Sajida Rana stands upright.
“Subtle as ever, Secretary Khan.”
“I am a mere civil servant.” Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head obediently but catches Ashok Rana’s eye. He is furious. Chowdhury speaks up.
“With respect, Secretary Khan, I think you underestimate the will of the Bharati people. There is more to Bharat than Varanasi and problems with its Metro stations. I know that in Patna we are simple, patriotic people. There, everyone believes a war will unite popular opinion and marginalise N. K. Jivanjee. It is a dangerous tactic, playing subtle games at times of national danger. The same Ganga flows through us as flows through you, you are not the only thirsty ones here. As you say, Prime Minister, the people need a war. I do not want to go to war, but I believe we must, and strike fast and strike first. Then we negotiate from a position of strength and when there is water in the pumps, that is when Jivanjee and his karsevaks will be seen as the rabble they are. Prime Minister, when have you ever misjudged the mood of the people of Bharat?”
Nods, grunts. The climate is shifting again. Sajida Rana stands at the head of her table of ministers, looking over her ancestors and influencers as Shaheen Badoor Khan has seen at so many cabinet meetings before, calling on them to sanctify the decision she is about to make for Bharat.
“I hear you, Mr. Chowdhury, but there is merit in Mr. Khan’s proposal. I am minded to try it. I will let N. K. Jivanjee do our work for us, but keep the army on three-hour standby. Gentlemen, reports to my office mail by sixteen hundred today, I will circulate directives by seventeen hundred. Thank you, this meeting is closed.”
Cabinet and advisors rise as Sajida Rana turns and strides out in a furl colours, her secretarial staff falling in behind her. She is a tall, thin, striking woman, no trace of grey in her hair despite a first grandchild imminent. Shaheen Badoor Khan catches a ghost of Chanel as she sweeps past. He glances once at the sex divinities crawling all over the walls and roof, suppresses a shudder.
In the corridor, a touch at his cuff: the Defence Minister. “Mr. Khan.”
“Yes, how can I help you, Minister?”
Chowdhury draws Shaheen Badoor Khan into a window alcove. Minister Chowdhury leans towards him, says quietly and without inflection, “A successful meeting, Mr. Khan, but might I remind you of your own words? You are a mere civil servant.”
He tucks his briefcase under his arm and hurries on down the corridor.
Hungover on blood, Najia Askarzadah wakes late in her backpackers’ berth at the Imperial International. She staggers into the communal kitchen in search of chai, steers past Australians complaining about how flat the landscape is and that they can’t get decent cheese, makes a glass and gets back to her room, mobbed by horrors. She remembers how the microsabres leaped for each other and she had risen with the crowd with the blood roar in her throat. It’s a viler and dirtier feeling than she ever had from any drugs or sex but she’s addicted.
Najia has thought much about her attraction to danger. Her parents had brought her up a Swede, permissively educated, sexually liberal, Westward-looking. They brought no photographs into their exile, no souvenirs, no words or language or sense of geography. The only Afghan thing about Najia Askarzadah is her name. Her parents’ opus was so complete that it was not until her first term at university, when her tutor had suggested she research an essay on post-Civil War Afghan politics that Najia understood that she had an entire, buried identity. That identity opened up beneath Najia Askarzadah the little liberal arts Scandinavian poly-sexual and swallowed her for three months in which the essay became the foundation of the work that would become her final thesis. There is a life she could have led and her career so far has been foreplay with it. Bharat on the edge of water war is the preparation for her return to Kabul.
She sits on the cool cool veranda of the Imperial and checks her mail The magazine likes the story. Likes the story a lot. Wants to pay her eight hundred dollars for the story. She thumbs agreement to the contract through to the United States. One step on the path to high Kabul, but only one step. She has a next story to plan. It will be a politics story. Her next interview will be Sajida Rana. Everyone’s after Sajida Rana. What’s the angle? It’s woman to woman. Prime Minister Rana, you are a politician, a leader, a dynastic figure in a country divided over a traffic roundabout, where men are so desperate to marry they pay the the dowry, where monster children who age half as fast as baseline humanity assume the privileges and tastes of adults before they are biologically ten, that is dying of thirst and about to start a war because of it. But before any of that, you are a woman in a society where women of your class and education have vanished behind a new purdah. What was it that enabled you, virtually alone, to escape that silk cage of cherishing?
Not a bad line that. Najia flips her palmer open. As she is about to thumb it in her palmer chirps. It’ll be Bernard. Not very Tantra, going to a fighting club. Not very Tantra, going with another man. Not that he’s possessive, so he doesn’t need to forgive her, but what she needs to ask herself is, is this going to advance me down the path to samadhi?
“Bernard,” says Najia Askarzadah, “fuck off and stay fucked off. I thought you didn’t do jealousy or is that just another thing you tell women like the Tantric thing with your dick?”
“Ms. Askarzadah?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were something else.” She’s listening to a lot of air noise. “Hello? Hello?”
Then: “Ms. Askarzadah. Be at the Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road, within the next half hour.” An educated voice, lightly accented.
“Hello? Who are you, look, I’m sorry about.”
“The Deodar Electrical warehouse, Industrial Road.”
And he’s gone. Najia Askarzadah looks at the palmer as if it is a scorpion in her hand. No call back, no explanation, no identification. She taps in the address the voice gave her, the palmer displays a route map. She’s out the gate on her moped within the minute. Deodar Electrical is part of the old Town and Country studio lot, broken up into small businesses when the series went virtual and moved into Indiapendent’s Ranapur headquarters. The map leads her to the huge double doors of the main studio, where a teen in a long kurta and waistcoat sits at a table listening to cricket on the radio. Najia notices he wears a Shivaji trident medallion, like the one she had seen around Satnam’s neck.
“Someone called me, told me to come here. I’m Najia Askarzadah.” The youth looks her up and down. He has an attempted moustache. “Ah. Yes, we were told to be expecting you.”
“Told? By who?”
“Please come with me.”
He opens a small access door in the gates. They duck through. “Oh, wow,” says Najia Askarzadah.
The rath yatra stands fifteen metres high under the studio floods, a red and gold pyramid of tiers and parapets, riotous with gods and adityas. It is a mobile temple. At its apex, almost touching the studio girders is a plexiglass cupola containing an effigy of Ganesha, throned, the people’s god, claimed by the Shivaji. The base, a wide balcony for party workers and PR, rests on the backs of twin flatbeds.