River of Gods Read Online Free PDF Page B

never know peace again.
    The gate controller has gifts for all from Minister Naipaul; vacuum
flasks bearing the crest of the Joint States of East and West Bengal.
When he is belted in and the curtains are closed on economy and the
BharatAir airbus is bumping out over the uneven concrete, Shaheen
Badoor Khan uncaps his flask. It contains ice: glacier cubes for
Sajida Rana's gin slings. Shaheen Badoor Khan caps the flask. The
airbus makes its run and as its wheels leave Bengal, Shaheen Badoor
Khan presses the flask to him as if the cold might heal the wound in
his belly. It can't. It never will. Shaheen Badoor Khan looks out the
window at the steadily greying land as the airbus heads west to
Bharat. He sees the white dome of a skull; the sweep of a neck; pale,
lovely hands elegant as minarets, cheekbones turning towards him like
architecture. Cranes dancing.
    So long he had thought himself safe. Pure. Shaheen Badoor Khan hugs
his glacier ice to him, eyes closed in silent prayer, heart luminous
with ecstasy.

4: NAJIA
    Lal Darfan, number one soap star, grants interviews in the howdah of
an elephant-shaped airship navigating the southern slopes of the
Nepali Himalayas. In a very good shirt and loose pants he reclines
against a bolster on a low divan. Behind him banners of high cloud
stripe the sky. The mountain peaks are a frontier of jagged white, a
wall across the edge of sight. The tasselled fringe of the howdah
ripples in the wind. Lal Darfan, Love God of Indiapendent
Production's biggest and brightest soap, Town and Country , is
attended by a peacock that stands by the head of his divan. He feeds
it ftagments of rice cracker. Lal Darfan is on a low-fat diet. It's
all the talk in the gossip chati magazines.
    The diet, Najia Askarzadah thinks, is a fine conceit for a virtual
soapi star. She takes a deep breath and opens the interview.
    "In the West we find it hard to believe that Town and Country can be so incredibly popular. Yet here there's maybe as much interest
in you as an actor as in your character, Ved Prekash."
    Lal Darfan smiles. His teeth are as improbably and gloriously white
as the tivi chat channels say.
    "More," he says. "But I think what you're asking is
why an aeai character needs an aeai actor. Illusions within
illusions, is that it?"
    Najia Askarzadah is twenty-two, freelance and fancy-free, four weeks
in Bharat and has just landed the interview she hopes will seal her
career.
    "Suspension of disbelief," she says. She can hear the hum
of the airship engines, one in each elephant foot.
    "It is simply this. The role is never enough. The public have to
have the role behind the role, whether that is me"—Lal
Darfan touches his hands self-deprecatingly to his going-to-bulge
midriff—"or a flesh and blood Hollywood actor, or a pop
idol. Let me ask you a question. What do you know about, say, some
Western pop star like Blochant Matthews? What you see on the
television, what you read in the soap magazines and the chati
communities. Now, what do you know about Lal Darfan? Exactly the
same. They are no more real to you than I am, and therefore no less
real, either."
    "But people can always bump into a real celebrity or catch a
glimpse at the beach or the airport, or in a shop."
    "Can they? How do you know anyone has had these glimpses?"
    "Because I've heard. . . Ah."
    "You see what I mean? Everything comes through one medium or
another. And, with respect, I am a real celebrity, in that my
celebrity is indeed very real. In fact these days, I think it's only
celebrity that makes anything real, don't you agree?"
    Half a million person-hours have gone into Lal Darfan's voice. It's a
voice calculated to seduce and it is laying orbits around Najia
Askarzadah. It says, "Might I ask you a personal question? It's
very simple; what is your earliest memory?"
    It's never far, that night of fire and rush and fear, like a
geological iridium layer in her life. Daddy scooping her out of her
bed, the paper all over the floor