River of Gods (8 page)

He has their stash read-out on his scanner. There's always someone
doing a quick, dirty lift on the salbutamol/ATP-reductase reaction.

"I need your wheezers, quick." Goldie girl peers at him as
if he's some incredible alien elf from Antares. To her, he could be.
She fumbles open her pink Adidas purse. "Here, those."
Thomas Lull scrapes out the blue and white caplets. The grey girl is
panting shallowly now, hands on thighs, very frightened, looking
round for help. Thomas Lull bulls through the party people, cracking
the little gelatin capsules and shaking them into his fist.

"Open your mouth," he orders, cupping his hands. "Inhale
on three and hold for twenty. One. Two. Three."

Thomas Lull claps his cupped hands over her mouth and blows hard
between his thumbs, spraying powder deep into her lungs. She closes
her eyes, counting. Thomas Lull finds he's looking at her tilak. He's
never seen one like it before. It looks like plastic fused to the
skin, or raw bone. Suddenly he has to touch it. His fingers are
millimetres away when she opens her eyes. Thomas Lull snatches his
hand back.

"You all right?"

She nods. "Yes. Thank you."

"You should've brought some medication with you. You could have
been in a lot of trouble; these people, they're like ghosts. You
could have died and they'd've danced right over you. Come on."

He leads her through the maze of blind dancers to the shadowed sand.
She sits, bare feet splayed out. Thomas Lull kneels beside her. She
smells of sandalwood and fabric conditioner. Twenty years of
undergraduate expertise pins her at nineteen, maybe twenty. Come on,
Lull. You've saved a strange little driftwood girl from an asthma
attack and you're running your prepull checks. Show some
self-respect.

"I was so scared," she says. "I am so stupid, I had
inhalers but left them back at the hotel. I never thought."

Her soft accent would sound English to less experienced ears but
Thomas Lull's recognises a Karnatakan twang.

"Luck for you Asthma Man picked up your wheezing on his
super-hearing. Come on. Party's over for you tonight, sister. Where
are you staying?"

"The Palm Imperial Guest House." It's a good place, not
cheap, more popular with older travellers. Thomas Lull knows the
lobby and bar of every hotel for thirty kays up and down the coconut
coast. Some of the bedrooms too. Backpackers and gap-yearers tend
toward the beachshacks. He's seen a few of those too. Killed a few
snakes.

"I'll get you back. Achuthanandan will look after you. You've
had a bit of a shock, you need to take it easy."

That tilak: he's certain it's
moving
. Mystery girl gets to her
feet. She offers a hand shyly, formally.

"Thank you very much. I think I would have been in very bad
trouble without you." Thomas Lull takes the hand. It is long and
aesthetic, soft and dry. She cannot quite look at him.

"All in a day's work for Asthma Man."

He walks with her toward the lights among the palms. The surf is
lifting, the trees grow agitated. The lamps on the hotel veranda
dance and glimmer behind the veil of fronds. The beach party behind
him is suddenly weary and stale. All the things that seemed valuable
and confirming before this girl now taste thin and old. Perhaps the
monsoon is coming; the wind that will blow him on again.

"If you want, there's a technique I can teach you. I used to
suffer asthma bad when I was young; it's a breathing trick; to do
with gas exchange. It's quite easy. I haven't had an attack in twenty
years, and you can throw away those inhalers. I could show you the
basics; you could call round tomorrow."

The girl pauses, gives it thought, then nods her head. Her tilak
catches a light from somewhere.

"Thank you. I would value that very much."

The way she talks; so reserved, so Victorian, such regard for the
stress of words. "Okay well, you can find me."

"Oh, I will just ask the gods, they will show me. They know the
way to everywhere."

Thomas Lull has no answer to that, so he sticks his hands in the
pockets of his cut-off baggies and says, "Well, gods permitting,
I'll see you tomorrow, ah?"

"Aj." She gives her name a French pronunciation:
Ah-zjh
.
She looks to the hotel lights, coloured bulbs jigging in the rising
wind. "I think I will be all right from here, thank you. Until
tomorrow then, Professor Lull."

Tal travels tonight in a plastic taxi. The little bubble phatphat
rattles over the pocks and pots of a rural road as the driver steers
nervously by his single headlamp. He's already narrowly missed one
wandering cow and a column of women with bundles of firewood on their
heads. Shade trees loom out of the deep, thick rural night. The
driver scans the verge for the turn-off. His instructions are taped
to the dash where he can read them by instrument light. So many kays
along this road, through this number of villages, second left after
the wall ad for Rupa underwear. He's never been out of the city
before.

