The City of Devi: A Novel (15 page)

I caught up with him as he fumbled with the door at the entryway to the flat. “It’s locked. I have the key.”

“I really have to go.”

“I’ll open it, and you can go, but first you have to answer one question. Tell me, truthfully, why you came.”

“What? You’re the one who invited me. For dinner. Have you forgotten?”

“Not today. Why you came to the
park
. What you were searching for. All these weeks, the question you’ve evaded.”

He glared at me. “The children. I came to watch them play. Someday I hope to have my own. Satisfied?” His voice had a defiant tone. “Not for this, not for what you were thinking, what you were trying. It’s outrageous.”

“OK, fair enough. You’ve obviously had enough time to cook up a response. But you must be crazy if you expect me to believe it. Even crazier if you believe it yourself.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy—”

“I know the way you were staring at the park. The way you’ve been carrying on with me. Tea and ice cream, what crap. Why don’t you just be honest and admit it?”

“Open this door.” He began pounding on it. “Open this door at once. Somebody help.”

“No need for such drama. Here’s the key.” I threw it at him. “There are taxis around the corner—I hope this time you have enough money in your wallet to pay the fare yourself.”

HE CALLED ABOUT
an hour later on his cell. “I have to tell you something.” I didn’t answer. “About your question.” Again, I kept silent. “Are you there?”

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“Not like that. I’m downstairs.”

He had found the path that circled around to the small strip of beach behind the building. As I approached, he rose from the fallen palm trunk on which he sat. “Jaz?”

“Yes, it’s me.” I stepped carefully toward him across the debris-littered sand. The moon shone down through the palm fronds, covering him in a delicate crisscross of light. He looked insubstantial, lace-like, like a spirit that had lost its way and been captured in this lunar mesh.

For a few minutes we stood in silence, watching the bay. The tide was the furthest I’d ever seen, the waves streaks of silver that appeared almost stationary. “I’d read about the park,” he finally said. “On the internet, while still in Karnal.”

It all came tumbling out—how after junior college in Karnal, he knew he had to spend his three senior years somewhere else, how he’d found postings for similar parks in Delhi, but it still seemed too close to his mother and his family. “I felt dreadful applying for the scholarship, but I knew I had to go far away to survive. It still took me a year and a half in Bombay before I got together the courage to do anything.”

He began telling me more—about grappling with his inner feelings, the doubts he had. Too much information smothers passion every time, I wanted to warn him. Before the moment could drift away in a flow of words, I leaned forward and locked his lips in a kiss.

His mouth felt small, perhaps because his tongue didn’t know how to respond. I held his head and pressed my body into his. He sighed—a sound that emanated from deep within his throat and didn’t fully escape. The moon’s filigree covered my person as well, its rays now engulfed us both in their net.

Upstairs, I led him by the hand to my room. His skin tasted salty but fresh. He cried out when I took him in my mouth, grabbing my head and finishing before I could slow him down. Afterwards, he buried his head in my chest and shyly asked if he could reciprocate.

We slept curled up together. I offered to get us a second pillow, but Karun said no. “I want to be as close as we can—I’ve never spent the night with someone else.” It occurred to me that this was the first time for me as well. For all these years, I’d been used to shikar, in which one doesn’t need a bed.

THE SUN HAS SUNK LOWER
, but dusk hasn’t arrived yet. It looks like we’re passing through one of the shabbier tracts of Matunga or Mahim, but I can’t be sure. It’s easier to tell at night, when the poor areas are the only ones without light. The rich have their own generators, prompted by the past year’s power cuts.

What will I do once the sun sets? The bulbs and switches in my compartment surely don’t work. Boxes of incense and candles lie stacked next to a pile of saris in a corner, but the Jazter, a non-smoker, is matchless. I pull the tarpaulin off a row of crates running along a wall and discover a weapons cache. Gingerly, I sort through the rifles, the ammunition, the hand grenades, wary of triggering off my own private October
19
. I find nothing to illuminate my surroundings—at least not without a bit of a blast.

