

Thomas Lull stares at the inspector in his neat suit. It is Aj who pulls him away. They reach the intercarriage lobby as smoke forces its fingers between the inner door seals. The lights go out. Thomas Lull blinks in darkness, then the emergency floor-level lighting kicks in casting an eerie, Gothic footlight glow into the crannies and crags of human faces. The outer door remains fast. Sealed. Dead. Thomas Lull watches the smoke fill up the carriage behind the inner door. He tries to find purchase on the rubber seal.

“Sir, sir, I have a key.”

The inspector hauls a heavy metal Allen key out of his pocket on a chain, fits it to a hex nut, and begins to crank the door open. The inner carriage door is blackened with soot and beginning to buckle and blister. “A few more moments, sir.”

The door cranks wide enough for six hands to haul it open. Thomas Lull flings the luggage into the dark and himself after it. He hits awkwardly, falls, rolls on rocks and rails. Aj and the railwayman follow him. He pulls himself upright to see the interior of the carriage they have abandoned light startling yellow. Then every window detonates outwards in a hail of crumbed glass.

“Aj!” Thomas Lull shouts through the tumult. He has never heard noise like it. Screaming voices, wailing, a jagged tangle of cries and roars and language multilayered and shattered into incomprehensibility. Revving engines, a steady hammer of missiles. Children’s fear-stricken shrieks. And behind all, the sucking, liquid roar of the burning train, steadily consuming itself from both ends like vile incense. Hell must sound like this. “Aj!”

Bodies move everywhere in every direction. Thomas Lull has a sense of the geography of the atrocity now. The people flee from the head of the train, now a series of actinic detonations as electrical switchgear blows, where a deep line of men in white advances on them like a Raj army. Most are armed with lathis, some carry edged mattocks, hoes, machetes. An agricultural army. There is at least one sword, raised high above the horizon of heads. Some are naked, white with ash, naga sadhus. Warrior priests. All carry a scrap of red on them, the colour of Siva. Flames glint from missiles; bottles, rocks, pieces of smashed train superstructure hailing down on the passengers who crouch and scurry, not knowing where to look for the next attack, dragging bundles of luggage. Gunsmoke plumes up into the air. The ground is strewn with abandoned, burst baggage, shirts and saris and toothbrushes trampled and scuffed into the dust. A man clutches a gashed head. A child sits in the middle of the rush of feet, looking around in terror, mouth wide and silent with a terror beyond cries, cheeks glossy with tears. Feet trample a crumpled pile of fabric. The pile quivers, struck by hurrying shoes. Bones crack. Thomas Lull now senses a purpose and direction in the flight: away from the men in white, towards a low line of huts that has become visible as eyes adjust to the dark of Bharati countryside. A village. Sanctuary. Except a second wave of karsevaks runs from behind the burning rear of the train, cutting off the retreat. The stampede halts. Nowhere to tun. People go down, piling up on each other. The noise redoubles.

“Aj!”

And then she is there in front of him, like she’s come up off the ground. She combs glass crumbs out of her hair.

“Professor Lull.”

He seizes her hand, hauls her back towards the train.

“It’s all cut off on this side of the train. We’re going the other way.”

The two wings of attackers hook towards each other, closing a half-encirclement. Thomas Lull knows anything in that arena is dead. There is only a small gap to the dark, desiccated fields.

The families flee into it, dropping everything and running for their lives. Ash swirls and storms in the updrafts from the train fire; Lull and Aj are now within missile range. Rocks and bottles start to clang off the carriages, shattering into glassy shrapnel.

“Under here!” Thomas Lull ducks under the train. “Watch out for this.” The undercarriage is lethal with high-voltage cables and drums of pressurised hydraulic fluid. Thomas Lull crawls out to find himself looking at a wall of car headlights. “Fuck.” The vehicles are parked in a long line a hundred metres from the train. Trucks, buses, pickups, family cars, phatphats. “They’re right round us. We’re going to have to try it.”

Aj snaps her head up to the sky.

“They’re here.”

Thomas Lull turns to see the helicopters roar over the top of the train, fast, hard, low enough to swirl the flames up into a fire tornado. They are blind insects, combat bots slung from their dragonfly thoraxes like eggs. They carry the green and orange yin-yang of Awadh on their noses. Counterinsurgency pulse lasers pivot in their housings seeking targets. Deep under Delhi, helicopter jockeys recline on gel beds watching through their pineal eyes, moving their hands a centimetre here, a flicker there to instruct the pilot systems. The three helicopters turn in the air above the parked cars, bow to each other in a robot gavotte, and swoop down on their drop runs. Gunfire cracks out from beyond the line of headlights, bullets smack, and white from the spun-diamond carapaces. From ten metres they release their riot control bots, then climb, spin, and open up with the pulsers. The bots hit the ground and immediately charge. Cries. Shots. Men come running from between the cars into the open space. The helicopters lock on and fire. Soft bangs, dull flashes, bodies go sprawling, crawling. The pulse lasers flash the first thing they touch to plasma and pump it into an expanding shock wave, whether clothing or the ash-daubed skin of a naked naga. The karsevaks go reeling, stripped bare-chested by laser-fire. The counterinsurgency bots clear the vehicles in a leap like something from a Japanese comic and unfold their riot control shock-staves.

“Down!” Thomas Lull yells, shoving Aj’s face to the dust. The men flee but the springing bots are faster, harder, and more accurate. A body crashes beside Thomas Lull, face scorched in second-degree sunburn. Steel hooves flash, he covers his head with his arms, then rolls to see the machines hurdle the train. He waits. The helicopters are still up there. He plays dead until they pass over, frail craneflies never intended for human occupancy. “Up! Go, now! Run!” A prickle of suspicion on the back of his neck makes Thomas Lull look up. A helicopter turns a sensor cluster on him. A gatling pulser swings to bear. Then smoke billows between man and machine, the aeai loses tracking and the helicopter dips over the train, turrets stuttering laser fire. “Get behind the cars, down behind a wheel, that’s the safest place,” Thomas Lull shouts over the tumult. Then they both freeze in their flight as the air between the cars seems to shiver and the wash of light from the massed headlights breaks into moving shards. Men in combat gear fade into visibility. Thomas Lull pulls his passport from his pocket, holds it high like an Old Time preacher of the gospel.

“American citizen!” he shouts as the soldiers slip past, their suits now camouflaged in mirror and infrared. “American citizen!” A subadar with an exquisitely groomed moustache pauses to survey Thomas Lull. His unit badge bears the eternal wheel of Bharat. He casually cradles a multitask assault gun.

“We have mobile units to the rear,” the subadar says. “Make your way there. You will be cared for.” As he speaks the helicopters reappear over the train, now half ablaze. “Go now, sir.” The subadar breaks into a run; the lead helicopter locks its belly turret onto him and fires. Thomas Lull sees the officer’s uniform glow as it absorbs the laser, then the Bharati soldier brings his weapon to bear and fires off a Sam. The helicopter pulls up and peels away in a spray of chaff, the little missile zig-zagging after it, a line of fire across the night. A rain of tinsel the colour of burning shatabdi falls around Thomas Lull and Aj. Recognising a more potent threat, a squad of riot control bots has taken position along the top of the train attempting to hold off the Bharati troops with stun lasers and riot control chaff. The firelight catches on the chromed joints and sinews. The humans take them one at time with EMP fire. As each bot tumbles from the train it releases a clutch of fist-sized subdrones. They bounce, unfold into scurrying scarabs armed with spinning strimmer-wires. They swarm the soldiers; Thomas Lull sees one man go down and turns Aj away before the wire flays him to the bone. He sees the subadar kick one off the toe of his boot, raise his weapon butt, and smash it to pieces. But there are always too many of them. That is the tactic. The subadar calls his men back. They run. The scarabs skitter after. Thomas Lull still clutches his passport, like a tract waved in the face of a vampire.

“I think it will take more than that,” the subadar says, snatching Thomas Lull by the arm and dragging him in his wake. Beyond the line of vehicles men with flamethrowers fade out of stealth into visibility. And Thomas Lull realises that Aj has slipped his grip. He yells her name. He does not know how many times this night he has called that name in that lost, crippled by fear tone. Thomas Lull tears himself away from the Bharati officer.

Aj stands before the scurrying, bounding line of combat bots. She goes down on one knee. They are metres, moments away, flay-wires shrilling. She raises her left hand, palm outward. The onslaught of robots halts. By ones, then by two, tens, twenties, they spin down their weapons, curl up into their transit spheres. Then a Bharati jawan darts in and whirls her away and the flamethrower men open up, fire on fire. Thomas Lull goes to her. She is shivering, tearful, smoke-smeared with the strap of her small luggage still twisted in her hand.

“Has somebody got a blanket or something?” he asks as the soldier moves them through the line of cars. A foil spaceblanket unfolds from somewhere, Thomas Lull pulls it around Aj’s shoulders. The soldier backs away; he has seen aeai strike helicopters and fought robots, but this scares him. You do well, Thomas Lull thinks as he guides Aj towards the laager of troop carriers. We would all do well.

19: MR. NANDHA

Each of the five bodies has its fists raised. Mr. Nandha has seen enough death by fire to understand that it is a thing of biology and temperature but an older, pre-Enlightenment sensibility sees them fighting swirling djinns of flame. It would have been demonic at the end. The apartment is still sooty with floating polycarbon ash, drifts of vaporised computer casing. When they settle on Mr. Nandha’s skin they smear to the softest, darkest kohl. It takes a temperature of over a thousand degrees to reduce plastic to pure carbon soot.

Varanasi, city of cremations.

The morgue crew zip black bags shut. Sirens from the street; the firefighters pulling out. The scene is now in the hands of the law agencies, last of which is the Ministry. SOCO boys brush past Mr. Nandha, recording videos on their palmers. He is trespassing on another’s bailiwick. Mr. Nandha has his own comfortable methodology and for him simple observation and the application of imagination yield insights and intuitions police procedural might never apprehend.

The first sense the crime assails is smell. He could smell the burned meat, the oily, sweet choke of melted plastic from the lobby. The stench so overpowers all other senses that Mr. Nandha must focus to extract information from it. He opens his nostrils for hints, contradictions, subtle untogethernesses that might suggest what has happened here. An electrical fault among all the computers, the fire investigation officer had immediately suggested. Can he pick that unmistakable prickle of power out of the mix?

Sight is the second sense. What did he see when he entered the crime locus? Double doors forced open by fire department hydraulics, the outer the standard apartment block fascia door; the inner, heavy green metal, dogged and barred, the latches warped by fire service jacks. They could not open the door? They trapped themselves in their own security? The paint is seared from the inside of the inner door, blackened raw metal. Proceed. The short lobby, the main lounge, the bedrooms they had been using as their memory farm. Kitchen; skeletons of cupboards and racks on the wall, melamine peeled away but the woodchip intact. Chipboard survives. Ash and blackness, one thing fused into another. The windows have blown inwards. A pressure drop? The fire must almost have exhausted itself. It would have burned smoky and black. They would have asphyxiated before the windows blew and fresh oxygen kindled the fire djinn. Melted stubs of computer drives flow into each other. Vikram will rescue what is rescueable.

Hearing. Three thousand people in this apartment pile yet the quiet on the fire floor is absolute. Not even the chirp of a radio left burbling. The firemen have withdrawn their cordon but residents are reluctant to return to their homes. There are rumours that the blaze was a revenge attack by the Awadhis for the shatabdi massacre. The neighbours on either side only knew what was happening when the wall grew hot and the paint started to blister.

Touch. The greasy, coagulating smut of soot in the air. A black floating cobweb settles on to Mr. Nandha’s sleeve. He goes to wipe it, then remembers that it is ten percent human fat.

Taste, the fifth test. Mr. Nandha has learned the technique from cats, a flaring of the nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth, a rasping of the air across the palate. It is no elegance but it works for little hunters and Krishna Cops.

“Nandha, whatever are you doing?” Chauhan the State Pathologist bags up the penultimate corpse and slaps the despatch notice on the plastic sack.

“A few preliminaries. Have you anything for me yet?”

Chauhan shrugs. He is a big bear of a man with the callous joviality of those who work among the inner doings of the violently killed.

“Call by me this afternoon, I may have something for you by then.”

Vaish, the police inspector in charge, looks up, disapprovingly, at the trespass.

“So, Nandha,” Chauhan says as he steps back and his white-suit team lift the bag on to the stretcher. “I hear your good woman is rebuilding the hanging gardens of Babylon. She really must be missing the old village.”

“Who is saying this?”

“Oh, it’s all the word,” Chauhan says, noting down comments on the fourth victim. “Doing the rounds after the Dawar’s party. This one’s a woman. Interesting. So, green fingers then, Nandha?”

“I am having a roof-top retreat constructed, yes. We’re thinking of using it for entertainments, dinners, social get-togethers. It’s quite the thing in Bengal, roof gardens.”

“Bengal? They’ve all the fashions, there.” Chauhan regards himself as Mr. Nandha’s equal in intellect, education, career, and standing; everything but wedlock. Mr. Nandha married within jati. Chauhan married below subcaste.

Mr. Nandha frowns at the ceiling.

“I presume this place would have a halon fire extinguisher system as a matter of course?”

Chauhan shrugs. Inspector Vaish stands up. He understands.

“Have you found anything that looks like a control box?” Mr. Nandha asks.

“In the kitchen,” the inspector answers. The box is under the sink beside the U-bend, the most inconvenient place. Mr. Nandha rips off the seared cupboard door, squats down, and shines his pencil torch all around. These people used a lot of multisurface cleaner. All those hard cases, Mr. Nandha presumes. The heat has penetrated even this safe cubby, loosening the plumbing solder and sagging the plastic cover. A few turns of the multitool unscrews it. The service ports are intact. Mr. Nandha plugs in the avatar box and summons Krishna. The aeai balloons beyond the tight constraints of the under-sink cupboard. The god of little domesticities. Inspector Vaish crouches beside him. Where before he had radiated spiky resentment, he now seems in mild awe.

“I’m accessing the security system files,” Mr. Nandha explains. “It will take no more than a few moments. Ironic; they’ll protect their memory farm with quantum keys but the extinguisher system is a simple four-digit pin. And that,” he says as the command lines scroll up on his field of vision, “seems to have been their downfall. Do we have an estimated time of the fire?”

“The oven timer is stopped at seven twenty-two.”

“There’s a command from the insurance company—it’s certainly false—logged at seven oh five shutting down the halon gas system. It also activated the door locks.”

“They were sealed in.”

“Yes.” Mr. Nandha stands up, brushes himself down, noting with distaste the soft black smears of ten percent human fat where floating soot has gravitated on to him. “And that makes it murder.” He folds his avatars back into their box. “I shall return to my office to prepare an initial scene of crime report. I’ll need the most intact of the processors in my department before noon. And Mr. Chauhan.” The pathologist looks up from the last corpse, burned down to bones and a grin of bloody white teeth in black char. He knows those teeth; Radhakrishna’s impudent monkey-grin. “I will call on you at three and I expect you to have something for me by then.”

He imagines the SOCO’s smile as he quits the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. Like him, they have neither the money nor the patience to marry in jati.

At breakfast the talk had all been of the Dawar’s reception.

“We must have one,” Parvati said, bright and fresh with a flower in her long, black hair and the Fifth Test burbling in male baritones behind her. “When the roof garden is finished, we’ll have a durbar and invite everyone and it’ll be the talk for weeks.” She pulled her diary from her bag. “October? It should be looking best then, after the late monsoon.”

“Why are we watching the cricket?” Mr. Nandha asked.

“Oh that? I don’t know how that came to be on.” She waved her hand at the screen in the gesture for Breakfast with Bharti. An in-studio dance-routine bounced upon the screen. “There, happy? October is a good time, it is always such a flat month. But it might seem a bit of an anticlimax after the Dawars, I mean, it’s a garden and I love it very much and you are so good to let me have it, but it is only plants and seeds. How much do you think it cost them to get a Brahmin baby?”

“More than an Artificial Intelligence Licensing Investigations Officer can afford.”

“Oh, my love, I never thought for a moment.”

Listen to yourself, my bulbul, he thought. Babbling away, letting it fall from your lips and presuming it will be golden because you are surrounded by colour and movement and flowers every second of every day. I heard the society women you so envy and said nothing because they were right. You are quaint and open and say what is in your heart.

You are honest in your ambitions and that is why I would keep you away from them and their society.

Bharti on the Breakfast Banquette chattered and smiled with her Special! Morning! Guests! Today: Funki Puri Breakfast Specials from our Guest Chef, Sanjeev Kapur!

“Good day, my treasure,” Mr. Nandha said pushing away his half-empty cup of Ayurvedic tea. “Forget those snobbish people. They have nothing we need. We have each other. I may be late back. I have a scene of crime to investigate.” Mr. Nandha kissed his beautiful wife and went to look at the incinerated remains of Mr. Radhakrishna in his sundarban wedged unassumingly into a fifteenth-floor apartment in Diljit Rana Colony.

Dangling his damp tea bag from its string, Mr. Nandha looks out over Varanasi and tries to make sense of what he has seen in that charred apartment. The fire was savage but contained. Controlled. An engineered burn. A shaped charge? An infrared laser fired through the window?

Mr. Nandha flicks Bach violin concertos on to his palmer, sits back in his leather chair, puts his fingers together like a stupa, and turns to the city outside his window. It has been an unfailing and unstinting guru to him. He scrys it like an oracle. Varanasi is the City of Man and all human action is mirrored in its geography. Its patterns and traumas have yielded insights and wisdoms beyond reason and rationality. Today his city shows him fire patterns. On any given day there will be at least a dozen coils of smoke from domestic conflagrations. Among the jostling middle classes the habits of bride-burning have been extinguished, but he does not doubt that some of those further, paler smoke ribbons are “kitchen fires.”

You are safe with me, Parvati, he thinks. You can forever trust that I will not hurt you or tire of you, for you are rare, a pearl without price. You are protected from the sati of boredom or dowry envy.

The military troopships cut down across the skyline in the same regular rhythm. How many lakhs of soldiers now? In the police cruiser he had scanned the day’s headlines. Bharati jawans had driven back an Awadhi incursion along the railway line into western Allahabad. Awadhi/American robots were attacking a sit-down demonstration blocking a Maratha shatabdi on the mainline from Awadh. Mr. Nandha knows the reek of Rana spin, stronger than any incense or cremation smoke. Ironic that the Americans, engineers of the Hamilton Acts, chose to wage war through the machines they so mistrusted. If high-generation aeais ever gained access to the fighting robots.

