River of Gods (10 page)

"This is nice," Anye says. "Expensive."

Vishram still has his hand down her pants, guiding her up the steps
with his hot finger. His groin, his breathing, his belly muscles all
tell him he's going to have her big and heavy and naked on his floor.
He's going to find out the noises she makes. He's going to see the
dirt in her head, the things she wants another body to do to her.
Vishram almost tumbles through the door in a rush of want. His foot
sends the thing waiting for him skittering across the lobby. He
thinks about leaving it. The automatic lights pick out the green and
silver logo of The Company.

"Just a wee second."

Already his proto-stiffie is subsiding.

The plastic priority mail wallet is addressed to Vishram Ray,
Apartment 1a, 22 Kelvingrove Terrace, Glasgow, Scotland. Sick, sober
and de-aroused, Vishram opens the envelope. Inside, two items: a
letter from Shastri the wrinkled retainer and a ticket from Glasgow
via LHR to Varanasi, first class, one way.

He began the thing with the woman in the very good suit in the
BharatAir Raja Class lounge because he's still glowing on the winning
high and the booze but mostly frustrated libido.

He had the zip just pulled on his jam of travel essentials when the
limo arrived. He'd offered Anye a ride back to hers. She'd given him
a freezing, solid Gallic SNP-activist look.

"I'm sorry, it's family."

She looked very cold, in those pants, that much bare skin, hurrying
through the early August Glasgow predawn. Vishram made it to check-in
with ten minutes to spare. He was the sole occupant of the sharp end
of the short shuttle flight to Londlon. He came down the airbridge
slightly vertiginous from the velocity of it all and headed straight
to the first-class lounge with a determination for vodka. The shower,
the shave, the change of clothes, and a shot of Polish restored his
Vishram Ray-ness. He felt good enough about himself to try to hook
the woman in the comfortable-for-flying suit into casual chat. Just
to pass the time. Lounge reptile.

Her name is Marianna Fusco. She is a corporate lawyer. She has been
summoned to Varanasi to attend to a complex trusteeship issue.

"Me, I'm just the black sheep, the court jester. The youngest
brother sent to England to study law at some 'bridge university;
except he ends up in Scotland aspiring to stand-up. The highest human
art form, incidentally. And not all that different from law, I
suspect. We're both creatures of the arena."

She doesn't rise to that one. Instead, she asks,

"How many brothers?"

"Big bear, middle bear."

"No sisters?"

"Not many sisters in Varanasi, or at least, my bit of it."

"I've heard this," she says, turning her body comfortably
on the leather couch towards him. "What's it like, a society
with four times as many men as women?"

"Not too many lady lawyers," Vishram says, settling back on
the creaking upholstery. "Not too many ladies anything
professional."

"I shall remember to press home my advantages," the lawyer
says. "Can I get you another vodka? It is going to be a long
flight."

Shortly after the third they are called to board. Vishram's seat goes
all the way back. After years of budget airlines, the legroom is
incredible. There is such play value in the buttons and toys that he
doesn't notice the passenger strapping in beside him.

"Well, hello there, isn't this a coincidence?" he says.

"It isn't," Marianna Fusco says, slipping off her jacket.
She has good arm definition under her stretch-brocade top.

The first armagnac comes over Belgium as the hypersonic plane climbs
steeply towards its thirty-three kilometre cruising altitude. It's
not a drink Vishram has ever considered. He's a vodka boy. But now he
thinks armagnac rather suits the personality he's playing here. He
and Marianna Fusco talk through the indigo sky about their
childhoods, hers in a vast nation of family spread out across
marriages and remarriages—her
constellation family,
she
calls it, his in the bourgeois patriarchy of Varanasi. She finds the
emergent social stratification fascinating and horrifying, as the
English always have. It's what they perennially love about Indian
culture and literature. The guilt and thrill of a really good class
system.

"I do come from rather a well-off family." Play it up. "Not
Brahmins, though. Capital 'B' Brahmins, I mean. My father's a
Kshatriya, quite devout in his wee way. Tinkering with the DNA would
be blasphemous."

Two more armagnacs and the conversation sags into a doze. In full
luxurious recline, Vishram pulls his airline blanket up around his
neck. He imagines the chill of near-space beyond that nanocarbon
wall. Marianna moves against him under her blanket. She is warm and
far too close and breathing in time with him.

