River of Gods (69 page)

The taxi-wallah balks at taking his lovely Maruti across the dirty,
gravelly causeway.

"Baba, for what I'm paying you, you buy a new taxi," Tal
exhorts. It is then that the Merc comes bowling towards them along
the long straight causeway from the walled hunting lodge half-seen in
the grey drizzle; hooting furiously. Tal checks yts lock on the
position of the target palmer, taps the driver. "Stop that car,"
yt orders.

"Stop that?" the driver asks. Tal flings the door open. The
driver swears, skids to a halt. Before cry or protest, Tal has
slipped out and walks through the drizzling rain towards the car.
Headlights flash on, blinding yt. Yt can hear the engine rev deep in
its throat. The horn is deep, polyphonic. Tal shields yts eyes with
yts hand and keeps walking. The Merc leaps towards yt.

Najia presses her palms against the glass and cries our as she sees
the car bear down on Tal in yts bedraggled finery. Tal raises a
futile hand. Brakes screech and bind in the clingy marsh-mud. Najia
closes her eyes. She does not know what the sound of half a million
rupees of heavy Northern European engineering striking a heavily
engineered human body sounds like but she is certain she will know it
when she hears it. She doesn't hear it. She hears a heavy car door
thud shut. She dares open her eyes. The man and the nute stand in the
dawn rain. That is Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia thinks. She cannot but
remember that other time she saw him, in the photographs at the club.
Flashlight over dark upholstery, carved wood, polished surfaces but
the dialogue is the same, politician and nute. This time it is the
nute handing over the object of power. Shaheen Badoor Khan is smaller
than she had imagined. She tries to fit opinions to him: traitor,
coward, adulterer, fool; but her accusations are drawn down like
stars to a black hole to the image of the room at the end of the
corridor; the room she was never in, the room she never knew existed,
the room at the end of her childhood, and her father welcoming her.
History is happening here, she tries to tell herself to burn through
the dreadful gravity of what the aeai had told her about her father.
In front of you on a dirt road the feature is being shaped and you
have a ringside seat. You are down there by the sand among the blood
and sinews and you can smell the warm money. This is the story of
yours or anyone else's lifetime. This is your Pulitzer Prize before
you are twenty-five.

And the rest of your life looking back, Najia Askarzadah.

A tap on the glass. Shaheen Badoor Khan bends low. Najia winds down
the window. His face is grey-stubbled, his eyes are buried in
exhaustion but they hold a tiny light, like a diya floating on a
wide, dark river. Against all events and odds, against the tide of
history, he has glimpsed victory. Najia thinks of the women parading
their battle-cats head-high around the fighting ring, torn but
valiant. He offers a hand.

"Ms. Askarzadah." His voice is deeper than she imagined.
She takes the hand. "You'll excuse me if I seem a little slow
this morning; I have rather been overwhelmed by the flow of events,
but I must thank you, not just for myself—I am only a civil
servant—but on behalf of my nation."

Don't thank me, Najia thinks. I was the one sold you in the first
place. She says, "It's all right."

"No no, Ms. Askarzadah, you have uncovered a conspiracy of such
scale, such audacity. I do not know quite how to deal with this, it
is quite literally breathtaking. Machines, artificial intelligences."
He shakes his head and she senses how infinitely weary he is. "Even
with this information, it is by no means over yet and you are by no
means safe. I have an escape plan—everyone in the Bharat Sabha
has an escape plan. I had intended to take myself and my wife, but my
wife, as you have discovered." Shaheen Badoor Khan shakes his
head again and this time Najia senses his disbelief at the nested
involutions, the wanton daring of the conspiracy. "Let's say, I
still have loyal agents in positions of influence, and those whose
loyalty I can't trust are at least well paid. I can get you to
Kathmandu, after that you are on your own, I am afraid. I'd ask one
thing, I know you're a journalist and you have the story of the
decade, but please do not release anything until I have played my
card?"

"Yeah," Najia Askarzadah stammers. Of course, anything. I
owe you. Because you do not know it, but I am your torturer.