Mr. Nandha’s fingers part. Intuition. Enlightenment. A movement at his side: a chai-boy whisks his used bag away on a silver saucer.

“Chai-wallah. Send Vikram down here. Quick now.”

“At once, sahb.”

Military aeai counter-countermeasure gunships. Trained to fly down and assassinate cyber-war craft like hunting falcons. Armed with pulse lasers. The murder weapon is out there, cutting patrol arcs through the sacred city’s sacred airspace. Someone cut into the military system.

Mr. Nandha smells Vik before any other sense announces his arrival. “Vikram.”

“How can I please you?” Mr. Nandha turns in his chair.

“Please get me a movement log of every military aeai drone over Varanasi for the past twelve hours.”

Vikram sucks in his upper lip. He’s dressed in vast running shoes and pseudo-shorts hitting midcalf today, with a clingtop someone of his carbohydrate intake should never contemplate.

“Doable. Why for?”

“I have an idea that this was no conventional arson. I have an idea that it was a sustained, high-energy infrared laser pulse from a military aeaicraft.” Vik’s eyebrows lift. “Anything on the source of the lockdown on the security system?”

“Well, it didn’t come from Ahura Mazda Mutual of Varanasi. Its ass is well covered but we’ll follow it home. We’ve got some initial data back from what we could salvage from Badrinath. Whatever it was they wanted gone, they took a lot of high-rental property out with it. We lost bodhisofts of Jim Carrey, Madonna, Phil Collins.”

“I don’t believe it was bodhisofts, or even information they were after,” Mr. Nandha says. “I think it was the people.”

“How come we’re the Aeai Licensing Department but it always ends up humans every time?” Vikram says, bobbing on his big padded jog boots. “And next time you need me so badly, a simple message will suffice. Those stairs kill me, man.”

But that would not be seemly for a Senior Investigator, Mr. Nandha wants to say. Order, propriety, smudge-free suits; varna. On his tenth Holi his mother dressed them up as little Jedi with swirling robes and the new super-soaker guns from Chatterjee’s store, the ones with five separate barrels, Gatling-style and a different festival colour in each one. He had watched his younger brother and sister go through their moves in their hooded cloaks made from old sheets with their tubes of brightly coloured festival liquid, going zuzh, zuzh, zuzh as they cut down the forces of the dark side. He feels again the nausea of embarrassment, that they were expected to go in public in these humiliating rags, with these cheap toys, with everyone looking. That night he had crept from his room and taken the lot to Dipendra the nightwatchman’s brazier and fed them to the coals. His father’s fury had been terrible, his mother’s incomprehension and disappointment worse, but he bore the emotions and the privations stoically for he knew he had prevented a more terrible thing altogether: shame.

Mr. Nandha’s fingers scrabble for his lighthoek. He will call Parvati now, about that Brahmin baby talk, he will tell her what his opinion really is about those things. He will set her straight, she will know, and there will be no more of this. He slides the ’hoek over his ear, unconsciously adjusts the inducer, and has the number up as an unexpected call comes through from outside.

“Umph,” says Mr. Nandha, discommoded. It is Chauhan.

“Here’s a novelty, me calling you. Something to show you, Nandha.”

“It was an infrared laser, wasn’t it?” Mr. Nandha says as he walks into the morgue. The bodies are laid on ceramic tables, black, shrivelled mummy-corpses and snapping teeth.

“Well guessed,” says jolly, brutal Chauhan in his morgue greens with his demure forensic nurses around him. “Short, high-intensity burst from a high-power infrared laser, almost certainly air-capable, though I wouldn’t rule out a lined-up shot from Shanti Rana Apartments opposite.”

One body, more terribly charred than the rest, is a black stick opening into bare ribs and yellow thigh bones, truncated at the knee. The stench of burned hair, flesh, incinerated bone is worse in Ranapur’s pristine new city morgue than masked by the hydrocarbons and polycarbonates of the apartment, but there is nothing in this clean, cool room that is ultimately unfamiliar or disturbing to a Varanasian.

“What happened to him?”

“I suspect he was by the window when the fireball blew out. He’s not the interesting one,” Chauhan continues as Mr. Nandha bends over the inhuman Y-shape of the Darwinware pirate. “These ones. Nothing to identify them of course—I’ve only had an initial poke around—but this one was male, this one female. The male is European, anywhere from Palermo to Paris, the female is South Indian-Dravidian. I get the feeling they were a couple. Interesting, the woman was born with a severe deformity of the womb—certainly nothing functional. Good old police procedure’ll crack them eventually, but you might be interested in these.”

Chauhan slides open a padded drawer and holds up two plastic evidence bags. In each is a small ivory pendant, charred and blackened. The motif is a white horse rearing on its back legs in a chakra circle of stylised flames.

“Do you know what it is?” Chauhan asks.

“Kalki,” Mr. Nandha says. He lifts a disc and holds it to the light. The work is very fine. “The tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu.”

Veritable shitfuls of holy monkeys pour off the trees and come loping on their soft knuckles to greet the Ministry Lexus as it draws up outside the old Mughal hunting palace. The bot steps out of the scrub rhododendrons to scan the driver’s credentials. The staff has let the gardens go to weed and wild again. Few gardeners pass the security vetting and those that do don’t work long for Ministry money. The machine squats down in front of the car, drawing a line on Mr. Nandha with its arm-turret. Its left-leg piston vents intermittently, giving it a lopsided bob as it interrogates the clearances. Maintenance slipping also. Mr. Nandha purses his lips as the monkeys swarm the car, prying for crannies with their mannikin fingers. They remind him of the hands of the burned corpses in Chauhan’s clean morgue, those black, withered fists. A langur perched over the radiator like a hood ornament masturbates furiously as the St. Matthew Passion swirls around Mr. Nandha.

Lack upon slack upon slop breeds lapse. It was scruffy maintenance and shoddy security that let the prisoner escape those other two times. That, and stealthy robots the size and agility of cockroaches.

The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery like some late Cretaceous hunter. Mr. Nandha jerks the car forward to scare off the monkeys. He has a horror of one getting trapped in his wheel-arch. Lord High Masturbator takes a tumble from the bonnet. Mr. Nandha peers to see if it has left a vile squiggle of monkey-jizz on the paintwork.

When he was thirteen and hammered flat by hormones and doubt, Mr. Nandha had entertained a fantasy about catching a sacred monkey, keeping it in a cage, and slowly and excruciatingly breaking every one of its tiny, birdlike bones. He can still feel a glow of the joyous anger of that delight.

A persistent few monkeys ride the Ministry Lexus all the way up the curving drive to the lodge. Mr. Nandha kicks them away as he steps out on to the crunching red gravel and slips on his dark glasses. The white Mughal marble is dazzling in the afternoon light. Mr. Nandha steps away from the car to enjoy the uninterrupted view of the palace. It is a hidden pearl, built in 1613 by the Shah Ashraf as a game retreat. Where hunting cheetahs rode atop howdahs and Mughal lords hawked over the marshes of Kirakat, now factory units and pressed-aluminium go-downs nudge up to the low, cool lodge on every side. But the genius of the architect endures: the colonnaded house remains enfolded, separate in its jungled gardens, unseen by any of them, unseeing in return. Mr. Nandha admires the balance of the pillared cloister, the understatement of the dome. Even among the English Perpendicular and Baroque triumphs of Cambridge, he had still considered the Islamic architects the masters of Wren and Reginald of Ely. They built as Bach composed, strong and muscular, with light and space and geometry. They built timelessly and for all time. Mr. Nandha thinks that he might not mind confinement in such a prison as this. He would have solitude, here.

Sweepers bow around him, twig besoms busy as Mr. Nandha goes up the shallow steps to the cool cool cool of the cloister. The Ministry staff greet him at the door; discreetly scanning him down with their palmers. Mr. Nandha commends their thoroughness but they look bored. They are EO1 civil servants, but they did not join the Ministry to guard a mouldering pile of Mughal masonry. Mr. Nandha waits for the warder to cycle the transparent plastic lock that sits like an ugly sex-toy yoni in the wall of exquisitely carved alabaster. The last security check lights green. Mr. Nandha steps into the banqueting hall. As ever, he catches his breath at the white stone jalis, the bandied masonry, the low generous spaciousness of the onion arches, the geometries of the azure roof tilings, the tall pointed windows shaded by fabric blinds. But the true focus of the room is not the radiant harmony of the design. It is not even the Faraday cage painstakingly woven into the fabric of the architecture. It is the transparent plastic cube that stands in the centre. It is five metres long and five metres high, a house within a house divided by transparent plastic partitions into see-through rooms, with transparent plumbing and wiring and chairs and tables and a transparent bed and a transparent toilet. In the midst of this transparency sits a dark, heavily bearded man, running to fat. He is dressed in a white kurta and is barefoot and reads a paperback book. His back is turned to Mr. Nandha but hearing his footfalls on the cool marble he rises. He peers short-sightedly, then recognises his visitor and drags his chair to the transparent wall. He pokes the broken-backed paperback with a toe. He wears a transparent toe ring.

“The words still don’t move.”

“The words don’t need to move. It is you who is moved by them.”

“It is a very effective way of compressing a virtual reality experience, I’ll give it that. All this for one-point-four megs? It’s just so non-interactive.”

“But it is different for everyone who reads it,” says Mr. Nandha.

The man in the plastic cube nods his head, pondering.

“Where’s the shared experience in that? So, what can I do for you, Mr. Nandha?”

Mr. Nandha glances up as he hears the mosquito drone of a hovercam. It rolls its lens-eye at the plastic cage, climbs away towards the fantasia of the domed roof. Light falls in dusty shafts through the mullions. Mr. Nandha takes the plastic evidence bags out of his jacket pocket, holds them up. The man in the plastic chair squints.

“You’re going to have to bring them closer, I can’t see anything without my glasses. You could at least have left me them.”

“Not after last time, Mr. Anreddy. The circuitry was most ingenious.”

Mr. Nandha presses the bags against the plastic wall. The prisoner kneels down. Mr. Nandha sees his breath mist the transparency. He gives a small, hushed gasp.

“Where did you get these?”

“From their owners.”

“They’re dead, then.”

“Yes.”

J. P. Anreddy is a short, dumpy asthmatic in his midtwenties with too little hair on his head and far too much around his soft jowls and he is Mr. Nandha’s greatest professional triumph. He was Dataraja of the Sinha sundarban, a major station on the aeai underground railway when Awadh ratified the Hamilton Acts and outlawed all artificial intelligences above Level 2.0. He had made a cosmological amount of money rebranding high-level aeais as low and faking their licence idents. Man-machine fusion had been his peccadillo, an extension of his one hundred and fifty kilos of mostiy middle-body fat into lither, nimbler robot bodies. When Mr. Nandha came to arrest him for licence violations, he had cut his way through charge after charge of service robots. He remembers the clicking plastic peds, conflates them with the little black monkey hands besieging his Ministry car. Mr. Nandha shivers in the bright, warm, dust-fragrant room. He had run the dataraja down through his suite off chambers until Indra locked on to the protein matrix chips seeded across the underside of Anreddy’s cranium that allowed him to interface directly with his machine extensions and fused them all with a single EM pulse. J. P. Anreddy had lain in a coma for three months, lost fifty percent of his body mass, and regained consciousness to find that the court had confiscated the house and turned it into his prison. Now he lived at the centre of his beautiful Mughal architecture in a transparent plastic cube where every move and breath, every mouthful and motion, every scratch and flea and insect crawling upon it could be monitored by the hovercams. He had twice escaped with the help of bug-sized robots. Though he could no longer control them by will alone, J. P. Anreddy had never lost his love for little scuttling sentiences. Here he would remain under house arrest until he expressed remorse for what he had done. Mr. Nandha confidently expected he would die and rot in his plastic wrap. J. P. Anreddy genuinely had no comprehension that he had done anything wrong.

“How did they die?” the dataraja asks.

“In a fire, on the fifteenth floor of.”

“Stop. Badrinath? Radha?”

“No one survived.”

“How?”

“We have theories.”

Anreddy sits on the transparent plastic floor, head bowed. Mr. Nandha shakes out the medallions, holds them up by the chain.

“You knew them, then.”

“Knew of them.”

“Names?”

“Something French, though she was Indian. They used to work at the University but got into the free world. They had a big-name project, there was a lot of money behind them.”

“Have you ever heard of an investment company called Odeco?”

“Everyone’s heard of Odeco. Everyone out in the wild, that is.”

“Did you ever receive funding from Odeco?”

“I’m a dataraja man, big and wild and fierce. Public enemy number one. Anyway, I wasn’t their particular shade of blue sky. I was into nanoscale robotics. They were high-level aeai; protein circuitry, computer-brain interfaces.”

Mr. Nandha holds the amulets against the plastic. “You know the significance of this symbol?”

“The riderless white horse, the tenth avatar.”

“Kalki. The final avatar that will bring the Age of Kali to an end. A name from legend.”

“Varanasi is a city of legends.”

“Here is legend for our times. Might Badrinath, with funding from this Odeco organisation, have been developing a Generation Three aeai?”

J. P. Anreddy rocks back on his coccyx, throws his head back. Siddha of the scuttling robots. He closes his eyes. Mr. Nandha lays out the amulets on the tiles in Anreddy’s full view. Then he goes to the window and slowly pulls up the blind. It folds up on itself in a wide concertina of sun-bleached fabric.

“I will tell you now our theory about how they died at Badrinath. We believe it was a deliberate attack by a laser-armed drone aircraft,” Mr. Nandha says. He draws up the next blind, admitting the blinding sun, the treacherous sky.

“You bastard!” J. P. Anreddy shouts, leaping to his feet. Mr. Nandha moves to the third window.

“We find this theory convincing. A single high-energy shot.” He crosses the room to the opposite set of mullions. “Through the living-room window. A precision attack. The aeai must have targeted, identified, and fired in a few milliseconds. There’s so much traffic in the air since the train incident no one is ever going to notice a drone slip out of its patrol pattern.”

Anreddy’s hands are spread on the plastic, his eyes wide, scanning the white sky for flecks of betrayal.

“What do you know about Kalki?”

Mr. Nandha furls another blind. Only one remains. Burtresses of light slant across the floor. Anreddy looks in pain, a cyber-vampire burned by the sun.

“They’ll kill you, man.”

“We shall see about that. Is Kalki a Generation Three aeai?”

He takes the soft cotton cord of the last blind and hauls it in, hand over hand. A wedge of light expands across the tiles. J. P. Anreddy has retreated to the centre of his plastic cage but there is no hiding from the sky.

“So?”

“Kalki is a Generation Three aeai. It exists. It’s real. It’s been real and existent for longer than you think. It’s out there. You know what Generation Three means? It means an intelligence, measured on standard assessment scales, between twenty and thirty thousand times human baseline. And they’re only the start. These are emergent properties, man. Evolution is running a million times faster in there. And if they want you, you cannot run, you cannot hide, you cannot lie down and hope that they will forget about you. Whatever you do, they can see you. Whatever identity you take, they know it before you do. Wherever you go, they’ll be there ahead of you, waiting, because they’ll have guessed it before you even think it yourself. These are Gen Threes, man. These are the gods! You cannot license gods.”

Mr. Nandha lets the rant ebb before he collects the cheap, heat-tarnished Kalki amulets and returns them to their bags.

“Thank you. I now know the name of my enemy. Good day.”

He turns and walks away through the shafts of dusty white light. His heels resound on the fine Islamic marble. Behind him he hears the soft woof of fists on flexible transparent plastic, Anreddy’s voice, distant and muffled.

“Hey, the blinds man! Don’t leave me, don’t leave the blinds! Man! The blinds! They can see me! Fuck you, they can see me! The blinds!”

20: VISHRAM

He has a desk big enough to land a fighter on. He has a top-level wood and glass office. He has an executive elevator and an executive washroom. He has fifteen suits made to the same design and fabric as the one he wore when he inherited his empire, with matching hand-tooled shoes. And he has for his personal assistant Inder who has the disconcerting ability to be physically in front of him and at the same time manifesting herself on his desk-top organiser and as a ghost in his visual cortex. He’s heard about these corporate PA systems who are part human, part aeai. It’s modern office management.

Vishram Ray also has a raging Strega hangover and an oval of sunburn around his eyes where he looked too deep and too long into another universe.

“Who are these people?” asks Vishram Ray.

“The Siggurdson-Arthurs-Clementi Group,” says Inder-on-the-carpet while Inder-in-the-desk opens her lotus-hands to show him a schedule and Inder-in-the-head dissolves into mugshots of well-fed white men with good suits and better dentistry. Inder-on-the-carpet has a surprisingly deep voice for someone so very Audrey Hepburn. “Ms. Fusco will brief you further in the car. And Energy Secretary Patel has requested a meeting, as has the Shivaji’s energy spokeswoman. They both want to know your plans for the company.”

“I don’t even know them myself, but the Honourable Secretary will be the first to find out.” Vishram pauses at the door. All three Inders wait inquiringly. “Inder, would it be possible to move this whole office right out of Ray Tower, to the Research Facility?”

“Certainly, Mr. Ray. Is it not to your satisfaction?”

“No, it’s a lovely office. Very. businesslike. I just feel a bit. close to the family. My brothers. And while we’re at it, I’d like to move out of the house. I find it a bit. oppressive. Can you find me a nice hotel, good room service?”

“Certainly, Mr. Ray.”

As he leaves Inder’s alters are already pricing corporate removal firms and hotel penthouse suites. In the Ray Power Merc, Vishram savours Marianna Fusco’s Chanel 27. He can also sense that she is pissed at him.

“She’s a physicist.”

“Who’s a physicist?”

“The woman I had dinner with last night. A physicist. I’m telling you this because you seem a little. snippy.”

“Snippy?”

“Short. Annoyed. You know. Snippy.”

“Oh. I see. And this is because you had dinner with a physicist?”

“Married physicist. Married Hindu physicist.”

“I’m interested why you felt you had to tell me that she was married.”

“Married Hindu physicist. Called Sonia. Whose pay-cheques I sign.”

“As if that makes any difference.”

“Of course. We’re professional. I took her to dinner and then she took me back to hers and showed me her universe. It’s small, but perfectly formed.”

