River of Gods (43 page)

Tal taps the driver.

"White Fort."

"Don't go there this time of night."

"I'll pay you double."

Yt should have taken the money. The cash in yts bag is running out
like water through sand. The cards that aren't at the limit are close
to it. A crore rupees, untraceable, unstoppable, that could take yt
anywhere. Anywhere on the planet. But that would be to accept yts
role. Who has written that yt must be punished? What has yt done to
deserve global infamy? Tal looks at yts small life, unpicks the
terrible vulnerabilities that have turned it into an unthinking
political weapon. Alien, alone, isolated, new. They had been watching
from the moment yt stepped off the shatabdi. Tranh, the night of
burning delirium in the airport hotel—the best sex yt has ever
known—the temple party, the creamy gilt-edged invitation it had
waved around the office like an icon. Every one of those chota pegs
poured down yts golden throat.. .Yt had been played like a bansuri.

Tal finds yts fists tight in fury. The heat of yts anger surprises
Tal. Safe, sane, wise nute would be to run. But yt wants to know. Yt
wants one good, clear look at the face that ordained all this for yt.

"Okay my friend, this is as far as you go." The driver
waves his radio. "Those Shivaji lunatics are on the move.
They've broken out of Sarkhand Roundabout."

"You're leaving me with them out there?" Tal shouts after
the receding phatphat. Yt can hear the rage of Hindutva, swelling and
receding in the cavernous streets. And the streets are waking, shop
by stall by kiosk by dhaba. A pickup dumps bundles of morning
editions in the concrete centre strip. The newsboys descend like
black kites. Tal pulls yts collar around yts betraying features. Yts
shaved skull feels hideously vulnerable, a fragile brown egg. Two
roads to safety. Yt can see the satellite-dish studded revetments of
White Fort beyond the rooftop water tanks and solar panels. Tal slips
along the line of vehicles, headdown, avoiding eye contact with the
shopkeepers rolling up their shutters, the night walkers heading back
from a shift on Pacific Coast Time. Sooner, not later, someone will
see what yt is. Yt eyes the bundles of newspaper. Front page, banner
headline, full colour splash.

The sound of the mob moves behind yt, left, then right, then close
behind. Tal breaks into a jog, coat pulled tight around yts chin
despite the rising heat. People are looking now. One more junction.
One more junction. The voiceless roar moves again, seemingly in front
now, then leaps in volume and vehemence. Tal glances around. They are
behind it. A front of jogging males in white shifts turns out of a
side street on to the avenue. There is a moment of silence. Even the
traffic falls still and hushed. Then a focused roar strikes Tal with
almost physical force. Yt gives a small whimper of fear, throws off
yts stupid, encumbering coat and runs. Yips and bays go up behind yt.
The karsevaks come leaping in pursuit. Not far. Not far. Not. Far.
Not. Far. Not. Far. Close. Close. Close. Tal fires ytself through the
forest of pillars that are White Fort's undercroft. Howling shouts
echo and dart off the concrete piles. We are closing. We are fast. We
are faster than you, unnatural, perverted thing. You are bloated with
unnaturalness and vice. We will stamp on you, slug. We will hear you
burst beneath our boots. Missiles clatter and bounce around Tal:
cans, bottles, pieces of broken circuitry. And Tal is failing,
failing. Fading. There's nothing left in yt. The batteries are flat.
Zero charge. Tal taps commands into yts subdermals. Seconds later the
adrenaline rush hits. Yt'll pay dearly for it later. Yt'll pay
anything now. Tal pulls away from the hunters. Yt can see the
elevator bank. Let there be one. Ardhanarisvara, Lord of the divided
things, let there be one, and let it work. The hunters slap their
hands off the oily concrete pillars. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You.
We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You.

Green light. Green light is salvation, green light is life. Tal dives
towards the green elevator light as the door slides open. Yt squeezes
through the dark slit, hits the button. The doors close. Fingers
squeeze through, feeling for the sensors, the switches, the flesh
within, anything. Centimetre by centimetre, they force the door open.

"There he is, the chuutya!"

