River of Gods (59 page)

"What would we suggest for our new friend Jivanjee himself?"
Laxman asks, pressing the steward call to summon a Bells, to which he
is legendarily partial.

"I can't see him settling for much less than interior Minister,"
Narvekar says.

"Chuutya," grunts Laxman into his Scotch.

"This'll be no Muslim marriage to get out of," Narvekar
says. Ashok Rana toggles the screen to watch his wife and children
sleeping against each other in the cheap seats. The clock reads oh
four fifteen. Ashok Rana's head aches, his feet and sinuses feel
swollen, his eyes dusty and weary. All senses of time and space and
perspective have vanished. He could be floating in space in this
migraine-inducing light. Chowdhury is talking about Shaheen Badoor
Khan: "That's one Begum wishing the divorce thing ran the other
way."

The men laugh softly in the harsh directional light of the overhead
halogens.

"You have to admit, he has rather receded into the background,"
Narvekar says. "Twenty-four hours is a long time in politics."

"Never trusted the fellow," Chowdhury says. "Always
felt there was something oily about him, too refined, too polite."

"Too Muslim?" Narvekar asks.

"You said it; something not quite.. .manly. And I'm not so sure
I agree with what you say about him vanishing into the background.
You say twenty-four hours is a long time; I say, in politics nothing
is unconnected. One loose pebble starts a landslide. For one
horseshoe nail, the battle was lost. Butterfly in Beijing, all that.
Khan is the root of it, for his own sake I hope he is out of Bharat."

"Hijra," Laxman comments. His ice clinks in the glass.

"Gentlemen," Ashok Rana says, hearing his voice as if
spoken by another at a great distance, "my sister is dead."
Then, after a grace-moment, he says, "So, our answer to Mr.
Jivanjee?"

"He has his Government of National Salvation," Secretary
Narvekar says. "After the speech."

The staffers in the second cabin speed-draft a revised speech. Ashok
Rana skims the printout adding marginal marks in blue ink. Government
of National Salvation. Extend Hand of Friendship. Unity in Strength.
Through this Trying Time as One Nation. The Nation United Will Never
Be Defeated.

"Prime Minister, it's time," Trivul Narvekar hints. He
guides Ashok Rana to the studio at the front of Vayu Sena One. It is
little bigger than an airline toilet; a camera, a boom microphone, a
desk and chair and a Bharati flag draped from a pole, a vision mixer
and sound engineer beyond the glass panel in the booth's mirror
image. The sound engineer shows Ashok Rana how the desk hinges up so
he can slip behind it on to the chair. A seat belt is fitted in case
of turbulence or an unexpected landing. Ashok Rana notices the
cloying smell of scented furniture polish. A young woman he does not
recognise from his press corps dresses him with a new tie, a pin
bearing the spinning wheel of Bharat, and tries to do something with
his hair and sweaty face.

"Forty seconds, Prime Minister," Trivul Narvekar says. "The
speech will autocue on screen in front of the camera." Ashok
Rana panics about what to do with his hands. Clasped? Bunch of
bananas? Seminamaste? Gesturing?

The vision mixer takes over. "And satellite uplink is active and
we're counting down twenty, nineteen, eighteen, the red dot means the
camera is live, Prime Minister, cue insert.. .Run VT. six, five,
four, three, two. and cue."

Ashok Rana decides what to do with his hands. He lays them loosely on
the desktop. "My fellow Bharatis," he reads. "It is
with heavy heart that I address you this morning."

In the garden, soaked through with rain. Rain penduluming the heavy
leaves of the climbing, twining nicotianas and clematis and kiwi
vine. Rain streaming from drain holes in the raised beds, black and
foaming with loam; rain sheeting across the carved concrete paving
slabs, chuttering in the grooves and channels, dancing in the drains
and soakaways, leaping into the overloaded runnels and downpipes;
rain cascading in waterfalls from the sagging gutters to the street
below. Rain gluing the silk sari to Parvati Nandha's flat belly,
round thighs, small flat-nippled breasts. Rain plastering her long
black hair to her skull. Rain running down the contours of her neck,
her spine, her breasts and arms and wrists resting neatly,
symmetrically on her thighs. Rain swirling around her bare feet and
her silver toe rings. Parvati Nandha in her bower. The bag is at her
feet, half empty, top folded to keep the rain out of the white
powder.