“I was wondering how you were going to explain the panda eyes. Is this a universe of sunbeds?”

“Zero-point energy, actually. And you have very elegant ankles.”

He thinks he sees a shadow of a smile.

“Okay, these people, how do I deal with them?”

“You don’t,” says Marianna Fusco. “You shake hands and you smile politely and you listen to what they have to say and you do absolutely nothing. Then you report back to me.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“You’re on your own on this one, funny man. But be prepared for Govind to make Ramesh an offer this afternoon.”

By the time he gets to the airport, Vishram’s forehead is starting to flake. The car drives past the drop-off zones and the white zones and picking-up zones and tow-away zones to the bizjet zone through the double barrier security gate on to the field up to a private executive tilt-jet perched on its engines and tail pods like a mantis. An Assamese hostess, immaculate in traditional costume, opens the doors, namastes like a flower budding, and takes Vishram to his seat. He raises a hand to Marianna Fusco as the Merc pulls away. Flying solo.

The hostess’s hand lingers as she checks Vishram’s seat belt but he doesn’t notice for then Vishram feels his belly and balls sag as the tilt-jet leaps into the air, puts its nose down, and takes him up over the brassy towers of Varanasi. An ineluctable part of Vishram Ray registers the close presence of an attractive woman next to him but he keeps his face pressed to the window as the tilt-jet swoops in over the river temples and ghats and the palaces and havelis onto a course following Ganga Devi. The shikara of the Vishwanath temple dazzles gold. The hand on his thigh finally draws his attention as the engines swivel into horizontal flight and the pilot takes the aircraft up to cruising altitude.

“I can get you some ointment for your forehead, sahb,” says the perfect, round face full in front of his like a moon.

“I’ll survive, thank you,” says Vishram Ray. The first of the champagne arrives. Vishram assumes it’s the first. He’ll make that first last, although he’s supposed to abuse the hospitality. It is cold and very very good and drinking airborne has always made Vishram Ray feel like a god. The bastis spread under him, multicoloured plastic roofs so tight together they look like a cloth spread on the ground for a feast. The tilt-jet follows the line of the river to the edge of Patna airspace, then swings south. Vishram should read his briefing but Bharat bedazzles him. The titanic conurbation of slums breaks up in a weave of fields and villages that rapidly turns from tired yellow to drought white as the river’s influence diminishes. It would have looked little different two thousand years ago and were Vishram Ray indeed a god passing across holy Bharat to battle the rakshasas of the black south. Then his eyes catch on a power line and a stand of wind-turbines turning sluggishly in the heavy dry air. Ray Power turbines. His brother’s turbines. He looks out at the yellow haze of the horizon. Does he imagine a line of shadow in the brown high-atmospheric smog, the skirmish line of an advance of clouds? The monsoon, at last? The burned stone of the plain deepens to beige, to yellow, to outcrops of green trees as the land rises. The tilt-jet rises with the edge of a plateau and Vishram is over high forest. To the west rises a line of smoke, drifting northward on the wind. The green is a lie, this high forest is dry, fire-hungry after three years of drought. Vishram finishes his champagne—flat and hand-warm now—as the seat belt sign lights.

“Shall I take that?” the hostess says, too close again. Vishram imagines a tic of irritation on that perfect, made-up face. I resisted your seductions. The tilt-jet leans into a landing spiral. A change in turbine pitch tells him the engines are swivelling into landing mode but looking down Vishram can see nothing that appears like an airport. The tilt-jet drifts across the forest canopy, so low its jet wash sends the leaves raving and storming. Then the engine roar peaks, Vishram drops into the canopy, birds scatter on every side in a silent explosion of wings, and he is down with a gentle bounce. The engines ebb to a whine. Assam girl is doing the thing with the door. Heat floods in. She beckons. “Mr. Ray.” At the foot of the steps is an old Rajput with a great white moustache and a turban so tight Vishram feels himself developing a sympathetic migraine. Ranked behind him are a dozen men in khaki with bush hats bent severely up at one side and heavy assault rifles at the slope.

“Mr. Ray, you are most welcome to Palamau Tiger Sanctuary,” says the Rajput with a bow.

Assam girl stays with the tilt-jet. The hats carrying rifles spread out on all sides as the Rajput guides Vishram away from the ’plane. The ship has come down in a circle of bare dirt in a dense stand of bamboo and scrub. A sandy path leads into the trees. The path is lined with what seems to Vishram an excessive number of solidly built wood shelters. None is more than a panicked sprint away.

“What are they for?” Vishram asks.

“In case of attack by tigers,” the Rajput answers.

“I’d imagine anything that could eat us is kilometres away by now, the noise we made coming in.”

“Oh, not at all sir. They have learned to associate the sound of aeroplane engines.”

With what? Vishram feels he should ask, but can’t quite bring himself to. He’s a city boy. City. Boy. Hear that you man-eaters? Full of nasty additives.

The air is clean and smells of growing and death and the memory of water. Dust and heat. The path curves so that in a few footsteps the landing pad is invisible. By the same camouflage the lodge conceals itself until the last stride. One moment it is green and leaves and rustling stems; then the trunks turn into stilts and ladders and staircases and there is a great wooden game lodge strung out across the treetops, like a galleon lifted by a monsoon and dropped in the forest.

White men in comfortable and therefore expensive suits hang over the balcony rail, greeting him with waves and smiles.

“Mr. Ray! Come aboard!”

They line up at the top of the wooden companionway as if receiving a boarding admiral. Clementi, Arthurs, Weitz, and Siggurdson. They have firm handshakes and make good eye contact and express Business School bluff cheer. Vishram does not doubt that they would bend you over and stick a mashie niblock up your hoop at golf or any other muy macho power game. His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather. He can see quite a nice little routine falling together about golf; if his were the kind of life that any longer contemplated stand-up routines.

“Isn’t this just the greatest place for lunch?” the tall, academic-looking one, Arthurs, says as he escorts Vishram Ray along wooden walkways, spiralling higher and higher into the roof canopy. Vishram squints down. The men with rifles look up at him. “Such a pity that Bhagwandas here tells us we’ve almost no chance of seeing a tiger.” He has the nasal, slightly honking Boston accent. He’ll be the accountant then, Vishram decides. In Glasgow they had said, always have Catholic lawyers and Protestant accountants. They pass between rows of elegantly pyjamaed waiters in Rudyard Kipling turbans. Double mahogany doors carved with battle scenes from the Mahabharata are thrown open, a maitre d’ leads them to the meal, a sunken dining pit with cushions and a low table that would be the acme of kitsch but for the view out under the eaves through the panoramic windows to the waterhole. The verge is puddled to mud but Vishram thinks he sees chital sip nervously from the dirty brown water, ears swivelling on perpetual alert. He thinks of Varanasi, her vile waters and her radar defences.

“Sit, sit,” insists Clementi, a wide, dark-haired man, sallow as an Indian and already developing a blue chin. The Westerners adjust themselves with some huffing and laughing. Punkah fans wave overhead, redistributing the heat. Vishram seats himself comfortably, elegantly on the low divan. Maitre d’ brings bottled water. Saiganga. Ganges water. Vishram Ray raises his glass.

“Gentlemen, I am entirely at your mercy.” They laugh overappreciatively.

“We’ll claim your soul later,” says Weitz, who is the one who obviously never had to try too hard in Junior High, High, College Sports, and Business Law School. Vishram’s eye for an audience notes that Siggurdson, the big cadaverous one, finds this marginally less funny than the others. The Born-Again; the one with the money.

Lunch comes on thirty tiny thalis. It is of that exquisite simplicity that is always so much more expensive than any lavishness. The five men pass the dishes between them, murmuring soft alleluias of appreciation at each subtle combination of vegetables and spices. Vishram notices that they eat Indian style without self-consciousness. Their Marianna Fuscos have even drilled them on which hand to use. But for the quiet epiphanies of flavour and mutual encouragements to try a taste of this, a morsel of that, the lunch is conducted in silence. Finally the thirty silver thalis are empty. The maitre d’s boys flurry in like doves to clear and the men settle back on to their embroidered bolsters.

“So, Mr. Ray, without wasting too many words, we’re interested in your company.” Siggurdson speaks slowly, a measured tread of words like a buffalo drive, inviting dangerous underestimation.

“Ah, if only it were all mine to sell,” Vishram says. He wishes he hadn’t taken a side of the table all to himself now. Every head is turned to him now, every body-language focused on him.

“Oh, we know that,” says Weitz. Arthurs chips in.

“You’ve got a nice little middle-size power-generation and distribution company; good build-up, rudimentary semi-feudal ownership model and you really should have diversified years ago to maximise shareholder value. But you guys do things differently here, I recognise that. I don’t understand that, but then there’s a lot of things about this place that frankly makes no sense to me at all. Maybe you’re a little overcapitalised and you do have way too much invested in social capital—your R&D budget would raise eyebrows at home, but you’re in pretty good shape. Maybe not planet-beating, not sector-leading, but good Little League.”

“Nice of you to say so,” Vishram says which is all the venom he can permit himself in this teak arena—he knows that they want to niggle him, nettle him, needle him into a careless comment. He looks at his hands. They are steady on the glass as they were always steady on the mike. It’s no different from dealing with hecklers.

Siggurdson rests his big fists on the table, leans forward over them. He means to intimidate.

“I don’t think you quite appreciate the seriousness of what we are saying. We know your father’s company better than he knows it himself. His move was abrupt but not altogether unexpected: we have models. They are good models. They predict with an acceptable degree of accuracy. This conversation would be happening whatever he decided with regard to you. That this conversation is taking place here is a reflection of how much we know not just about Ray Power, but about you, Mr. Ray.”

Clementi draws a cigar case from inside his jacket. He flips it open. Little beautiful black Cuban cigarillos like bullets in a magazine. Vishram’s saliva glands stab with hungry pain. Lovely smokes.

“Who’s backing you?” he asks with fake nonchalance. He knows they can see through it like a gauze veil. “EnGen?”

Siggurdson deals him a long stupid-son look.

“Mr. Ray.”

Arthurs moistens his lip with his tongue, a tiny, delicate pink darting dab, like a tiny snake lodged in the crevices of his palate.

“We are a registered acquisitions arm of a large transnational concern.”

“And what is that large transnational^ concern in the research division of Ray Power? Might it be anything to do with the results we’ve been getting in the zero-point lab? Results that are turning in neat little positives where everyone else’s are handing back big red negatives?”

“We’ve heard rumours to that effect,” says Weitz, and Vishram decides that he is the cortex behind the whole operation. Arthurs the money man, Siggurdson the baron, Clementi the enforcer.

“More than rumours,” Vishram says. “But the zero point is not for sale.”

“I think perhaps you may have misunderstood me,” Siggurdson says slowly, ponderously. “We don’t want to buy your company outright. But if the results you’ve been getting are reproducible on a commercial scale, this is a very exciting area of potential high yield. This is an area we would be interested in investing in. What we want, Mr. Ray, is to buy a share in your company. It would be enough money to run a full-scale demonstration of the hot-zero-point technology.”

“You don’t want to buy me out?”

“Mr. Siggurdson said no,” says Clementi tetchily. Siggurdson nods. He has a smile like a Minnesota winter.

“Ah. I think I have misunderstood you. Could you excuse me one moment, gentlemen? I have to go to the snanghar.”

Enthroned among the exotic wood panels, Vishram slips his ’hoek behind his ear and flicks open the palmer. He’s about to call up Inder when the paranoia strikes. Plenty of time for these men in suits to have bugged the gents. He calls up a mail aeai, raises his hand like a pianist, ready to type air. They could have bindicams. They could have movement sensors that read the flexing of his fingers. They could have nanochips that read the gurglings of his palmer; they could have sanyassins looking into the corners of his soul. Vishram Ray settles on the polished mahogany ring and zips off a query to Inder. Inder-in-the-head is back within seconds; head and shoulders materialising over the toilet paper holder on the back of the door.

She reels out names and connections Vishram knows only from the pink pages and money sections he would click past on his way to the entertainment listings, attention only caught by the unintentionally ridiculous corporate titles. He thinks of the khaki men with the straitly tilted bush-hats and assault rifles. Hey guys, you’re in the wrong place. The tigers are up here.

He types, HYPOTHETICAL: WHY WOULD THEY WANT MY COMPANY?

There is an un-aeaily pause. When Inder speaks next, Vishram knows that it is the flesh and bone.

“To tie you up forever in due diligence clauses, with the eventual aim of gaining full control of the zero-point project.”

Vishram sits on the warm mahogany seat and the wood beneath and around him seems sweltering and oppressive, a coffin buried in summer earth. It is going to be like this from now on.

“Thank you,” he says aloud. Then he washes his hands to fix his alibi and walks back to the men around the table.

“Sorry to be so long; funny, but I haven’t readjusted to the diet yet.” He sits down, crosses his legs nimbly, comfortably. “Anyway, I’ve had a think about your offer.”

“Take your time,” Clementi suggests. “This isn’t the sort of decision to rush. Take a look at our proposal, then get back to us.” He pushes a plastic wallet of high-gloss documents across the table. But Weitz sits back, detached, planning permutations. He knows, Vishram thinks.

“Thanks, but I’m not going to need any more time and I don’t want to waste any more of yours. I am not going to accept your offer. I realise that I owe you some kind of explanation. It isn’t going to make much sense to you; but the main reason is my father wouldn’t want me to do it. He was as hard-headed a businessman as any of you here and he wasn’t scared of money, but Ray Power is first and foremost an Indian company and because it’s an Indian company, it has values and morals and ethics that are quite alien to the way you do business in the West. It’s not racism or anything like that, it’s just the way we work in Ray Power and our two systems are incompatible. The second reason is that we don’t need your money. I’ve seen the zero-point field myself.” He touches a finger to the flaking corner of his eye. “I know you’ve been politely not staring at this; but that’s the seal of approval. None genuine without this mark. I’ve seen it, gentlemen. I’ve seen another universe and I’ve been burned by its light.” Then the rush comes, that moment when you go off script. Head reeling with adrenaline, Vishram Ray says, “In fact, we’re going public with a full-scale demonstration within the next two weeks. And by the way, I gave up smoking three weeks ago.”

After that there is coffee and very good armagnac, a drink Vishram knows he will never be able to take again without a freight of memory, but the talk is polite and mannered and dies quickly in the way of enemies with etiquette. Vishram wants to be out of there, out from the wood and the glass and the hunting creatures. He wants to be on his own in a place he can enjoy the fierce, intimate burn of a fine deed well done. His first executive decision, and he knows he made it right. Then hands are shaken and leaves taken but as the Major and his jawans escort Vishram back to the tilt-jet he imagines he is walking differently, and that they can all see, and understand, and approve.

The hostess doesn’t try to come on to him on the flight home.

At Ray Tower a gang of coolies shifts corporate furniture to a flotilla of removal trucks. Still glowing on adrenaline afterburn, Vishram rides the elevator up to his former office. The executive lift makes an unscheduled stop at the third floor, where a small, dapper, birdlike Bangla in a black suit steps in and smiles at Vishram as if he has known him all his life.

“Might I say, Mr. Ray, that you made the correct decision,” says the Bangla, beaming.

The glass elevator climbs the curving wooden cliff of the Ray Tower. Fires still burn out on the cityscape. The sky is a precious velvety apricot colour.

“Just who,” says Vishram Ray, “the hell are you?”

The Bangla beams again.

“Oh, a humble servitor. A name, if you must, would be Chakraborty.”

“I have to tell you, I’m not really in the mood for obfuscation,” Vishram says.

“Sorry, sorry. To the point. I am a lawyer, hired by a certain company to convey a message to you. The message is this: we fully support your announcement to go to a full output demonstration as soon as possible.”

“Who is this we?”

“Less who than what, Mr. Ray.”

The glass elevator climbs higher into the amber glow of Varanasi’s holy smog. “What then?”

“Odeco is a company that makes a few, carefully chosen, highly specific investments.”

“And if you know that I just turned down an offer from a company that at least I’d heard of, what do you think your Odeco could offer me?”

“Exactly what we offered your father.”

It is now that Vishram wishes this glass cocoon had the fantasy stop button that is a mandatory feature in Hollywood elevators. But it doesn’t and they keep climbing the sculpted wood face of Ray Power.

“My father didn’t take partners in the company.”

“With respect, Mr. Ray, I differ. Where do you think the investment for the particle collider came from? The budget for the zero-point project would have bankrupted even Ranjit Ray, unassisted.”

“What’s your cut?” Vishram asks. His Hero of the People warmth has been snuffed out. Games within games, levels of access and secrecy, names and faces and masks. Faces that can get into your elevator and tell you your most secret dealings.

“Only success, Mr. Ray. Only success. To repeat and perhaps amplify my employers’ message to you, you intend to run a full-scale demonstration of the zero-point project. Odeco desires this very much. It wishes you to know that it will back you to ensure the success of the project. Whatever that entails, Mr. Ray. Ah. This seems to be my floor. Good day to you, Mr. Ray.”

Chakraborty slips between the doors before they fully open. Vishram ascends a full floor before he thinks to drop a level back to where the weird little man got off. He looks out into the curving corridor. Nothing, no one to see. He could have stepped into an office. He could as easily have stepped into another, zero-point universe. The lowering sun beats into the elevator but Vishram shudders. He needs to get out somewhere tonight, away from all this, even for a handful of hours. But which woman is he going to ask?

21: PARVATI

The apricot flies in a high, rising arc out over the parapet, turning slowly, bleeding a trail of juice from its crushed skin. It drops out of sight between the buildings, the long fall to the street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t do that overarm thing.”

“It’s not hard.”

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

“Now, you try.”

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

“I cannot do it!”

“Here, let me help you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krishan rocks gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We are part of the world now,” Mrs. Jaitly had told her women at the evening group. “Our web of cables connects to another web, connects to a greater web, connects to a web across the whole world.”