Yt! Yt!
Tal screams silently as it smashes at the fingers with
yts fists, yts sharp boot heels. The fingers reel back. The door
seals. The ascent begins. Tal goes two levels low to draw them up,
waits while the doors open and the doors close, and then goes up one
over. As yt creeps down the stairwell, glossy from the steady tread
of bare feet and reeking of dank ammonia even in drought, yt hears a
growing babble of voices. Tal edges around the turn. Yts neighbours
are crowded into Mama Bharat's open door. Tal edges a step lower.
Everyone is talking, gesticulating, some of the women have their
dupattas pressed to their mouths in shock. Some bow and bob in the
rituals of grief. Men's voices cut through the jabber and keening, a
word here, a phrase there.
Yes, the family are coming, right away,
who would have left an old woman here on her own, shameful shameful,
the police will find them
.

One step closer.

The smashed door to Mama Bharat's apartment lies on the floor. Over
the heads of the angry men, Tal can see the desecrated room. Walls,
windows, paintings of gods and avatars are full of holes. Tal gapes
at the holes, not wanting to comprehend. Bullet holes. It is a gape
too long. A cry.

"There he is!"

Neighbour Paswan's querulous voice. The crowd parts, allowing a clear
line of connection between Tal and Paswan's accusing finger and the
feet on the floor. Every head turns. Their feet are in a slick of
blood. The slick of startling, fresh, red blood, fresh with life and
oxygen, already drawing in the flies. The flies are in the room. The
flies are in yts head.

You're dispensable now,
Tranh had said.

The feet in the fresh, oily blood. They are still in the building. Yt
turns, runs again. "There he is, the monster!" Paswan
roars. Tal's neighbours take up the cry. The mass voice throbs in the
concrete shaft of the stairwell. Tal grasps huge handfuls of steel
banister, hauls ytself up the stairs. Everything aches. Everything
screams and moans and tells yt it's come to the end, there is no
more. But Mama Bharat is dead. Mama Bharat is shot and this August
morning with the early light climbing down the sides of the shaft
from the grimy cupola far above, all the hatred and despite and fear
and anger of Bharat is focused on one nute hauling ytself up a
concrete stairwell. Yts neighbours, the people yt lived among so
quietly these months, want yt torn apart by their hands.

Yt pushes past two men on the seventh-floor landing. A flicker of
memory: Tal glances back. They are young, and lean dressed in baggy
pants and white shirts, the Young Bharati Male Street uniform but
there is something out of place about them. Something not White Fort.
Eyes meet. Tal remembers where yt has seen them before. They wore
suits then, fine dark suits. They had passed him on the landing, down
there, as Mama Bharat put out the trash and Tal had danced past,
blowing a kiss, all excited and bouncing about heading out to the end
of it all. They had looked back, as yt looks back now. A good
designer never forgets the details.

You're dispensable now.

In the instant it takes them to work out their mistake, Tal has
gained a floor and a half but they are young and male and fit and do
not wear hi-fashion boots and have not been running for what seems an
entire night.

"Out of my way!" Tal yells as yt ploughs into the head of
the daily procession of water girls from the upper levels descending
the endless staircases with their plastic litrejohns balanced on
their heads. Yt must get into the open. White Fort is a trap, a vast
concrete killing machine. Yt has to get out. Get into the crowd, get
among the people. They will shield you with their bodies. Tal swings
off at the next landing, wrenches open the door and plunges out on to
the exterior walkway.

Diljit Rana's urban planners, good neo-Le Corbusiens all, had
conceived White Fort as a village in the sky and had drafted in wide
sunlit terraces for urban farming. Most of the drip-irrigated plots
have gone to dirt and dust in the long drought and plumbing crisis or
grow stands of GM cannabis, tended with painstaking love and bottled
spa water. Feral goats, five generations from their first urbanised
forebears, graze the trash-piles and desiccated market gardens. They
are as surefooted on the concrete runways and safety rails of White
Fort as their native precipices. The maintenance bots duel them
ferociously with high-voltage tasers. The goats have a taste for
wiring insulation.

Tal runs. Goats look up, ruminating. Mothers snatch children out of
the path of the mad, flying, perverted thing. Old men smoking bidis
and solving crosswords in the early sun follow yt with their heads,
delighted by action, any action. Young men, idle men cheer and hoot.

The chemical surge is failing, fading. Yt's not built to run. Tal
glances over yts shoulder. Guns beat up and down in the men's hands.
Black hard guns. That changes everything on the White Fort farm
levels. Women whisk children indoors. Old men hide themselves. Young
men edge away.