Muted thunder rolls in from the west. She listens behind it for the
sound from the streets. The gunfire seems further away now,
fragmented, random; the sirens move from left to right, then behind
her.

There is another sound she listens for.

There. Since she made the call she has been training herself to
distinguish it from the strange new sounds in the city tonight. The
rattle of the front door latch. She knew he would come. She counts in
her head and as she had timed, he appears a black silhouette in the
roof garden door. Krishan cannot see her in her dark bower, soaked by
rain.

"Hello?" he calls.

Parvati watches him trying to find her. "Parvati? Are you there?
Hello?"

"Over here," she whispers. She sees his body straighten,
tense.

"I almost didn't make it. It's insane out there. Everything is
coming apart. There's people shooting, stuff burning everywhere."

"You made it. You're here now." Parvati rises from her seat
and embraces him. "You're soaking wet, woman. What have you been
doing?"

"Tending to my garden," Parvati says, pulling away. She
lifts her fist, lets a trickle of powder fall. "See? You must
help me, there is too much for me to do."

Krishan intercepts the stream, sniffs a palmful.

"What are you doing? This is weedkiller."

"It has to go, it all has to go." Parvati walks away,
sowing sprays of white powder over the raised beds and pots of
drenched geraniums. Krishan makes to seize her hand but she throws
the white powder in his face. He reels back. Lightning flares in the
west; by its light he grasps her wrist.

"I don't understand!" he shouts. "You call me in the
middle of the night; come over, you say, I have to see you right
away. They've got martial law out there, Parvati. Soldiers on the
streets. They're shooting everything.. .I saw. No, I don't want to
tell you what I saw. But I come over and I find you sitting in the
rain, and this." He holds her hand up. The rain has smeared the
weedkiller to white streaks, a hennaed hand in negative. He shakes
her wrist, trying to jerk sanity into this one piece of the world be
can apprehend. "What is it?"

"It has to go." Parvati's voice is flat, childlike.
"Everything must go. My husband and I, we fought and do you
know? It wasn't terrible. Oh, he was shouting but I wasn't afraid
because what he said made no sense. Do you understand? All his
reasons; I heard them and they did not make any sense. And so I have
to go now. From here. There's nothing here. Away from here, away from
Varanasi and everything."

Krishan sits down on the wooden rim of a raised bed. A swirl in the
microclimate brings a surge of anger from the city.

"Go?"

Parvati clasps his hands between hers.

"Yes! It is so easy. Leave Varanasi, leave Bharat, go away. He
sent my mother away, did you know that? She is in a hotel somewhere;
she rings and she rings and she rings but I know what she will say,
it's not safe out there, how could I abandon her in the middle of a
dangerous city, I must come and rescue her, take her back. You know,
I don't even know what hotel she is in?" Parvati throws back her
head and laughs at the rain. "There is nothing for me back in
Kotkhai and there is nothing for me here in Varanasi; no, I can never
be part of that world, I learned that at the cricket match, when they
all laughed. Where can I go? Only everywhere; you see, it's so easy
when you think you have nowhere to go, because then everywhere
becomes open to you. Mumbai. We could go to Mumbai. Or Karnataka—or
Kerala. We could go to Kerala, oh, I'd love to go there, the palms
and the sea and the water. I'd love to see the sea. I'd love to find
out what it smells like. Don't you see? It's an opportunity,
everything going mad around us; in the middle of it all we can slip
away and no one will notice. Mr. Nandha will think I have gone to
Kotkhai with my mother, my mother will think I am still at home, but
we won't be, Krishan. We won't be!"

Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take
Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the
street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being
given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his
parents' house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools,
who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower
to build her a garden in the sky. And the gardener built the garden
on the tower for the beautiful, solitary woman whose best friends
were in stories and in so doing fell in love with her, though she was
a powerful man's wife. And now in a great storm she asks him to run
away with her to another land where they live happily ever after. It
is too big, too sudden. Too simple. It is
Town and Country
.