But old India was dying, Nehru’s dream bursting at the seams under the pressure of ethnic and cultural division and an environment sagging beneath a billion and a half humans. Kotkhai prided itself that its backwardness and isolation would insulate it from Diljit Rana’s idiosyncratic mix of Hinduism and future vision. But the men were talking at the dhaba, reading out columns from the evening news about National Armies and armed militias and lightning raids to seize and hold a fistful of sand-poor villages like Kotkhai in the grab for national territory. Jai Bharat! The young men went first. Parvati had seen how her father watched them leave on the country bus. S.J. Sadurbhai had never forgiven his wife for only delivering him daughters. He daily envied the middle classes who could afford to choose the sex of their children. They were building a strong nation, not weak and womanly as old India had been, bickering herself to death. It was almost a relief in the Sadurbhai house when he announced that he and his apprentice Gurpal from the garage were driving off to the war. A good war. A man’s war. They drove off and in all Kotkhai there were only two casualties, those two, killed in the truck they were driving by an aeai attack helicopter that could not tell friend from foe. A man’s war, a man’s death.

Three weeks later a nation was born and war replaced with soap. Within a month of the proclamation of new Bharat, more men brought more cables, fibre-optic cables, down which came news and gupshup and soap. Teacher Jaitly railed against Town and Country as mind-gelling propaganda promulgated by the state to stifle real political debate, but week by week her classes dwindled, woman by woman, until in the end she returned to the city, defeated by the affairs of the Prekashs and Ranjans. The new village gathering place was around the state-supplied widescreen. Parvati grew to womanhood in the light of Town and Country. From it she learned all the skills needed to become the perfect wife. Within six months Parvati was in Varanasi receiving the final social lacquer that would get her into every best party and durbar on the loop. A half-year later, at a wedding of some cousin of a cousin, she caught a whisper from her second cousin once-removed Deepti, and looked where the whisper pointed, across the lantern-lit gardens, through the glowing awning to the thin, scholarly looking man trying not to be seen looking at her. She remembers that the tree under which he stood was hung with tiny wicker birdcages containing candles. She imagined him haloed in stars.

A further six months and the arrangements were complete, the dowry lodged in Parvati’s mother’s grameen account and a taxi booked to carry Parvati’s few things to the new penthouse flat in the heart of great Varanasi. Except that the things looked like orphans in the cedar-lined closets and penthouse it might be but everyone was now moving out of that dirty, crowded, noisy Kashi to the green soft Cantonment and the thin, scholarly man cloaked with stars was only a policeman. But with a word or a wave of her hand the Prekashs and Ranjans would be there, round to call, who were as happy in Kotkhai as Varanasi, who knew neither snobbery nor caste and whose doings and scandals were always interesting.

On the Thursday Krishan works late on the roof. There are many needling things that require finishing off; the electrical supply to the drip irrigation, the grouting on the path of round stones, the brackets on the bamboo screens around the meditation bowl. He tells himself that he will not be able to move on unless he completes these small niggles, but the truth is that Krishan is curious to see again this Mr. Nandha, this Krishna Cop. He knows from the papers and the radio chat what it is they do but he cannot comprehend why what he hunts down is such a terrifying menace. So he works until the sun swells to a globe of blood in the west beyond the towers of the money town, tightening bolts and cleaning tools until he hears the door close downstairs and Parvati’s voice meet the deeper, wordless male rumble. The conversation grows in definition with each step he descends. She is asking, pleading, wanting him to take her out. She wants to go somewhere, get away from this high apartment. His voice is tired and flat and Krishan knows that it will say no to anything she suggests. He sets down his bag and waits by the door. He is not eavesdropping, he tells himself. Doors are thin and words have their natural volume. The policeman is impatient now. His voice hardens, like a parent worn away by an insatiable child. Then Krishan hears the voice bark in anger, a chair scrape back from a table. He seizes his bag, retreats down the main stairs. The door flies open and Mr. Nandha strides down the stair to the lobby door, face set like a carving. He brushes past Krishan as if he were a lizard on a wall. Parvati comes out of the kitchen. She and Mr. Nandha face each other at opposite ends of the stairs. Krishan, invisible, is trapped between their voices.

“Go then!” she shouts. “It is obviously so important.”

“Yes,” Mr. Nandha says. “It is so important. But I would not trouble you with matters of national security.”

He opens the door to the elevator lobby.

“I will be on my own, I am always on my own!” Parvati leans over the chromed railing but the door is closed and her husband is gone without a look. Now she sees Krishan.

“Will you go, too?”

“I should.”

“Don’t leave me. I’m always on my own, I hate being on my own.”

“I really think I have to go.”

“I am on my own,” Parvati says again.

“You have your Town and Country,” Krishan ventures.

“That’s just a stupid soap!” Parvati shouts at him. “A stupid television programme. Do you really think I believe it? Do you think I’m some country yokel can’t tell the difference between a television programme and real life?” She bites back the anger. The women of Kotkhai’s training holds. “I’m sorry. I should not have said that. It wasn’t you it was aimed at. You should not have had to hear any of that.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Krishan says. “He should not speak to you like that; like you are a child.”

“He is my husband.”

“Forgive me, I’ve spoken out of turn. I should go. It’s the best thing.”

“Yes,” Parvati whispers. She is backlit by the deepening sun, beaming through the apartment windows, turning her skin to gold. “It would be the best thing.”

The gold light is amber, trapping the moment. Krishan is sick with tension. The futures balance on a brass pin. Their fall could crush him, crush her, crush them all here in this penthouse apartment. He picks up his bag. But the kick inside takes him.

“Tomorrow,” he says, feeling the shake deep in his voice. “Tomorrow there is a cricket match at the Dr. Sampurnanand Stadium. England, Bharat, the third test. The last, I think. The English will recall their team very soon. Would you. could you. might you come?”

“With you?”

Krishan’s heart thunders, then he realises. “No, of course not, you could not be seen.”

“But I would very much like to see a Test Match, and against England as well. I know! The Cantonment Set ladies go to the Test. We would be in different parts of the ground, you understand. But we would be there together, sharing it. A virtual date, as the Americans would say. Yes, I shall go tomorrow and show the ladies of The Mall that I am not a rural ignoramus about the game of cricket.”

The sun has dropped, Parvati is no longer golden-skinned, the amber is broken, but Krishan’s heart is in light.

“We’ll do that then,” Krishan says. “Tomorrow, the Test.” Then he picks up his bag and is whirled down the lift out into the eternal traffic.

Dr. Sampurnanand Stadium is a white concrete bowl, simmering under a beige sky, a pan of heat and anticipation circled around a disc of fresh, watered, microclimate-controlled green. Varanasi has never been one of India’s great cricketing cities like Kolkata or Chennai or Hyderabad or even her neighbour and former rival for capital city-hood, Patna. The Doctor’s stadium had been little more than a bumpy, scorched stretch of withered grass, a crease no bowler of international standing would risk a ball on and no batsman would dare defend. Then came Bharat and the same transfiguring hand of the Ranas that had swept Sarnath into a citadel of audacious architecture and high technology changed the old Sanskrit University sports ground in a hundred-thousand seater. A classic government white elephant, it has never been more than half-full, not even for the 3rd Test of 2038 when Bharat crushed an ailing Australia to win the series, the first and only time. Today its climate-field traps a lens of cool air against forty-degree ambient heat, but the white men out the field still need plastic bags of water slung on to the pitch. Bharat are 55 for 3, lunch is an hour off and high above the stadium Awadhi and Bharati aeaicraft hunt each other. At the moment the action in the stratosphere is more interesting than the action on the green to the cricketing ladies of canopy-shaded Block 17. The block is owned by Mrs. Sharma’s husband, a property developer in Sarnath who bought it as a corporate hospitality tax-break to treat friends and guests and clients. In the season it is a recognised gathering place for society ladies. They make a pretty patch of colour, like an unexpected window-box on the face of a tenement. They squint up through their Western-label sunglasses at the twining helices of contrails. Everything is different since Bharat’s brave jawans made their daring move in the night from Allahabad to seize the Kunda Khadar Dam. Mrs. Thakkur opines that they are scouting out an Awadhi attack.

“On Varanasi?” Mrs. Sharma is affronted. Mrs. Chopra thinks that would be typical of Awadh, a vindictive, weasel nation. The jawans took Kunda Khadar so easily because Awadh’s troops are already moving on the capital. Mrs. Sood wonders if they are spreading plagues. “You know, like spraying crops.” Her husband is a middle-manager in a big biotech firm, booking air-dusting on monocrops the size of entire districts. The ladies hope the Ministry of Health would give enough warning to relocate to their summer bungalows in the hills ahead of the rush.

“I should expect the more important elements in society would be informed first,” says Mrs. Laxman. Her husband is a senior civil servant. But Mrs. Chopra has heard another rumour, that the Banglas’ ridiculous iceberg is actually starting to work and that the winds are swinging around, drawing the monsoon back to true. This morning as she took tea on the verandah she was certain, certain, she saw a line of shadow along the horizon to the southeast.

“Well then, nobody will need to invade anybody,” Mrs. Laxman declares but the Begum Khan, who is married to Sajida Rana’s Private Secretary and has the word from the Bharat Sabha, is derisive.

“If anything, it makes war more likely. Even if the monsoon started tomorrow it would take a week for the levels to rise on Ganga. And do you think the Awadhis are going to let us see any of it? They’re as thirsty as we are. No, I tell you, pray it doesn’t rain, because as soon as the first drop hits, Delhi’ll want its dam back. That, of course, is predicated on whether the Banglas’ ludicrous iceberg is anything more than a juggernaut of pseudoscience and the opinion, frankly, is no.”

The Begum Khan has a reputation as a hard, opinionated woman, with too much learning and too few manners. Muslim traits; but that’s not the sort of thing you mention in company. But she is a voice men listen to, in her articles and radio pieces and talks. And there are strange rumours about her quiet, busy little husband.

“Seems we’re dammed if we do and damned if we don’t,” Mts. Sharma puns in English. The ladies smile and the cricket ground rustles to applause as Bharat hit a boundary. A sport of gentle, distant sounds, cricket; muted handclaps, a click of ball on bat, muffled voices. The umpire lowers his finger, the scoreboard flips over, the ladies turn back to the sky. The confrontation is ended, the contrails blowing ragged on a high wind from the southeast, the monsoon wind. The shy Mrs. Sood wonders who won.

“Why, our side, of course,” says Mrs. Chopra, but Parvati can see that Begum Khan is not so sure. Parvati Nandha shades herself with her parasol from the sun that edges under the canopy. It doubles as sunscreen for her palmer on which scores and Test statistics flash up, beamed diagonally across the pitch, through the umpires and the outfield and the infield and the wicket keeper and the batsman and the bowler, from Krishan, down on the boundary line in the day-ticket stands.

The English bowler winds up. TREVELYAN, says the palmer. SOMERSET. PACE. 16TH

CAP FOR ENGLAND. CLEAN BOWLED SIX SRI LANKAN WICKETS IN THE SECOND TEST IN COLOMBO. 2046 SEASON.

The batsman steps forward, bat hold out in front like a narrow shield. He bears the ball down, his counterpart at the far wicket tenses. No. The ball runs a little way before a fielder (SQUARE SHORT LEG, says the palmer) scoops it up, looks around, sees no one vulnerable out on the wicket, lobs it back to the bowler.

LAST BALL OF OVER, Krishan palms.

“Their square short leg was fight on top of that one,” Parvati says. The ladies halt in their talk of state, mildly perturbed. But once again she feels outbatted, a Deep Fine Leg watching the ball scurry towards the boundary. She has tried so hard, learned the language and the rules and still they are beyond her; the war, government strategy, the Ranas, international power politics. She persists: “Husainy’s up next, he’ll take Trevelyan’s pace delivery like it’s being served to him on a thali.”

Her words are less than the jet contrails evaporating in the yellow air above Sampurnanand Stadium. Parvati flips up zoom on her palmer, scans the ranked faces across the pitch. She thumbs WHERE ARE YOU? A message comes back: TO RIGHT OF SIGHT SCREENS. THE BIG WHITE THINGS. She swings her screen over the brown, sweating faces. There. Waving smally, so as not to disturb the players. That would not be cricket.

She can see him. He cannot see her. Fine features, naturally pale skin darkened by his work in the sun on the roof of Diljit Rana Apartments. Clean-shaven; it is only when she contrasts Krishan with the exuberance of moustaches around him that Parvati realises that has always been an important thing for her in a man. Nandha is a shaving man, too. Hair lightly oiled, springing from its chemical confinement, spilling over his forehead. Teeth, when he shouts in delight at some male pleasure from the rules, good and even and present. His shirt is clean and white and fresh, his trousers, as she notices when he stands up to applaud a good two runs, are simple and well ironed. Parvati feels no shame at watching Krishan anonymously. The first lesson she learned from the women of Kotkhai was that men are their most true and most beautiful when they are least conscious of themselves.

A crack of willow. The crowd surges to its feet. A boundary. The scoreboard clicks over. The Begum Khan is saying now that the Ranas have made N. K. Jivanjee look quite the fool since the Awadhi incursion sent him and his silly rath yatra flying back to Allahabad like Ravana fleeing to Lanka.

I SPY YOU, whispers the palmer. The screen shows her Krishan’s smiling face. She tilts her parasol in unobtrusive greeting. Behind her the ladies have fallen to chatter of the Dawar’s party and why Shaheen Badoor Khan had not stayed for the entertainment. Begum Khan pleads that he is a very busy man, doubly so in this time of Bhatat’s need. Parvati hears the hooks in their voices. She turns to the game. Now that Krishan has opened up cricket’s mysteries, she can see that there is much subtlety and wit in it. A Test Match is not so different from Town and Country.

MAZUMDAR WILL TAKE JARDINE, Krishan messages. Jardine walks lazily back from the crease, examining the ball, working at it with his thumb, polishing it. He lines up. The fielders tighten up in their strangely titled positions. Mazumdar, two stripes of anti-dazzle cream beneath his eyes like a tiger’s stripes, prepares to receive the delivery. Jardine bowls. The ball bounces, hits a scuff in the grass, bounces high, bounces sweet. Everyone in Sampurnanand Stadium can see how high, how sweet; can see Mazumdar judge it, weight it, shift his position, bring his bat back, get underneath it, send it soaring up, out into the yellow sky. It is a magnificent stroke, a daring stroke, a brilliant stroke. The crowd roars. A six! A six! It must be. All the gods demand it. Fielders run, eyes on heaven. None will ever catch it. This ball is going up, up, out.

Keep your eye on the ball, Krishan had told Parvati when it was spades and apricots on the roof garden. Parvati Nandha keeps her eye on the ball as it reaches the top of its arc and gravity overcomes velocity and if falls to earth, towards the crowd, a red bindi, a red eye, a red sun. An aerial assault. A missile from Krishan, seeking out the heart. The ball falls and the spectators rise but none before Parvati. She surges up and the ball drops into her upheld right hand. She cries out at the sting, then yells “Jai Bharat!” mad on the moment. The crowd cheers, she is marooned in sound. “Jai Bharat!” The noise redoubles. Then, as Krishan showed her, she hooks back her sari and flings the ball out across the boundary. An English fielder catches it, nods a salute, and skims it to the bowler. But it is six, six, glorious six to Mazumdat and Bharat. I kept my eye on the ball. I kept my hand soft, moved with it. She turns to show off her pride and achievement to her ladies and finds their faces rigid with contempt.

Parvati only allows herself to stop when she is outside the ground but even then she can still hear the muttering and feel the burn of shame on her face. A fool a fool a country fool, carried away with the mob, getting up and making an exhibition of herself like someone with no manners, no class at all. She had shown them up. Look at the Cantonment lady who throws the ball like a man! Jai Bharat!

Her palmer has been vibrating, message after message after message. She does not want to see them. She does not want even to look back for fear he might have come after her. She heads across the landscaped area to the road. Taxis. There must be taxis, any time on a match day. She stands by the cracked roadside, parasol raised as the phatphats and city cabs slide past. Where are you going who are you driving this time of day? Can’t you see a lady is hailing you?

Hope-to-be lady. Never-was lady. Never-can-be lady.

A moped cab swings through the traffic to the curb. The driver is a buck-toothed youth with a straggle of down for a moustache.

“Parvati!” The voice is behind her. This is worse than death. She climbs into the back and the driver accelerates away, past the startled, staring figure in the pressed black trousers and the sharply ironed pure white shirt. Returning to the empty apartment, shaking with shame and wanting to die, Parvati finds the doors unlocked and her mother with her travelling baggage encamped in the kitchen.

22: SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

The dam is a long, low curve of bulldozed earth, huge as a horizon, one end invisible from the other, anchored in the gentle contours of the Ganga valley. The Bharati Air Force tilt-jet comes in over Kunda Khadar from the east. It passes low over the waving jawans, turns above the lake. The aeai strike-copters flock closer than Shaheen Badoor Khan finds comfortable. They fly as birds fly, daring manoeuvres no human pilot could attempt, by instinct and embodiment. The tilt-jet banks, the aeaicraft dart and swoop to cover and Shaheen Badoor Khan finds himself looking down into a wide, shallow bowl of algae-stained water rimmed by dirty, sandy gravel as far as the eye can see, white and toxic as salt. A silty sump not even a cow would drink. Across the aisle Sajida Rana shakes her head and whispers, “Magnificent.”

If they had listened, if they had not rushed in the soldiers, heads full of Jai Bharat! Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. The people want a war, Sajida Rana had said at the cabinet meeting. The people shall have one, now.

The Prime Ministerial jet lands on a hastily cleared field on the edge of a village ten kays on the Bharati side of the dam. The aeaicraft flock above it like kites over a Tower of Silence. The occupation force has made its divisional headquarters here. Mechanised units dig in to the east, robots sow a minefield. Shaheen Badoor Khan in his city suit blinks behind his label shades in the hard light and notes the villagers standing at the edges of their requisitioned and ruined fields. In her tailored combats Sajida Rana is already striding purposefully towards the receiving line of officers and guards and V. S. Chowdhury. She wants to be Number One pin-up on the barrack-room walls; Mama Bharat, up there with Nina Chandra. The officers namaste and escort Prime Minister and prime counsellor through the dust to the hummers. Sajida Rana strides out, Minister Chowdhury trotting alongside as he attempts to brief her. Little yipping dog, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. As he climbs into the sweatbox of the hummer’s passenger compartment he glances back at the tilt-jet, perched on its wheels and engines as if fearful of contamination. The pilot is a black-visored tick plugged into the plane’s head. Beneath the sensor-tipped nose the long barrel of an autocannon is like the proboscis of some insect that lives by sucking the juices from another. A dainty killer.

