River of Gods (36 page)

The wrapping was perfect, simple, elegant. Red, black, and white koi
patterned paper, a single strand of cellophane raffia, gold. Minimal.
Indians would have prettied it, gaudified it, put hearts and bows and
Ganeshas, had it play tunes and spring out confetti blessings when
opened. At the age of thirteen, Shaheen Badoor Khan knew when he saw
the parcel from Japan that his would never be a true Indian spirit.
His father had brought gifts for all the family back from the trade
trip to Tokyo. For his younger brothers, Boys Day Carp Kites—proudly
flown from the balconies of Haveli Khan ever after. For oldest son,
Nihon in a box. Shaheen had goggled at the squeeze tubes of Action
Drink, the Boat In the Mist chocolate, the trading cards and Waving
Kitty robotpet, the mood-colour scarves and the disks of Nippon-pop.
What transformed his life, like a motorbike that turns into an
avenging battle-bot, was the manga. At first he had not liked their
easy mix of violence and sex and high-school anxiety. Cheap and
alien. But what seduced him were the characters; the elongated,
sexless teens with their deer eyes and their snub noses and their
ever-open mouths. Saving the world, having parent problems, wearing
fabulous costumes, sporting fantastic hairstyles and footwear,
worrying about their boy-girl-friends as the destroying angel-robots
bore down on Tokyo but mostly being independent and cool and fabulous
and long-legged and androgynous. He wanted their thrilling,
passionate lives so badly he had cried. He envied their beauty and
sexy sexlessness and that everyone knew and loved and admired them.
He wanted to be them in life and death. In his bed in the loud
Varanasi dark, Shaheen Badoor Khan would invent on-stories for them;
what happened after they defeated the angels streaming through the
crack between the heavens, how they loved and played together in
their fur-lined battle-dome. Then they pulled him down into the pink
fur-lined bulb of the battle-nest and they rubbed together,
indeterminate but passionate, for ever and ever and ever. On those
nights when he was made a Mage-rider of a Grassen Elementoi, Shaheen
Badoor Khan would wake in the suffocating morning with the front of
his pyjama pants stiff.

Years after he would sneak those yellowing, soft, and fraying comics
out of the shoebox. Ever young, ever slim, ever beautiful and
adventurous, the boy-girl pilots of the Grassen Elementoi stood, arms
folded, challenging him with their cheekbones and animal eyes and
sullen, kissable mouths.

Shaheen Badoor Khan, whirling on the edge of the transcend, feels his
eyes sharp with teats. The sema wheels him back, to the beach.

His mother had complained about the humidity and the socialism and
how the fishermen would shit on the sand outside the bungalow. His
father had been edgy and stuffy and homesick for the searing north.
He had fretted about in creased pants and short-sleeved poplin shirts
and open-toe sandals in the smothering Keralese heat and it had been
the worst holiday Shaheen Badoor Khan could remember because he had
been looking forward to it so much. The south the south the south!

In the evening the fisher kids would come in from the sea.
Sun-blackened, naked, smiling, they had played and yelled and
splashed while Shaheen Badoor Khan and his brothers sat on their
verandah and drank lemonade and listened to their mother tell them
how terrible those dreadful children were. Shaheen Badoor Khan did
not find them dreadful. They had a little outrigger. They would play
all day with that boat, in and out of it. Shaheen Badoor Khan would
imagine them sailed in from an adventure out on the big water;
piracy, rescue, exploration. When they ran their outrigger up on to
the strand and played cricket on the beach he thought he would die
from desire. He wanted to sail off with black, grinning Keralese
boy-girls, he wanted to slip naked into blood-warm water and wear it
like a skin. He wanted to run and yell and be skinny and
un-self-conscious and free.

In the next bungalow was a family of civil servants from Bangalore,
below the salt in every way, but Shaheen Badoor saw their boy and
girl play on the outrigger, jump into the clear water and surface,
gasping, dewed with drops, laughing and laughing and laughing to do
it all again. A seed of emptiness was planted there, that germinated
on the long train journey back up the length of India into an ache, a
hope, a desire that had no name or words, but smelled like sunburn
lotion, itched like sand between the toes, felt like warm coconut
matting, sounded like children cries coming across water.

