The Death of Vishnu (6 page)

Vishnu turns around and goes back through the door. He climbs down slowly, one step at a time. A cloud covers the moon, funneling the night down the spiral of stairs. His feet feel the familiar stone of his landing. He sinks to the floor. He sits there surrounded by the darkness, allowing it to fill his universe and push all thought from it.

W
HILE MRS. PATHAK
fought Mrs. Asrani, and Mr. Pathak avoided Mr. Asrani’s doom-laden look, the ambulancewalla stood and watched, and silently stiffened with anger.

“How dare you interrupt my kitty party!” Mrs. Pathak shouted, waving the end of her sari accusingly at Mrs. Asrani. “It was
your
husband who called the ambulance!” The earrings flashed and swung through the air with the angry bob of her head.

“Liar!” Mrs. Asrani shouted, launching the word with the full heft and conviction of her bosom. “It was your husband! And don’t think I don’t know what you do with my ghee!”

“
You
liar!
You
thief! All that water you steal—you can take all the baths you want, but you’ll never get rid of the dirt on your face!”

“Thief, thief! I’ll teach you, you thief!” Mrs. Asrani turned to the kitty party ladies, who had filled up plates and come out to watch the fight. “Hai, all you women, with the dal sticking to your fingers and to your face. It’s fried in stolen ghee, all of it—now how do you like the taste?”

“No!” Mrs. Jaiswal gasped, quick to draw upon her thespian grounding. She allowed her shocked fingers to release the toxic plate, and watched wide-eyed as it shattered with a satisfying crash, sending lentils bouncing everywhere. Mrs. Mirchandani tried doing the same, but inexpertly toppled her plate inwards instead, depositing cubes of cheese in her sari, some of which she only found (and ate) at home, later.

Mrs. Pathak lunged at Mrs. Asrani, but was stopped by the ambulancewalla, who positioned himself between the two women. “No more!” he screamed. “How many hours the driver is waiting on the road for you. You don’t have the only sick person in Bombay, you know. Two hundred and thirty-five rupees, right now! Or I’m calling the police. On all of you.” He slapped his palms on his knees for emphasis.

“On
all
of us?” Mrs. Jaiswal exclaimed, from behind him. “What rot! We don’t even live here! I’ve had enough of this tamasha—come, ladies, let’s go.”

But the ambulancewalla spread his hands out and blocked the head of the stairs. “First I want my money. Nobody can go until I get my money.”

Instinctively, Mrs. Jaiswal advanced to challenge him, but Mrs. Mirchandani held her back. “He’s holding us hostage, Sheila!” she gasped. She turned around, her face flushed, and explained the situation sadly to the others: “Mrs. Pathak hasn’t paid him, so he’s holding us all hostage.”

“Pay him at once, Usha!” Mrs. Jaiswal commanded.

“
I
pay him?
You
pay him, you cheat! Stealing everyone’s money, week after week, stuffing your black purse—you think no one can see? Let’s have a look—all of us, what’s in that purse of yours—what special good-luck charm, for you only, Lakshmi has bestowed—even the ambulancewalla wants to see—” Mrs. Pathak grabbed a strap and tried to snatch the purse out from under Mrs. Jaiswal’s arm, but the strap broke and came loose in her hand. Mrs. Pathak stared at it, bewildered. All the fight seemed to go out of her.

“How dare you!” Mrs. Jaiswal hissed, as she pulled the strap back out of Mrs. Pathak’s limp hand. “How
dare
you!” she repeated, and Mrs. Pathak flinched, as if expecting Mrs. Jaiswal to strike her with it. But all Mrs. Jaiswal did was to open her purse and fold the strap into one of the compartments.

“For your information, I have nothing to hide in my purse,” Mrs. Jaiswal said, and held open the compartment for everyone to see. Mrs. Mirchandani extended a hand to feel inside, but was stopped by a withering look from Mrs. Jaiswal. Mrs. Ganesh was curious about the other compartments, but decided not to say anything.

“
Now
can we go?” Mrs. Jaiswal said, and the women nodded in unison. The ambulancewalla started to say again that he wouldn’t let them pass, but sheepishly lowered his arms as Mrs. Jaiswal approached with her entourage.

“Why won’t anyone pay me?” he moaned, as they filed past him down the steps.

Mrs. Pathak spotted a piece of cheese that had been flattened under Mrs. Jaiswal’s sandal, and picked it up. She looked at it in her palm, as she would an injured bird that needed nursing back to health. “Pay him,” she said tonelessly to Mr. Pathak, pressing the cheese with her fingers to coax it into a cube.

