The Age of Shiva (27 page)

I looked at him, startled—it was the most famous address in the country. “Yes,” he nodded, obviously pleased at my astonishment. “I was at Indira Gandhi's. First in the garden with everyone else, but then inside, to speak to her in person. She said that the country depended on publishers like myself. She hinted that the Congress Party might have things in store for me as well. Who knows, your father may even end up standing for election someday. Rajinder Sawhney, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, what do you think?”

Over the last few years, Paji had grown increasingly enamored of Indira Gandhi, applauding her each time she did something daring. Snubbing the superpowers, nationalizing the banks, stripping the former maharajas of their titles and pensions, and through it all, ignoring the accusations of arrogance and high-handedness. The most recent act, where she formed her own breakaway Congress Party rather than take orders from the older politicians like Morarji Desai, sent Paji's opinion of her skyrocketing. “She's an example for all womanhood to emulate, I tell you—not afraid of any man. Any father would be proud to have such a daughter—were he still alive, she'd be able to stand up to Nehru himself.”

By now I threw away unread the cuttings Paji sent me—I found politics not only tedious but irrelevant. How could antagonizing America or confiscating the maharajas' purses have any bearing on my life with you, notwithstanding the titillation these actions afforded Paji? The one exception concerned prices, which rose faster than we could keep up with on what Dev earned. The cost of food alone seemed to have doubled recently.

Biji blamed it all on Indira Gandhi. “I'm supposed to be illiterate, so what can I say? All I can tell you is that when I give the servant five rupees to go to the market now, he asks for ten. What people like your Paji never talk about is how prices are crushing people, how families have so little that they can't even keep their cattle from dying.” It startled me to discover this sudden interest in politics Biji had developed, even more so to be apprised of her newfound empathy for the common man. “I'm a zamindar's daughter, remember—it runs in my blood—my ancestors have tended their villages for centuries. There's no honor in warming your behind on the throne if you can't even keep your population alive.”

Paji brushed aside such objections. “Look at all the respect India is gaining in the world for being so independent, for not kowtowing to the West. She's only been in office for a few years—it takes time to solve problems of the economy. It'll all be sorted out by the time my grandson's up to my chest, won't it, Ace?”

Paji had started calling you by this truly strange nickname. I complained to him that it sounded like a fighter pilot in the British air force, but he persisted. “Tell me, Ace, what would you like to be when you grow up? Not a singer like your father, I trust?”

Although you adored Biji, who ordered a full crate of Coca-Cola especially for you on the first day of each vacation visit, you always remained a little wary of Paji. Perhaps you sensed my own mistrust. He tried to lure you with candy or coins to come talk to him—enticements you would snatch from his hand and run. Each time you lingered, he lectured you on one of his pet topics—the evils of religion, the worthlessness of prayer. Sometimes he got quite aggressive, even towards you. “Perhaps you're not quite an ace after all,” he said, when you told him about feeding Mickey Mouse, at the foot of Ganesh. “One can't expect to breed a prize rose if it has stock mixed in from a pedestrian strain.”

This attitude towards you convinced me to take my chances with Arya at Nizamuddin rather than stay at Darya Ganj. I didn't want Paji's shadow to cast a pall over your life, like it had mine.

PAJI WASN'T THE ONLY PERSON
I tried to make sure didn't influence you too much. There was, of course, Arya as well, and also Hema's husband Gopal. I worried about them brainwashing you with their HRM propaganda if my vigilance faltered. Already Hema's younger son boasted about watching the new recruits wrestling in the mud—I saw him marching around the house one day, a stick propped against his shoulder as if it were a gun.

I also kept a wary eye on Roopa. She had managed to find out in advance about two of our Delhi trips, and shown up each time on the train from Madras, with her twins. Although Dilip and Shobha, being nine years older, already inhabited their own separate world, you fell instantly in love with your “Roo auntie,” much to my chagrin. “Darling Ashu,” she kneeled down and called to you, and you ran across the room to fling yourself into her arms.

