The Age of Shiva (45 page)

I watched my favorite old movies every night—
Mamta
and
Aurat
and
Mother India
. Nargis appeared on my screen repeatedly, to shoot her son over and over again. A part of every woman was Kali, just like a part was Parvati—that's what the reviews had explained. Did Kali reside in me as well—would I have consumed you too, had you stayed?

Sometimes the evenings progressed, the streetlamps came on, and still the cassettes played on the VCR. I knew what awaited me in the other room—the sight that made each night so difficult to bear. Your bed all neatly made up, with the sheets and the pillowcases I still changed. And right next to it my own, as stark as the cot from
Aradhana
on which Sharmila slept in jail. We had kept them apart ever since the year you turned fifteen, when everything changed. Was it so wrong of me to join them again?

ONE EMOTION BURNED
brightly through the haze of my grief—anger towards Paji. After the movies ran their course, I lay in bed—sometimes yours, sometimes my own. The sheets crinkled in the heat of my fury, the walls glowed orange and red. I played out imaginary dialogues with him—how this was the final straw, how I was fed up of his meddling, how I would no longer allow him to run my life. Sometimes I found myself spouting my lines aloud. “Did you forget I'm his mother? How dare you make such enormous changes in his life without even talking to me?” At other times, I scrambled into the living room and furiously started scribbling out a letter to him, listing all the ways he had derailed my attempts at happiness. “Isn't it enough that you made my mother's life a living hell? Did I have so much left that you had to take away my son as well?”

By daylight, my ire subsided somewhat, though it never completely abated. I made more reasoned plans on how to convey my resentment. Calling him was no use—I always became too tongue-tied when he was on the phone. Sending a letter would not work either—he was much too articulate, much too adept at finding arguments to snake around the written word. I could see him finding elegant ways to counter my accusations, to assert that he had acted selflessly, only to neutralize Arya's influence.

The only option was to confront him in person. To stand in the same library room, refusing to be cowed by the cold blast of the air-conditioning, and pummel him one by one with my grievances. I decided to go to Delhi and have a final showdown with him. Even if it did nothing to change his behavior, the satisfaction of telling him off to his face was something I needed deep inside.

But it was not so easy to get the better of Paji. Before I could get my ticket, he died.

I HARDLY BELIEVED
the news when the call came. Surely Paji couldn't have been felled by something as ordinary as a heart attack? It happened on his morning walk, near the intersection of Ansari and Tilak roads. There was a temple at the corner, and for years Paji had been climbing the steps to the shrine at the top. He never went inside, just walked past the entrance, “to show God that His adversary was still in good health.” Most of the pilgrims took their footwear off at the bottom of the steps and climbed barefoot, but Paji tromped up in his leather shoes, and made it a point to scrape the dirt off his soles on the top step. He would relish the shocked looks and outraged shouts he encountered—a few times, he had been involved in confrontations with the priest himself. “If your God made everything, then surely He made cow dung as well—why should you object?”

Perhaps if Paji had sat down on the steps when the pain started, or even asked his friend Bansi, who was accompanying him, for help, he might have survived. But he soldiered on, refusing to give anyone in the temple (including the idols themselves, Bansi noted) the satisfaction of seeing him falter. He made it to the top, scraped his shoes on the steps for the last time, and managed to make it all the way around the corner, so that he was completely out of sight of the temple before he collapsed. Bansi said that he had tried several times that morning to get Paji to stop to take a rest, but was dismissed. “It's just gas,” Paji said. “That's the most God has ever managed to conjure up to scare me.”

For quite some time now, the only interaction remaining between Biji and him had, quite literally, been a battle to the death. A staring contest to see who would outlive the other—nobody expected Paji to be the first to blink. Certainly nobody expected him to be a victim of divine retribution, as everyone now said.

