River of Gods (37 page)

But Tal does kick off yts boots and slips out of yts cool coat before
lying back on the white, softly padded table. Yt blinks,
self-conscious, up into the lights as Nanak bustles about
recalibrating the scanner. This is when Tal remembers that Nanak, the
sweet doctor, doesn't even have a nursing qualification. Yts just a
broker, a stevedore of surgery. Robots dismembered Tal and put yt
back together again, micromanipulators, molecule-thin scalpels guided
by surgeons in Brazil. Nanak's talent is in bedside manner and a nose
for the sharpest medics at the keenest prices wherever the global
market opens an opportunity.

"So, baba, tell Nanak, is this a purely medical call or are you
checking out the Patna scene?" Nanak asks as yt slips a 'hoek
behind yts large ear.

"Nanak, I'm a career nute now, don't ya know? I've moved up to
section head in three months. A year from now, I'll be running the
show."

"Then you'll be able to come to me to buy whole new sets of
emotics," Nanak says. "I've got some new stuff, fresh from
the mixers. Very good. Very strange. Right. Ready. Just breathe
normally." Yt lifts a hand in a mudra and semicircles of white
metal slide out of the bed base and join in a ring over Tal's feet.
Despite Nanak's injunction, Tal finds yt's holding yts breath as the
scanner begins its pilgrimage up yts body. Yt closes yts eyes as the
ring of light sweeps over yts throat and tries not to imagine that
other table, beyond that other door. The table that is not a table,
but a bed of gel in a tank of robots. Yt was lain on that table,
anaesthetised to within a glimmer of death, autonomic responses wired
to a medical aeai that kept yts lungs pumping, heart beating, blood
circulating. Tal cannot remember the top of the tank descending,
locking in place, filling with more pressurised, anaesthetic gel. But
yt can imagine and imagination has become memory, a claustrophobic
imaginary memory of drowning. What yt cannot—dares not—imagine
are the robots moving through the gel, blades extended, to flay every
centimetre of skin from yts body.

That was the first part.

As the old skin was incinerated and the new one that had been seeded
three months before from a sample of Tal's DNA and a egg sold by some
basti woman grew ripe in its tank, the machines went in. They moved
slowly through the viscous, organic gel, driving in under the muscle
armouring, peeling back fat, detouring around blood tines and
engorged arterials, disconnecting sinews to get to the bone. In their
Sao Paulo offices, the cheap surgeons operated on air with their
manipulator gloves and opened up intimate, bloody vistas of Tal's
body on their visors. Osteobots sculpted bone, reshaping a cheek
here, widening a pelvis, shaving slivers from shoulder blades,
dislocating, relocating, amputating, substituting plastic and
titanium. As they worked, teams of GUMbots removed all genitalia,
replumbed ureter and urethra, and respliced the hormone triggers and
neural response pathways to the array of subdermal studs embedded in
the left forearm.

Tal hears Nanak laugh. "I can see right inside you," yt
giggles.

Three days in that tank Tal hung; skinless, bleeding constantly, a
whole body stigmata, while the machines worked slowly, steadily,
shift after shift dismantling yts body and rebuilding. Then their
task was done and they withdrew and the neurobots went in. Different
doctors guided these, a team from Kuala Lumpur. In the three days of
Tal's passion, the market had shifted in neurosurgery. This was a
different, more refined science than cutting and pasting gobbets of
meat. Clicking crab-bots fused protein circuitry to nerve fibre,
spliced nerves to gland inducers, rewired Tal's entire endocrine
system. While they grafted, big machines took the top off Tal's skull
and micromanipulators crept between the tangled ganglia like hunters
in a mangrove swamp to spot-weld protein processors to neural
clusters in the medulla and amygdala, the deep, dark root-buttresses
of the self. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, they brought Tal
back from the edge of death and woke yt up. The aeai hooked into the
back of Tal's skull now had to run a full autonomic nervous system
test that the chip grafts had seated correctly and that the neural
firing patterns yt had previously associated with
gender
would
trigger the new, implanted behaviours. Skinless, muscles hanging like
sacks from disconnected sinews, eyeballs and brain naked to dermal
trauma gel, Tal woke up.