Your Roo auntie bought you all sorts of expensive presents—a windup tank that spewed sparks when it ran, a toy gun that shot Ping-Pong balls. (Back in Bombay, you used these to terrorize poor Pinky with particular gusto—lodging a Ping-Pong ball in her mouth, setting fire to her hair with sparks from the tank.) When Roopa heard about Zaida's makeup skills, she brought out her own bottles and brushes and did your face up so extravagantly that for two days you refused to wash it off. The night we slept over at Paji's, she told you stories we had heard in our childhood—mangling the scenes, confusing characters and events, but managing, nevertheless, to tantalize you—she could have read you the telephone directory, and you would have still been rapt. The next morning, you wailed that you wanted her to bathe you, and I reluctantly gave in. After that, you insisted I lather you in the ears like Roo auntie did, that I float the Ping-Pong balls in the mugs of water poured over your head. “Roo auntie didn't wash my shamey—she told me I was old enough to do it myself.”

“Did she show you how?” I asked, and you shook your head. “Then you're not old enough.” I swished it as usual through the water in the mug.

I did not understand Roopa's motives. What was behind this attempt to charm you, to make this new inroad into my life? That last time in Delhi, I had gone as far as threatening to inform her husband Ravinder if she ever repeated what I had witnessed between her and Dev. It didn't quite seem like she still lusted after my husband, though I remained alert whenever they met. Perhaps I still intercepted the occasional wistful look or fleeting glance, mostly from Dev, but I could no longer be sure of it.

I tried to delve into this, the night you insisted you wanted to sleep close to your Roo auntie again. “You've certainly put the charm on Ashvin. All those presents, all this attention—he's going to think that you're his mother, not I. Are you trying to steal him away?”

Perhaps I was reading too much into things, perhaps this was the way an aunt normally behaved, perhaps I was being too jealous or possessive, like Dev always complained. Roopa didn't rise to the bait. “I'm lucky to have such a wonderful nephew,” she said, brimming over with a sweetness that made my jaw ache. “He reminds me so much of you, and a little bit of Dev.”

THE DAYS GO BY,
much too fast, like the pages flying off a calendar to denote the passage of time in a movie shot. A jumble of memories, photos spilling from a brimming album, overwhelming me each time I try to keep the years apart. There you are, peeling litchis by the half dozen, trying to shoot them out of your Ping-Pong gun. Squatting by the Ashoka pillar at Hanging Gardens to have your picture taken, smiling enigmatically, like Mona Lisa might, because you are secretly doing number two in your shorts. Is that on the same page that you dance on the bed, your very own moon surface, as the radio announces the first step by Neil Armstrong? Or the day that Montessori begins, when I stand outside listening to you howl, then go back in, defeated, to take you back into my arms?

Perhaps the pictures are arranged by theme, not chronology. With an entire section reserved just for all the times you land in trouble. The week you steal into the bathroom and cut your face while trying to shave like Daddy. The time you spray pedestrians with color left over from Holi as they pass below our balcony. The afternoon you wrestle with Pinky and she breaks your tooth accidentally, the dog at Sharmila's house that bites your thigh when you try to ride it like a pony. How many times alone did you fall from the swing to bloody your chin at Mafatlal Park?

And next the images that include your father. The night we found ourselves huddling together in the hotel bed in Khandala under a single frayed mosquito net. We had barely enough room to balance on the edges of the bed without falling off, the way you had your arms and legs splayed. Neither of us could sleep, with the heat and the lack of space, and the mosquitoes diving unhindered through the holes in the net. Then you made a sound so alarming and strangled it made us both sit up. We looked at each other and began to laugh—we had just heard you snoring for the first time.

The album has another section, one I have named the “bamboo house,” in which this image could have also fit. The section with the three of us always cozily absorbed together in some activity, every frame a tinted photo capturing an instant of domestic harmony. We are playing the Ganesh game before your bath, or negotiating the waves at Chowpatty, and in the background above us, the bamboo eaves hover protectively. Riding the giant wheel at the Dassera fair, or tucking into a Cream Centre sundae with three spoons, the slats of bamboo all polished and gleaming like ivory.

