The Age of Shiva (15 page)

We climbed the staircase next to the shop. The door at the top opened just as we got to it, and a thickset woman in a salwar kameez peered out suspiciously. She had a dupatta wrapped around her head and tied in a knot behind, giving her a curiously bald look. “Yes?” she asked, and I caught a fleeting whiff of betel juice when she opened her mouth.

“Dr. Mishra sent us,” Dev answered. The woman opened the door wider and wordlessly led us to a small room with green walls. She gestured towards a wooden bench, and sat down herself at a metal desk. She pulled out a notebook from one of the drawers and tore out a blank page on which she started writing something. I noticed the nail of her right thumb was black, her fleshy fingers devoid of rings.

“How old?” she asked Dev.

“Eighteen.”

“Not her, what's inside.”

“Four months.”

“Not more? You're sure?”

“A little more.”

The woman asked a few more questions about my weight and diet, continuing to address Dev, not me. “Wait here,” she said. “I'll go get some tea.” Dev began to protest that we didn't need any, that she was being too polite. “It's not for you, it's for her. To help her not feel anything.” She disappeared into the adjacent room where we heard her mixing something.

I looked around the room. Scabs of green paint were peeling off the wall and ceiling. The floor needed a good washing, even though it had been swept clean. Next to the notebook on the desk lay a long screwdriver and hammer, as if someone had been about to carry out a repair. A strong meaty odor, like that from a fatty cut of mutton boiled in a curry, emanated from the door. It made me long for the smell of disinfectant, even chloroform.

I was about to remark to Dev that this didn't feel like a doctor's waiting room, when he pulled two tickets out of his pocket. “See this? The Frontier Mail, next week. Babuji got us first class.” A grin flashed over his face before he could suppress it.

“You mean you told your father?”

“I had to. But nobody else knows. Once we get to Bombay, we'll send them a telegram that you miscarried.”

The woman came out with the tea. She handed it to me and gave Dev a folded bedsheet. “For her, after the tea. There's a charpoy in the second room through there. She has to take off what she's wearing.”

“Is the doctor here yet?” I asked.

“What doctor?” For the first time, the woman spoke directly to me.

“You don't need a doctor for this. I've been doing it for years. Don't worry, I'm not some village dai who uses mud to clean her hands.” She smiled and I saw her paan-stained teeth.

Later, after I had begun to hemorrhage in the taxi back, after I had collapsed, blood-drenched, in Sandhya's arms, after I had passed the remaining chunks of fetus which Dev wrapped in a rag to dispose of somewhere, Paji would come to see me. “I had no idea,” he would say, as he held his hand against my burning forehead and managed to cry for the second time that day. “Please forgive me.” But back in that room, I quelled the uneasiness I felt, thinking that if Paji had arranged it, and if Dev hadn't considered anything to be amiss, it must be fine. After all my previous unwillingness, I didn't want to now appear as if I was making excuses and trying to back out.

I looked at the brown liquid in the cup. A swirl of white was floating on top, like some powder mixed in which had not quite dissolved. I took a sip, and it tasted like tea—lukewarm, and heavily spiked with ginger to mask whatever it was hiding, but tea, nevertheless. I was about to drink it down when a thought flitting in my brain since Darya Ganj articulated itself. “How was it that you came when you did to pick me up at Paji's?” I asked Dev.

“Your father told me. He said to come by at twelve-thirty, that he would have you ready by then.”

I nodded. I raised the cup to my lips and emptied it.

S
OMETIMES I THINK THAT THE FIREWORKS I DAYDREAMED ABOUT THAT
evening in 1955 were heralding not Dev in my life but you. That they were sent up in the sky to preside over the coming decade and illuminate the way to your birth. Whenever the days grew too oppressive, I would see Gandhiji standing under a galaxy of starry rocket flashes, indicating that things would be all right. “Over there,” he seemed to say, pointing at what lay unseen beyond the towering walls of the fort, his staff lit up in the night.

Did he somehow rig the flag that was still hanging over the platform at Bombay Central even though we arrived more than three months after Republic Day? As we circled around the station's manicured gardens, I noticed more flags affixed to the lampposts outside. I looked at the colored stripes fluttering in the gaslight, amazed that only a year and a quarter had elapsed since I had met Dev. How many lifetimes had I aged since that day?

But I had not aged, I reminded myself—I was young and healthy, as Paji had correctly declared. My body had pulled through the assault on it, the pills Dr. Mishra had given me had made my fever go away. “It's going to be a new city, a new beginning—forget what's happened here,” Paji had said at the station. “You're only eighteen—just go to Bombay and pretend you're newly wed.”

The taxi drove past the tall iron gates and merged with the traffic on the road. I stared at the women with saris tied in unfamiliar ways, the urchins drumming the backs of their brushes against their shoe polish stands, the hawkers vending peanuts and gram and sugarcane, the men balancing crates of tiffin boxes on their heads. Everywhere, people spilled from the pavements and swarmed towards the station like convoys of purposeful ants. A double-decker bus roared up threateningly behind a horse-drawn victoria, a burst of overhead sparks showered down as an electric tram rumbled along on its tracks. Was this the allure of the city, then, the therapeutic hubbub with which I was supposed to regenerate myself?