"Nearly done, baba," Nanak says. "You can open your
eyes, you know."

Only that cocoon of anaesthetic gel kept Tal from dying of pain. The
aeai played yts neural network like a sitar. Tal imagined fingers
moving, legs running, felt urgings and stirrings where yt never had
before, saw visions and wonders, heard choruses and God whistling,
was sucked down by washes of sensation and emotion yt had never known
before, hallucinated monster striped buzzing insects filling yts
mouth like a gag, then, in the same instant, dwindling to the size of
a pea, revisited places yt had never been, regreeted friends yt had
never known, remembered lives yt had never lived, tried to cry out
yts mother's name, yts father's name, God's name, screamed and
screamed but yts body had been shut down, mouthless, helpless. Then
the aeai shut Tal's brain down again and in the amnesia of
anaesthesia yt forgot all the wonders and horrors yt had met in the
tank of gel. The helpful machines put the top back on yts head,
reconnected everything that had been disconnected and draped Tal in
yts new skin fresh from the stem cell vat. Five days more yt hung,
merely unconscious, in a wash of cell stimulant medium, dreaming the
most astonishing dreams. On the tenth morning the aeai disconnected
from Tal's skull, drained the tank, and washed down yts sleek new
skin as yt lay there, complete, new, on the transparent plastic,
shallow chest rising and falling in the white spotlights.

"Well, that's you," Nanak says and Tal opens yts eyes to
see the scanner ring split in two and retract inside the diagnostic
bed.

"Am I?"

"Apart from time's usual depredations, you look lovely inside.
Full of light. Otherwise, the usual homily about saturated fats,
alcohol, tobacco, nonprescription drugs and moderate exercise."

"What about." Tal raises a hand to yts head.

"Not a damn thing wrong with you. I issue you a complete bill of
health. Isn't that good? Now, get up and have dinner with me and tell
me what this is all about."

Swinging over the side of the diagnostic bed, Tal tries out a dozen
excuses to turn down the invitation and then realises that if yt
doesn't tell Nanak what's in yts heart, then the entire trip to Patna
will have been folly.

"Right then," yt says. "I accept."

Dinner is simple, exquisite vegetarian thalis taken on the flying
bridge from which captains once overviewed their flotillas of barges.
Nanak's assistant and cook Suniti flits in and out with bottles of
cold Kingfisher and advice on how each dish should be eaten, "a
mouthful, and hold it until your tongue goes numb," "two
bites," "a spoon of this, a bite of that, then the lime."
Gandaik FTZ winds down after its day earning dividends for the
medical professionals of Nebraska. Music and the smell of ganja coil
up from the barges where entrepreneurs emerge from their workshops to
lean on the rails and smoke and crack beer in the last of the sun.

"So, now you must pay me," Ninak says and when yt sees the
consternation on Tal's face, yt touches it lightly, reassuringly. "No
no. Suniti will take care of that. You must pay me what you owe me
for this excellent food and fine evening and my exquisite company,
with what you have kept from me all day, bad baba."

Tal rolls on to yts back on the soft tatami mat. Above yt, the sky is
barred with straps of purple cloud, the first yt has seen in months.
Yt imagines yt can smell rain, so long anticipated, an imagination of
a memory.

"It's someone, but you knew that anyway."

"I had an idea."

A lone bansuri throws notes out in the softening dark. A musician,
down there amongst the badmashes, coiling out an ancient Bihari folk
tune.

"Someone who is clever and successful and quiet and deep, with
good taste and mysteries and secrets and is scared by it all but
wants it so much."

"Isn't that what we're all looking for, janum?"

"Someone who happens to be a man." Nanak leans forward.
"This is a problem to you?"

"I got out of Mumbai to get away from complicated relationships
and I'm in the most complex of them all. I Stepped Away because I
didn't want to have to play that game; the man and woman game. You
gave me new rules, you put them in my head, down there and now they
don't work, either."

"You wanted me to check out that everything was functioning
within its operational parameters."

"There has to be something wrong with me."

