River of Gods (52 page)

The headlights of the car are visible for kilometres across the flat,
treeless land. Shaheen Badoor Khan descends the crumbling steps from
the drum tower to open the gate. Ramghat's servants are old and meek
and deserving of sleep. He starts at a touch of rain on his lip,
gently tastes it with his tongue.

I started a war for this.

The Lexus pulls into the courtyard. Its black sleek carapace is
jewelled with rain. Shaheen Badoor Khan opens the door. Bilquis
Badoor Khan steps out. She wears a formal shalwar in blue and gold,
chador pulled over her head. He understands. Hide your face. His is a
people that once could die from shame.

"Thank you for coming," he says. She raises a hand. Not
here. Not now. Not in front of the servants. He indicates the
pillared chhatri of the drum turret, stands aside as his wife brushes
past, lifting her hem to take the steep steps. The rain has a rhythm
now, the southeastern horizon a celebration in lightning. Rain runs
in ropes from the edge of the domed roof of the octagonal Mughal drum
tower. Shaheen Badoor Khan says, "Before anything else, I have
to tell you how very, how profoundly sorry I am over what has
happened." The words taste like dust on his lips, the dust of
his ancestors with the rain seeping down towards them. They swell in
his mouth. "I.no. We had an agreement, I broke it, somehow that
got out. The rest will be history. I have been intolerably foolish
and it has rebounded on me."

He had not known when she first suspected but, since Dara was born,
it had become obvious that Bilquis could not be all the things he
desired. Theirs was the last Mughal marriage, of dynasty and power
and expedience. They had spoken of it overtly only once, after Jehan
had left for university and the haveli was suddenly echoing and too
full of servants. The conversation had been forced, dry, painful; the
sentences couched in allusion and elision for the house staff who
overheard everything, just long enough to lay down the agreement that
he would never allow it to threaten family and government and she
would remain the proper, dutiful politician's wife. By then they had
not slept together for a decade.

It
. They had never given the thing between them a name.
Shaheen Badoor Khan is not now certain there is one. His affliction?
His vice? His weakness, thorn in the flesh? His perversion? There are
no words in the language between two people for
its
.

The rain is so heavy Shaheen Badoor Khan can hardly make himself
heard.

"I have a few favours left; I have arranged a way out of Bharat;
it is a direct flight to Kathmandu. There will be no difficulty
entering Nepal. From there we can connect on to anywhere in the
world. My own preferences are for Northern Europe, perhaps Finland or
Norway. These are large underpopulated countries where we can live
anonymously. I have funds in transportable bank drafts set aside, it
will be enough for us to buy a property and live adequately, if
perhaps not in the comfort we enjoy here in Bharat. Prices are steep
and we would have difficulty adjusting to the climate but I think
Scandinavia is the best for us."

Bilquis's eyes are closed. She holds a hand up.

"Please, stop this."

"It does not have to be Scandinavia, New Zealand is another
fine, remote country."

"Not Scandinavia, not New Zealand. Shaheen, I will not go with
you. I have had enough; you are not the one who has to apologise. I
am. Shaheen, I broke the agreement. I told them. You think you are
the only one with a secret life; no! You're not! And that always was
you, Shaheen; so arrogant, that you are the only one can have lies
and secrets. Shaheen, for the past five years, I have been working
for N. K. Jivanjee. The Shivaji, Shaheen. I, the Begum Bilquis Badoor
Khan, betrayed you to the Hinduvavadis."

Shaheen Badoor Khan feels the rain, the thunder, his wife's voice
smear into a thin hiss. He understands now how it might be to die of
shock.

"What is this?" he hears himself say. "This is
nonsense, nonsense, you are talking nonsense, woman."

"I suppose it must seem like nonsense, Shaheen, a wife betraying
her husband to his greatest enemies. But I did, Shaheen. I betrayed
you to the Hindus. Your own wife. Who you turned away from, every
night while we still slept together. Five conceptions, five fucks. I
counted, five fucks, a woman remembers that. And only two of those
were allowed to come to term as our fine sons. Five fucks. I'm sorry,
does my coarseness shock you? Is this not how society Begums should
talk? You should hear what those good Begums say among themselves,
Shaheen. Woman talk. Oh, your ears would burn for shame. Shameless
creatures we are, in our chambers and societies. They know, all the
women know. Five fucks Khan. I told them, but not
it
. That I
didn't tell them, Shaheen.

