Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (12 page)

And here, last of all, is Adi, an asura with serpentine attributes – scaly skin, reptilian eyes, lipless mouth – and a penchant for rape. He has been prowling the seedier corners of Bangkok, not just the Patpong district where the strip clubs are but the Khao San Road where the rundown backpacker hostels are. He has been violently molesting female tourists, sex workers, even ladyboys – he’s not picky – leaving them with horrific injuries, but he receives his comeuppance at the hands of the Dashavatara. Buddha tries to talk him into surrendering peaceably, but his silver tongue seems not to work on Adi, who responds with a hiss and an insolent flicker of his own forked tongue. So Kalkin steps in with his talwars, slicing Adi to shreds, rending him limb from limb.

End of montage.
²

It was a big deal, the Avatars’ first appearance and early battles. All around the world the news wasn’t about much else. Phone camera recordings of the Ten taken by members of the public fetched silly prices, networks outbidding one another to buy up every scrap of footage they could for broadcast, however wobbly or fragmentary. Same went for still snapshots and the print media. “Feeding frenzy” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Pundits and commentators queued up to give their opinions. On Twitter, nobody tweeted about much else. Roughly five hundred Facebook pages dedicated to the Avatars were set up within the first twenty-four hours.

The mighty Stan Lee himself, brainfather of the Marvel Comics universe, was so in demand as a talking head that he rented an outside broadcast van and stationed it in the driveway of his West Hollywood mansion, so that he wouldn’t have to pinball around Los Angeles calling in at one TV studio after another all day long to talk superheroes.

Western theologians were consulted, and most of them pooh-poohed the notion that the Avatars were genuine deities, while a minority attempted to reconcile the Avatars’ godlike abilities with the existence of a monotheistic Creator, arguing that it must be all part of God’s ineffable plan.

Hindu scholars cheerfully and gleefully explained the Avatars’ mythological background and discussed their respective siddhis. They seemed to have no problem with the idea of gods from their religion being incarnated on Earth and re-enacting the motifs of the Vedas in a new guise. As one of them said, “Hinduism has evolved constantly over four thousand years, changing as different outside powers have invaded India and exerted influence, from the Persians to the British. Its core texts sprang from the collective consciousness of countless generations of Indians. It’s more a worldview than a faith. So these Avatars do not present a dichotomy. They are not blasphemous. If they really are what they seem to be, they are merely Hinduism’s latest model, Hinduism in an age when secularity and empiricism rule, an age when we accept only the real, the tangible, the concrete. They are postmodern Hinduism in the flesh.”

¹
Lovely way to go. Couldn’t happen to a nicer set of demons.

²
Interesting. That passage took me about an hour to write, and you perhaps three or four minutes to read. Whereas, it I’d drawn it, it would have taken me at least two days and more likely three, and you’d have looked at it for twenty, thirty seconds, a minute at most, before turning the page. There’s a whole different creative-effort-to-audience-attention ratio between prose and art.

14. PARANOID IN PARADISE

M
OUNT
M
ERU WAS
the eye of the storm, the calm centre of the whirlwind. The Dashavatara came and went, travelling wherever their missions took them. The rest of us carried on about our business.

Some of us had more to do than others. I myself was pretty much redundant by this point, but since no one had suggested I should go home, I stayed. A call to Mrs Deakins confirmed that Herriman was okay. In fact, the blasted cat seemed to be thriving in my absence. Everyone on my street was aware that he was currently ownerless, and so everyone was looking after him. “He’s getting rather fat,” Mrs Deakins informed me. “If this keeps up he’ll have a hard time getting through the catflap.”

To occupy my days, so that I wasn’t completely at a loose end, I sketched possible upgrades for the Avatars’ costumes. If their image ever needed freshening, I’d be ready. I also polished off the last few pages of the Mark Millar miniseries. It seemed daft not to finish the commission, seeing as I had the time.

Otherwise: plenty of swimming, sunbathing, reading, snoozing, boozing. The sea around Mount Meru was just beautiful, warm and calm and pellucid, like liquid glass, and there was a reef a couple of hundred yards off the sandbar promontory at the island’s western tip that was fish-spotter heaven. I’d float above it, mask and snorkel on, looking down at thousands of finny creatures, from tiny electric-blue things no bigger than a paperclip to iridescent six-bar wrasse, all skittering around their coral metropolis beneath my hovering shadow. At times I felt like Godzilla terrorising the inhabitants of Tokyo. At other times I just felt like God.

One evening I heaved myself out of the sea to find Aanandi on the beach. I’d been in the water for an hour and a half and was as wrinkled as a prune. I flopped down next to her on the sand, heavy-limbed and near exhausted.

“Hello, stranger.”

“Hello yourself,” Aanandi said. “Want one?” She had a cooler with her, full of Tiger beer on ice.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

I uncapped the bottle and drank. I was glad that I’d been wearing a t-shirt while swimming in order to avoid sunburn. Aanandi did not need to behold the pallid frame of an Englishman who spent far too much time indoors and did not know the meaning of the word exercise. In particular she did not need to be exposed to his puffy midriff and budding moobs.

“How’ve things been?” I asked. “I’ve hardly seen you since it all kicked off.”

“Good,” she said. Distantly, distractedly. “Good.”

“This is a lark, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, here we are, support team for a bunch of actual superheroes. The world out there is going nuts for them. Some people even think they’re gods. We know better. They’re not devas, they’re very naughty boys.” The Monty Python reference was lost on her. “How long’s it going to last, do you reckon?”

