River of Gods (62 page)

They skirt the southern wall, cross the southwestern turret, and slip
along the riverside terrace. Shiv's thigh muscles scream from the
enforced half-crouch. He is wet beyond saturation. The Hastings
Pavilion rises like a moon before him, hypnotic in Taj-white stone.

He tears his gaze away, nudges Yogendra on the thigh.

"Hey."

A simple square-built Lodi temple stands in the centre of the
courtyard, upper storeys tattily decorated with peeling murals of
Siva, Parvati, and Ganesha, the work of bored Indian Army jawans with
surplus military issue paint. The sucddhavsa, the crypt of crypto.

"Let's go."

The kid taps Shiv's visor, rolls his ringer in a gesture that
eloquently says,
up the brightness
. The temple leaps into
renewed sharpness. Shiv makes out a boiling, dark mass, constantly
flowing and breaking, between the arches. He ups the magnification.
Robots. Scarab robots. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A plague,
scuttling round each other, clambering over each other, jostling and
bumping on their silent plastic pods.

Yogendra points to the temple. "Anand's way." Then to the
white bright pavilion. "Yogendra's way."

They spy the sentry on the old Mughal execution ground. The man wears
no nightwatch visor so Shiv and Yogendra can move within easy taser
range. He is treating himself to a long luxurious piss in the rain
over the sheer drop. Yogendra carefully aims at the midnight
urinator. The weapon makes the slightest of clicks but in Shiv's
amplified sight the effect is spectacular. A glowing cloud surrounds
the man, his body crawls with microlightning. He drops. His dick is
still out. Yogendra is on him before he stops twitching. He slips the
big black Stechkin machine pistol out of the man's leg holster, holds
it up in front of his face, smiling at its lines and contours. Shiv
grabs his wrist.

"No fucking guns."

"Yes fucking guns," Yogendra says. The rakshasa-bot passes
on another round. Shiv and Yogendra press up close to the unconscious
guard, merging their thermal profiles with his. As a parting gift
Shiv leaves pisser an armed taser mine. Just to cover the rear.
Beyond the execution tower the walls cut back behind the Hastings
Pavilion to isolate it on its marble plinth. Shiv has to admit that
even in the rain the prospect stuns. The building stands on the edge
of a steep drop down to the tin rooftops of Chunar. In his enhanced
vision Shiv sees the plain glitter like an inverted night sky with
the glow of villages and vehicles and great trains. But Ganga Mata
dominates all, a silver blade, the weapon of a god, wide as all the
world, rippled like a Damascus steel sword he had once seen in a
Kashi antique store and envied as the proper adjunct of a raja. Shiv
follows the curve of the river all the way to the air-glow of
Varanasi, like a great conflagration beneath the horizon.

The pavilion that first Raj Governor Warren Hastings built to enjoy
this preview is an Anglo-Mughal hybrid, classical columns supporting
a traditional open Mughal diwan with a closed upper level. Shiv steps
his visor down to minimum. He peers. He thinks he sees bodies in the
diwan, bodies all over the floor. No time to stare. Yogendra taps him
again. The wall is less high here and slopes down to the marble
plinth. Yogendra slips through the battlement, then Shiv hears a
rough slither and when he next peers over Yogendra beckons up at him.
It's further and steeper than Shiv thought despite the bravado pills;
he lands heavily, painfully, suppresses a yelp. Figures stir in the
open pavilion.

Shiv turns towards their potential threat. "Fuck," he says
reverently.

The carpeted floor is covered in women. Indian, Filipino, Chinese,
Thai, Nepali, even African women. Young women. Cheap women. Bought
women, dressed not in red carsuits, but in classical Mughal zenana
fashion in transparent cholis and light silk saris and translucent
jamas. In the centre, on a raised divan, Dataraja Ramanandacharya
stirs his fat self. He is arrayed in the style of a Mughal grandee.
Yogendra is already pacing through the harem. The women flee from
him, voices joining together in apprehension. Shiv sees
Ramanandacharya reach for his palmer: Yogendra pulls the Stechkin.
The consternation becomes panicked cries. They have only moments to
get this to work. Yogendra walks up to Ramanandacharya and casually
slides the muzzle of the Stechkin into the hollow beneath his ear.