"Help me!" Tal cries. Yt grabs bins, piles of paper,
baskets, anything that might cost the men behind yt a second, pulls
them down behind yt. Saris and dhotis and lungis, the daily laundry
is pinned out along line after line sagging across the wide
sky-streets. Tal ducks under the dripping dhobi, sticks out yts arm
to knock out clothes prop after clothes prop. Yt hears damp curses,
looks back to see the hunters disentangling themselves from a wet
green sari. Sanctuary is in sight, a service elevator at the end of
the street filling up with the school run. Tal darts through the
closing gates, dodges past the fluttering chaperone. The lift jerks
and begins its descent. Tal hears voices. Yt looks up to see the two
dacoits hanging over the rail. They put their guns up. From the midst
of the press of black-eyed primary-school girls in their beautiful
neat uniforms, Tal waves up at them.

The sun pours scalding light into the canyon streets of Varanasi as
Tal moves through the crush hour. Yt slips between the walking
schoolkids and the white-shirted civil servants on bicycles, the
street sellers and the shopworkers, the doorway sleepers and the
students in their labels and Japanese shoes, the delivery drays piled
high with cardboard boxes of Lux Macroman underwear and the fine
ladies under the canopies of the cycle rickshaws. Any time, any one
in that crowd might recognise yt from the front page of the newspaper
tucked under his arm, from the breakfast news bulletin on his palmer,
from the news stand headline posters or the scrolling ad-screens on
every intersection and chowk. One shout; one hand thrust out to snag
a jacket sleeve; one Hey! You! Stop! and that milling motion of
individuals would crystallise into a mob, one mind, one will, one
intent.

Tal skips down trash-strewn steps into VART. Even if the killers had
followed yt through the morning crush, they cannot hope to hunt yt in
the labyrinth of Varanasi underground. Tal dodges the line for the
iris reader, slips into the women's queue, who do not permit the
Varanasi Area Rapid Transit such liberties with their eyes. Yt drops
five rupees into the hopper and squeezes through the barrier before
the ladies of New Varanasi can complain.

Tal works up the platform to the women's section. Yt scans the crowd
for the wake of killers cutting through the press of people. So easy
to die here. A hand in the back as the train surges out of the
tunnel. And the down-wave is coming, the ashes of the artificial
adrenaline hit washing out of yts bloodstream. Tal shivers, alone and
small and very very paranoid. A wave of sickeningly hot, electric
air; the train slams into the station. Tal rides two stops in the
women-only bogie and gets off. Yt counts one train, two, then boards
again in the reserved women's section. Yt has no idea if this is the
right thing to do, if there is any right thing to do, if there are
any self-help books on how to throw killers on the city metro.

The robot train slams through the underpinnings of Varanasi, jolting
across the points and switchovers. Tal feels naked among the women's
bodies. Yt can hear their thoughts:
this is not your place; we do
not know what you were but you are no longer one of us, hijra
.
Then yts heart freezes. Jammed in between a stanchion and the fire
extinguisher, an office girl has found room to read the
Bharat
Times
. Her attention is on the back page, the cricket news. The
front shrieks an eighty-point banner headline and a half-page
photograph. Yt is looking at ytself, face pale in the flash, eyes
wide as moons.

The train rocks across points. The passengers sway like grain in the
wind. Tal releases yts straphold and reels across the carriage. Yt
pulls ytself up in front of the screaming front page. Newspaper girl
folds the top of her morning read down to stare at Tal, then gets
back to the gossip about Test hero V. J. Mazumdar and his forthcoming
celebrity wedding. The subhead at the bottom of the page reads DEATHS
IN PERVERT CLUB FIRE ATTACK.

Varanasi City Station
, the aeai announces over the din of
radios and conversation. Tal spills out on to the platform, running
ahead of the slow spreading stain of commuters. Time to mark and
meditate on that headline later, when the shatabdi is up to speed and
Varanasi a hundred kilometres behind yt.

The escalator casts Tal up on to the main concourse. Yt's already
checked on yts palmer what's going soonest out of here. The Kolkata
Hi-Speed. Straight down the steel line to the States of Bengal. Patna
and Nanak can wait. What Tal needs more than a new face is a new
nation. The Banglas are civilised, cultured, tolerant people. Kolkata
shall be yts new home. But the online booking is slow slow slow and
the pile of bodies around the ticket office deadly. Unwanted
newspapers lie scattered among the discarded mango-leaf bowls of aloo
and dal on the concrete concourse. Ragpickers poke and sift. Any one
of them would turn yt in for a fistful of rupees.