Did I imagine our future would look like this? The pages of this section fluttering open one after the other, ready to archive, to celebrate, every incident in our lives?

But then other images come into focus, and I see a darker reality emerge. One in which bamboo houses simply get blown away and even the Beatles split up. This flurry of scenes is from a different part of the album, one marked by confrontation, conflict. The occasions when Dev gets so drunk that I send you in to plead with him to stop. The nights he stays out somewhere and you keep waking up to ask if he has returned. The fights over tilaks smeared on your head each time Dev drags you to his Dadar guruji. The time he slaps you when you break the clock, and I warn him never to touch you again.

The last scene remained fresh in my mind for weeks. I hugged your head, trying to leach the hurt away with my body, and kissed your eyes, your cheeks, your nose. I sat on the bed and rocked you in my arms—you looked into my face and neither cried nor spoke. I kept you by my side that night—Dev slept on the sofa, something he did more and more as time went on. You touched my face as I kissed you good night, and unfurled your fingers to show me they were wet. For a moment I couldn't believe it—my vow of so long ago not to cry—even though this time, it was for you, not myself. I tried to turn away, but you tugged me back by the arm and told me that I had to close my eyes. I felt your mouth dab the spot under my eye—uncertainly at first, but then with more assurance. You pressed tiny kisses like an angel might, first into the left cheek, then the right. I squeezed my eyelids shut tighter together, forcing out more tears for you to scoop up. Each fleeting contact so soft and pleasurable that I didn't want the sensation to end.

Perhaps my inventory of images contains nothing so egregious to justify a future so bleak. A lawyer pleading Dev's case might claim that by no means have I proved he deserves his fate. Except doesn't the album contain yet another section in the back, its pages yellowed, its edges all bleached? With something dark and unformed beginning to stir again unseen?

I know, of course, of this section's existence—I have clasped it firmly shut to lock away the memory it contains. Of the sibling who went before you, the twin to your Ashvin, the one with whom you share your name. Somehow, after all this time, I can feel him reawaken inside me, preparing to press his claim again.

It takes a while before I realize what is happening. That he is the one whispering to me silently, all those times my lips start quivering unexplained. That it is his presence, wafting silkily through my being, which makes me want to get up each time I am joined in bed by Dev. We are laughing over some joke, the three of us, and I suddenly want to stalk away. Dev brings home a tandoori chicken, or my favorite pakodas, and it is all I can do not to throw them away.

I never quite understand why he has reappeared. Perhaps to guard against forgiveness, to mount a campaign against the past being erased. Perhaps we are becoming too much of a family, and he wants to ensure I don't sign on to the bamboo future with Dev. I find myself fighting your father on trivial matters, getting more contentious over every decision that has to be made. The emotion overloading my nerves, the resentment ratcheting up inside, until I am ready to turn you against Dev.

But right now let me show you a scene from the front of my album—a walk on the beach to search for Ganesh. We are on the sands at Chowpatty, on the morning after the annual festival has ended. You run along the edge of the water, pointing at the bits of colored clay that have begun to wash up already. We have done this for the past few years—joined the crowds to watch Ganesh and his entourage of gods and leaders and film stars immersed. And then, come back the next day, to look for what the waves have put on display, what the tide has returned. You find a few small parts—a trunk with a tusk attached, an upturned palm imprinted with an auspicious swastika, the tapering ornamentation of a head. But you seek something more awe-inspiring—the truncated bust of a movie-star hero, or perhaps a half-dissolved face, still recognizable as a Gandhi or Nehru.

Today, though, the waves are big and foamy and leave little behind. We should have come when the tide was going out, not flowing in. The sand is smooth and cleanly swept—even the sculptor has not resumed his carving after yesterday's crush of people. You pick up a shell and toss it into the water, disappointed by the paucity of the treasure on the beach. “Let's go to the aquarium,” Dev suggests, and you cheer up at this prospect.