River of Gods

26: SHIV

The American is a big man and bleeds a lot in the sand ring. Unseen in his box in the shadows under the gallery, Shiv studies him. There is an expression he likes from American crime movies. Stuck pig. He has never seen a pig stuck with a blade but he can imagine it, little pig legs lifted up and kicking as it fights against the hands pulling its head back, opening its pig throat to the edge. Then the knife goes into the sweet spot, the blood spot. He imagines the pig’s waving legs like this man’s pale, hairy hocks sticking out of his baggy shorts. He imagines it might make a sound like this panting wailing, flat and ugly, pushed through layers of fat. It would look around it like this, looking for its killer. He dresses the pig-of-his-mind in these American clothes.

Pigs revolt him.

It had only been a tiny nick, just to get the bleeding started. They are more aggressive when there is blood on the air, the girl in the muscle-top told him. You could even consider it a fashion declaration. The earring looked ridiculous on a grown man. Better no lobe at all.

“I ask you again. Where is the sundarban?”

“Look, I keep telling you, I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. I’m not the man you want.”

Shiv sighs. He nods to Yogendra. The kid climbs up on the rail, scissors held out to catch the light.

“Don’t you fucking cut me, man. You cut me and it’s a diplomatic incident. You are so fucked. You hear me?”

Yogendra grins, puts his arms out at his side, wiggles his hips, snips his scissors chip-chop chip-chop. Shiv watches the estuary of blood fan across the American man’s neck. Some has already dried and crusted, food for flies. He follows it under the round collar of his surf-shirt—some starting to show through the fabric—down his arm to form a rubbed, red slick around his wrists where he has chafed at the cuffs. Stuck pig, Shiv thinks.

“You are Hayman Dane?”

“No! Yes. Look, I don’t even know who you are.”

“Hayman Dane, where is the sundarban?”

“Sundarban? Sundarban, what fucking sundarban?”

Shiv stands up. He brushes the dust from his new full-length leather coat. As the tour guides who take the backpackers past the ghats at dawn say, morning light makes all the difference.

It shows Fight! Fight! for the cheap dirty little back-alley gambling joint it is. It shows up the dust and the cigarette burns and cheap wood. Empty of fighters and sattamen and the gamblers and the ringmaster strutting in his sequin costumes, singing into his microphone, it has no spirit, no atman. He opens the door of his box and steps on to the shallow staircase.

“The sundarban where the United States government is decoding information it received from space.”

The big American rolls his head back.

“Man, you fuck off right now. I’m telling you, that little pecker there with the scissors can cut off as much as he likes, but you don’t fuck over the White House.”

Shiv moves to the row in front. This is the sign he has arranged. The pit doors open and the girl pushes the microsabre cage in on a rubber-wheeled gurney.

It had been sweet, getting back into the car, feeling the leather upholstery, resetting the radio, knowing it wasn’t hired now, it was his; his raja’s chariot, his own rath yatra. Sweet to have an anthracite black unlimited card in his pocket, nestled right in there with the roll of notes because as any gentleman knows the important transactions are cash only. Sweet to let the streets see that Shiv Faraji was back and untouchable. In Club Musst he peeled off the notes one thousand two thousand three thousand four and slid them across the blue counter in a little fuck-you line in front of Salman.

“You have given me more than you owe me, sir,” Fat Salman poked his pudgy finger at the last in line, a big ten K. Bar Star Talvin was with clients around the angle of the bat, but glanced over between cocktail acrobatics.

“That’s a tip.”

All the girls stared as he left. He looked for Priya, to acknowledge her, tip her the nod of big thanks but she was drinking elsewhere that night.

“You think maybe we should do some work now?”

It was the longest sentence he had ever heard from Yogendra. Shiv sensed a change in the relationship since Construxx August 2047. The kid was cocky now. He had the balls to do the things Shiv could not, because he felt something, because he was weak, because he had choked at the moment. Never again. The boy would see. The boy would learn. There was another body beside the woman in the sari rolling into Ganga: Juhi going back over the balcony, heels kicking, hands snatching. What he saw most clearly were her eyes. Long stick-on lashes, semaphoring ultimate, resigned betrayal. It was easier now, and he knew it would get easier still, but it pulled him up. It was bad, bad as it can be, but he was a man again. A raja. And he would do some work now.

Now it is morning and Hayman Dane backs away from the microsabre snarling in its cage, snarling because Sai his cute handler in the big combat baggies and small tight muscle top has shot his ass full of stimulants and hallucinogens so when he looks at fat American he sees enemy bad cat thing he hates kill pussycat faster faster. And oh dear, far Hayman Dane has forgotten his handcuffs and he goes over heavy like a load falling off a truck, kicking his legs and squirming around trying to get up and you can’t when you are that fat and your hands are cuffed behind your back.

“Unfortunate,” Shiv says, getting up and walking down one step two three to the row in front.

“The fuck with you, man!” Hayman Dane shouts. “You are in so much trouble. You are dead, you know. You and your butt-boy and your bitch and your little fucking pussy.”

“Well, there’s not really any trouble here at all,” Shiv says taking a seat, resting his chin on his hands on the wooden pew top. “You could tell me what sundarban you’re working for.”

“How many times do I fucking have to say this?” Hayman Dane bellows. A string of drool lolls from his mouth on to the sand where he lies on his side, face red with rage. For a genius he makes a very fine fool, Shiv thinks. But then that is the Western idea of genius, someone who is inhumanly good at just one narrow thing.

A vast morning was opening in crimson and saffron beyond the swags of power and com cables as Yogendra took the cat out to make the lift. Unsettled times coming. Perhaps even the long-promised monsoon. Shiv pulled his jacket around him, suddenly chilled, and went to call on his technical adviser. Anand was an aspirant dataraja who ran a small stable of unlicensed Level 2.5 aeais out of the back of his uncle’s shoe repair shop in Panch Koshi. That was how Shiv knew him; he had taken pairs there in the past. He was a good man with leather. He had sewn them sweet and tight as Shiv waited with the finest hand-stitching he had ever seen. Anand served coffee to the customers, good strong Arab style coffee, with a nugget of Nepali Temple Ball melted in the sweet, seething black liquid for those that wanted.

This morning Anand’s Gucci wraprounds masked flaky red eye-sockets. Anand kept US time. Shiv folded himself onto the low bolster, lifted a tiny, beautifully aromatic cup, and sipped. Mynahs crackled and commented on the unfolding red morning from their cages hung from the beams of the open wooden balcony. He tilted his head back as the Nepalese kicked in.

“Raiding a sundarban.” Anand pursed his lips and bobbed his head in the way aspirant datarajas did to indicate impressed. “My first advice is, if you can possibly get away with not doing it, do.”

“Your second advice?”

“It’s surveillance surveillance surveillance. Now, I can breed you up some ware will probably make you invisible to most common monitoring aeais—few of them are even over Level One, but these guys by definition aren’t industry standard. Until I know who you’re up against, it’s all guesswork.” Anand puffed his cheeks out: bafflement in aspirant dataraja. “We’re on that right now.”

Yogendra would almost be there now. The parking space outside the hotel had been reserved, an agreement with the doorman. He would be powering the window down now, reaching for the stinger on the seat beside him. No guns. Shiv hated guns. You have one shot, boy, make it right.

Shiv sat back on his low embroidered divan. The coffee bubbled on its trivet over the charcoal brazier. Anand poured two fresh cups. He may look like a lavda, but he does things well, Shiv thought.

“My next query?”

“How much faith do you put in conspiracy theory.”

“I don’t put much faith in any theory.”

“Everyone’s got a theory, my friend. Theory is at the bottom of everything. My cousin’s wife’s brother works dataprocessing for the ESA and this is the rumour there. Remember some time back the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans announced they were going to send an unmanned mission to Tierra?”

Shiv shook his head. The second cup was making Anand’s voice spread out into a wash of story, like his mother telling him a hero tale of Rama and bold Hanuman.

“The first EXP? Earth-like Extrasolar Planet? No? Anyway, they found this planet Tierra and there was a big tarrah and stuff on the news channels that they were going to build a probe to go there. Listen up, here comes the conspiracy: there is no Tierra mission. There never was. It’s all a smokescreen for what they were really doing up there. The rumour is, they found something. Something God didn’t make and we didn’t put there. Some kind of object, and it’s old. Way old. I mean, not just millions, but billions of years old. Can you imagine that? Arahbs of years. Brahma-scale time. It’s got them shit-scared—so shit-scared they’re prepared to risk their security and take it to the only people can do quantum crypto right. Us.” He stabbed his thumbs at his chest.

The American will be coming out now, Shiv thought, floating with the sweet smoke up into the cube of air that filled the courtyard, away from the flat words to the street where the women worked and the big hire car waited with the needle in it. He will be coming out the door, pale and blinking and cold. He will not even look at the car. He will be thinking about his coffee and donut, coffee and donut, coffee and donut. It is the habits that kill us. Shiv heard the spit of the stinger. He saw the fat man’s knees crumple as the chemicals overloaded his motor neurons. He saw Yogendra wrestle him into the back of the car. He smiled at the skinny street kid trying to haul the big man up over the tailgate.

Shiv sat, hands draped over knees, on the soft cushion. The bars of early cloud were burning away, the sky blueing. Another death-dry day. He could hear distant radio. The announcer seemed to be very excited about something. Raised voices, arguments, a denouncing tone. He tilted his head back and watched the steam from the coffee curl up until he could, with a squint, merge it with jet contrails. The Nepali Temple Ball said, believe: believe nothing is solid, everything is credible. It is a big universe. Shit. The universe was tight and mean and crammed into a wedge of brightness and music and skin a handful of decades long and no wider than your peripheral vision. People who believed otherwise were amateurs.

“And my third query?”

Yogendra would have him by now, would have got him somehow into the back before the spasms wore off, would have turned through the traffic: fuck you to cars cabs phatphats trucks buses mopeds and sacred cows, be bringing him in.

Anand’s eyes widened as if taking in a truth too large even for a conspiracy-theorist aspirant dataraja.

“Now this is the mad thing. You don’t fucky-fuck with the Naths, but there are rumours about who they’re working with, who their client might be.”

“Conspiracies and rumours.”

“If there’s no God, they’re all you’ve got left.”

“The client?”

“Is none other than Mr. Geniality himself, friend of the poor and champion of the downtrodden, scourge of the Ranas and hammer of the Awadhis: I present, the Honourable N. K. Jivanjee.”

Shiv passed on a third cup of the enriched coffee.

Shiv gets up and moves, slowly as the play demands, to the row in front. That is the cue for Yogendra to jump down on to the sand. He saunters up to Hayman Dane, who is panting now. Yogendra turns his head to this side, then to the other, studying him as if he is a new fruit. Yogendra squats, makes sure Hayman Dane can see what he is doing and picks up the severed earlobe. He dances over to the caged microsabre and daintily drops the ear-tip through the bars. One snap. Shiv can hear the crunch, small but distinct. Hayman Dane starts to shriek, a shrill, pant-pissing keening moan, the shriek of a man in final fear of his life, the shriek of a man who is no longer a man. Shiv grimaces at the ugly, unseemly sound. He remembers his first sight of him as Yogendra brought him down the tunnel into the ring; Yogendra bouncing him before him with shoves from his hands, the fat man taking little tripping, trotting steps for fear of losing his balance, gaping around, blinking to try to understand what manner of place this was. Now Shiv sees the piss stain spreading warm and dark as the waters of birth across his tan shorts and he cannot believe this white Western genius for hire can bring himself to end so stupidly.

Yogendra hops back on to the rail. Sai goes to the cage. She lifts the microsabre above her head and starts her parade, one foot slowly, deliberately in front of the other. Step step step, turn. Step step step, turn. The ritual dance that seduced and mesmerised Shiv the night he saw her, in this ring, on this sand. The night he lost everything. And now, she dances for him. There is something ancient in it, the woman stalking the fighting floor, powerful, a dance of Kali. The microsabre should have her wrist open, the side of her head off. It hangs there, caressed by hands, hypnotised.

Shiv moves to the front row now. Ringside seat.

“I ask you, Hayman Dane. Where is the sundarban?”

Sai crouches in front of him, one leg bent under her, the other outstretched to the side. She fixes Hayman Dane’s tearful eyes with her own. She drapes the cat around her neck. Shiv holds his breath. He has never seen that move before. He has a fast, hard, pleasing erection.

“Chunar,” Hayman Dane sobs. “Chunar Fort. Ramanandacharya. His name is Ramanandacharya. Let go my hands, man! Let go my fucking hands!”

“Not yet, Hayman Dane,” Shiv says. “There will be a file name, and a code.”

The man is hysterical now; an animal, no thought or wit.

“Yes!” he shrieks. “Yes, just let go my hands!”

Shiv nods to Yogendra. Crowing like a rooster he scampers up to the American and unlocks the cuffs. Hayman Dane cries out as circulation returns to his wrists.

“Fuck you, man, fuck you,” he mutters but there is no defiance in it now.

Shiv raises a finger. Sai strokes the tattered head of her microsabre, millimetres from her right eye.

“The name and the key, Hayman Dane.”

The man raises his hands: see, I am unarmed, helpless, no threat or danger. He fishes in the breast pocket of his gaudy shirt. He has bigger tits than some women Shiv has fucked. He holds his palmer aloft.

“See man? It was in my fucking pocket all the time.”

Shiv raises a finger. Yogendra snatches the palmer, swings over the rail into the seating. Sai strokes the tattered head of her microsabre.

“You’ll let me go now, man. You’ve got what you want, you’ll let me go now.”

Yogendra is already halfway up the aisle. Sai is on her feet, moving back towards the tunnel. Shiv climbs the shallow stairs, one by one.

“Hey, what do I do now?”

Sai stands at the gate. She looks at Shiv, waiting. Shiv raises a finger. Sai turns and throws the microsabre into the ring of bloodied sand. Pig time.

27: SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

In a white yukata, Sajida Rana leans over the carved stone balustrade and exhales smoke into the scented fore-dawn darkness.

“You have fucked me up the ass, Khan.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan had thought he could feel no sicker dread, no tighter guilt, no deeper annihilation as his state car slipped through the three AM streets to the Rana Bhavan. He had watched the thermometer on the dashboard rise. The monsoon is finally coming, he had thought. It is always unbearable just before it breaks. Yet he saw ice, Bangla ice. The States of Bengal and their tame berg had worked ice magic. He tried to imagine it, moored in the Bay of Bengal, blinking with navigation lights. He saw the gulls circling over it. Whatever happens, it will rain down on me and these streets. He thought, I have bottomed out. I am hammered flat. There is no further down to go. On the verandah of the Rana Bhavan he understands that he is not even over the first shelf. The abyssal plain lies tens of kilometres below him, down in the crushing dark. There is ice above him, ice he can never break through.

“I don’t know what to say.”

It is so weak. And it is a lie. He does. He had rehearsed it as he reeled in the phatphat back to the haveli. The words, the order of the confessions, the drawing out of secrets a lifetime deep, all had come to him in one mass, one rush, perfectly formed in his head. He knew what he must do. But he must be let do it. She must grant him that grace.

“I think I deserve something,” Sajida Rana says.

Shaheen Badoor Khan lifts one hand in exquisite pain but there is no placating it, no amelioration. He deserves no mercy.

The lamps had been on in the old zenana. Standing in the cloister, Shaheen had strained to pick out women’s voices. Most nights there were guests; woman writers, lawyers, politicians, opinion makers. They would talk all the hours beyond the old purdah. Bilquis should know, before any, before even his Prime Minister, but not in front of guests. Never in front of guests.

Gohil the chauffeur came bleary, hobbling with a rolled-down sock in his boot, stifling a yawn. He turned the official car in the courtyard.

“The Rana Bhavan,” Shaheen Badoor Khan ordered.

“What is it, sahb?” Gohil asked as he drove through the automatic gates into the perpetual crawl of traffic. “Some vital affair of state?”

“Yes,” Shaheen Badoor Khan said. “An affair of state.” By the time the car reached the junction he had written his letter of resignation on the government notepad in the arm-rest. Then he took his ’hoek, set it to audio only, and called the number he had kept next to his heart since the day he was invited to the Prime Ministerial Office and offered the role of Grand Vizier, the number he had confidently expected never to use.

“Shah.” He heard Sajida Rana’s breath shudder. “Thank gods it’s you; I thought we’d been invaded.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan imagined her in bed. It would be white; wide and white. The light would be a small, shallow pool from a lamp. She would be leaning over a bedside cabinet. Her hair would be loose, it would fall darkly around her face. He tried to imagine what she wore in bed. You have betrayed your government, your nation, your faith, your marriage, your dignity, and you are wondering if your Prime Minister sleeps naked. Narendra would be at her side, rolled over into a muffled, white cylinder, go to sleep, affairs of state. It was well known that they still slept together. Sajida Rana was a woman of appetite, but she insisted on her family name.

“Prime Minister, I must tender my resignation with immediate effect.”

I should have rolled the partition up, Shaheen Badoor Khan thought. I should have put glass between myself and Gohil. Why bother? In the morning he will see everything. Everyone will see everything. At least he will have a good story, nuggety with gossip and eavesdroppings. You owe him that much, good and faithful driver.

“Shah, what nonsense is this?”

Shaheen Badoor Khan repeated himself verbatim, then added, “Prime Minister, I have put myself in a position that has allowed the government to become compromised.”

A soft sigh like a spirit departing. A sigh so weary, so tired. A rustle of fine, crisp, clean-smelling white cotton.

“I think you should get over here.”

“I am on my way, Prime Minister,” Shaheen Badoor Khan said, but she had already cut the connection and all he heard was the Zen hum of cyberstatic in the sanctuary of his skull.

Sajida Rana rests on the white balustrade, hands firmly gripping the rail.

“How good is the detail?”

“My face is clearly visible. There will be no doubt that it is me. Prime Minister, they photographed me giving money to the nute.”

She bares her teeth, shakes her head, lights another cigarette.

Shaheen Badoor Khan had never thought of her as a smoker. Another secret about his Prime Minister, like her vile mouth. That is the reason she must have brought him out here; to keep the smoke out of the Rana Bhavan. Marvellous, the details he notices.

“A nute.”

Now the dying within starts. In that one syllable are all her disgust and incomprehension and betrayal and rage.

“They are. a gender.”

“I know what they are. This club.”

Another cube of him is torn away. The tearing is agony but once it is gone the pain vanishes. There is a clean joy in being able say the truth for once.

“It is a place where people go to meet nutes. People who find nutes sexually attractive.”

Smoke rises straight from Sajida Rana’s cigarette before breaking into lazy, phantom zigzags. The air is wonderfully still. Even the eternal roar of the city is muted.

“Tell me one thing, what did you think you could do with them?”

It was never a doing thing, Shaheen Badoor Khan wants to exclaim. That is what you can never understand, soft from your bed with the smell of your husband still on you. That is what the nutes have always understood. It is not about doing anything. It is about being. That is why we go there, to that club, to see, to be among creatures from our fantasies, creatures we have always longed to be but which we will never have the courage to become. For those brief burning stabs of beauty. Sajida Rana does not let him say these things; she cuts in: “I don’t need to know any more. There is, of course, no hope of you remaining in the administration.”

“I never thought there might be, Prime Minister. I was set up.”

“That’s no excuse. In fact, it only makes it. What were you thinking? No, don’t answer that. How long has it been going on?”

Another wrong, uncomprehending question.

“Most of my life. As long as I can remember. It’s always been going on.”

“When you said that time we were coming back from the dam, when you said you and your wife were going through a cold period. for fuck’s sake, Khan.” Sajida Rana grinds the dead stub out with the heel of her white satin slipper. “You have told her, haven’t you?”

“Not about this, no.”

“Then about what?”

“She knows about my. predilections. She has known for some time. For a long time.”

“How long?”

“Decades, Prime Minister.”

“Stop calling me that! You do not call me that. You’ve been a liability to this government for twenty years and you still have the gall to Prime Minister me. I needed you, Khan. We could lose this. Yes, we could lose this war. The generals have all been showing me their satellite pictures and their aeai models and they all say that the Awadhis are moving troops in to the north towards Jaunpur. I’m not so sure. It’s too obvious. One thing the Awadhis have never been is obvious. I needed you, Khan, to play against that fool Chowdhury.”

“I am sorry, I am truly sorry.” But he does not want to heat what his Prime Minister has to say. He has heard it all already, he told it to himself again and again as the car slipped through the stifling morning. Shaheen Badoor Khan wants to talk, to let all the things he has packed down all this lifetime spill out like water from the stone lips of a fountain in some decadent European city. He is free now. There is no secret now, no restraint, and he wants so much for her to understand, to see what he sees, feel what he feels, ache where he burns.

Sajida Rana settles heavily on the balustrade.

“It’s raining in Maratha, did you know that? It will be here before the week is out. It’s moving across the Deccan. As we speak, there are children dancing in the rain in Nagpur. A few days more, and they will be dancing in the streets of Varanasi. Three years. I could have waited. I didn’t need to take the dam. But I couldn’t risk not taking it. So now I’m going to have Bharati jawans patrolling the Kunda Khadar dam in the rain. How will that look to the plain people of Patna? You were right though. We did fuck N. K. Jivanjee up the ass. And now he’s paying me back. We have underestimated him. You underestimated him. This is the end of us.”

“Prime. Mrs. Rana, we don’t know.”

“Who else? You’re not as clever as you think, Khan. None of us are. Your resignation is accepted.” Then Sajida Rana clenches her teeth and smashes her fist into the carved limestone railing. Blood starts from her knuckles. “Why did you do this to me? I would have given you everything. And your wife, your boys. Why do men risk these things? I will condemn you.”

“Of course.”

“I can no longer protect you. Shaheen, I do not know what is going to happen to you now. Get out of my sight. We shall be lucky if we survive the day.”

As Shaheen Badoor Khan crunches back over the raked gravel to the state car, the dark trees and shrubs around him light up with birdsong. For a moment he thinks it is the singing ringing in his inner ear of all the lies that are his life rubbing past each other as they flock to the light. Then he realises it is the overture of the dawn chorus, the herald birds that sing in the darkest of night. Shaheen Badoor Khan stops, turns, lifts up his head, listens. The air is hot but piercingly clean and present. He breathes pure darkness. He senses the heavens a dome above him, each star a pin of light spearing down into his heart. Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the universe wheel around him. He is at once axle and engine, subject and object, turned and turner. A tiny thing, a small song calling out with countless others into the vast dark. Time will smooth out his deeds and misdeeds; history will flatten his name into the general dust. It is nothing. For the first time since those fisher children splashed and adventured in the Kerala sunset he understands free.

Joy kindles in the well of his manipura chakra. The Sufi moment of selfessness, timelessness. God in the unexpected. He does not deserve it. The mystery of it is that it never comes to those who think they do.

“Where to, sahb?”

Responsibilities. After enlightenment, duty.

“To the haveli.” It is all downhill now. The words having been said once are easy to repeat. Sajida Rana had been right. He should have told her first. The accusation had surprised him: Shaheen Badoor Khan had been reminded, sharply, that his Prime Minister was a woman, a married woman who would not take her husband’s name. He polarises the windows dark against prying eyes.

Bilquis doesn’t deserve it. She deserves a good husband, a true man who, even if she no longer loved him or shared his bed or his life, would do her no disgrace in public, would smile and talk the right talk and never cause her to cover her face in shame among the Ladies of the Law Circle. He had it all—Sajida Rana had said as much—he had it all and he still could not stop himself from destroying it. How deeply he deserves what has happened to him. Then on the sun-cracked Bharat government leather upholstery, Shaheen Badoor Khan’s perceptions turn. He doesn’t deserve it. No one deserves it and everyone deserves it. Who can hold his head up, and who would presume to judge? He is a good advisor; the best advisor. He has served his country wisely and well. It still has need of him. Perhaps he can go dark, burrow down like some toad in a drought to the bottom of the mud and wait for the climate to change.

An edge of light fills the streets as the government car whirrs along, soft as a moth. Shaheen Badoor Khan allows himself to smile inside his cube of darkened glass. The car turns the corner where the sadhu sits on a concrete slab, one arm held aloft in a sling strapped around a lamppost. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows that trick. After a time you lose all feeling. The car stops abruptly. Shaheen Badoor Khan has to put out his hands to keep himself from falling.

“What is it?”

“Trouble, sahb.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan unpolarises the window. The road ahead of him is blocked with early traffic. People have left their cabs and are leaning against their open doors to watch the spectacle that has stopped them. Bodies stream past the intersection; shadowy men in white shirts and dark pants, young men with first moustaches, moving at a steady, angry jog, lathis jerking up and down in their hands. A battery of drummers passes, a group of fierce, sharp-faced women in Kali red; naga sadhus, white with ash, wielding crude Siva trishuls. Shaheen Badoor Khan watches a vast, pink papier mache effigy of Ganesha lumber into view, gaudy, almost fluorescent in the rising light. It veers from side to side, steered unsteadily by bare-legged puppeteers. Behind Ganesha, an even more extraordinary sight: the billowing orange and red spire of a rath yatra. And torches. In every hand, with every attendant and runner, a fire. Shaheen Badoor Khan dares open the window a crack. An avalanche of sound falls on him: a vast, inchoate roar. Individual voices emerge, take up a theme; submerge again: chants, prayers; slogans, nationalist anthems, karsevak hymns. He does not need to hear the words to know who they are. The great gyre of protestors around Sarkhand Roundabout has broken out and is streaming across Varanasi. It would only do so if it had a greater object for its hate. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows where they are going with fire in their hands. The word is out. He had hoped for longer.

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks behind him. The road is still clear.

“Get me out of here.”

Gohil complies without question. The big car backs up, swings round, hooting savagely at traffic as it mounts the concrete central strip and crunches down on to the opposite side of the road. As Shaheen Badoor Khan blackens the windows, he glimpses smoke coiling up into the sky in the east, oily as burning fat from a funeral pyre against the yellow dawn.