"Thank you. Thank you indeed." Shaheen Badoor Khan looks up
at the bleeding sky, squints at the thin, sour rain. "Ah, I have
never known worse times. And please believe me, if I thought what you
have given me would make it worse for Bharat. There is nothing I can
do for my Prime Minister, but at least there is something I may yet
do for my country." He stands up briskly, looks out over the
sodden marshland. "We have a way to go yet before any of us are
safe."

He shakes hands, firmly, grimly, again and returns to his car. He and
Tal exchange the briefest of glances.

"That the politician?" the taxi-wallah asks as he reverses
up to let the Mercedes pass.

"That was Shaheen Badoor Khan," Tal says, wet in the back
seat beside Najia. "Private Secretary to the late Sajida Rana."

"Hot damn!" the driver exclaims as he tailgates Shaheen
Badoor Khan, hooting at early bullock carts on the country back road.
"Don't you love Bharat!"

Jamshedpur Grameen Bank is a dozen rural sathin women running
microcredit schemes in over a hundred villages, most of whom have
never left backcountry Bihar, some of whom have never physically met
each other but they hold fifty lakh ordinary shares in Ray Power.
Their aeai agent is a homely little 2.i bibi, chubby and smiling,
with a life-creased face and a vivid red bindi. She would not look
out of place as a rural auntie in an episode of
Town and Country
.
She namastes in Vishram's 'hoek-vision.

"For the resolution," she says sweetly, like your mama
would, and vanishes.

Vishram's done the mental calculation before Inder can render it up
on his in-eye graphic. KHP Holdings is next on the list with its
eighteen percent stock, by far the biggest single shareholder outside
the family. If Bhardwaj votes yes, it is game to Vishram. If he votes
no, then Vishram will need eleven of the remaining twenty blocks to
win.

"Mr. Bhardwaj?" Vishram asks. His hands are flat on the
table. He cannot lift them. They will leave two palm-sized patches of
misty sweat.

Bhardwaj takes off his hard, titanium framed glasses, rubs at a
tactical spot of grease with a soft felt polishing cloth. He exhales
loudly through his nose.

"This is a most irregular procedure," he says. "All I
can say is that, under Mr. Ranjit Ray, this would never have
happened. But the offer is generous and cannot be ignored. Therefore
I recommend it and vote for the resolution."

Vishram allows his fist and jaw muscles a little mental spasm, a
little yes. Even on that night when he took the Funny Ha! Ha!
contest, there was never an audience kick like the murmur that runs
around the board table that says they've all done their sums too.
Vishram feels Marianna Fusco's hosiery-clad thigh press briefly
against his under the transparent plane of nanodiamond. A movement of
the edge of his peripheral vision make him look up. His mother slips
out.

He hardly hears the formalities of the remainder of the vote. He
numbly thanks the shareholders and board members for their faith in
the Ray name and family. Thinking: Got it. Got it. Fucking got it.
Telling the table that he will not let them down, that they have
assured a great future for this great company. Thinking: I'm going to
take Marianna Fusco to a restaurant, whatever is the very best you
can get in the capital of an invaded country that's just had its
Prime Minister assassinated. Inviting: everyone to make their way
down the corridor and then we'll see exactly the future you've voted
for. Thinking: a softly knotted silk scarf.

IT'S LIKE HERDING CALVES, Marianna Fusco messages as Ray Power
staffers try to usher board members, researchers, guests, strays, and
those second-string journalists who can be spared from the Day's Big
Story down the Ramayana marquetry maple floors. The whorl of bodies
brings Vishram and Ramesh, a head taller, into orbit.

"Vishram." Big Brother smiles, broad and honest. It looks
alien. Vishram recalls him always serious, puzzled, head bowed. His
handshake is firm and long. "Well done."

"You're a rich man now, Ram."

Typically Ramesh is the tilt of the head, the roll of the eyes
upwards, looking for answer in heaven.

"Yes, I suppose I am, quite obscenely so. But you know, I don't
actually care. One thing you can do for me: find me something to do
on this zero-point thing. If it's what you say, I've spent my
professional life looking in the wrong direction."

"You'll come to the demonstration."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world. Or I suppose I should say,
universe." He laughs nervously. Third rule of comedy, Vishram
Ray thinks. Never laugh at your own jokes. "I think Govind needs
a word with you."