Manoeuvre six. Somewhere over Iran he cups a breast. She moves
against him. They kiss. Armagnac tongues. She wiggles closer. He
slides her breasts out of her white stretch top. Marianna Fusco has
big areolar patches with raised pores and nipples like bullets. She
hitches up her comfortable-but-businesslike skirt as the shockwave
rider hits Mach 3.6. He licks and tries the slip but Marianna Fusco
intercepts him and guides his finger to that other, pert hole. She
gives a little gasp, rides his finger up to the hilt and slickly
unzips. Vishram Ray's heavy dick tumbles out into the gap between the
seats. Marianna Fusco rubs her thumb over the glans. Vishram Ray
tries not to be overheard by the stewardess and thumbs her clitoris.
"Fuck," she whispers. "Rotate it. Fucking rotate."

She hooks a leg over, settles deeper on to his digit. Sutra at
thirty-three kay. A quarter of the way to orbit, Vishram Ray comes
carefully into a BharatAir Raja Class napkin. Marianna Fusco has an
airline pillow half stuffed into her mouth, making tiny muffled
mewling screams. Vishram rolls back, feeling every centimetre of
altitude beneath him. He just made it into the most exclusive club on
the planet, the Twenty-Five-Mile-High Club.

They clean off in the bathroom, separately, giggling uncontrollably
at each glance of the other. They straighten their clothes and return
soberly to their seats and shortly after they feel the shift in pitch
as the aerospacer enters descent, plunging like a burning meteor
towards the IndoGangetic plain.

He waits for her on the far side of customs. He admires the cut of
her cloth, how her height and the solid way she moves stand out among
the Bharatis. He knows there will be no phone calls or e-mails or
comeback. A professional relationship.

"Could I offer you a lift?" he asks. "My father will
have sent a car — I know, it's cheesy, but he's old-fashioned
about things like that. It's no problem to drop you at your hotel."

"Thank you," Marianna Fusco says. "I don't like the
look of the taxi rank."

It's easy to spot the limo. The chauffeur is actually flying little
Ray Power company flags from the wings. He doesn't miss a beat as he
takes Marianna Fusco's bag, sticks it in the trunk, and chases a
small posse of beggars and badmashes. The few seconds of heat between
airport and air-conditioned car stun Vishram. He's been too long in a
cold climate. And he had forgotten the scent, like ashes of roses.
The car pulls into the wall of colour and sound. Vishram feels the
heat, the warmth of the bodies, the greasy hydrocarbon soot against
the glass. The people. The never failing river of faces. The bodies.
Vishram discovers a new emotion. It has the blue remembered
familiarity of homesickness but is expressed through the terrible
mundane squalor of the people that throng beneath these boulevards.
Home nausea. Nostalgic horror.

"This is near the Sarkhand Roundabout, isn't it?" Vishram
says in Hindi. "I'd like to see it."

The driver waggles his head and takes the next right.

"Where are we going?" Marianna Fusco asks.

"Somewhere to tell that constellation family of yours about,"
Vishram says.

Police barricades block the main road so the driver takes a way he
knows through intestinally narrow back streets and turns out of them
straight into a riot. He hits the brakes. A young male tumbles over
the bonnet. He picks himself up, more shaken than damaged, a chubby
post-teen with a wisp of a holy moustache, but the impact has rocked
the car and its passengers. Instantly, the crowd's attention switches
from the gaudy statue of Hanuman under his shady concrete chhatri to
the car. Hands drum the hood, the roof, the doors. They bounce the
limo on its springs. The crowd sees a big Merc, tinted windows,
company flags, a thing allied to the forces that would demolish their
sacred place and turn it into a metro station.

