River of Gods (51 page)

"Did something happen at the cricket?"

"I was stupid, that's all. Very stupid. I imagined caste was the
same as class."

"What happened?"

"I showed myself to have no class. Or rather, not the right
class. Krishan, my mother wants me to go with her to Kotkhai. She
says she is worried about the war. She fears Varanasi may be
attacked. Varanasi has never been attacked in three thousand years;
she just wants to hold me ransom so Mr. Nandha will promise me a
million things, the house in the Cantonment, the chauffeured car, the
Brahmin baby."

She feels his muscles tighten beside her.

"Will you go?"

"I can't go to Kotkhai and I can't go to the Cantonment. But
Krishan, I cannot stay here, on this rooftop." Parvati sits up,
listening, alert. "What time is it?"

"Eleven thirty."

"I must go. Mother will be back. She would not miss
Town and
Country
for a million rupees." Parvati dusts the rooftop
grit from her clothes, rearranges the drape of her sari, flicks her
long straight hair over her left shoulder. "I'm sorry, Krishan.
I shouldn't burden you. You have a garden to grow."

She flits barefoot across the roof garden. Moments later he hears the
blaring theme from
Town and Country
drift up the stairs.
Krishan moves from bed to bed, tying down his growing things.

Mr. Nandha pushes the plate away from him untouched. "This is
brown food. I cannot eat brown food."

Mrs. Sadurbahai does not remove the thali but stands resolutely by
the stove.

"That is good honest country fare. What is wrong with my cooking
that you cannot eat it?"

Mr. Nandha sighs.

"Wheat, pulses, potato. Carbohydrate carbohydrate carbohydrate.
Onions, garlic ghee. Heavy heavy spices."

"My husband." Parvati starts to say but Mr. Nandha cuts in.

"I have a white diet. It is all Ayurvedically calculated and
balanced. What has happened to my white diet sheet?"

"Oh that, that went with the cook."

Mr. Nandha grips the edge of the table. It has been long gathering,
like the monsoon heavy in his sinuses. Before Mrs. Sadurbhai
abseiling in like Sajida Rana's elite troops, before the afternoon's
meeting when the reality of politics trampled over his dedication and
sense of mission, before even this Kalki case unfolded, he has been
assailed by the feeling that he battles against madness, that order
has one champion against the gathering chaos, that all others may
succumb but one must remain to lift the sword that ends the Age of
Kali. Now it is here in his house, in his kitchen, around his table,
coiling its white blind roots through his wife.

"You come to my home, you turn my household upside down, you
fire my cook, you throw away my diet sheets, I come home from a
strenuous and demanding day's work to find myself served slop I
cannot eat!"

"Dearest, really, mother's only trying to help," Parvati
says but Mr. Nandha's knuckles are white now.

"Where I come from, a son has respect for his mother," Mrs.
Sadurbhai returns. "You have no respect for me, you think I am
an ignorant and superstitious peasant up from the country. You think
no one knows anything next to you and your important work and your
Angreez education and your horrible, tuneless Western music and your
bland white food that is like babies eat and not fit for a real man
doing real work. You think you are a gora; you think you are better
than me and you think you are better than your wife, my daughter—I
know it—but you are not and you are not a firengi; if the white
men saw you they would laugh at you, see the babu thinks he is a
Westerner! I tell you this, no one has any respect for an Indian
gora."

Mr. Nandha is amazed by the paleness of his knuckles. He can see the
blood vessels through them.

"Mrs. Sadurbbai, you are a guest under my roof."

"A fine roof, a government roof."

"Yes," Mr. Nandha says slowly, carefully, as if each word
is a weight of water drawn up from a well. "A fine government
roof, earned by my care and dedication to my profession. A roof under
which I expect the peace and calm and domestic order that profession
demands. You know nothing of what I do. You understand nothing of the
forces I battle, the enemies I hunt. Creatures with the ambitions of
gods, madam. Things you could not even begin to understand, that
threaten our every belief about our world, I confront them on a daily
basis. And if my horrible, tuneless Western music, if my bland white
firengi diet, my cook and my sweeper all give me that peace and calm
and domestic order so that I can face another day in my work, is that
unreasonable?"