28: TAL

The phatphat is headed nowhere, just driving. Tal had thrust a bouquet of rupees at the taxi driver and told him that: just drive.

Yt has to get away. Abandon job, home, everything yt had made for ytself in Varanasi. Go to a place where nobody knows yts name. Mumbai. Back to Mum. Too close. Too bitchy. Deep south, Bangalore, Chennai. They have big media industries there. There is always work for a good designer. Even Chennai might not be far enough. If yt could change yts name, yts face again. Yt could go via Patna, buy more surgery from Nanak. Stick it on the tab. If yts credit was still good with Nanak. Yt’d need work, soon. Yes, that’s yt; get everything, get to the station, get to Patna, get a new identity.

Tal taps the driver.

“White Fort.”

“Don’t go there this time of night.”

“I’ll pay you double.”

Yt should have taken the money. The cash in yts bag is running out like water through sand. The cards that aren’t at the limit are close to it. A crore rupees, untraceable, unstoppable, that could take yt anywhere. Anywhere on the planet. But that would be to accept yts role. Who has written that yt must be punished? What has yt done to deserve global infamy? Tal looks at yts small life, unpicks the terrible vulnerabilities that have turned it into an unthinking political weapon. Alien, alone, isolated, new. They had been watching from the moment yt stepped off the shatabdi. Tranh, the night of burning delirium in the airport hotel—the best sex yt has ever known—the temple party, the creamy gilt-edged invitation it had waved around the office like an icon. Every one of those chota pegs poured down yts golden throat…Yt had been played like a bansuri.

Tal finds yts fists tight in fury. The heat of yts anger surprises Tal. Safe, sane, wise nute would be to run. But yt wants to know. Yt wants one good, clear look at the face that ordained all this for yt.

“Okay my friend, this is as far as you go.” The driver waves his radio. “Those Shivaji lunatics are on the move. They’ve broken out of Sarkhand Roundabout.”

“You’re leaving me with them out there?” Tal shouts after the receding phatphat. Yt can hear the rage of Hindutva, swelling and receding in the cavernous streets. And the streets are waking, shop by stall by kiosk by dhaba. A pickup dumps bundles of morning editions in the concrete centre strip. The newsboys descend like black kites. Tal pulls yts collar around yts betraying features. Yts shaved skull feels hideously vulnerable, a fragile brown egg. Two roads to safety. Yt can see the satellite-dish studded revetments of White Fort beyond the rooftop water tanks and solar panels. Tal slips along the line of vehicles, headdown, avoiding eye contact with the shopkeepers rolling up their shutters, the night walkers heading back from a shift on Pacific Coast Time. Sooner, not later, someone will see what yt is. Yt eyes the bundles of newspaper. Front page, banner headline, full colour splash.

The sound of the mob moves behind yt, left, then right, then close behind. Tal breaks into a jog, coat pulled tight around yts chin despite the rising heat. People are looking now. One more junction. One more junction. The voiceless roar moves again, seemingly in front now, then leaps in volume and vehemence. Tal glances around. They are behind it. A front of jogging males in white shifts turns out of a side street on to the avenue. There is a moment of silence. Even the traffic falls still and hushed. Then a focused roar strikes Tal with almost physical force. Yt gives a small whimper of fear, throws off yts stupid, encumbering coat and runs. Yips and bays go up behind yt. The karsevaks come leaping in pursuit. Not far. Not far. Not. Far. Not. Far. Not. Far. Close. Close. Close. Tal fires ytself through the forest of pillars that are White Fort’s undercroft. Howling shouts echo and dart off the concrete piles. We are closing. We are fast. We are faster than you, unnatural, perverted thing. You are bloated with unnaturalness and vice. We will stamp on you, slug. We will hear you burst beneath our boots. Missiles clatter and bounce around Tal: cans, bottles, pieces of broken circuitry. And Tal is failing, failing. Fading. There’s nothing left in yt. The batteries are flat. Zero charge. Tal taps commands into yts subdermals. Seconds later the adrenaline rush hits. Yt’ll pay dearly for it later. Yt’ll pay anything now. Tal pulls away from the hunters. Yt can see the elevator bank. Let there be one. Ardhanarisvara, Lord of the divided things, let there be one, and let it work. The hunters slap their hands off the oily concrete pillars. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You.

Green light. Green light is salvation, green light is life. Tal dives towards the green elevator light as the door slides open. Yt squeezes through the dark slit, hits the button. The doors close. Fingers squeeze through, feeling for the sensors, the switches, the flesh within, anything. Centimetre by centimetre, they force the door open.

“There he is, the chuutya!”

Yt! Yt! Tal screams silently as it smashes at the fingers with yts fists, yts sharp boot heels. The fingers reel back. The door seals. The ascent begins. Tal goes two levels low to draw them up, waits while the doors open and the doors close, and then goes up one over. As yt creeps down the stairwell, glossy from the steady tread of bare feet and reeking of dank ammonia even in drought, yt hears a growing babble of voices. Tal edges around the turn. Yts neighbours are crowded into Mama Bharat’s open door. Tal edges a step lower. Everyone is talking, gesticulating, some of the women have their dupattas pressed to their mouths in shock. Some bow and bob in the rituals of grief. Men’s voices cut through the jabber and keening, a word here, a phrase there. Yes, the family are coming, right away, who would have left an old woman here on her own, shameful shameful, the police will find them.

One step closer.

The smashed door to Mama Bharat’s apartment lies on the floor. Over the heads of the angry men, Tal can see the desecrated room. Walls, windows, paintings of gods and avatars are full of holes. Tal gapes at the holes, not wanting to comprehend. Bullet holes. It is a gape too long. A cry.

“There he is!”

Neighbour Paswan’s querulous voice. The crowd parts, allowing a clear line of connection between Tal and Paswan’s accusing finger and the feet on the floor. Every head turns. Their feet are in a slick of blood. The slick of startling, fresh, red blood, fresh with life and oxygen, already drawing in the flies. The flies are in the room. The flies are in yts head.

You’re dispensable now, Tranh had said.

The feet in the fresh, oily blood. They are still in the building. Yt turns, runs again. “There he is, the monster!” Paswan roars. Tal’s neighbours take up the cry. The mass voice throbs in the concrete shaft of the stairwell. Tal grasps huge handfuls of steel banister, hauls ytself up the stairs. Everything aches. Everything screams and moans and tells yt it’s come to the end, there is no more. But Mama Bharat is dead. Mama Bharat is shot and this August morning with the early light climbing down the sides of the shaft from the grimy cupola far above, all the hatred and despite and fear and anger of Bharat is focused on one nute hauling ytself up a concrete stairwell. Yts neighbours, the people yt lived among so quietly these months, want yt torn apart by their hands.

Yt pushes past two men on the seventh-floor landing. A flicker of memory: Tal glances back. They are young, and lean dressed in baggy pants and white shirts, the Young Bharati Male Street uniform but there is something out of place about them. Something not White Fort. Eyes meet. Tal remembers where yt has seen them before. They wore suits then, fine dark suits. They had passed him on the landing, down there, as Mama Bharat put out the trash and Tal had danced past, blowing a kiss, all excited and bouncing about heading out to the end of it all. They had looked back, as yt looks back now. A good designer never forgets the details.

You’re dispensable now.

In the instant it takes them to work out their mistake, Tal has gained a floor and a half but they are young and male and fit and do not wear hi-fashion boots and have not been running for what seems an entire night.

“Out of my way!” Tal yells as yt ploughs into the head of the daily procession of water girls from the upper levels descending the endless staircases with their plastic litrejohns balanced on their heads. Yt must get into the open. White Fort is a trap, a vast concrete killing machine. Yt has to get out. Get into the crowd, get among the people. They will shield you with their bodies. Tal swings off at the next landing, wrenches open the door and plunges out on to the exterior walkway.

Diljit Rana’s urban planners, good neo-Le Corbusiens all, had conceived White Fort as a village in the sky and had drafted in wide sunlit terraces for urban farming. Most of the drip-irrigated plots have gone to dirt and dust in the long drought and plumbing crisis or grow stands of GM cannabis, tended with painstaking love and bottled spa water. Feral goats, five generations from their first urbanised forebears, graze the trash-piles and desiccated market gardens. They are as surefooted on the concrete runways and safety rails of White Fort as their native precipices. The maintenance bots duel them ferociously with high-voltage tasers. The goats have a taste for wiring insulation.

Tal runs. Goats look up, ruminating. Mothers snatch children out of the path of the mad, flying, perverted thing. Old men smoking bidis and solving crosswords in the early sun follow yt with their heads, delighted by action, any action. Young men, idle men cheer and hoot.

The chemical surge is failing, fading. Yt’s not built to run. Tal glances over yts shoulder. Guns beat up and down in the men’s hands. Black hard guns. That changes everything on the White Fort farm levels. Women whisk children indoors. Old men hide themselves. Young men edge away.

“Help me!” Tal cries. Yt grabs bins, piles of paper, baskets, anything that might cost the men behind yt a second, pulls them down behind yt. Saris and dhotis and lungis, the daily laundry is pinned out along line after line sagging across the wide sky-streets. Tal ducks under the dripping dhobi, sticks out yts arm to knock out clothes prop after clothes prop. Yt hears damp curses, looks back to see the hunters disentangling themselves from a wet green sari. Sanctuary is in sight, a service elevator at the end of the street filling up with the school run. Tal darts through the closing gates, dodges past the fluttering chaperone. The lift jerks and begins its descent. Tal hears voices. Yt looks up to see the two dacoits hanging over the rail. They put their guns up. From the midst of the press of black-eyed primary-school girls in their beautiful neat uniforms, Tal waves up at them.

The sun pours scalding light into the canyon streets of Varanasi as Tal moves through the crush hour. Yt slips between the walking schoolkids and the white-shirted civil servants on bicycles, the street sellers and the shopworkers, the doorway sleepers and the students in their labels and Japanese shoes, the delivery drays piled high with cardboard boxes of Lux Macroman underwear and the fine ladies under the canopies of the cycle rickshaws. Any time, any one in that crowd might recognise yt from the front page of the newspaper tucked under his arm, from the breakfast news bulletin on his palmer, from the news stand headline posters or the scrolling ad-screens on every intersection and chowk. One shout; one hand thrust out to snag a jacket sleeve; one Hey! You! Stop! and that milling motion of individuals would crystallise into a mob, one mind, one will, one intent.

Tal skips down trash-strewn steps into VART. Even if the killers had followed yt through the morning crush, they cannot hope to hunt yt in the labyrinth of Varanasi underground. Tal dodges the line for the iris reader, slips into the women’s queue, who do not permit the Varanasi Area Rapid Transit such liberties with their eyes. Yt drops five rupees into the hopper and squeezes through the barrier before the ladies of New Varanasi can complain.

Tal works up the platform to the women’s section. Yt scans the crowd for the wake of killers cutting through the press of people. So easy to die here. A hand in the back as the train surges out of the tunnel. And the down-wave is coming, the ashes of the artificial adrenaline hit washing out of yts bloodstream. Tal shivers, alone and small and very very paranoid. A wave of sickeningly hot, electric air; the train slams into the station. Tal rides two stops in the women-only bogie and gets off. Yt counts one train, two, then boards again in the reserved women’s section. Yt has no idea if this is the right thing to do, if there is any right thing to do, if there are any self-help books on how to throw killers on the city metro.

The robot train slams through the underpinnings of Varanasi, jolting across the points and switchovers. Tal feels naked among the women’s bodies. Yt can hear their thoughts: this is not your place; we do not know what you were but you are no longer one of us, hijra. Then yts heart freezes. Jammed in between a stanchion and the fire extinguisher, an office girl has found room to read the Bharat Times. Her attention is on the back page, the cricket news. The front shrieks an eighty-point banner headline and a half-page photograph. Yt is looking at ytself, face pale in the flash, eyes wide as moons.

The train rocks across points. The passengers sway like grain in the wind. Tal releases yts straphold and reels across the carriage. Yt pulls ytself up in front of the screaming front page. Newspaper girl folds the top of her morning read down to stare at Tal, then gets back to the gossip about Test hero V. J. Mazumdar and his forthcoming celebrity wedding. The subhead at the bottom of the page reads DEATHS IN PERVERT CLUB FIRE ATTACK.

Varanasi City Station, the aeai announces over the din of radios and conversation. Tal spills out on to the platform, running ahead of the slow spreading stain of commuters. Time to mark and meditate on that headline later, when the shatabdi is up to speed and Varanasi a hundred kilometres behind yt.

The escalator casts Tal up on to the main concourse. Yt’s already checked on yts palmer what’s going soonest out of here. The Kolkata Hi-Speed. Straight down the steel line to the States of Bengal. Patna and Nanak can wait. What Tal needs more than a new face is a new nation. The Banglas are civilised, cultured, tolerant people. Kolkata shall be yts new home. But the online booking is slow slow slow and the pile of bodies around the ticket office deadly. Unwanted newspapers lie scattered among the discarded mango-leaf bowls of aloo and dal on the concrete concourse. Ragpickers poke and sift. Any one of them would turn yt in for a fistful of rupees.

Thirty minutes to train time.

Again, the online booking is locked out. And the card-ticketing machine have felt-markered Out of Service posters taped over their slots.

Bloody Bharat.

“Hey, hey there friend, you want to buy ticket right quick?” The tout is a barely moustached youth in sports fashion, pressing close, do-a-deal intimate. He spreads a fan of tickets “Safe, sound. Reservation guaranteed. You look, you find your name on the bogie, no questions. We have a hack into the Bharat Rail system.” A wave of a beatup palmer.

Come on come on. Yt’s not going to make it. Yt’s not going to make it.

“How much?”

Sports boy names a price that any other time, any other situation, would have made Tal laugh out loud.

“Here, here.” Yt presses a fan of rupees at the ticket tout.

“Hey hey first things first,” the boy says, leading Tal towards the platforms. “What train what train?”

Tal tells him.

“You come with me.” He hustles Tal through the crowd around the chai stall where morning commuters sip their sweet, milky tea from tiny plastic cups. He slips a ticket blank into the palmer print slot, enters yts ID, thumbs a few icons. “Done. Bon voyage.” He hands the ticket to Tal, grinning. The grin freezes. The mouth opens. A tiny ascot of red appears on the neck of his Adidas Tee. The red spreads into a soft gush. The expression goes from smug satisfaction to surprise to dead. The boy slumps on to Tal, a cry goes up from a woman in a purple sari, a cry taken up by the whole crowd as Tal sees over the shot tout’s shoulder the man in the neat Nehru suit with the silenced black gun in his hand, caught between getting out after a botched job or taking a clear shot and finishing it here, now, in front of everyone.

Then out of the crowd comes a moped, twisting this way, that, horn blaring; a moped, with a girl on it, aiming straight at the gunman who hears and sees and reacts just that millisecond too late. He brings the gun around as the moped smashes into him. Screams. The gun spins out of his hand. The man in black reels across the platform, slams into the side of the train, slips down between the edge of the platform and the bogie, under the Kolkata Unlimited, on to the tracks.

The girl spins her moped round to face Tal as the crowd rushes to the train to see what has become of the gunman. “Get on!” she cries in English. A hand appears from underneath the bogie. Arms reach down to help it up. “If you want to live, get on the bike!”

Any other option would be a greater insanity. The girl swings Tal around, yt slips on close and clinging behind her. She twists the throttle, tears away through the platform crowd, horn buzzing furiously. She runs off the end of the platform, steers the bouncing moped over the tracks and sleepers, cuts in front of a slow moving local, speeds along the litter-strewn verge, hooting at the pedestrians who use it as a commuter run.

“I should introduce myself,” the girl throws back over her shoulder. “You don’t know me, but I sort of feel I owe you.”

“What?” shouts Tal, cheek pressed against her back. “My name’s Najia Askarzadah. I got you into all this.”

29: BANANA CLUB

By eleven o’clock repeated police lathi charges have cleared the streets. Policemen chase individual karsevaks through the galis but they are just the rude boys, trouble boys who are always there for anything on their terrain. The alleys are too narrow for the fire engines so the brigade reels hoses along the streets, bolting them together into longer runs. Water sprays from the seams. Kashi residents peer enviously from their verandas and open storefronts. It is all too late. It is over. The old wooden haveli has fallen in on itself in a pile of glowing, clinking coals. All the firefighters can do is tamp it down and prevent it spreading to neighbouring buildings. They slip and fall on a slick of banana skins.

The attack was thorough and effective. Amazing, the speed with which it caught and held. Dry as tinder. This drought, this long drought. Stretcher parties draw away the dead. Varanasi, city of burnings. The ones who fled out the front ran into the full wrath of the Shivaji. The bodies are strewn up the alley. One wears a car tire around its neck, burned down to the steel wires. The body is intact, the head a charred skull. One has been run through with a Siva trident. One has been disembowelled and the gape filled with burning plastic trash. The police stamp out the flames and drag the thing away, trying to handle it as little as possible. They fear the polluting touch of the hijra, the un-sex.

Hovercams and handhelds come in for close-ups, back in the livefeed studio the news editors read the footage and decide what stance to take: outraged liberal opinion or popular wrath at the hypocrisy of the Rana government. N. K. Jivanjee will issue a statement at eleven thirty. Newsroom editors love a story on the up-ramp. The cricket pulled out before the climax, the war has provided nothing but hours of armoured personnel carriers driving up and down the long curve of the Kunda Khadar dam; but this Rana sex scandal is spiralling out of control into charred bodies and street fighting. One shot in particular makes it on to all the morning bulletins; the poor blind lady, caught up by the rage with the side of her head smashed in by a club. No one can work out why she has a banana in her hand.

30: LISA

Beyond the dripping fringe of coconut thatch, the rain reduces the world to flux. Palms, church, the stalls along the road, the road itself and the vehicles that pass up and down it are shades of grey, washed out, liquid, running into each other like a Japanese ink painting. The truck headlights are wan and watery. Earth, river, and sky are a continuity.

In her shapeless plastic cape, Lisa Durnau can’t even see the end of the gangplank. In the next cabin Dr. Ghotse crouches over the gas burner with a promise of chai and cheer. Lisa Durnau can leave the chai. She’s tried to get them to make it just with water and nix the sugar but it comes sweet and milky anyway. Iced would be ecstasy. Beneath her stifling rainsheet sweat clings to her. The rain cascades from eaves.

It was raining when she touched down at Thiruvananthapuram. A boy with an umbrella escorted her across the streaming apron to arrivals. Coach-class Westerners clashed and cursed, jackets and newspapers held over their heads. The Indians just got wet and looked happy. Lisa Durnau has seen many types of rain; the steely grey rain of north eastern springs; the penetrating drizzle that blows for days on end up in the northwest; the terrifying cloudbursts of the plains states that are like a waterfall opening in the sky, mothers of flash-floods and sheet erosion. Happy rain was new to her. The cab to the hotel had driven axle-deep through streets awash with floodwater and floating trash. The cows stood mired to the hock. Cycle rickshaws ploughed through the dancing brown liquid, throwing up beery wakes. She watched a rat swim across the taxi’s path, brave head held high. Today as she dodged between the puddles to the gangplank she had seen a little girl swimming up the backwater, pushing a slim raft no more than three bamboo poles lashed together, a battered metal pot balanced on it. The girl’s hair was plastered to her skull like some sleek aquatic mammal but her face was radiant.

The CIA briefing had neglected to tell her it was the monsoon in Kerala.

Lisa Durnau does not like being a government spook. No sooner had the lightbody touched down on a pyre of plasma than the lessons began. She had her first briefing in the bus to the medical centre, still weak and achey from welcoming back gravity. She had not even had time to change before they lifted her and threw her on the flight up to New York. At Kennedy she was briefed on embassy liaisons and security passwords in the limo to the vip suite. There a man and a woman in suits lectured her on the correct use of the location device inside one of the business centre mute fields. At the gate they presented her with a small valise of suitable clothing in her size. Then they shook hands gravely and wished her a pleasant trip and a successful mission. Lisa opened the case as the taxi drew up at the hotel. As she had feared. The sleeves on the T-shirts were all wrong and the underwear was simply unspeakable. Folded at the bottom were two elegant black suits. She half expected Daley Suarez-Martin to climb out of the minibar. The next day Lisa took her bottomless black credit card out to the bazaar and refilled the case for less than the price of a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch panties. Including wet-weather wear.

“Yes, it is a marvellous thing to see,” Dr. Ghotse says. Lisa Durnau starts. She has let herself become hypnotised by the fingers of rain on the thatch. He stands with a cup of chai in either hand. It is as she feared but it indeed cheers her. The boat smells damp and neglected. She does not like to think of Thomas Lull ending up here. She cannot imagine it under any other climate than this endless white rain. She had read the Tantric symbols on the roof mats, noted the name in white on the prow: Salve Vagina. No doubt that Thomas Lull had been here. But she had been scared at what she would find: Lull’s things; Lull’s life beyond her, beyond Alterre; Lull’s new world. Now that she has seen how little there is, how poor and spare the three thatched cabins are, apprehension turns to melancholy. It is like he has died.

Dr. Ghotse bids her sit on one of the upholstered divans that run the length of the cabin. Lisa Durnau struggles out of her plastic sheet, leaves it dripping on the soft fibre matting. The chai is good, sensual.

“Why, up in the black north they have gone to war over it. They are uncivilised people. Most caste ridden. Now, Miss Durnau; what is it you require from my good friend Thomas Lull?”

Lisa Durnau realises there are two ways she can play this and every other similar scene. She can assume Lull has told his good friend Dr. Ghotse about what he left behind, and who. She can take the line of her intelligence briefings and assume no one knows or can know anything.

You’re in India now, LD.

A chip of Schubert piano sonatas has worked its way down the side of the cushion.

“I’ve been commissioned by my government to find Lull and pass information to him. If possible, I’m to persuade him to return to the United States with me.”

“What is this information you are asking?”

“I’m technically not at liberty to disclose that, Dr. Ghotse. Sufficient to say that it’s of a scientific nature and requires Lull’s unique insight to interpret.”

“Lull. Is that what you called him?”

“Did he tell you about me?”

“Enough for me to be surprised that you are about your government’s business.”

Look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on the clouds, he had charged her. The memory of Lull that night in the Oxford student bar is more fresh, more vital than this house he vacated so recently. She cannot feel him here, beneath this canopy of rain-sound. She imagines running through that rain, pushing like an otter through the blood-warm backwater like the little raft girl with her pewter pot. What have they asked you to become?

Lisa Durnau takes out the datablock and thumbs it open. Dr. Ghotse sits with his legs crossed at the ankles, his chai cup set on the low carved coffee table.

“You’re right. This is the truth. You may not believe it, but as far as I know, it is true.” She calls up the Tabernacle image of Lull.

“That is Professor Lull,” Dr. Ghotse says. “It is not a very good photograph. Excessively grainy.”

“That’s because that photograph was generated by an extraterrestrial artefact discovered by NASA inside an asteroid called Darnley 285. This artefact is known as the Tabernacle.”

“Ah, tabernacle, the sanctuary of the Ark of the Covenant of the Hebrews.”

“I’m not quite sure you heard what I said. The Tabernacle is a non-human artefact. It’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

“I heard you correctly, Miss Durnau.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“The universe is a very great place. The surprise would be if it were not so.” Lisa sets the block down on the table between the chai cups.

“There’s something else I need you to understand. This asteroid Darnley 285 is extremely old.

It’s older than the age of our solar system. Can you understand that?”

“Miss Durnau, I am educated in both Western and Hindu cosmologies. It is indeed a wonder that an object has survived the destruction at the end of the Dwapara Yuga; perhaps even ages before that. This Tabernacle might be a remnant of the Age of Truth itself.”

“The reason I want to find Thomas Lull, what I want to ask him is: why is his face inside a rock seven billion years old?”

“That would be a question,” Dr. Ghotse agrees.

The rain has found its way through the coconut thatch. A small but swelling drip gathers and bursts on the low table carved with entwined Tantric lovers. Monsoon above Lisa Durnau, below her, behind her, before her, dissolving the certainties of Kennedy, of New York, of the hypersonic transport. This rain, this India.

The roar, the rain, the smell of sewage and spice and rot, the ceaseless chaos of the traffic, the burst dog half gone to black bones in the streaming gutter, the circling carrion-eyed kites, the peeling mould-stained buildings, the sweet stench of sugar-cane alcofuel and burning ghee from the puri vendors, the children pressing in around her, clean and fed but asking for rupee rupee, a pen a pen, the hawkers and vendors and fortune tellers and massage artists homing in on a white woman in the rain: the people. The people. Within a hundred metres of her hotel, Kerala felled her. The sounds, the smells, the sights and sensations combined into a massive attack on her sensibilities. L. Durnau the preacherman’s daughter. This was Thomas Lull’s world. She must meet it on Thomas Lull’s terms.

She got her hair cut in the Ganga Devi Booti Salon by a blind hairdresser and only afterwards as she patted the short bob did she realise it was the style in the Tabernacle image. Seal of prophecy. She bought bottled water in the middle of the monsoon and her light, efficacious wet wear and had dozens of photographs of Thomas Lull copied from the datablock—which she was beginning to think of as the Tablet—at a print shop wedged behind a pipal tree hung with red and orange Brahmin threads. Then she began her investigation.

The rickshaw driver looked about twelve. Lisa doubted such a scrawn could ever carry a passenger but he hung on her heel for three blocks, calling “hello, hello lady,” as she wove between the umbrellas. She stopped him where the road narrowed at the fort gate.

“You speak English?”

“Indian, American, or Australian, lady?”

“I need boys speak English.”

“There are many such boys, lady.”

“Here’s a hundred rupees. Come back with as many as you can in half an hour to that chai shop there and there are two hundred more for you. I need boys can speak English and know everything and everyone.”

He tucked the banknote into a pocket inside his Adidas pants, gave the wiggle of his head that Lisa had learned meant affirmation.

“Hey! What’s your name?” she shouted as he pulled into the traffic, bells chiming melodiously. He shot a grin back as he pedalled off through the swirling water.

“Kumarmangalam.”