Tal's special mix plays big anokha breaks with Slav Metal death
chords, in honour of the host. Celebrity occasions demand
extra-special mixes. Tal's life can be chronicled by a series of
soundtrack files. Tal's DJ aeai wove up a set of top grooves between
drafting the wedding pavilion for the Chawla/Nadiadwala match.
There's much happening in
Town and Country's
actors' lives
right now.

A sudden lurch throws Tal from the bench seat. The phatphat bounces
to a stop. Tal rearranges yts thermal scatter coat, tuts at the dust
on yts silk pants, then notices the soldiers. Six of them phase out
of rural night camouflage. A chubby Sikh officer has his hand raised.
He steps up to the taxi.

"Didn't you see us?"

"You are kind of hard to spot," the driver says. "No
chance of a licence, I suppose?" the jemadar asks. "None
whatever," the driver says. "My cousin."

"Do you not know we are in a state of heightened vigilance?"
the Sikh soldier admonishes. "Awadhi slow missiles could already
be moving across our country. They are stealthy things, they can
conceal themselves in many ways."

"Not as slow as this old crock," the driver jokes. The Sikh
suppresses a smile and bends down to glance in at the passenger. Tal
hastily shuts off the bpm. Yt sits very still, very upright, heart
betrayingly loud.

"And you sir? Madam?"

His soldiers titter. The Sikh has been eating onions. Tal thinks yt
might pass out from the reek and the tension. Yt opens yts evening
bag, slips out the thick, gilt-scallop-edged invitation. The Sikh
looks at it as if it could be grounds for a full body-cavity search,
then snaps it back to Tal.

"You're lucky we're out here tonight. You missed your turn a
couple of kilometres back. You must be about the seventh or eighth.
Now, what you do is."

Tal breathes again. As the driver turns the cab Tal can clearly hear
the soldiers' nasty laughter over the purr of the alcohol motor.

Hope there are slow missiles a-creeping up on you, Tal thinks.

The half-ruined Ardhanarisvara temple stands among trees on a country
track that strikes right from the main road. The party organisers
have lit the drop-off zone with biolume patches. The green light
draws faces from the tree trunks, spook-lights the slumped statues
and yakshis, bedded in the ancient soil. The reception is themed
around polar opposites: sakti and purusa; female and male energies;
sattva and tamas; spiritual intelligence and earthy materialism. The
yoni-shaped tanks have been extravagantly flooded. Tal thinks of yts
party preparations, a frugal lick-wash with a bottle of warmed
mineral water. The mains water in the White Fort—the mammoth
agglomeration of housing projects where Tal has yts two-room
apartment—has not been working for two months now. Day and
night a procession of women and children carry water cans up and down
the stairs past yts front door.

Gas flames blaze from nozzles in the centres of the yoni tanks. Tal
studies the twin temple guardian dvarapalas while the taxi driver
runs yts card through his reader. The ruined arcade is dominated by
the image of Ardhanarisvara; half male, half female. A single full
breast, an erect penis sliced down the middle, a mono testicle, a
curl of labius, a hint of a slit. The torso has a man's broadness of
shoulder, a woman's fullness of hip, the hands sensitively held in
ritual mudras but the features are genetic, androgynous. The third
eye of Siva is closed on the forehead. Inside, the music is banging.
Invitation clutched in hand, Tal passes between the guardian deities,
into the party of the season.

Even when Tal showed them the invitation, the department told yt yt
had faked it. It was an automatic supposition to make in a section
designing visual wallpaper for the fake lives of the aeai actors of
India's favorite soapi. Tal hadn't believed it ytself when yt found
the thick, creamy wafer card resting in yts intray.

FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS on behalf of MODE ASIA invites TAL, 27
Corridor 30, 12th Floor, Indira Gandhi Apartments (as White Fort was
known only to the post office, the tax department, and the bailiffs)
to a RECEPTION to welcome YULI to Varanasi for BHARAT FASHION WEEK.
LOCATION: Ardhanarisvara Temple, Mirza Murad District CELEBRATION: 22
bells. NATION: NuTribe. RSVP.