Wrapped in a cloth is a handgun. It looks as cute and compact as a toy—surely it fires nothing more potent than caps. I’ve never handled a gun before—I’m startled by how much it weighs. I look for the safety catch, such a frequent hiccup in the novels I’ve read, but cannot locate it. Dare I squeeze the trigger to see if it’s loaded? I place it back atop the pile, then pick it up again. Ever since the war started, I’ve felt unsafe—all the people out to get me, as in this morning’s close shave. So I stash the gun in my side trouser pocket. Immediately, I worry about accidental discharges. I try to corral the Jazter jewels out of harm’s way but they keep swinging back.

This all seems so unreal that I feel like laughing. To think I need a gun to protect against those who’d kill me for being Muslim. The joke is on them—the last time I prayed was with Rahim, in the mosque annex. It’s too bad they don’t know about my true religion of noodling—a reason to really get their nuts in a snit.

THE NEXT DAY
, Karun seemed to slip rapidly into morning-after regret. “What time is it? My roommate must be wondering where I went.”

“It’s only ten, and it’s a Saturday, so just relax. I’ll freshen up a bit and then whip us up some omelets.” He looked at me wide-eyed, as if stricken at the thought of eggs. “Of course, if you like, I could make you something else—”

“No, it’s not that. I just have to go.” He fished out his shirt from the jumble on the floor and put it on, then hopped around on one foot as he tried to get the other through a trouser leg. “I’m sorry—I just need to be by myself.”

My shikari reflexes kicked in with full force, juices astir at my prey’s escape attempt. “Wait,” I said, struck by
déjà vu
as he scuttled to the entryway, shoes in hand. “I won’t let you leave just like that.”

The locked door stopped him as before. “Could you give me the key, please. Please?”

“Or what? You’ll threaten to cry for help again? Go ahead, scream all you want, be my guest. I’m not opening the door until after breakfast.”

“I’ll come back, I promise. Some other time, believe me. Right now, just let me go.” Tears sprang to his eyes, panic to his face.

“No, Karun. It’s always scary in the beginning. You can’t just keep running away like that.”

He let me take his shoes and set them down, then lead him back to my room. I tried to steer him to the bed again, but he slumped in a chair instead. Minutes ticked by without him speaking. Finally, I prompted him. “Why don’t you finish telling me what you started last night on the beach? What made you go looking in the first place on the web.”

He must have been waiting for encouragement, because he opened up at once. It began with an innocent question at a family gathering—his cousin Sheila asked him why he didn’t have a girlfriend. “Everyone stopped talking just then, and in the silence, I turned absolutely red. I mumbled something about waiting to finish my studies, that not all my college mates were paired. ‘Yes, but you don’t ever even talk about women,’ Sheila said. ‘Not to you, he doesn’t,’ my mother shot back in my defense. People laughed, and the conversation went on, but Sheila’s remark stayed with me. One of those thoughts that keeps burrowing deeper, once it gains entry into your head.

“Why
didn’t
I take any interest in the opposite sex? My mother, I knew, kept waiting for me to say something about a girlfriend. The boys in junior college, just like the ones in high school, talked about nothing else—it was all I could do to tune them out. I wondered if I might be different—could I prefer men? A purely intellectual hypothesis, mind you, like one might make in physics or mathematics—I’d never detected any actual such feelings in myself. But it quickly became an obsession—I started reading everything I could find about it on the internet. The only scientific way to answer the question, I realized, was to put it to an experimental test.”

“But you’d never even tried it with a woman.”

“I thought about it. Going to a brothel or something sordid like that. I couldn’t get up the courage. Just like I circled the park so many times, too scared to go in, before the evening we met.”

“The evening you ran away.”

“I panicked, as I did each time I thought about explaining myself at tea afterwards. It’s hard to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. As you can see, even sitting here talking to you now takes an effort.”

“I’m honored, I guess. To be your science experiment.” The Jazter had been called many other things after sex, but never that. “And what have you discovered from this experiment?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

I was. After last night, I knew which band he played in—down to the exact instrument. But who was I to argue if he felt he needed to research an encore concert? “I’ll be glad to help any way I can.”

