River of Gods (15 page)

"Couple of seconds longer," Thomas Lull says. He waits
until she can take no more, and one second beyond. "Okay, and
in." Aj opens her mouth in an ecstatic, whooping inhalation.
Thomas Lull clamps his hand over it. "Through the nose. Always
through the nose. Remember, the nose for breathing, the mouth for
talking."

He removes his hand, watches the slow belling out of her little round
belly.

"Would it not be simpler taking medication?" Dr. Ghotse
opines. He holds a little coffee cup very delicately in his two
hands.

"The whole point of this method," says Thomas Lull, "is
that you don't need medication, ever again. And hold."

Dr. Ghotse studies Aj as she again empties her lungs in a long,
whistling exhalation through her nostrils and holds.

"This is very like a pranayama technique."

"It's Russian; from the days when they had no money to buy
anti-asthma drugs. Okay, and out." Thomas Lull watches Aj
exhale. "And hold again. It's a very simple theory if you accept
that everything you've been taught about how to breathe is dead
wrong. According to Dr. Buteyko, oxygen is poison. We rust from the
moment we're born. Asthma is your body's reaction to try to stop you
taking in this poison gas. But we go around like big whales with our
mouths open taking great searing lungfuls of O2 and tell ourselves
it's doing us good. The Buteyko method is simply balancing your O
₂
,
and your CO
₂
, and if that means you have to starve your
lungs of oxygen to build up a healthy supply of carbon dioxide, then
you do what Aj here is doing. And in." Aj, face pale, throws her
head back and expands her belly as she inhales. "Okay, breathe
normally, but through the nose. If you feel panicky, do a couple of
rounds of breath retention, but don't open your mouth. The nose,
always the nose."

"It seems suspiciously simple," Dr. Ghotse says.

"The best ideas are always the simplest," Thomas Lull says,
the Barnum of breathology.

After he has seen Dr. Ghotse creaking off on his tricycle, Thomas
Lull walks Aj back to her hotel. Trucks and Maruti micro-buses roll
along the straight white road tootling their multiple horns. Thomas
Lull raises a hand to the drivers he recognises. He should not be
here. He should have sent her off with a wave and a smile and when
she was out of sight taken his bag straight to the bus station. And
why does he say, "You should come back tomorrow for another
session. It takes a while to get the technique right."

"I don't think so, Professor Lull."

"Why?"

"I do not think you will be here. I saw the case on your bed, I
think you will be leaving today."

"What makes you think that?"

"Because I found you."

Thomas Lull says nothing. He thinks, can you read my mind? A dug-out
carrying neatly dressed schoolchildren crosses the backwater to the
landing, alcofuel engine burbling.

"I think you want to know how I found you," Aj says mildly.
"You do?"

"Yes, because it would always have been easier for you to leave,
but you are still here." She stops, head following a
dagger-billed, wild-eyed bird that glides down from the pastel blue
Church of St. Thomas through the palms, their trunks handed red and
white to warn traffic, to settle at the edge of a raft of copra husks
softening in the water. "Paddy-bird, Indian pond-heron,
Ardeola greyii
," she says, as if hearing the words for the
first time. "Hm." She moves on.

"You obviously want me to ask," says Thomas Lull.

"If that is a question, the answer is, I saw you. I wanted to
find you but I did not know where you were, so the gods showed me you
here in Thekaddy."

"I'm in Thekkady because I don't want to be found by gods or
anyone."

"I am aware of that, but I did not want to find you because of
who you were, Professor Lull. I wanted to find you because of this
photograph."

She opens her palmer. The sunlight is very strong even through the
palm-dapple, the picture is washed-out. It is taken on a day as
bright as this, three Westerners squinting in front of the
Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram. There is a slight
sallow-skinned man and a South Indian woman. The man's arm is around
the woman's waist. The other is Thomas Lull, grinning in Hawaiian
shirt and terrible shorts. He knows the picture. It was taken seven
years ago, after a conference in New Delhi when he took a month to
travel the states of newly sundered India, a landmass that had always
fascinated, appalled, and attracted him in equal measures. Kerala's
contradictions held him a week longer than planned; its perfume of
dust, musk, and sun-seared coconut matting, its sense of ancient
superiority to the caste-ridden north, its dark, fetid chaotic gods
and their bloody rituals, its long and successful realisation of the
political truth that Communism was a politics of abundance not
scarcity; its ever-shifting flotsam of treasures and travellers.

