The Age of Shiva (38 page)

“The point I'm trying to make is simply this. On at least this one issue, I can clear away any misgivings you might have about me. God willing, my best days are just around the corner. It wouldn't be such a bad time to link your star to mine.” He said this not boastfully, but with sincerity. The suit kept the scent of his body contained as he sat there—the air was heady with coffee and nothing else.

Could I really have been serious when I told him I would think about it, or was it just a way to be polite? Did I really keep flashing back to the earnestness on his face as I rode the motor rickshaw back to Darya Ganj, or was it just the heat playing tricks? “There's nobody else in the world I'd rather leave him to,” I heard Sandhya say. She held out her arms lovingly for me, inviting me to press my head against her breast again.

The next time I met Arya in Nizamuddin, he was again as proper and reserved as before. He was no longer attired in a coat, though, and his hair didn't seem as perfectly trimmed.

BY THE TIME
I got on the train to Bombay, the intensity of Arya's proposal had subsided in my mind. It was one thing to find his letters pleasant reading, quite another to entrust my fate into his hands. Marriage, as I had found out, was all about physical responsibilities. This was not going to be some platonic union or meeting of minds.

For years, a part of me had waited for the day that Dev would make love to me in a way that left me fulfilled. The longer this hope remained unrealized, the more the actual need within me had faded. After Dev died, I had wondered if the physical side of me might, in some glorious renaissance, flower again. Perhaps I would run into the boy who followed me in college and actually carry out my reverie of spending the night with him.

I revisited all the fantasies I'd had about the boy over the years, and tried to imagine their consummation. The heat flowing once again through my lower self, like it had so long ago in my life. The craving magically returning, so that the two of us could be united in its embrace through the night. I was only in my thirties, Hema had reminded me (and Arya barely forty, she had lied). There were many more years of sexual activity ahead of me, according to the
Femina
issue on women's sexuality Sharmila had mailed.

But the renaissance hadn't come. The yearnings of my body remained dormant, only in an abstract sense did they seem still alive. I wondered if it could be true, what
Femina
was claiming about female gratification, or a myth cooked up in the reporter's overheated mind. And not just
Femina
, but all the references that cropped up with increasing boldness in books and songs and films. The way Sharmila kept rhapsodizing about Munshi, the way Hema made sly references to Gopal. Even Zaida shocked me with her fantasies one afternoon when she talked about the neighborhood boy she had loved.

Surely all this enthusiasm about sex must be exaggerated. There was little I could remember to recommend it from my experiences with Dev. Even were I to feel moved enough by such considerations and seek a husband again, I would hardly expect Dev's brother to be the best candidate. I tried to imagine Arya's mouth on my lips, his hands on my breasts, his body on top of mine, and shivered.

There was also a nagging question about Sandhya's note—why had it been unsigned? I remembered all the letters I received from Nizamuddin on the corners of which she had laboriously scrawled out her name. If this was to be her last communication, wouldn't she have wanted to do the same? Could Arya have written the note himself, to push me towards accepting him? Could he have omitted the signature, realizing I might recognize it as fake? In the end, I decided he probably hadn't, but the last bit of doubt remained.

It hardly mattered, though—once I was back in the flat with you, I realized how little need I had for someone else. I always avoided characterizing our existence as a happy one for fear of having our luck turn, of attracting the evil eye. But with each day of contentment that went by, it became harder not to admit it. I decided to write Arya a nice letter declining his proposal. I told him that with all the loss his parents had been through, it was important he stay with them now. I complimented him on his gentlemanly behavior towards me ever since Dev had died. “Wherever she is, the kindness you extended to Ashvin and me must have filled Sandhya's heart with joy. I can never stop thinking of you as her husband, as the one she truly loved. As Dev's brother, and hence my own. And of course, you will always be Ashvin's Yara uncle to me.” The result was quite satisfying, I decided—reading it, he could not possibly be offended. Nor could he be left with any hope that it would be fruitful to pursue me further. I mailed it just in time—a few days later, on the twenty-sixth of June, 1975, to be exact, the whole country came to a standstill.