We had breakfast, and then I prepared the bathtub, using a bubble solution my mother had got from France. At first, Karun wouldn’t get in with me, despite my promise of only vegetarian fun. But then curiosity got the better of him. “Nobody I’ve known has ever owned a bathtub—I suppose you must see them all the time in the West.” He put a foot in tentatively, as if mindful of popping the bubbles, then lowered himself to face me in the water. “I always imagined from the photos that they would feel like small personal swimming pools. But actually, this is so much tinier.”

He dodged his body out of the way when I tried to soap him up. So I splashed him, and tickled him with my toes, to which he did respond. Before long, other parts of our anatomy inescapably got involved. And yet, the Jazter scrupulously restrained himself—not so much to honor his gentlemanly word as to preserve Karun’s stamina for afternoon research.

Back in my room, Karun noticed the stack of games I had as a kid. “A model train set! Does it still work?”

“Yes, but it takes forever to set up.” I tried to steer him to something snappier, like Boggle or Mikado, but his mind was set. So I took down the toy village accessories from the top of my cupboard, and the box of extra rails from under my bed. Karun dove right in, spreading out the components, coupling the bogeys, installing the village, down to the tiny plastic men and women. As he stretched out over the tracks to peer at how they aligned through a tunnel, I had visions of the train choo-chooing (
chew-chewing?
) through the valley of his ass.

Between my lecherous fantasies, I helped Karun with the setup. “This was always my favorite,” I said, demonstrating how two sections of track could cross with the help of an elevated bridge. “A great spot for nifty accidents—one train derailing atop another, even a bomb attack once that set the bridge aflame.”

The talk of havoc got Karun all excited—he couldn’t wait to set up a collision once we finished laying the rails. We rammed engines into each other, made cars fly off the tracks, and in one particularly tragic accident, watched as a runaway train mowed down an entire village. “It’s even better with fire,” I said, and a pyromaniacal gleam immediately sprang to Karun’s eyes. We drew the curtains and turned off the lights, then sent two trains to their mutually assured doom by stuffing them with matches and lit birthday candles.

Later, as we lay amid the ruins (in the finale, an enemy air raid had blown apart the tracks), I took one of the engines and ran it down Karun’s back. “Does it tickle?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I skimmed it lazily over his buttocks. “And now?” He didn’t answer, so I rolled it down his leg, teased his ankle with it, then rolled it back. “This little engine thinks it’s time for another experiment.” I worked off his pants and underwear, then pressed the engine playfully into his cleft.

Karun still didn’t speak, but stretched out more fully, crossing his forearms to rest his head. He sighed as I retraced the engine’s path with my lips, kissing him all over, using my tongue to tease out ingress. I moved to position myself in place, the condom already discreetly slipped on, my mouth still planting kisses to keep him relaxed. “Shh,” I whispered, as I began to enter and he tensed, “it’ll feel better in a second.” I wrapped myself over his body as completely as I could, to convey my tenderness, to let him feel our oneness.

That night, I awoke around three a.m
.
Karun lay beside me, his mouth open, the air flowing in and out in regular breaths. He looked innocent, untroubled—I wondered what dreams unfolded in his head. Could I be in them, could his scientist mind be tabulating the results of his tests? We still had tomorrow morning—I’d have to think up some more games, some other experiments. Right now, though, I just wanted to gaze at him, feel the warmth of his body next to mine, absorb the pleasure of sharing my bed.

8

THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES ME WHEN THE TRAIN CRASHES
through the wall and barrels down the road is the collisions Karun and I used to engineer. The candles, the matches, the smoke billowing out from the windows, the flames burning paint off the cars. Surely when the weapons in my compartment detonate, they will surpass any of our extravaganzas. Too bad I’ll be seated right in the middle. The Jazter would have preferred being a spectator of the conflagration to come, rather than an ingredient.

The compartment twists and grinds around me like a giant pepper mill, and I am rendered airborne along with everything else inside, but only for the instant before we land on our side, skid along the ground, and come to a crashing halt. Three separate miracles occur in those milliseconds—I am unhurt except for a bruised arm, the weapons decide not to go off, and most magically, the door at the rear of the compartment bursts open. Perhaps Allah does have a soft spot for sodomites after all.

