The commercial segued almost indistinguishably into the music station’s corporate ID. Marz fidgeted, bumping her heels against the floor. Jack noticed that her socks did not match. When he glanced at the TV again it showed a swirling background of green and purple and gold, violently redolent of the sky outside. Across the screen letters flowed, formed of varicolored smoke.
A woman’s voice began repeating the words, eerily affectless and breathy, as though it had been generated by a computer; like one of those voices you got on the phone during the rare periods it worked, warning you to expect extensive difficulties and delays in placing your call. Low, ominous music began to creep from the TV: gamelans and drums, a growing crescendo of guitar feedback. Within the garish whorls of color a tiny object appeared. A golden pyramid beset by rays of light and spinning like a pinwheel until it was large enough to fill the screen. Then the pyramid was gone. A huge glittering eye stared out from the television, blinked so that a tarantula fringe of lashes swept across its sky-blue iris, and wheeled back to become fixed like a gem within the face of a radiantly beautiful young man.
“Ah,” gasped Jack. “It’s that song…”
“
He was dressed like a temple dancer. Face ash white, lips and eyes outlined in scarlet, his blond hair all but hidden beneath a pagodalike headdress. His clothes were heavy with jewels and long fringes of brocade. Flowering vines swept across his body as he swayed and spun, crouched and leapt across what seemed a vertiginous height. Beneath his unshod feet clouds and sea churned like dust, and the ragged peaks of mountains. Jack watched raptly. There was something eerie, yet self-consciously hyperbolic, about the dancing figure which was at odds with the doomy music—
But the dancing boy—he reminded Jack of the Hindi films Leonard dragged him to when they were in Bombay in the late seventies and early eighties, bizarre epics where blue-skinned actors played gods who raped then embraced weeping ecstatic women, only to be interrupted by waves of sari-clad Busby Berkeley chorines on acid, all singing, all dancing, all for the greater glory of the avatars of Vishnu…
And that, too, was oddly familiar.
“…
A shiver of recognition edged up Jack’s spine. He frowned, remembering a coke-fueled evening in 1983. He and Leonard and one of Bollywood’s rising film stars, a golden-skinned man named Ashok Sonerwalla, sat on a terrace overlooking the Gulf of Khambhat, talking long into the night and drinking a beverage the color of Pepto-Bismol. Even now Jack recalled their conversation very clearly, because Leonard (much impressed by
Ashok was telling them about his current movie, something about the Kali Yuga—
“That is the cosmic period we are in now, the Kali Yuga,” he explained, and sipped his drink. “It lasts for one thousand years, and ends with a cataclysm that threatens to disrupt the divine order of the Three Worlds. There have been many, many
He tapped the glass coffee table. “Each
Ashok laughed, leaning across the table to gaze at Jack with wide hunted-stag eyes. “I got to play Prahlada the last time—he gets thrown into the sea with his hands and feet bound, but then Vishnu appears to him and Prahlada experiences