The Age of Shiva (17 page)

Dev's strategy did yield some modest results. Under his badgering, a few of the music directors promised to have him audition. Roshan and Jaikishan actually came through on their word—though encouraging, neither gave him a song. Naushad hired him as an extra—sometimes as a chorus member, sometimes to sing a line or two in the background. His biggest success, one that received quite a bit of airtime, was a radio spot for Bournvita breakfast drink. Even Hema wrote that she had heard it in Delhi on the Vividh Bharati afternoon program.

As Dev became more of a fixture at the studio, music directors and film producers started relying increasingly on him. He was the one who knew whom to call to fix a microphone, the one to approach if the song needed the cry of an infant or the woof of a dog for a sound effect. He could arrange for a driver to go to Peddar Road when a Mangeshkar sister overslept, or get a battalion of violinists to be ready with their instruments on a day's notice. Once, he managed to switch an entire evening's schedule to Audio Labs, when a cat pawed its way into the utility box, shutting down the power and electrocuting itself. At first, he was happy to accept tips for these services, but gradually, as he became more indispensable, his name was added to the payroll. We could have been quite comfortably off, if Dev hadn't become addicted to his after-work stops at Auntie's Place. The cab fares alone (to get him home the few blocks in his drunken state) would have bought enough mutton to feed us all month.

One night, tired of waiting for Dev to show up drunk at the door, I decided to visit Auntie myself. I walked to the A-1 chip outlet, then entered the unlit alley next to it. The stench of garbage was so strong that I had to hold my dupatta over my face. It took some searching to detect the door built into the side of the A-1 building, stained as it was with countless streaks of paan. Inside, it was dark and smoky, with just enough light from the naked bulbs in wall sockets to make out the rickety tables. I saw only men there, sitting on benches at the tables, staring somberly into the liquid in their glasses. Dev sat alone on a stool at a bar at the back of the room. Behind him stood Auntie, her fingertips spread out on the counter, her multicolored dispensations glowing in rows behind her like bottles of orange and lemon squash.

The thing I noticed immediately was not the enormous vermilion bindi that covered half her forehead, but her hair. It had been dyed an emphatic black, both the tresses on her head and her eyebrows, though she had missed the eyelashes, which were white and furry. The light from the bulbs gave her hair a sheen that made her look like someone with an aura—a devi, perhaps. She took my hand in hers as Dev, flustered by my presence, tried to introduce us. “You're not here for what they all are—I'll get you some lemonade,” she said.

That evening, I matched Dev glass for glass, as he poured the homemade brew from a bottle (pineapple, the label said) and I poured from a jug of lemonade. Auntie was very solicitous, behaving almost as if she were my real aunt. At one point, a man from one of the tables came and sat next to me. Dev was too far gone to care, but Auntie was there in a flash, yanking him out and depositing him back on his bench. “If they bother you, just let me know, Beti,” she said.

Finally, when Dev's bottle was empty and we were at the door, Auntie pressed a one rupee coin into my palm. “For good luck, from your aunt.” She brushed her hand in blessing over my head.

At the main road, I gave the coin to a man begging outside the A-1 shop. To think she could buy me for a rupee. I vowed I would never go back.

In time, though, I came to accept the role Auntie played in Dev's life. The nightly visits helped dull the keenness of his disappointment, blur the stark outlines of his lack of success. It wasn't as if there had been a paucity of effort on his part. Within months of joining the studio, Dev had begun voice lessons, continuing them religiously for over a year and a half. Every Tuesday and Saturday morning, he took the suburban train all the way to Jogeshwari, where his guru had promised him an entirely new singing persona, one that would give not only Mukesh but also Rafi a run for his money. On other mornings, he waited patiently for his hangover to abate at home, so that he could practice an hour or two before going to work.