Shaheen Badoor Khan whirls to a stop. He fights immense, racking sobs
heaving up inside him. He wanted it so much but his was not the life
that could ever have that kind of freedom. He would give anything to
be that beautiful, even for one day.

Feet. Outside. Bare feet. Shaheen Badoor Khan shakes free of the
succubus.

"Who's there?"

"Sir? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Leave me, please."

Everything is fine, as fine it can be amidst ruins. Shaheen Badoor
Khan straightens his suit, smoothes out the rucked up dhuri where he
whirled, and God honoured him. He was taken down into the nafs, the
desiring core of the soul, and there shown the true nature of the
God-within and his cry for aid beyond comprehension was answered.

He knows what he must do now about the nute.

For the rest of the week Tal throws ytself into yts work, but not
even the interiors for the haveli into which Aparna Chawla and Ajay
Nadiadwala will move after their virtual wedding can quell the
demons. A gendered. A
man
. A Khan. Tal tries to shake the
image from yts brain but he's strung out along the neurons like
Diwali lights. That's the ultimate fear: it's all unravelling in
there, all those biochips and hormone pumps dissolving into yts
bloodstream. Tal fears yt's pissing yts nuteness away through yts
kidneys. Yt can still taste this Khan's lips.

By the end of the week even Neeta is telling yt yt should take time
off.

"Get, go on, out of here," Line Producer Devgan orders. Tal
gets, goes, out-of-heres to Patna. No one but a nute would think of
weekending in that sprawling, hot, soul-free industrial city. There's
someone Tal needs to see there. Yts guru.

Two hours later Tal is down at the river, blinking polarised contact
lenses against the brilliants glinting from the water and booking a
first return (it is better to travel first class than to arrive,
baba) on the fast hydrofoil to Patna. Thirty minutes later yt's
curling back into yts seat, closing yts eyes and small, soft fists in
pleasure to the opening beats of GURU GRANTH

MIX as the industrial plants slip by on the far dry banks. Yt's
amazed there's enough water to
float
this thing.

There's a new look on Patna's pollution-soaked streets. Dark and
flowing is in. As is
hair
, worn in a single off-centre moheek,
flopped over the forehead. And nobody would be seen dead in
ski-goggles. Nothing Tal can do about the hair but ClimBunni on Amrit
Marg has all the look, racked up and ready to vend. Tops here,
bottoms there, unders here, footwear in back. The card takes another
weighty blow but half an hour later Tal swings out on to the streets
in swathes of soft grey silk and silver-black cow-nute boots with
five-centimetre heels and the
essential
bead tassles swaying
from the bootstraps. The guys are reeling, the girls are watching
enviously, the women in the coffee-shops are leaning together and
talking behind their hands, the traffic-cop on point-duty at the
roundabout almost spins three sixty as Tal clicks yts contact lenses
black against the sun and it's good, so good, so astonishingly
unexpected and wonderful and hilarious to be back on Patna streets
under Patna sun breathing Patna smog, threading through the Patna
bodies and faces, moving to the Patna mix in yts phones. Everything
dances to the mix. Everything is a musical, every chance encounter
between passersby is murder or an adultery or a robbery or long-lost
lovers reuniting. The clothes are brighter and the signs are flashier
and everything is about to break into one huge production number,
citywide, just for Tal. Yt prays to Ardhanarisvara god of nutes to
let yt be the first to bring the noo look back to Varanasi.

Varanasi. And men called Khan. And everything.

For those who know, there is the fast boat down beneath the glass
towers of the Commercial Bund that will take you up to the sangam
where the guru conducts yts operations. The boat is a mahogany Riva,
Tal notes with approval. Twin engines stand the Riva on its tail and
take it out past the scuttling little ferries and barge trains. The
boat cuts across the main channel and veers left towards the great
sand spit where the Gandak joins the sacred Ganga. On and around this
wide sand delta stands Bharat's biggest, cheapest, dirtiest, and
least regulated free-trade zone. The pressed aluminium larri-gallas
and go-downs long ago crowded each other off the available land on to
the water: the sangam is fringed by decommissioned lighters twenty
deep. Families live here that boast they never set foot on dry land;
all they need for birth, for life, for death, they can find running
over the maze of gangplanks and companionways, boat to boat.