“Listen to your wife only, and pay me,” the ambulancewalla chimed in.

Mr. Pathak looked sternly through his glasses at Mr. Asrani, who started shifting uncomfortably.

“Actually,” Mr. Asrani mumbled, his face reddening as he stared at his wife’s feet. “Actually, Mr. Pathak asked me to help him call the ambulance.” He looked up to gauge her reaction, then quickly lowered his eyes. “How could I refuse only, he asked me when I was on my way to the temple. So I had to give my name, too.” His voice choked, as if he had just discovered a remnant of biscuit lodged in his throat.

Wordlessly, Mrs. Asrani went back into her flat. She reemerged moments later, and put some bills and a fifty-paisa coin in the ambulancewalla’s hand. “Here’s our share of the money,” she said, not looking at the Pathaks or her husband.

Mr. Pathak paid the ambulancewalla the other half. “Now go downstairs and take him away,” he directed authoritatively.

“I will,” the man said, “but you have to sign this first.” He produced a printed form from his pocket, which Mr. Pathak looked at suspiciously.

“Well, either you or the lady there—someone has to sign it.
Someone
has to agree to pay the hospital charges when the patient gets admitted.”

T
HE RED HAS
returned, it surrounds him again. Behind it, he can hear voices, rising and falling, the color bulging as they try to push through. The red stretches like a balloon, then ruptures, and the voices flow in. Vishnu hears Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak—they are both very angry.

Floating above the others, he recognizes the voice of his mother. He tunes everything else out and focuses only on it.

“We all start as insects,” she is saying, “every one of us. That’s why there are so many more insects than people.” He recognizes these words—it is the tale of the yogi, the yogi-spirit named Jeev, the yogi-spirit born nine hundred and ninety thousand times. A tale stretching all the way from Jeev’s past through all his incarnations in the future.

“Jeev started from an insect so tiny, it was smaller than a banana seed. Of course, as an insect, he was not a yogi. But even then, some part of him knew there was more to be aspired to than just being an insect.”

Mrs. Pathak starts screaming at Mrs. Asrani. The story of the yogi’s ascent is in danger of getting lost. He wants to hear his favorite incarnations—the one where Jeev is born as a pig and saves a child, the one where he is a mistreated ox who sets a landlord on fire. “It took the yogi many lives to reach the level of a human,” his mother says, “and he fell back several times to where he started. But finally, he got to the next level—he became human like you and me.”

This is the part Vishnu likes best. The lives of wealth and indulgence that await Jeev. The feast where each grain of rice is dipped in silver, where the apricots have emeralds as pits. The marriage to the princess of Sonapur, with the procession of the thousand trumpeting elephants.

“Bit by bit, life by life, Jeev sated his soul with worldly pleasure. And only then, when he had slaked its thirst, and quelled its hunger; only then did his soul allow him to look upwards again. To a place beyond his own needs and his own self, where he could be of service to others.” Vishnu recites the words along with his mother. He is proud he knows the story so well.

There is a crash, and the sound of more screaming. Noise has been pouring in steadily, cascading down the steps and flooding the landing. Waves of sound lap at his neck. The story starts dissolving, Jeev’s years of service begin to break off, renunciation and enlightenment swirl away. He tries to reel in the thread of his mother’s voice, but it snaps and comes back weightless through the surge of sound.

All the noise he has borne in his life, every shout, every insult, every curse, is roaring down on him. The pounding of feet on the steps, the crackling of songs from the radio, the squabbling of horns in the street—they are all there, and getting louder every second. Even the chimes of the ghungroos have turned into crashes—Vishnu wonders how such tiny bells can make so much noise.

He realizes he has to escape this noise. This noise that has tormented him for so long. Born at the moment of his own birth, it has swelled insidiously over the years. This noise that has been the price of every breath he has taken, of every action, every event in his life. This noise that is submerging him, taking over his brain and obliterating his senses. If there is anything to be left of him, he must escape this noise.

With all his will, Vishnu pushes on the ground. He feels his torso lifting up, feels the floor straighten under his feet. Part of him remains behind, sprawled under the sheet. Ahead rise the stone steps, spiraling into light.

Noise still surges down. Perhaps, Vishnu thinks, the best way to escape is to descend. He turns around, but cannot see the stairs that have always connected him to the street. The landing is suddenly immense, stretching in all directions into milky darkness.

