The City of Devi: A Novel

THE CITY OF DEVI

M
ANIL
S
URI

Dedication

for Larry

Contents

SARITA

1

FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE BOMB THAT IS SUPPOSED TO OBLITERATE
Bombay and kill us all, I stand in the ruins of Crawford Market, haggling with the lone remaining fruit seller over the price of the pomegranate in my hand.

“Is five hundred rupees not an outrageous price already? Why won’t you sell it to me for five hundred?”

“Look at what’s happening around you, memsahib. Do you think the orchards are overflowing with pomegranates? Do you think the lorries are driving into Mumbai every day and filling the markets with fruit? I’m only asking for a thousand because it’s you, memsahib, but even three times that wouldn’t be too much for this last piece. Which really was the best one in the pile to begin with.”

I look at the sign for Crawford Market behind me, still smoldering from last night’s air raid (or has it simply been another terrorist bomb?). All around are shops gutted in the fire. Remains of baskets lie scattered on the ground, pieces of fruit too charred for the scavengers to steal rest at my feet. I notice a tangerine that still has its characteristic knob at the top—it has been roasted to a black, perfectly whole crisp. Down the corridor, only one other stall stands intact—a spice merchant who has also somehow escaped the attack. He is using a stick to try and rouse the carcass of a dog that has died in front of his store.

The fruitwalla has a point. Supply and demand, he has me where he wants. This much I know: I must have the pomegranate before I begin my quest—some instinct deep inside insists it’s my best shot. But what’s tied into the folds of the silk dupatta around my neck is a few hundred less than the fruitwalla wants.

“Bhaiyya, listen,” I try once more. “They’re dropping the atom bomb this week. Atom bomb, you understand, not some firecracker that’s demolished the market around you. On Bombay. Mumbai. Whatever you call it, the city’s going to be finished. What would you do even if you
did
manage to squeeze out the extra money from someone? Take it to heaven with you? And what if nobody else came to your store?—most of the city has fled, you know. Is this what you want to happen to your fruit?” I nudge the tangerine with my foot, and it crumbles into ash.

But the fruitwalla is adamant, he won’t sell for less. “It’s all up to Devi ma’s grace,” he says. “She’s the city’s patron goddess, after all. Now that she’s appeared in our midst, perhaps she’ll save us, who knows? But even if she doesn’t, even if she only lets me hold the money for ten minutes, at least I’ll have it for that much time. At least I’ll die with an offering for her in my hand.”

Suddenly, the futility of what I am trying to do overwhelms me—how ridiculous to put such hopes in a pomegranate! I look at the smoke billowing out of the buildings in the distance and smell the soot that hangs everywhere. The garbage collecting for days, the stench of bodies rotting in the air. Ever since I started my vigil for Karun eighteen days ago, I’ve kept close to my building complex, sheltered from the mayhem. Trying not to obsess over where he might be now, why he left. With the internet dying out, together with phones, radio and television, even electricity, my only news about the outside has been through tidbits from our lone remaining watchman. Seeing the devastation all around today fills me with disbelief—the city, as I knew and loved it, is gone. Somewhere towards Metro, a gun fires three times—looters, probably, executed by the police. Or perhaps by vigilantes, the police force, according to our watchman, having also fled. I wonder what would happen if I bolted—wrapped the pomegranate in my dupatta and leapt over the rubble that used to be the entrance. Would the fruitwalla run after me? Would the vigilantes fire at me as well? Surely their code of conduct must frown upon the gunning down of women?

Perhaps the fruitwalla sees the calculation on my face, because he takes the pomegranate from my hand. He eyes me carefully, and I see him appraising the mangalsutra I wear. Has it been two years already since our marriage when Karun tied it around my neck?

I run the black beads of the necklace through my fingers, I feel the gold pendant. What difference does it make if I die with or without it?—at least this way I will feel I have a chance. I take off the mangalsutra and hand it to the fruitwalla. He drops the red and heavy orb, that is to give me Karun, back into my palm.

“Five hundred more, memsahib,” he cries after me, remembering that I must have at least that much money. I do not turn around.