Lisa Durnau installed herself in the chai shop and surfed into Alterre for the half hour. A week was literally an age at twenty thousand years per hour. Algal blooms in Biome 778 in the Eastern Pacific had generating a self-sustaining oceanic microclimate that created a wind reversal similar to RealEarth’s El Nino. The montane cloudforests were dying; the complex symbiotic ecosystems of flowering trees, pollinating colonial birds, and complex arborealsaurian canopy societies was coming apart. Within a couple of days a dozen species and a system of rare, poised beauty would have slipped into extinction. Lisa knew she should hold the Buddha-nature about Alterre; they were only virtual species competing for memory and power resources and a set of mathematical parameters in eleven million host computers, but she grieved for every extinction. She had proved the physical possibility of CyberEarth’s reality somewhere in the postexpansion polyverse. It was real death, real annihilation, real forever.

Until now. In a Kerala chai shop, it felt like games, toys. A pocket freak show. The flatscreen was running a soap. Every eye was turned to it. She had read that not only were the characters aeai generated, so were the actors that played them. A vast false edifice threatened to overwhelm the drama, like the huge encrusted towers that dominated the temple architecture of the Dravidians. There is not one CyberEarth, she realised. There are thousands.

Kumarmangalam was back on the half hour. This was a thing she was discovering about this alien world. It only looked like chaos. Things got done and done well. You could trust people to lift your bags, launder your clothes, find your former lover. The street boys jammed into the chai shop. The owner gave the bold Western woman hard looks. The other clients moved their seats and complained loudly that they could not hear the television. Kumarmangalam stood beside Lisa and shouted at this one, then that one, and they seemed to obey him. Already he was making himself her lieutenant. As Lisa had suspected, most of them had only meet-greet-and-fleece English but she fanned the photographs of Thomas Lull across the table.

“One to each,” she ordered Kumarmangalam. Hands tore at the prints as the rickshaw boy dealt them out. Some he dismissed without a photograph, some he harangued lengthily in Malayalam. “Okay, I need to find this man. His name is Thomas Lull. He is American. He comes from Kansas, can you get that?”

Kansas, the street boys intoned back. She held up the shot. It was his publisher’s PR shot, the sensitive one leaning on one arm with the wise smile. How he’d hated it.

“This is how he looked about four years ago. He may still be here, he may have moved on. You know where the tourists go, where the people who decide to stay go. I want to know where he is or where he has gone. Do you understand?”

An oceanic murmur.

“Okay. I’m going to give Kumarmangalam here some money. There are one hundred rupees now. There are another four hundred if you come back with information. I will check this information before you are paid.”

Kumarmangalam translated. Heads nodded. She took her new lieutenant aside and gave him the wad of notes.

“And there’s your two hundred, and another thousand if you keep your eye on these people.”

“Lady, I will keep them in line, as you say in American English.”

In her first year at Keble, Lisa Durnau had taken the crash course in Anglophilia and read the complete Sherlock Holmes. She had always felt that the Baker Street Irregulars never saw enough column inches. Now she had her own. As Kumarmangalam pedalled her back through the rain to the hotel, she imagined them, running out through the city, into a shop here, a cafe there, a restaurant, a temple, a travel bureau, a money changer, a lawyer, a real estate agent, a leasing factor. This man this man? It pleased her greatly. Women make the best private detectives. At the hotel she swam fifty lengths of the outdoor pool with the rain slashing around her and the attendants huddled together under an awning watching her gravely. Then she changed into a sarong and top with gaudy blue gods printed on it and took a phatphat out to the places Thomas Lull would have gone, the tourist bars where the girls are.

The rain added a new glaze of dismal to the upstairs bars and dance clubs. The Westerners who were stupid enough to have been caught in town by the big rain were all corporate or political spooks. The club owners and barristas and restaurateurs who shook their heads and pursed their lips over her photographs were a hundred Lulls-that-might-have-been; overweight and balding in XL beach-shirts that hung off their bellies like square-rigging. The local bar boys stirred from their stools and came round for the chat and an attempted slip of the hand into her V-string. She worked twenty bars and could take no more. Humming home in the phatphat she sat half-hypnotised by the rhythm of the rain through the headlights and wondered how it was that clouds never rained themselves dry. In the hotel she attempted to watch CNN but it seemed as alien and irrelevant as Alterre. One image lodged with her; warm monsoon rain falling on an iceberg in the Bay of Bengal.

Kumarmangalam was circling on his rickshaw when she ventured out the next morning. He swung her out through the traffic in a big U-turn to an Internet shop on the other side of the street. Nobody walked in this country. Just like home.

“This boy has information,” he said. Lisa wasn’t even sure he was one of the mob from the day before. The boy waved his photograph.

“Four hundred rupees four hundred rupees.”

“We check it out first. Then you get your money.”

Kumarmangalam glared down the boy’s insolence. They rode on his rickshaw. The boy would not ride in the back with a Western woman; he clung on in front of Kumarmangalam, feet on the axle nuts, leaning back against the handlebars, steering the rickshaw-wallah through the traffic. It was a long heavy haul. Kumarmangalam dismounted and pushed several times. The boy helped him. Lisa Durnau clutched her bag beset by Presbyterian work-ethic guilt. Finally they rolled downhill and through an arch scatter-gunned with filmi flyposters into a courtyard framed by wooden balconies and cloisters in the Keralese style. A cow chewed sodden straw. Men glanced up from a battery of sewing machines. The boy led them upstairs past an actuary and an Ayurvedic wholesaler to an open-fronted office unit beneath the peeling sign Gunaratna Floating Lotus Craft Hirings. A greying Malayali and a younger Westerner in a surf-brand T-shirt looked up.

“You’ve come about the gentleman in the photograph?” the local man, Gunaratna, asked. Lisa Durnau nodded. Mr. Gunaratna waved the street boys out of his office. They squatted on the balcony, listening hard.

“This man.” She slid the Tablet across the desk like a poker dealer. Gunaratna showed it to his associate. Surf-shirt-man nodded.

“It was a while ago.” He was Oceanian—Oz, maybe Enzee; Lisa had never been able to tell them apart but then some folk couldn’t distinguish Canucks from Americans.

“Several years,” Gunaratna confirmed. Then Lisa realised that they were waiting for the baksheesh. She fanned out three thousand rupees.

“For information retrieval,” she hinted. Gunaratna scooped it sweetly away.

“We only remember him because he bought a boat from us,” Oz-boy said.

“We run a bespoke vessel chartering service on the backwaters,” Gunaratna chimed in. “It is most unusual for someone wanting to buy, but such an offer.”

“In cash.” Oz-boy was now perched on the edge of the desk.

“In cash, was impossible for us to refuse. It was most excellent craft. It had not one but two certificates of seaworthiness from the State Inspectorate of Shipping.”

“You have a record of the transaction?”

“Madam, this is an upstanding business of immaculate repute and all accounts are triple-filed in strict accordance with State Revenue regulations.”

Oz-boy hooked up a rollscreen and tapped through a database. “There’s your boy.”

July 22, 2043. Ten-metre kettuvallam/houseboat conversion with fixtures and fittings and ten horsepower alcofuel engines last serviced 18/08/42, moored at Alumkadavu. Sold to J. Noble Boyd, US citizen, passport number. A true Lull touch; using the name of the Kansas pastor who had made it his religious duty to oppose the evolutionist heresies of Alterre on his false ID. Lisa Durnau jotted the boat’s registration details into the Tablet.

“Thank you, you have been most helpful.”

Oz-boy pushed a thousand rupees back across the desk.

“If you do find Dr. Lull could you get him to do another series like Living Universe? Best science show I’ve seen in years. Made you think. There’s nothing but soap these days.”

On the way out she gave the boy his four hundred rupees. In the back of the rickshaw as Kumarmangalam pushed her up the long, slow hill into the city centre Lisa Durnau called for the first time on the full power of the Tablet. By the time Kumarmangalam had slipped back onto his saddle, she had her answer. Ray Power Electric Pallakad District Office had registered a hook-up to kettuvallam Salve Vagina registry no: 18736BG at Thekaddy, St. Thomas’s Road Mooring. Supplied’s name: J. Noble Boyd. Revd.

Salve Vagina.

The coastal hydrofoil did not run in the monsoon months so Lisa Durnau spent four hours leaning against the window of an air-conditioned express coach looking out at the buffalos in the village ponds and the country women swaying beneath their burdens along the raised pathways between the flooded fields and trying not to hear the dsh dshdsh on her neighbour’s fileplayer earphone that was as irrefutable and annoying as Captain Pilot Beth’s whistling nostril. She could not believe she had been into space. She pulled out the Tablet and thumbed through the data from the Tabernacle. Hey, she wanted to say to her Hindi-Hits! aisle-mate, look at this! Have you any idea what this means?

That was the question she must put to Thomas Lull. She found she was dreading that meeting. When his disappearance had crossed the subtle but distinct boundary between temporary and permanent, Lisa Durnau had often imagined what she might say if, Elvis-like, she bumped into Thomas Lull in some hypermarket aisle or airport duty-free. It was easy to come up with smart lines when you knew you would never have to use them. Now every kilometre through the rain and dripping palm trees brought that impossible meeting closer and she did not know what she was going to say. She put it away from her while she found a phatphat in the sodden whirl of people and vehicles at the wide spot in the road that was Thekkady’s bus station. But as she bounced around the lagoon-sized puddles on the long straight road past the backwater the dread returned, became a fearful sickness in her stomach. She sped past an elderly man labouring through the rain on an enormous red tricycle. The phatphat driver let her off at the mooring. Lisa Durnau stood in the rain, paralysed. Then the red tricycle creaked past her, executed a right-angle turn, and bounced down the gangplank on to the rear deck.

“Well, Ms. Durnau, even though I am not sure how Professor Lull can help you, you have been frank with me and it is only proper that I should reciprocate,” Dr. Ghotse says. He shuffles out into the rain to search in the boot of his red tricycle and returns with a sheet of paper, folded and soggy. “If you please.”

It’s an e-mail printout. Amar Mahal Hotel, Manasarovar Ghat, Varanasi. My Dear Dr. Darius. Well, it’s not that little dive school I promised myself. Against all your advice, I’m in the black north with Aj. Asthma girl, remember? Deep mystery here—never could resist a mystery. Last place on earth I should be—already been caught up in a small railroad incident you might have read about—but could you ease my sojourn in hell by forwarding the rest of my stuff to this address? I will reimburse you by BACS transfer.

There followed a list of books and recordings including the Schubert nestling down the side of the cushion.

“Aj?”

Dr. Ghotse corrects her pronunciation. “A young lady Professor Lull met at a club. He taught her a technique to control her asthma.”

“Buteyko method?”

“Indeed so. Most alarming. I would not professionally recommend it. He was most perturbed that this young woman knew who he was.”

“Stop. I’m not the first?”

“I doubt she was the operative of any government.”

Lisa Durnau shivers though it is clammy warm in the humid cabin. She thumbs the first image from the Tabernacle upon the Tablet and turns it on the low table to face Dr. Ghotse.

“Again, it is a poor photograph, but that is the young woman.”

“Dr. Ghotse, this is also an image from the artefact inside Darnley 285.”

Dr. Ghotse sits back on his divan.

“Well, Miss Durnau, as Professor Lull says in his letter, there is indeed deep mystery here.” Outside the rain finally seems to be lightening.

31: LULL

In the lawyer Nagpal’s office the windows and shutters are all thrown open. The din from the street is oppressive.

“Apologies apologies,” the lawyer Nagpal says showing his visitors to their cracked leather club chairs and settling himself behind his ornately carved desk. “But otherwise the heat. Our air-conditioning system; it is our landlord’s duty to keep it in good repair. A strongly worded letter, I think. Please, some chai. Personally, I find hot chai the most refreshing beverage when the heat oppresses.”

Thomas Lull disagrees but the lawyer Nagpal has rung his little bell for the office-wallah.

“I have heard it is already raining in Jharkhand.” The boy serves the hot, sickly chai from a brass tray. Nagpal picks up his cup and gulps it down. Lawyer Nagpal of Nagpal, Pahelwan, and Dhavan is a man who acts older than his years. Thomas Lull has long subscribed to the theory that every human has an inner spiritual age at which they remain all their lives. He’s stuck at twenty-five. This advocate is late fifties, though from his face and hands Thomas Lull pegs him at no more than thirty. “Now, how may I help you?”

“A photograph was sent from this office to my colleague here,” he says.

Nagpal frowns, purses his lips in a little oh? Aj pushes her palmer across the desk. Thomas Lull puts the temperature in the early forties but she is cool and poised. Her tilak seems to shine in the shadowy office.

“It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday,” Aj prompts.

“Ah, I have you now!” Nagpal opens his palmer in a hand-tooled leather case, taps up briefs. Thomas Lull reads the play of lawyer’s fingers, the movements of his pupils, the dilation of his nostrils. What are you scared of, lawyer Nagpal with your degrees and diplomas and certificates on the wall? “Yes, Ajmer Rao. You have come all the way from Bangalore, most extraordinary, and in these troubled times too. The photograph, I believe, is of your natural parents.”

“Bullshit,” says Thomas Lull. “Sir, the photograph is of.”

“Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau. They’re well known A-life researchers, I’ve been working with them for years. And while Aj here was theoretically being conceived, I was in daily contact with Anjali and Jean-Yves in Strasbourg. If anyone had been pregnant I would have known.”

“With respect, Mr. Lull, there are modern techniques, surrogacies.”

“Mr. Nagpal, Anjali Trudeau never produced a viable egg in her life.”

The lawyer Nagpal chews his bottom lip in distaste.

“Our questions then are: who are Aj’s natural parents, and who instructed you to send that photograph? Someone is playing head-games with her.”

“Much as I feel for Miss Rao’s confusion, I am not at liberty to divulge that, Mr. Lull. It is a matter of client confidentiality.”

“I can always talk to them directly. I’m only here as formality.”

“I do not think so, sir. Pardon my bluntness, but Mr. and Mrs. Trudeau are deceased.”

Thomas Lull feels the dark, sweating, cluttered room turn inside out.

“What?”

“Sir, I regret to inform you that Mr. and Mrs. Trudeau died in an apartment fire yesterday morning. There is a question over the circumstances, the police are investigating.”

“Are you saying they were murdered?”

“I can say, sir, that the incident has attracted the attention of the government department known informally as the Ministry.”

“The Krishna Cops?”

“As you say. The apartment was alleged to be the location of the Badrinath sundarban.”

“They were working with the datarajas?” Lawyer Nagpal spreads his hands. “I could not possibly speculate.”

Thomas Lull speaks slowly and clearly so the lawyer can make no mistake about what he means.

“Did the Badrinath sundarban instruct you to send the photograph to Aj?”

“Mr. Lull, I have a mother, brothers, a married sister with three children, gods be kind to her. I am a public notary and recorder of oaths in a less than salubrious location. There are forces at work here I do not have to understand to know are powerful. I merely follow my instructions and bank my fee. I cannot help you with any of your questions, please understand. But I can comply with one final instruction from my clients.”

Mr. Nagpal rings his bell, chips an order in Hindi at his babu who returns with a book-sized case wrapped in Varanasi silk. Mr. Nagpal unwraps the hand-woven silk square. Inside are two objects, a photograph and a carved wooden jewellery box. He passes the photograph to Aj. It is such a photograph as families lake, a mother, a lather, a girl, smiling by the waterside with the towers of a bright city behind them. But the man and the woman are dead now, and the girl blinking in the bright morning has a shaved scalp scarred with the evidence of recent surgery.

Aj runs her hand over her hair.

“I am sorry for your trouble,” Lawyer Nagpal says. “This is the second part of what they wished you to have.” He presents the little jewel box for Aj to open. Thomas Lull smells sandalwood as she unfastens the brass catch.

“My horse!”

Between her thumb and forefinger is the universal circle of the fiery chakra. Dancing in its centre, a white horse rears.

Beyond the cracking towers and tank farms of the East Bank the sky is obsidian, the curtain wall of a fortress ten kilometres high. From where he sits on the upper tiers of Dasashvamedha ghat, Thomas Lull can feel its pressure in his sinuses. Hazy yellow sun covers city and river. The wide sand shoals of the eastern shore where the nagas perform their asceticisms are white against the black sky. A flaw of wind chases marigold petals across Dasashvamedha ghat, sets the boats rocking on the river. Even in Kerala Thomas Lull never knew humidity like it. He imagines the heat, the humidity, the chemicals coiling around his airways, tightening.

The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.

The mood in the city is tight, coiling. Heat and war. The anger of Sarkhand has boiled over into the streets. Burnings. Deaths. The nutes first; then the Muslims, as ever. Now Mahindra pickups ram-raid American fast-food chains in the New Town and karsevaks pour alcofuel over blasphemous cow burgers. For the first time Thomas Lull feels self-conscious of his accent and skin.

The army officer had taken his passport and left him alone in the windowless storeroom in the small village medical centre that the Bharati Defence Forces were using to process refugees from the train attack. Thomas Lull sat on the metal chair under the single shadeless lightbulb suddenly scared, suddenly naked while in the next room men made loud, rattling phone calls in Hindi about his passport. He had never consciously believed in the American grace, that that little booklet made him a global aristocrat, cloaked him with invulnerability, but he had held it up like a crucifix, caught between incomprehensible clashing forces. He had not thought that it might make him a player, at best a running-dog of hostile power, at worst a spy. Thomas Lull was three hours in the room while keypads rattled as army babus took down testimonies from a torrent of voices and women keened on the street outside. Then a chubby subaltern with a neat blue tilak down the centre of his tongue from licking the point of his pen ripped out dockets, stamped pages, and handed Thomas Lull a rustle of papers, pink blue and yellow, and his solid black passport.

“This is a travel permit, this is your temporary ID, this is your ticket,” he pointed out with his pen. “The buses leave from the front of the Durga temple; your bus number is 19. May I express the regrets of the Bharati government for your hardships and wish you a safe onward journey.” Then he beckoned with his pen to the women behind him in the line.

“My travelling companion, a young woman, with a Vishnu tilak?”

“All buses, all people in front of the temple. God-speed you sir.”

The subaltern flicked Thomas Lull off the end of his pen. The village street was lit by vehicle headlights. Thomas Lull walked between rows of bodies, laid out close as lovers to each other. By the time he was half way to the white buses the army had run out of body bags and the dead lay uncovered. He tried not to breathe in the stench of charred flesh. Army medics were already at work stripping out the corneas.

“Aj!” he shouted. Camera-flashes flickered, camera lights bobbed as news crews sought shots. Behind the forest of sound booms, satellite uplink trucks unfolded dishes like poppies blooming. “Aj!”

“Lull! Lull!” A pale hand waved from a bus window. The tilak caught the light. Lull pushed through the crowd, turning his back to cameras with American logos on them. “You were so long,” she said as he piled down beside her.

“They wanted to make sure I wasn’t an agent of a foreign power. What about you? I’d’ve thought, with that display.”

“Oh, they let me go at once. I think they were afraid.”

The bus drove through the remains of the night and all the next day. Hours blurred into heat and flatness and villages with painted advertisements for water and underwear and the constant blaring of vehicle horns. What Thomas Lull saw were red-eyed corpses laid out on the village street and Aj on one knee, her hand outstretched and the enemy robots obeying.

“I have to ask you.”

“I saw their gods and asked them. That is what I told the soldiers. I do not think they believed me, but then they seemed afraid of me.”

“Robots have gods?”

“Everything has a god, Mr. Lull. You just have to find it.”

At the next toilet stop Thomas Lull bought a newspaper to convince himself that all his shards of impression and experience were real memory. Bharati Hindutva extremists had attacked an Maratha Rail shatabdi in a regrettable excess of patriotic zeal (the editorial said) but the brave jawans of the Allahabad division had driven back the savage and unjustified Awadhi retaliatory strike.

However liberal the Westerner, there is always some part of India that shocks. For Thomas Lull it is this buried stratum of rage and hatred that can one day take a neighbour of a lifetime into his neighbour’s house to cut him open with an axe and burn his wife and children in their beds, and then, when it is all done and over, to go back to the neighbourly life. Even on the ghats amongst the worshippers and the dhobi-wallahs and the hawkers chasing the rag-end of the tourist trade, the mob is only a shout away. There is no explanation for it in his philosophy.

“There was a time I thought I might work with the sundarbans,” Thomas Lull says. “That was after I testified to the Hamilton Inquiry. They were right to be suspicious; hall the idea behind Alterre was to set up an alternative ecosystem where intelligence could evolve on its own terms. I don’t think I could have stayed in the States. I like to think I’d have been tough and noble under persecution, like Chomsky in the Bush Wars, but I’m a complete pussy cat when it comes to authority with guns. What I was scared of was being ignored. Writing and speaking and talking and not one blind soul paying attention to me. Locked in the white room. Shouting into your pillow. That’s worse than death. That’s what did Chomsky in the end. Smothered by inanity.

“I knew what they had over here, everyone who did anything with aeai knew what they were hiding in their cyberabads. In the month before the Hamilton Act came into force they were pushing bevabytes of information out of the United States. Washington had all the Indian states under incredible pressure to ratify the International Agreement on Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licencing. And I thought, they might at least have someone to speak for them, an American voice, making the other side of the argument.

“Jean-Yves and Anjali wanted me to come—they knew that even if Awadh went with Washington the best they could ever get from the Ranas was a halfway house licensing deal to keep the soapis sweet. And then my wife walked out on me with half of my worldly goods and I thought I was together and sophisticated and cool and I was none of those things. I was the opposite of everything I thought I was. I was crazy for some time, I think. I’m not out of it yet. Jesus, I cannot believe they are dead.”

“What do you think they were working on in the sundarban?”

Aj sits cross-legged on a wooden level where the priests celebrate the nightly puja to Ganga Devi. Devotees look long at her tilak, a Vaishnavite in the heart of Siva’s lordship.

“I think they had a Generation Three in there.”

Aj toys with a twist of marigold petals.

“Have we reached the singularity?”

Thomas Lull starts at the abstruse word falling like a pearl from Aj’s lips. “Okay mystery girl, what do you understand by singularity?”

Doesn’t it mean the theoretical point where aeais become first as intelligent as humans, then rapidly leave them behind?”

“My answer is yes and no. Yes, there are undoubtedly Generation Three aeais out there that are every bit as alive and aware and filled with sense of self as I am. But they aren’t going to reduce us all to slavery or pethood or just nuke us because they perceive we’re in competition with them for the same ecological niche; that’s Hamilton’s thinking, and it’s not thinking at all. That’s the ‘no’ part of the answer: they are intelligent but not as humans are intelligent. Aeai is alien intelligence. It’s a response to specific environmental conditions and stimuli, and that environment is CyberEarth, where the rules are very very different from RealEarth. First rule of CyberEarth: information cannot be moved, it must be copied. In RealEarth, physically moving information is a piece of piss; we do it every time we stand up, carrying this sense-of-self-ware around in our heads. Aeais can’t do that, but they can do one thing we can’t. They can copy themselves. Now, what that does to your sense of self, I don’t know, and technically speaking, I can’t know. It’s a philosophical impossibility for us to be in two places at the same time; not for aeais. For them, the philosophical implications of what you do with your spare copy when you move yourself to a new matrix is of fundamental importance. Does a complete self die, or is it just part of a greater gestalt? Already we’re getting into a completely alien mind-set. So, even if aeais have hit the singularity and are racing away into IQs in the millions, what does that actually mean in human terms? How do we measure it? What do we measure it against? Intelligence is not an absolute thing, it’s always environment specific. Aeais don’t need to manufacture stock market crashes or set the nukes flying or trash our planetary web to put humanity in its place; there is no competition, these things have no meaning or relevance in their universe. We’re neighbours in parallel universes and as long as we live as neighbours we will live peacefully to our mutual advantage. But the Hamilton Acts mean we’ve risen up against our neighbours and are driving them into annihilation. At some point they will fight, like anything will when its back’s against the wall, and that will be a terrible, bitter battle. There’s no battle more terrible than when the gods fight and we are each other’s gods. We’re gods to the aeai. Our words can rewrite the appearance of any part of their world. That’s the reality of their universe; nonmaterial entities that can unsay any part of reality are as much the fabric of it as quantum uncertainty and M-Star theory is of ours. We used to live in a universe that thought like that once; spirits and ancestors and everything was held together by the divine word. We need each other to maintain our worlds.”

“Maybe there is another way,” Aj says softly. “Maybe there doesn’t have to be a war.”

Thomas Lull feels a stir of wind on his face, a distant tiger-purr of thunder. It is coming.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” he says. “Wouldn’t that be a first? No no, this is the Age of Kali.” He stands up, dusts wind-blown sand and human ashes from his clothes. “Come on then.” He extends a hand to Aj. “I’m going to the Computer Science department at the University of Varanasi.”

Aj tilts her head to one side.

“Professor Naresh Chandra is in today but you will have to hurry. You will forgive me if I do not accompany you, Lull.”

“Where are you going?” Spoken like a piqued boyfriend.

“The Bharati National Records Office on Raja Bazaar Road is open until five o’clock. As other methods have failed, I feel a mitochondrial DNA profile will tell me who my real parents are.”

The rising wind ruffles her boy-short hair, flaps Thomas Lull’s pant legs like flags. Down on the suddenly choppy water rowboats swarm for shore.

“Are you sure about this?”

Aj turns her ivory horse over and over in her fingers. “Yes. I have thought about it and I have to know.”

“Good luck then.” Without thought, against will, Thomas Lull hugs her. She is slight and bony and so so light that he fears he might snap her like glass rods.

Thomas Lull prides himself on possessing the male gift for visiting somewhere once and forever after being able to navigate infallibly around it. Which is how he is lost within two minutes of stepping out of the phatphat onto the dense green lawns of the University of Bharat Varanasi. It had been eighty percent building site when Thomas Lull delivered his lecture to the nascent Computer Science department.