M
RS. HUSSAIN KNOCKED ON THE DOOR AT 8 A.M. “COME QUICK. IT'S
your Paji on the phone. A trunk call from Delhi.” Then, seeing my alarm, she added, “Don't be worried—he probably just wants to talk about the Emergency that Indira Gandhi's declared.”

She elaborated as we hurried up the stairs. “It's on radio and in all the newspapers. JP and the rest of the opposition—Indira Gandhi's rounded them all up and thrown them in jail. She did it last night, after her own cabinet ministers were all sound asleep. Plus, she's suspended freedom of speech—not just that, but right to property, everything. All the news is being censored—
the Indian Express
left its editorial page blank in protest.”

Paji quickly filled me in on the rest of the details. How the crisis had been brewing for two weeks, since the judge in Allahabad found Indira Gandhi guilty of election fraud and banned her from holding office. How a Supreme Court judge ruled that she could remain until her appeal was settled, but not vote in Parliament until then. “Of course, the opposition went wild with the scent of her blood in the air. Did you see JP's rally yesterday, when he called for a blockade of the prime minister's house? I suppose this was the only way she could stay in power, though she claims she did it because JP urged the armed forces to revolt.”

The morning newspapers in Delhi hadn't even been printed. “She had the electricity cut off to every press in the city, including my own. What's sad is that the original election fraud charges were so laughable. Do you know, the London
Times
called them no more serious than a traffic offense?”

Someone seemed to be screaming in the background on Paji's side, and I heard a series of muffled thuds. “In case you're wondering, that's your mother. I've locked her up in her room, and she's trying everything she can to get out. She was all dressed up to go on a protest march with her student hooligans this morning, can you imagine? What she doesn't realize is how much trouble she's in already—it'll be a miracle if I can prevent her from being carted off to jail.”

As it was, the police came that week not only for Biji but, much to his shock, Paji himself. It was only through the intervention of his Congress friends, and a promise to print two lakh free copies of a pamphlet entitled “The Many Boons of the Emergency” that Paji managed to secure his (and Biji's) continuing freedom. “The amazing thing is that your mother still seems to think that what she did was reasonable,” he wrote. “She spends all day threatening to go to Tihar jail to visit her incarcerated friends.”

Paji wasn't the only one forced to resort to such tactics to save himself. All sorts of people found themselves entangled in the giant nationwide dragnet that was supposed to capture “antisocial elements” (smugglers, black marketeers, and, presumably, opposition politicians). The dowager princess of Jaipur was kept in jail until she signed a declaration in support of the Emergency. The editor of the Communist-leaning weekly
Blitz
, who had denounced Indira at every opportunity, suddenly appeared on television to laud her boldness and integrity. Mrs. Hussain told me of industrialists lining up to garland Indira, or even throw themselves at her feet for forgiveness, depending on how errant had been their politics.

A few mornings after the declaration of the Emergency, I saw a list in the newspaper of twenty-six “antipatriotic” organizations that had been banned. As Paji pointed out, the groups spanned the political spectrum, from the Marxist Communist Party to all sorts of right-wing communal Hindu factions. Foremost among the latter was the HRM. Arya went into hiding that very first week, just before the police came to arrest him under MISA, the ominously titled Maintenance of Internal Security Act.

June turned into July, then August, then September. With each month, the nation backed away further from the anarchy into which it had seemed ready to plunge. It was tremendously soothing to wake up every morning and read about nothing but all the benefits we were enjoying. MISA had cleansed everyone from tax evaders to drug dealers to, we were told, wife beaters, from the country. Both sugar and kerosene were suddenly in plentiful supply at the ration shop downstairs. I went to get the television license renewed, and to my shock, the clerk greeted me with a smile. Nobody had an inkling as yet of the forced sterilizations and other atrocities Indira's son Sanjay was planning to unleash.