The Riva takes Tal through ever-narrowing channels between steel
hulls painted with improving Hindu texts until it squeezes into a
conduit barely wide enough to contain it to pull in beside an old tug
with the unlikely name of
Fugazi
. For thirty years she hauled
bulk cargo upstream from Kolkata to Patna's new industries. Then
White Eagle Holdings bought her up, sailed in to final dock on the
Gangak Free Trade Zone and eviscerated her engines. White Eagle
Holdings is a deeply respectable fund management company based in
Omaha, Nebraska, specialising in pension plans for healthcare
workers. It owns several floating factories in Patna that specialise
in those medical services the Bible-believing voters of the Midwest
vehemently deny their fellow countrymen. Hundreds of high-revenue,
low-legality industries have their corporate headquarters in Gangak
Eff Tee Zee: custom-pirate radio stations, pharm phakers, fileshare
services, datahavens, emotic breweries, genebusters, clonelabs, cell
therapists, Darwinware jungles, copy prorection strippers, forex
shuttle services, label tippers, stem-cell farmers, pornocrats, at
least one Gen 3 aeai (mooted), and Nanak the kind doctor, the good
nute, the guru of the sweet knives.

Tal climbs the steel ladder, nervously conscious of the looming metal
wall of the neighbouring barge at yts back. One eddy in the mingling
of waters around this point and the closing walls of steel would
burst yt like a dropped egg. A face peeps over the rail: it is Nanak,
the good doctor, disreputable as always in a pair of cargo shorts
three times too big, a clingy mesh top and big tank-girlie boots,
grinning like a holy monkey.

They embrace. They touch. They kiss. They stroke emotions of joy and
presents and childhood stay-up-lates and the first bread of the
morning and glissandos of baroque into their subdermals, those same
neural keys Nanak's robot surgeons fused into the nerve fibres of
Tal's flayed body. Then they break and smile and make silly, joyous
noises and are happy all over again.

"The style got you, I see," Nanak says. Yt's small and a
little shy and coy, and bowed a little lower by gravity but yt's
still got the kindest smile. Yts skin is ochre from the sun.

"At least I make an effort," Tal says, inclining yts head
at Nanak's dock-wallah gear.

"You just watch your heels around here," Nanak warns. The
deck is a fashion assault course of cable ducts and hatch dogs and
pipes any of which could send the careless nute crashing against hard
steel plate. "You will stay for tea, won't you? Careful here."
They scale a steep ladder to the wheelhouse. One step before the top
Tal pauses to look out over the city of boats. It is as busy as any
bazaar. Beyond making money, there is always work to be done on any
ship: painters and deck-swabbers, gardeners, water-engineers, solar
power experts, com riggers. Music booms, bass amplified by the
copious hollow metal.

"So, what is it?" Nanak asks as yt shows Tal into the
wood-panelled, cedar-scented reception room. The smell evokes as
powerful an emotional reaction in Tal as any neural keyed response.
Yt is back in the wood-lined womb. Yt remembers how the leather sofas
creak, how Suniti on the desk hums filmi hits when she thinks no one
else is around.

"Just a routine check up," Tal says.

"Well, we'll certainly do that for you," Nanak says and
calls the elevator to go down into the empty heart of the ship where
yt carries out yts transformations.

"You busy?" Tal asks to hide yts apprehension. The elevator
opens on to a corridor of mahogany and brass doors. Tal spent a month
behind one of them, crazy on painkillers and immunosuppressives as
yts body came to terms with what the robot surgeons had done to it.
The real insanity had come when the protein chips wired into yts
medulla unpacked and started overwriting four million years of
biological imperative.

"I've two in," Nanak says. "One waiting—cute
little Malay, really nervy, could bolt at any time, which would be a
shame—and one in post-op. We seem to be picking up a lot of
old-style transgenders so our reputation is spreading outside the
scene but I'm not that keen on it. It's just butchery. No finesse at
all."

And they will pay for it, as Tal pays for it still; ten percent down
and monthly repayments for most of the rest of yts life. Full body
mortgage.

"Tal," Nanak says gently. "Not that one, in here."
Tal finds yts hand on the door of the surgery. Nanak swings open the
clinic door. "Just checking you over, cho chweet. You don't even
need to take your clothes off."