"There is nothing wrong with you, Tal. I saw right through you
to the other side. You are perfectly healthy in body, mind, and
relationships. Now you want me to tell you what to do. You call me
guru, you think I'm wise, but I won't do that. There's never been a
rule of human behaviour that hasn't been broken by someone,
somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To
be human is to transcend the rules. It's a phenomenon of this
universe that the simplest of rules can give rise to the most complex
behaviours. The implants just give you a new set of reproduction-free
imperatives, that's all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They
wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't give rise to the most
troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all
this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to trouble as sparks
fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen,
nute."

The notes of the flute stalk Tal. Yt smells a rumour of rain on the
evening wind that blows up from the river.

"It's who, not what," Suniti comments as she gathers up
thalis. "Do you love him?"

"I think about him all the time, I can't get him out of my head,
I want to call him and buy him shoes and make him music mixes and
find out all the things he likes to eat. He likes Middle Eastern, I
know that."

Nanak rocks on yts hip bones.

"Yes yes yes yes yes. My assistant is, of course, right as she
always is, but you haven't answered her question. Do you love him?"

Tal takes a breath.

"I think so."

"Then you know what you must do," Nanak says and Suniti
scoops the metal dishes up in the tablecloth and whisks them away,
but Tal can tell from the set of her shoulders that she is pleased.

After the dinner is the Jacuzzi. Nanak and Tal lap in nipple-deep
water in the big wooden tub on the other wing of the flying bridge,
dappled with marigold petals and a subtle slick of tea-tree oil, for
Nanak's persistent athlete's foot. Incense rises vertically on three
sides, the air is preternaturally still, climate in abeyance,
waiting.

Patna's airgiow is a golden nebula on the western horizon. Nanak
strokes Tal's thighs with its long, articulate big toes. There is no
gendered rule of arousal in it. It is touching, what nutes do,
friends do. Tal lifts two mote Kingfishers from the plastic cool box,
uncaps them on the side of the tub. One for yt, one for yts guru.

"Nanak, do you think it will be all right?"

"You, personally? Me? Yes. It is easy for people to have happy
endings. This city, this country, this war? I am not so sure. Nanak
sees a lot from yts bridge here. Most days I can see the Indian Brown
Cloud, I see the water level go down, I see skeletons on the beach,
but they don't frighten me. It is those dreadful children, those
Brahmins, they call them. Whoever gave them that name knew a thing of
two. I tell you what it is scares Nanak about them. It's not that
they live twice as long, half as fast as we do, or that they are
children with the rights and tastes of adults. What frightens me is
that we have reached a stage where wealth can change human evolution.
You could inherit crores of money, send your children to American
schools—like all those inbred half-mad Maharajahs—but you
couldn't buy an IQ, or talents or good looks even. Anything you could
do was cosmetic. But with those Brahmins, you can buy a new
infrastructure. Parents have always wanted to give their children
advantages, now they can hand it down through all future generations.
And what parents would not want that for their child? The Mahatma,
blessed be his memory, was wise in many many ways, but he never spoke
bigger nonsense than when he said about the heart of India was in the
villages. The heart of India, and her head, has always been in the
middle classes. The British knew this, it's how a handful of them run
us for a hundred years. We are an aggressively bourgeois society;
wealth, status, respectability. Now all of those have become directly
inheritable, in the genes. You can lose all your money on the
markets, go bankrupt, gamble it away, be ruined in a flood but no one
can take your genetic advantage away from you. It is a treasure no
thief can steal, a legacy they will pass free to their descendants. I
have been thinking about this a lot, these days."

Tal says, "Nanakji, you mustn't trouble yourself. It's nothing
to do with us. We've Stepped Away." Yt feels Nanak stiffen
against yts touch.

"But we haven't, baba. No one can. There are no noncombatants in
this. We have our beautiful lives and out crushing little things of
the heart, but we are humans. We are part of it. Only now it is us
divided against ourselves. We will be at each other's throats for our
children's futures. All the middle classes have learned from the Lost
Women decades is how easy it is to create a new caste, and how we
love that, especially when the bindi is in your DNA. It will rule us
for a thousand years, this genetic Raj."