The driver slams the car into reverse, smokes rubber as he backs down
the alley beneath the banners of laundry and rickety wooden
balconies. Bricks lob through the air, crack off the metal work.
Marianna Fusco gives a small cry as the windscreen suddenly stars
into a white spider web. Steering by rear-view cam, the driver slots
his car between two flanking bamboo scaffold towers. The young
karsevaks chase the car, striking at it with lathis and calling
curses on the faithless Ranas and their demonic Muslim spin-doctors.
They wave the torn-off company flags. One petrol bomb in these
alleys, and hundreds are dead, Vishram Ray thinks. But the driver
navigates the maze to his point of entry, finds a momentary gap in
the constant torrent of traffic, and throws his car backwards into
it. Trucks buses mopeds slam to a halt. The driver handbrakes it. The
holy boys follow them through the traffic, slipping between phatphats
and Japanese pick-ups painted with Hindu iconography. Slipping,
jogging, gaining. The driver raises his hands in desperation. Nothing
to be done in this traffic. Glancing over his shoulder, Vishram can
read their shirt-buttons. Then Marianna Fusco cries out
Oh Jesus
God!
and the car slams to a halt hard enough for Vishram to jar
the bridge of his nose off the back of the driver's seat. Through
tears and stun he sees a steel demon drop out of the sky before him;
Ravana the devourer, demon-lord, squatting on hydraulic-loaded
titanium hams, ten blades spread like a fan. The tiny mantis-head
looks right at him, unfolds a dentist's arsenal of sensor pods and
probes. Then it leaps again. Vishram feels clawed toes rake the
limo's roof. He whirls, looks out the back to see it land beside a
bus stop. Traffic freezes, karsevaks scatter like goats. The thing
stalks away down the street, quartering the boulevard with gatling
pods. It wears the stars and bars on its carapace. A US combat robot.

"What the. ?" They've started a war while he was in
immigration. The driver points to the street across the intersection
to a street of neon shop fronts and glowing umbrellas where a man in
dark, expensive clothing yells imprecations at the departing machine.
Behind him are two fillets of Mercedes SUV. The man picks up lumps of
circuitry and metal and shies them after the battle-bot. "I
still don't."

"Sahb," the driver says as he engages drive. "Have you
been so long gone you have forgotten Varanasi?"

The journey to Marianna Fusco's hotel is in grim silence. She thanks
him politely, the Rajput doorman salutes and lifts her bag, and she
goes up the steps without a look back.

Not looking good for a follow-up fuck, then.

The battered limo turns into the gates between the motor parts shop
and the IT school through the screen of ashok trees. At once he is in
a different world. The first thing money buys in India is privacy.
The street roar is hushed to a pulse. The insanity of his city is
shut out.

The house staff has lit naphtha flares all along the drive to welcome
the returned prodigal. Drummers greet Vishram Ray with a tattoo and
escort the car, and there is the house, wide and proud and
unbelievably white in the floods. Vishram finds uninvited tears in
his eyes. When he was beneath its roof he had always been ashamed to
acknowledge that he lived in a palace, cringing at its pillars and
pediments and wide portico screened with honeysuckle and hibiscus,
its bloody whiteness, its interior of swept marble and old quaint,
pornographic wood carvings and ceilings painted in the Nepali style.
A family of merchants had built it in the British days in a style to
remind them of home. The Shanker Mahal, they named it. Now that
adolescent contempt, that embarrassment at being privileged, is swept
away as he steps out and the house assails him with the old
remembered smells of dust and neem trees and the musk of the
rhododendrons and the faint reek of the sewage system that never
really worked.

They await him on the steps. Old Shastri, on the lowest rung, already
namasteing. Flanking him, the house staff, in two wings, the women to
his left, the men to the right. Ram Das the venerable gardener is
still there, an incredible age now but still zealous as ever, Vishram
doesn't doubt, in his eternal war against the monkeys. On the middle
rank, his brothers. Eldest Ramesh seems taller and thinner than ever,
as if the gravity of the interstellar objects he studies is drawing
him into the sky, spinning him into a rope of inquiry. Still no
significant female. Even in Glasgow, Vishram heard Bharati diaspora
rumours about weekend specials to Bangkok. Next, perfect brother,
Govind. Perfect suit perfect wife perfect twin heirs Runu and Satish.
Vishram sees the middle body fat piling around his chest. The stellar
DiDi, former breakfast-tivi presenter and trophy bride, is at his
side. At her side the aya cradles the latest line in the dynasty. A
girl. How 2047. Vishram coos and chuckles little Priya but something
about her gives him the idea that she's a Brahmin. Something primal,
pheromonal, a shift in the body chemistry.

His mother holds the top step; superior in her deference, as Vishram
always remembers her. A shadow among the pillars. His father is not
present.