Shaheen Badoor Khan sees the banana club, the blind smile of the old woman, identifying her guests by pheromone; the dark alcoves where the voices mingled and laughed and the bodies relaxed into each other. The alien, beautiful creature, swimming out of the dark and the dhol beat like a nautch dancer.

The hummer smells of Magic Pine air freshener. Shaheen Badoor Khan unfolds blinking into the light that glares from the concrete road surface. They are on the dam-top road. The air is rank with dead soil and stagnant water. Magic Pine is almost preferable. A thin piss of yellow water trickles from the spill-way flume. That is Mother Ganga.

Jawans form up a hasty honour guard. Shaheen Badoor Khan notes the SAM robots and the nervous glances between the lower level officers. Ten hours ago this was the Republic of Awadh and the soldiers wore green, white, and orange triple yin-yangs on their otherwise identical chameleon camous. Easy mortar range from those ghost villages revealed in their architectural nakedness by the dwindling water level. A single sniper, even. Sajida Rana strides on, her hand-tooled boots clicking on the roadbed. The troops are ranked up beyond the dais. Someone is testing the PA with a series of feedback shrieks. The news channel camerapersons spot the Prime Minister in combats and charge her. Military Police draw lathis and brush them aside. Shaheen Badoor Khan waits at the foot of the steps as Prime Minister, Defence Secretary, and Divisional Commander mount the dais. He knows what Sajida Rana will say. He put the final lacquer on it himself this morning in the limo to the military airfield. The general susurrus of men gathered together under a hot sun ebbs as they see their commander-in-chief take the microphone. Shaheen Badoor Khan nods in silent pleasure as she holds the silence.

“Jai Bharat!”

An unscripted moment. Shaheen Badoor Khan’s heart freezes in his throat. The men know it, too. The silence hangs, then erupts. Two thousand voices thunder it back. Jai Bharat! Sajida Rana gives the call and response three times. Then she delivers the message of her speech. It is not for the soldiers standing easy on the dam top road, sloped at their weapons in the APCs. It is for the cameras and the mikes and the network news editors. Sought a peaceful resolution. Bharat not a nation craves war. Tigress roused. Sheathe her claws. Hoped for diplomatic solution. Still achieve a negotiated peace with honour. Noble offer to our enemies. Water should always have been shared. No one nation. Ganga our common life-vein.

The soldiers don’t shift. They don’t shuffle. They stand in their battle gear in the tremendous heat with their heavy weapons and take this stuff and cheer at the cheer points and hush down when Sajida Rana quiets them with her eyes and hands, and when she leaves them on a final killer: “And finally, I bring you another major triumph. Gentlemen, Bharat three hundred and eighty seven for seven!” they erupt and the chanting starts. Jai Bharat! Jai Bharat! Sajida Rana takes their applause and strides off while it is still fresh and ringing.

“Not bad, eh, Khan?”

“Mazumdar just went for one hundred and seventeen,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says, falling in behind his leader. The hummer convoy whisks them back to the forward command headquarters. This was always going to be an in and out operation. General Staff had counselled in every way against it but Sajida Rana insisted. The offer of conciliation must be made from a posture of might that would not demean the Rana government. The analysts had studied the satellite data and cywar intelligence and given an hour of reasonable confidence before the Awadhis could muster a retaliation. The hummers and APCs rip back along the corrugated country dirt roads. Their dust plumes must be visible from orbit. The aeaicraft flock in behind like a hunt of raptors. Sentries nervously eye the sky as they hurry Prime Minister Rana and her chief advisor to the powering-up tilt-jet. The hatch seals, Shaheen Badoor Khan belts up, and the ship bounds into the air, leaving his stomach down there on the flattened, scorched crops. The pilot climbs at full throttle a hair under stall angle. Shaheen Badoor Khan was not born to fly. He feels every lurch and drop like a little death. His fists grip white on the armrests. Then the tilt-jet flips over into horizontal flight.

“Well that was a bit dramatic, wasn’t it?” Sajida Rana says, unfastening her seat belt. “Bloody army never forgets who’s the woman here. Jai Bharat! Still, that went well. I did think the cricket score finished it off nicely.”

“If you say you, Ma’am.”

“I do say so.” Sajida Rana writhes in her clinging combats. “Bloody uncomfortable things. I don’t know how anyone ever does any serious fighting in them. So, your analysis?”

“It will be frank.”

“Is it ever anything else?”

“I think the occupation of the dam is foolhardy. The plan called…”

“The plan was good as far as it went, but it had no balls.”

“Prime Minister, with respect.”

“This is diplomacy, I know. But fuck it, I am not going to let N. K. Jivanjee play the Hindutva martyr. We’re Ranas, for God’s sake.” She lets the little touch of theatre ebb, then asks, “Our position is still salvageable?”

“Salvageable, but international pressure will be a factor when it hits the news channels. It might give the British their excuse to renew calls for an international conference.”

“Hopefully not in London, the shopping’s gone to hell. But the Americans.”

“We’re thinking the same thought, Prime Minister. The Special Relationship.”

“Is nowhere near as reciprocal as the Brits like to think. I’ll tell you one thing gives me joy out of this whole mess, Khan. We stuck it up that chuutya Jivanjee. He thought he was so clever, leaking those photographs of his Holy Shopping Trolley; well, now he’s the one running back home with his balls in his mouth.”

“Still, Prime Minister, he hasn’t gone away, you know. I think we shall be hearing from Mr. Jivanjee if we get our peace conference.”

“When, Khan.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head in acquiescence. But he knows that there is no science in this thing. He, his government, and his nation have been lucky thus far. Sajida Rana picks a badly sewn seam in her combat pants, slouches down in her seat, and asks, “Anything about me yet?” Shaheen Badoor Khan flips on his palmer and scans the news channels and agency services. Phantom pages appear before his field of vision. News breaks around him in soft, colourful detonations.

“CNN, BBC, and News International are running it as breaking news. Reuters is just copying to the US Press.”

“What’s the Great Satan’s general tenor?”

Shaheen Badoor Khan flicks through leader articles from Boston to San Diego.

“Mild scepticism to outright rejection. The conservatives are calling for our withdrawal, then maybe negotiations.”

Sajida Rana tugs gently at her bottom lip, a private gesture known only to intimates, like her fabulously dirty mouth.

“At least they aren’t sending the marines. But then it’s only water, not oil. Still, it’s not Washington we’re at war with. Anything from Delhi?”

“Nothing on the online channels.”

Prime Minister Rana drags the lip a little lower.

“I don’t like that. They’ve got other headlines written.”

“Our satellite data show Awadhi forces still holding position.”

Sajida Rana lets go her lip, sits up in her seat.

“Fuck them. This is a great day! We should rejoice! Shaheen.” The first name. “In confidence: Chowdhury, what do you think of him?”

“Minister Chowdhury is a very able constituency member.”

“Minister Chowdhury is a hijra. Shaheen, there’s an idea I’ve been pushing around the back of my head. Deedarganj will be up for by-election some time in the next year, Ahuja’s putting a brave face on it but that tumour’s eating him from the inside out, poor bastard. It’s a good staunch seat; hell, they’d elect James F. McAuley if he waved a bit of incense at Ganesha.”

“With respect Prime Minister, President McAuley is not a Muslim.”

“Well fuck it, Khan, you’re hardly Bin Laden. What are you, Sufi, something like that?”

“I come from a Sufi background, that’s correct.”

“Well, that’s my point exactly. Look, truth of it is, you’ve played a good chukka on this one and I need your abilities out in the open. You’d have to serve out your apprenticeship on the backbenches, but I’d certainly be fast-tracking you for a ministerial portfolio.”

“Prime Minister, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, you could start with thank you, you fucking parsimonious Sufi. Strictest, of course.”

“Of course, Prime Minister.”

Deprecating, bowing, acquiescing; a mere civil servant; but Shaheen Badoor Khan’s heart leaps. There was a time at Harvard after the freshman results when the tension burst and the summer opened free and wide and he forgot both business school virtues and the disciplines of his school of Islam. Under the lengthy guidance of a liquor store owner he had bought himself a bottle of imported Speyside single malt whisky and, in the shafts of dusty light through his room window, toasted his success. Between the creak of the cork in the bottle-neck and the dry retching in the purple twilight there had been a distinct period when he felt embedded in joy and radiance and confidence and that the world was his without limit or bar. He had gone to his window, bottle in hand, and roared at the planet. The hangover, the spiritual guilt, had been worth it for that one, charged burn of epiphany. Now strapped in beside his Prime Minister in an army tilt-jet, he knows it again. Cabinet Minister. Him. He tries to look at himself, imagine a different seat at the table in the beautiful, luminous council room; imagine himself rising to his feet under the dome of the Sabha. The Honourable Member for Deedarganj. And it will be right. It is his just reward, not for his diligent, unstinting service, but for his ability. He deserves this. Deserves it, will have it.

“How long have we worked together?” Sajida Rana asks.

“Seven years,” Shaheen Badoor Khan replies. He thinks, and three months twenty-two days. Sajida Rana nods. Then she does the thing with the lip again.

“Shaheen.”

“Yes, Prime Minister?”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Prime Minister.”

“It’s just, well, you’ve seemed distracted recently. I’ve heard a rumour.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan feels his heart stop, his breath freeze, his brain crystallise. Dead. He is dead. No. She would not have offered him everything she has in this high, private place only to rip it away from him for a trifle of madness. But it is not madness, Shaheen Badoor Khan. It is how you are. Thinking you can deny it, hide it, is the madness. He moistens his lips with his tongue. There must be no faltering, no dryness or failure in these words he has to say.

“Government is the province of rumours, Prime Minister.”

“I’d just heard you’d left some do in the Cantonment early.”

“I was tired, Prime Minister. That was the day.” He is not safe yet.

“Of the briefing, yes, I remember. What I heard, and doubtless it’s gross slander, is that there was a bit of. tension between you and Begum Bilquis. I know it’s bloody cheek, Shaheen, but is everything all right at home?”

Tell her, Shaheen Badoor screams at himself. Better she finds out now than from some party tout, or, God preserve us, N. K. Jivanjee. If she does not know already, if this is not some test of honesty and loyalty. Tell her where you went, who you met, what you almost did with him. Yt. Tell her. Hand it over to the mother of the nation, let her manage it and spin it and massage it for the cameras, all those things he has done so long, so loyally, for Sajida Rana.

He cannot. His enemies within and without the party hate him enough as a Muslim. As a pervert, a wife-abandoner, a lover of things most of them cannot even regard as human, his career would be over. The Rana government could not survive. Before everything, Shaheen Badoor Khan is a civil servant. The administration must stand.

“May I be frank, Prime Minister?”

Sajida Rana leans across the narrow aisle.

“That’s twice in one conversation, Shaheen.”

“My wife. Bilquis. well, recently, we’ve been going through a cold period. When the boys left for university, well, we’d never had that much apart from them to talk about. We live independent lives now—Bilquis has her column and women’s forum. But you can be assured that we won’t let that get in the way of our public duties. We won’t embarrass you that way again.”

“No embarrassment,” Sajida Rana murmurs, then the military pilot makes a terse announcement about landing at Nabha Sparasham Air Force Base in ten minutes and Shaheen Badoor Khan uses the distraction to look out of the window at the great brown stain of Varanasi’s monstrous bastis. He allows himself a small twitch of a smile. Safe. She doesn’t know. He has spun it. But there are tasks he has to do now. And there, along the very southern edge of the horizon, is that a dark line of cloud?

It was only after his father died that Shaheen Badoor Khan understood how much he hated the house by the river. It is not that the haveli is ugly or overbearing—it is the contrary of all of those things. But its airy cloisters and verandahs and spacious, high-ceilinged white rooms are heavy with history, generation, duty. Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot go up the steps and pass under the great brass lantern in the porch and enter the hall with its twin spiralling staircases, the men’s and the women’s, without remembering himself as a boy, hiding behind a pillar as his grandfather Sayid Raiz Khan was carried out to the burying ground by the old hunting lodge in the marshes, and again, walking behind his own father as he made that same, swift journey through the teak doors. He will make that journey himself, through his fine teak double doors. His own sons and grandsons will bear him through. The haveli is crowded with lives. There is no cranny away from relatives and friends and servants. Every word, deed, intention is visible, transparent. The concept of place apart is one he remembers with tight pleasure from Harvard. The concept of privacy, the New England reserve: reserve, a thing set aside, for another use.

He crosses the mezzanine to the women’s half of the house; as always, he hesitates at the door of the zenana. Purdah had been abolished in haveli Khan in his grandfather’s time but Shaheen Badoor Khan had always felt a sense of shame of the women’s apartments; things here, stories in the walls, ways of living that had nothing to do with him. A house divided, like the hemispheres of the brain.

“Bilquis.” His wife has set up her office in the screened balcony with its view over the teeming, tumultuous ghats and the still river. Here she writes her articles and radio speeches and essays. In the bird garden beneath she entertains her clever, disenfranchised friends as they drink coffee and make whatever plans clever, disenfranchised women make.

We are a deformed society, the music-loving civil servant had said as Mumtaz Huq took the stage.

“Bilquis.”

Footsteps. The door opens, the face of a servant—Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot remember which one—peeps out.

“The Begum is not here, sahb.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan slumps against the sturdy doorframe. The one time he would cherish a few sentences snatched between busy lives. A word. A touch. For he is tired. Tired of the relentlessness. Tired of the appalling truth that even if he sat down and did nothing like the sadhu on a street comer, events he has set in motion will swell behind him, one feeding the other, into a drown-wave. He must always run those few steps ahead. Tired of the mask, the face, the lie. Tell her. She will know what to do.

“Always out, yes.”

“Mr. Khan?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The door closes on the sliver of face. For the first time in memory, Shaheen Badoor Khan is lost in his own house. He cannot recognise the doors, the walls, the hallways. He is in a bright room now, overlooking the river, a white room with the mosquito nets tied up in big, soft knots, a room filled with slants of light and dust and a smell that calls him back to himself. Smell is the key of memory. He knows this room, he loved this room. It is the old nursery; his boys’ room. His room, high over the water. Here he would wake every morning to the salutations of the Brahmins to the great river. The room is clean and pale and bare. He must have ordered it cleared after the boys left the house for university but he cannot remember instructing it so. Ayah Gul died ten years ago but in the wooden slats, the draped curtains he can smell the perfume of her breast, the spice of her clothing though Shaheen Badoor Khan realises with a start that it is decades since he entered this room. He squints up into the light. God is the light of the Heavens and of the Earth… It is light upon light. God guideth whom He will to His light, and God seteth forth parables to men, for God knoweth all things. The sura curls like smoke in Shaheen Badoor Khan’s memory.

It is only because, for the first time in long memory, he feels there are no eyes watching, that Shaheen Badoor Khan can do what he does now. He reaches his arms out at his side and starts to spin, slowly at first, feet feeling fot balance. The Sufi spinning dance, that whirled the dervishes into the God-consciousness within. The dhikr, the sacred name of God, forms on his tongue. A bright flash of child-memory, his grandfather holding perfectly in place on the geometric tiled floor of the iwan as the qawwals play. A Mevlevi had come from Ankara to teach Indian men the sema, the great dance of God.

Spin me out of this world, God-within.

The soft mat rucks beneath Shaheen Badoor Khan’s feet. The concentration is intense, every thought on the motion of the feet, the turning of the hands, down to bless, up to receive. He spins back through his memories.

That crazy New England summer when high pressure moored over Puritan Cambridge and the temperature climbed and stuck and everyone opened their doors and windows and went out into the streets and parks and greens or just sat in their doorways and balconies, when Shaheen Badoor Khan, in his sophomore year, forgot what it was to be cold and restrained. Out with friends, coming back late from a music festival in Boston. Then it came, out of the soft, velvet, scented night and Shaheen Badoor Khan was paralysed, fixed like a northern star as he was to be a quarter of a century later in Dhaka airport by a vision of the unearthly, the alien, the unobtainable beauty. The nute frowned at the rush of noisy undergraduates as it tried to sidestep. It was the first Shaheen Badoor Khan had ever seen. He had read, seen pictures, been intrigued, tantalised, tormented by this dream of his childhood incarnate. But this was flesh: real, no legendary beast. He had fallen in love on that Harvard green. He had never fallen out again. Twenty-five years, carrying a thorn in the heart.

Feet move, hands weave, lips shape the mantra of the dhikr. Spinning back.

The wrapping was perfect, simple, elegant. Red, black, and white koi patterned paper, a single strand of cellophane raffia, gold. Minimal. Indians would have prettied it, gaudified it, put hearts and bows and Ganeshas, had it play tunes and spring out confetti blessings when opened. At the age of thirteen, Shaheen Badoor Khan knew when he saw the parcel from Japan that his would never be a true Indian spirit. His father had brought gifts for all the family back from the trade trip to Tokyo. For his younger brothers, Boys Day Carp Kites—proudly flown from the balconies of Haveli Khan ever after. For oldest son, Nihon in a box. Shaheen had goggled at the squeeze tubes of Action Drink, the Boat In the Mist chocolate, the trading cards and Waving Kitty robotpet, the mood-colour scarves and the disks of Nippon-pop. What transformed his life, like a motorbike that turns into an avenging battle-bot, was the manga. At first he had not liked their easy mix of violence and sex and high-school anxiety. Cheap and alien. But what seduced him were the characters; the elongated, sexless teens with their deer eyes and their snub noses and their ever-open mouths. Saving the world, having parent problems, wearing fabulous costumes, sporting fantastic hairstyles and footwear, worrying about their boy-girl-friends as the destroying angel-robots bore down on Tokyo but mostly being independent and cool and fabulous and long-legged and androgynous. He wanted their thrilling, passionate lives so badly he had cried. He envied their beauty and sexy sexlessness and that everyone knew and loved and admired them. He wanted to be them in life and death. In his bed in the loud Varanasi dark, Shaheen Badoor Khan would invent on-stories for them; what happened after they defeated the angels streaming through the crack between the heavens, how they loved and played together in their fur-lined battle-dome. Then they pulled him down into the pink fur-lined bulb of the battle-nest and they rubbed together, indeterminate but passionate, for ever and ever and ever. On those nights when he was made a Mage-rider of a Grassen Elementoi, Shaheen Badoor Khan would wake in the suffocating morning with the front of his pyjama pants stiff.

Years after he would sneak those yellowing, soft, and fraying comics out of the shoebox. Ever young, ever slim, ever beautiful and adventurous, the boy-girl pilots of the Grassen Elementoi stood, arms folded, challenging him with their cheekbones and animal eyes and sullen, kissable mouths.