"Everyone shut the fuck up!" Shiv shouts. Women. Women
everywhere. Women of every race and nationality. Young women. Women
with lovely breasts and wonderful nipples showing through their
transparent cholis. Bastard Ramanandacharya. "Shut. The. Fuck.
Up. Okay. Fat boy. You've got something we want."

Najia hears children's voices from the house. The dhobi is gone from
the shrubbery, in its place swags of bunting run from the kitchen
door to apricot trees now in blossom. Folding tables draped with
coloured cloths are laden with halwa and jellabies, ras gullahs and
sugared almonds, burfi and big plastic bottles of full-sugar Coke. As
Najia walks towards the house the children burst from the open patio
door into the garden, running and shrieking in their Kid at Gap
junior casuals.

"I remember this!" Najia says turning to the aeai. "This
is my fourth birthday. How are you doing this?"

"The visuals are a matter of record, the children are as you
think you remember them. Memory is such a malleable commodity. Shall
we go inside?"

Najia stops in the doorway, hands raised to her mouth in potent
remembering. The silk antimacassars her mother insisted that every
chair-back wear. The Russian samovar by the table, never off the gas;
the table itself, dust and crumbs permanently engrained in the
Chinese carving in which Najia-age-four had tried to discern roads
and paths for her dolls and toy cars to follow. The electric coffee
pot at the other end, also never inactive. The chairs so heavy she
could not move them alone and would ask Shukria the maid to help her
build houses and shops with brooms and blankets. On the chairs around
the dining table, her parents and their friends, conversing over
coffee and tea, the men together, the women together; the men talking
politics and sport and promotion, the women talking children and
prices and promotion. Her father's palmer rings and he frowns and it
is her father as she knows him from the family photographs, when he
had hair, when his beard was black and neat, when he had no need for
unmanly half-glasses. He mutters apologies, goes to his study, the
study into which Najia-age-four is never permitted for fear of the
sharp poisonous delicate personal infectious dangerous things a
doctor kept in his workroom. Najia watches him come out with a black
bag, his other black bag, the one he did not use everyday, the black
bag he kept for special visits. She sees him slip away into the
street.

"It was my birthday and he missed me getting my presents and the
party. He came back late after everyone was gone and he was too tired
to do anything."

The aeai beckons her into the kitchen and in three steps down three
months pass, for it is a dark autumn night and women prepare the
iftar to celebrate the end of that day's Ramadan fast. Najia follows
the trays of food into the dining room. In that year her father's
friends, the ones from the hospital and the ones in uniforms, gather
often in the house of a Ramadan evening, talking of dangerous
students and radical clerics who would take them all back to the
Middle Ages and the unrest and the strikes and arrests. Then they
notice the little girl standing by the end of the table with the bowl
of rice and they stop their talk to smile and ruffle her hair and
press their faces too close to hers. Suddenly the smell of tomato
rice is overpowering. A pain like a knife stabbed in the side of her
head makes Najia lose hold of the rice dish. She cries out. No one
hears. Her father's friends talk on. The rice dish cannot fall. This
is memory. She hears words she cannot remember.

"... will clamp down on the mullahs."

"... moving funds to offshore banks. London's looking good, they
understand us over there."

"... your name's going to be high on any of their lists."

"... Masoud won't stand for that from them."

". you know about tipping points? It's this American
mathematical thing, don't knock it. Basically, you never know it's
going until it's too late to stop it."

"... Masoud will never let it get to that stage."

"... I'd be seriously looking if I were you, I mean you've got a
wife, little Najia there."

The hand reaches out to ruffle her softly curled black hair. The
world whips away and she is standing in her
Mammoths!â„¢
pyjamas by the half-open living-room door.

"What did you do to me?" she asks the aeai, a presence
behind her more felt than seen. "I heard things I'd forgotten
for years, for most of my life."

"Hyperstimulation of the olfactory epithelium. Most effective at
evoking a buried memory trace. Smell is the most potent activator of
memories."

"The tomato rice. how did you know?" Najia is whispering
though her memory-parents cannot hear her, can only play out their
foreshadowed roles.