Now that I’ve accomplished this goal, I’m overwhelmed by the enormity of what remains. This morning when I informed the watchman that I, too, was leaving “for a while” like most of the other residents already had, the sole imperative in my mind was to find Karun, or risk everything trying. I couldn’t bear to waste another day waiting for him, not with so little time left before the promised end. Except I didn’t pause to formulate a strategy—I have no game plan on how to get to him. The last time we spoke, before the phones all jammed, he called from the conference center in Bandra, several miles north. Perhaps I can take a bus, I think to myself, before remembering the roads are bereft of traffic: anything with wheels and petrol driven off in the scramble to evacuate. Even the police station near the market lies deserted, stripped of all its jeeps. My only far-fetched hope is there might still be a stray train. I decide to head towards Metro Cinema and the railway station beyond.

The art deco “Metro” sign beckons as resplendently as ever from the edge of the building, but the adjoining wall and roof have been blown off. Banks of rubble-covered seats rise from the ruins like a multiplex of just-excavated coliseums. In the lobby of the theater, arranged faceup next to each other, lie three bodies with neat bullet holes in their foreheads. They are surrounded by a TV set, a car stereo, and several cell phones, with a sign above their heads that reads, “Thief does not pay.” Some passer-by has deposited flowers at their feet. Why steal a TV when there hasn’t been a broadcast for so long? I think of myself laid out next to them, the pomegranate positioned as a warning above my head.

I walk along the side of the building, past the broken windows and empty frames for coming attractions. An old poster of
Superdevi
lies among the glass shards, showing the girl goddess flying triumphantly over the city’s skyscrapers. I remember the throngs when the film opened on all six screens, the advance booking lines stretching around the block. How innocuous everything seemed when it was released. Who would have ever thought a movie could lead us this far?

Karun and I went some weeks after its release—it was the first movie we saw together. Sitting by his side, I sensed his shyness thicken in the dark until it hung like a scrim between us. Would he reach through it for my hand? I wondered, did he share the attraction I felt? Would we ever be like a Bollywood couple, so joyously in love that we sang in gardens, danced around parks?

Before I can lose myself in such thoughts, the air raid siren goes off.

I SQUAT IN THE DARK
in the bomb shelter basement of Bombay Hospital. Fingers of sunlight reach out through boarded windows, their tips tracing patterns across the floor. The air in the room is shared by so many people, I wonder if it has any oxygen left to give. The orderlies who guard the staircase door, their nostrils flaring with affected menace each time they exhale. The khaki-clad men standing in a knot, oblivious to the smoke their beedis create. (Who are they? Taxi drivers? Surely I didn’t miss taxis still plying the streets above, willing to be hailed?) The doctors snoring in their cordoned-off chairs, the nurses giggling over old film star magazines, the patients (the ones who have managed to drag themselves down from their rooms, anyway) cursing and groaning as they try to accommodate their bodies to the unyielding cement. I listen to their hacks and wheezes and wonder what they are suffering from, what pestilence they empty into my air. Strangely, all I smell is fish.

It is not quite the clean fragrance of pomfret freshly caught, when you first slice it, or prawns, cold and pink, when you pull their shells off. No, this has a whiff of pungency, just this side of rot, the kind that hovers over nameless denizens displayed in the sun too long. I think back to the crush of people that materialized out of the empty streets as if by a magician’s trick. Was there a machiwalli in the crowd? Who managed like me to squeeze in past the iron hospital gate and the gesticulating sentries somehow? I look around the room, wondering, absurdly, if I might make a purchase. Small misshapen creatures left over in the machiwalli’s basket, best disinfected with spices and sterilized in hot oil. But none of the women carries a basket. They stare back at me—housewives, maids, saffron-clad devotees, jewelry-laden socialites. Have they smelled it as well? Are they thinking of crisp machi-fry too?

Ever since Karun disappeared, the only way I can distract myself is to think about food. I reminisce about the roasted corn vendors who used to sit along Marine Drive, the shuttered dosa shop down the street, even the McDonald’s at Colaba that fell victim to the very first bombing raid. Puris puff and crisp in my mind as I roll out my daily quota of chappatis made with gritty black-market flour. Imaginary chops sizzle in cumin-scented oil as I throw a stingily measured portion of lentils yet again into the pot. No matter how hard I try, though, my thoughts keep returning to Karun. I would gladly forsake all the food in the world, never let it stray past my lips again, if only I could be assured of my reunion with him.

