“You’re destroying yourself.”
“No, I’m making my move.”
It’s coming back to him, through the fog, it’s coming back to him.
Something Dinesh knew.
“By siding with some fucking farmers?”
“Yes. And you’re going to side with them too.”
“You’re insane.”
“After we get rid of them both, we’re going to change this world.”
“Get rid of them both?”
“My father. Yours.”
“Fuck you. Why would I do that? I’m not betraying my father for you.”
“Then do it for yourself.” Dinesh walked to his desk, picked up a manila envelope. “He never stood by you.”
“He always stood by me.”
“He never did. And I have the proof.”
He held the envelope out to Sunny.
“What’s this?”
“I know you don’t care about the world, and the suffering taking place in our names. But maybe you’ll care about this. Your father lied to you. Controlled you. Took the only thing you’ve truly created away.”
In an almighty flood it returns to him.
The envelope held in his lap as he and Eli drove away.
The envelope opened, the documents spilled from inside.
Patient’s name: Neda Kapur.
And the sonogram.
The image of his unborn child.
Alongside the photos of Neda and Chandra at the clinic in London where his child returned to atoms and stars.
He sits stunned in the dark.
When dawn finally comes a figure sits before him on a stool, swigging from a plastic bottle of country liquor.
“Manoj?” Sunny groans, through the pain and the sorrow.
“Oh no,” comes the reply. “Manoj is gone.”
It’s the Incubus. His rasping voice unmistakable.
“Gone?”
Sunny feels the floodwaters of panic rise in his chest.
“Gone where?”
“To get the first payment, of course.” The Incubus laughs. “Your people have come through for you.”
Sunny squeezes his eyelids shut. “They’re going to kill him,” he says.
“No, no, no,” the Incubus replies. “You’re the heir to the kingdom. You’re much too precious for them to risk that.” He gets off the stool, tosses the liquor bottle to the floor, slowly circles around behind Sunny. “Besides,” he goes on, “you’re the one who’s going to kill him.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Incubus pulls a long, greasy rag from his pocket as he edges out of Sunny’s vision, like a bad magician performing a bad trick.
“Just not yet.”
“What are you doing?”
Unable to see.
Unable to turn or break free.
Writhing in his ropes.
Until the Incubus looms above him, a nightmare in flesh.
“What are you doing?!”
Brings the rag down over Sunny’s gaping mouth.
Ties it tight.
“Telling you my story.”
ALL GLORY MUST GO TO GODS
1.
It’s the story of my life, Sunny Wadia. Here I am, Sunil Rastogi, crippled and scarred. But not so long ago I was a young man of nineteen on the back of my brother’s brand-new Pulsar, and my brother, twenty-five years on earth, riding up front. On that day it was just before dark, when the birds are loudest above the fields and the sun is a ball of fire in the sky. We were riding slow. The road had been paved only three months before, but it was crumbling already. Such is life. Sunny Wadia, listen. A man flagged us down at the Bulandshahr junction, stepped out and waved us down in a panic, and we saw another man lying motionless in the road beside him. “Don’t stop,” I said, “it’s a trick,” but before my brother could react the first man pulled a gun and the second leaped to his feet. My brother stopped the bike in a calm manner, and as we climbed off, he said, “Do what they say,” then he whispered to me, “We can always kill them later.” Some gust of wind must have carried his voice to them like a stray spark igniting my life, for the one with the gun laughed a moment later and said, “Oh really?” then he shot my brother in the chest. “Behenchod!” I cried as they jumped on our bike and escaped toward the sunset, while my brother collapsed into the dirt.
Some other men on bikes passed by as I held my hand to the wound, tried to stop the blood that was pumping out of him. One of these men turned and hurried off to fetch a police Gypsy they’d seen parked just down the road. As we waited, my brother slipped out of consciousness. “Why did you do that?” he said. “Do what?!” I replied, but I would never find out, for those were his last words.