“Excuse me,” he asks a mali inexplicably wearing gumboots in the greatest drought in Bharat’s brief history. The clouds pile deep and dark behind the light, airy faculty buildings, flickering with edges of lightning. The hot wind is strong now, the electric wind. It could sweep this frail university up into the clouds. Let it rain let it rain let it rain, Thomas Lull prays as he runs up stairs past the chowkidar and through the double doors into the department office where eight young men and one middle-aged woman fan themselves with soapi magazines. He picks the woman.

“I’d like to see Professor Chandra.”

“Professor Chandra is unavailable at present.”

“Oh, I have it on the highest authority that he is sitting there in his office. If you could just buzz him.”

“This is most irregular,” the secretary says. “Appointments must be made in advance through this office and written into the appointments diary before ten am on a Monday.”

Thomas Lull parks his ass on the desk. He’s getting his thunder-head on him but knows that the only ways to deal with Indian bureaucracy are patience, bribery, or rank. He leans over and palms on all the intercom buttons at once.

“Would you be so good as to tell Professor Chandra that Professor Thomas Lull needs to talk to him?”

Up the corridor a door opens.

32: PARVATI

It had started at the railway station. The porters were thieves and gundas, the security checks a gross discourtesy to a respectable widow from a loyal village in a peaceable district, the taxi driver had banged her case manhandling it into the boot and when he did drive took the longest route and drove fast and dodged in and out of the buses to terrify an old woman up from the country and then after half frightening her to death demanded an extra ten rupees to carry her bag up all those stairs and she had to give it to him, she could never have managed with the lungs half-coughed out of her with the terrible fumes in this city. And now the chai the cook has given her has a sour tang; there is never good clean water in this city.

Parvati Nandha shoos the sullen cook away, greets her mother with proper daughterly fervour, and has the sweeper carry her bags to the guest room and make all ready.

“I will make you a proper cup of chai, and then we will go up on to the roof.”

Mrs. Sadurbhai softens like a ghee sculpture at a mela.

The sweeper announces that the room is ready. As her mother goes to inspect and unpack, Parvati busies herself with the kettle and wipes and tidies and neatens any lingerings of her humiliation at the cricket match.

“You should not have to do that,” Mrs. Sadurbhai says, pushing in beside Parvati at the kettle. “The very least you should expect from a cook is that she can make a cup of chai. And that sweeper is cheating you. An exceedingly lazy girl. The dust rabbits I found under the bed. You must be firm with staff. Here.” She sets a garish packet of tea on the worktop. “Something with real flavour.”

They sit in the semishade of the jasmine arbour. Mrs. Sadurbhai studies the workmanship, then the neighbouring rooftops.

“You are a little overlooked here,” she comments, pulling her dupatta over her head. The evening rush has started, conversation competes with car horns. A radio blasts chart hits from a balcony across the street. “It will be nice when it grows up a little. You will have more privacy then. Of course you cannot expect the kind of privacy you would get out in the Cantonment with full-size trees, but this will be quite pleasant of an evening, if you’re still here.”

“Mother,” Parvati says, “why are you here?”

“A mother cannot visit her own daughter? Or is this some new style in the capital?”

“Even in the country it’s customary to give some warning.”

“Warning? What am I, a flash flood, a plague of locusts, an air raid? No, I came because I am worried about you, in this city, in this current situation; oh you message me every day but I know what I see on the television, all those soldiers and tanks and aeroplanes, and that train burning, dreadful, dreadful. And I sit here, and I look up and I see these things.”

Aeaicraft patrol the edge of the monsoon, white wings catching the westering light as they bank and turn kilometres above Varanasi. They can stay up there for years, Krishan had told Parvati. Never touch the ground, like Christian angels.

“Mother, they are there to keep us safe from the Awadhis.”

She shrugs.

“Ach. That is what they want you to think, but I know what I see.”

“Mother, what do you want?”

Mrs. Sadurbhai hitches up the pallav of her sari.

“I want you to come home with me.”

Parvati throws her hands up but Mrs. Sadurbhai cuts in and breaks her protest.

“Parvati, why take needless risks? You say you are safe here and maybe you are, but what if all these wonderful machines fail and the bombs fall on your lovely garden? Parvati, it may only be a risk the size of a grain of rice but why take any risk at all? Come back with me to Kotkhai; the Awadhi fighting machines will never find you there. It will only be for a little time, until this unpleasantness is over.”

Parvati Nandha sets down her chai glass. The low sun shines into her face, and she must shade her eyes to read her mother’s expression.

“What is this about really?”

“I’m not at all sure what you mean.”

“I mean, you’ve never really thought my husband sufficiently honours me.”

“Oh, but I don’t, I don’t, Parvati. You married within jati and that is a treasure beyond price. It just grieves me when ambitious women—no, we are speaking as we find here this evening, so I shall call them what they are, caste-jumpers: there, that’s it said—when caste-jumpers flaunt their wealth and husbands and status to which they have less right than you. It hurts me, Parvati.”

“My husband is a highly respected and important civil servant. I know of no one who speaks of him with the slightest disrespect. I want for nothing. See, this fine garden? This is one of the most sought after government apartments.”

“Yes, but government, Parvati. Government.”

“I have no desire to move to Cantonment. I am content here. I also have no desire to come with you to Kotkhai in some ruse to focus my husband’s attention on my needs because you do not think he appreciates me enough.”

“Parvati, I never.”

“Oh, forgive me.” The women fall silent at the third voice. Krishan stands at the head of the stairs in his cricketing best. “I need to, ah, check the drip irrigator.”

“Mother, this is Krishan, my garden designer. All this is the work of his hands.”

Krishan namastes.

“A remarkable transformation,” Mrs. Sadurbhai says grudgingly.

“Often the finest gardens grow from the least promising soils,” Krishan says and leaves to fiddle purposelessly with the pipes and taps and regulators.

“I don’t like him,” Mrs. Sadurbhai whispers to her daughter. Parvati catches Krishan’s eye as he lights little terra-cotta oil cups along the bed borders as day ebbs from the sky. The tiny flames gutter and sway in the wind that has sprung up among the rooftops. Thunder growls in the dark east. “He has a familiar way with him. He gives looks. It is never good when they give looks.”

He has come to see me, Parvati thinks. He has followed me here to be with me, to keep me safe from the tongues of the caste-jumping women, to be strong for me when I am in need.

The garden is transformed into a constellation of lamps. Krishan bows to the ladies of the house.

“I’ll bid you a good night and I hope to find you well in the morning.”

“You should have him pick up those apricot stones,” Mrs. Sadurbhai throws after Krishan as he goes down the stairs. “They will only attract monkeys.”

33: VISHRAM

Marianna Fusco really does have the most magnificent nipples, Vishram thinks as she heaves herself out of the pool and drips across the tiles to the sunlounger. He traces them through wet lycra; round and hand-filling, pores puckered into little subnipples, textured, satisfying.

The cold water has brought them up like champagne corks.

“Ah God, that’s great,” Marianna Fusco declares, shaking out her wet hair and knotting a silk wrap around her waist. She flops weightily into the chair beside Vishram, leans back, slides on shades. Vishram motions for the waiter to pour coffee.

He hadn’t meant to move into the same hotel as his legal advisor. War had put suites at a premium; every hotel parking lot in Varanasi was full of satellite uplink vans, every bar full of foreign correspondents catching up on the boring bits between conflicts. He had not even realised it was the same hotel at which he had left her after the disastrous first night limo ride until he saw her descending in an elevator through the glass atrium. He knew the cut of that suit anywhere.

The suite is unexceptionably comfortable but Vishram can’t sleep in it. He misses the hypnagogic tendril patterns of his bedroom’s painted roof. He misses the morning-glory comfort of Shanker Mahal’s erotic carvings. He misses sex. Vishram watches the sweat bead Marianna’s arm before the water drops have even dried.

“Vish.” She’s never called him that before. “I mightn’t be staying for much longer.” Vishram sets his coffee cup down carefully so no rattle may betray his dismay. “Is it the war?”

“I’ve had calls from head office; the Foreign Office advice is for nonessential British passport holders to leave, and my family’s worried too, especially after the rioting.” Her family, that brawling constellation of partnerships and remarriages among five different races across the red brick terracelands of South London. The front of her swimsuit has dried in the sun but it’s still damp and bodyhugging next to the chair. Vishram has always had a notion for onepieces. Conceal to appeal. Its wet cling emphasises the muscled curve of Marianna Fusco’s lower back. Vishram feels his cock stir in his Varanasi silk trunks. He would love to take her there and then down into the pool, legs hooked over in the lapping water with the roar of the morning rush hour bouncing over the wall from the street beyond.

“I have to tell you, Vish, I didn’t really want this brief. I had projects I was working on.”

“It’s not really my idea of a gig either,” Vishram says. “I had a good career going as a stand-up comedian. I was funny. I made people laugh. That’s not a thing to brush off: oh, Vishram, what silliness are you up to now? Well stop it right now and come here, there’s important stuff for you to do. And do you know what the worst part of it is, the part that really makes me choke? I love it. I fucking love it. I love this corporation and the people who work for it and what they’re trying to do and the things they’ve got out at that research place. That’s what really annoys me, the bastard didn’t give a fuck about my feelings but he was right all along. I will fight to save this company and that’s with or without you and if it’s going to be without you, if you are going to leave me, I need to clear a couple of things with you and the first is that I adore the sight of your nipples through that swimsuit and the second is there is not a moment at a meeting or a briefing or at the desk or on the phone that I do not think about sex with you in the pointy end of a BharatAir 375.”

Marianna Fusco’s hands are flat on the armrests. She looks dead ahead, eyes invisible behind her Italian shades.

“Mr. Ray.”

Oh fuck.

“Come on then.”

Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the size of Vishram’s penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the gentleman’s way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a thugee. The stretchy swimsuit fabric takes some ripping but it’s what she wants and Vishram is only too eager to oblige and he loves the feel of it in his fists, tearing apart, exposing her. He tries to push into her vagina, she rolls away saying no no no, I’m not letting that thing in there. She lets him get three fingers in both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot up inside her and she straddles him, big nipples silhouetted against the yellow storm-light, handing him until he comes and after he’s come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out, each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and full-body thrash.

By the time either of them can speak again it is twenty past eleven on the Noughties retro wall-clock and they lie side by side on the mat drinking minibar malt from the bottle and thrilling to the flickers and growls of approaching thunder.

“I will never, ever be able to look at that silk wrap the same way,” Vishram says. “Where did you learn that from?”

“Who said I had to be taught?” Marianna Fusco rolls on to her side. “It’s you Indians have this guru thing.”

The room flashlights blue to a stronger pulse of lightning. Vishram thinks of the photograph on the cover page of his morning news-site; the faces white in the camera flash, the man, open mouthed, the alien, sexlessly beautiful nute with the bank notes in yts hand. What do they do? he thinks. What do they think they can do? And whatever they can do, does it deserve the destruction of a man’s career and family? He had always thought of and practised sex as one thing, one set of actions and reactions whatever the sexual orientation but on the floor with Marianna Fusco among the shreds of her swimsuit and the knotted snake of a scarf he had lovingly pulled out of her colon he realises it is a nation of many erogenies and responses, as full of languages and cultures as India. “Marianna,” he says, staring at the ceiling. “Don’t go.”

“Vish.” The nick again. “This time there really is something I need to tell you.” She sits up. “Vish, I told you I was hired by your father to oversee the transfer of power.”

“Hired, ah, right, so what does that make what we’ve just done?”

“You know, any real comedian I’ve ever known doesn’t try to be funny in real life. Vish, I was hired by another company. I was hired by Odeco.”

Vishram feels he is falling into the floor. Muscles go limp, his hands fall open, an unconscious Corpse Asana.

“Well, now it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Soften the horny fucker before you knife him.”

“Hey!” Marianna Fusco sits up, leans over him. Her hair falls around her face, a soft dark silhouette against the windows. “That is not right and it is not fair. I am not a corporate. whore. We did not do this because it was some plot or conspiracy. Fuck you, Vishram Ray. I told you because I trusted you, because I like you, because I like sex with you. You’ve had your hand up my ass, how much more trust would you like?”

Vishram counts the spaces between the lightning flicker and the thunder growl. One Odeco two Odeco three Odeco four. The rain is almost upon them.

“I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on,” he says to the bland, international-stylie ceiling. “Who’s behind what, who’s funding what, who’s got a stake in what and who is working for what and why.”

“You think I know any better?” Marianna Fusco says, rolling on to her side and pressing her thick dense body against Vishram’s. He can feel the soft kiss of her pubic hair against his thigh. He wonders at the yonic secrets she keeps from him. “I’m a junior partner in a London corporate law firm. We do mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers. We’re not very good at cloak and dagger, skulduggery and conspiracy theory.”

“So can you tell me, what is Odeco?”

“Odeco is an international group of venture capitalists based in various tax havens. They specialise in blue-sky technology and in what some might consider the grey economy; industries that aren’t strictly illegal but have a dodgy reputation, like Darwinware. They’ve invested in Silicon Jungles in cyberabads all across the developing world, including a sundarban right here in Varanasi.”

“And they came up with the money for the accelerator at the research centre. I met Chakraborty, or rather, Chakraborty met me.”

“I know. Mr. Chakraborty is my liaison here in Varanasi. You can believe me or not, but

Odeco wants the zero-point project to succeed.”

“He told me he was delighted I was going to run a full demo. The only people I told that to were our friends from EnGen.”

“EnGen is not Odeco.”

“Then how did Chakraborty know about the trial?” Marianna Fusco chews her top lip.

“You’ll have to ask Chakraborty. I’m not authorised to tell you. But believe me, anything EnGen has offered you to shut down the experiment, Odeco will match it to keep it open. Match it and more.”

“Good,” says Vishram Ray sitting up. “Because I’m minded to take their money. Can you get me a meeting with your liaison? Provided he doesn’t know already, like telepathy or something? And can we do this again, real real soon?”

Marianna Fusco tosses back her still-damp and chlorine-perfumed hair.

“Can I borrow a bathrobe? I don’t think I should go down in the lift like this.”

Forty minutes later Vishram Ray is showered, shaved, suited, and humming to himself as he rides down through the glass roof of the hotel atrium. The car waits among the satellite vans. The silk wrap soaks in the Jacuzzi, still in its knots, all the better to scandalise the prying room staff.

Marigolds on black water. In the open boat Vishram feels the wall of cloud like the hammer of God, raised over him. The wind from the feet of the monsoon stirs the river into a chop. Buffalo press close to shore, nostrils lifted our of the water, flared, sensing the change of the season. Along the ghats women bathers struggle to hold their saris with modesty. It is one of his nation’s perennial contradictions that the culture that wrote and illustrated the Kama Sutra should be so glacially prudish. People in cold, wet Christian Glasgow burned more ardently. He suspects what he has just done with Marianna Fusco would get him twenty in chokey in back-country Bihar.

The boatman is a fifteen-year-old with a frozen wide smile, struggling against the frets and flows. Vishram feels unclad and exposed to the lightning. Already the factories across the river have put on their lights.

“I hate to say it but EnGen got me a tilt-jet? To a tiger sanctuary? With armed guards and a really good lunch. And their flight crew was a lot better looking than him.”

“Hm?” Chakraborty says. He stands in the middle of the boat absently watching the passing panoply of shore life. Vishram wishes he wouldn’t do that. He remembers an old number from the College Dram. Soc. production of Guys and Dolls. Sit down you’re rocking the boat.

And the devil will drag you under . Heavy on the Christian sin and judgement and damnation today Vishram, he thinks.

“I said, it’s kind of choppy.”

Rowing-boy grins. He has a clean blue shirt and very white teeth.

“Ah yes, a little turbulent, Mr. Ray.” Chakraborty touches a finger to his lips, then shakes it at the gleaming ghats. “Do you not find it comforting, knowing where you will end, on these steps, by this shore, before the eyes of all the people?”

“Can’t say it’s a thing I’ve thought too much about.” Vishram reaches for the gunwales as the boat rocks.

“Really? But you should, Mr. Ray. I think a little about death every day. It is most focusing. It is a great reassurance that we leave the particular and rejoin the universal. That I think is the moksha of Ganga. We rejoin the river of history like a drop of rain, our stories told and woven into the stream of time. Tell me—you have lived in the West—is it true that they burn their dead in secret, hidden away from everyone as if they are a thing to be ashamed of?”

Vishram remembers the funeral in a grimy sandstone district of Glasgow. He had not known the woman well—she had been a flatmate of a girl he had been having sex with because she had a name as an up-and-coming director in the Dram. Soc. — but he did recall the sense of shock when he learned she had been killed in a climbing accident in Glencoe. And he does recall the sense of horror in the crematorium; the muffled grief, the eulogy by a stranger that had got her friends’ names wrong, the taped Bach as the sealed casket lurched on the dais and then slowly sank out of sight to the furnace below.

“It is true,” he says to Chakraborty. “They can’t look at it because it scares them. For them, it is the end of everything.”

On the ash-strewn river steps the process of death and moksha wheels on. By the waterline a pyre has collapsed, the head and shoulders of the dead loll out, strangely untouched by the flames. That is a burning man, Vishram thinks. The wind swirls smoke and ash over the burning ghat. Vishram Ray watches the burning man slump on his pyre, cave in, and collapse in sparks and charcoal and he thinks that Chakraborty is right; it is better by far to end here, death in the midst of life, to leave the particular and rejoin the universal.

“Mr. Chakraborty, I would like a very large sum of money from you,” Vishram Ray says.

“How much do you need?”

“Enough to buy out Ramesh’s part of the company.”

“That will require a sum in the region of three hundred billion rupees. I can give you that in US dollars, if you require.”

“I just need to know that that money could be available to me.”

Mr. Chakraborty does not hesitate. “It is.”

“One other thing. Marianna told me there was something I should ask you, that only you could answer.”

“What is that question, Mr. Ray?”

“What is Odeco, Mr. Chakraborty?”

The boat-boy idles on his oars, letting the current carry the skiff past the burnings to the capsized temple of Scindia ghat, leaning into the cracked mud.

“Odeco is one of a series of shell companies for the Generation Three Artificial Intelligence known informally as Brahma.”

“I’m going to ask you that question again,” Vishram says. “And you will receive the same answer.”

“Come on, man.” The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond or Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.

“What is it about my answer that you do not believe?”

“Generation Three aeais, that’s science fiction.”

“I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.”

“The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops.”

“There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.”

“You’re telling me that this…Brahma…is the stock market, come to life?”

“The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiralled, so did that of the aeais.”

“But who would design something like that?”

“Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved.”

Vishram shakes his head. The heat at the edge of the monsoon is terrible, crazy, draining of all sense and energy.

“Brahma?” he says weakly.

“A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents, lower-level aeais, that may not realise they are part of a larger sentience.”

“And this. Generation Three. is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.”

“Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.”

“Why, Mr. Chakraborty?”

Now the lawyer sits. The boat-boy reaches for the oars to keep the little shell from spilling its passengers into the Ganga water that washes those it receives free from karma.

“My employer wishes to see the zero-point project safeguarded and brought to fruition.”

“Again, why?”

Mr. Chakraborty shrugs slowly and expressively inside his well-cut black suit.

“This is an entity with the financial power to destroy entire economies. I am not privy to that kind of intelligence, Mr. Ray. Its understanding of the human world is partial. In the financial markets that are its ecological niche, Brahma as far exceeds human intellect as we do snakes but if you were to speak with it directly, it would seem to you naive, neurotic; even a little autistic.”

“I have to ask this, does. did. my father know?” Chakraborty sways his head. Affirmation.

“The money can be transferred into your account within the hour.”

“And I have to decide who I trust; a gang of American corporate raiders who want to shred my company or an aeai that just happens to be named after a god and can erase every bank account on the planet.”

“Succinctly put sir.”

“Not really a choice, is it?”

Vishram gestures to the boat-boy. He leans into his left oar and turns the little skiff on the black water back towards the great Dasashvamedha Ghat. Vishram thinks he feels a spot of rain on his lip.

34: NAJIA, TAL

A whisper: “He can’t stay here”

The air is fetid and oppressive but the figure on the mattress sleeps the sleep of Brahma.

“Yt’s not a he, yt’s an yt,” Najia Askarzadah whispers back to Bernard. They stand in the door of the darkened room like parents watching over a colicky child. The light fades by the minute, the humidity climbs. The veils of gauze hang straight, heavy, gravity-bound.

“I don’t care, yt’s not staying here.”

“They tried to kill yt, Bernard,” Najia hisses. It had seemed bold and brilliant when she took the moped across the polo lawn past the yelling malis and along the verandah, dodging tables and gap-yearers to Bernard’s room. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere they would never connect but was close. Bernard had not said a word as they stumbled through his door. The nute had been half-conscious, raving something about adrenaline in yts strange, heavily accented voice. Yt was out by the time they got it to the bed. Bernard had taken yts boots off, then stepped back, scared. Then they stood in the door and argued in whispers.

“And you make me a target now as well,” Bernard hisses. “You don’t think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to cheer because you’re the hero.”

“Bernard, I’ve always known that the only ass you’re ultimately interested in is your own, but that is a new low.” But the barb hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion. Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence, or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. “I don’t know where else to go,” she confesses weakly. He goes out shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything right.

She feels again the crack of the thugee’s ribs as she slammed into him; the recoil through the frame of the bike and her hips as the karsevak assassin slid away across the platform. She starts to shake in the stifling, dim room. She cannot hold herself, she finds a chair and sits, hugging her arms close against the cold from within. It is all madness and you walked into it. A nute and a Swedish girl reporter. You can be disappeared from Varanasi’s ten million and no one will blink.

She turns her chair to cover both the door and the bedroom window. She angles the wooden louvres so she can see out but a bad man will find it hard to see in. She sits and watches the slats of light move across the floor.

Najia comes out of sleep with a start. Noise. Movement. She freezes, then dives for the kitchen and its French cooking knives. She burst the door open, a figure at the refrigerator whirls, snatches up a knife. Him. Yt.

“Sorry sorry,” yt says in yts strange, child’s voice. “Is there anything to eat? I am so hungry.”

There are half-things, nibbles and a bottle of champagne in Bernard’s refrigerator. Of course. The nute sniffs at them, grazes from the shelf.

“Excuse excuse,” yt says. “I am so hungry. The hormones…I pushed them too hard.”

“Can I make you tea?” Najia says, the rescuing heroine still needing a role to play. “Chai, yes, chai, wonderful.”

They sit on the mattress with the little glasses. Yt likes it European style, black without sugar. Najia starts at every shadow on the shutters.

“There are not enough thanks.”

“I don’t deserve them. I got you into it in the first place.”

“You said that at the station, yes. If not you, it would have been someone else. They might not have felt so guilty. Was it guilt?”

This is the closest Najia Askarzadah has been in her life to a nute. She knows of them and what they are and how they come to be and what they can do with themselves and even some understanding of what they enjoy of each other and has the proper Scandinavian acceptance-cool, but this Tal smells different. She knows it is the things they can do with their hormones and neurochemicals but she is afraid that Tal will sense it and think it is neutrophobia.

“I remembered,” she says. “I saw the pictures and I remembered where I had seen you before.”

Tal frowns. In the golden gloaming among the mesh fronds it is a deeply alien expression. “At Indiapendent,” she volunteers.

Tal holds yts head in yts hands, closes yts eyes. Yts lashes are long and very beautiful to Najia.

“This is hurting me. I don’t know what to think.”

“I was doing an interview with Lal Darfan. Satnam took me around. Satnam gave me the photographs.”

“The trishul!” Tal exclaims. “Chuutya! He set us both up! Ai!” Yt starts to shake, tears well, yts holds yts hands up like leper’s claws. “My Mama Bharat, they thought it was me; the wrong flat.” The shaking builds into heaving sobs, torn up from exhaustion and shock. Najia creeps away and makes fresh chai until she hears the keening cries subside. For an Afghan she has a northern European fear of big emotion.

“More chai?”

Tal has the sheet wrapped around yt. Yt nods. The glass shakes in yts hand. “How did you know I would be at the station?”

“Journalistic hunch,” Najia Askarzadah says. She wants to touch yts face, yts so bare, so tender scalp. “It’s what I would have done.”

“Your journalistic hunches are powerful things. I have been a fool! Smiling and laughing and dancing and thinking everyone loved me! The new nute in town everyone wants to know, come to the big party, come to the club.”

Najia reaches out to touch, to reassure and warm. Then she finds Tal pulled into her breast, her cheek brushing its smooth, oiled head. It is like hugging a cat, all bone and tension. Her fingers brush the dimples on yts arm, like rows of symmetrical insect bites. Najia recoils.

“No, there, please,” Tal says. She gently pushes the spot, feels fluids move under the skin. “And, please, here?” Yts fingers guide hers to a place near the wrist. “And here.” A hand’s breadth down from the elbow. The nute shudders in her embrace. Yts breathing steadies. Yts muscles tighten. Yt gets shakily to yts feet, moves nervously around the room. Najia can smell the edgy tension.

Najia says, “I can’t imagine how you live, being able to choose your emotions.”

“We don’t choose our emotions, just our reactions. It is…intense. We don’t live much over sixty.” Tal is pacing now, fretting, a caged mongoose, glancing through the shutter slats, snapping them closed again.

“How can you. ?”

“Make that choice? It’s long enough for beauty.”

Najia shakes her head. Unbelievable on unbelievable. Tal bangs yts fist against the wall. “Fool! I should die I should die I am too stupid to live.”

“You are not the only one, I was stupid too, thinking I had a special line to N. K. Jivanjee.”

“You met Jivanjee?”

“I spoke to him, on the video, when he set up the meeting where Satnam gave me the photographs.”

A shadow falls across the shutters. Nute and woman freeze. Tal slowly lowers ytself until it is beneath the line of the windowsill. Yt beckons for Najia to join it against the wall. Listening with her whole body, Najia crawls across the matting through the planes of gauze. Then a woman’s voice speaks German. Najia’s stomach loosens. For a moment she thought she might have vomited from fear.

“We must get out of Bharat. They’ve seen you with me,” Tal whispers. “We are the same now. We have to buy safe passage.”