We turned into a road lined with apartment blocks—not the one-or two-story structures of Nizamuddin, but buildings that towered four and five and six times as tall. They were built so close that they looked glued to each other, like in a hurriedly assembled collage. Occasionally a temple entrance would emerge, decked with carvings and flowers, or a movie palace, moored by the side of the road like a glittering ocean liner. There were blinking lights and neon signs, and a billboard for cigarettes that changed into a cough syrup advertisement before my eyes. Despite all the cars, the atmosphere was clear, unlike the perpetual haze that hung over Delhi. Instead of dung, it was salt that I smelled in the air.

The flat Paji had bought us (from the brother of one of his qawwali friends, who sold it and migrated to Pakistan) was in Tardeo. Dev had been hoping for something in one of the more posh areas, like Malabar Hill or Breach Candy, perhaps even in one of the buildings facing the sea along Marine Drive, the jewels in “the Queen's Necklace,” as he had heard them called. Not only did Paji purchase the cheapest place he could find, but he also left it in his name, to ensure I didn't stray. That I went to college and (a condition for which Dev assured me he would take nightly precautions) didn't have another child.

The taxi stopped in front of a building with an exterior so dark it looked charred. At first, I thought it might have been damage suffered during the riots in January. Nehru had announced Bombay would be centrally governed in order to develop it as the commercial capital of the country. Mobs of Marathi-speaking locals had rampaged across the city to protest it being wrested from their control. A front-page photograph had even made the Delhi
Times of India
, showing thousands of policemen battling the crowds on the worst day of the rioting.

As it turned out, our building had not been one of the victims of the public wrath. The burnt-looking exterior was actually a protective undercoating, painted on right before the monsoon one year. The rains had come early that season, and the project abandoned, without the surface layer of white ever being applied. When we stepped inside, the walls in the hallway, though cracked and peeling, were fortunately painted a less unsettling color.

Upstairs, the living room was cramped, the bathroom tiny, the furniture old and dusty. The balcony was so decrepit that it looked ready to shear off into the street two floors below. There was a filthy sink in the kitchen—when I tried to turn on the water, a cockroach crawled out from the tap. Dev carried his suitcase from room to room, as if searching for the door to a hidden, more commodious wing of the flat. He finally placed his bag on the bed and sat down next to it. “If I'd known this was all your father was offering, I would've moved us to Bombay myself long ago.”

THE FIRST MORNING,
after Dev left to meet a musician contact, I took my tea to the living room. The blare of horns rose from the road downstairs, and over it the call of a man going door to door sharpening knives. Dust streamed in through the open window, giving the sunlight a granular look. This would be my world from now on, I told myself as I sipped my tea—these rooms, these walls, this curiously humid heat. The village-like atmosphere of Nizamuddin dispelled by all the activity, the whistles of trains replaced by the sounds of traffic in the street.

What I longed for, though, were not the sights or surroundings I remembered from Nizamuddin, but the people I had left behind. For days, Sandhya and Mataji had taken care of me with such tenderness that in my delirium, I was never sure if it was my own mother ministering to me or one of them. Even Hema had attempted to sit awake next to my bed for a whole night (finally dozing off, still sitting I was told, at 3 a.m.). There had been so little time with them afterwards, so few opportunities to express how strong a bond I felt towards them. Barely had I recovered, it seemed, before I was being bundled up into the train—the compartment waiting to whisk me away to another life, like a second doli.

I closed my eyes and tried to transport myself back to Nizamuddin. There was the house in the railway colony, with the scraggly hibiscus bush growing outside. There were Hema and Mataji and Sandhya in the courtyard, their features slowly blossoming into color from black and white. Perhaps I had just walked in as well, because the three of them gathered close around me, as if in greeting. I saw the sun dappling our hair, smelled the hibiscus in the air, tried to get a snatch of what was being said. Then Sandhya turned, her hands streaked with red, her screams muffled as if coming through a windowpane, and behind her I glimpsed my bloodstained sari.

I went to the balcony to calm myself. Paji's words sounded in my ears—not to allow myself to think of Nizamuddin, not to regret what I had forever left behind. How meticulously I had followed his advice for a change. Pulling myself back from the brink whenever I felt tempted to relive the visit to the woman with the paan-stained teeth. Disengaging my remorse, my guilt, my shame, each time it began to clump around the part of me wrapped up and carried away that day by Dev. I had taken pains to stick with the story he and Paji advanced. Everyone from Hema to Biji believed I had miscarried.

My throat seized up. These days, it was the closest I came to crying. Even the sight of a newborn infant in its mother's arms could only coax up the tears so far. “Don't keep things bottled up,” Biji had said. “You'll get eaten up from inside.” But there was nothing I could do. I had lost the language of sorrow—even Dev singing “Light the Fire of Your Heart” couldn't wring anything from me now.