A man comes down the stairs. There is a white band around his arm, with a red cross on it. The man doesn’t notice Vishnu, but goes over to the figure stretched under the sheet. Vishnu sees him bend and feel a wrist, then straighten out and shake his head. He tries to follow the man, but loses him somewhere on the landing.

Vishnu stands before the steps, gauging the monument he must scale. He lifts a foot tentatively, then places it on the first step. The stone feels cold and smooth against his sole. He has not felt anything for some time now—the sensation is surprising, welcome. He presses down the toes, the arch, the heel, so that each part of his foot can feel the surface.

He wonders what to do next. He pushes down with the other foot, but nothing happens. He tries to recall the mechanics of climbing—is it his ankle he should bend? Then he remembers—he has to lean his weight forward and straighten out his knee.

Vishnu thrusts his body forward and up. The muscles in his leg flex. His foot relinquishes contact with the landing, it lifts into the air. The spell of gravity is broken, a sensation of buoyancy infuses him. He stands on the first step, and feels he can float up the rest.

M
RS
. J
ALAL STOOD
on her second-floor balcony, watching the ambulance depart. Must be for Vishnu, she thought, not allowing herself to breathe—perhaps the Pathaks or Asranis downstairs were having him admitted to a hospital. When she was six, Nafeesa had terrified her with stories about the germs released into the air by ambulances, about people inhaling them and dying horrible, twisting deaths. Her sister’s warnings still tightened around her lungs every time she heard the telltale siren. She waited until the van had reached the far intersection before cautiously sniffing a small sample of the air.

It was Short Ganga who had told her this morning about Vishnu lying unconscious on the landing. Mrs. Jalal had been skeptical at the report—could he again be feigning some illness, as he had done so many times in the past? “The last time that happened, Mr. Jalal revived him with a ten-rupee note,” she told Short Ganga.

“Not everything can be cured that way, memsahib. Maybe Mr. Jalal can save his ten rupees this time,” Short Ganga said without looking up, and without interrupting her ferocious scrubbing of the iron pot with rope.

Mrs. Jalal felt her cheeks burn red. She wanted to defend herself, to protest the unfairness of the comment. How many times had Vishnu come to their doorstep with some real or fabricated ailment, and hadn’t they always sent him away with something? Even though he hardly did any errands for them, compared to all the work he did for the Pathaks and the Asranis. And the time he had stolen their car—what about that? They had not even reported him to the police, to get him the thrashing he deserved.

“When Mr. Jalal comes home, I’ll send him down to see what can be done.”

Short Ganga didn’t reply. She rinsed the pot out, banging it around in the basin with unnecessary violence, her pigtail snaking angrily behind her. “Is there anything else you want me to do now?” she asked when she’d finished, wiping her brow with her forearm.

“No, nothing,” Mrs. Jalal said. She felt guilty, without being certain why. “Wait—these bananas—Mr. Jalal isn’t going to eat them. They’re not going to last another day—here—for the children.” She broke off two bananas from the bunch and thrust them into Short Ganga’s hand.

A look of such contempt sprang into Short Ganga’s eyes that Mrs. Jalal was appalled. For a moment, she wondered if Short Ganga was going to hand the fruit back to her. Then Short Ganga wrapped the edge of her sari around the bananas and left the room.

Mrs. Jalal took a series of tentative breaths, still alert to the possibility of pestilence in the air. What disease was going around these days that everyone was acting so bizarrely? Short Ganga storming off like that. Salim playing hide and seek with that Hindu girl from downstairs. Ahmed, her husband, whose behavior she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. She took a professional-sized gulp of the air, and satisfied that the answer didn’t lie in it, went back to the kitchen.

The remaining bananas sat on the table. She knew she never should have bought them. Salim was never around, Ahmed ate less and less every day, and she herself had always loathed their slimy feel. If they’d been less expensive, she’d have given the whole bunch to Short Ganga. But now there were three left, and she was the only one around to dispose of them. She peeled the darkest one, broke off the top section, and put it in her mouth. The ripeness made her gag, but stoically, she chewed on the mushy flesh.

