The City of Devi: A Novel (2 page)

By the time I finished my bachelor’s in statistics, I had experienced the first inklings of how lonely a future might be lying in wait. “Numbers are her friends,” everyone kept repeating, as if I shrank from the prospect of two-legged company. I applied for the management master’s on a lark—with only twenty students selected nationwide, the scholarship offer caught me by surprise when it came. Could this be a solution? A way to break free of the shell I’d been pigeonholed in, to enter a field that depended on human interaction as its very basis? With the added remunerative promise of participating in the great Indian economic boom, surely this was an opportunity too good to miss?

It didn’t work out. The classes were interesting enough, with various simulations and case studies and theoretical management games I excelled in. But putting these lessons into practice at my textile factory internship afterwards proved disastrous. Both the workers and their supervisors instantly pegged me as a pushover—a walking, breathing catalogue of weaknesses meant to be exploited, ruthlessly and at will. The labor union leaders kept threatening to strike, the personnel staff walked out regularly over claimed slights, and an income tax official closed the place down without notice (it turned out he hadn’t been bribed). I fled at the end of my fourth week, never to use my degree again.

Statistics, when I returned for a master’s, was as orderly as before, as tranquil and welcoming. But I kept yearning for something more—I could not be sustained just by my love of the discipline. I envied the most driven of my classmates, the ones whose eyes lit up with compulsive interest at the very mention of Bayesian theory, who launched into animated lunchtime discussions of unbiased estimators and Markov chains. Why wasn’t I as possessed as they were? Why didn’t I share their obsessive desire to blaze a fiery career path across the subject’s firmament? Why did I keep mooning over such mundane distractions as falling in love or getting married?

Uma diagnosed my quandary as part of a larger problem. I was too content to let things flow, not resolute enough in any goal. “This is the twenty-first century—you have to know what you want, then set upon it with everything you’ve got.” I suppose she meant to offer herself as example—the way she aggressively pursued Anoop at college, then flaunted him as her boyfriend for four long years before finally marrying him (much to the relief of our parents). We both knew, however, that this model simply didn’t fit me. Despite the same underlying proportions to our facial features and body geometry (as far as I could determine), I felt neither as attractive as Uma nor as self-confident. Wasn’t this the very reason why I’d tacitly entrusted to my parents the task of fixing me up, of curing the solitude that had started shadowing me?

My sister phoned me the night before the picnic. “You’ll like Karun, I think. Just a hunch married people have.”

He appeared at our house at ten a.m
.
He was wearing black sandals, khaki pants, and a shirt of blue cotton. I did not look at him as he said hello, despite Uma’s call for assertiveness. Instead, I stared at the ground as I always did on such occasions, studying the guavas and parrots painted in green on the vestibule tiles around his feet.

I did let my gaze stray. Past the leather loop encircling his big toe, where I noticed the trimness of the nail and wondered if he had (like me) pared it the night before. Up the tiny hairs on the rise of his foot, ending just before the cloth of his trousers began. One cuff somehow caught high upon itself, so that the ankle (which I noticed was hairless) lay exposed. I did not let my eyes rise further, though Uma had teased me about his tireless legs and muscular thighs, about the strength that surely lay hidden in between.

It was his lips, the way they parted, that I wanted to examine. I looked once or twice towards his mouth but his face was averted each time. I saw the navy-colored emblem of a man riding a horse on his breast pocket. He was not well-built, not like the film heroes who bared their bodies in posters around town. But his chest rose and fell appealingly as he breathed, and I thought he looked healthy. The shirt, I decided, was American (though Uma claimed later it was a knockoff).

As we prepared to leave, my mother emerged from the bathroom, wearing her pink salwaar kameez with the white tennis shoes she reserved for special occasions. “I haven’t been to the beach in so long. I thought I’d get some fresh air too, if you all don’t mind.” Clearly, she had decided that Anoop and Uma’s chaperoning would not be adequate.