"I didn't tell them because I still thought, this is a great
man, a star climbing in a black sky, with high office and
achievements before him, even if he lies in his separate bed and
dreams of things I cannot even see as human. But a wife can push
things down to the bottom of her mind if she thinks that her husband
is a man who could rise to greatness, as great as any of your
ancestors buried out there, Shaheen. A woman who could have had her
choice of men, who would have loved her in heart and in body, who
might also have risen to great stations. A woman who had her own
education and potential that was forced into the golden purdah
because for every one woman lawyer there are five men. Do you
understand what I am saying, Shaheen? Such a woman expects things.
And if that star rose, and then it stopped, and stayed fixed, and
rose no higher and other stars rose above it and outshone it.. .What
should that woman do then, Shaheen? What should that wife and Begum
do?"

Shaheen Badoor's hands cover his face in shame but he cannot stop the
words that cut through the rain, the thunder, his own fingers. He had
thought himself a good and true advisor to his leader, government,
and country but he remembers how he had reacted when Sajida Rana had
offered him a cabinet position on the flight back from Kunda Khadar:
fear of discovery, fear that the
it
was spilling out of him
like blood from a cut throat. Now he sees how many times and places
in his career he could have taken that step into public power and had
drawn back, paralysed by the inevitable fall.

"Jivanjee?" he says weakly. The heart of the madness in
this ancient Mughal drum turret in the heart of a monsoon storm: his
wife an agent of N. K. Jivanjee. She laughs. There is no more
terrible sound.

"Yes, Jivanjee. All those afternoons when I would entertain the
Law Circle, when you were at the Sabha, what did you think we were
doing? Talking about property prices and Brahmin children and cricket
scores? Politics, Shaheen. The finest woman lawyers in Varanasi; how
else do you think we would amuse ourselves? We were a shadow cabinet.
We ran a simulation on our palmers. I tell you this, there was more
talent in my jharoka than there was in Sajida Rana's Cabinet room.
Oh, Sajida Rana, the great mother who has made it impossible for any
other woman to match her. Well, in our Bharat, Shaheen, there was no
water war. In our Bharat there was no three-year drought, no
hostility with the United States because we were in the pockets of
the datarajas. In our Bharat we assembled a Ganga Valley Water
Management plan with Awadh and the States of Bengal. We ran your
country better than you did, Shaheen, and do you know why? To see if
we could. To see if we could do it better. And we did.

"And it was the talk of the capital but you don't hear that kind
of talk, do you? Women's talk. Talk of no consequence. But N. K.
Jivanjee heard. The Shivaji heard, and that is another thing I cannot
forgive. A Hindu politician recognised the talent, whatever its
gender, whatever its religion, that her husband could not. We became
the Shivaji policy unit, our little afternoon group taking chai in
our gardens. It was a game worth the playing now. I used to hope that
you would not come home and tell me what you were up to in the Sabha
so I could try to read your mind, ask myself what you would do, try
and outguess and outmanoeuvre you. All those times you would come
home cursing that Jivanjee because he always seemed to be that one
step ahead, that was me." She touches her breast, not seeing her
husband now, not seeing the rain breaking over Ramghar, seeing only
her memory of a great game that became the rule of her life.

"Jivanjee," Shaheen Badoor Khan whispers. "You sold me
to Jivanjee." And the dam that held him in so long, so high and
wide, breaks and Shaheen Badoor Khan finds that inside him, all these
years, all these lies and concealments, is only a roar, an inchoate
howl like the nothing before creation, shrieking out of him. He
cannot stop it, he cannot hold it in. Its vacuum tugs at his inner
organs. He is on his knees. He crawls on his knees towards his wife;
everything is destroyed. He had allowed himself to hope and for that
pride, it was taken away, everything was taken away. He cannot hope
the animal howl breaks into yelping, retching sobs. Bilquis backs
away. She is afraid. This was never in her strategies and game plans.
Shaheen Badoor Khan is on his hands and knees now, like a dog,
barking up shrieks of pain.

"Stop, stop it," Bilquis begs. "Please, no. Please,
have some dignity."

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks up at her. Her hand goes to her mouth in
horror. There is nothing there she can recognise. The game has
destroyed them both.

She steps away from the ruined thing huddled on the smooth sandstone
of the drum turret, retching up the infected pus of its life. She
finds the sandstone steps, flees into the curtains of rain.