Ahmed. She’d resolved to stop obsessing about him, but the banana fumes had for some reason sent her mind down that track again. She couldn’t believe it had started all the way back with the fasts at Ramzan. How happy she’d been then, when instead of one or two half-kept rozas, Ahmed had decided to stick with them for the entire fasting period. She had always been distressed by his failure to assume the proper role in their family’s religious activity. Month after month, year after year, it had been she who had written out the checks for the due to the poor, who had made all the arrangements for festivals, and taken Salim to the masjid on Fridays. Upon prodding, Ahmed would sometimes join her when it was time for namaz, but usually he simply left the room, still reading his book, whenever she unrolled the prayer mat. Her father had warned her, had almost turned the proposal down. “He seems to have read a lot of books, this Ahmed Jalal,” he’d remarked. “Perhaps one of these days he’ll even accidentally open the Koran.”

She’d realized, quite quickly after their wedding, that her father had been wrong about Ahmed. Her husband
had
read the Koran, in fact, he had read it frighteningly well, and could recite several passages from memory. The problem was his interest in religion only seemed to extend to reading about it, not practicing it. “Thought control,” he would call it, “something to keep busy the teeming masses.” Then, without looking up from his book, he would add, “Not to exclude you, my love,” and she would feel herself turn red at the blatancy with which he mocked her.

Some nights he would spout passages from the Bible or a Chinese religious book whose name she could never remember. He would compare these quotes to verses from the Koran, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each text, unmindful of the fact that she was covering her ears to deflect any possible blasphemy. She especially dreaded the times he brought up the Din Ilahi, a sixteenth-century amalgam of Hinduism and Islam that the Mughal emperor Akbar had concocted to unify his subjects. “Religion revealed by man, not prophet,” their school mullah had contemptuously asserted, “is religion fit for no one.”

Ahmed, though, was all for it, and regarded Akbar as a personal hero. “He really put the mullahs in their place,” he would say, as he looked for opportunities to taunt people. “Perhaps it’s time to give the experiment another shot—force everyone to convert to it, Hindus and Muslims alike. Just think of it—instant peace, instant harmony—the mullahs might have to share their masjids, but so what?”

Statements like these made her wonder how many more she could afford to hear before being condemned to accompanying Ahmed into the fires of hell. An image from the Koran kept coming to her—that of Abu Lahab being consumed by flames, his wife bringing the firewood, a rope tied around her neck.

For the first few months of their marriage, she had meekly listened to everything Ahmed said, without comment. But she soon learned that her silence elicited increasingly outrageous pronouncements, which let up only when he had succeeded in provoking her into an argument. She had embarked then into the next phase, the one where she believed that she would be able to change him, that the intrinsic virtue of her beliefs would shine through and banish the shadows from Ahmed’s mind. But she had found herself unequipped to match his prowess at debate—the keenness of his words, the onslaught of his ideas, the way he spun strands of her own arguments into webs around her and then watched in amusement as she flailed and struggled and tried to cut herself loose. She had felt the ground of her own faith begin to soften, and had realized the danger of allowing herself to be further engaged. That is when she had summoned up the courage to deliver an ultimatum—Ahmed was forbidden to talk about religion in her presence, or she would leave, taking Salim with her.

Of course, Ahmed wasted no time calling her bluff, carrying on as usual, ignoring her threat. Until one night, in the middle of a lecture on the equality of all religions, she grabbed Salim and rushed down the stairs to the taxi stand. Although she returned soon enough (she had forgotten to take money for the taxi), it got Ahmed’s attention. At first, he was furious, railing at her for being unintellectual, calling her backward and brainwashed and bigoted. Then he tried appealing to her open-mindedness, her sense of fair play, arguing that a man should be able to discuss anything with his wife, that they were only words, not actions, so where was the harm? But she stood her ground, leaving the room whenever he brought up the subject, and for good measure, going to Salim’s crib and pressing him to her bosom to reiterate her threat. Ahmed gave up soon after, and the nightly discourses came to an end.

It was several weeks before Ahmed’s imposed stoniness thawed. But a trace of formality crept into all his dealings with her, a perceptible guardedness, that over the years hardened into something unbridgeable between them. He started lapsing into periods of secretive behavior—days, sometimes weeks, when he would keep to himself and hide things from her. She remembered one night in particular, not long ago, when he refused to let her look at his back, even though she could see a spot of blood soaking through his nightshirt.

Usually, though, the secrets he tried to keep were innocuous and easy enough to guess, and she would display just the right mixture of curiosity and consternation at his behavior to make him think he was getting away with them. What troubled her more, and what she blamed herself for, was the further deterioration in his observance of Islam. She watched in silent helplessness as his namaz-reciting dwindled month by month, as he started cheating at the one or two rozas he did keep and stopped going to the masjid altogether. Even more distressing was the fact that despite her best efforts, Salim was turning out more and more like his father. She reconciled herself to practicing her faith alone, and never being able to share this part of her existence with her family.