But Nawab Mohammed's assessment turned out to be devastatingly accurate. Dev was never able to truly make the new voice his own, give it the conviction it needed, imbue it with tunefulness or soul. By the time he gave up on his lessons, there was rarely a night that he wasn't going to visit his Auntie. It was her libations that helped ease his way deeper into the responsibilities at the studio, whispering to him that this was not a slide into obscurity or failure but merely a step on the way to attaining his dream.

T
HE ACADEMIC YEAR STARTED IN JUNE, SO I HAD TO WAIT UNTIL OUR SECOND
summer in Bombay to enroll for my B.A. Paji made the choice of college easy. He recommended the highly reputed Sophia, followed by St. Xavier's, or failing both, Elphinstone as a distant third. I immediately struck them all off my list. Instead, I decided on Wilson, not only because he hadn't mentioned it, but also because it was right across the road from Chowpatty.

On the first day of classes, I walked the familiar route towards the sea. It was the week before the start of the monsoon, and the skies overhead were gray and ponderous. In contrast, my mood was lighthearted, even optimistic. This would be a welcome change, I was beginning to realize, from the cooking, the shopping, the mindless haggling with which I pretended to entertain myself. Even Dev had wished me luck as I left the house, and said he would arrange for dinner that evening.

But my spirits settled as soon as the college came into view. I looked at the dark stone buildings, at the Gothic arches over the windows, at
Wilson
in Old English lettering spelled out above the iron bars of the fence. I had walked past the college so many times before. Why did it feel, as I passed through the gate today, that this was a prison to which I had been sentenced?

Beyond the walls was a courtyard, with a central fountain of three nymphs spouting water from their mouths. Students sat on the grass and stood around in knots—a few hung up a sign announcing an annual Bazaar Day. I knew they must be sixteen or seventeen, only a few years younger than I, and yet I felt the chasm of an entire generation between us. Listening to their chatter, I was reminded of Roopa's girlfriends in college, whose parents were only educating them so they would be more marketable for marriage. (Wasn't that why Biji had relented about Roopa attending as well?) Once, I would have yearned for such company, for the chance to meet day after day to flirt and gossip. Now, after all I had experienced, what could I possibly have left in common with such classmates?

The first lecture, on Indian history, made me feel worse. I found it impossible to concentrate on the civilizations that had taken root along the Indus Valley—all I could think was how pleased Paji would be by the image of me sitting there. The weeks to come on these wooden benches, the months under the fans rotating lazily overhead—had he made me trade in my baby for this? I stared at the pages of my blank notebook, the ink glistening on the nib of my new fountain pen. Each word I jotted down in the next four years would be in accordance with what he had planned. I imagined him nodding in satisfaction—“Another new idea's been nudged into our Meera's head.” The resentment was so sharp that I could taste it in my mouth—a bitterness, like the quinine we used to swallow in Rawalpindi for malaria. I tried to pull my mind towards the lecture, to the names of civilizations like Harrapa and Mohenjodaro, to the centuries before Christ when they flourished. But the chalk marks kept leaping and diving on the blackboard, the instructor's voice rising and falling like waves in my ears. A peon went by at last, ringing a large handheld bell to signal that the period had come to an end.

I rushed out of the classroom, through the hall, down the college steps. The waves were not only audible now but visible as well—I could see them flowering in blooms of white all along the arc of Marine Drive. I crossed the road and walked down the beach. The sea was engorged and foaming, as if the spirit of the monsoon strained inside, waiting to be delivered from its belly. Further up, a sand sculptor was smoothing out the previous day's deity carved into the ground, to start afresh. I thought about going back to attend my other lectures—English literature and civics, Hindi and world geography. But the clouds cast an irresistible melancholy over the beach, and the churning water kept me spellbound the whole afternoon. At three, I finished the lunch I had brought and started back home.

That week, I tried several times to sit through my lectures. But the classroom felt airless and suffocating each time, and the blood pounded so loudly in my ears that I thought my head would burst. Only the beach calmed me. I sat on the sand and imagined how different my life would have been with a child, how focused I would be, how active and happy. Perhaps I should simply go home to my chores, I thought, lose myself again in their vapidity. There would even be a sense of empowerment in not returning, in thwarting the future Paji had ordained for me. But then the idea of him shaking his head at the failure he'd been expecting all along stopped me.