At Juhu, we walked past the stalls selling cold drinks and coconuts and dosas and bhel puri, past the games where one could win talcum or a bar of soap by tossing a ring, past the men hawking toys and jewelry from sheets spread out on the sand. For the last several years, this line of commerce seemed to encroach further along the beach each time we came. Most of the palm trees I remembered bordering the beach were gone, replaced by a string of hotels and buildings. A Ferris wheel had sprouted in the distance, and closer by, a giant inflated Mickey Mouse slide loomed above the sand. At the just-opened Indica Hotel, a large sandstone figure, looking remarkably like a sari-clad Statue of Liberty, toasted the Arabian Sea with its torch from atop a turret.

We walked quite far, all the way to the Sun ’n Sand, which my mother said was once the only five-star Juhu hotel. The umbrella man still stood in his usual spot, and Uma poked around through his collection to find something less frayed. He tried to rent us two umbrellas, pointing out that we were five, but my mother paid him his twenty rupees and told him we’d all fit under one just fine.

It was a very hot day, and muggy as well, the kind when the air hovers around skin, waiting to condense into droplets of sweat. Karun sat in the umbrella’s shade with my mother, and Uma and Anoop and I on the edges, craning our heads to get out of the sun. My mother took off her shoes but not the peacock blue socks underneath (socks on a woman, she had always taught us, were a sign of superior breeding). She passed around glasses of orange squash from a thermos and took several sips herself. She let Karun talk a bit about the three years he’d spent in Bombay for college, the Ph.D. he’d completed in Delhi, the job at Anoop’s institute for which he’d returned. Then her questioning began.

We had been through this several times before, but never on a beach. Sometimes I wondered if my mother wallowed in this part of the job so enthusiastically because with Uma gone, she knew I was her last chance. I shifted uncomfortably as she poked and pried into Karun’s past—it was a picnic, not an interrogation, I wanted to remind her. But she was experienced, delicate, always indirect in her questioning. She found out quite quickly that he was an only child, that he was thirty years old, that both his parents were dead.

“Were the legal problems very difficult to resolve?” she asked, proceeding with a careful set of questions to determine what he had inherited (the flat in Karnal, near Delhi, where he grew up, but not much by way of family wealth).

I tuned my mother out and focused instead on Karun’s lips. I imagined how the corners of his mouth might draw apart when he pronounced my name. “Sarita.” The crease of his lips darkening first at one spot, then another, the different syllables causing it to expand and relax. “Sa-ri-ta.” How would it sound on another beach somewhere, the sand spreading around just the two of us? Would it be pleasant to hear over and over again from his lips—the tenth time, the hundredth, for the span of an entire life?

The questioning stopped at noon. The sun saved us, by shrinking the shadow until it cowered underneath the umbrella next to us. Heat swirled into the area previously shaded and my mother began sweating so profusely that she lost her single-minded train of thought. “Karun must be hungry. Let’s have lunch.”

“Perhaps a swim first, to work up an appetite?” Anoop asked. He laughed when Karun wondered about the Mumbai seashore being polluted. “It won’t kill you. Not like a dip in the Yamuna, my Delhi friend.”

“You might as well go in while the girls and I lay the food out,” my mother said. Not quite convinced, Karun nodded his head.

We all watched as Anoop got up and unbuttoned his shirt, preened a little, then unzipped his pants. His chest was dark and shiny with sweaty whorls, thick hair covered his legs. Uma had complained once that he perspired a lot, had made me blush with talk of his sweat rubbing off on her thighs in bed.

Karun was slow to follow. He felt shy, I could tell, taking his clothes off in front of us. We were embarrassed as well and looked away, my mother and Uma and I. From the corner of my eye I watched him begin to pull his shirt off, waiting for the instant it covered his face. This was my cue to inspect his body, appraise any muscle he might have on his ribs, follow the line of chest hair snaking down to his thin waist. He worked the shirt free from his head, and I quickly averted my gaze, but not before catching Uma do the same.

He hesitated so long over his pants that I thought he might wear them into the water. Finally, satisfied that none of our gazes were on him, he began to undo his belt, fumble with the buttons at his waist.

I’m not sure why I did what I did. “Are those eyes in your skull or motor headlights?” my mother reprimanded me later. Perhaps it was all the times I had been through this, the number of boys to whom I had been displayed. Always told to lower my head, to never let them see the whites of my eyes. Maybe it was the novels I read—the racier Mills & Boon romances of late, Danielle Steel instructing me on international sex and sin. Uma claimed it was her dogged exhortations finally having effect, her years of summons to my killer instinct. I felt it awaken deep inside me that day—the urge to rebel, determine destiny myself.

