River Of Gods Page 19

  Vishram calls for another round of Stregas. He doesn’t know if it’s the Sip that Charms or the physics, but his brain is at the Swaddled in Cottonwool stage.

  ‘What stops cold zero-point theory in its tracks is the second law of thermodynamics.’ The waiter serves the second round. Vishram studies Sonia Yadav through the gold in the little bubble glass. ‘Stop that, and pay attention! To be useful, energy has to go somewhere. It’s got to flow from higher to lower, hot to cold, if you like. But in our universe the zero point, the quantum fluctuation, is the ground state. There’s nowhere for the energy to flow; it’s all uphill. But in another universe . .

  ‘The ground state, whatever you call it, might be higher . . .’

  Sonia Yadav claps her hands together in a silent namaste.

  ‘Exactly! Exactly! It would naturally flow from higher to lower. We could tap that infinite energy.’

  ‘First find your universe.’

  ‘Oh, we found one a long time ago. It’s a simple manifold of the M-star theoretical structure of our own universe. Gravity is more powerful there; so is the expansion constant, so there’s a lot more vacuum energy tied up in the stressed space-time. It’s quite a small universe, and not too far away.’

  ‘I thought you said the universes were all inside and outside each other.’

  ‘They are, topologically. I’m talking about energy distance, how much we need to warp our ’branes to the geometry of that one. In physics, ultimately, everything is energy.’

  Warped brains, all right.

  Sonia Yadav sets her empty glass firmly on the gingham tablecloth, leans forward and Vishram cannot refuse the physical energy in her eyes, her face, her body.

  ‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘Come and see it.’

  After Glasgow, the University of Bharat Varanasi at night is unusually well mannered. No discarded polystyrene trays of rain-soaked chips or dropped beer glasses or vomit pizzas to dodge in the brownout. No sounds of coitus from the halls or urination from the shrubberies. No sinister drunk reeling out of the peripheral vision with a racial curse. No gangs of girls half-naked arm in arm streeling across the dusty, withered lawns. What there is is a lot of heavy security, a few dons on big clunky bicycles with no lights, the rattle of a solitary night-radio and a sense from the shut-up faculty buildings and student residences of curfew.

  The driver heads towards the only light. The experimental physics building is an orchid-like confection of luminous plastic sheeting and pylons, daring and delicate. The name on the marble plinth is the Ranjit Ray Centre for High Energy Physics. Buried beneath the delicate, flowery architecture is a grunt engineering pulse laser particle collider.

  ‘He seems to have been a man of many parts, my father,’ Vishram says as the night security nods them through the lobby. His face is known now.

  ‘He’s not dead,’ Sonia Yadav says and Vishram starts.

  An elevator bank at the end of the lobby takes them down a tube to the root of the beast. It is a mythological creature indeed, a world-devouring worm curled in a loop beneath Sarnath and Ganga. Vishram looks through the glass observation window at electrical devices each the size of a ship engine and tries to imagine particles forced into strange and unnatural liaisons.

  ‘When we run it to full power to open an aperture, those containment magnets put out a field strong enough to suck the haemoglobin out of your blood,’ Sonia Yadav says.

  ‘How do you know this?’ Vishram asks.

  ‘We tried it with a goat, if you really want to know. Come on.’

  Sonia Yadav leads the way down a long flight of concrete steps to an air-lock door. The security panel eyeballs her, opens into an airlock.

  ‘Are we going into space or something?’ Vishram asks as the lock cycles.

  ‘It’s just a containment device.’

  Vishram decides he doesn’t want to know what’s being contained, so he fluffs, ‘I know my father’s rich - was rich - and there’s rich buys private jets, rich buys private islands, but rich that buys private particle colliders . . .’