“Should we not go to the police?”

“Do you know nothing about how this country works? Sajida Rana owns the police and she wants me for a traitor, and the police she doesn’t own belong to Jivanjee. We need something that will give us enough value to be protected. You said you talked to Jivanjee on the video. I presume you’ve enough intelligence to have kept it. Show me. There may be something there.”

They sit by side against the wall. Najia holds up the palmer. Her hand shakes; Tal grasps her wrist, steadying her.

“This is not a very good model,” yt says.

The volume is painfully loud as Najia plays back the video chip.

Out in the club tennis balls pop and tock. On the screen the undulations of N. K. Jivanjee’s kalamkari-hung pavilion seem a divine inversion of this dim, overheated bedroom choked with fear.

“Freeze freeze freeze!”

Najia’s thumb fumbles the control.

“What is this?”

“It is N. K. Jivanjee.”

“I know this stupid. Where is it from?”

“It is his office, maybe his private apartment, it could even be his rath yatra, I don’t know.”

“Lies lies lies,” Tal hisses. “I do know. That is not the private apartment or rath yatra or office of Mr. N. K. Jivanjee. That is the marriage chamber of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala for the wedding of the year on Town and Country. I designed those kalamkaris myself.”

“A stage set?”

“My stage set. For a scene that hasn’t been shot yet.”

Najia Askarzadah feels her eyes widen. She wishes she had a subdermal menu she could call up to wash away her paralysing disbelief in a rinse of neurotransmitters.

“No one’s ever met N. K. Jivanjee face to face,” she says.

“Our passport,” Tal says. “I have to get into Indiapendent. We have to go now, right now.”

“You can’t go like that, they’ll see you a kilometre off, we have to get you a disguise.” Then the cluck of tennis balls and the shouts of the players fall silent all at once. Tal and Najia dive and roll across the room as the shadows touch the shutters. Voices. Not German. Not female. Crouching, Najia wheels the moped from the hall into the kitchen. She squats on one side, Tal on the other. They know what they have to wait for though it is the scariest wait in the world. Click click. Then the bedroom explodes in automatic fire. In the same instant Najia guns the little alcohol engine, throws herself on. Tal jumps up behind her. The bullets go on and on and on. Don’t look back. You can never look back. She negotiates Bernard’s folding table, opens the back door and bursts out into the scrubby ground behind the bar. Waiters look up as she steers between the crates of Kingfisher and Schweppes mixers.

“Out of my fucking way!” Najia Askarzadah screams. They scatter like magpies. Her peripheral vision checks two dark figures rounding the end of the accommodation wing, figures busy with their hands. “Oh Jesus,” she prays and takes the moped up three concrete steps into the club kitchens. “Move move move move!” she yells as she swerves around stainless-steel coolers the size of battle tanks and sacks of rice and dal and potatoes and chefs with trays and chefs with knives and chefs with hot fat. She skid-turns on a spot of dropped ghee, smashes through the swinging door and through the dining room, down the neat aisles of linen-covered tables, blares her hooter at a couple in matching surf-Ts and shades and into the corridor. In the main hall an evening yoga class is under way: Najia and Tal bowl through, horn rasping rudely as sarvangasana shoulder stands collapse like a felled forest all around them. Through the French windows—always open to allow ventilation for the women in cotton lycra, over the gasping flower beds and through the main gates into safe anonymity of the early evening rush. Najia laughs. Thunder echoes her.

35: MR. NANDHA

Mr. Nandha’s presentation of the case against Kalki takes the form of an orb floating in the ’hoek-sight of managers, at once small enough to fit beneath the dome of the human skull and so vast it envelops the Ministry’s glass tower like a fist around an orchid. It rotates in the inner vision of Commissioner Arora and Director General Sudarshan bringing new vistas of information into their view. A continent-sized cityscape of pages and windows and images and frames opens up into a two-dimensional map of information. Saraswati is the name of the voice-over aeai, goddess of speech and communication. Over a glowing schematic of Pasta-Tikka Inc. information system, Saraswati traces the unlicensed aeai back to the neural fizz of Kashi, then ratchets up level by fractal level into the dendritic blur of the Janpur localnet, Malaviri node, sublocation Jashwant the Jain (all his little cyberpooches, ghostly skeletons knobbly with actuators and chipset arrays: Jashwant himself is a saggy blue bag of naked flesh). The next window of information is SOCO footage of the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. The hovercam bobs through blackened rooms, floating a moment over half-fleshed skeletons, processor shells melted like candles, Mr. Nandha peering into the utility box with his pen-flash. Two huddled humps of charcoal unfold into living, smiling, passport photo Westerners: Jean-Yves Trudeau; Annency, France, European Union, d.o.b. 15/04/2022; Anjali Trudeau, nee Patil, Bangalore, Karnataka. d.o.b. 25/11/2026.

“Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau were formerly researchers at the University of the Strasbourg in the Artificial Life laboratory of the Computer Science Department. For the past four years they have been research fellows at the Varanasi campus of the University of Bharat in the Faculty of Computer Science under Professor Chandra specialising in the application of Darwinian paradigms to protein-matrix circuitry,” Saraswati says. Her voice is derived from Kalpana Dhupia on Town and Country.

The Trudeaus tear off from their quadrant of the sphere and hover in stationary orbit. A video window fills with the low-resolution grain of an apartment interior. Foreground of shot, a naked eighteen-year-old male, half-hard erection in right-handed grip. Attitude, leaning back, aiming it into the centre of shot. Goofy grin on face. Mid-ground Shanti Rana apartments; mid-level, window open. Balcony, some washing. Across the canyon of street, apartment windows and the rusty boxes of air-conditioners. A dart of white across the square of outside. Then the window frame fills with a peal of flame. Mr. Grippo spins round, shrieks something overloaded by the digital compression on the camera mike. Freeze-frame, skinny ass against exploding glass and flame, left hand reaching for a silk wrap.

“The Krishna system ran a traceback through all net traffic out of the area network for an hour before and after the offence,” Saraswati says sweetly, “This fortunate webcam footage was obtained from an apartment immediately opposite the crime scene.” The image reels back to the darting sliver of white, freezes, frames and enlarges, frames and enlarges. What it ends up with is a pile of pixels but the image manipulation packages sharpen and smear and turn the array of greyscale boxes into a flying machine, a white bird with upturned winglets and a sponson tail and a bulbous ducted fan in its belly. Graphics packs outline it, isolate it, render it in, and morph it into catalogue-spec war-porn pin-ups of an Ayappa aerial defence drone, Bharati licence version, infrared laser armed.

Data-panes pop up filled with fluttering manifests demonstrating the inexplicable hole in the military records filled by Aerial Defence Drone 7132’s attack on the Badrinath sundarban. Mr. Nandha watches the fine display but his thoughts are on Professor Naresh Chandra, profoundly shocked to learn how his research colleagues had died. Most of his staff held outside consultancies—it was the nature of research funding—but a sundarban. He had meekly opened up their office. Mr. Nandha had already called in the search unit. He had sniffed at their many jars of coffee—a different blend for each occasion, it seemed—while the Krishna Cops went through the files. Mr. Nandha very much wished he could drink coffee without it making him feel as if his stomach was dissolving. Within minutes they had found the link.

Graphics can dazzle and seduce but every successful excommunication order reaches a point where machines fail and the prosecution rests on human drama. Mr. Nandha takes a silk handkerchief from the pocket of his Nehru jacket, unfolds it. He holds up the charred disc-image of a rearing white horse.

“Kalki,” he says. “The tenth avatar of Vishnu, ender of the Age of Kali. An appropriate name, as we shall see, for an unholy contract between a private company—Odeco—the university and the Badrinath sundarban. Even Ray Power receives research funding from Odeco. But what is Odeco?”

Behind him the virtual globe unpeels into a Mercator projection of Planet Earth. Cities, nations, islands rise out of the surface as if torn free from gravity: blue lines arrow between them, arcing high up into the virtual stratosphere. It is the money trail, the nested shell companies, the storefront offices, the holding groups and the trusts. The web of light wraps the map, the projection folds back into a sphere as a ray of light arcs up from the Seychelles and plunges ballistically towards Varanasi: a Jyotirlinga reversed, the creative light of Siva that burst from the earth of Kashi, returning after its trip around the curvature of the universe.

“Odeco is a venture capital fund domiciled in tax havens,” Mr. Nandha continues. “Its methods are…unorthodox. It has a small shop-window office in Kashi but its preferred mode of operation is through a network of distributed aeai trading systems. The Pasta-Tikka excommunication involved just such a system, unwittingly sold on to Jashwant. It had been hybridised in Badrinath to run an illegal betting system but its operating core was always for Odeco, trading away in the background.”

“To what end?” asks Arora.

“I believe to fund the creation of Kalki, a Generation Three artificial intelligence.”

Murmurs from the Ministry seniors. Mr. Nandha raises a hand and the orb of information collapses in on itself. The Ministry men blink in the bright sun.

“An impressive presentation as ever, Nandha,” Arora says slipping off his ’hoek.

“A stimulating but clear presentation is the most effective means of establishing the case.” Mr. Nandha sets the ivory disc on the desktop.

“The Badrinath sundarban was destroyed,” Sudarshan says.

“Yes, I believe by the Kalki aeai to cover its tracks.”

“You hinted that Odeco also fund Ray Power. How far does this thing go? Are you suggesting that we go after Ranjit Ray? The man is a virtually a Mahatma now.”

“I suggest a close investigation of his youngest son, Vishram Ray, who has taken over the Research and Development Division.”

“Before you go against any Ray, you had better have a damned tight case.”

“Sir, this is a Generation Three aeai investigation. All avenues should be pursued. Odeco has also funded an extraterritorial medical facility in the Free Trade Zone at Patna through an American Midwestern fund management corporation. This, too, is a subject of investigation. At present I rule nothing out.”

“Odeco is your immediate target,” Arora says. Behind him against the panoramic windows the storm front breaks like a black wave.

“I believe it is now the sole link to the Generation Three. I require a full airborne tactical support unit with police backup, with an immediate embargo on all information traffic in and out of Odeco. I also require…”

“Mr. Nandha, this country is on a war footing.”

“I am aware of that, sir.”

“Our military resources are fully occupied defending threats to our nation.”

“Sir, this is a Generation Three aeai. It is an entity ten thousand times more intelligent than any of us. That, I believe, is a threat to our nation.”

“I have to sell this to the Ministry of Defence,” Arora says. “And there is the karsevak problem—they could flare up again at any time.” His face looks as if he has swallowed a snake. “Nandha, when did we last request a full tactical support unit?”

“As you are aware, sir.”

“My colleague Sudarshan may not be aware.”

“The recapture and secure incarceration of J. P. Anreddy.”

“For the benefit of my colleague Sudarshan.”

“Mr. Anreddy was a notorious dataraja, eight of spades on the FBI’s most-wanted deck of cards. He had twice escaped from lawful custody using microscale robots to infiltrate his prison. I requested a full military support unit to recapture him and incarcerate him in specially designed maximum-surveillance panopticon unit.”

“That will have come cheap,” Sudarshan mutters.

“Mr. Nandha, maybe you are not yet aware, but J. P. Anreddy has filed harassment charges against you.”

Mr. Nandha blinks.

“I was not aware of that, sir.”

“He claims that you interrogated him without recourse to legal representation, that you used psychological torture, and that you exposed him to the threat of physical emperilment to his life.”

“Might I say, sir, that at the moment Mr. Anreddy’s allegations are of small concern to me. What is.”

“Nandha, I need to ask this. Is everything all right at home?”

“Sir, is my professionalism under question?”

But it is as if a single steel-jacketed slug has ripped out half his spine and it is the sheer shock of being dead that holds him upright.

“Your colleagues have noticed that you’ve been absorbed in your work—too much absorbed. Intense, I think, is their word.”

“Is it not good that a man treats serious work seriously?”

“Yes, but not at the expense of other things.”

“Sir, my wife is the treasure of my life. She is my dove, my bulbul, my shining light. When I go home she delights me.”

“Thank you, Nandha,” Sudarshan hastens. “We all have much to occupy our attention these days.”

“If I seem absorbed, distracted even, it is only because I believe this Generation Three to be the most serious threat this department has faced since its inception. If I may offer an opinion?”

“Your opinions are always valued here, Nandha,” Arora says.

“This department was established out of our government’s desire to be seen to comply with the international agreement of artificial intelligence licensing. Failing to act against a Generation Three aeai could give the Americans reason to push their Awadhi allies into invasion on the grounds that Bharat is a haven for cyber-terror.”

Arora studies the grain in the desktop. Sudarshan sits back in his leather chair, fingertips bouncing off each other as he considers Mr. Nandha’s submission. Finally he says, “Excuse us one moment.” Sudarshan raises a hand and the air goes flat around Mr. Nandha. The Superintendent has summoned a mute field. The two men swivel in their chairs, turning leather backs to him. Mr. Nandha presses his hands together in an unconscious namaste and looks out at the flickers of lightning pressing the edge of the monsoon. It must break. Tonight. It will break.

My shining light. My dove, my bulbul. Treasure of my life. She delights me, when I go home. When I go home. Mr. Nandha closes his eyes at the sudden clench of panic inside him. When he goes home, he does not know what he will find.

The flat air unfolds into space and sound. The conference is done.

“There is merit in your argument, Nandha. What exactly would you require?”

“I have a military briefing prepared, it can be sent at a moment’s notice.”

“You have this all worked out,” Sudarshan says. “It must happen, sir.”

“There is no doubt of that. I will authorise your action against Odeco.”

36: PARVATI, MR. NANDHA

This morning Bharti on the Breakfast Banquette wears her Serious News Face. Thanks to Raj for that analysis of what the Khan Scandal might mean for Sajida Rana and here’s a message from us at Breakfast with Bharti to the brave jawans at Kunda Khadar: keep it up boys, you’re doing a great job, we’re all right behind you. But now here’s the latest gupshup from Town and Country and all the talk is Aparna and Ajay’s upcoming wedding, the event of the season and here’s a real Bharti Breakfast Breakthrough: an exclusive peek at Aparna’s dress.

Cheered, Parvati Nandha sails into the kitchen to find her mother at the stove stirring a pot of dal.

“Mother, what are you doing?”

“Making you a proper breakfast. You don’t look after yourself.”

“Where is Ashu?”

“Oh, that idle lump. I dismissed her. I’m certain she was stealing from you.”

The early morning joy from the Town and Country exclusive evaporates. “You did what?”

“I told her to go. I gave her a week’s wages in lieu of notice. It was fifteen hundred rupees, I gave it to her out of my own purse.”

“Mother, that was not your decision.”

“Somebody had to make it. She was robbing you blind, never mind her cooking.”

“Mr. Nandha requires a special diet. Have you any idea how hard it is to get a decent cook these days? By the way, have you seen my husband?”

“He left early. He is working on a most important and trying case, he says. He would not take any breakfast. You need to take him in hand and tell him that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The brain cannot function if the stomach is not well-lined. It never ceases to amaze me how stupid supposedly educated people can be. If he had some of my dal and roti.”

“Mr. husband has conditions, he cannot eat this stuff.”

“Nonsense. It is good, nutritious food. This bland, pale city diet is no good for him. He is withering away. You only have to look at him, pale and tired all the time, and no energy for anything, you know what I mean. He needs strong, honest country food. This morning he came in, I thought I was looking at one of those hijra/nute things on the television news this morning.”

“Mother!” Parvati bangs her hands on the table. “This is my husband.”

“Well, he doesn’t act like it,” Mrs. Sadurbhai declares. “I’m sorry, but it has to be said. A year you have been man and wife, and am I hearing ayas singing and little laughter? Parvati, I have to ask, is he working properly? You can get this checked, there are doctors specially for men. I have seen the advertisements in the Sunday papers.”

Parvati stands up, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Mother. No. I am going up to my garden. I intend to spend the morning there.”

“I have messages to run myself. I have things I need to get for the evening meal. By the way, where do you keep the cook’s grocery money? Parvati?” She has already left the kitchen. “Parvati? You really should have some dal and roti.”

That morning Krishan works staking up the young plants and binding the climbers and covering seedlings against the coming storm. In a single night the wall of cloud has leapt closer, to Parvati Nandha it seems about to topple over on her, crush her and her gardens and the whole government apartment building beneath its blackness. The heat and humidity appall her but she cannot go downstairs, not yet.

“You came to see me yesterday,” she says. Krishan is shutting down the irrigation system. “Yes,” he says. “When I saw you get up and run out, I wondered.”

“What did you wonder?”

“If it was something I had said, or done, or maybe the cricket.”

“I loved the cricket. I would love to go back.”

“The team has gone home. Their government recalled them, it was not safe for them to stay, with the war.”

“With the war, yes.”

“Why did you leave like that?”

Parvati spreads a dhuri on the ground in the scented arbour. She arranges the cushions and bolsters and settles among them.

“Come and lie beside me.”

“Mrs. Nandha.”

“No one is looking. Even if they were no one would care. Come and lie down beside me.”

She pats the ground, Krishan kicks off his work boots and settles beside her, lying on his side, propped up on an elbow. Parvati lies on her back, hands folded across her breasts. The sky is creamy, close, a dome of heat. She feels she just needs to reach her hand out and plunge it into it. It would feel milky and thick.

“What do you think of this garden?”

“Think? It’s not really for me to think, I’m just building it, that’s all.”

“As the man who is building it then, what do you think?”

He rolls on to his back. Parvati feels a touch of warm wind on her face.

“Of all my projects, this is the most ambitious and I think it is the one of which I am most proud. I think if people could see it, it would help me greatly in my career.”

“My mother thinks it is not worthy of me,” Parvati says. The thunder is closer today, intimate. “She thinks I should have trees, for privacy; rows of ashok trees like the gardens out in the Cantonment. But I would say we have privacy here, wouldn’t you?”

“I would say so, yes.”

“It’s strange; it is like we can only have so much privacy. Out in the Cantonment you have your walled gardens and your ashok trees and your charbagh but everyone knows your business every hour of every day.”

“Did something happen at the cricket?”

“I was stupid, that’s all. Very stupid. I imagined caste was the same as class.”

“What happened?”

“I showed myself to have no class. Or rather, not the right class. Krishan, my mother wants me to go with her to Kotkhai. She says she is worried about the war. She fears Varanasi may be attacked. Varanasi has never been attacked in three thousand years; she just wants to hold me ransom so Mr. Nandha will promise me a million things, the house in the Cantonment, the chauffeured car, the Brahmin baby.”

She feels his muscles tighten beside her.

“Will you go?”

“I can’t go to Kotkhai and I can’t go to the Cantonment. But Krishan, I cannot stay here, on this rooftop.” Parvati sits up, listening, alert. “What time is it?”

“Eleven thirty.”

“I must go. Mother will be back. She would not miss Town and Country for a million rupees.” Parvati dusts the rooftop grit from her clothes, rearranges the drape of her sari, flicks her long straight hair over her left shoulder. “I’m sorry, Krishan. I shouldn’t burden you. You have a garden to grow.”

She flits barefoot across the roof garden. Moments later he hears the blaring theme from Town and Country drift up the stairs. Krishan moves from bed to bed, tying down his growing things.

Mr. Nandha pushes the plate away from him untouched. “This is brown food. I cannot eat brown food.”

Mrs. Sadurbahai does not remove the thali but stands resolutely by the stove.

“That is good honest country fare. What is wrong with my cooking that you cannot eat it?”

Mr. Nandha sighs.

“Wheat, pulses, potato. Carbohydrate carbohydrate carbohydrate. Onions, garlic ghee. Heavy heavy spices.”

“My husband.” Parvati starts to say but Mr. Nandha cuts in.

“I have a white diet. It is all Ayurvedically calculated and balanced. What has happened to my white diet sheet?”

“Oh that, that went with the cook.”

Mr. Nandha grips the edge of the table. It has been long gathering, like the monsoon heavy in his sinuses. Before Mrs. Sadurbhai abseiling in like Sajida Rana’s elite troops, before the afternoon’s meeting when the reality of politics trampled over his dedication and sense of mission, before even this Kalki case unfolded, he has been assailed by the feeling that he battles against madness, that order has one champion against the gathering chaos, that all others may succumb but one must remain to lift the sword that ends the Age of Kali. Now it is here in his house, in his kitchen, around his table, coiling its white blind roots through his wife.

“You come to my home, you turn my household upside down, you fire my cook, you throw away my diet sheets, I come home from a strenuous and demanding day’s work to find myself served slop I cannot eat!”

“Dearest, really, mother’s only trying to help,” Parvati says but Mr. Nandha’s knuckles are white now.

“Where I come from, a son has respect for his mother,” Mrs. Sadurbhai returns. “You have no respect for me, you think I am an ignorant and superstitious peasant up from the country. You think no one knows anything next to you and your important work and your Angreez education and your horrible, tuneless Western music and your bland white food that is like babies eat and not fit for a real man doing real work. You think you are a gora; you think you are better than me and you think you are better than your wife, my daughter—I know it—but you are not and you are not a firengi; if the white men saw you they would laugh at you, see the babu thinks he is a Westerner! I tell you this, no one has any respect for an Indian gora.”

Mr. Nandha is amazed by the paleness of his knuckles. He can see the blood vessels through them.

“Mrs. Sadurbbai, you are a guest under my roof.”

“A fine roof, a government roof.”

“Yes,” Mr. Nandha says slowly, carefully, as if each word is a weight of water drawn up from a well. “A fine government roof, earned by my care and dedication to my profession. A roof under which I expect the peace and calm and domestic order that profession demands. You know nothing of what I do. You understand nothing of the forces I battle, the enemies I hunt. Creatures with the ambitions of gods, madam. Things you could not even begin to understand, that threaten our every belief about our world, I confront them on a daily basis. And if my horrible, tuneless Western music, if my bland white firengi diet, my cook and my sweeper all give me that peace and calm and domestic order so that I can face another day in my work, is that unreasonable?”

“No,” Mrs. Sadurbhai throws back. She knows she is in a losing stance but she also understands that it is a fool who dies with a weapon undrawn. “What is unreasonable is that I hear no part in all this for Parvati.”

“Parvati, my flower.” The air in the kitchen is slow as syrup. Mr. Nandha feels the momentum and weight behind every word, every movement of his head. “Are you unhappy? Do you want for anything?”

Parvati begins to speak but her mother rides over her.

“What my daughter wants is some recognition that she is wife of a careful and dedicated professional, not hidden away on top of a housing block in the city centre.”

“Parvati, is this true?”

“No,” she says, “I thought maybe.” Again her mother tramples her.

“She could have had her pick of anyone, anyone; civil servants, lawyers, businessmen—politicians even, and they would have taken her and put her in her rightful place and shown her off like a flower and given her things she is due.”

“Parvati, my love, I don’t understand this. I thought we were happy here.”

“Then you indeed understand nothing if you do not know that my daughter could have all the riches of the Mughals and she would set them aside just for a child.”

“Mother! No!” Parvati cries.

“.a proper child. A child that is worthy of her status. A true heir.”

The air is thick now. Mr. Nandha can barely turn his head to Mrs. Sadurbhai.

“A Brahmin? Is that what you are saying? Parvati, is this true?” She weeps at the end of the table, face hidden in her dupatta. Mr. Nandha can feel the table shaking to her sobs. “A Brahmin. A genetically engineered child. A human child that lives twice as long but ages half as fast. A human being that can never get cancer, that can never get Alzheimer’s, that can never get arthritis or any number of the degenerative ills that will come to us, Parvati. Our child. The fruit of our union. Is this what you want? We will take our seed to the doctors and they will open it up and take it apart and change it so that it is no longer ours and then fuse it and put that inside you, Parvati; fill you full of hormones and fertility drugs and push it up into your womb until it takes and you swell up with it, this stranger within.”

“Why would you deny her this?” Mrs. Sadurbhai declaims. “What parent would refuse a chance for a perfect child? You would deny a mother this?”

“Because they are not human!” Mr. Nandha shouts. “Have you seen them? I have seen them. I see them every day in the streets and the offices. They look so young, but there is nothing we know there. The aeais and the Brahmins, they are the destruction of all of us. We are redundant. Dead ends. I strive against inhuman monsters, I will not invite one into my wife’s womb.” His hands are shaking. His hands are shaking. This is not right. See what these women have brought you to? Mr. Nandha pushes himself back from the table and stands up. He feels kilometres tall, vast and diffuse as an avatar from his box, filling buildings. “I am going out now. I have business to attend to. I may not be back until tomorrow, but when I do return, your mother will be gone from under this roof.”

Parvati’s voice follows him down the stairs.

“She is an old woman, it is late, where will she go? You cannot throw an old woman out on to the streets.”

Mr. Nandha makes no reply. He has an aeai to excommunicate. As he walks from the lobby of the government apartment block to the government car pigeons fly up around him in a wheezing applause of wings. He grips the ivory Kalki image in his fist.

37: SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

From this turret drummers once welcomed guests as they crossed the causeway over the swamp. Water birds would rise up on either side; egret, cranes, spoonbills, the wild duck that had drawn Moazam Ali Khan to build his hunting lodge here on the Gaghara’s winter floodplain at Ramghar Lake. The lake is dry now, the swamps parched mud, the birds gone. No drums have played from the naqqar khana in Shaheen Badoor Khan’s lifetime. The lodge had been semiderelict even in his father’s time: Asad Badoor Khan, asleep in the arms of Allah beneath his simple marble rectangle in the family graveyard. Over Shaheen Badoor Khan’s lifetime, first rooms then suites then wings were abandoned to the heat and the dust, fabrics rotting and splitting, plaster staining and flaking in the monsoon humidity. Even the graveyard is overgrown with grass and rank weeds, now withered and yellow in drought. The shading ashok trees have been cut down one by one and carried away by the caretakers for fuel.

Shaheen Badoor Khan has never liked the old hunting lodge of Ramghar Kothi. That is why he has come here to hide. No one but those he trusts knows it still stands.