Shaheen Badoor Khan, whirling on the edge of the transcend, feels his eyes sharp with teats. The sema wheels him back, to the beach.

His mother had complained about the humidity and the socialism and how the fishermen would shit on the sand outside the bungalow. His father had been edgy and stuffy and homesick for the searing north. He had fretted about in creased pants and short-sleeved poplin shirts and open-toe sandals in the smothering Keralese heat and it had been the worst holiday Shaheen Badoor Khan could remember because he had been looking forward to it so much. The south the south the south!

In the evening the fisher kids would come in from the sea. Sun-blackened, naked, smiling, they had played and yelled and splashed while Shaheen Badoor Khan and his brothers sat on their verandah and drank lemonade and listened to their mother tell them how terrible those dreadful children were. Shaheen Badoor Khan did not find them dreadful. They had a little outrigger. They would play all day with that boat, in and out of it. Shaheen Badoor Khan would imagine them sailed in from an adventure out on the big water; piracy, rescue, exploration. When they ran their outrigger up on to the strand and played cricket on the beach he thought he would die from desire. He wanted to sail off with black, grinning Keralese boy-girls, he wanted to slip naked into blood-warm water and wear it like a skin. He wanted to run and yell and be skinny and un-self-conscious and free.

In the next bungalow was a family of civil servants from Bangalore, below the salt in every way, but Shaheen Badoor saw their boy and girl play on the outrigger, jump into the clear water and surface, gasping, dewed with drops, laughing and laughing and laughing to do it all again. A seed of emptiness was planted there, that germinated on the long train journey back up the length of India into an ache, a hope, a desire that had no name or words, but smelled like sunburn lotion, itched like sand between the toes, felt like warm coconut matting, sounded like children cries coming across water.

Shaheen Badoor Khan whirls to a stop. He fights immense, racking sobs heaving up inside him. He wanted it so much but his was not the life that could ever have that kind of freedom. He would give anything to be that beautiful, even for one day.

Feet. Outside. Bare feet. Shaheen Badoor Khan shakes free of the succubus.

“Who’s there?”

“Sir? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Leave me, please.”

Everything is fine, as fine it can be amidst ruins. Shaheen Badoor Khan straightens his suit, smoothes out the rucked up dhuri where he whirled, and God honoured him. He was taken down into the nafs, the desiring core of the soul, and there shown the true nature of the God-within and his cry for aid beyond comprehension was answered.

He knows what he must do now about the nute.

23: TAL

For the rest of the week Tal throws ytself into yts work, but not even the interiors for the haveli into which Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala will move after their virtual wedding can quell the demons. A gendered. A man. A Khan. Tal tries to shake the image from yts brain but he’s strung out along the neurons like Diwali lights. That’s the ultimate fear: it’s all unravelling in there, all those biochips and hormone pumps dissolving into yts bloodstream. Tal fears yt’s pissing yts nuteness away through yts kidneys. Yt can still taste this Khan’s lips.

By the end of the week even Neeta is telling yt yt should take time off.

“Get, go on, out of here,” Line Producer Devgan orders. Tal gets, goes, out-of-heres to Patna. No one but a nute would think of weekending in that sprawling, hot, soul-free industrial city. There’s someone Tal needs to see there. Yts guru.

Two hours later Tal is down at the river, blinking polarised contact lenses against the brilliants glinting from the water and booking a first return (it is better to travel first class than to arrive, baba) on the fast hydrofoil to Patna. Thirty minutes later yt’s curling back into yts seat, closing yts eyes and small, soft fists in pleasure to the opening beats of GURU GRANTH

MIX as the industrial plants slip by on the far dry banks. Yt’s amazed there’s enough water to float this thing.

There’s a new look on Patna’s pollution-soaked streets. Dark and flowing is in. As is hair, worn in a single off-centre moheek, flopped over the forehead. And nobody would be seen dead in ski-goggles. Nothing Tal can do about the hair but ClimBunni on Amrit Marg has all the look, racked up and ready to vend. Tops here, bottoms there, unders here, footwear in back. The card takes another weighty blow but half an hour later Tal swings out on to the streets in swathes of soft grey silk and silver-black cow-nute boots with five-centimetre heels and the essential bead tassles swaying from the bootstraps. The guys are reeling, the girls are watching enviously, the women in the coffee-shops are leaning together and talking behind their hands, the traffic-cop on point-duty at the roundabout almost spins three sixty as Tal clicks yts contact lenses black against the sun and it’s good, so good, so astonishingly unexpected and wonderful and hilarious to be back on Patna streets under Patna sun breathing Patna smog, threading through the Patna bodies and faces, moving to the Patna mix in yts phones. Everything dances to the mix. Everything is a musical, every chance encounter between passersby is murder or an adultery or a robbery or long-lost lovers reuniting. The clothes are brighter and the signs are flashier and everything is about to break into one huge production number, citywide, just for Tal. Yt prays to Ardhanarisvara god of nutes to let yt be the first to bring the noo look back to Varanasi.

Varanasi. And men called Khan. And everything.

For those who know, there is the fast boat down beneath the glass towers of the Commercial Bund that will take you up to the sangam where the guru conducts yts operations. The boat is a mahogany Riva, Tal notes with approval. Twin engines stand the Riva on its tail and take it out past the scuttling little ferries and barge trains. The boat cuts across the main channel and veers left towards the great sand spit where the Gandak joins the sacred Ganga. On and around this wide sand delta stands Bharat’s biggest, cheapest, dirtiest, and least regulated free-trade zone. The pressed aluminium larri-gallas and go-downs long ago crowded each other off the available land on to the water: the sangam is fringed by decommissioned lighters twenty deep. Families live here that boast they never set foot on dry land; all they need for birth, for life, for death, they can find running over the maze of gangplanks and companionways, boat to boat.

The Riva takes Tal through ever-narrowing channels between steel hulls painted with improving Hindu texts until it squeezes into a conduit barely wide enough to contain it to pull in beside an old tug with the unlikely name of Fugazi. For thirty years she hauled bulk cargo upstream from Kolkata to Patna’s new industries. Then White Eagle Holdings bought her up, sailed in to final dock on the Gangak Free Trade Zone and eviscerated her engines. White Eagle Holdings is a deeply respectable fund management company based in Omaha, Nebraska, specialising in pension plans for healthcare workers. It owns several floating factories in Patna that specialise in those medical services the Bible-believing voters of the Midwest vehemently deny their fellow countrymen. Hundreds of high-revenue, low-legality industries have their corporate headquarters in Gangak Eff Tee Zee: custom-pirate radio stations, pharm phakers, fileshare services, datahavens, emotic breweries, genebusters, clonelabs, cell therapists, Darwinware jungles, copy prorection strippers, forex shuttle services, label tippers, stem-cell farmers, pornocrats, at least one Gen 3 aeai (mooted), and Nanak the kind doctor, the good nute, the guru of the sweet knives.

Tal climbs the steel ladder, nervously conscious of the looming metal wall of the neighbouring barge at yts back. One eddy in the mingling of waters around this point and the closing walls of steel would burst yt like a dropped egg. A face peeps over the rail: it is Nanak, the good doctor, disreputable as always in a pair of cargo shorts three times too big, a clingy mesh top and big tank-girlie boots, grinning like a holy monkey.

They embrace. They touch. They kiss. They stroke emotions of joy and presents and childhood stay-up-lates and the first bread of the morning and glissandos of baroque into their subdermals, those same neural keys Nanak’s robot surgeons fused into the nerve fibres of Tal’s flayed body. Then they break and smile and make silly, joyous noises and are happy all over again.

“The style got you, I see,” Nanak says. Yt’s small and a little shy and coy, and bowed a little lower by gravity but yt’s still got the kindest smile. Yts skin is ochre from the sun.

“At least I make an effort,” Tal says, inclining yts head at Nanak’s dock-wallah gear.

“You just watch your heels around here,” Nanak warns. The deck is a fashion assault course of cable ducts and hatch dogs and pipes any of which could send the careless nute crashing against hard steel plate. “You will stay for tea, won’t you? Careful here.” They scale a steep ladder to the wheelhouse. One step before the top Tal pauses to look out over the city of boats. It is as busy as any bazaar. Beyond making money, there is always work to be done on any ship: painters and deck-swabbers, gardeners, water-engineers, solar power experts, com riggers. Music booms, bass amplified by the copious hollow metal.

“So, what is it?” Nanak asks as yt shows Tal into the wood-panelled, cedar-scented reception room. The smell evokes as powerful an emotional reaction in Tal as any neural keyed response. Yt is back in the wood-lined womb. Yt remembers how the leather sofas creak, how Suniti on the desk hums filmi hits when she thinks no one else is around.

“Just a routine check up,” Tal says.

“Well, we’ll certainly do that for you,” Nanak says and calls the elevator to go down into the empty heart of the ship where yt carries out yts transformations.

“You busy?” Tal asks to hide yts apprehension. The elevator opens on to a corridor of mahogany and brass doors. Tal spent a month behind one of them, crazy on painkillers and immunosuppressives as yts body came to terms with what the robot surgeons had done to it. The real insanity had come when the protein chips wired into yts medulla unpacked and started overwriting four million years of biological imperative.

“I’ve two in,” Nanak says. “One waiting—cute little Malay, really nervy, could bolt at any time, which would be a shame—and one in post-op. We seem to be picking up a lot of old-style transgenders so our reputation is spreading outside the scene but I’m not that keen on it. It’s just butchery. No finesse at all.”

And they will pay for it, as Tal pays for it still; ten percent down and monthly repayments for most of the rest of yts life. Full body mortgage.

“Tal,” Nanak says gently. “Not that one, in here.” Tal finds yts hand on the door of the surgery. Nanak swings open the clinic door. “Just checking you over, cho chweet. You don’t even need to take your clothes off.”

But Tal does kick off yts boots and slips out of yts cool coat before lying back on the white, softly padded table. Yt blinks, self-conscious, up into the lights as Nanak bustles about recalibrating the scanner. This is when Tal remembers that Nanak, the sweet doctor, doesn’t even have a nursing qualification. Yts just a broker, a stevedore of surgery. Robots dismembered Tal and put yt back together again, micromanipulators, molecule-thin scalpels guided by surgeons in Brazil. Nanak’s talent is in bedside manner and a nose for the sharpest medics at the keenest prices wherever the global market opens an opportunity.

“So, baba, tell Nanak, is this a purely medical call or are you checking out the Patna scene?” Nanak asks as yt slips a ’hoek behind yts large ear.

“Nanak, I’m a career nute now, don’t ya know? I’ve moved up to section head in three months. A year from now, I’ll be running the show.”

“Then you’ll be able to come to me to buy whole new sets of emotics,” Nanak says. “I’ve got some new stuff, fresh from the mixers. Very good. Very strange. Right. Ready. Just breathe normally.” Yt lifts a hand in a mudra and semicircles of white metal slide out of the bed base and join in a ring over Tal’s feet. Despite Nanak’s injunction, Tal finds yt’s holding yts breath as the scanner begins its pilgrimage up yts body. Yt closes yts eyes as the ring of light sweeps over yts throat and tries not to imagine that other table, beyond that other door. The table that is not a table, but a bed of gel in a tank of robots. Yt was lain on that table, anaesthetised to within a glimmer of death, autonomic responses wired to a medical aeai that kept yts lungs pumping, heart beating, blood circulating. Tal cannot remember the top of the tank descending, locking in place, filling with more pressurised, anaesthetic gel. But yt can imagine and imagination has become memory, a claustrophobic imaginary memory of drowning. What yt cannot—dares not—imagine are the robots moving through the gel, blades extended, to flay every centimetre of skin from yts body.

That was the first part.

As the old skin was incinerated and the new one that had been seeded three months before from a sample of Tal’s DNA and a egg sold by some basti woman grew ripe in its tank, the machines went in. They moved slowly through the viscous, organic gel, driving in under the muscle armouring, peeling back fat, detouring around blood tines and engorged arterials, disconnecting sinews to get to the bone. In their Sao Paulo offices, the cheap surgeons operated on air with their manipulator gloves and opened up intimate, bloody vistas of Tal’s body on their visors. Osteobots sculpted bone, reshaping a cheek here, widening a pelvis, shaving slivers from shoulder blades, dislocating, relocating, amputating, substituting plastic and titanium. As they worked, teams of GUMbots removed all genitalia, replumbed ureter and urethra, and respliced the hormone triggers and neural response pathways to the array of subdermal studs embedded in the left forearm.

Tal hears Nanak laugh. “I can see right inside you,” yt giggles.

Three days in that tank Tal hung; skinless, bleeding constantly, a whole body stigmata, while the machines worked slowly, steadily, shift after shift dismantling yts body and rebuilding. Then their task was done and they withdrew and the neurobots went in. Different doctors guided these, a team from Kuala Lumpur. In the three days of Tal’s passion, the market had shifted in neurosurgery. This was a different, more refined science than cutting and pasting gobbets of meat. Clicking crab-bots fused protein circuitry to nerve fibre, spliced nerves to gland inducers, rewired Tal’s entire endocrine system. While they grafted, big machines took the top off Tal’s skull and micromanipulators crept between the tangled ganglia like hunters in a mangrove swamp to spot-weld protein processors to neural clusters in the medulla and amygdala, the deep, dark root-buttresses of the self. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, they brought Tal back from the edge of death and woke yt up. The aeai hooked into the back of Tal’s skull now had to run a full autonomic nervous system test that the chip grafts had seated correctly and that the neural firing patterns yt had previously associated with gender would trigger the new, implanted behaviours. Skinless, muscles hanging like sacks from disconnected sinews, eyeballs and brain naked to dermal trauma gel, Tal woke up.

“Nearly done, baba,” Nanak says. “You can open your eyes, you know.”

Only that cocoon of anaesthetic gel kept Tal from dying of pain. The aeai played yts neural network like a sitar. Tal imagined fingers moving, legs running, felt urgings and stirrings where yt never had before, saw visions and wonders, heard choruses and God whistling, was sucked down by washes of sensation and emotion yt had never known before, hallucinated monster striped buzzing insects filling yts mouth like a gag, then, in the same instant, dwindling to the size of a pea, revisited places yt had never been, regreeted friends yt had never known, remembered lives yt had never lived, tried to cry out yts mother’s name, yts father’s name, God’s name, screamed and screamed but yts body had been shut down, mouthless, helpless. Then the aeai shut Tal’s brain down again and in the amnesia of anaesthesia yt forgot all the wonders and horrors yt had met in the tank of gel. The helpful machines put the top back on yts head, reconnected everything that had been disconnected and draped Tal in yts new skin fresh from the stem cell vat. Five days more yt hung, merely unconscious, in a wash of cell stimulant medium, dreaming the most astonishing dreams. On the tenth morning the aeai disconnected from Tal’s skull, drained the tank, and washed down yts sleek new skin as yt lay there, complete, new, on the transparent plastic, shallow chest rising and falling in the white spotlights.

“Well, that’s you,” Nanak says and Tal opens yts eyes to see the scanner ring split in two and retract inside the diagnostic bed.

“Am I?”

“Apart from time’s usual depredations, you look lovely inside. Full of light. Otherwise, the usual homily about saturated fats, alcohol, tobacco, nonprescription drugs and moderate exercise.”

“What about.” Tal raises a hand to yts head.

“Not a damn thing wrong with you. I issue you a complete bill of health. Isn’t that good? Now, get up and have dinner with me and tell me what this is all about.”

Swinging over the side of the diagnostic bed, Tal tries out a dozen excuses to turn down the invitation and then realises that if yt doesn’t tell Nanak what’s in yts heart, then the entire trip to Patna will have been folly.

“Right then,” yt says. “I accept.”

Dinner is simple, exquisite vegetarian thalis taken on the flying bridge from which captains once overviewed their flotillas of barges. Nanak’s assistant and cook Suniti flits in and out with bottles of cold Kingfisher and advice on how each dish should be eaten, “a mouthful, and hold it until your tongue goes numb,” “two bites,” “a spoon of this, a bite of that, then the lime.” Gandaik FTZ winds down after its day earning dividends for the medical professionals of Nebraska. Music and the smell of ganja coil up from the barges where entrepreneurs emerge from their workshops to lean on the rails and smoke and crack beer in the last of the sun.

“So, now you must pay me,” Ninak says and when yt sees the consternation on Tal’s face, yt touches it lightly, reassuringly. “No no. Suniti will take care of that. You must pay me what you owe me for this excellent food and fine evening and my exquisite company, with what you have kept from me all day, bad baba.”

Tal rolls on to yts back on the soft tatami mat. Above yt, the sky is barred with straps of purple cloud, the first yt has seen in months. Yt imagines yt can smell rain, so long anticipated, an imagination of a memory.

“It’s someone, but you knew that anyway.”

“I had an idea.”

A lone bansuri throws notes out in the softening dark. A musician, down there amongst the badmashes, coiling out an ancient Bihari folk tune.

“Someone who is clever and successful and quiet and deep, with good taste and mysteries and secrets and is scared by it all but wants it so much.”

“Isn’t that what we’re all looking for, janum?”

“Someone who happens to be a man.” Nanak leans forward. “This is a problem to you?”

“I got out of Mumbai to get away from complicated relationships and I’m in the most complex of them all. I Stepped Away because I didn’t want to have to play that game; the man and woman game. You gave me new rules, you put them in my head, down there and now they don’t work, either.”

“You wanted me to check out that everything was functioning within its operational parameters.”

“There has to be something wrong with me.”

“There is nothing wrong with you, Tal. I saw right through you to the other side. You are perfectly healthy in body, mind, and relationships. Now you want me to tell you what to do. You call me guru, you think I’m wise, but I won’t do that. There’s never been a rule of human behaviour that hasn’t been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules. It’s a phenomenon of this universe that the simplest of rules can give rise to the most complex behaviours. The implants just give you a new set of reproduction-free imperatives, that’s all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn’t be worth anything if they didn’t give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute.”

The notes of the flute stalk Tal. Yt smells a rumour of rain on the evening wind that blows up from the river.

“It’s who, not what,” Suniti comments as she gathers up thalis. “Do you love him?”

“I think about him all the time, I can’t get him out of my head, I want to call him and buy him shoes and make him music mixes and find out all the things he likes to eat. He likes Middle Eastern, I know that.”