I unwrap the pomegranate from my dupatta. I picture its juice beading on Karun’s lips. His tongue wiping it off, tasting the sweet and the sour, leaving behind a thin trace of the red. Doubt clutches at me again. To believe in folly like this, such desperation, such old wives’ tales. And yet all I need, I remind myself, is for him to remember those nights we played this game. I squeeze the pomegranate for reassurance, feel the smoothness of its skin. What made him leave so abruptly, in such an agitated state? Was it me from whom he was trying to get away? Will I ever see him again—all the disasters that could have befallen him in the eighteen days since?

I calm myself by imagining the spell taking effect. He stretches in bed, his shirt pulls up, and I notice its shadow against his skin. I pull it up higher and kiss his navel, pull it to his neck and kiss his clavicle, then rest my chin on his chest and lose myself somewhere along the line that separates his lips.

IT WAS THIS LINE
that first drew me in. Not the eyes or the nose or the actual lips themselves but rather the way they rested against each other. What did the darkness between them signify? A hint of mystery? A mark of shyness? I felt an invitation there to explore what lay beyond his face, a promise of empathy I had not sensed in the scores of photographs I had evaluated over the years.

Of course I expertly scanned the other parts of the photo as well. I made sure his ears were both the same size and examined his hair for flecks of gray. I searched for scars and blemishes and found one on his chin. (A fall from a swing, perhaps—was he a daredevil still?) His eyes were set a little close together, but I didn’t find the effect unappealing. He looked like a boy posing in a childhood photograph, staring just past the camera at someone for reassurance—his mother, perhaps.

I kept being pulled back to the curve. The way it rose from the corner of his mouth to outline the innocence of each lip. The way it darkened intriguingly at its midpoint before continuing on its path, as graceful and symmetric as a mathematical plot. How did it change through the course of a day? Did it widen when he laughed, twist when he was angry, smudge when he was sad? What effect would desire have on it?

“Not bad, is he?” my sister Uma said, taking the photograph from my hand. “But let me warn you right away—he’s a scientist just like Anoop and the rest of them, and you know how those people are.” She rolled her eyes at me, though I knew she was fairly satisfied with my brother-in-law to whom she had been married three years. “Though you, with your statistics, should be able to better relate.”

I took the photograph back from her. A scientist, I thought, and imagined Karun with test tubes and microscopes, with banks of computer lights blinking in the background. Only the sheen of filing cabinets glimmered behind him in the picture. “So, do we have a fourth person for the picnic?” Uma inquired.

“Why ask me?” I replied. She could tell I was intrigued. “He’s Anoop’s friend—let him be the one to decide.”

Uma smiled meaningfully at my mother, who sighed. She believed in old-fashioned visits by the boy to the girl’s house, not these sorts of informal meetings. She had objected in the beginning, when Uma started setting up picnics and restaurant outings and once even a movie with two male colleagues. But we had already tried more formal routes without any success. The networking, the astrologers, the classified ads, all these had failed. I had approved at least a half dozen boys and came close to matrimony on three separate occasions, but a last-minute problem always intervened. The most recent match was the worst, almost permanently killing my chances: the boy’s grandfather passed away just before the wedding and his family declared me inauspicious, blaming the death on me. “Who knows how long our Bunty would have survived in her shadow?” they went around saying.

Last month I turned thirty-one (though prospective matches were told twenty-eight). In a few weeks I would complete my M.A. in statistics (my second master’s—I already had one in management sciences). With this latest degree, I would be not only old but also over-educated, my prospects slimmer still. My mother knew she had no choice but to agree to events like this picnic—her fear was that I might embark on yet another degree, immure myself permanently in the nunnery of college. “Do you even know what kind of family he comes from?” she asked worriedly.

“We’re just meeting him for a picnic, not digging up his ancestral tree,” Uma replied. “He’ll be here next Sunday—if you’re so worried, you can ask him yourself.”

I suspected that my sister had started arranging these meetings partly out of guilt. Being younger than me by three years made it all the more awkward that I remained unmarried. “Sarita’s been so busy exercising her brain that she hasn’t had time for her heart, the poor thing,” my mother would offer embarrassedly, by way of explanation. Except I think she had it backwards, that I buried myself in books precisely because of my lack of popularity, of romantic success. Ever since childhood, I’d been burdened with the epithet of the brainy one—perhaps I would have gladly cast off this reputation had more opportunities for fun come my way. I sometimes wished I enjoyed schoolwork less—like Uma, for instance, whose circle of friends seemed to widen each time her class rank dipped. Even my mother and she bonded over their shared phobia of algebra in ways I never could.