I climb out and see the engine lying on its side like a downed beast, smoke still heaving out in dying spurts. Behind it, the first compartment has somehow remained upright, though the roof has caved in and the walls have dramatically scrunched up. It all looks very cool—something we never could have done with the toy set. Two women are trying to pry loose a third—her upper half gesticulates animatedly out a window while the rest disappears inside, as if she is being eaten alive by the car. For an instant, I fear it is Sarita, who will no longer be able to lead me to Karun, but then I spot her sitting dazed on the road next to a wheel that has rolled off. Standing beyond are the engine driver and his assistant, contemplating the wreckage with identical small wrenches in their hands, as if with this single tool, they will get the train back on its tracks.

I run up to Sarita. For some reason, she’s changed into a bridal costume since I last saw her—the lead of her sari unfurls in a flaming red swathe around her feet. “Come, we have to get out of here.” She just stares at me when I offer her my hand—I notice the line of white dots decorating her forehead. “We don’t have any time.” Something flickers in her eyes, and I wonder if she’s placed me. “It’s Gaurav. From the hospital. And the aquarium. Remember?”

“Gaurav? What happened?”

“The train derailed. Probably an ambush. We have to run.”

“But how did you find me?”

“I’ll explain everything. Just come with me.” I can see the confusion on her face begin to harden into suspicion, so I squat down beside her. “I know you told me not to follow, but I did—I jumped into the rear compartment when I saw you get on. I still want to save your life, do the same thing you did for me. But we have to leave immediately, since whoever made the train derail will show up any minute.”

“I . . . I don’t think. The girls. I can’t leave them here.”

So we try to get the girls to come with us, but they’re reluctant. “Mura chacha’s still inside,” the one half stuck in the train says. Her name is Madhu, and despite her sandwiched state, she seems in charge. “Can you go in and free him? Then we can all go visit Devi ma.”

Sarita declares she wants to search the wreckage as well—not for this Mura character, but for a pomegranate. I think I have not heard her correctly, but she starts babbling about how it’s the last pomegranate in all of Bombay and her very fate depends on it. I wonder if she has a concussion—is there a way to unobtrusively check her scalp? Madhu, meanwhile, barks orders at the other girls from her horizontal position. “Guddi, leave me alone and go fetch the train driver. Anupam, get this man here to help you lift the sleeper berth that fell on Mura chacha. You there. Go and help.”

She gets very irate when I reply there’s no time. “Mura chacha’s much more important than a few of your precious minutes. How can anyone be so selfish?”

I’m trying to drag Sarita away from the train as Madhu continues to hector me when there is a retort. “I’ve been shot,” Madhu screams, and holds up her hand. She has, indeed, been shot—blood streams down her arm and drips from her shoulder. More shots ring out, and she slumps forward, dangling limply from the waist. As the other girls scream, I grab Sarita’s hand and pull her behind the bogey to take cover. She stops jabbering about her pomegranate.

We scramble down a side street, Sarita’s sari blazing as conspicuously as a flag. The sounds of gunshots ricochet between the walls on either side. A few times, I think I hear someone running behind us. I lead Sarita in a zigzag through the labyrinth of an abandoned slum, finally stopping at a curbside bus shelter to catch my breath. For a moment, neither of us speaks as we gulp in air.

“Are they going to come looking for us?”

I shake my head. “My compartment was full of weapons. That’s probably what they were after.” As if to endorse my words, the rat-a-tat of a machine gun starts up. The sound is uncomfortably close, a little beyond the buildings we face—we must have circled around inadvertently.

Someone laughs, a man screams, and I hear more gunfire. The screaming resumes—its cadence is pitiful, pleading. “That sounds like Mura,” Sarita says. “Those shots—I wonder if Guddi and Anupam—” She looks at me, her lip bloodless.

Before I can offer her any reassurance, a motorcycle revs up. We hear it circle behind the buildings, then begin to get closer. “It’s coming down the street,” I say, grabbing Sarita’s hand and pulling her down behind the shelter wall. I peer cautiously over the edge after the motorcycle has passed, then duck again, as another motorcycle, then a van, come rumbling up behind. The cries are now coming from the van.