  ‘There are other backers involved,’ Sonia Yadav says. The inner hatch spins and they enter an unspectacular concrete office, headachingly lit with neon and flatscreen flicker. A young, bearded man rocks back on a chair, feet on the desk, reading the evening paper. He has an industrial thermos of chai and a Styrofoam cup; the computers bang out old school bhangra from a Bengali station. He jumps up when he sees his late-night visitors.

  ‘Sonia, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Deba, this is . . .’

  ‘I know, pleased to meet you, Mr Ray.’ He has an overemphatic handshake. ‘So, you’ve come to take a look at our own little private universe?’ Beyond a second door is a small concrete room into which the visitors fit like segments of an orange. A heavy glass panel is level with Vishram’s head. He squints but can make nothing out of it. ‘We only need numbers really, but some people have this atavistic urge to eyeball things,’ Deba says. He’s brought his chai with him, he takes a sip. ‘Okay, we’re in an observation area beside the confinement chamber, which we in our humorous physicists’ way call the Holding Cell. It’s basically a modified tokamak torus - does this mean anything to you? No? Think of it as an inverse donut; it’s got an outside, but inside is the hardest vacuum you can imagine. It’s actually harder than any vacuum you can imagine, all there is in there is space-time and quantum fluctuation. And this.’

  He hits the lights. Vishram’s blind for an instant, then he becomes aware of a gaining glow from the window. He remembers a physics student he once took home telling him that the retina can detect a single photon and therefore the human eye can see on the quantum scale. He leans forward; the glow comes from a line of blue, sharp as a laser; Vishram can see it curve off around the walls of the tokamak. He presses his face to the glass.

  ‘Uh oh, panda eyes,’ Deba says. ‘It throws "off a lot of U V.’

  ‘This is . . . another universe?’

  ‘It’s another space-time vacuum,’ Sonia Yadav says. She stands close enough for Vishram to fully appreciate her Arpege 27. ‘It’s been stable for a couple of months. Think of it as another nothing, but with a vacuum energy higher than ours . . .’

  ‘And it’s leaking into our universe.’

  ‘It’s not much higher, we’re only getting a two per cent above input return from it, but we hope use this space to open an aperture into a yet higher energy space, and so on, up the ladder until we get a significant return.’

  ‘And the light . . .’

  ‘Quantum radiation; the virtual particles of this universe - we call it Universe two-eight-eight - running into the laws of our universe and annihilating themselves into photons.’

  Not it’s not, Vishram thinks, looking into the light of another time and space. And you know it’s not, Sonia Yaday. It is the light of Brahma.

  KALKI

  SHIV

  A boyz always got his mother.

  It had been almost a homecoming, walking through the narrow galis between the shanties, ducking under the power cables, keeping the good shoes on the cardboard paths because even in the driest of droughts the alleys of Chandi Basti were pissmud. The runways constantly realigned themselves as shanties collapsed or additions were built on but Shiv steered by landmarks: Lord Ram Indestructible Car Parts where the brothers Shasi and Ashish were taking a VW apart into tiny parts; Mr Pillai’s Sewing Machine under its umbrella; Ambedkar the child-buyer’s agent sitting on his raised porch of forklift pallets, smoking sweet ganja. Everywhere, people looking, people stepping aside, people making gestures to ward off the eye, people following him with their gaze because they had seen something from outside their existence, something with taste and class and great shoes, something that was something. Something that was a man.

  His mother had looked up at his shadow across her doorway. He pushed money on her, a wad of grubby rupees. He had a little cash in hand from the man who hauled away the remains of the Merc. It left him short
, but a son should repay some of the debt he owes his mother. She pretended to tsk it away but Shiv saw her tuck it behind the brick by the fire.

  He’s back. It’s only a charpoy in the corner but there’s a roof and a fire and dal twice a day and the secure knowledge that no one, no thing, no killing machine with scimitars for hands will find Shiv here. But there is a danger here too. It would be easy to sink back into the routine of a little eating, a little sleep in the noon-day sun, a little thieving, a little hanging around with your friends, talking this and that and looking at the girls and that is a day, a year, a life gone. He must be thinking, talking, pulling in his debts and his favours. Yogendra goes out running through basti and city, listening to what the streets are saying about Shiv, who has turned his collar against him, who still has a thread of honour.