The rains drove me back indoors. I looked into spending my time sipping tea in the girls' canteen, but the principal, Dr. Airan, often roved around outside, trying to catch students who were not in class. He was known for terrorizing not only the students but also the faculty, wielding not a timepiece or wristwatch but the very desk clock from his office each morning to check whether any of his professors were late ascending the staircase. I didn't want to attract his attention in case he knew Paji and started sending reports to Delhi.

The only alternative was to force myself to sit through the lectures. Fortunately, most of them were in Room 403, one entire wall of which consisted of a row of windows facing the sea. On clear days, the entire bay of Chowpatty opened up through the windows like in the panels of a painting. I found that glancing at this panorama from time to time helped me breathe. When the professor's voice became too oppressive, or my thoughts too claustrophobic, I followed the cars whizzing up and down the toy track of Marine Drive. Then I tried once again to turn to world economy or Shakespeare or the Indus Valley.

I INTERACTED WITH
almost no one in college. Although some of the friendlier girls struck up conversations in class or the canteen, I was never more than polite. My feeling of otherness was too great, my sense of isolation too deep. Then, around the middle of the term, one of the male students started following me.

I first noticed him at the beach, reclining on the sand with his head on a blue cloth book bag. The monsoon had abated, and I had brought my lunch outside after a long time. I recognized him from history and perhaps civics as well—he always sat in one of the back rows monopolized by boys. As I watched, he propped himself to a seated position and bought a cone of peanuts from a passing hawker. I thought he glanced my way as he paid for his snack, but I was careful not to look back.

The next day, he came into the library while I was reading the newspaper, and made his way to a table a few spaces from me. I didn't look at his face, but I could tell it was him, from his nubbly blue bag. He opened a book and held it awkwardly in the air, so that it was in line with where I sat. I didn't wait for him to start eyeing me while pretending to read—I replaced the paper on its rack and left.

After that, he seemed everywhere. Gazing at the sand deity being carved on the beach, I picked out his face from the ring of onlookers tracking the sculptor's progress with me. He paced back and forth outside the open door as I sat in the girls' canteen sipping tea. Once, he showed up while I was haggling with a roasted-corn seller on Marine Drive. He now seemed to be in
all
my classes, not just in history and civics. I kept wondering if he would leave the safety of his bench at the back to try and come sit next to me.

By now, I had managed to take several good looks at him covertly. He was younger than I had thought at first, probably not yet seventeen. There was the faintest of fuzz sprouting from his chin, the galaxy of pimples on his face seemed to rotate every week. His hair was long, and stiff with pomade, as if he had tried to forcibly straighten out the curls. He wore a good-luck charm around his neck, the black cord wound so tight that his throat muscles strained against it when he coughed. There was a sweetness about him, an innocence, an earnestness, that came through even while he was stalking me.

Although every effort was made at Wilson to keep the sexes segregated, there was no dearth of furtive romance. Each afternoon, the alcoves along the balcony floor of the library were filled with couples pretending to study together (until one day Dr. Airan banned boys from climbing the stairs). Girls living in the hostel at Gamdevi were reputed to be particularly fast—some of them openly strolled around campus with male classmates, though even they weren't bold enough to hold hands. Was this the way these courtships started? I wondered to myself. Did my student think me unmarried, given that I didn't mark the parting of my hair with vermilion or wear a mangalsutra necklace?

I knew I should tell him at once to stop what he was doing. Hadn't such games, after all, led to my initial rashness with Dev in the tomb at Nizamuddin? But this student had never harassed me or even approached me in any way, so what sense did it make for me to initiate contact? Given how unlikely it was that I would ever speak to him or confront him, what danger could there be in carrying around some idle romantic notions to amuse myself?