“How long what?”

“Until people cotton on to the truth.”

“No idea. It doesn’t matter anyway. That’s not part of the...”

She tailed off. I realised she was quite tipsy. There were at least three empties lying next to the cooler.

“Part of the...?” I prompted.

“Nothing.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

“Nothing,” she repeated, more insistently.

“Oh. Okay.” I let it go. What did I care? It was her I was interested in, way more than the Trinity or the Dashavatara.

We gazed out to sea for a while. The sun was setting fast, turning water to flame.

“I’d like to draw you sometime,” I said. “You have a great profile.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Aanandi sighed. “Is that one of your pick-up lines? Is that how you get girls? ‘Hey, look at me, I’m an artist, I’ll draw you.’ Could you be any cheesier?”

Guilty as charged. I’d pulled with that line, or tried to pull, on more than one occasion. Who wouldn’t be flattered when offered the opportunity to be immortalised on paper? It was a date without any of the usual pressures or expenditures of a date.

“Yeah,” I admitted sheepishly. “I must be a little rusty. Not working?”

“You think? Maybe if I was a Zak Zap fan I’d have gone weak at the knees, but I’m not and I haven’t.”

“I thought you liked my work. That’s the impression I’ve been getting.”

“You’re talented, no doubt, but it’s not as if I’m actually into comics. I have a life.”

“Ah. Well. I see.” I got to my feet. I had no idea why Aanandi had turned all snarky like this, why she’d soured on me, but I did know that there was nothing to be gained by my sticking around. “Thanks for the bev. I’m sorry I’m not important enough for you to talk to any more. I thought we had a, you know, a connection, you and me. Obviously I was wrong.”

I’d gone three paces when she said, “No. Wait. I’m sorry. Come back.”

I hesitated.

“I’m in a mood, I admit it,” she said. “And your huffy passive-aggressive self-pity is not attractive. But still. I could do with company.”

“All right,” I relented. “But my fee is another Tiger.”

“Done,” Aanandi said, fishing out a fresh bottle and patting the sand beside her.

“I’m wondering why I’m still here,” I said after downing half the bottle. “I’ve done my bit, haven’t I? There isn’t really any reason to keep me around.”

“I’m wondering that, too,” she said, adding quickly, “Kidding, I’m just kidding. I guess the Trinity think they still need you.”

“Either that or they’ve forgotten about me.”

“It’s perfectly possible. As you can imagine, they’re crazy busy right now. They’ve launched the Dashavatara. There’s endless maintenance and management to be done.”

“That was all very corporate-speak.”

“They’re corporate men. I spend a lot of time with them. Their influence must be rubbing off.”

“But you make it sound like this is all some sort of grandiose business scheme. Isn’t it about saving the world? Protecting humanity from danger?”

“Do you think that, Zak? Honestly?”

“I’d
like
to think that altruism lies at the heart of it. After all, I’m a superhero buff. Superheroes never fight crime for the money or the glory. They do it out of a sense of responsibility. It’s a vocation. But maybe I’m naive.”

“Do you have any inkling how much Lombard, Krieger and Bhatnagar have spent on this?” She jerked her head backwards to indicate Mount Meru.

“I’m guessing ‘a lot.’”

“The technical term for it is, in fact, ‘a buttload.’ And they’re not the types to just throw away huge sums of capital. They’re going to want to see a return on their investment.”

“They want to monetise the Avatars somehow?” I said. “How? Action figures, movies, licensing deals, lunchboxes, that sort of thing?”

Aanandi gave a hollow laugh. “You
are
naive. It’s actually quite charming.” She uncapped two more Tigers and handed me one, even though I hadn’t finished the one I was on. I was building up a decent buzz. She, I could tell, was starting to reel. Her eyes were losing focus and her speech had developed a slight slur. She was getting herself drunk in that way that people who don’t want to think too hard about their lives get themselves drunk. “I don’t know if I haven’t been wasting my time here.”

“What, with me, on this beach?”

“No, Mister Ego. At Mount Meru. Maybe I’m not cut out for this job. I just... I couldn’t resist. When they asked, when they told me what they were doing... I loved the myths, you see. My pop used to tell me them on his knee. Every night, those were my bedtime stories. Hindu folk tales. How King Kaushika tried to steal the yogi Vasistha’s cow, only he ended up seeing that Vasistha’s lifestyle was better than his own and so abandoned his kingdom to become a yogi himself instead. How mischievous Krishna hid the cowherd girls’ clothes while they were bathing in the river, and how his foster mother accused him of eating earth and he opened his mouth and showed her the entire universe inside his throat. How the sage Rishyashringa made it stop raining and King Lomaharsha sent his daughter Shanta to seduce him and take away his chastity so that he lost his power and the drought ended. When I was really little I used to think my dad was making the stories up himself. I must’ve been about nine or ten when I finally learned they were taken from the
Upanishads
and the
Brahmana
and the
Mahabharata
. He’d sit there speaking in his thick accent, and I’d sit there listening with his beard tickling my head, and I loved it. I loved it all. And that’s why I so wanted to be a part of this, because it would make it real, those stories, and I know my poppa would have loved to see it. Only now...”

“It’s not what you expected.”

“It’s so much less. So much cheaper. So much more cynical. I can’t explain. There are things you don’t know and shouldn’t know, Zak.”