“It’s the Limbus,” I whisper. “They’re just like the hoodlums in khaki, only Muslim. We couldn’t have done anything.” I’ve read about the group appropriating the word for “lemons” as their badge of honor—the same epithet used for years by the HRM to denounce Muslims who supposedly curdle the country’s milk-and-cream Hindu population.

The street lapses back into silence. The sun just manages to clear the empty buildings that run down its trash-strewn length. From the direction of the rays, it seems the Limbus are headed west. Is that the direction in which Karun awaits? Sarita is unresponsive when I ask her destination. “Bandra,” she finally reveals. “My husband is there, at a guesthouse.”

I’m tempted to press her for the exact address, but I know she’s still mistrustful of my helpfulness. “I actually need to make it further north to Jogeshwari to see my mother, so Bandra is on the way,” I say to assuage any suspicions. “Is your husband east of the railway line or west?”

“West. Near the water.” I try to get more details by engaging her in conversation but she rebuffs me with monosyllabic replies. Perhaps she’s still shell-shocked.

I wonder how to proceed. In addition to the Limbu-infested areas in between, we’re also cut off from Bandra by the expanse of Mahim creek. Rising sea levels and repeated monsoon floods have extended this breach all along the Mithi river, which at one point was little more than a canal emptying sludge into the creek, but now has widened into a chasm. The most direct way across the water is to go back and follow the train tracks, but the Limbus probably have that staked out. The alternative is to aim for the Mahim causeway bridge ahead—perhaps there will be a crowd of people crossing, and we’ll stick out less. Except I can’t quite imagine blending in with Sarita all decked up like a lollipop. “They wanted me to be one of Devi’s maidens,” she explains apologetically when I ask about her outfit. “It’s even supposed to glow when it gets dark, just like Superdevi.”

“Well, we’re in Mahim now. If you don’t look Muslim, we’re both dead.”

“But there’s nobody around.”

“Not here, not in this no-man’s-zone—the Limbus probably cleared it out as a safety buffer. But ahead, there’ll be people everywhere. When the rioting started, Mahim is where thousands of Muslims fled.” I hand her my handkerchief. “We’ll figure out the sari later, but let’s start by wiping off your forehead.”

Sarita smears off her bindi and bridal dots and returns my handkerchief—the stain on the cloth looks a dark and clotted red. She runs her fingers nervously through her hair. “Won’t they still suspect?”

“Not if we say you’re my wife. Mrs. Hassan. That’s my name. Ijaz Hassan, not Gaurav. You must have guessed back at the hospital that I’m Muslim.”

Sarita looks startled, and I realize I may have committed a terrible blunder. What if Karun has mentioned me to her and she’s recognized my name? To my relief, it’s the thought of playing the begum to my nawab that flusters her. I remember how she fled when I first tried to talk to her in the hospital basement—who knew the Jazter came across as such a predator of female flesh? “Couldn’t I be your sister instead?” she asks.

That would certainly ease her worry. Except, even with her features half obscured by shadows, one can tell there’s no resemblance. About to be paralyzed once again by the conundrum of what Karun could have seen in her, I remember her looks won’t actually matter. The rules in this new Mahim decree that women remain properly veiled, so it’s fine to play my sister.

She’s not pleased when I explain this to her. “You mean I have to keep my face covered?”

“Actually, your whole body. We’ll look for some cloth to use as a burkha—to conceal your sari as well. The Limbus call the shots—I hear they go around punishing infractions with whips.”

We decide that she’ll be Rehana Hassan, my virginal and impeccably virtuous younger sister. Maybe not too virginal, since the story is I’m escorting her to rescue her ailing husband, who’s stranded in Bandra. “Where will we spend the night?” Rehana inquires.

“At the best boutique hotel in Mahim. We’ll pay my dear cousin Rahim a visit.”

