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realises she
has assumed that India's long history of trans- and non-genders has
always been hidden, veiled.
    "Yt, him, whatever. Yt's full of it today, some invite to a big
celebi party."
    "Yuli. The Russian model. I tried to get invited to that, to
interview him. Yt."
    "So you settled for Fat Lal instead."
    "No, I really am interested in the psychology of aeai actors."
Najia looks over at the nute. Yt glances up. Yts eyes meet hers for a
moment. There is no recognition, no communication. Yt looks back into
its work again. Yts hands sculpt digits.
    "What Fat Lal doesn't know is the characters and plot are basic
packages," Satnam continues, ushering Najia along between the
glowing workstations. "We franchise them out and different
national broadcasters drop their own aeai actors in on top of them.
There are different actors playing Ved Prekash in Mumbai and Kerala
and they're as mega down there as Fat Lal is up here."
    "Everything's a version," Najia says, trying to decipher
the beautiful dance of the nute's long hands. Out in the corridor,
Satnam tries the chat.
    "So, are you really from Kabul?"
    "I left when I was four."
    "It's not a thing I know very much about. I'm sure it must have
been."
    Najia stops dead in the corridor, turns to face Satnam. She's
half-a-head shorter, but he takes a step back. She grabs his hand,
scrawls a UCC across his knuckles.
    "There, my number. You call it, I may answer. I may suggest we
go out somewhere, but if we do, I choose where. Okay? Now, thanks for
the tour, and I think I can find my way back to the front door."
    He's where and when he said he would be as she cruises in to the kerb
in the phatphat. He's dressed in nothing he's too fond of, as Najia
requested, but he still wears his trishul. Site's been seeing a lot
of those, on the streets, around men's necks. He settles in the seat
beside her; the little autorickshaw rocks on its home-brew
suspension.
    "My shout, remember?" she says. The driver pulls out into
the swarm of traffic.
    "Mystery tour, okay, that's fine," Satnam says. "So,
did you get your article written?"
    "Written, done, off," Najia says. She banged it out this
afternoon on the terrace at the Imperial International, the
Cantonment backpackers hostel where she has a room. She'll move out
when the payment comes in from the magazine. The Australians are
getting to her. They moan about everything.
    The thing is, Najia Askarzadah has a boyfriend. He's called Bernard.
He's a fellow Imperialist, a gap-yearer whose twelve months turned
into twenty, forty, sixty. He's French, indolent, overly convinced of
his own genius and has atrocious manners. Najia suspects he only
stays at the hostel to pull fresh girls like her. But he practises
Tantric sex, and can keep his dick up any woman for an hour while
chanting. So far Tantra with Bernard has involved her squatting on
his lap for twenty, thirty, forty minutes tugging on a leather thong
looped around his cock to keep it hard hard hard until his eyes roll
up and he says Kundalini has risen, which means the drugs are finally
kicking in. It's not Najia's idea of Tantra. He's not Najia's idea of
a boyfriend. Neither is Satnam, and for many of the same reasons, but
it's an idea, a game, a why not ? Najia Askarzadah has steered
as many of her twenty-two years as she's been allowed responsibility
for by why nots ? They steered her to Bharat, against the
advice of her tutors, friends, and parents.
    New Varanasi runs into old Kashi in a series of discontinuities and
juxtapositions. Streets begin in one millennium and end in another.
Vertiginous corporate spires lean over shambles of alleys and wooden
houses unchanged in four centuries. Metro viaducts and elevated
expressways squeeze past the sandstone linga of decaying
temples. The cloy of rotting petals permeates even the permanent jizz
of alcohol-engine fumes, dissolving into an urban perfume that cities
dab behind their cloacal bits. Bharat Rail employs sweepers with
besoms to keep flower