"Can't deny it, that's me," Thomas Lull confesses.

"The other couple, do you recognise them?"

Thomas Lull's heart kicks.

"Just tourists," he lies. "They've probably got a
photograph exactly the same. Should I?"

"I believe they may be my natural parents. It is them I am
trying to find; it is because of them that I asked the gods to show
me you, Professor Lull."

Now Thomas Lull stops up short. A truck decorated with images of Siva
and his wife and sons rolls past in a wave of dust and Chennai filmi
music.

"How did you come by this photograph?"

"It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday by a firm of
lawyers in Varanasi, in Bharat."

"And your adoptive parents?"

"They are from Bangalore. They know what I am doing. They gave
me their blessing. I always knew I had been adopted."

"Have you any photographs of them?"

She scrolls up an image of a coltish teen sitting on a verandah step,
knees pressed chastely together, hands wrapped around shins,
barricading virginity. She doesn't wear the Vishnu tilak. Behind her
stand a South Indian man and woman in their late forties, dressed in
the Western style. They look like people who would be always open and
honest and Western with their daughter and never try to interfere
with her journey of self-discovery. He thumbs back to the temple
photograph.

"And these you say are your natural parents?"

"I believe so."

Impossible,
Thomas Lull wants to say. He keeps silent, though
silence binds him in lies. No, you bind yourself in lies wherever you
turn, Thomas Lull. Your life is all lies.

"I have no recollection of them," Aj says. Her voice is
flat and neutral, like the shade she wears. She might be describing a
tax return. "When I received the photograph, I felt nothing. But
I do have one memory; so old it is almost like a dream. It is of a
white horse galloping. It comes to me and then it rears up with its
hooves in the air, as if it is dancing, just for me. Oh, I can see
it. I love that horse very much. I think it is the only thing I have
from that time."

"No explanation from these lawyers?"

"That is correct. I had hoped that you could help me. But it
seems you cannot, so I will go now to Varanasi and find these
lawyers."

"They're about to start a war up there."

Aj frowns. Her tilak creases. Thomas Lull feels his heart turn.

"Then I shall trust the gods to keep me safe from harm,"
she declares. "They showed me where you were from this
photograph, they will guide me in Varanasi."

"These are mighty handy gods."

"Oh yes, Professor Lull. They have never failed me yet. They are
like an aura around people and things. Of course, it took some time
before I realised that not everyone could see them. I just thought it
was manners that they had all been taught not to say what they knew,
and that I was a very rude and unmannerly girl, who blurted out
everything she saw. Then I understood that they couldn't see and
didn't know."

As a ragged-assed seven-year-old William Blake had seen a London
plane tree churning with angels. Only his mother's intercession
prevented a thrashing from his father. Presumptions and lies. A
lifetime later the visionary had looked into the eye of the sun and
seen an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying
Holy Holy
Holy is the Lord God Almighty
. Thomas Lull had squinted at the
Kansas sun every morning of his working life and seen nothing but
nuclear fusion and the uncertainties of quantum theory. Tension coils
at the base of Thomas Lull's stomach but it is not the old serpent of
sexual anticipation he knows from the affairs and the sun-warmed
backpacker girls. It is something other. Fascination. Fear.

"Any person or thing?" Aj cocks her head, a gesture between
a Western nod and an Indian head-roll. "Who's that, then?"
Thomas Lull points to the tin toddy-stall where Mr. Sooppy sits
waving away flies with a tattered copy of the
Thiruvananthapuram
Times.

"That is Sandeep Sooppy. He is a toddy-seller and he lives at
number 1128 Joy of the People Road."

Thomas Lull feels his scrotum slowly contract in fear. "And
you've never met him before in your life."

"I have never met him at all. I never met your friend Dr. Ghotse
before, either."