  And then there is his sister.

  Leela is a reminder that a son and brother should not leave it from Diwali to Guru Poornima to see his family. What had been a nice-looking, quiet, shy but solid-minded seventeen year old - could have married up - has turned Bible Christian. She went out one night with a friend to a religious thing run by a cable television station and came back born again. But it is not enough that she has found the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone else must find him too. Especially her baaaadest of baaaadmash brothers. So round she comes with her bible with the whisper-thin paper that Shiv knows makes the very best spliffs and her little tracts and her cumbersome zeal.

  ‘Sister, this is my time of rest and recreation. You disrupt it. If your Christianity means as much as you say, you would respect you brother. I think it says that somewhere, respect and honour your brother.’

  ‘My brothers are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said that because of me, you will hate your mother and father, and your brother too.’

  ‘Then that is a very foolish religion. Which one of your brothers and sisters in Christ got you drugs when you were dying of tuberculosis? Which one of them rammed that rich man’s pharmacy? You are making yourself no one, nothing. No one will marry you if you are not properly Indian. Your womb will dry up. You will cry out for those children. I don’t like to say this, but no one else will tell you this truth but me. Mata won’t, your Christian friends won’t.You are making a terrible mistake, put it right now.’

  ‘The terrible mistake is to choose to go to hell,’ Leela says defiantly.

  ‘And what do you think this is?’ Shiv says. Yogendra bares his ratty teeth.

  That afternoon Shiv has a meeting: Priya from Musst. Good times there are not forgotten. Shiv watches the chai stall for fifteen minutes to be sure it is her and her alone. She is pain to his heart in her pants that cling to the curve of her ass and her wispy silk top and her amber shades and her pale pale skin and red red sucking lips that pout as she looks around impatiently for him, trying to pick his hair, his face, his walk out of the thronging, staring bodies. She is all the things he has lost. He must get out of here. He must raise himself up again. Be a raja again.

  She bounces on her boot heels and gives little squeaks of delight to see him. He gets her tea, they sit on a bench at the metal counter. She offers to get the bill but he pays with some of his dwindling wad. Chandni Basti will not see a woman buy Shiv Faraji tea. Her legs are long and lean and urban. The men of Chandni Basti measure them with their eyes, then catch the hem of the leather coat on the man beside her. They go on their way then. Yogendra sits on an upturned plastic fertiliser barrel and picks at his teeth.

  ‘So, are my women and bartender missing me?’ He offers her a bidi, takes a light from the gas burner under the rattling water boiler.

  ‘You are in such trouble.’ She lights hers off his, a Bollywood kiss. ‘You know who Ahimsa Debt Collection Agency is?’

  ‘Some gang of hoods.’

  ‘The Dawood Gang. It’s a new line of work for them, buying debts. Shiv, you have the Dawoods after you. These are the men skinned Gurnit Azni alive in the back of his limo.’

  ‘It’s all bargaining; they go in high, I go in low, we meet in the middle. That is the way men do business.’

  ‘No. They want what you owe them. Not a rupee less.’

  Shiv laughs, the free, mad laugh breaking up inside. He can see the blue around the edge of his field of vision again, the pure, Krishna blue.

  ‘No one has that kind of money.’

  ‘Then you are dead and I am very sorry.’ Shiv lays his hand flat on Priya’s thigh. She freezes.

  ‘You came here to tell me that? I was expecting something from you.’

  ‘Shiv, there are a hundred big dadas like you on every street corner, all expecting . . .’ Her sentence snaps off as Shiv seizes her jaw, pressing his fingers hard into the soft meat, rubbing his thumb over the bone. Bruises. He will leave bruises like blue roses. Priya yelps. Yogendra bares his incisors. Pain arouses that boy, Shiv thinks. Pain makes him smile. The people of Chandni Basti stare. He feels eyes all around him. Stare well.

