Free River of Gods by Ian McDonald Page A

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