He had sounded the horn for ten minutes before the staff roused themselves to the idea that someone might want to visit the lodge. They were an aged couple, poor but prideful Muslims, he a retired schoolteacher. For struggling against entropy they were permitted a wing rent-free and paid a weekly handful of rupees for rice and dal. The surprise on old man Musa’s face as he swung open the double gates could not be hidden. It might have been the unannounced visit after four years of neglect. Or, he might know everything from Voice of Bharat news. Shaheen Badoor Khan drove into the shelter of the stable cloister and ordered his lodge keeper to bar the gate.

Before an eastern horizon like a black wall Shaheen Badoor Khan moved among the dusty graves of his clan. His Mughal forefathers had named the monsoon the Hammer of God. That hammer had fallen and he was still alive. He could plan. He could dream. He could even hope.

Moazam Ali Khan’s mausoleum stood among pulpy tree stumps in the oldest part of the graveyard, the first Khan to be buried here on their gravel rise above the flood silts. The shade foliage had been cut down over seasons by the Musas, but the current steward of Ramghar approved of this despoilment. It allowed the small but classically proportioned tomb to stretch its bones, let its sandstone skin breathe, a building unveiled. Shaheen Badoor Khan ducked under the east-facing arch into the domed interior. The delicate jali screens had long since crumbled and he knew from childhood adventures that the burial vault beneath was haunted by bats but even in its decay the tomb of the founder of the political line of Khan graced the visitor. Moazam Ali had led a life of achievement and intrigue storied by the Urdu chroniclers as Prime Minister to the Nawabs of Awadh in the time that power haemorrhaged from the fading Mughals at Agra to their nominal lieges at Lucknow. He had overseen the transformation of a squalid medieval trading city into a flower of Islamic civilization, then, scenting the fragility of it all from the hair-pomade of the envoys of the East India Company, retired from public life with his small but fabled harem of Persian poetesses to study Sufi mysticism in the game-shooting lodge donated by a grateful nation. First and greatest of the Khans. Since Moazam Ali and his poetesses lived and studied among the calling marsh birds, it has been a slow decline to dust. The gloom beneath the dome deepened by the instant as the monsoon advanced on Ramghar Kothi with its promise of swamps refreshed, lakes restored. Shaheen Badoor Khan’s fingers traced the outline of the mihrab, the niche facing Mecca.

Two generations later, Mushtaq Khan lay beneath an elegant chhatri, open to the wind and the dust. Saviour of the family reputation and fortune by remaining staunch to the Raj as North India mutinied. Engraved illustrations in the newspapers of 1857 showed him defending property and family from besieging sepoy hordes, pistol in either hand, cartridge smoke billowing. The truth was less dramatic; a small detachment of mutineers had charged Ramghar and been repulsed without casualty by small arms fire but it was enough to earn him the title among the British of That Faithful Mohammedan; and the Hindus Killer Khan, a kudos among the Lords of the Raj he would carefully convert into a campaign for special political recognition for Muslims. How proud he would have felt, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks, to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophesies from the barrel of an AK47. Time, death, and dust. Temple bells clanged out across the dead marsh. From the south, the horn of a train, constantly blaring. Soft thunder shook the air.

And here, beneath this marble stele on the gravel bank that had the only soil deep enough to accept a grave, was his own grandfather, Sayid Raiz Khan, judge and nation builder who had kept his wife and family safe through the Partition Wars in which a million people died, steadfast in his belief that there must be an India and that India, to be all Nehru claimed on that midnight in 1947, must have a seat of honour for Muslims. Here, his own father; campaigning lawyer and campaigning Parliamentarian in two Parliament Houses, one in Delhi, one in Varanasi. He had fought his own Partition Wars. The Faithful Mohammedan Khans, each generation warring against the achievements of the previous one, unto the last drop.

The headlights of the car are visible for kilometres across the flat, treeless land. Shaheen Badoor Khan descends the crumbling steps from the drum tower to open the gate. Ramghat’s servants are old and meek and deserving of sleep. He starts at a touch of rain on his lip, gently tastes it with his tongue.

I started a war for this.

The Lexus pulls into the courtyard. Its black sleek carapace is jewelled with rain. Shaheen Badoor Khan opens the door. Bilquis Badoor Khan steps out. She wears a formal shalwar in blue and gold, chador pulled over her head. He understands. Hide your face. His is a people that once could die from shame.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. She raises a hand. Not here. Not now. Not in front of the servants. He indicates the pillared chhatri of the drum turret, stands aside as his wife brushes past, lifting her hem to take the steep steps. The rain has a rhythm now, the southeastern horizon a celebration in lightning. Rain runs in ropes from the edge of the domed roof of the octagonal Mughal drum tower. Shaheen Badoor Khan says, “Before anything else, I have to tell you how very, how profoundly sorry I am over what has happened.” The words taste like dust on his lips, the dust of his ancestors with the rain seeping down towards them. They swell in his mouth. “I.no. We had an agreement, I broke it, somehow that got out. The rest will be history. I have been intolerably foolish and it has rebounded on me.”

He had not known when she first suspected but, since Dara was born, it had become obvious that Bilquis could not be all the things he desired. Theirs was the last Mughal marriage, of dynasty and power and expedience. They had spoken of it overtly only once, after Jehan had left for university and the haveli was suddenly echoing and too full of servants. The conversation had been forced, dry, painful; the sentences couched in allusion and elision for the house staff who overheard everything, just long enough to lay down the agreement that he would never allow it to threaten family and government and she would remain the proper, dutiful politician’s wife. By then they had not slept together for a decade.

It. They had never given the thing between them a name. Shaheen Badoor Khan is not now certain there is one. His affliction? His vice? His weakness, thorn in the flesh? His perversion? There are no words in the language between two people for its.

The rain is so heavy Shaheen Badoor Khan can hardly make himself heard.

“I have a few favours left; I have arranged a way out of Bharat; it is a direct flight to Kathmandu. There will be no difficulty entering Nepal. From there we can connect on to anywhere in the world. My own preferences are for Northern Europe, perhaps Finland or Norway. These are large underpopulated countries where we can live anonymously. I have funds in transportable bank drafts set aside, it will be enough for us to buy a property and live adequately, if perhaps not in the comfort we enjoy here in Bharat. Prices are steep and we would have difficulty adjusting to the climate but I think Scandinavia is the best for us.”

Bilquis’s eyes are closed. She holds a hand up.

“Please, stop this.”

“It does not have to be Scandinavia, New Zealand is another fine, remote country.”

“Not Scandinavia, not New Zealand. Shaheen, I will not go with you. I have had enough; you are not the one who has to apologise. I am. Shaheen, I broke the agreement. I told them. You think you are the only one with a secret life; no! You’re not! And that always was you, Shaheen; so arrogant, that you are the only one can have lies and secrets. Shaheen, for the past five years, I have been working for N. K. Jivanjee. The Shivaji, Shaheen. I, the Begum Bilquis Badoor Khan, betrayed you to the Hinduvavadis.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the rain, the thunder, his wife’s voice smear into a thin hiss. He understands now how it might be to die of shock.

“What is this?” he hears himself say. “This is nonsense, nonsense, you are talking nonsense, woman.”

“I suppose it must seem like nonsense, Shaheen, a wife betraying her husband to his greatest enemies. But I did, Shaheen. I betrayed you to the Hindus. Your own wife. Who you turned away from, every night while we still slept together. Five conceptions, five fucks. I counted, five fucks, a woman remembers that. And only two of those were allowed to come to term as our fine sons. Five fucks. I’m sorry, does my coarseness shock you? Is this not how society Begums should talk? You should hear what those good Begums say among themselves, Shaheen. Woman talk. Oh, your ears would burn for shame. Shameless creatures we are, in our chambers and societies. They know, all the women know. Five fucks Khan. I told them, but not it. That I didn’t tell them, Shaheen.

“I didn’t tell them because I still thought, this is a great man, a star climbing in a black sky, with high office and achievements before him, even if he lies in his separate bed and dreams of things I cannot even see as human. But a wife can push things down to the bottom of her mind if she thinks that her husband is a man who could rise to greatness, as great as any of your ancestors buried out there, Shaheen. A woman who could have had her choice of men, who would have loved her in heart and in body, who might also have risen to great stations. A woman who had her own education and potential that was forced into the golden purdah because for every one woman lawyer there are five men. Do you understand what I am saying, Shaheen? Such a woman expects things. And if that star rose, and then it stopped, and stayed fixed, and rose no higher and other stars rose above it and outshone it…What should that woman do then, Shaheen? What should that wife and Begum do?”

Shaheen Badoor’s hands cover his face in shame but he cannot stop the words that cut through the rain, the thunder, his own fingers. He had thought himself a good and true advisor to his leader, government, and country but he remembers how he had reacted when Sajida Rana had offered him a cabinet position on the flight back from Kunda Khadar: fear of discovery, fear that the it was spilling out of him like blood from a cut throat. Now he sees how many times and places in his career he could have taken that step into public power and had drawn back, paralysed by the inevitable fall.

“Jivanjee?” he says weakly. The heart of the madness in this ancient Mughal drum turret in the heart of a monsoon storm: his wife an agent of N. K. Jivanjee. She laughs. There is no more terrible sound.

“Yes, Jivanjee. All those afternoons when I would entertain the Law Circle, when you were at the Sabha, what did you think we were doing? Talking about property prices and Brahmin children and cricket scores? Politics, Shaheen. The finest woman lawyers in Varanasi; how else do you think we would amuse ourselves? We were a shadow cabinet. We ran a simulation on our palmers. I tell you this, there was more talent in my jharoka than there was in Sajida Rana’s Cabinet room. Oh, Sajida Rana, the great mother who has made it impossible for any other woman to match her. Well, in our Bharat, Shaheen, there was no water war. In our Bharat there was no three-year drought, no hostility with the United States because we were in the pockets of the datarajas. In our Bharat we assembled a Ganga Valley Water Management plan with Awadh and the States of Bengal. We ran your country better than you did, Shaheen, and do you know why? To see if we could. To see if we could do it better. And we did.

“And it was the talk of the capital but you don’t hear that kind of talk, do you? Women’s talk. Talk of no consequence. But N. K. Jivanjee heard. The Shivaji heard, and that is another thing I cannot forgive. A Hindu politician recognised the talent, whatever its gender, whatever its religion, that her husband could not. We became the Shivaji policy unit, our little afternoon group taking chai in our gardens. It was a game worth the playing now. I used to hope that you would not come home and tell me what you were up to in the Sabha so I could try to read your mind, ask myself what you would do, try and outguess and outmanoeuvre you. All those times you would come home cursing that Jivanjee because he always seemed to be that one step ahead, that was me.” She touches her breast, not seeing her husband now, not seeing the rain breaking over Ramghar, seeing only her memory of a great game that became the rule of her life.

“Jivanjee,” Shaheen Badoor Khan whispers. “You sold me to Jivanjee.” And the dam that held him in so long, so high and wide, breaks and Shaheen Badoor Khan finds that inside him, all these years, all these lies and concealments, is only a roar, an inchoate howl like the nothing before creation, shrieking out of him. He cannot stop it, he cannot hold it in. Its vacuum tugs at his inner organs. He is on his knees. He crawls on his knees towards his wife; everything is destroyed. He had allowed himself to hope and for that pride, it was taken away, everything was taken away. He cannot hope the animal howl breaks into yelping, retching sobs. Bilquis backs away. She is afraid. This was never in her strategies and game plans. Shaheen Badoor Khan is on his hands and knees now, like a dog, barking up shrieks of pain.

“Stop, stop it,” Bilquis begs. “Please, no. Please, have some dignity.”

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks up at her. Her hand goes to her mouth in horror. There is nothing there she can recognise. The game has destroyed them both.

She steps away from the ruined thing huddled on the smooth sandstone of the drum turret, retching up the infected pus of its life. She finds the sandstone steps, flees into the curtains of rain.

38: MR. NANDHA

The austere polyphony of the Bach Magnificat swirls around Mr. Nandha as the tilt-jet banks over the river. The hot wind that heralds the monsoon buffets the ghats. Flaws spun off the storm front send the ordered flotillas of diyas scattering across Mother Ganga. The tilt-jet lurches on the gusts. Mr. Nandha sees lightning reflected in the pilot’s visor, then her hands bring them safely about. Ahead of him the other three aircraft in the squadron are patterns of moving lights on the greater city glow. Kashi. City of light.

In Mr. Nandha’s augmented vision, gods tower over Varanasi, vaster even than the monsoon, their vahanas crawling in the concrete and shit, their crowns in the stratosphere. Gods like thunderclouds, attributes held aloft and crackling with lightning, multiple arms performing the sacred mudras with meteorological deliberateness. The containment went in as the excommunication force lifted off from the military airfield. Prasad has intercepted a few hundred Level One aeais running out along the cable network but otherwise it has been as quiet as death or innocence in the fifth-floor office unit. The squadron splits, navigation lights darting acrobatically between Ganesha, Kartikkeya, Kali, and Krishna. Mr. Nandha’s lips silently pray Magnificat magnificat as the tilt-jet banks and plunges through Ganesha in a spray of handsized pixels. A spear in the side, thinks Mr. Nandha. The pilot swivels the wing-tip engines into descent mode and takes them down through veils of divine light. Mr. Nandha thumbs off the visuals. The gods are extinguished as if by unbelief but years of intimacy have given Mr. Nandha a sense of their presence, an electricity in the back of the skull. His gun is a dark weight against his heart.

Odeco corporate headquarters is a low-rent office block in a labyrinth of school-uniform clothiers and sari merchants. The pilot spins the tilt-jet to fit into the narrow street; wing-tip lights scrape balconies and power poles as she brings her ship down into the junction. The backwash from the engines tumbles racks of bicycles across the street. A cow idles out of the way. Shop owners haul down their billowing, flapping wares. Wheels unfold, kiss the concrete. Mr. Nandha goes through to the troop hold and his excommunication team: Ram Lalli, Prasad, Mukul Dev, Vik queasy in riot armour over his Star-Asia rock-boyz gear.

The tilt-jet settles on its shock absorbers. Nothing moves, nothing stirs but the wind from the edge of the monsoon, driving papers and scraps of torn filmi posters through the narrow streets. A street dog barks. The ramp lowers as the engines power down. Tilt-jets make point-perfect landings at the two other drop points. The fourth spins in the air against the neon towers of New Varanasi, swoops in over the roof of the office unit and swings its engines into hover The roar in the narrow alleys is like Vedic armies clashing in the sky. Its belly opens and Bharati air-cav sowars spool down on droplines. On the woman pilot’s helmet display they abseil into a yawning canyon of gods.

Shaped demolition charges open up the roof like a can of ghee. Communicating by hand signals, the sowars reattach their karabiners to the solar array and dive in.

Mr. Nandha advances through a graveyard of bicycles. A touch to the right ear sets the ’hoek and Indra, Lord of Rain and Lightning, swirls into manifestation over the haberdasher’s quarter of old Kashi mounted on his elephant vahana, four-tusked Airavata. The Vajra of judgement is raised in his right hand. Mr. Nandha shifts his hand to his gun. True lightning flickers through Indra’s translucent red body; Mr. Nandha looks up. Rain. On his face. He stops, wipes the drip from his forehead, stares at it in wonder. In the same instant, Indra swirls and he feels the gun aim him.

The robots come bounding down the unlit gali, a chitter of tiny running feet and tapping claws. Monkey robots cat robots robots like wingless birds and long-legged insects, a wave of clicking motion surging towards the main street. Mr. Nandha levels his gun, fires, aims fires aims fires aims fires. Bach’s towering counterpoints roar in his ears. He never misses. Indra guides true and sure. The robots spin and smash into each other and wheel into walls and doorways as the fat, random drops steepen into rain. Mr. Nandha advances up the gali, gun held before him, unerringly seeking its targets with its red laser eye and sending them spinning and smoking and burning in shaped pulses of electromagnetic radiation. Monkey robots scale the cables and chati-mag posters and metal advertising sheets for bottled water and language schools, scrambling for the rooftops and comlines. Indra brings them down with his thunderbolt. Behind Mr. Nandha the agents of the Ministry form a line, picking off those that make it into the excommunication zone. Mr. Nandba silences Johann Sebastian and lifts his hand.

“Cease fire!”

The power lines fizz with overload as the last escapees are consigned to scrap. Glancing behind him, Mr. Nandha reads the distaste on Vik’s face as he he struggles with his big multirole assault rifle. This is what you wanted, Mr. Nandha thinks. A piece of the action. The gun and the gear.

The rain falls luminous through the belly-spots from the hovering aircraft. Jet-wash and the rising storm wind swirl the drops into glowing veils.

“Something is not right here,” Mr. Nandha says quietly and then the monsoon breaks over Varanasi. In an instant Mr. Nandha is soaked to the bone. His dove grey suit is plastered to his skin. Blinded, he tries to wipe the rain from his eyes. Unbowed by the monsoon, Indra towers through the lightning and rain over five-thousand-year-old Kashi.

The sowars crash down through the roof onto the desks and filing cabinets and collapsed ceiling fans, kicking over displays and chai cups and water coolers. Weapons levelled, they quarter the open-plan office with their nightwatchs. It’s a dead black office in the middle of a downpour. Rain cascades through the holes they have blown in the roof. The subadar-major signs for her sowars to make safe the evidence. As they shift processor cubes and stacks out of the rain she calls Mr. Nandha on her throat-mike. Another mudra and her troopers spread out, scanning on full sensory array for aeai activity. Lightning spooks her face. She can hear the regular police jawans work their ways up through the lower levels. She gestures for her warriors to spread and secure. There’s nothing here. Whatever spirit dwelled in this place is fled.

Mr. Nandha signals his team to close up.

“What’s not right?” Vik says. His hair is streaked flat, his nose runs rain, and his baggy clothes cascade at the creases. He raises his eyes to Indra, high above the chaotic roofscape of Kashi.

“This is a decoy.” Mr. Nandha kicks a fist-curled corpse of a maintenance robot. “This is not the Generation Three breaking itself down into subaeais and escaping. This is deliberate. They want us to destroy everything.” He calls into his palmer-glove. “All units, cease firing, do not ^eng^ag^e.”

But the two squads to the north and west are too busy chasing monkey-robots over bales of sari silk and through racks of schoolgirls’ uniforms while the proprietors throw their hands up in loud lamentation as the pulses wipe their till memories. The jawans’ combat suits turn sari-colour as they run, whooping, after the leaping, bounding machines through storerooms, past chowkidars hiding in doorways, hands over their heads, up and up concrete staircases until the last of the robots are driven under the guns of the sowars. It is like a Raj duck-shoot. For a few moments the light of induced EM-charges outshines the lightning.

Mr. Nandha enters the destroyed office. He looks at the circular waterfalls pooling on the cheap carpet. He looks at the smoking robots and the shattered screens and smashed desks. Mr. Nandha purses his lips, vexed.

“Who is in command here?”

The subadar-major’s helmet opens and retracts into the cowl of her combat suit. “Subadar-Major Kaur, sir.”

“This is a crime-scene investigation, subadar-major.”

Voices, feet scuffling at the door. The sowars restrain a small but evidently vigorous Bangla, smart as a mynah in an inexplicably dry black suit.

“I demand to see.”

“Admit him,” Mr. Nandha orders. Shafts of search-light beaming through the streaming holes in the roof light the office. The Bangla looks around him in shock as the soldiers stand back.

“What is the meaning of this?” the Bangla demands.

“You are, sir?” Mr. Nandha asks, acutely conscious of his saturated suit.

“My name is Chakraborty, I am a lawyer with this company.”

Mr. Nandha holds up his left hand. The picture in his palm displays the open hand symbol of the Ministry. Palm within a palm.

“I am conducting an investigation into the illegal harbouring of a Generation Three Artificial Intelligence contrary to Section twenty-seven of the International Treaty of Lima,” Mr. Nandha says. The Bangla blinks at him.

“Buffoon.”

“Sir, these are the premises of Odeco Incorporated?”

“They are.”

“Please read this warrant.”

The sowars have the generator up and string clip-lamps around the office. Chakraborty swivels Mr. Nandha’s hand into the light of the nearest lamp. “This is what is known informally as an excommunication order.”

“From the office of the Minister of Justice himself.”

“I will be launching an official appeal and civil action for damages.”

“Of course, sir. You would not be acting professionally otherwise, Now, please be careful; my agents have work to do and there are live weapons present.”

Sowar engineers rig waterproof covers over the holes in the ceiling, Jawans spool power cables to the processors; Vik is already at the terminals, his own version of the avatar box jacked into the arrays.

“Nothing here.”

“Show me.”

Mr. Nandha feels Chakraborty at his shoulder, smirking as he bends over Vik squatting at the roll screen. Vik thumbs through stack after stack of registers.

“If there was ever any Gen Three here, it’s long gone,” he says. “But hey, look at this! Our friend Vishram Ray.”

“Sir.” Madhvi Prasad at another screen. She pulls up a pair of broken-backed typist’s chairs. Mr. Nandha settles beside her. His socks squeak inside his shoes and he winces at the indignity. It is bad to conduct the most important investigation of your career in creaking cotton socks. It is worse to be called a buffoon by a sleek Bangla lawyer. But what is worst is to be accused of being no man at all, a ball-less hijra, in your kitchen, under your own roof, by your wife’s mother, by a withered country widow. Mr. Nandha pushes the humiliation away. Those naked sadhus dancing in the rain endure greater for less.

“What am I looking at?” Mr. Nandha asks. Prasad swings the screen to him.

It is bright morning at the new ghat at Patna. Ferries and hydrofoils crowd the edges of the shot, businessmen and workers throng the background; behind them the towers of the new commercial Bund glitter in the east-light. In the foreground stand three smiling people. One is Jean-Yves Trudeau, the other his wife, Anjali. Their arms are around a third person who stands between them, a girl in her late teens, wheat-complexioned like the best matrimonial advertisements. She is a head shorter than the Westerners but her smile is wide and radiant despite her shaved scalp on which Mr. Nandha can read the hairline scars of recent surgery.

Mr. Nandha bends closer. Chilled by the rain, his breath steams in the close blue glow of the stack-and-stick neons.

“This is what they wanted us to destroy.” He touches a finger to the girl’s face. “This one is still alive.”

39: KUNDA KHADAR

For ten days the slow missiles have crossed the flat, scorched lands of western Bharat. Even as the Awadhi garrison at Kunda Khadar fled before the bold Bharati jawans, artillery units across an eighty-kilometre front released between two and three hundred autonomous drones from their stubby cylindrical silos. Each carries a payload of ten kilogrammes of high-yield explosive and is the size and shape of a small, densely muscled cat. By day they sleep in shallow scrapes or stacks of half-moon dried dung ladhus. When the night comes they unfold antennae to the moon, stir their folded metal legs and skulk across fields and down dry country drains, feline subtle, feline wary, steering by the light of the moon and quiet chirps of GPS. Truck headlights startle them, they freeze, trusting in their rudimentary chameleon camouflage. No one sees, no one hears, though they slink within centimetres of the tractor mechanic sleeping on his charpoy. By the time the first Brahmin salutes the sun on the banks of holy Ganga they have burrowed into the sand or cling to the rafters in the smoke and shadows of the temple ceiling or have submerged themselves at the bottom of the village tank. They are level 1.4 aeais but their fuel cells run on a tungsten-moderated methane reaction. They converge across Bharat navigating from cow fart to cow fart.

In the late hours of a July evening the slow missiles arrive on target. For the past two nights they have moved through city streets, running along suburban garden walls standing hunting cats, leaping from rooftop to rooftop across the narrow inner-city alleys, jumping down tiers of balconies to dart silent and dark across city streets, banding together in twos and threes, in tens and dozens, finally in their hundreds, a swarm of plastic paws and flexing whisker antennae, setting the pi-dogs to barking. But no one heeds the barking of pi-dogs.

At ten thirty, two hundred and twenty slow missiles infiltrate all key systems at Ray Power’s Allahabad Main electrical distribution station and simultaneously detonate themselves.

Western Bharat from Allahabad to the border is blacked out. Communication lines go silent. Command and control centres are paralysed, scrambling to get their backup system online. Satellite ground stations go blind. Air defence switches to auxiliary. Emergency power-up takes three minutes. Restoring comlinks and control chains takes another two minutes. It is a further three before Bharat is fully defence-capable.

In those eight minutes, one hundred and fifty Awadhi helicopter drop-ships supported by aeai ground-attack craft morph out of stealth and offload infantry and light mechanised units five kilometres inside the Bharati border. As APCs drill through dirt-scrabble border villages and mortar teams set up advanced positions, heavy armoured units move under air support from their holding positions and sweep in towards the northern end of the dam. Simultaneously two armoured divisions punch through Bharat’s lightly defended border at Rewa and push up the Jabalpur road towards Allahabad,

By the time the backup power is online and command and intelligence systems are restored, Bharat’s western artillery positions are staring down the muzzles of Franks main battle tanks while swarms of rat-robots take out the defensive minefields and the first mortar rounds whistle eerily onto the Kunda Khadar dam. Surrounded, cut off from the command structure and naked to air power, support pinned down holding Allahabad, General Jha surrenders. Five thousand soldiers lay down their weapons. It is the most triumphant eight minutes in Awadh’s history of arms. It is the most ignominious in Bharat’s.

At ten forty the cell network is restored. Within ten minutes palmers are ringing all over rain-punished Varanasi.

40: VISHRAM

Under the instruction of old Ram Das the outdoor staff carry the garden furniture to the shelter of the Shanker Mahal’s generous porches. Vishram walks past a line of white cast iron and wicker crossing the lawn. His mother sits alone at the far end of the garden, a little pale woman at a little white table highlit against the towering dark of the monsoon. Like a British dowager, she will wait until the storm is upon her before she relinquishes her redoubt. Vishram perennially remembers her thus, on the lawns, at her white tables, beneath her clustered parasols, with her ladies and her chai on a silver tray. Vishram always loved the house best in the rain, when it seemed to float free against the green and the black clouds. Then its dehydrated ghosts returned to life and his room sounded to their creakings and clickings. In this season the Shanker Mahal smells of old wood and damp and growing, as if the plant patterns on his bedroom ceiling might burst into bud and flower. The entwined figures on the pillars and brackets relax in the rain.