ONCE MY PARENTS
’ return shut down our research lab, I tried to find other venues to facilitate Karun’s experimentation. He quickly dismissed my usual haunts: the beach at Chowpatty was too exposed, the alley near the Taj too seedy (I didn’t even bother suggesting the Bandra station facilities). I tried reasoning with him, pointing out that the city didn’t offer anything more hospitable. Hadn’t he come to Bombay after reading about park activities on the internet? What, exactly, did he now expect? Surely his training had taught him to take risks, to show some spunk, if not for his own fulfillment, then at least for the cause of scientific research?

But he remained unmoved. The tale of the Jazter and the physicist might have ended there, had not the Mumbai University library come to the rescue. Although I had often looked up to see the gothic structure indulgently witnessing my plunge fests at the Oval, I had never before stepped into its august halls. The place was cool and silent when we entered that afternoon, stained glass windows soared towards the cathedral-like ceiling. The books looked appropriately old and solemn, dusty tomes with cracked binding locked away in glass-paned wooden prisons. We stumbled upon the door behind a cupboard in a deserted reading room. It blended in so perfectly with the dark wood of the walls that only the presence of two small bolts, also painted brown, gave any indication it wasn’t just another panel. Opening it and stepping over the knee-high base led to a tiny balcony which time (and the staff) seemed to have forgotten. The floor was filthy with bird droppings—in fact, several pigeons burst into energetic flight as we emerged (though a few continued cooing in the eaves, unconcerned). Two stories below us stretched the verdant greens of the Oval, to our right rose the university clock tower, Mumbai’s own Big Ben. “The heart of the city, and no one knows we’re up here. This is perfect,” I said.

Karun was scandalized when he understood what I meant. One by one, I addressed all his concerns. Yes, it was dirty, but nothing a blanket or dhurrie couldn’t cover. True, it was outdoors, but lying down, we’d be completely shielded from view by the balcony enclosure. No, I didn’t believe other patrons would find it or try to enter, but had he noticed the door had bolts on this side as well? Even as I ticked off these answers, I knew I’d never be able to lure Karun back.

So there remained only one option. “Did you get today’s
Times of India
?” Bewildered by my question, Karun took the paper he bought every morning out of his rucksack. “It’s good they’ve bulked it up with all these tabloid supplements,” I said, as I opened up the sheets and spread them over the grunge at our feet. Before Karun could recover from his disbelief, I bolted the door. “Don’t worry—we’re just going to lie here for a minute so you can see for yourself.”

Despite his resistance, I managed to pull Karun down—he was too nervous of attracting attention to protest out loud. I lost no time unzipping his pants—once sprung free, he could no longer deny his arousal. He gasped each time my tongue found something else to probe, struggling briefly, unconvincingly, when I tried to turn him around. The paper rustled noisily beneath us, but only the pigeons heard. At the end, as he climaxed, Karun remembered to whisper out his moans.

After that, I had much more success in overcoming Karun’s decorum, his squeamishness. The dove nest became our love nest, but I pushed his boundaries to include other venues as well. During an uncrowded matinee at the Regal, we treated the empty last balcony row to action it probably had never before witnessed, either on screen or otherwise. At a secluded spot in Versova, north of Juhu, we attempted it while waist-deep in the sea—the waves kept ruining our rhythm, so we had to find a spot under the palms to finish. I even got Karun to give me a hand job while barreling down Marine Drive on the top deck of an empty
123
bus late one evening. The experience proved so memorable that it moved the Jazter to poetry: “Salt air flew as the Jazter blew,” “Sea breezes rushed as the Jazter gushed,” “Scenery whizzed as the Jazter jizzed”—there’s a haiku in there somewhere, if he can get the number of syllables right.

Karun’s amenability to these escapades surprised me. I could tell he enjoyed sex, but I didn’t get the impression he
hungered
for it—it would never be the all-consuming force that fueled the Jazter. Rather, it occupied a single drawer in the orderly portfolio of his needs, one whose replenishment he could control and monitor. Perhaps he viewed our trysts as experiments, contributions to a broader ethnographical study on the congregational patterns and mating behavior of homosexuals. More likely, what attracted him was the chance to set responsibility aside and regress to a reckless adolescence. “I feel like a kid again,” he said each time we assembled the train set or rode the roller coasters at Essel Park, and I think our undercover adventures generated a similar thrill.