"Memory is what I am made of," says the aeai and Najia
gasps and doubles to another migraine attack as the remembered scent
of orange-flower water throws her into the past. She pushes open the
door's light-filled crack. Her mother and father look up from the
lamp-lit table. As she remembers, the clock reads eleven. As she
remembers, they ask her what's the matter, can't you sleep, what's
wrong, treasure? As she remembers she says it's the helicopters. As
she has forgotten, on the lacquered coffee table, under the row of
her father's diplomas and qualifications and memberships of learned
bodies framed on the wall, is a piece of black velvet the size of a
colouring book. Scattered across the velvet like stars, so bright, so
brilliant in the light from the reading lamp that Najia cannot
understand how she ever forgot this sight, is a constellation of
diamonds.

The facets unfold her, wheel her forward in time like a shard in a
kaleidoscope.

It is winter. The apricot trees stand bare; dry snow, sharp as grit,
lies drifted grudgingly against the water-stained white wall. The
mountains seem close enough to radiate cold. She remembers her house
as the last in the unit. At her gate the streets ended and bare
wasteland stretched unbroken to the hills. Beyond the wall was
desert, nothing. The last house in Kabul. In every season the wind
would scream across the great plain and break on the first vertical
object it found. She never remembers a single apricot from the trees.
She stands there in her fur hooded duffel with her Wellington boots
and her mittens on a string up her sleeve because last night like
every night she heard noise in the garden and she had looked out but
it was not the soldiers or the bad students but her father digging in
the soft soil among the fruit trees. Now she stands on that slight
mound of fresh dug earth with the gardening trowel in her hand. Her
father is at work at the hospital helping women have babies. Her
mother is watching an Indian television soap opera translated into
Pashtun. Everyone says it is very silly and a waste of time and
obviously Indian but they watch it anyway. She goes down on her knees
in her ribby winter tights and starts to dig. Down down, twist and
shovel, then the green enamelled blade rasps on metal. She scrapes
around and pulls out the thing her father has buried. When she
wrestles it out she almost drops the soft, shapeless thing, thinking
it is a dead cat. Then she understands what she has found: the black
bag. The other black bag, for the special visits. She reaches for the
silver clasps.

In Najia Askarzadah's memory her mother's scream from the kitchen
door ends it. After that come broken recalls of shouting, angry
voices, punishment, pain, and, soon after, the midnight flight
through the streets of Kabul lying on the back seat where the
streetlights strobe overhead one flash two flash three flash four. In
the aeai's virtual childhood the scream tapers off into a stabbing
scent of winter, of cold and steel and dead things dried out that
almost blinds her. And Najia Askarzadah remembers. She remembers
opening the bag.
Her mother flying across the patio scattering the
plastic chairs that lived out there in every season
. She
remembers looking inside.
Her mother shouting her name but she
does not look up there are toys inside, shiny metal toys, dark rubber
toys
. She remembers lifting the stainless steel things into the
winter sunlight in her mittened hands: the speculum, the curved
suture needle, the curettage spoon, the hypodermics and the tubes of
gel, the electrodes, the stubby ridged rubber of the electric
truncheon.
Her mother hauling her away by her furry hood, smacking
the metal things the rubber things away from her, throwing her away
across the path, the frost-hardened gravel ripping her ribbed tights,
grazing her knees
.

The fine-boned branches of the apricot trees mesh and fold Najia
Askarzadah into another memory not her own. She has never been to
this green-floored corridor of concrete blocks but she knows it
existed. It is a true illusion. It is a corridor that you might see
in a hospital but it does not have the smell of a hospital. It has a
hospital's big translucent swinging doors; the paint is chipped off
the metal edges suggesting frequent passage but there is only Najia
Askarzadah on the green corridor. Frigid air blows through the
louvered windows along one side, down the other are named and
numbered doors. Najia passes through one set of flapping doors, two,
three. With every set, a noise grows a little louder, the noise of a
sobbing woman, a woman past the end of everything where no shame or
dignity remains. Najia walks towards the shrieking. She passes a
hospital trolley abandoned by a door. The trolley has straps for
ankles, wrists, waist. Neck. Najia passes through the final set of
doors. The sobbing rises to a sharp keening. It emanates from the
last door on the left. Najia pushes it open against the sturdy
spring.