"No," Mrs. Sadurbhai throws back. She knows she is in a
losing stance but she also understands that it is a fool who dies
with a weapon undrawn. "What is unreasonable is that I hear no
part in all this for Parvati."

"Parvati, my flower." The air in the kitchen is slow as
syrup. Mr. Nandha feels the momentum and weight behind every word,
every movement of his head. "Are you unhappy? Do you want for
anything?"

Parvati begins to speak but her mother rides over her.

"What my daughter wants is some recognition that she is wife of
a careful and dedicated professional, not hidden away on top of a
housing block in the city centre."

"Parvati, is this true?"

"No," she says, "I thought maybe." Again her
mother tramples her.

"She could have had her pick of anyone, anyone; civil servants,
lawyers, businessmen—politicians even, and they would have
taken her and put her in her rightful place and shown her off like a
flower and given her things she is due."

"Parvati, my love, I don't understand this. I thought we were
happy here."

"Then you indeed understand nothing if you do not know that my
daughter could have all the riches of the Mughals and she would set
them aside just for a child."

"Mother! No!" Parvati cries.

".a proper child. A child that is worthy of her status. A true
heir."

The air is thick now. Mr. Nandha can barely turn his head to Mrs.
Sadurbhai.

"A Brahmin? Is that what you are saying? Parvati, is this true?"
She weeps at the end of the table, face hidden in her dupatta. Mr.
Nandha can feel the table shaking to her sobs. "A Brahmin. A
genetically engineered child. A human child that lives twice as long
but ages half as fast. A human being that can never get cancer, that
can never get Alzheimer's, that can never get arthritis or any number
of the degenerative ills that will come to us, Parvati. Our child.
The fruit of our union. Is this what you want? We will take our seed
to the doctors and they will open it up and take it apart and change
it so that it is no longer ours and then fuse it and put that inside
you, Parvati; fill you full of hormones and fertility drugs and push
it up into your womb until it takes and you swell up with it, this
stranger within."

"Why would you deny her this?" Mrs. Sadurbhai declaims.
"What parent would refuse a chance for a perfect child? You
would deny a mother this?"

"Because they are not human!" Mr. Nandha shouts. "Have
you seen them? I have seen them. I see them every day in the streets
and the offices. They look so young, but there is nothing we know
there. The aeais and the Brahmins, they are the destruction of all of
us. We are redundant. Dead ends. I strive against inhuman monsters, I
will not invite one into my wife's
womb
." His hands are
shaking. His hands are shaking. This is not right. See what these
women have brought you to? Mr. Nandha pushes himself back from the
table and stands up. He feels kilometres tall, vast and diffuse as an
avatar from his box, filling buildings. "I am going out now. I
have business to attend to. I may not be back until tomorrow, but
when I do return, your mother will be gone from under this roof."

Parvati's voice follows him down the stairs.

"She is an old woman, it is late, where will she go? You cannot
throw an old woman out on to the streets."

Mr. Nandha makes no reply. He has an aeai to excommunicate. As he
walks from the lobby of the government apartment block to the
government car pigeons fly up around him in a wheezing applause of
wings. He grips the ivory Kalki image in his fist.

From this turret drummers once welcomed guests as they crossed the
causeway over the swamp. Water birds would rise up on either side;
egret, cranes, spoonbills, the wild duck that had drawn Moazam Ali
Khan to build his hunting lodge here on the Gaghara's winter
floodplain at Ramghar Lake. The lake is dry now, the swamps parched
mud, the birds gone. No drums have played from the naqqar khana in
Shaheen Badoor Khan's lifetime. The lodge had been semiderelict even
in his father's time: Asad Badoor Khan, asleep in the arms of Allah
beneath his simple marble rectangle in the family graveyard. Over
Shaheen Badoor Khan's lifetime, first rooms then suites then wings
were abandoned to the heat and the dust, fabrics rotting and
splitting, plaster staining and flaking in the monsoon humidity. Even
the graveyard is overgrown with grass and rank weeds, now withered
and yellow in drought. The shading ashok trees have been cut down one
by one and carried away by the caretakers for fuel.