“Vishram, my bird. That suit does look well on you.”

He summons back the last garden chair with a crook of his finger. Lightning glimmers beyond the Ashok trees. Beyond them, headlights slash through the murk. “Mamaji.” Vishram inclines his head. “I won’t keep you. I need to know where he is.”

“Who, dear?”

“Who do you think?”

“Your father is a man who takes the spiritual life seriously. If he has chosen the sadhu’s path of seclusion, that should be respected. What do you need from him?”

“Nothing,” Vishram Ray says. He thinks he sees his mother duck away a sly smile as she lifts her cup of Darjeeling to her lips. Electric hot wind buffets the flowerbeds; peacocks shriek in panic. “I want to tell him something I’ve decided.”

“A business thing? You know I’ve never had a head for business,” Mamata Ray says.

“Mother,” Vishram says. All his life she had maintained this soft lie; simple Mamata understands nothing of business, wants nothing to do with it, that is men’s affairs, business and money and power. No decision had ever been taken, no investment made, no purchase recommended, no research authorised, that Mamata Ray had not been there saying she knew nothing but what would happen if, and how would that be, and in the long run might this? Vishram did not doubt that her hesitant questions had been at the root of the Shakespearean division of Ray Power, hers the voice that gave Ranjit Ray his blessing to walk away from the world.

Vishram pours himself a cup of the scented Darjeeling tea. He thinks the taste overrefined but it gives himself something to do with his hands. First Rule of Comedy. Always have something to do with your hands.

“I’m buying out Ramesh. I’ve called an extraordinary board meeting.”

“You’ve spoken to Mr. Chakraborty.”

His mother’s eyes are lenses of lead, reflection of the churned grey sky.

“I know what Odeco is.”

“Is this what you want to tell your father?”

“No. What I want to tell him is that I have very few choices here and I’ve made the best I think I can.”

Mamata Ray sets her cup on the table turning it on the saucer so the handle faces exactly to the left. Gardeners and houseboys lean close, anticipating action. The rising wind tugs at their turbans and tassles.

“I argued against it, you know. The decision to split the business. That may surprise you. I argued against it because of you, Vishram. I thought you would waste it, throw it away. I am no different from Govind in that. Your father alone had faith. He was always so interested in what you were doing in that terrible Scottish country. He did quite respect you for having the courage of your own convictions—you always had, Vishram. I said I had no head for business, maybe it is people I have no head for, my own sons. Maybe I am too old to change my opinions.”

Mamata Ray looks up. Vishram feels rain on his face. He sets down his cup—the tea is cold, bitter—and the malis lift first it, then the table. The rain drops heavily on the bougainvillea leaves.

“Your father is doing puja at the Kali temple at Mirzapur,” Mamata Ray calls back from the rear of the procession of garden furniture. The rain is heavy but not so loud as to mask the sound of aircraft engines on approach. “He does puja for the end of an age. Siva’s foot is descending. The dance begins. We have been given over to the goddess of destruction.”

As they reach the safety of the east veranda the clouds burst. Thunder blares as the tilt-jet comes in over the water garden. Navigation lights turn the pelting drops into a curtain as the engines swivel into descent mode and the wheels lower towards Ram Das’ shaved turf. The garden staff shield their eyes.

“Then again, you were right, I always was a flash bastard,” Vishram says to his mother and dashes through the rain, collar of his good suit pulled up, towards his transport. Marianna Fusco waves excitedly from the rear seat.

Old Shastri leads Vishram and Marianna Fusco up the steep galls of Mirzapur. The laneways are narrow and dark and smell of piss and old joss. Kids fall in behind the little procession as it trudges up from the concrete ghats. Vishram glances back at the tilt-jet on the river beach. The pilot has taken his helmet off and sits on the sand a respectful distance from the fuel tanks smoking a cigarette. The monsoon that was breaking over Varanasi has not reached Mirzapur sixty kilometres west. The alleys concentrate the heat into a thing almost tangible; trash swirls in the djinns of stifling, fetid air. Marianna Fusco climbs steadily, letting the stares of the youths and old men slide off her peripheral vision.

The Kali temple is a marble plinth crowded in on every side by shops selling votives and gajras and icons of the goddess custom printed from a huge database of images. Kali is the main business of this end of Mirzapur, a decaying rural town that missed the information revolution and still wonders what happened. The footpaths push up against the water-washed marble steps, even at this late hour they are thronged with devotees. Bells clang constantly. Metal cattle grids herd the worshippers toward the garbhagriha. A cow saunters up and down the steps, bones moving loosely inside its bag of yellow skin. Someone has daubed red and yellow tikka paste between its horns.

“I’ll stay here,” Marianna Fusco says. “Someone’s got to mind those shoes.” Vishram understands the apprehension in her voice. This is a place outside her experience. It is essentially, inexplicably Indian. It makes no concessions to any other sensibilities; all the contradictions and contraries of Bharat are made incarnate in this place of love and devotion to the wrathful manifestation of primal femininity. Black Kali with her garland of heads and terrible swift sword. Even Vishram feels a clench of the alien in his stomach as he ducks under the lintel adorned with musician Mahavidyas, the ten wisdoms that emanate from the yoni of the black goddess.

Shastri remains with Marianna Fusco. Vishram is absorbed into the stream of pilgrims, shuffling through the maze. The temple is low, smoky, claustrophobic. Vishram salutes the sadhus, receives their tilaks for a handful of rupees. The garbhagriha is minute, a narrow slit of a coffin where the black, goggle-eyed image is smothered under swags of marigold garlands. The narrow passage is almost impassable from the crowd pressing around the sanctuary, thrusting their hands through the yonic slit to light incense, offers libations of milk and blood and red-dyed ghee. Thirsty Kali demands seven litres of blood every day. Goats provide it now in sophisticated urban centres like Mirzapur. Vishram’s eyes meet those of the goddess that see past present future, piercing all illusion. Darshan. The surge of people whirls him on. Thunder shakes the temple. The monsoon has come westward. The heat is intense. The bells clang. The devotees chant hymns.

Vishram finds his father in a black windowless subtemple. He almost stumbles over him in the deep darkness. Vishram puts out his hand to steady himself, pulls it back from the lintel, wet. Blood. The floor is thick with ash. As his eyes adjust he sees a rectangular pit in the centre of a room. SmasanaKali is also goddess of the ghats. This is a cremation house. Ranjit Ray sits cross-legged among the ashes. He wears the sadhu’s dhoti and shawl and red Kali tikka. His skin is grey with vibhuti; the white sacred ash streaks his hair and stubble. To Vishram this is not his father. This is a thing you see sitting by a street shrine, sprawling naked in a temple doorway; an alien from another world.

“Dad?”

Ranjit Ray nods. “Vishram. Sit, sit.” Vishram looks around but there is nowhere but ash. It’s probably a worldly thing to worry about your suit. Then again he is worldly enough to know he can get another one. He sits down by his father. Thunder shakes the temple. The bell clangs, the devotees pray.

“Dad, what are you doing here?”

“Puja for the end of an age.”

“This is a terrible place.”

“It’s meant to be. But the eye of faith sees differently and to me it seems not so terrible. It’s right. Fitting.”

“Destruction, Dad?”

“Transformation. Death and rebirth. The wheel turns.”

“I’m buying Ramesh out,” Vishram announces sitting barefoot among the ashes of the dead “That will give me two thirds control over the company and freeze out Govind and his Western partners. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

Vishram sees a flicker of old worldliness in his father’s eyes.

“I’m sure you can guess where the money’s come from.”

“My good friend Chakraborty.”

“You know who—or what, rather—is behind him?”

“I do.”

“How, long have you known?”

“From the start. Odeco contacted me when we embarked on the zero-point project. Chakraborty was admirably direct.”

“It was a hell of a risk, if the Krishna Cops had ever found out. Ray Power, power with conscience, treading lightly on the earth, all that?”

“I see no contradiction. These are living creatures, sentient creatures. We owe them a duty of care. Some of the grameen bankers.”

“Creatures. You said creatures there.”

“Yes I did. There seem to be three Generation Three aeais, but of course their subjective universes do not necessarily overlap though they may share some subroutines. Odeco I believe is a common channel between at least two of them.”

“Chakraborty called the Odeco aeai Brahma.”

Ranjit Ray gives a small knowing smile.

“Did you ever meet with Brahma?”

“Vishram, what would there be to meet with? I met men in suits, I talked to faces on the phone. Those faces may have been real, they may have been Brahma, they may have been its manifestations. Can one meet a distributed entity in any meaningful sense?”

“Did they ever say why they wanted to fund the zero-point project?”

“You will not understand it. I do not understand it.”

Lightning momentarily flashes up the inside of the cremation chamber. Thunder comes hard and heavy on it; strange winds stir the ash.

“Tell me.”

Vishram’s palmer calls. He grimaces in exasperation. Devotees glare at the interruption of profanity in their sanctum. High-priority call. Vishram flicks to audio only. When Marianna Fusco has finished speaking he slides the little device into an inside pocket.

“Dad, we have to leave now.”

Ranjit Ray frowns.

“I can’t understand what you are saying.”

“We have to leave right now. It’s not safe here. The Awadhis have captured the Kunda Khadar dam. Our soldiers have surrendered. There’s nothing between them and Allahabad. They could be here in twenty-four hours. Dad, you’re coming with me. There’re spare seats on the plane. All this has to stop now, you’re an important man with an international reputation.”

Vishram stands, offers a hand down to his father.

“No, I will not come and I will not be ordered around like some doting widow by my own son. I have made my decision, I have walked away and I will not go back. I cannot go back; that Ranjit Ray does not exist any more.”

Vishram shakes his head in exasperation.

“Dad.”

“No. Nothing will happen to me. The Bharat they have invaded is not the one I live in. They cannot touch me. Go. Go on, you go.” He pushes at his son’s knees. “There are things you must do, go on. Nothing must happen to you. I will pray for you, you will be kept safe. Now go.” Ranjit Ray closes his eyes, turns a blind, deaf face.

“I will come back.”

“You won’t find me. I don’t want to be found. You know what you have to do.” As Vishram ducks under the blood-daubed lintel his father calls out. “I was going to tell you. Odeco, Brahma, the aeai—what it’s looking for in the zero-point project. A way out. Out there in all those manifolds of M-Star theory there is a universe where it and those of its kind can exist, live free and safe, and we will never find them. And that is why I am here in this temple, because I want to see the look on Kali’s face when her age comes to an end.”

The rain is falling steadily as Vishram leaves the temple. The marble is greasy with water and dust. The narrow lanes around the temple still throng with people but the street spirit has changed. It is not the zeal of religious devotion, nor is it the communal celebration of rain falling on a drought dry city. Word of the humiliation at Kunda Khadar has passed into general circulation and the galis swarm with brahmins and widows in white and Kali devotees in red and angry young males in Big Label jeans and very fresh shirts. They peer up at television screens or tear hardcopies from printers or cluster round rickshaw radios or boys with news-feeds to their palmers. The noise in the streets rises as news spreads into rumour into misinformation into slogans. Bharat’s bold jawans defeated. The Glory of Bharat crushed. Awadhi divisions already driving around the Allahabad ring road. The sacred soil invaded. Who will save? Who will avenge? Jivanjee Jivanjee Jivanjee! Warrior-karsevaks march to sweep back the invader in waves of their own blood. The Shivaji will redeem the shame of the Ranas.

“Where’s your father?

Rickshaw drivers shove around Vishram as he pulls on his shoes. “He’s not coming with me.”

“I did not think he would, Mr. Ray.” Strange to hear those words from Shastri. Mister. Ray.

“Then can I suggest we get out of here because I feel very white and very Western and very female,” says Marianna Fusco. The steep lanes are streaming and treacherous with rain. “How is it with you things always end in a riot?” Marianna Fusco asks but the spirit on the street is jabbing, ugly, contagious. Vishram can see the tilt-jet on the beach between the overhanging buildings. Behind him a crash; voices lift into panic. He turns to see a tin samosa cart spilled on its side, its cargo of spicy triangles scattered across the gali, hot oil spreading across the shallow steps. A touch from the lighted gas burner; fire fills the narrow alley. Cries, shrieks.

“Come on.” Vishram takes Marianna’s elbow and hurries her down the steps.

The pilot has the engines warmed up as Vishram and Marianna dive into their seats behind him. Shastri steps back out of the blast pattern of the jets, hands raised in blessing. The tilt-jet lifts through the downpour as the people come pouring down the steps like rats rushing to water, waving lathis and picking up sticks and stones to throw at the alien, the invader. The pilot is already too high. He turns his ship and Vishram sees the fire as a pool of heat, spreading from building to building like liquid, undaunted by the rain.

“The Age of Kali,” he whispers. The lowest throw of the dice when human discord and corruption abounds and heaven is closed, when the ears of the gods are deaf and entropy is maximum and there is no hope to speak of. When the earth is destroyed by fire and water, Vishram thinks as the tilt-jet slips into horizontal flight, when time stops and the universe is born anew.

41: LISA

Outside the arch the rain falls like a curtain and Lisa Durnau is on her third gin. She sits on the wicker chair on the marble cloister. The only others on the terrace are two men in cheap suits and sandals, taking tea. From this vantage she can cover main gate and reception desk. The noise of the rain on the tired stone is incredible. It is some storm, even by Midwestern standards. Lightning and everything.

Empty again. She signs to the waiter. They are all young, shy Nepalis dressed as Rajputs, in Bharati Varanasi. She cannot work that. She cannot work most anything up here in the black north. She had just been getting the beautiful civilised south and its soft anarchy then she was set down in the middle of a nation and a city that looked the same and dressed the same but was in every way different.

The taxi driver had taken the words American consulate as an invitation to scam her, driving her round a roundabout with a big statue of Ganesha under a funny little domed pavilion and a hoarding for Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers.

“Sarkhand Roundabout,” the driver shouted. “Danger money danger money.”

There were swastikas sprayed on every flat surface. Lisa could not remember which was the right way round and which was the fascist but either way they made her uneasy.

Rhodes the consular officer thumbed through her accreditations.

“What exactly does this authorise you to do here, Ms. Durnau?”

“Find a man.”

“This is not a good time. Embassy advice is for all US nationals to leave. We can’t guarantee your safety. American interests are being targeted. They burned a Burger King.”

“Extra flame-grilled.”

He had leaked the tiniest, tightest smile. He raised an eyebrow at the Tablet. Lisa Durnau wished she could do that. He handed her documents smartly back to her. “Well, success with your mission, whatever it is. Whatever assistance we can render, we will. And whatever else they say, this is a great city.”

But to Lisa Durnau Varanasi seemed a city of ash, for all its neons and towers and floodlit shikaras. Ash on the streets and the shrines and temples, ash on the foreheads of the holy, ash on the streamlined wings and roofs of the Marutis and phatphats. A sky of ash, dark and breaking in a soft wave of soot. Even through the air-conditioning of her hotel room she could feel greasy hydrocarbon ash on her skin. Lull’s hotel was a lovely old Islamic city house of marble floors and unexpected levels and balconies but her room was unclean. The minibar was empty. There was a strip from a sanitary towel wedged across the toilet bowl. The levels and balconies were full of news crews. She checked the shower, for old times.

There was a second reservation in the Lull party. Ajmer Rao. The Tablet pulled a lo-res shot off the lobby-cam; her. Space-bunny. Shorter than Lisa had imagined. Wide in the ass but that might have been the angle of the lens. What was that on her forehead?

Ajmer Rao. But Lisa Durnau’s first thought was that she was glad Lull was not sleeping with her. And Lull himself. Leaner. Face softer. Terrible, terrible clothes. Encroaching baldness, hair long at the back in compensation. In every way as she had seen him swirl out of the seething pixels of the Tabernacle.

Watching the rain, Lisa Durnau finds she is angry, moltenly angry. All her life she has striven against her father’s Calvinist doctrine of predestination, yet the fact that she is watching the monsoon fall on Varanasi is the result of karmic forces seven billion years old. She, Lull, this wide-assed girl, all play to a script as foreordained and fatalistic as any episode of Town and Country. She is angry because she never had escaped. The complex behaviours of Alterre, of her Calabi-Yau mind-spaces, the cellular automata brawling across her monitor emerged from simple, relentless rules. Rules so simple you might never realise you were governed by them.

She thumbs into Alterre. For fun she enters her current GPS location adjusted for continental drift, taps in full proprioception, and steps into hell. She stands on a furrowed plain of black lava veined red with glowing cracks. The sky is curdled with smoke lit by lightning flashes, a snow of ash falls about her. She almost chokes on sulphur and combustion gases, then thumbs off olfactory. The plain rises gently towards a line of low cones pouring thick, fast torrents of magma. Cascades of sparks close off the horizon. She can see around her for twenty kilometres in every direction and in none of them is there any living thing.

Panic-stricken, Lisa Durnau blinks back into Varanasi in the rain. Her heart races, her head reels; it is like turning a street intersection and stumbling on Ground Zero without warning. She is physically shocked. She fears to make the gesture that will wish her back into Alterre. She opens up window mode. The commentary box tells her the Deccan Traps are erupting.

Half a million cubic kilometres of lava issue from a magma plume coiling up from the mantle over what will in sixty-five million years’ time be the island of Reunion. Mt. St. Helens blew a puny single cubic kilometre when it shook the Pacific Northwest. Half a million Mt. St. Helens. Spread them out and they would smother the states of Washington and Oregon two kilometres deep in liquid basalt. The actual Deccan Traps formed a layer two kilometres deep over Central Western India, when that subcontinent was racing (geologically speaking) towards the Asian landmass in the head-on collision that would throw up Earth’s mightiest mountain range. The CO₂, released overwhelmed all extant carbon-burying mechanisms and brought the curtain down on Earth’s Cretaceous period. Life on Earth has been to the edge many times. Alterre would not have been an alternative evolution without mechanisms for mass extinction like vulcanism, polar wandering, celestial impact. The toys of major league God-gamers. What scares Lisa Durnau is not that the Traps are erupting. It is that the Deccan flood basalts never reached the Indo-Gangetic plain. In Alterre, Varanasi is buried beneath a plain of glowing basalt.

Lisa pulls up into God-vision. A finger of guilt from her church childhood accuses her as she spins up high above the Australo-Indian Ocean. The view was never this good from real space. Europe is an arc of islands and peninsulas around the westward curve of the planet,

Asia a northward-steering sweep of terrain. North Asia burns. Ash clouds cover half a continent. The fires light the dark half of the planet. Lisa Durnau calls up a data window. She gives a soft, wordless cry. The Siberian Traps are also erupting.

Alterre is dying, trapped between the fires at its head and its waist. Crustal carbon dioxide released by the frothy, gassy basalt will join with carbon from the burning forests into a rabid greenhouse that will lift atmospheric and ocean temperatures sufficiently to trigger a clathrate burst: methane, locked in ice cages deep under the ocean, released in one titanic outgassing. The oceans will seethe like a dropped can of soda. Oxygen levels plunge as temperatures rise. Photosynthesis in the oceans shuts down. The seas become cauldrons of rotting plankton.

Life might survive one meltdown. Earth had survived the Chixulub impact and the resulting Deccan melt on the other side of the planet at the cost of twenty-five percent of its species. The Siberian Traps eruption two hundred and fifty million years ago had ended the Permian life-burst with the extinction of ninety-five percent of living organisms. Life had reeled over the abyss and come back. Two eruptions at the same time is the end of biology on Earth.

Lisa Durnau watches her world fall apart.

This is not nature. This is an assault. Thomas Lull had designed Alterre with a robust immune system to defend against the inevitable hacks. For an attack to come through the aeais that ran the geophysical, oceanological, and climatological systems must have access to the central registries. This is an inside job.

Lisa Durnau rolls out of Alterre back on to the terrace of the haveli in the summer rain. She is shaking. Once in London Lisa Durnau was mugged outside a Tube Station. It had been short and sharp and not particularly brutal, just quick and businesslike: her cash, her cards, her palmer, her shoes. It was over before she realised. She had gone through the crime with a sense of numb acquiescence, almost of scientific inquiry. Afterwards the fear hit, the shaking, the anger, the outrage at what had been done to her and her utter impassivity in the face of it.

A whole world has been mugged here.

The call is lined up to the department before she realises. Lisa Durnau waves away the address, folds the Tablet, slides it back inside her pocket. She cannot break cover. She does not know what to do. And she sees him; Thomas Lull, leaning over the reception desk, asking for his key, dripping from his saturated surfer shirt and baggie shorts and slicked-down hair into little spreading pools on the white marble. He has not seen her. To him she is half a planet away on a hilltop in Kansas. Lisa Durnau starts to call his name and the two men in cheap suits and sandals get up and walk over to the desk. One shows Thomas Lull an object in his hand. The other places a firm hand on his shoulder. He looks dazed, confused, then the first man opens a large black umbrella and the three of them hurry across the rain-soaked garden to the gates where a police car has drawn up in a slush of spray.

42: LULL

The game is bad cop and bad cop. You’re in an interrogation room. It could be a jail cell, a confession box, or a torture chamber, what matters is that you can’t hear or see what’s happening outside. All you know is what the cops tell you. You have a partner in crime in an identical room. For you are accused.

So they have you in this green interview room that smells of thick paint and antiseptic. See that partner/fellow hoodlum/lover of yours? Soon as the tape went on, they spilled everything, including you. This is what you have to decide. They could be telling the truth. They could be playing headgames to get you to grass up your partner. You don’t know and bad cops won’t tell you. They’re bad. Then they let you stew without even a cop coffee.

The way you see the deal is this. You deny everything and your partner/fellow hoodlum/lover denies everything and you might both walk. Insufficient evidence. You both confess and the cops turn out to be not so bad after all because there’s nothing a cop likes less than paperwork and you’ve just saved them deskloads of that so they’ll push for a noncustodial. Or you deny everything and in the other cell, you get fessed up. Fellow hoodlum walks and the full weight falls on you. What’s best for you? You’ve got the answer before their footsteps even reach the far end of the corridor. You bang on the door. Hey hey hey, come back here, I want to tell you every little thing.

The game is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s not as much fun as blackjack or Dungeons and Dragons but it’s a tool A-life researchers use to investigate complex systems. Play it enough and all manner of human truths emerge. Long-term good, short-term bad. Do as you would be done by and if not, then do unto them as they do unto you. Thomas Lull has played Prisoner’s Dilemma and a slate of other limited-information games millions of times. It’s very different playing for real.

The room is green and smells of disinfectant. It also smells of mould, old urine, hot ghee, and damp from the shirts of the rain-soaked cops. They are not good cops, they are not bad cops, they are just cops who would rather get back to their wives and children. One keeps rocking back on his chair and looking at Thomas Lull, with his eyebrows raised, as if expecting an epiphany. The other one is constantly checking his nails and has an uncomfortable thing he does with his mouth that reminds Thomas Lull of old Tom Hanks movies.

Do what you need to, Lull. Don’t be clever, don’t be fly. Get yourself out of here. He feels a growing closeness in his chest.

“Look, I told the soldiers, I’m travelling with her, she has relatives in Varanasi.”

Chair-rocker swings forwards and scrawls Hindi on a spiral-bound notepad. The voice recorder isn’t working. They say. Tom Hanks does the thing with the mouth again. It’s really starting to needle Thomas Lull. That, too, could be part of it.

“That might be enough for provincial jawans, but this is Varanasi, sir.”

“I don’t understand what the hell is happening.”

“It is quite simple, sit. Your colleague made an inquiry at the National DNA database. A routine security scan revealed certain. anomalous structures in her skull. She was apprehended by security and passed into our custody.”

“You keep saying this, anomalous structures, what does that mean, what are these anomalous structures?”

Tom Hanks looks at his nails again. His mouth is unhappy.

“This is now a matter of national security, sir.”

“This is fucking Franz Kafka, is what it is.”

Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.

“He’s a Czech writer,” Thomas Lull says. “He’s been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony.”

“Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue.”

Chair-rocker deliberately crosses the name out and takes a swing back to study Thomas Lull with added perspective. The heat in the windowless room is incredible. The smell of damp policeman is overpowering.

“What do you know of this female?”

“I met her at a beach party at Thekkady down in Kerala. I helped her over an asthma attack. I liked her, she was travelling north, I went with her.”

Tom Hanks flips up a corner of the folder on the desk, pretends to consult a scrap of text. “Sir, she stopped a section of Awadhi counterinsurgency robots with a wave of her hand.”

“That’s a crime?”

Chair-rocker snaps forward. His chair feet crack on the shoe-polished concrete floor.

“Awadhi airborne divisions have just taken the Kunda Khadar dam. The entire garrison has surrendered. It may not be a crime, but you must admit, the coincidence is. extreme.”

“This is a fucking joke. What, you think she is something to do with that?”

“I do not make jokes where my country’s security is concerned,” Tom Hanks says. “All I know is this report and that your travelling companion set off the alarms trying to access the National DNA database.”

“I need to know these anomalies.” Tom Hanks swivels his eyes at chair-rocker. “Do you know who I am?”

“You are Professor Thomas Lull.”

“Do you not think I might be better positioned to offer a hypothesis about this than you? If I knew what you were taking about?”

Chair-rocker confers in short, stabbing Hindi with Tom Hanks. Thomas Lull can’t decide which of them is the superior.

“Very well, sir. As you know, we are in a state of heightened alert because of the situation with our neighbour, Awadh. It is only logical that we protect ourselves against cyberwar, so we have installed a number of scanners at sensitive locations to pick up slow missiles, infiltrators, agents, that sort of thing. Identity theft is a recognised tool of undercover operatives so the archive was routinely equipped with surveillance devices. The scanners at the DNA archive picked up structures inside this woman’s skull similar to protein circuitry.”

By now Thomas Lull cannot tell what is game and what is real and what is beyond either. He thinks of the shock he gave Aj on the train when he exposed the lies that were her life. She has returned that shock tenfold.