The card felt warm and soft as skin. Tal had shown it to Mama Bharat,
the old widow woman whose front door shared yts stair head. She was a
soft soul incarcerated by her family in a silk prison. The modern
way: an independent old age. Three months ago Tal had moved in an
become Mama Bharat's family. No one would talk to yt, either. Tal
accepted the daily chai and snack visits and twice weekly cleaning
calls and never asked what kind of family yt was to her, daughter or
son.

The aged aged woman ran her fingers over the invitation, stroking and
cooing softly, like a lover.

"So soft," she said. "So soft. And will they all be
like you?"

"Nutes? Most. We're a theme."

"Ah, a great great honour, the best in the city, and all the
tivi people." Yes, Tal had thought. But why this one?

Tal walks through the shadowy temple mandapa lit by flambeaux held by
four armed Kali avatars and feels a little gnaw of awe in yts nadi
chakra.
There
is a Big Name Film Director talking rather
uncomfortably to a Well Respected New Young Woman Writer underneath
startlingly pornographic statue.
Here
is an international
circuit tennis star looking relieved to have found not just a Big Pro
golfer, but an All-India League footballer and his radiant wife so
they can all talk strokeplay and handicaps. And
that's
Mr.
Interstellar Pop Promoter Man and he's his latest piece of pop
engineering with a debut song bound to go to Number One on prerelease
bookings already while the girl in the too-short skirt clutching the
cocktail a little too hard and laughing a little too loud has to be
FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS PR. That's not counting the three
under-twenty-five wetware rajas, the two edgy games designers, and
the deeply shady Lord of the Sundarbans, the Cyberjungle entrepreneur
of the Darwinware hot zone, all on his ownio, at ease and sleekly
tigerish as only a man with his own pandava legion of aeai bodyguards
can. Plus the overdressed overmouthed faces Tal doesn't recognise but
who advertise their fashion magazine origins, the fortysomething tivi
commissioning editors looking sweaty and over-familiar with each
other, the gossip journos with the very wide and active peripheral
vision, and the Varanasi society have-to-haves, ruffled and sullen at
being outshone by a gaggle of
nutes
. There are even a couple
of generals, gorgeous as parakeets in their full dress. Army is
tres tres
hip in this time of edge-play with Awadh. Not
forgetting that clutch of sullen seeming-ten-year-olds looking
daggers over the tops of their gyro-stabilised cocktail glasses: the
Golden, the Brahmin sons and daughters.

Tal's been given a checklist by Neeta, boss Devgan's PA. Most of the
metasoap unit find Neeta's perfect vacuity oppressive but Tal likes
her. Her unfeigned banality throws up unexpected, Zen-like
juxtapositions. She wanted to know what yt was wearing, what makeup
yt was going to put on, where yt was going for pre-club drinks and
the after-party bash. You have to make an effort for the biggest
brashest celeby gotta-go bash of the season. Along the colonnade yt
clicks thirty Big Names off Neeta's list.

Two rakshasas guard the entrance to the sanctuary and the free bar.
The groove is Adani, Biblical Brothers remix. Scimitars swing down.
The actors are flesh but the lower set of arms is robotic. Tal
admires the full-body makeup. It really is seamless. They scan the
invitation. The swords go up. Tal steps into wonderland. Every nute
in the city has turned out. Tal notes that yts ankle-length
shag-fibre optical shatter coat is still the thing, but since when
have ski goggles pushed high on the forehead become the accessory?
Tal hates missing a move. Heads turn as yt progresses to the bar,
then bend together. Yt can feel the wave of gossip spread behind yt
like a wake:
Who's that nute, yt's new, where's yt been hiding
ytself, Stepped Away or stepped in?

I disregard your regard, Tal declares to ytself. Tal is here for
stardom. Yt stakes a pitch at the end of the curving luminous plastic
bar and scans the talent. Four-armed barmen shake acrobatic
cockrails. Tal admires the dexterity of their robotics. "What's
this?" yt asks of the fluorescent cone of golden ice balanced on
its point on the bar.

"Non-Russian," says the barman as his lower arms lift
another glass and scoop up ice. Tal sips cautiously. Vodka-based
something vanilla-syrupy, a fistful of crush and a slash of German
cinnamon schnapps, flakes of gold foil drifting down through the
interstices in the ice. The thrum of the microgyros tickle Tal's
fingers.