Below me, a man and woman were ascending slowly through the air. Their cheeks were afire in pink, their lips engorged in lurid pouts, their pupils floated up dreamily from milky seas of white. It was a film poster, hoisted for a rather seedy-looking movie theater called the Diana opposite our building. I watched as the edges were fastened to a metal framework, as the name of the film,
Love in Kashmir
, was inked onto the marquee. What a quaint notion, I thought, to be in love and frolic about in the snow in Kulu or Srinagar. I spotted the same poster in miniature clamped around a whole line of lampposts running along the sidewalk.
Love
blossomed improbably over and over again down the street.

DEV RETURNED AT TWO
in the afternoon. “The water's as beautiful as they say it is. I caught a glimpse of it from the bus. Come, let's go take a look.” He hurried me downstairs into a taxi as if the sea was in danger of evaporating.

It wasn't a very long ride. The water revealed its presence even before we got to it—the sunshine reflecting off its surface created a shimmer in the air. Suddenly the buildings parted to reveal an expanse of gleaming sand. Beyond lay the bay, the sea stretching to the horizon, the waves sweeping in gracefully to garland the land.

“Do you recognize it?” Dev asked excitedly. “It's Chowpatty Beach. From the postcard I had framed up in Delhi.” He paid the driver and we got out of the cab. “See those tall buildings with the palm trees?—that's Marine Drive, where I had been hoping Paji would buy us a flat.”

The beach was as lustrous as the floor of a marble temple in sunlight—I unhooked my sandals before stepping on it. When I looked up, Dev was already running towards the water. Perhaps he tripped, perhaps he flung himself down on purpose, but the next instant, he was tumbling on the ground, clouds of sand rising and cascading around his body.

“Look at this,” he yelled, scooping up the sand by the handful and throwing it into the air. It landed on his arms, his chest, his face, but he didn't seem to care. “Isn't it wonderful?” I stared at the rivulets running down his head—tiny particles—mica, perhaps—sparkled in his hair.

Dev stretched out his legs and swished his feet luxuriously this way and that. “Did they used to make a children's beach for you at the Baisakhi fair like they did in Lahore? Trucked in all the way from Karachi, they would say. To wait all these years and finally feel the grains sliding between my toes again.” He burrowed a foot in, then watched the sand cascade off as he lifted it into the air.

Before I could sink down to the ground next to him, Dev was up and bounding towards the sea again. This time, he ran all the way to the water's edge. He stretched out his arms and thrust his chest forward as if expanding the cavity within to take in the deepest possible breath. “The sea,” he shouted, twirling around towards me. “This is it. Finally.” He turned back to the water. “Finally,” he called out, and paused, as if waiting for an echo. He bent down to roll up his cuffs, but then simply kicked off his shoes and ran into the waves. “Come on in,” he yelled, waving to me, just as a swell crested around his knees.

I stood where I was. Following Dev into the water seemed too forgiving—I was not yet ready to share with him the intimacy of the sea. “My sari will get all wet,” I responded, but he was too absorbed in the waves to hear me.

I found a dry patch of sand to sit on. Dev frolicked around, falling backwards into the water, skimming the foam with his arms, tossing a coconut away from shore and then splashing over dog-like to retrieve it. The tide was not very strong, and the tallest of the waves rose lethargically only to his thighs. At one point, he disappeared headfirst into the water and I saw his legs rise and stick straight up towards the sky. Every once in a while he stood and cupped his hands over his mouth. I heard him call out something to the bay: “I love you,” or “Beautiful,” or “Finally.”

In spite of myself, I decided that I, too, liked the sea. The salt in the air smelled curiously familiar, like something I had been breathing in all my life. I felt as if I had reached the end of a pilgrimage—the shore I was sitting on a frontier of opportunity, the sweep of water ahead ready to forgive, to absorb all memory. I could lose myself in this city, be a new person, start a new life, as Paji had said. Fate seemed to insist I remain tied to Dev, that I subordinate my will to his. It had taught me a lesson on how reckless it could be to resist. Perhaps it was time now to try leading the life it had limned out for me. Surely in time the salt would heal the wound inside.

IT WAS ONE THING
to make my resolution at the beach, quite another to resist being pulled back under by the past. What kept me afloat was the responsibility of running a household. Each time I felt myself slipping into the darkness, I found a chore to distract myself. I counted the clothes for the dhobi's weekly wash and examined the floor for patches the ganga had missed in her cleaning. I haggled with vegetable sellers to squeeze out an extra apple or onion, and stood for hours to get our ration cards from the municipality. My resourcefulness surprised me, since nobody had ever advised me on how to perform such tasks. Each one completed made me feel more authentic in my newly assumed role as a housewife. Every hour I cooked or cleaned or shopped was another hour not spent wallowing in the disappointments and betrayals of my previous life.

The one area where my resourcefulness failed me was in the kitchen. For the first few weeks, I went through untold heads of cauliflower, since that happened to be the only vegetable Mataji had really taught me to cook. I was familiar with yellow moong, but the range of lentil colors at the bania's shop unnerved me. I managed to burn mutton and leave it uncooked inside at the same time. The chappatis I rolled had such intricate borders that they could have been the maps of countries.