But Paji proved to be iron-willed even in death. After the Emergency was rescinded and Indira Gandhi defeated, it had been Biji's political connections that protected them from reprisals by the new government. Paji never lived down the humiliation, never forgave her for this. He was foresighted enough to plan for the eventuality of his dying first, organized enough to arrange his revenge against Biji in advance. I got off the train in Delhi to find my mother beside herself—the funeral had not taken place as yet. Paji had stipulated something he knew would be a slap across her face—something to repudiate not only Biji, but the religion they both had been born into as well. He left written instructions specifying that there was to be no funeral pyre, not even an electric cremation—he wanted to be placed in a plain wooden box like a Muslim or a Christian and be buried instead.

It took a while to find a graveyard willing to accept a coffin with a Hindu body in it. Sharmila's husband Munshi, the only Muslim in the family, led us in throwing handfuls of dirt into the grave. A reporter from the
Times of India
attended, and wrote an article playing up the unusualness of the funeral arrangement the next day.
“In death as in life, even in these days of communal strife, Rajinder Sawhney has shown the country that the secular ideals of Jawaharlal Nehru have not been forgotten yet.”
The Congress Party then felt shamed into issuing a statement, lauding Paji as someone who single-handedly built the entire Indian publishing industry from scratch. (The statement was later retracted when other publishers, who were bigger donors to the party coffers, objected.)

Biji boycotted the ceremony, which she regarded as blasphemous. Upon hearing that the news of this ignominy, which she had hoped would pass unnoticed, was now in the newspaper for everyone to see, she became somewhat unhinged. She stormed through the house, collecting all of Paji's paraphernalia—his souvenirs, his clothes, his books, even the ancient pair of his slippers she used to secretly touch long ago to start her day. “If he wants his body eaten by worms, that's fine with me. Since he refused to be cremated, the least I can do is give a proper end to his things.” Sharmila made a plea to have at least the books spared, but Biji seemed particularly determined to ensure that none of them escaped the “purification,” as she put it. “All those years he flaunted his learning in my face—look, how foolish of him to have forgotten his library behind.” She tore down the plaque with Nehru's disavowal of religion from the wall and added it to her pile.

She had the ceremony performed with real sandalwood, even paying for a Brahmin priest to recite the prayers at the cremation ghats at Nigam Bodh. Roopa's son Dilip, as the eldest male heir, was taken along to light the pyre. Afterwards, Biji insisted that we all sort through the ashes, collecting bits of charred knickknacks and the spines of books that had not burnt. She had them placed in a traditional earthenware pot covered with a red cloth—we drove to Hardwar that very afternoon to deposit them in the Ganges.

Biji hired a boat to take us to the middle of the river, guarding the pot zealously in her lap as the boatman rowed us over. She didn't offer to share the task with any of us, but shook out all the contents herself—reaching in to scour out the last stubborn bits with her bare hands before consigning the pot as well. Unlike the box with Dev's remains, the mix contained little actual ash—mostly heavier remnants that plopped into the water, plus a few unburned leathery bits that floated for a while. I imagined the spines of books from Paji's entire library released into the river, from Shakespeare to Austen, Kipling to Tagore. A giant school of fish liberated from their confines, streaming through the water to turn the Ganges green and gold and red.

Perhaps I could swim away as unfettered as well, now that Paji no longer had his hold on me. I looked at Sharmila weeping as she murmured her farewells—why couldn't I share her grief? Roopa, beside her, was alternating between heartrending wails and long, luxurious sobs—she threw out a hand towards the water now as if trying to latch onto Paji before he swirled away in the Ganges. I tried once more to ignite regret in my heart, but all I could summon was relief.

Then I thought of the red and green and gold fish again. I imagined them swimming through valleys and gorges, past towns and villages, across the vast Gangetic plains. Spreading their knowledge through the water, the learning so consistently championed by Paji over the years, until they reached the open sea.

At home, we opened the letters Paji had left with his lawyer for each of his three daughters. Although he had willed me a generous sum of money for your education, he put the flat in Bombay in your name, Ace, not mine. Rather than being stung by this omission, the idea struck me as almost quaint—Paji worrying about the danger I might pose to the property's ownership by remarrying.
To be a parent is to be guilty
, he wrote.
Remember that, if you feel tempted to judge me. Perhaps you'll understand one day, and forgive me if you think I played too strong a role in shaping your destiny.