The austere polyphony of the Bach Magnificat swirls around Mr. Nandha
as the tilt-jet banks over the river. The hot wind that heralds the
monsoon buffets the ghats. Flaws spun off the storm front send the
ordered flotillas of diyas scattering across Mother Ganga. The
tilt-jet lurches on the gusts. Mr. Nandha sees lightning reflected in
the pilot's visor, then her hands bring them safely about. Ahead of
him the other three aircraft in the squadron are patterns of moving
lights on the greater city glow. Kashi. City of light.

In Mr. Nandha's augmented vision, gods tower over Varanasi, vaster
even than the monsoon, their vahanas crawling in the concrete and
shit, their crowns in the stratosphere. Gods like thunderclouds,
attributes held aloft and crackling with lightning, multiple arms
performing the sacred mudras with meteorological deliberateness. The
containment went in as the excommunication force lifted off from the
military airfield. Prasad has intercepted a few hundred Level One
aeais running out along the cable network but otherwise it has been
as quiet as death or innocence in the fifth-floor office unit. The
squadron splits, navigation lights darting acrobatically between
Ganesha, Kartikkeya, Kali, and Krishna. Mr. Nandha's lips silently
pray
Magnificat magnificat
as the tilt-jet banks and plunges
through Ganesha in a spray of handsized pixels. A spear in the side,
thinks Mr. Nandha. The pilot swivels the wing-tip engines into
descent mode and takes them down through veils of divine light. Mr.
Nandha thumbs off the visuals. The gods are extinguished as if by
unbelief but years of intimacy have given Mr. Nandha a sense of their
presence, an electricity in the back of the skull. His gun is a dark
weight against his heart.

Odeco corporate headquarters is a low-rent office block in a
labyrinth of school-uniform clothiers and sari merchants. The pilot
spins the tilt-jet to fit into the narrow street; wing-tip lights
scrape balconies and power poles as she brings her ship down into the
junction. The backwash from the engines tumbles racks of bicycles
across the street. A cow idles out of the way. Shop owners haul down
their billowing, flapping wares. Wheels unfold, kiss the concrete.
Mr. Nandha goes through to the troop hold and his excommunication
team: Ram Lalli, Prasad, Mukul Dev, Vik queasy in riot armour over
his Star-Asia rock-boyz gear.

The tilt-jet settles on its shock absorbers. Nothing moves, nothing
stirs but the wind from the edge of the monsoon, driving papers and
scraps of torn filmi posters through the narrow streets. A street dog
barks. The ramp lowers as the engines power down. Tilt-jets make
point-perfect landings at the two other drop points. The fourth spins
in the air against the neon towers of New Varanasi, swoops in over
the roof of the office unit and swings its engines into hover The
roar in the narrow alleys is like Vedic armies clashing in the sky.
Its belly opens and Bharati air-cav sowars spool down on droplines.
On the woman pilot's helmet display they abseil into a yawning canyon
of gods.

Shaped demolition charges open up the roof like a can of ghee.
Communicating by hand signals, the sowars reattach their karabiners
to the solar array and dive in.

Mr. Nandha advances through a graveyard of bicycles. A touch to the
right ear sets the 'hoek and Indra, Lord of Rain and Lightning,
swirls into manifestation over the haberdasher's quarter of old Kashi
mounted on his elephant vahana, four-tusked Airavata. The Vajra of
judgement is raised in his right hand. Mr. Nandha shifts his hand to
his gun. True lightning flickers through Indra's translucent red
body; Mr. Nandha looks up. Rain. On his face. He stops, wipes the
drip from his forehead, stares at it in wonder. In the same instant,
Indra swirls and he feels the gun aim him.

The robots come bounding down the unlit gali, a chitter of tiny
running feet and tapping claws. Monkey robots cat robots robots like
wingless birds and long-legged insects, a wave of clicking motion
surging towards the main street. Mr. Nandha levels his gun, fires,
aims fires aims fires aims fires. Bach's towering counterpoints roar
in his ears. He never misses. Indra guides true and sure. The robots
spin and smash into each other and wheel into walls and doorways as
the fat, random drops steepen into rain. Mr. Nandha advances up the
gali, gun held before him, unerringly seeking its targets with its
red laser eye and sending them spinning and smoking and burning in
shaped pulses of electromagnetic radiation. Monkey robots scale the
cables and chati-mag posters and metal advertising sheets for bottled
water and language schools, scrambling for the rooftops and comlines.
Indra brings them down with his thunderbolt. Behind Mr. Nandha the
agents of the Ministry form a line, picking off those that make it
into the excommunication zone. Mr. Nandba silences Johann Sebastian
and lifts his hand.