River of Gods (12 page)

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

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

"I was telling your star here."

"I've been hearing things about your bankability."

"My friend, I have status all over this city."

Salman lays a cold finger on the cold canister.

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

"Some fucker is undercutting me? I'll have his balls in dry
ice."

Salman shakes his head.

"This is a macroeconomic issue. Market forces, sir."

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

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

"Let's see him shake and make with no thumbs," Shiv hisses.
"Bar. Star."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Going somewhere?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you know about nonblastular stem cell technology?"

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

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

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

"There're always going to be people can't afford American
technology. This is Bharat."

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

"Where are you going?" Shiv asks.

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

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

Madam Ovary snaps shut her valise.

"Make yourself useful. Give me your lighter."

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

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

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

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

Fucking jabber.

"Where are you taking me, boy?"

"Fighting."

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

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

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

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

"Take me to Murfi's," Shiv orders. He is ravenously hungry
now.

"What with?"

"There's change in the glovebox."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, you keep 'em. You never know someone may get the taste."

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

"Leave that shit and get me away."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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