My reveries about him were very different from my fantasies of Dev when I was seventeen. He was never shirtless or indecent in any way, I never followed him into a tomb, the cord around his neck did not metamorphose into a snake. Rather than amorous, my affection was maternal more than anything else. I wanted to cradle his head in my lap, rock him to sleep in my arms. I wanted to run my hands through the locks of his hair on days he allowed it to curl. If ever I pressed my lips against his, I wanted no wetness to taint our kiss.

The evening came when my student followed me after school. I caught glimpses of him loitering in front of a cigarette shop, examining newspapers spread out by a pavement vendor. At the Nana Chowk intersection, I paused in front of the window of the Bata shoe store to see if he would come up. But he stopped as well, pretending to be engrossed by the wares of a tea grocer.

I imagined leading him back home, walking up the steps, leaving open the door. Dev wouldn't be home from work for another few hours. What would I do if my admirer, like a stray dog, followed me up?

Perhaps I could pet him, lay out a plate of biscuits, and watch him eat. Fix him a cup of tea, the beverage that still seemed to have him entranced in its charms at the shop down the street. And after I have fed him and quenched his thirst, what then? Do I hug him and muss his hair to test my theory of motherly affection? Am I surprised when I discover the feelings he carries for me?

I could usher him into the bedroom after his feeding. Watch him take off his shoes and stand skittishly by the door in his bare feet. Do I boldly reach up to brush a crumb from the corner of his mouth? Catch a glimpse of his tongue as it nervously licks his lips clean?

And then? Do I go over to the bed and pull back the sheets? Does he waver a bit, then lie down next to me? His fingers too timid to make contact, but the desire so strong I can hear it thump in his heartbeat. I lie there and inhale the scent of his adolescence, let his presence envelop me.

Try as I might, I was unable to proceed further with this reverie. The image of his skin against mine eluded me. I looked at him watching the bins of tea so innocently. Wasn't I too young to have so disengaged myself from physical needs? Had my experiences with Dev drained all desire from me?

Even if I could complete my fantasy, where would it take me? How would my life be better if I were to cast my lot in with his? Would we run away together, settle down somewhere to begin again? What made me imagine he would be an improvement over Dev?

It was time, I decided, to confront my admirer. To disentangle myself from the game he was playing. “Hello, listen?” I said, striding up to the tea store. He looked up too late, unable to make a getaway. “Why are you following me, what do you want from me?” A flash of panic arced in his eyes. His complexion turned white, as if guilt was a lightbulb illuminating his face.

I could tell he was ready to bolt, so I softened my tone. “Did you want to ask me something?” He stared at me, his expression unchanged. He swallowed so hard that I thought the cord around his neck would break. Each instant he stood there represented a separate trembling decision not to flee. I spoke even more gently. “You do know I'm married, don't you?”

He stared at me, then shook his head mutely. He swallowed again, and I thought he was going to say something. But he went back to examining the tea bins, perhaps to hide his disappointment. His gaze roved over them as if trying to identify the one in which the secret to happiness lay hidden.

It was his shyness that made me feel the stirring. The painful self-consciousness coming through, the discomfort he radiated at not fitting in. Without thinking, I extended my fingers towards him in empathy. As if we were in some foreign country where it was perfectly reasonable for a woman to reach for the hand of a man.

For an instant, he began to extend his hand as well, as if to clasp my palm and shake it. Then he realized what he was doing, what I had said. His neck stiffened, his eyes widened, and his whole body seemed to shrink from my fingertips. He began to walk backwards, first in small steps, then in more reckless strides, until he had cleared the tea shop, then the tire shop after that, and the restaurant that was next in line. He turned around and ran, weaving through the people shopping for shoes and tires and tea, then abruptly veered off the pavement onto the road. I caught my breath as a tram clanged by, but he sprinted nimbly around it, reaching the other side safely and continuing towards the police station at Gamdevi. I watched as long as I could for the white of his shirt as it bobbed down the street, the illumination of the lampposts coloring it yellow each time he passed underneath. Then, wrapping my untouched fingers in my dupatta, I turned around to make my way back home.