So when Ahmed started observing the rozas so diligently this Ramzan, Mrs. Jalal was startled, and quite pleased. Perhaps he had come around, maybe he was going to be like all the other husbands and fathers after all. Maybe there would even still be time to influence Salim. She had risen before dawn every morning to have turmeric potatoes and freshly fried puris ready for their breakfast, and stood on the balcony each evening with Ahmed, to wait for the sun to set. It had given her such a sense of fulfillment, doing the shopping herself every day, making all his favorite foods, feeding him the first bite of mutton kebab or chicken biryani with her own hands. And to her relief, he had not brought up the old discussions of other religions. Even Salim, persuaded by their joint example, had been moved to keep a fast or two.

But then the rozas were over, and Ahmed was still fasting daily. Sometimes he would keep them two days at a time, not eating from sunrise the first day to sunset the second. When questioned about it, he claimed it helped his digestion, or he needed to lose weight, or he was doing it in empathy with all the people starving in the world. Uncertain about how to respond to these assertions, and limited somewhat by the apparent absence of health side effects, Mrs. Jalal tried not to dwell on it.

But it got worse. He started wearing the same clothes day after day, ignoring the fresh white kurtas she laid out on his bed every morning. She would have to sneak out with his dirty clothes at night while he slept, and hide them in the dhobi hamper. Which didn’t always work, since sometimes he would retrieve them the next day, and scold her for putting them there.

He stopped bathing for a while and only resumed when his body odor was so ripe that even the cigarettewalla was prompted to ask what was happening to the sahib. The radio suddenly started bothering him, making him irritable whenever it was playing in his presence. He would try to turn it off when he thought she was not looking, and if she objected, storm out of the room in a huff. One day she came back from the market to find it had disappeared altogether. That afternoon, a tearful Short Ganga demanded to know why the sahib had sold the radio for ten rupees to the paanwalla, when the opportunity to buy it should have been rightfully hers, given all the work she did for them, and who was the paanwalla to them anyway, when they hardly even ate two paans a month, if that? It had taken Mrs. Jalal an hour of standing on the pavement outside the paanwalla’s stall and hurling accusations of thievery at him in front of his customers before he agreed to sell it back.

And then had come the night when Ahmed had thrown off the covers, turned on the light, and started rearranging the furniture in their bedroom. She had watched, frightened, as he deposited all the chairs in the corridor outside, moved the desk against the wall, and dragged the heavy metal trunk clear across the floor. Then he put his shoulder against the frame, and with her still perched on it, started pushing the bed towards the wall in short, grunting thrusts, like some overstimulated beast of burden.

“Ahmed, what are you
doing?
” she cried, not knowing whether to get up and assist him or sit there and allow her body to be jerked sideways with each thrust.

“Too soft,” he mumbled through his exertion. “Bad for the back.” He pulled a sheet out of the cupboard, and spread it out on the space cleared on the floor, then plucked his pillow off the bed and switched off the light.

“Ahmed, come back,” she called to him in the dark, still sitting up in bed. “Why are you doing this?”

But he did not answer. She waited until she could hear his breathing grow soft and regular before lying down and trying to sleep herself. Sometime during the night, Ahmed tossed his pillow back on the bed, and she awoke in the morning to find him stretched out on the bare floor, the sheet draped over his body and his head.

The weeks went by, but he did not return. Although it had been years since they had done anything in bed but sleep, the presence of his body next to hers had always reassured her. She found now that if she happened to wake up at night (something that occurred more and more frequently as she grew older, or was it just her imagination?), she was unable to fall back asleep. Instead, she would lie in the dark for what seemed like hours, trying to lose herself in the sounds of his breathing, waiting for the dawn to paint its first strokes of pink across the ceiling.

She had been unable to solve the mystery of his behavior. She had tried reasoning with him and pleading with him, tried subjecting him to great big luxuriant blooms of tears (both silent and racking), and even threatened to leave him, but to no avail. He had stubbornly returned the same responses, insisting he was doing everything for his health, and accusing her of wanting to cripple him every time she asked him to start sleeping on the bed again. His answers had frustrated her, then made her despondent. These days, she was just plain exhausted—Ahmed’s behavior had so sapped her that even a trip down the stairs seemed a major undertaking.