His writing had lost none of its beauty with age. I remembered his hand enfolding mine as he helped me practice my penmanship. “You have to think of the pen as part of yourself—only then will the ink flow smoothly through the nib.” I folded Paji's letter back into its envelope and tucked it into my suitcase.

“Would it have killed you to cry a little?” Roopa demanded at dinner. “Even if you didn't love Paji as much, did you forget you were still his daughter?”

I looked at her face. Her eyes were ferociously red—on her cheeks, she proudly wore a palimpsest of grief where streams of tears had dried successively.

“Or do you still hold Paji to blame?—poor Meera, always going around complaining he never loved her enough, that she was never his favorite. I suppose you must feel better now, with all the evidence he's given you today.”

She was referring to Paji's will. Roopa's face had crumpled upon learning that the amount mentioned in her letter was only a little more than what Paji had left to Sharmila or myself. She rose out of her chair, visibly agitated, when the lawyer announced that the bulk had gone to an obscure scientific organization based in Madras, whose purpose was to debunk claims of religious miracles. “They're the ones who capture sleight of hand on film, who arrange for a swimming pool when some holy man declares he can walk on water. Your father wants them to use his money to go after the Satya Sai Baba himself.”

To her credit, Roopa quickly regained her composure, even managing to hide her disappointment when the lawyer, in response to her delicate questioning, said it would be pointless to contest the will. “It just shows you what a great man he was,” she forced herself to say.

Now, however, she had freed herself from any restraints. The desire to draw blood was radiant on her face. “It must be tempting to count what Paji left and be comforted by it. But I know you're not that foolish, Meera, to mistake fairness for love. We all know whom he really cared for inside—it would be difficult, even for you, to delude yourself on that count. As for the money, what choice did you leave him with, anyway? All those years of guilt that you piled up on him, all those times you shamed him into believing he didn't love you enough. I can only imagine how beleaguered he must have felt, how tortured you must have left him. It's a wonder he wasn't driven to leave you his entire estate.”

Sharmila, sitting white-faced at the table, began to say something, but I put my hand over hers. “This might come as a shock to you, Roopa, but not all of us have had designs on Paji's money. That's what all these nasty words are about, isn't it? Perhaps we should leave this talk till tomorrow, before you say something you'll regret.”

But Roopa was too enkindled to stop midway. “It wasn't just him, Meera, was it? You've forged an entire career of making people feel guilty for not loving you enough. Even I haven't been immune from it. When I think back to the days we first met Dev—how, after all, did you maneuver him into marrying you in the first place? He certainly paid for it, the sweet man—and not just him—we're all paying the price, with Paji's will. I just shudder to think what havoc you must be wreaking now on poor Ashvin.”

Hearing your name made me rise to Roopa's bait again. “You know Ashvin has nothing to do with this, so don't bring his name to your lips. As for the will, I've already told you I don't care about it. If anyone's the greedy one, it's you, Roopa—greedy about Paji, greedy about Biji, greedy about Dev. Whenever you've seen me get the slightest bit of love or attention or happiness, you've always tried to snatch it away. I used to wonder how anyone could be so jealous, what I could have possibly done to deserve such treatment, whether you were just insecure. But now I realize that you can't really help your meanness, you were just born filled with it.”

Roopa made a sound in her throat between a laugh and a growl. “See? This is just what I was talking about. I'm mean, I'm against Meera, I've wronged her, like everyone else has. Go ahead, fault me, tell me all your problems are because of my hate. You've killed Dev and banished poor Ashvin to a hostel—with Paji gone too, whom else can you blame? I don't mind—from now on, I can be your whipping boy. Every time something goes wrong in your life, I'll be standing by to accept the blame. The truth is that there's only one person who's responsible, and that's you, Meera. It's been you all along, nobody else. All the times you've blundered, all the people you've driven away.”