Nanak rocks on yts hip bones.

“Yes yes yes yes yes. My assistant is, of course, right as she always is, but you haven’t answered her question. Do you love him?”

Tal takes a breath.

“I think so.”

“Then you know what you must do,” Nanak says and Suniti scoops the metal dishes up in the tablecloth and whisks them away, but Tal can tell from the set of her shoulders that she is pleased.

After the dinner is the Jacuzzi. Nanak and Tal lap in nipple-deep water in the big wooden tub on the other wing of the flying bridge, dappled with marigold petals and a subtle slick of tea-tree oil, for Nanak’s persistent athlete’s foot. Incense rises vertically on three sides, the air is preternaturally still, climate in abeyance, waiting.

Patna’s airgiow is a golden nebula on the western horizon. Nanak strokes Tal’s thighs with its long, articulate big toes. There is no gendered rule of arousal in it. It is touching, what nutes do, friends do. Tal lifts two mote Kingfishers from the plastic cool box, uncaps them on the side of the tub. One for yt, one for yts guru.

“Nanak, do you think it will be all right?”

“You, personally? Me? Yes. It is easy for people to have happy endings. This city, this country, this war? I am not so sure. Nanak sees a lot from yts bridge here. Most days I can see the Indian Brown Cloud, I see the water level go down, I see skeletons on the beach, but they don’t frighten me. It is those dreadful children, those Brahmins, they call them. Whoever gave them that name knew a thing of two. I tell you what it is scares Nanak about them. It’s not that they live twice as long, half as fast as we do, or that they are children with the rights and tastes of adults. What frightens me is that we have reached a stage where wealth can change human evolution. You could inherit crores of money, send your children to American schools—like all those inbred half-mad Maharajahs—but you couldn’t buy an IQ, or talents or good looks even. Anything you could do was cosmetic. But with those Brahmins, you can buy a new infrastructure. Parents have always wanted to give their children advantages, now they can hand it down through all future generations. And what parents would not want that for their child? The Mahatma, blessed be his memory, was wise in many many ways, but he never spoke bigger nonsense than when he said about the heart of India was in the villages. The heart of India, and her head, has always been in the middle classes. The British knew this, it’s how a handful of them run us for a hundred years. We are an aggressively bourgeois society; wealth, status, respectability. Now all of those have become directly inheritable, in the genes. You can lose all your money on the markets, go bankrupt, gamble it away, be ruined in a flood but no one can take your genetic advantage away from you. It is a treasure no thief can steal, a legacy they will pass free to their descendants. I have been thinking about this a lot, these days.”

Tal says, “Nanakji, you mustn’t trouble yourself. It’s nothing to do with us. We’ve Stepped Away.” Yt feels Nanak stiffen against yts touch.

“But we haven’t, baba. No one can. There are no noncombatants in this. We have our beautiful lives and out crushing little things of the heart, but we are humans. We are part of it. Only now it is us divided against ourselves. We will be at each other’s throats for our children’s futures. All the middle classes have learned from the Lost Women decades is how easy it is to create a new caste, and how we love that, especially when the bindi is in your DNA. It will rule us for a thousand years, this genetic Raj.”

It is full dark now. Tal feels cool air from an unexpected quarter on yts skin. Yt shivers, a small thing on a huge continent, sensing a future with no place for yt, Stepped Away, genetically noncombatant. An Australian accent calls up from below.

“Good evening to you up there, Nanakji! Rain in Hyderabad, I’ve just heard.”

Nanak lifts ytself half out of the scented water but the caller in the night cannot be seen.

“Good news indeed!” yt replies. “We shall certainly celebrate that!”

“I’ll drink to that!”

There is a soft sound from the hatch to the main bridge. The bathers turn. A nute stands there, wrapped in a crisp blue yukata, arms wrapped round itself.

“I heard. I thought, could I?”

“All are welcome,” Nanak says, fishing in the ice bucket for a Kingfisher.

“Is it true, is the rain really coming?” the nute asks as yt slips out of yts blue cotton robe. Tal experiences a cold shock at the narrow shoulders, the broad child-giving hips, the hormone-injection flattened breast buds, the sacred triangle of the shaven yoni. Pre-op. The shy one, the one Nanak had said might bolt. Yt tries to remember the three years yt had lived as a pre-op, trying to save the deposit on a berth on the Fugazi. Like a memory of a nightmare it is a series of disjointed impressions. The three-a-day hormone jabs. The constant shaving. The endless roll of mantras to stop thinking like a gendered, be a nute.

“Yes, I believe it’s coming at last,” Nanak says as the nute steps down into the water beside yt and all sexual identity is erased. They move together through the blood-warm water, touching, as nutes do. Tal sleeps that night by Nanak’s side, curled up and deep, touching, as nutes do, as friends who sometimes sleep together.

“Take care in that Varanasi,” Nanak calls to Tal as yt climbs down the scabbed side of Fugazi to the waiting Riva, skipping on the filthy water.

“I’ll try,” Tal calls back, “but it’s a crushing little thing of the heart.”

Looking out of the window as the hydrofoil pulls away from the astonishing sweep of the Bund waterfront, Tal sees a plane of churned grey cloud spread into the south and east further than yt can see. ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE MIX booms in yts inner ears.

As Tal had hoped, yt wows Varanasi. More specifically, yt wows Indiapendent Productions, Meta-Soap Design Department. Precisely, yt wows Neeta on the desk, who claps her hands and tells yt yt looks faaaabulous and yt obviously had a good time in horrid Patna and oh I almost forgot there’s a letter for you, special delivery and all.

The Special Delivery wears a plastic wallet with priority and hand deliver and lightning flash seals and tricky little strings to pull here that released tabs there which in turn enable you to rip a perforated strip and then draw out the inner IMPORTANT DOCUMENT liner on its quick release thumb-pull and tear open the sealed plastic along the marked perforations and only then do you get the message. A single sheet of paper. Handwritten; these words. Must see you again. Can you come tonight, August 12? The club, whenever. Please. Thank you. And a single looping initial at the bottom.

“It’s like Town and Country, but real!” Neeta declares.

Tal reads the letter a dozen times in the phatphat to the White Fort. As yt tarts up the look for the big night (if there’s anyone else in the club with the look, yt’ll have their eyes) the television news is all war bores and the entertainment channels are all full of smiling people dancing in echelon and for the first time yt can’t watch any of it. Nothing for it. Yt grabs yts bag and dashes. Mama Bharat is out on the landing leaving out trash.

“Can’t stop, can’t stop, hot hot date,” Tal shouts. Mama Bharat namastes, then yt’s down the stairs, squeezing past a couple of men in suits who stare just those few seconds too long. Yt watches them pass yts door and up the next flight. Down in the pillared sublevel the cab is waiting and tonight tonight tonight the kids can shout what they like and call names and make animal and sucking noises and they just fall around Tal like marigold petals. On yts system this night of nights are STRANGE CLUB, FUGAZI FLOAT TANK and, dare yt dare yt dare yt? FUCK MIX.

At the entry to the alley of the Banana Club Tal slides up yts sleeve and programmes in blissfullfloatyanticipationsmoulder. The protein chips kick in as the grey wood door opens. The blind bird-woman in the crimson sari is there, head tilted back slightly, fingers filled with dwarf bananas. She might not have moved since Tal’s last visit.

“Welcome back, welcome back, lovely thing! Here, help, have.” She offers her fruit. Tal gently curls her fingers on the bananas.

“No, not tonight.” Tal hesitates, shy to ask, “Is there.”

The blind woman points to the topmost gallery. No one’s in tonight, though it’s early in the month. Rumours of war and rain. Down in the central courtyard a nute in a long swirling skin performs a kathak with a grace beyond classical. The second level is deserted but for two couples talking on the divans. The third level is leather club armchairs and low tables. Brass table lanterns shed a glow-worm ambience. The chill zone. There is only one guest up here tonight. Khan sits in the chair at the end of the gallery, hands resting symmetrically on the armrests in that way that Tal has always thought timelessly classy. Very English. Eyes meet. Tal blinks a blessing. Khan is so sweet, he doesn’t know the language. Tal trails yts hand along the wooden rail. Sandalwood has been used in the construction, the handrail leaves a pheromone imprint on Tal’s palm.

“Oh, you,” Tal says as yt curls ytself into a chair at right angles to Khan. Yt waits for a smile, a kiss, any greeting. Khan starts edgily with a small grunt. There is a white envelope on the low fat-legged table. Tal takes out yts own letter, neatly quartered and sets it beside the envelope. Yt crosses yts smooth thighs.

“Well, at least tell me I look stupendous,” Tal jokes. The man starts. This is not going by his script. He nudges the envelope towards Tal.

“Please, take that.”

Tal unfolds the flap, peeks inside, then can’t believe what yt’s seeing and takes a longer, even less believing stare. It’s a wad of thousand rupee notes, one hundred of them.

“What is this?”

“It’s for you.”

“What, me? This is.”

“I know what it is.”

Tal sets the envelope flat on the table.

“Well, it’s very generous, but I’d need to know a bit more about it before I accept it. It’s a hell of a lot of money.”

The man grimaces.

“I can’t see you again.”

“What? Is it me, what’ve I done?”

“Nothing!” Then, soft with sorrow, “Nothing. It’s me, I should never. I can’t see you. I shouldn’t even be seeing you here.” He laughs painfully. “It seemed the most secure place. Take it, it’s for you, please have it.”

Tal knows yts mouth is open. Yt experiences what yt imagines it might be like to feel your brain slam against the back of your skull after an impact from a cricket bat. Yt also knows, by the smooth sacred skin on the back of yts skull, that there’s someone else up on the third level balcony with them, a newcomer.

“You’re buying me off? You’re handing me a lakh rupees and telling me you never want to see me again, to never cross your path again. I know what this is. This is get out of Varanasi money. You bastard. You bastard. What do you think I’ll do? Blackmail you? Tell your wife, or your boyfriend? Run to the papers? Tell all my pervy nute friends and lovers, because we’re all over each other, everyone knows that? Who do you think you are?”

The man’s face crumples in anguish but Tal will not be stopped. Yt has the red rage in yt. Yt snatches out the money, lunges across the table to shred the treacherous paper in Khan’s face.

The man lifts his hands, turns his face away, but there is no defence.

“And hold that, Tal,” says a voice. A flash of light. Tranh stands at the end of the table, feet apart, a solid brace for the palmer camera in yts right hand. “And another one” Flash. The man hides his face behind his hands, looks for a getaway but Tranh is backed by muscle in suits. “I’ll tell you who he bloody thinks he is, cho chweet. He is Shaheen Badoor Khan, Private Parliamentary Secretary to Sajida Rana, that’s who. And I am so sorry about this, my lovely, I am so sorry it had to be you. It’s nothing personal, please believe me. Politics. Bloody politics. So sorry, Tal.” Tranh snaps the palmer shut, hesitates, hand pressed to mouth as if holding in a vomitous secret. “Tal, get out of Varanasi. You were set up from the start. I was sent to find you; you were new, you were innocent, you are absolutely dispensable. Go!” The heavy men guide yt down the stairs, a hummingbird mobbed by crows.

24: NAJIA

Najia Askarzadah, power-walking with her girlfriends. In crop-top and shortie shorts and noo shoes that grope your feet and remember the sensation. She bought them with money from the Rath Yatra shots, and a lot of other things besides. Things for her, things for friends, to keep them friends. Najia Askarzadah’s relationships have always been contracts.

The girls have been doing this walking before breakfast every Tuesday and Thursday since Najia joined the Imperial International set. This morning she needs it. They all got destroyed on Omar Khayyam champagne last night. Bernard was present to praise her grudgingly on her journalistic fortune and then talked for the rest of the evening about representation and epistemic polyverses and how the only possible intellectual response was to treat the whole thing as an episode of Town and Country, no less and certainly no more, the unfolding soapi that can never be dramatically concluded, had anyone any evidence that Sajida Rana actually set foot on the Kunda Khadar apart from TV pictures? and as for N. K. Jivanjee, well, it’s a good political joke that everyone’s seen him but no one can remember meeting him; the impending wedding of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala at least had the credibility of the kitsch. But he was glad about her success, glad, because now she was realising the totalising energy of war.

He’s going to invite me back, she thought. He’s jealous and hasn’t had a fuck in a week.

Would she like to come back, work up a theory about all this with him? He’d got some Red Roof Garden Skunk in.

He had got into gauze. It was draped all over his rooms, great swags and drapes, billowing slightly in the rising winds through the louvers. He had heard that the rain was moving up over the Deccan and whole villages were going out to dance. He would love that, to dance in the rain, dance with her. She liked the thought of that. The Red Roof Garden was very fine and within half an hour she was squatting naked, thighs drawn up oyster-pose, on his lap with his penis held straight and hard inside her, clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing in time with the hummed mantra in the light of a dozen terracotta oil-lamps. But it was the bottle-and-a-half of Omar Khayyam that worked the magic so that they achieved what Bernard promised so long, which was to keep his cock inside her for one hour, not moving, breathing and chanting as one, clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing until, to Najia’s surprise, she felt the slow glow of orgasm light inside her and spread like running lamp oil until they both came in a white blast of semen and Kundalini burning a hole through the tops of their Sahasrar chakras.

The walking girls turn out of the shaded drive of the Imperial International on to the Mall. The greenery is cool and smells damp and growing but out on the boulevard the heat an hour after sunrise is already like a hammer. She’s sweating. Sweat out the night things. Najia Askarzadah’s gloved fists beat out her walk and her skinny ass rolls in her tight shortie-shorts as two lanes of traffic head inbound to Varanasi, gold and pink in the morning haze. Men whistle and call but power walking expat girlies are faster than Varanasi crush-hour traffic. Those foot-grope sports shoes can have Najia Askarzadah intersections ahead in the time it takes them to jerk one car length. By the new park hawkers are already laying out their plastic tarpaulins and arranging their fruit and car batteries and bootleg pharma in the limp, dusty shade of the dying almond trees. It’s going to be the hottest one yet, Najia’s pores tell her. It reaches a peak of unbearability just before it breaks, Bernard says. She scans the horizon as she takes a sip from her water bottle, but the sky beyond the towers of Ranapur is an upturned bowl of hammered bronze.

She feels the heat radiate from the big, soft-engined car as it tucks in beside her, a Merc SUV shimmering scarab black. The mirrored window rolls down, the low-level dhol’n’bass thud from the music centre jumps a level.

“Hi! Hi!”

A gap-toothed, dark-faced gunda leers out at her. He wears a string of pearls knotted around his neck.

Head down, fists up. Keep moving. Her ass quivers; her palmer, hooked over her waistband, is being called. Not a voice or video or a text: a direct data-transfer. Then the Merc accelerates past and the driver waves his palmer at her and gives an OK sign. He swings the black car through a gap between a municipal bus and a water tanker with its military escort.

Najia wants to collapse into the cool of the Imperial’s leisure pool but her mystery message won’t let her. It’s a video file. Her journalistic sense whispers caution. She takes the palmer into a shower cubicle and clicks up the video. N. K. Jivanjee is seated in a light, airy pavilion of beautifully patterned kalamkaris. The fabric billows gently, pregnantly. N. K. Jivanjee namastes.

“Ms. Askarzadah, good morning to you. I assume that is when my operatives will deliver this message to you. I trust you have a refreshing walk, I do think exercise first thing in the morning really does get the day off to the best possible start. I do wish I could say that I still greet every dawn with the surya namaskar, but, ah, the years. Anyway, my congratulations on the use to which you put my last piece of information. You have exceeded my expectations; I am quite, quite delighted. Therefore I have decided to entrust you with another release of privileged data. You will pick it up from my worker at midnight tonight, at the address which will follow on this screen. This one will be of the utmost sensitivity, I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that it will transform the political shape of this nation. All my previous caveats are repeated, and amplified. Yet again, I’m sure we can rely on you. Thank you, bless you.”

Najia Askarzadah knows the address. She takes care to lock her palmer in her room before joining her walking mates splashing in the blue pool.

Go somewhere once and you will be there again sooner than you think. The noise in the club is an assault. The scrap wood benches are packed with men waving betting slips and roaring down on to the blood spattered sand. Many are in uniform. All war is a bet. The instructions on her palmer direct her down the stairs, into the pit. The sound, the stink of sweat and spilled beer and oxidised perfume, are overpowering. Najia pushes between the shouting, gesticulating bodies. Through the forest of hands she can glimpse the fighting microsabres held high by their owners, parading around the sand ring. She wonders about the handsome, feral boy who caught her eye that first night. Then the cats go down, the owners dive over the side of the ring, and the crowd surges forward with a roar like a hymn. Najia beats through to the satta booths. The bookies measure her with their round, lilac glasses. A fat woman beckons her over.

“Sit, sit here beside me.”

Najia squeezes on to the bench beside her. Her clothes smell of burned ghee and garlic. “Have you something for me?”

The sattawoman ignores her, busy at her book. Her assistant, an old thin man, claws in the cash and sends betting slips skittering across the polished wooden desk. The barker leaps down from his high chair and scuttles into the ring to announce the next bout. Tonight he is dressed as a pierrot.

“No, but I do,” a voice says sudden and close behind her. She turns. The man leans over the pew-back. He is dressed in black leather; Najia can smell it, smoky, sensual. The feral boy from the Mercedes is beside him; same shirt same grin same string of pearls. The man holds up a manila A4 envelope. “This is for you.” He has dark, liquid eyes, lovely as a girl’s. You do not forget eyes like that and Najia knows she has seen them before. But she hesitates to take the envelope.

“Who are you?

“A paid operative,” the man says. “Do you know what this is?”

“I merely deliver. But I do know that everything in there is real and can be verified.”

Najia takes the envelope, opens it. Merc-boy’s hand strikes over the partition, staying hers.

“Not here,” the man says. Najia slides the envelope into her shoulder bag. When she turns back again the stall is empty. She wants to ask that nagging question: why me ? But the man with lovely eyes would have no answer to that either. She slips her bag over her shoulder and weaves through the crowd as the barker stalks the killing floor, blasting his air-horn and bellowing bet! bet! bet! She remembers where she knows those eyes from. They met across this perspective, her by the balcony rail, he in the satta pit.