By October, giant cloth posters of Indira hung all over the city, perhaps painted by the same artists who made the posters for Hindi films. They were so large that ripples ran through the image of her face, from the tip of her nose through the waves of white in her hair—a super-heroine flying intrepidly above us, ready to tackle any adversity that came our way. Her countenance became familiar, reassuring—whereas previously she had been ubiquitous only on the television news, now Indira truly was everywhere. One of these posters was even erected for a rally held in your school compound—it listed the entire twenty-point program the Emergency was supposed to accomplish. Afterwards, Indira remained smiling benignly over the playground, as if, undeterred by the twenty listed tasks already on her plate, she had generously tacked on the guardianship of the schoolchildren as the twenty-first.

Inspired by this vision in their backyard, the school organized a drawing contest—each student was to pick one of the twenty points and make a poster about it. You picked point number fourteen—“controlling the prices of essential commodities.” The poster depicted a gaggle of children cheering and dancing around a mound of sugar, with rupee notes sticking out of some of their pockets. The prize, however, went to an entry on point number seven, “limiting land ownership among the wealthy.”

WE DIDN'T MAKE OUR
usual trip to Delhi that year for the Divali festival. On the one hand, you missed the activities with your cousins, especially the gambling at vaguely understood card games, using potato chips as stakes. On the other hand, you had forgotten how much fun it was to light rockets from our terrace. Pinky was particularly outrageous, being at the peak of her tomboy phase. She lit “atom bombs” under cans, kicked ground wheels like footballs, flung live whistle rockets at children in range. Once, she set fire to the curtains in Mrs. Hamid's flat on the floor below. I noticed she was always protective of you—never subjecting you to the same rough play she employed to keep a hold on her gang.

The newspapers predicted an unusually subdued Divali this time due to the Emergency, but shops seemed packed as usual, and worshippers spilled out of temples into the street. I was apprehensive about Divali eve, when I would be the one responsible for the pooja for Lakshmi that Dev always used to perform. The year after he had died, we had not celebrated, and after then, we had always gone for Lakshmi pooja to Nizamuddin.

When it came time, I got several of the details wrong. You reminded me of the coins that were supposed to be dabbed with milk for prosperity, the saffron with which I neglected to mark the forehead of Lakshmi. I couldn't remember the prayers Dev used to recite—you were resentful of my impromptu substitutions. At the end, you brought the sugar for me to sprinkle in your mouth and my own, but without Dev, it wasn't the same. I tried to get you upstairs to the terrace to distract you with the fireworks, but you pouted that you preferred to stay in and watch a TV program on the Emergency.

When the doorbell rang, you let me be the one to answer it. It took me a few seconds to match the unshod person before me, clothed grimily in a loincloth, with the one I had seen only some months before, so spruce in a tie and coat. “I didn't think you'd turn me away on Divali,” Arya said, his face barely visible through a mass of knotted hair, his body reeking of dirt and sweat. “So I waited until today before knocking on your door.”

You must have recognized the voice even with the TV on, because you came running up, shouting, “Yara uncle!” The sight of the disheveled figure at our doorstep, still waiting to be invited in, made you stop. “Yara uncle?” you asked, uncertainly.

“Yes, it
is
your Yara uncle.” Arya took the opportunity to stride in and lift you up into the air. “Don't you recognize him under this beard?”

“No, I don't. It looks awful, your beard. Why are you dressed like that? And what's that smell?” You wrinkled your nose.

“Your uncle has been hiding because bad men are chasing him. He's trying to look very ordinary so no one recognizes him. You have to promise not to tell anyone you saw me here, understand?” Arya put you down. “Understand?” he repeated, staring into your eyes until you nodded.

He turned to me. “I hope you don't mind—I'm sorry to barge in like this. With everyone celebrating, I felt too alone—I just couldn't resist coming over today. It's only for an hour or two—I won't spend the night—I'll go right now if you say.”