A green and yellow bus rolls past. Aj does the head-cock thing again,
frowning at the hand-painted licence number. "And that bus
belongs to Nalakath Mohanan, but it could be someone else driving.
The bus is well past its service date. I would not recommend riding
on it."

"It'll be Nalakath," Thomas Lull says. His head is wheeling
as if he had taken an eighth of the Nepali that Mr. Sooppy sells out
the back of his toddy stand. "So, how come these gods of yours
can tell the state of Nal's brakes just by glancing at his
licence-plate, but they can't tell the first thing about these people
you say are your natural parents?"

"I can't see them," Aj says. "They are like a blind
spot in my vision, every time I look at them, everything closes up
around them, and I can't see them."

"Whoa," says Thomas Lull. Magic is spooky, but a hole in
the magic; that's scary. "What do you mean, you can't see them?"

"I can see them as human beings but I can't see the aura around
them, the gods, the information about them and their lives."

A rising wind rattles the palm blades, rattles Thomas Lull in his
spirit. Forces are drawing around him, penning him inside a mandala
of lives and coincidences. Blow on, away out of here, man. Don't get
involved in this woman and her mysteries. You've lied to her, what
you could not bear is if she is not lying to you.

"I can't help you," Thomas Lull says. They are at the gate
of the Palm Imperial. He can hear the satisfying crisp twang of a
tennis rally. The wind confesses in the bamboo, the surf is high
again. He will hate to leave this place. "I'm sorry your trip
has been wasted."

Lull leaves her in the lobby. When she has gone to her room he calls
in a long-term favour from Achuthanandan the hotel manager and pulls
her account details from the register. Ajmer Rao. 385 Valahanka Road,
Silver Oak Development, Rajankunte, Bangalore. Eighteen years young.
Paid for with an industrial-grade Bank of Bharat black card. A
high-calibre financial weapon for a girl working the Kerala
Bhati-club circuit. Bank of Bharat. Why not First Karnatic or Allied
Southern? A small mystery among the hosts of luminous gods. He tries
to spy them as he trails back the straight white road to his home,
catch them out of the corner of his eye, fix them in his fleeting
vision like floaters. The trees remain trees, the trucks obdurately
trucks, and the Indian pond-heron stalks among the floating coir
husks.

Aboard
Salve Vagina
Thomas Lull swiftly sets a stack of folded
beach-shirts on top of Blake and closes the bag. Leave and don't look
back. The ones who look back are turned to salt. He leaves a note and
some money for Dr. Ghotse to find a local woman and pack the rest
into boxes. When he arrives where he's meant to be he'll send for his
stuff.

On the road he flags down a phatphat and rides in to the bus station,
bag clutched on his lap. Bus station is a generosity: the battered
Tatas use a wide spot in the road as a turning circle, which they do
without regard for buildings, pedestrians, or any other road user.
The gaudily decorated buses lounge beside sewing repair stalls and
hot snack vendors and the ubiquitous toddy-men. Marutis with interior
fans rattling and open-back Mahindra pickups honk their way through
the bustle. Five bus sound-systems compete with hits from the movies.

The bus for Nagercoil won't leave for an hour so Thomas Lull buys
himself a toddy and squats on the oily soil under the seller's
umbrella to watch the driver and conductor argue with their
passengers and grudgingly wedge their luggage on to the roof rack.
The Palm Imperial's microbus arrives at its usual breakneck speed.
The side door slams open and Aj steps out. She has a small, grey bag
with her and wears shades and a wrap-round over her pants. Boys mob
her, clutching at her bag; informal porters. Thomas Lull gets up from
under his shady umbrella, strolls over to her, and lifts her bag.

"All connections to Varanasi this way, ma'am."

The Nagercoil bus driver sounds his horn. Last call for the south.
Last call for peace and dive schools. Thomas Lull steers Aj through
the skinny boys towards the Thiruvananthapuram express coach, firing
up its biodiesels.

"You have changed your mind?"

"Gentleman's prerogative. And I've always wanted to see a war
close up."

He jumps up on to the steps, pulls Aj up after him. They squeeze down
the aisle, find the back seat. Thomas Lull puts Aj by the window
grille. Shadows bar her face. The heat is incredible.

The driver sounds his horns a last time, then the bus for the north
draws away.