He's rehearsed this so many different ways, so many different voices,
so many nuances and stances and they all fall from him in the moments
it takes to pick Govind out of the crowd. He can't turn his weaponry
on this chubby, shyly smiling, sweating man in the too-small suit.

"Sorry," he says, extending the hand. Govind shakes his
head, takes the hand.

"And that is why, brother, you will still never make it in
business. Too soft. Too polite. You won today, you engineered a great
victory, enjoy it! Press it home. Gloat. Have your security escort me
from the building again."

"You've seen that routine already."

Ray Power's PR crew has chivvied the herd onwards; Vishram and Govind
are alone in the corridor. Govind's grip on Vishram's hand is tight.

"Our father would be proud but I still maintain that you will
run this company into the ground, Vishram. You have flash, you have
charisma, you have showbiz and there is a place for that, but that is
not how you run a business. I have a proposal. Ray Power, like the
Ray family, was never meant to be a house divided. I have verbal
agreements with outside investors but nothing is drawn up, nothing is
signed."

"A remerger," Vishram says.

"Yes," says Govind. "With me running the operational
side." Vishram cannot read this audience.

"I'll give you an answer in time," he says. "After the
demonstration. Now, I'd like you to see my universe."

"One thing," Govind asks as their leather soles click
softly on the inlaid maple. "Where did the money come from, eh?"

"An old ally of our father's," Vishram says and as he
subliminally hears that most feared of sounds to a comedian—his
own footsteps walking off—he realises that in the scripts he
rehearsed and never used, there was never one for what he would do if
he had stood up behind that diamond table and died the death.

They find a small space on the floor by the door, beneath the
carriage attendant's pull-down berth. Here they barricade themselves
in with the blue impact-resistant suitcases and huddle against each
other like children. The doors are sealed, all Parvati can see
through its tiny, smoked glass porthole is sky the colour of its own
rain. She sees through the partition door into the next car. The
bodies are pressed up against the tough plastic, disturbingly
flattened. Not bodies; people, lives like hers that cannot continue
in any meaningful way back in that city. The voices drowns out the
hum of the traction engines, the rattle of the rails. She finds it
amazing that anything so monstrously overloaded can move at all but
the tug of acceleration in the well of her belly, the small of her
back against the ribbed plastic wall, tells her the Raipur Express is
picking up speed.

There is no staff anywhere to be found on this train, no ticket
collector in her smart white sari with the wheel of Bharat Rail on
her shoulder of the pallav; no clanking chai-wallah, no cabin
attendant cross-legged on the bunk above them. The train runs fast
now, power pylons blur past the tiny rectangle of smoky sky and
Parvati panics for an instant that this is not the train, this is not
the track. Then she thinks,
What does it matter? Anywhere is away
.

Away. She presses against Krishan, reaches for his hand beneath the
drape of her stained sari, surreptitiously so no one will see, no one
will be tempted to speculate on what these two Hindus are doing. Her
fingers encounter warm wet. She jerks them away. Blood. Blood
spreading in a sticky pool in the space between the bodies. Blood
clinging to the ribs of the plastic wall. Krishan's hand, where it
failed by millimetres to meet hers, is a clenched red fist. Parvati
pushes herself away, not in horror, but to comprehend how this
madness is happening. Krishan sags across the wall leaving a red
smear, props himself up on his left arm. From just above his hip down
his white shirt is red, soaked through with blood. Parvati can see it
pumping through the fabric weave with every breath he takes.

That strange sigh, when he pulled her up on to the train, away from
the firing on the platform. She had seen the bullets ricochet from
the steel stanchions.

His face is the colour of ash, of the monsoon sky. His breath
flutters, his arm quivers; he cannot support himself much longer and
every heartbeat pumps more of his life onto the carriage floor. The
blood pools around his feet. His lips move but he cannot shape words.
Parvati pulls her to him, cradles his head in her lap.

"It's all right my love, it's all right," she whispers. She
should call out, shout for aid, help, a doctor but she knows with
terrible certainty that no one will ever hear in those jammed
carriages. "Oh Krishan," she murmurs as she feels the wet,
sexual blood spread under her thighs. "Oh, my dear man."
His body is so cold. She gently touches his long black hair and
twines it in her fingers as the train drives ever south.