"What will we do for money? And we will need to get passports to
get out of Bharat. Do you have a passport? I don't, how will I get
one? And what will we do when we get there, how will we live?"

"We will find a way," Parvati Nandha says and those five
words open up the night for Krishan. There are no rules for
relationships, no plans for landscaping and planting and feeding and
pruning. A home, a job, a career, money. A Brahmin baby, even. "Yes,"
he says. "Yes."

For an instant he thinks she has not heard or mistaken him for she
makes no move, no response. Krishan scoops up two handfuls of the
white powder from the sack of weedkiller. He hurls the dust up into
the monsoon in a fountain of poison.

"Let it go!" he shouts. "There are other gardens to
grow."

On the back of the giant elephant flying three thousand metres above
the foothills of the Sikkim Himalayas, N. K. Jivanjee namastes to
Najia Askarzadah. He is seated on a traditional musnud, a throne of
bolsters and cushions on a simple black marble slab. Beyond the brass
rail, snow-capped peaks glint in afternoon sun. No haze, no
smog-taint, no South Asian Brown Cloud, no monsoon gloom.

"Ms. Askarzadah, my sincerest apologies for the cheap sleight of
hand but I thought it best to assume a form with which you were
familiar."

Najia feels high-altitude wind on her skin, the wooden deck shift
beneath her feet as the elephant airship drifts in the air currents.
She is in deep here. She settles cross-legged on a tasseled cushion.
She wonders if it is one of Tal's.

"Why, what form do you usually take?"

N. K. Jivanjee spreads his hands.

"Any and every. All and none. I do not wish to be gnomic but
that is the reality of it."

"So which are you, N. K. Jivanjee or Lal Darfan?"

N. K. Jivanjee dips his head as if in apology for an affront.

"Ah, you see, there you are again, Ms. Askarzadah. Both and
neither. I am Lal Darfan. I am Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala—you
have no idea how I look forward to the experience of marrying myself.
I am every secondary character and minor character and walk-on and
redshirt. I am
Town and Country
. N. K. Jivanjee is a role into
which I seem to have fallen—or is it, had thrust upon me? This
is a real face I have borrowed—I know how you must always have
the body."

"I think I get this riddle," Najia Askarzadah, wiggling her
toes inside her power walk trainers. "You are an aeai."

N. K. Jivanjee claps his hands in delight.

"What you would call a Generation Three aeai. You are correct."

"Let me get this straight. You're telling me that
Town and
Country
—only India's most popular television programme—is
sentient?"

"You interviewed my Lal Darfan manifestation; you know something
of the complexity of this production, but you didn't even glimpse the
tip of the iceberg.
Town and Country
is much bigger than
Indiapendent, much bigger even than Bharat.
Town and Country
is spread across one million computers in every part of India from
Cape Comorin to the shadow of the Himalayas." He smiles
disingenuously. "There are sundarbans in Varanasi and Delhi and
Hyderabad running nothing but written-out aeai cast members, in case
they're ever brought back into the plot. We are everywhere, we are
legion."

"And N. K. Jivanjee?" But Najia Askarzadah can already see
the short step from virtual soap celebrity to illusory politician.
The art of politics has always been the control of information. In a
climate of sound bites and image-ettes and thirty-second
policy-stings it is easy to hide a fake persona in the chaff.

"I can see the similarity between soap and politics," Najia
says, thinking: this is a Gen Three, this is a squillion times
smarter than you, girl reporter; this is a god. "It's all about
narratives and the willing suspension of disbelief and creating
audience identity with characters. And the plots are equally
unbelievable."

"In politics the set decor is generally better," says the
aeai. "I tire of this gaudy flummery." He raises his hand
in a mudra and suddenly he on his musnud and Najia on her tasselled
cushion arc in a screened wooden jharoka of the haveli in Brahmpur B
overlooking the courtyard. It is night. It is dark. Rain rattles the
wooden jali. Najia feels splashes on her skin where it penetrates the
sandalwood screen. "The delight was to find that a politician
can get away with being a lot less real than a soap star."

"Did you give the order to have Tal killed? They shot Bernard's
place up. They had machine guns. Your man almost killed him at the
station, I saved him. Did you know about that?"