River of Gods by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online

petals off the track. Kashi generates them by
the billion and the steel wheels can't cope. The phatphat turns down
a dark laneway of clothing shops; pale plastic dummies, armless and
legless but smiling nevertheless, swing from racks overhead.
    "Am I allowed to ask where you're taking me?" Satnam says.
    "You'll find out soon enough." Truth is, Najia Askarzadah
has never been, but ever since she heard the Australians crowing
about how bold they were in going to it and they weren't grossed out,
not at all, she's looked for an excuse to find this
back-of-backstreet club. She has no idea where she is, but she
reckons the driver is taking her in the right direction when dangling
shop dummies give way to hookers in open storefronts. Most have
adopted the Western standard uniform of lycra and overemphatic
footwear, a few cling to tradition, in the steel cages.
    "Here," says the phatphat driver. The little wasp-coloured
plastic bubble rocks on its suspension.
    Fight! Fight! exclaim the alternating neons above the tiny
door between the Hindu icon shop and the hookers drinking Limka at
the chai stall. A cashier sits in a tin cubby by the door. He looks
thirteen, fourteen, and already he's seen everything from under his
Nike beanie. Beyond him, stairs lead up into stark fluorescent light.
    "One thousand rupee," he says, hand out. "Or five
dollar."
    Najia pays local.
    "This isn't exactly what I imagined for a first date,"
Satnam says.
    "Date?" Najia says as she leads him up the stairs that
climb, turn, dip, turn again, and finally empty on the balcony over
the pit.
    The large room had once been a warehouse. Sick green paint,
industrial lamps and conduiting, louvred skylights all tell its
history. Now it's an arena. Ranged around a five-metre hexagon of
sand are ranks of wooden pews, tiered as steeply as a lecture hail.
Everything's new built from construction timber stolen from the
cash-starved Varanasi Area Rapid Transit. The stalls are faced with
packing case panels. When Najia lifts her hand from the railing it
comes away sticky with resin.
    The warehouse is heaving, from betting booths and fighters' stalls
down at the ringside to the back row of the balcony where men in
check workshirts and dhotis stand on their benches for a better look.
The audience is almost entirely male. The few women are dressed to
please.
    "I don't know about this," Satnam says but Najia has the
scent of close packed bodies, sweat, primal fluids. She pushes to the
front and peers down into the pit. Money changes owners over the
betting table in a blur of soft, worn notes. Fists wave fans of
rupees and dollars and euros; the sattamen keep track of every paisa.
All eyes are on the money, except for one man, diagonally opposite
her on the ground floor, who looks up as if he has felt the weight of
her regard. Young, flashy. Obvious Hood, thinks Najia. Their eyes
meet.
    The barker, a five-year-old boy in a cowboy suit, stalks the pit
hyping up the audience as two old men with rakes turn the bloody sand
into a Zen garden. He has a bindi mike on his throat; his weird
little voice, at once old and young, rattles from the sound system
through a wash of tabla-and-mix anokha. From his tone of innocence
and experience, Najia wonders if he might be a Brahmin. No: that's
the Brahmin in the front row booth, a seeming ten-year-old dressed
twentysomething flanked by tivi-wannabe girlis. The barker is just
another street boy. Najia finds she's breathing fast and shallow. She
no longer knows where Satnam is.
    The din, already staggering, ratchets up a level as the teams go out
on the sand to parade their fighters. They hold them high over their
heads, stalking around the ring, making sure everyone can see where
their money is going.
    The microsabres are appalling creatures. A small California gentech
company owned the original patent. Cut standard Felis domesticus with reconstructed fossil DNA from Smilodon fatalis . Result:
bonsai sabretooth, something the size of a large Maine