So I looked. I stared. I caught Karun with his pants midway down his groin and studied his embarrassment with interest. He lowered his eyes at once and tried to pull his pelvis free. The red of his swimsuit shorts spilled out violently from the sheath of his trousers. He colored, he panicked, he got a foot stuck, but I didn’t turn away. I stared until my mother thrust the plates angrily at me, until his pants were fully shed.

Maybe that’s why he stayed in the water so long, to wash my stare off his body. We waited on the shore, shooing away a stray dog that kept returning, holding down the napkin-covered sandwiches so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. At last he emerged, the water dripping from his torso, his shorts a darker red and wrinkled against his skin. Anoop dried off, then slung the towel over Karun’s shoulders for him to dry himself as well. Uma offered Karun a sandwich and a paratha on a plate, which he accepted with a thanks. He talked with Anoop as he ate, he looked at Uma and my mother, but he would not catch my eye.

IT IS GETTING SO DIFFICULT
to breathe that I wonder if we are all going to be asphyxiated. Are these shelters safe anyway? Wouldn’t the building collapse on us if bombed? Have we congregated in this basement simply for efficiency, because it would take only a single hit to bury us all?

Of course, it hardly matters where we hide if the Pakistanis have decided to jump the gun. If their promised schedule is a ruse as people claim, and this is the day they drop the Big One.

“They can’t do anything—it’s all a bluff,” one of the khaki-clad men scoffs. “Forget the atom bombs, even the missiles to deliver them are probably fake. All tactics to scare us, all hoaxes.” They nod their heads in agreement and I notice they wear matching saffron-colored threads around their necks. The effect is unintentionally dandy, as if they’ve taken pains to coordinate bow ties.

“Let’s not forget they’re Muslim—they don’t have our shastras, our Vedic knowledge. To build an atom bomb, you need centuries of scientific skills.”

“Besides, we have Devi ma to protect us. Let’s see them harm even a single blade of grass on our sacred land.”

Is he mad? Has he glanced outside on this singed sacred land of his, checked its current horticultural state? Or has his almighty Devi just been napping through the attacks? As if the daily terrorist explosions weren’t enough (becoming just one more urban tribulation, like water shortages or corruption), for the past month and a half, we’ve had to contend with Pakistani air raids as well. The hollowness of his bluster must catch up, because he sobers. “It’s October fifteenth today—the nineteenth is just four days away.”

The rumors began soon after the war did, at the end of August. At first, they seemed like the usual saber rattling—hadn’t Pakistan been sporadically ballyhooing its nuclear capabilities ever since the
2002
standoff? “It happens whenever they feel the need to bolster their own self-confidence—like now,” my father said. For months, Pakistan had blustered about the unprecedented atrocities against Muslims in India, threatening military action but shying away from an actual strike. “Too bad they can’t openly trumpet their achievements—all the terrorists they’ve sent in instead.” Finally, with its prestige plummeting to humiliating depths, Pakistan was forced to ask China for help (a move the Pakistani president vigorously denied). In a flash invasion, Chinese troops poured in through the northeast frontier—just like during Nehru’s tenure in
1962
, my father pointed out. Their ostensible goal this time was to claim sovereignty over a border region so obscure that even our own prime minister had trouble pronouncing its name. The Indian government lost no time miring our military in this diversionary trap, then became too concerned with loss of image to pull out when Pakistan attacked from the northwest.

Ten days into the invasion, on September
4
, the UN forced a bitterly resentful and chafing China to withdraw. That very night, Uma sent me the link for the communiqués that had surfaced on the web. The first was a report from the Pakistani chief of staff to their defense minister describing the planned piggyback of their attack in conjunction with the Chinese invasion. Even I could recognize its authenticity, what with its details of the number and type of weapons used, the exact positions of deployed troops, and operational and launch times down to the second. But it was the second communiqué that had left Uma so excited. It contained an analysis of the situation after the Chinese left: since India had stronger conventional forces, nuclear retaliation would be the only option if the war continued. The attached blueprint for an attack on eight Indian cities included a range of prospective launch dates.