  ‘Raja,’ he whispers. ‘I am a raja.’

  He lets her go. Priya rubs her jaw.

  ‘That hurt, madar chowd.’

  ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’

  ‘You don’t deserve it. You deserve the Dawoods to cut you up with a robot, behen chod.’ She flinches as Shiv reaches for her face again. ‘It’s a little thing but it could lead to more. A lot more. Just a drop off. But if you do it right, they say . . .’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Nitish and Chunni Nath.’

  ‘I don’t work for Brahmins.’

  ‘Shiv . . .’

  ‘It is a point of principle. I am a man of principle.’

  ‘It’s principle to get chopped up into kabob by the Dawoods?’

  ‘I do not take orders from children.’

  ‘They aren’t children.’

  ‘They are here.’ Shiv cups his hand over his groin, jerks. ‘No, I will not work for the Naths.’

  ‘Then you won’t need to go here.’ She snaps open her little bag and slides a piece of paper across the greasy counter. There is an address, out in the industrial belt. ‘And you won’t need this car.’ She parks a rental chitty beside the address slip. It’s for a Merc, a big Kali-black four-litre SUV Merc, like a raja would drive. ‘If you don’t need any of that, I guess I’ll go now and pray for your moksha.’

  She scoops up her bag and slides off the high bench and pushes past Yogendra and strides off over the cardboard in those high heel boots that make her ass go wip-wop side-a-side.

  Yogendra is looking at him. It’s that wise-kid look that makes Shiv want to smash his head against the tin counter until he hears things crack and go soft.

  ‘You finished that?’ He snatches the kid’s can of tea, splashes its contents over the ground. ‘You have now. We have better business.’

  The kid is right in his fuck-you silence. He is as old as any Brahmin, inside there in the skull. Not for the first time Shiv wonders if he is a rich boy, a son and heir to some pirate lord, tumbled out of the limo under the neons of Kashi to learn how the world really works. Survive. Thrive. No other rules apply.

  ‘You coming or what?’ he shouts at Yogendra. Somewhere the kid has found himself a chew of paan.

  Leela comes around again that night to help her mother make cauliflower puris. They are a treat for Shiv but the smell of hot ghee in the confined, dark house makes his skin crawl, his scalp itch. Shiv’s mother and sister squat around the little gas cooker. Yogendra sits with them draining the cooked puris on crumpled newspaper. Shiv watches the boy, squatting with the women, scooping the smoking hot breads into their paper nests. This must have meant something to him once. A hearth, a fire, bread, paper. He looks at Leela clapping out the puris into little ovals and throwing them into the deep fat.

  She says into the peace of the house, ‘I’m thinking of changing my name to Martha. It is from the Bible. Leela is from Leelavati who is a pagan goddess but is really a demon of Satan in hell. Do you know what hell is like?’ She casually ladles cauli
flower puris out on the chicken-wire scoop. ‘Hell is a fire that never goes out, a great dark hall, like a temple, only greater than any temple you have ever seen because it has to hold all the people who never knew the Lord Jesus. The walls and the pillars are tens of kilometres high and they glow yellow hot and the air is like a flame. I say walls, but there is no outside to hell, only solid rock going on forever in every direction, and hell is carved inside it, so that even if you could escape, which you can’t, because you’re chained up like a package, there would be nowhere else to go. And the space is filled with billions and billion of people all chained up into little bundles, piled on top of each other, a thousand deep and a thousand wide and a thousand high, a billion people in a pile, and a thousand of those piles. The ones in the centre cannot see anything at all but they can hear each other, all roaring. That is the only sound you hear in hell, this great roaring that never stops, from all the billions of people, chained and burning but never being burned up. That is the thing, burning in flame, but never eaten up.’