It wasn't just his appearance that made me nervous, or the way his eyes roved about the room behind me, as if searching the corners to make sure nobody would spring out. His sudden presence here in Bombay, in our building, at our doorstep, the way he used to materialize all those years ago, also brought back uncomfortable memories. But I could hardly ask him to leave. I told myself that the issue between us already stood resolved by my letter, that all I had to do, if needed, was to remind him of my discouraging response. Perhaps in a way that was firm, yet not harsh—a way that acknowledged the compliment he was paying me with his continuing interest, even held out the possibility of meeting again, innocently someday, for ice cream at the Coffee House. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

Arya nodded. “It's been a while, especially, since I had chappatis cooked at home. Although Yara uncle can only eat if Ashvin here feeds me with his own hand.”

“But the smell,” you said, scrunching up your face again.

We decided he would first take a bath, before I served dinner. As the water heated, Arya told me how he had spent the last several months. His words tumbled out rapidly, with deep inhalations between them, like a man who has been running, speaking between gasps to catch his breath. “I was lucky—they made the mistake of going to Hema's house instead. I think they mixed me up with Gopal—they took him to the station, but then let him go—I suppose they didn't think him important enough. I left Delhi that very night. All the traveling I had done paid off—I knew exactly where to hide, whom I could trust. Of course, the police was shutting down HRM offices everywhere and locking up the same people who had helped me set them up, so I had to keep moving. They almost captured me, too—once in Patna, where a constable fired a rifle after me, and then again at the station in Nagpur. Someone had lent me the change of clothes I have on—the police thought I was a villager fresh off the train and let me walk out.” He paused to thrust a greedy handful of the peanuts I had laid in front of him into his mouth. “I must be quite high on their list, I think. Not like George Fernandes, whom they've still not caught—not as famous as him, but still.” I did not miss the note of pride in his voice. As he chewed, a little of his hunted expression seemed to dissipate.

I expected him to mention my letter, but he didn't. Could he not have received it? There was no point bringing it up myself, so I kept my silence.

You carried in a box from the bedroom and ceremoniously laid it down on the table next to the nuts. “What's this?” Arya asked. “A present for Yara uncle?” Inside were Dev's toiletries and shaving set. Arya pulled you into his lap. “Yara uncle can't get rid of his beard, you know. Otherwise the bad men might recognize him.”

In the end, though, perhaps against his better judgment, he did shave. I was startled to see him emerge from the bathroom. I had shown him to the cache of your father's clothes you had insisted we keep. Arya had helped himself to clean undergarments, a kurta pajama outfit, a pair of chappals that were almost the right size for his feet. With his suddenly clean-shaven face and the way he had slimmed down on the run, he resembled Dev more than ever before, despite his gray hair. He even had the same Cinthol soap smell on his skin, the same Godrej after-shave scent emanating from his face. You noticed it too, because you wrapped your head in the shirttails of his kurta, and tried to burrow into him.

At your insistence, Arya performed the Lakshmi pooja again. This time, Lakshmi had her forehead properly anointed with saffron, and the appropriate incantations were recited while moistening each coin with milk. Arya sprinkled the consecrated sugar in our mouths—his manner, from the closing of his eyes to the tilting of his head, was so reminiscent of Dev, that I had to look away. You pulled your Yara uncle to the pantheon, to have all the other gods appeased correctly as well, after the years of negligence to which I might have subjected them.

After dinner, you wanted to go up to the terrace to set off rockets, but Arya shook his head. “Yara uncle isn't ready yet to meet your neighbors after shaving off his beard. He's going to teach you three-card flush instead. It's more important on Divali than setting off fireworks—to gamble and test your fortune for the coming year.” Even with the five-paise stakes, you raked in more than six rupees—your uncle called it beginner's luck, but used various shuffling tricks to make you win.

At some point, you put on “House of Bamboo” on the gramophone. Arya was reluctant to dance, but you latched onto his kurta and dragged him out on the floor. He was slow and ungainly, not at all like Dev. He settled into a peculiar cycle of steps, alternately raising each arm to form a right angle at the elbow, then twirling clumsily. I clapped along, mildly amused, until, against my better judgment, I let you pull me in as well.