Shaheen Badoor Khan has never liked the old hunting lodge of Ramghar
Kothi. That is why he has come here to hide. No one but those he
trusts knows it still stands.

He had sounded the horn for ten minutes before the staff roused
themselves to the idea that someone might want to visit the lodge.
They were an aged couple, poor but prideful Muslims, he a retired
schoolteacher. For struggling against entropy they were permitted a
wing rent-free and paid a weekly handful of rupees for rice and dal.
The surprise on old man Musa's face as he swung open the double gates
could not be hidden. It might have been the unannounced visit after
four years of neglect. Or, he might know everything from Voice of
Bharat news. Shaheen Badoor Khan drove into the shelter of the stable
cloister and ordered his lodge keeper to bar the gate.

Before an eastern horizon like a black wall Shaheen Badoor Khan moved
among the dusty graves of his clan. His Mughal forefathers had named
the monsoon the Hammer of God. That hammer had fallen and he was
still alive. He could plan. He could dream. He could even hope.

Moazam Ali Khan's mausoleum stood among pulpy tree stumps in the
oldest part of the graveyard, the first Khan to be buried here on
their gravel rise above the flood silts. The shade foliage had been
cut down over seasons by the Musas, but the current steward of
Ramghar approved of this despoilment. It allowed the small but
classically proportioned tomb to stretch its bones, let its sandstone
skin breathe, a building unveiled. Shaheen Badoor Khan ducked under
the east-facing arch into the domed interior. The delicate jali
screens had long since crumbled and he knew from childhood adventures
that the burial vault beneath was haunted by bats but even in its
decay the tomb of the founder of the political line of Khan graced
the visitor. Moazam Ali had led a life of achievement and intrigue
storied by the Urdu chroniclers as Prime Minister to the Nawabs of
Awadh in the time that power haemorrhaged from the fading Mughals at
Agra to their nominal lieges at Lucknow. He had overseen the
transformation of a squalid medieval trading city into a flower of
Islamic civilization, then, scenting the fragility of it all from the
hair-pomade of the envoys of the East India Company, retired from
public life with his small but fabled harem of Persian poetesses to
study Sufi mysticism in the game-shooting lodge donated by a grateful
nation. First and greatest of the Khans. Since Moazam Ali and his
poetesses lived and studied among the calling marsh birds, it has
been a slow decline to dust. The gloom beneath the dome deepened by
the instant as the monsoon advanced on Ramghar Kothi with its promise
of swamps refreshed, lakes restored. Shaheen Badoor Khan's fingers
traced the outline of the mihrab, the niche facing Mecca.

Two generations later, Mushtaq Khan lay beneath an elegant chhatri,
open to the wind and the dust. Saviour of the family reputation and
fortune by remaining staunch to the Raj as North India mutinied.
Engraved illustrations in the newspapers of 1857 showed him defending
property and family from besieging sepoy hordes, pistol in either
hand, cartridge smoke billowing. The truth was less dramatic; a small
detachment of mutineers had charged Ramghar and been repulsed without
casualty by small arms fire but it was enough to earn him the title
among the British of
That Faithful Mohammedan;
and the Hindus
Killer Khan
, a kudos among the Lords of the Raj he would
carefully convert into a campaign for special political recognition
for Muslims. How proud he would have felt, Shaheen Badoor Khan
thinks, to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a
Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land
of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in
tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophesies from the barrel of an
AK47. Time, death, and dust. Temple bells clanged out across the dead
marsh. From the south, the horn of a train, constantly blaring. Soft
thunder shook the air.

And here, beneath this marble stele on the gravel bank that had the
only soil deep enough to accept a grave, was his own grandfather,
Sayid Raiz Khan, judge and nation builder who had kept his wife and
family safe through the Partition Wars in which a million people
died, steadfast in his belief that there must be an India and that
India, to be all Nehru claimed on that midnight in 1947, must have a
seat of honour for Muslims. Here, his own father; campaigning lawyer
and campaigning Parliamentarian in two Parliament Houses, one in
Delhi, one in Varanasi. He had fought his own Partition Wars. The
Faithful Mohammedan Khans, each generation warring against the
achievements of the previous one, unto the last drop.