Back on the moped, out in the traffic. The city seems close tonight, threatening, knife-bearing. The cars and trucks want her under their wheels. The street jams up around a cow taking a long luxurious piss in the middle of the road. Najia opens the manila envelope, slides out the top third of the first photograph. She pulls out half. Then the whole. Then she takes out the next photograph. Then the next. Then the next.

The cow has wandered on. Vans are hooting, drivers shouting, waving, issuing vivid curses at her.

And the next. And the next. That man. That man is. That man, she recognises him though his is a face that has concealed itself well from the cameras. That man is said to be the will behind Sajida Rana. Her private secretary. Giving money. Wads of cash. To a nute. In a club. Shaheen Badoor Khan.

The entire street is looking at her. A policeman advances waving his lathi. Najia Askarzadah rams the pictures back into the envelope, heart hammering, twists the throttle, revs away, her little alcohol engine going putty-putter-putt. Shaheen Badoor Khan. Shaheen Badoor Khan. She’s driving by amygdala alone through the blaring, poisonous traffic, seeing the money, seeing the riverside apartment in New Sarnath, seeing the noo clowthz and holidaze and champagne that isn’t Omar Khayyam and interviews and the name on the banner headlines Bharat-wide India-wide Asia-wide Planet-wide and in far cool nice Sweden her parents opening the Dagens Nyheter and it’s their darling daughter’s photograph under the foreign news leadline.

She stops. Her heart is beating arrhythmically, fluttering, wowing. Caffeine does it shock does it big sex does it joy does it. Getting everything you ever wanted does it. She can see. She can hear. She can sense. A gyre of noise and colour confronts her. No other place her preconsciousness could bring her than to the heart of Bharat’s madness and contradiction. Sarkhand Roundabout.

Nothing with wheels and an engine is getting through this intersection. The radiating roads have swollen like diseased arteries into rent cities and truck laagers, glossy with yellow streetlight and the glow of sidewalk shrines. Najia sets her feet on the ground and walks her little bike into the fringes, drawn to the magnificent chaos. The spinning wall of colour, glimpsed through the mess of trucks and plastic sheeting, is a wheel of people, loping and chanting as they orbit the gaudily painted concrete statue of Ganesha. Some carry placards, some hold lathis by the tips, the ends swaying and bobbing over their heads like a forest of cane in a premonsoon wind. Some wear dhotis and shirts, some are in Western pants, even suits. Some are naked, ash-smeared sadhus. A group of women in red, devotees of Kali, rush past. All have fallen into unconscious lockstep and perfect rhythm. Individuals spin in, spin out, but the wheel turns endlessly. The cylinder of air between the facing buildings throbs like a drum.

A massive red and orange object lumbers into Najia’s field of vision: rath yatra, like the one she saw on Industrial Road. Perhaps that same one. N. K. Jivanjee’s Chariot of Siva. She walks her bike inward. The syncopated chanting is a mad, joyful hymn. She can feel her breath and pulse fall into rhythm with the dance, feel her womb tighten, her nipples harden. She is part of this insanity. It defines her. It is all the danger and madness she has sought as the antidote to her sane Swedishness. It tells her it is still a life of surprises, worth enduring. Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers! declares a large yellow advertising sign above the crazy mela.

A buck-toothed karsevak thrusts a sheet of A5 at her.

“Read read! Demons attack us, sex-crazed violators of children!” he shouts. The flyer is printed front Hindi, back English. “Our leaders are in thrall to Bible Christians and Demonic Mohammedans! Mata Bharat founders! Read this paper!”

The leaflet features a large cartoon of Sajida Rana as a shadow puppet, dancing in her designer combat fatigues, her sticks held by a hook-nosed caricature Arab in a red and white shumagg. His ogal reads Badoor-Khan. She points the way for an American televangelist who sits at the controls of a big bulldozer, cigar erect in mouth, advancing on a Hindu mother and child cowering in the shadow of the rat-vahana of an enraged Ganesha, trunk uplifted, axe drawn back to strike.

Child-raping paedophile Muslims plan capitulation to Coca-Cola Kultur! First they steal the waters of Mother Ganga, then Sarkhand, then Holy Bharat. Your nation, your soul, are at risk!

They hate him, thinks Najia Askarzadah, still trembling from the accreted human energy. They hate him worse than anything I can imagine. And I can deliver him to them. I can give them what they want, the highest, hardest fall. Child-raping paedophile? No, much much worse: a lover of things not male, not female. Monsters. Nutes. An un-man. A glare of light, a bloom of yellow flame and a thunder of approval from the jogging crowd. A burning Awadhi flag twists into her view, writhing like a soul in fire. She can lift a finger and send all these futures spinning off into unknown dimensions. She has never felt so alive, so potent, so powerful and capricious. All her life she has been the outsider, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the Afghan Swede; wanting to be part, the whole, the core, the blood. She feels a delirious rub of warm damp against the vinyl of the bike saddle.

25: SHIV

Shiv and Yogendra ride up through a cylinder of sound. Construxx boasts a crew of architectural surveyors who cruise Varanasi and Ranapur’s construction zone jungles looking for the best pre- and post-industrial sites. Construxx’s niche is the dips in the cash flow charts. Last month it was the penthouse levels of the Narayan Tower in west Varauna: eighty-eight floors of rentable flexform office space; tenants four. This month it is the vast concrete shaft that, when the money comes on line again after the war, will be University metro station. Construxx boasts mighty architecture and word-of-mouth PR. If you want to find it, you must ask the right people in the right places.

Location of Construxx August 2047 Site. Take the metro to Panch Koshi Station, last stop on the new South Loop line, all chrome and glass and that concrete that looks oily to the touch. At the end of the platform is a temporary wooden staircase down onto the tracks. This section of the line is deactivated. Follow the tunnel until you see a small circle of flickering light. Two dark shapes will emerge on either side of the expanding circle: they are security. You must either impress them with your looks, your style, your celebrity, or your status. Or be an invited guest of Nitish and Chunni Nath.

Construxx August 2047 Site: for best effect, look up. Blue spots swing and dash down from a lighting gantry rigged under the temporary plastic roof. Catwalks, platforms, rigging wires, steel grilles and meshes shatter the light into a net of shadow and aqua. Moving shadows are bodies, dancing, grooving to the personalised tunes coming through their palmers. The DJ box is halfway up the wall, a rickety raft of scaffolding rods and construction mesh. Here a two-human, fifteen-aeai crew pump out a customised channel of Construxx August 2047 mix for every dancer out there on the platforms.

Construxx August 2047 Site obeys a strict and simple vertical hierarchy. Shiv and Yogendra ride the service elevator up through the new meat and the office grrrls who’ve saved all month for this one night of notoriety and the soapi wannabes and the fine young criminals and the sons and daughters of something, all arrayed on their appropriate platforms. The elevator drags them up red spray-bomb letters, each ten metres high: the dogma of Construxx, filling half the orbit of the concrete shaft: Art Empire Industry. Shiv flicks away his dead bidi. It rolls through the steel grating beneath his feet and falls into the throbbing blue, shedding sparks. The main bar and crush zone is on what will be the ticket concourse. The true gods are up on the vip levels, stacked out over the drop like a fan of playing cards. Shiv moves towards the security. They are two big blonde Russian women in orange coveralls bearing the Construxx mantra and bulges that speak of concealed yet easily accessible firepower. While they scan his invitation, Shiv checks out the action up on the vip level. The Naths are two small figures dressed in gold, like images of gods, giving darshan to their supplicants. A Russia grrrl waves Shiv over to the bar. He is far down the social order.

Drinks are served from the ticket counters. Ranks of cocktail-wallahs mix, shake, chill, and pour in a rhythm part dance, part martial art. Cocktail of the night seems to be something called Kunda Khadar. Drop an ice bubble into neat vodka. Ice cracks, seeps a clear liquid that turns red in contact with the alcohol. The blood of Holy Bharat shed on the waters of Mother Ganga. Shiv wouldn’t mind trying one, wouldn’t mind anything with a shot of grain in it to steady his nerve but he can’t even afford the house water. Someone will buy him one. The only eyes that will hold his belong to a girl by the railing, alone, on the edge of the spirals of talk. She is red: short soft terracotta leather skirt, a fall of long, straight crimson hair. An opal nestles in her navel. She has garial skin boots with feathers and bells swinging from the straps, a new look Shiv must have missed in his exile in Shit City. One two three seconds she looks at him then turns away to gaze down into the pit. Shiv leans on the rail and looks out into the motion and light.

“It’s bad luck, you know.”

“What’s bad luck?” the girl asks. She has a lazy, city drawl.

“This.” He taps her belly jewel. She flinches but does not recoil. She balances her gyroscopic cocktail glass on the rail and turns to face him. Red tendrils spiral through the clear alcohol. “Opals. Bad luck jewels. That is what the English Victorians believed.”

“I can’t say I feel particularly unlucky,” the girl says. “Are you bad luck?”

“The worst kind,” Shiv says. He relaxes and spreads himself along the railing and so knocks her cocktail off the railing. It drops like a god’s tear, catching the light like a jewel. A woman’s scream comes up from below. “And there’s your bad luck. I’m so sorry. I would get you another one.”

“Don’t worry.”

Her name is Juhi. Shiv steers her towards the ticket booths. Yogendra detaches himself from watching pretty things and follows at a discreet distanice. The Kunda Khadars really are very cold and very good and very expensive. The red stuff is cinnamon flavoured, with a little THC kick. Juhi chatters away about the club and its people. Shiv glances up at the vip zone. The Nath siblings have moved up to a higher level yet, two gold stars under the rippling plastic canopy. Juhi kicks him gently, foreplayfully with her garial boot. Feathers and everything.

“I see you looking up there, badmash. Who are you working for?” Juhi works closer to him.

Shiv nods towards the Naths, surrounded by their dark fixers. Juhi screws her face up.

“Chuutyas. You have business with them? You be careful. They can do what they like because they have money and their daddy owns the police. They look like angels but inside they are dark and old. They are bad to women. He wants to fuck because he is twenty years old inside his head but he can’t get it up so he has to take hormones and things and even then it’s nothing. I’ve seen bigger on a dog. So he uses toys and things. And she is as bad. She watches him play. I know this because a friend of mine went with them once. They are as bad as each other.”

Russia grrl catches Shiv’s eye, nods him over, and your little monkey too.

“Come up with me,” he says to Juhi. “You don’t have to meet them.” He is thinking about when he has his setup money. There will be more of those Kunda Khadar things and a hotel room and some place with junk food and a television for Yogendra. Shiv begins to feel the glow in his belly. The shoulders go back. The chin up. The step lengthens, lightens. Golden people turn to look, their Kunda Khadars like little murders in their hands. At the centre of them, the golden children. Nitish and Chunni Nath stand side by side. They are dressed identically in gold brocaded sherwanis. Their faces are smooth and puppy-fat and more open and innocent than they should be. The girl Chunni’s hair hangs to her waist. Nitish is shaved, his scalp glitters with mica dust. Shiv thinks it makes him look like a cancer kid. They smile. Now he sees where it is hiding. In the old, old smiles. Nitish beckons.

“Mr. Faraji.” Nitish Nath’s voice is high and pure and cuts through the mix. “And the boy is?”

“Personal assistant.”

“I see.”

Shiv feels sweat bead inside his leather. Every word, nuance, tone, muscle alignment is being scanned and read. He is getting that scent again. He does not know if it is real or his mind, but when he is around Brahmins he can always smell wrongness, genes turned awry. They don’t smell human.

“And the. female?”

“No one. Just someone I met. She’s nothing.”

“Very well. Come with me please.”

There is a level above all levels, a tiny cage of construction mesh suspended from the main crane. Shiv, Yogendra, and Nitish Nath fit it like segments into an orange skin. All the chatter, the echoes, the shuffle of bodies dancing silently on their tiered platforms are silenced so abruptly Shiv feels their absence as a sharp pain.

“This area has a mute field,” Nitish Nath says. His voice is flattened, it sounds to Shiv as if he is speaking in his eardrum. “Clever, isn’t it? Most useful for sensitive business. We are pleased with your performance to date, Mr. Faraji. Your businesslike ethos is refreshing. It was intimated to you that if we were satisfied with your work, there would be other tasks. We would like to offer you a new contract. It will be dangerous. There’s a distinct possibility you could be killed. In return we will write off your debts to the Dawoods. Their machines will not visit you again. And we will add enough to set you up in this town, or any other.”

“What is the job?”

“Abstraction, Mr. Faraji. Background then. This won’t make any sense to you, but never let it be said that you weren’t fully informed. For some time now the United States government has subcontracted intelligence-related computing that it cannot process under its own Hamilton Acts. It routinely uses datahavens in countries that are not signatory to the international agreement that have access to high-level artificial intelligence. You know what Generation two-point-five means?”

“A computer you can’t tell from a human seventy-five percent of the time.”

“A good summary. Anything above two-point-five is banned under the terms of the act. Anything below must be licensed. Bharat is a non-signatory country but self-enforces licensing of everything up to two-point-seven-five—this is to preserve its dominant position in the media market through the likes of Town and Country. Our client has ascertained that a Bharati sundarban is carrying out a decryption job for the United States—NASA, the Pentagon, and the CIA are all involved, which is unusual but gives some indication of the importance of the decoding work. Our client wants that decryption key.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?” The mute field is making Shiv’s molars ache. Nitish Nath claps his small, pudgy hands.

“So businesslike! It is a two-part mission. The first is to find which sundarban is doing the decrypt. The second is to infiltrate and steal the key. We know that this man arrived in Bharat three weeks ago.” Nitish Nath holds up his hand. He’s wearing a palmer glove. He holds a videoclip of a bearded Westerner in those baggy clothes they wear that never fit them. He’s been caught stepping out of a phatphat looking left, right for traffic and pushing through the crowds towards a Kashi bar. The clip loops again. “His name is Hayman Dane, he’s an American, a freelance crypto specialist.”

Shiv studies the fat man. “I think he is in for a great deal of pain.” Nitish Nath giggles. It is not a sound Shiv wants to hear again.

“Once you have the location and a plan for how to arrange the abstraction, our client will cover your legitimate expenses in addition to our generous remuneration package. Now can we leave this place? Your body odour is beginning to nauseate me.”

The mute field pops. Construxx August 2047 implodes on Shiv. It feels fresh, lithe, breathing, clean. Shiv follows Nitish Nath down the steep steps to the vip zone.

“I have a free hand?”

“Yes. Nothing will be traceable to us or our client. Now, we do need your decision.” It is no decision.

“I’ll do it.”

“Good good good!” Nitish Nath stops at the foot of the steps to thrust his small, smooth hand into Shiv’s. Shiv fights the recoil reflex. The hand feels dead to him. He sees a woman’s corpse spilling out of black plastic into the black river. “Chunni! Mr. Faraji is with us!”

Chunni Nath is less than half Shiv’s height but when she looks up into his eyes his balls prickle with fear. Her eyes are like spheres of lead.

“You are with us. Good.” She spins the word out like cotton. “But are you one of us, Mr. Faraji?” Her brother smiles.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Nath, what do you mean?”

“We mean, you have shown your worth in small things, but any street gunda can do that.”

“I am not some street gunda.” Blue flickers, down in the dance-shaft.

“Then demonstrate it, Mr. Faraji.” She looks at her brother. Shiv feels Yogendra’s hand on his sleeve. “That girl you came in with, the one you brought up here. I think you said you met in the bar.”

“She’s just someone I met, she wanted to see the vip area.”

“Your words were, she’s nothing.”

“Yes, I said that.”

“Good. Throw her over the railing, please.”

Shiv wants to laugh, a vast, coughing bark of a laugh the size and shape of this underground chamber at mad things that cannot possibly be said.

“Much has been entrusted to you, Mr. Faraji. The least we can demand is a demonstration of trustworthiness.’’

The laugh dies in his lungs. The platform is high and cold and terrifyingly fragile over a vast abyss. The lights look like epilepsy.

“You are joking. You’re mad, you are. She said you were mad fuckers, that you liked to do things, play mad games.”

“All the more reason then. We don’t tolerate insults, Mr. Faraji. It’s as much a test for us as for you. Do you trust us that you can do this thing here and no one will touch you?”

It would be easy. She stands by the rail, glancing over at him and the other stellar rich on the platform. Kunda Khadars have relaxed her. A hook of the foot, a push, the pivot around the metal rail would send her over. But he cannot do it. He is a seller of parts, a dealer, a butcher, a spiller of bodies into rivers but he is not a killer. And he is dead now. He might as well get up on that rail, put his arms out, and fall forwards.

Shiv shakes his head. He would speak, tell them this, but Yogendra is faster. Juhi smiles, frowns, opens her mouth to scream all in the instant it takes Yogendra to slam into her. He’s a scrawny pup but he’s got momentum. The glass flies into the air spilling a spray of bloody vodka. Juhi reels backwards. Yogendra lowers his head and butts her in the face. Her hands fly up. She loses balance. She goes backwards over the rail. Her garial boots kick, her feathers flutter. her arms windmill. She falls through the slashing lights and silent dancers. The brief scream, the ringing crack as she smashes into the edge of a lower platform echoes up the concrete well of Construxx August 2047 Site. She bounces. She spins, a strange, misshapen smashed thing. Shiv hopes it killed her. He hopes it broke her spine quick and clean. Everyone hears the soft splintering thud as she hits the bottom of the shaft. It took very much longer than Shiv had imagined. Peering over the rail he sees the door muscle come running. There is nothing they can do but talk into their collars. They look up the light beams straight at him. The shrieks start from below. Construxx August 2047 is a cylinder of panicked screaming.

She came out for a night. That was all. Drinks. Dance. A flirt. A bit of celebrity. Fun. Something to tell the girls the next day.

The empty glass still spins on the floor.

Nitish and Chunni Nath look at each other.

He’s not a killer. He’s not a killer.

A Russian girl gives him a thick plastic wallet. He can see the wadded bank notes through the smoky vinyl. It seems to float in front of him, he cannot understand what it is. He can see Yogendra standing by the rail, drawn in on himself, pale as bone. He cannot understand what it is.

She came out for a night. A body, spilling into the dark water. Juhi, falling away from him, hands and feet milling.

“By the way.” It is Nitish speaking. His voice had never sounded so dead and flat even in the mute field. “In case you ever wonder what the Americans are decoding. They have found something in space and they have no idea what it is.”

Art Empire Industry, whispers the red graffiti.