Tom Hanks slides a palmer across the desk to Thomas Lull. He does not want to look, he does not want to see the alien inside Aj but he turns the device to him. It is a false-colour pseudo-X-ray assembled from infrasound scans. Her lovely skull is pale blue. The globes of her eyes, the tangled vine-root of the optic nerve, the ghostly canals of sinuses and blood vessels are grey on greyer. Aj is a ghost of herself; her brain most spectral of all, a haunting of sentience in a web of fibres. There is a ghost in the ghost; lines and ranks of nanocircuits arching across the inside of her skull. The tilak is a dark gateway in her forehead like a mosque darwaz. From it chains and webs of protein wiring thread back through the frontal lobes, across the central fissure into the parietal lobe, sending probes into the corpus callosum, twining tight around the limbic system, delving deep into the medulla while it wraps the occipital lobe in coils of protein processors. Aj’s brain is chained in circuitry.

“Kalki,” he whispers and the room goes black. Complete lightlessness. No lights, no emergency power, nothing. Thomas Lull fumbles his palmer out of his pocket. Hindi voices yell in the corridor, rising in intensity.

“Professor Lull Professor Lull, do not attempt to move!” Tom Hanks’ voice is querulous and panicky. “For your own safety, I order you to remain where you are while I ascertain what has happened.”

The voices in the corridor grow louder. A rasp, a flare; chair-rocker man lights a match. Three faces in a bubble of light, then darkness. Thomas Lull moves quickly. His fingers feel out the memory wafer slot on the side of the police palmer and slide it open. A rasp, he whips his hands back, then light. Tom Hanks is by the door. The babble of voices has become intermittent, calls, responses. As the match burns out Thomas Lull thinks he sees a fluctuating line of light under the door, a torch bobbing. He releases the memory chip. Another match flare. The door is open now, Tom Hanks conversing with an unseen officer in the corridor.

“What’s going on, is Varanasi under attack?” Thomas Lull calls out. Anything to sow uncertainty. The match burns out. Thomas Lull flips out the memory chip of his own palmer. A few deft movements and he has switched them over.

He glimpsed other phantoms in that look inside Aj, phantoms that might confirm his suspicions about what had been done to her, and why.

“Your friend has escaped,” Tom Hanks says, swinging the torch beam into Thomas Lull’s face. In the shadow his hands close the slots.

“How did she manage to do that?” Thomas Lull asks.

“I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

“I’ve been right here in front of you all along.”

“Every system is out,” Tom Hanks says. The mouth is working double-shifts. “We do not know how far the blackout reaches, it is at least this district.”

“And she walked right out.”

“Yes,” the policeman says. “You will understand if we detain you for further questioning.” A burst of Hindi to chair-rocker who gets up and closes the door. Thomas Lull hears an old-school manual bolt shoot over.

“Hey!” he shouts in the dark. Thoughts of a middle-aged man locked in a dark police interview room. His suspicions, his calculations, his speculations swell to room-filling proportions, giants of fear and shock that press close against him, pressing the air from his lungs. The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking. The mind for dark imagining. Kalki. She is Kalki, the final avatar. All he needs is the proof he glimpsed etched into the scanner print.

After a timeless time that is only ten minutes by the wall clock the lights come back on. The door opens and Tom Hanks stands back to admit a black man in a wet raincoat that immediately identifies his nationality and employment.

“Professor Thomas Lull?”

Lull nods.

“I am Peter Paul Rhodes from the United States consular office. Please come with me.”

He extends a hand. Thomas Lull takes it hesitantly. “What is this?”

“Sir, your release into my charge has been ordered by the Bharati Justice Department because of your diplomatic status in the Department of Foreign Affairs.”

“Foreign Affairs?” Thomas Lull knows how dumb he sounds, thick like a broken down petty thief. “Senator Joe O’Malley knows I’m in a Bharati police station and wants me out?”

“That is correct. All will be explained. Please come with me.”

Thomas Lull takes the hand but scoops his palmer into his pocket. Tom Hanks escorts them down the corridor. The front office is full of policemen and one woman. She gets up from the wooden bench where she has been sitting. There is a pool of rainwater at her feet. Her clothes are wet, her hair is wet, her face shines with wet and is thinner, older but he knows it instantly and it makes the madness complete.

“L. Durnau?”

43: TAL, NAJIA

Eight and a half thousand rupees is enough to bribe the chowkidar. He counts notes with his skinny fingers while Najia Askarzadah drips in the glass and marble foyer of Indiapendent. Then he swipes his master pass and namastes them through the glass half doors.

“I never believed it was you, Talji,” Pande the security man shouts after them, folding Najia’s wad of cash into the breast pocket of his high-collared jacket. “We can make pictures do anything these days.”

“They shot at me, you know,” Tal calls as they head for the elevator stack.

It’s never like this in the movies, Najia Askarzadah thinks as the glass lift descends like a pearl of light. They should have had to blast their way in with beva-firepower and hi-kicking, mid-air-spinning, slo-mo martial arts action. The cool heroine shouldn’t have to call her parents in Sweden to ask them to BACS her a bribe. The most action she had seen was Pande the nightwatchman thumbing his generous wad. But it’s a strange little conspiracy; more Bollywood than Hollywood.

The glass walls of the metasoap wing stream with rain. It had begun as the taxi they had been hiding in all day arrived outside Indiapendent Productions. The parking lot was a basti of brick-and-card-board lean-tos and knots of soapi faithful huddled under plastic sheets.

“They always come out for a wedding,” Tal said. “It’s like a religion. Lal Darfan always delivers. PR says he’s had twenty miracle births attributed to him.”

Tal hurries Najia past the dark work carrels to the furthest desk. Yt pulls up two chairs, logs in—“nothing we can do about that, baba”—opens up the wrap-round screen and drops them into Brahmpur, the eponymous Town of Indiapendent’s all-conquering soapi.

Tal whirls her through the streets and galis, the ghats and malls of this virtual city. Najia is dazzled. The detail is complete down to the advertising signs and the bustling phatphats. In Brahmpur as in Varanasi it is night and it is raining. The monsoon has come to this imaginary city. Najia is too proud to have watched an entire episode of Town and Country but even as a neo she recognises there are whole districts of this city of illusions the plot never visits, that have been lovingly built and maintained by exabytes of processing power merely to hold the rest together. Tal raises yts hands and their djinn-flight slams to a halt in front of a crumbling waterfront haveli. She feels she could touch the flaking stucco. A mudra and they pass through the walls into the great hall of the Nadiadwala haveli.

“Wow,” says Najia Askarzadah. She can see the cracks on the low leather sofas.

“Oh, this isn’t the real Brahmpur,” Tal says. Another elegant gesture and time blurs forward. “Well, the cast think it is but we call it Brahmpur B. It’s the metacity in which the metasoap takes place. I’m just winding us forward to the Chawla/Nadiadwala wedding. Have you got that video handy?”

But Najia is dazed by the flickering ghosts of future plotlines across the still room. Day and night strobe across her vision. Tal opens yts hand like a claw, twists it, and time slows down to a chug of light and dark. She can see the people now, zipping through the elegant, cool marble hall. Tal slows time again and the hall is suddenly bright with coloured hangings. Tal pushes yts open palm against air and time freezes.

“Here, here.” Tal clicks yts fingers impatiently. Najia hands yt her palmer. Without taking yts eyes off the screen yt datatransfers from the palmer. A hole opens in the middle of the hall and fills with N. K. Jivanjee. With delicate flicks of yts fingers Tal jogs the picture forward until it has a good lock on the background, then pulls in, draws a box around the fabric hung-wall, tears it out of N. K. Jivanjee’s world, and drops it into fake Brahmpur. Even Najia Askarzadah can see the match.

“This is about six months down our metasoap timeline,” Tal says as yt lets the POV roam around the room, swooping around the frozen wedding guests in their couture and the simulacra of real-world chati-mag reporters in their texture-mapped society-best, waiting for the arrival of the fake groom on his white horse. “They exist in several time-frames at once.”

Najia remembers Lal Darfan’s fantastical flying elephant-pavilion hovering over the high Himalayas. Can any of us trust what we think we remember ? he had asked. She had thought to argue sophistries with an aeai actor but Tal plays a more sophisticated game, the meta-meta-game. Najia remembers an old childhood faery-tale told by a babysitter on a midwinter night, a dangerous one, disquieting as only the truly fey disquiets; that the faery realms were nested inside each other like baboushka dolls, but each was bigger than the one that enclosed it until at the centre you had to squeeze through a door smaller than a mustard seed but it contained whole universes.

“We’ve got them scripted up to about eight months ahead in fair detail. We haven’t got the weather; there’s a subaeai predicts it twenty-four hours ahead and then drops it on. By the time that script comes to real-time, the memory’s fixed and they can’t remember it ever having been another way. There’s a news aeai does the thing for gup-shup and sports results and stuff like that. The major characters are much further ahead on their timelines than the minor ones so we work in several time dimensions at once—properly they’re time vectors that angle away from our own.”

“This is freaky.”

“I like freaky. The point is, no one outside of Indiapendent has access to this.”

“Satnam?”

Tal frowns.

“I don’t know if he could operate the system. Okay, hold on. We’re going to go to full prope. I’ll ’hoek you up, here.”

Tal fixes yts own ’hoek, smart plastic hugging up warm against the curve of yts skull, then fits Najia with the second device. Yts fingers are very deft and very light and very soft. Were she not breaking and entering a secure system with a Most Wanted nute who might just have brought down the government and whom she had rescued that very morning from a railway-station assassin, she might purr.

“I’m going to go into the registries. You may find this a little disorienting.”

Najia Askarzadah almost goes straight over backwards on her chair. She is dropped into the centre of a vast sphere filled with dashes of registry code, all superimposed over the dark room and the curve of liquid screen and the rain streaming down the thick blue glass. She is the centre of a galaxy of data; whichever way she looks, code upon code streams away from her. Tal turns yts hands and the sphere spins, address lines blurring with data-shift across Najia’s vision. Reeling with vertigo, she grips the sides of her chair.

“Oh man.”

“You get used to it. If someone has been into my lovely wedding, they’ll have left a trace behind in the registry, that’s what I’m looking for now. The most recent entries are at the centre, the older ones get pushed further out. Ah.” Tal points. Codes blur like warp-driven stars. Najia Askarzadah is sure she can feel data-wind in her hair. She drops out of cyberdrive into an inertialess stop at a green code-fragment. The sphere of glowing file addresses looks unchanged. Centre everywhere, perimeter nowhere. Like the universe. Tal picks up the code.

“Now this is freaky.”

“Do you like this freaky?” Najia asks.

“Indeed I do not. Someone has been into my design files but it’s not a code I recognise. It doesn’t look like it’s come from the outside.”

“Some other bit of the ’ware is accessing your files?”

“More like the actors are rewriting their own scripts. I’m going in. If you feel dizzy, close your eyes.”

She doesn’t and her stomach turns loops as the universe of slow-drifting codes jerks and spins and zooms and warps around her. Tal hyper-jumps from code-cluster to code-cluster. “This is very very strange. It’s an inside job all right, but it’s not one of our cast. Look, see?” Tal gathers a harvest of codes, lays them out on a grid in space. “These bits here are all common. To save memory space, a lot of our lower-level aeai actors are subapplications of higher-level aeais. Anita Mahapatra also contains Narinder Rao, Mrs. Devgan, the Begum Vora and they in turn contain maybe fifty redshirts.”

“Redshirts?”

“Disposable extras. I think it’s an American term. This is a list of all the recent accesses to the set design system. See? Someone’s been into my design files regularly over the past eighteen months. But what is freaky is, all those common code sections point to an even higher level actor; one that contains Lal Darfan and Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala. It’s like there’s something else running in there we can’t see because it’s too big.”

In the cream coloured house by the water there was an atlas the size of a small child. On the winter nights when the inlet froze, Najia, age eight, would fight the thing down from its shelf, open it on the floor, and lose herself in other climates. She played a game with her mother and father where you picked a word on a map and raced to put a finger on it. She realised early that the way to play and win was to go big and obvious. The eye scrying through the towns and villages and stations of the Matto Grosso could miss the name BRAZIL spread across the map in faded grey letters the size of her thumb. Hiding in plain sight among the scribbles.

Najia blinks out of Tal’s spiral dance of codes and file addresses back into the dark carrel. She is trapped inside a cube of rain. A master script that wrote itself? A soap opera like India’s seven million gods; avatars and emanations descending through levels of divinity from Brahman, the Absolute, the One?

Then she sees Tal push ytself back from the computer, mouth open in fear, hand raised to ward off the evil eye. In the same perspective she also sees Pande in his high-collared jacket and yellow turban rush loose-boned into the department.

Tal: “This is impossible.”

Pande: “Sir Madam, sir madam, come quick come quick, the Prime Minister.”

Then Najias Askarzadah’s ’hoek flashes into full prope and she is swept away from Tal, from Pande, from Indiapendent in the monsoon, to a bright, high place, a silk-draped prospect among the clouds. She knows where this is. She has been summoned to this place before. It is the airborne elephant pavilion of Lal Darfan, sailing the line of the Himalayas. But the man on the cushioned throne in front of her is not Lal Darfan. It is N. K. Jivanjee.

44: SHIV

Yogendra takes the boat out into a stream of burning diyas. Monsoon winds churn Ganga but the little, delicate mango-leaf saucers bob on through the broken water. Shiv sits cross-legged under the plastic awning, gripping the gunwales and trying to feel the balance. He prays that he will not have to hurl. He glances back at Yogendra squatting in the stern, hand steady on the tiller of the alcofuel motor, eyes reading the river. His skin is beaded with rain, it streams from his hair down his face, his clothes cling to him. Shiv thinks of rats he has seen swimming in open roadside sewers. But the knotted pearls around Yogendra’s neck shine.

“Pump, pump,” Yogendra orders. Shiv bends to the little bilge pump. The rain is filling the boat—a handy little American sports white-waterer with Pacific Northwest iconography on its bows though Shiv would have preferred an Eye of Siva—faster than the hand-pump can clear it. That is not an arithmetic Shiv can look at too closely. He can’t swim. A raja’s experience of water is lolling in the shallow end of a pool with girls and floating drinks trays. As long as it takes them to Chunar.

“You land somewhere around here.” Anand laid the A4 high-resolution printouts of the Chunar district map out on his coffee table. Kif coffee simmered on its brazier. Anand tapped his finger on the map. “The town of Chunar is about five kays south. I call it a town purely as a politeness to the fact that it’s on a bridge over the Ganga. Chunar is a rural shithole full of cowfuckers and incest. The only thing of any interest is the old fort. Here, I’ve got printouts.” Anand dealt out a hand of glossies. Shiv flicked through the photographs. The story of the Ganga was the story of forts like Chunar, drawn down by historical inevitability onto the promontories and hill-tops where the river turned, drawing to them power, dynasty, intrigue, imprisonment, siege, assault. One last assault. He paused at the interiors, crumbling Raj-Moghul architectures smothered by swooping construction-carbon canopies, white as salt in the sun. “Ramanandacharya is a flash chuutya, but he’s the only game in town. As well as the sundarban, he’s got a call centre. You want to get into your husband’s system, see what he’s been up to; you want to hack into that credit black-list, they’ll crack the code for you while you wait.

“Every adivasi is loyal to the chief. You get in, you do your business, you get out, you do not hang around for thank-yous or kisses. Now, the defences at Chunar Fort.”

Aircraft hammer overhead so low and loud Shiv covers his head. Yogendra stands in the stem, turning to follow their lights; four military tilt-jets in tight formation. Shiv sees his teeth glint in the light from the city.

“Pump, pump!”

He works the creaking handpump, watches the water pooling around the plastic-sealed packages. He would be better throwing the fatuous techy thing over the side and bailing with his hands. Americans and their machines. Something to do everything. Learn that people are better and cheaper. You can punish them and they will learn.

The thunder moves west. In its wake the rain doubles in weight. On the left bank the gas flares from the processing plants give way to the heavy sandstone bulk of Ramnagar Fort, an imposing impostor under the floodlights. Yogendra takes the boat under the pontoon bridge, a sword of sound even in the downpour. Shiv studies Ramnagar; terraces and pavilions rising beyond its red curtain walls, their feet in the water. You stand there, Shiv thinks. You wait for when I get back, when I have taken your sister upstream and then we will see how proud and defiant you look with your walls and turrets. A true task for a raja, storming a castle. Not by siege or at the head of a thousand elephants, but by smart, by style. Shiv Faraji, Action Hero.

Now the swift little boat approaches the new bridge. Yogendra feels out the slack water channel and shoots it. A truck has come off the roadway and embedded itself in the shallows, a snag of decorative metal barely recognisable as a vehicle. There is still a smell of alcofuel on the water. Beyond the fuel reek, perfume. Shiv raises his head to the sickly odour of marigolds. Smell is the key of memory; a sharp flash of where he has smelled this before: the fat tires of his Mercedes SUV crushing petals as it climbed the banks here. Marigolds masking turning flesh, the swelling body he slipped into the waters of the Ganga, these waters he sails now. He has recapitulated the corpse’s journey, away from moksha.

“Ey!” Yogendra unhooks the earpiece of his palmer and lifts it up for Shiv to see. “Radio Kashi.” Shiv thumbs up the station. Urgent news voices breaking over each other, talking about soldiers, air strikes, fighting machines. Kunda Khadar. The Awadhis have taken Kunda Khadar. The Awadhis have broken on to the sacred soil of Bharat. The Awadhis are about to take Allahabad, holy Allahabad of the Kumbh Mela. Sajida Rana’s troops flee before them like mice from a stubble-burning. Sajida Rana’s vaunted jawans threw down their weapons and threw up their hands. Sajida Rana’s plan has brought ruin to Bharat. Sajida Rana has failed Bharat, shamed Bharat, brought Bharat to its knees. What will Sajida Rana do now?

Shiv turns the radio off.

“What is this to do with us?” he says to Yogendra. “The elephants fight but the rats go about their business.” The boy waggles his head and opens up the engine. The boat lifts its prow and pushes upriver through the walls of the rain.

“This is good kit. Not top, now, but good. I’ll take you through it. These are plasma tasers. You know how they work? They’re not hard. Arm here, the yellow tab. Your basic point and shoot. You don’t even need a particularly good aim, that’s the beauty of them and that’s what makes them your weapon of preference. There’s enough gas in the canister for twelve shots. You’ve got five each, that should be enough. Just throw them away when you’re done, they’re dead. They will stop machinery but their best use is against biological targets. Our man Ramanandacharya is a tech head and that is his fatal weakness, but he does have a few bits of meat around the place for sex and gun stuff. He likes women. A lot. He’s got this James Bond thing, so Mukherjee says. I mean, you’ve seen the castle? Now, I don’t know if they’re in red catsuits, but you might have to taser a couple, just to teach them, you know? And every yokel is his loyal mindslave. On top of that there’s a couple of real guys with guns and martial arts, Mukherjee says, but there’s a way to deal with them and that’s not let them get too close. Do you think the women are in red catsuits? Could you get me some photographs? Tasers for the meat. For the machines you want area-effect weapons. You want these sweeties. EMP grenades. These are so cool. Like pouring kerosene on scorpions. Just make sure you aren’t ’hoeked up or anything or you’re deaf, dumb, blind. Also, careful round the ware. I don’t need to tell you this but they will crispy any soft systems. Now, the suddhavasa where he keeps his decrypters. He’s converted an old Siva temple in the grounds—there on the map. The crypt won’t be very big, maybe only a few gigs, but I don’t recommend you try to mail it out. It’ll all fit onto a palmer. Just be careful with the EMPs around it, okay? You’ve got the master file name and the quantum key so even you should be able to pull it out of the suddhavasa. Now, why our beloved N. K. Jivanjee wants this, I don’t know, but we don’t ask. Not the Naths anyway.

“Getting back out, well that’s always the part where it’s a little bit loose. You kind of make it up as you go along here. That’s not to say there isn’t an uber-strategy. The thing is you don’t waste time. Get in there, take them out, get the thing and get out and do not permit distractions. Distractions destroy. Get out and don’t stop for anyone or anything least of all some village Egor. There’re more than enough shots in the tasers, if they look like they’re coming after you, drop a second minefield behind you. Get back to the boat and then get back here and you are a free free man, Shiv Faraji, and I will hail and salute you as a god and friend.

“How do I know all this? What do you think I do all day? Play sneak-and-shoot games and watch shitloads of movies. How does anyone know?”

After an hour and a half pushing upstream the monsoon slackens from a downpour to a steady rain. Shiv looks up from playing Commando Attack on his palmer at the change in tempo on the curved plastic. It would be an irony upon an irony if, after three years of drought and fighting a water war in the middle of a downpour, the saving monsoon should rain itself out in a single night.

Beyond Ramnagar the river is darker than darkness. Yogendra steers by GPS fixes on the shoals and the feel of the current. Shiv has felt sand grate under the hull. The shallows flow and reform faster than the satellites ten thousand kilometres overhead can map them. The boat rocks as Yogendra throws the tiller over hard. He cuts the engine, swings it up. The boat runs up on to the beach. Yogendra ducks through the canopy and jumps on to the shore.

“Come on, come on.”

The shore sand is soft, sinking and flowing away with the current beneath Shiv’s feet. The darkness out here is immense. Shiv reminds himself that he is only a few tens of kilometres away from his club and barman. A clutch of lights to the south is Chunar. In the vast quiet of the country night he can hear the traffic on the pontoon and the persistent chug of the water-extraction plants downstream. Jackals and pi-dogs yip in the distance. Shiv arms himself swiftly. He splits the taser mines between himself and Yogendra but keeps the kill switch. Hayman Dane’s file name and system key are in the fat man’s palmer, slung around Shiv’s neck.

Among the thorn-hedged dal fields of Chunar, Shiv rigs out for battle. This is madness. He will die here among these fields and bones.

“Okay,” he says with a deep shuddering sigh. “Wheel them out.”

He and Yogendra wrestle two bulky cling-wrapped rectangles on to the sand. Ribs and spars, curves and bulges press through the plastic skin. Yogendra flashes a long blade.

“What is this?” Shiv demands.

Yogendra offers him the knife, turning it so the gleams of light from the distant town catch its steel. It is the length of a forearm, serrated, hooked at the tip, ferruled. He lays open the stretch plastic skins with two swift strokes. He returns the blade to its leather holster, next his skin. Lying in the plastic are two factory-fresh, chrome-bright Japanese trail bikes fuelled and ready to run. They start at first kick. Shiv mounts up. Yogendra walks his around the sand a little, feeling out the capabilities. Then Shiv nods to him and they open up the made-in-Yokohama engines and burn off through the rain-soaked dal fields.

45: SARKHAND ROUNDABOUT

At eleven thirty the huddle of umbrellas moves from the porch of the Rana Bhavan towards the Mercedes parked on the gravel turning circle. The umbrellas are white, an unnatural shade. They press together like a phalanx. Not one drop of water passes through. The rain is torrential now, a thunderous drowning downpour shot through with muggy lightning. At the centre of the cluster of domed umbrellas is Prime Minister Sajida Rana. She wears a white silk sari trimmed with green and orange. It is the most serious business she goes to this night. It is the defence of her country and her authority. All across Varanasi identical Mercedes are pulling away from tasteful government bungalows.

The umbrellas press up against the side of the car like piglets at the teat of a black sow. Safe and dry, Sajida Rana slips into the back seat. She sits instinctively on the left side. Shaheen Badoor Khan should be in the right seat offering analyses, advisements, perceptions. She looks alone as the doors lock and the car pulls off into the rain. She looks like what she is, a middle-aged woman with the weight of a nation upon her. The umbrellas break up and dart back to the shelter of the Rana Bhavan’s deep verandas.

Sajida Rana flicks through the hastily prepared briefing document. The facts are scant and perfunctory. The Awadhi assault was technically flawless. Brilliant. Bloodless. Military colleges will be teaching it for decades to come. Awadhi armour and mechanised infantry are within twenty kilometres of Allahabad, antiaircraft and communication systems have come under sustained aeai attack and the defending battalion is in disarray, its control at the Kunda Khadar dam beheaded, desperately trying to reestablish a line of command with the divisional headquarters at Jaunpur. And it is raining. Sajida Rana is losing a water war in the rain. But it comes too late. Her nation can die of thirst in a deluge.

They knew. The bastards had it calculated to the minute.

In her white, gold, and green sari Sajida Rana tries to imagine how the words of surrender will feel in her mouth. Will they be bloated, choking; will they be dry and acid; will they slip out as easily as a Muslim divorcing his wife? Talaaq talaaq talaaq.

Khan. Faithless Muslim. Betrayed her with another, a thing. When she needs his words, his insights, his presence beside her on the cream leather. If Jivanjee and his karsevaks knew she rode on cow-coloured leather. Let Jivanjee do your work for you, Khan had said. Now he will drive his juggernaut over her bones. No. She is a Rana, daughter of a founder of nations, a seeder of dynasties. She is Bharat. She will fight. Let the Ganga overflow with blood.

“Where are we going?”

“Traffic, ma’am,” the driver says. Sajida Rana settles back on her upholstery and looks out through the rain-streaked windows. Neons and tail lights, the gaudy Diwali illuminations of the trucks. She thumbs the com.

“This is not the usual way to the Bharat Sabha.”

“No, ma’am,” the driver says and sinks his foot to the board. Unbalanced, Sajida Rana reels. She tries the locks knowing it for folly, knowing she heard the solid, German-engineering click of the central locking. She opens her palmer, calls her security as the Mercedes touches one hundred and twenty.

“This is Prime Ministerial emergency code. Lock on to my GPS signal, I am being abducted, I repeat, this is Sajida Rana, I am being abducted.”

Sky hiss. Then the voice of her chief of security says,

“Prime Minister, I will not do that. No one will help you. You have betrayed Holy Bharat and Bharat will punish you.”

Then the Mercedes turns into Sarkhand Roundabout and the screaming starts.