The City of Devi: A Novel (28 page)

The show ends differently than the one we witnessed from the beach. As the girl reaches her zenith, an enormous buffalo effigy, hoisted from the ground at the end of a cable, swings into view. I’ve seen these as part of the City of Devi celebrations—an enactment of the Devi myth where the goddess slays the buffalo demon. “I am the demon Mahisha, who neither Vishnu nor Shiva has been able to vanquish,” a voice intones over the speakers. “I am the lord of the three worlds, and you will marry me.” A series of threats from both sides follows, with the Devi promising to cut off the demon’s head and drink its blood. Finally, a trident appears in her hand, one that shoots laser-like rays of light through the air to ignite the buffalo. Strings of firecrackers go off in its belly, red and green flares emerge from its mouth and tail. A tremendous cheer rises from the crowd as fire engulfs the animal.

“What’s that?” Inside the metal ribcage of the buffalo, I think I make out a shadowy form, one that writhes and shivers in the flames. I point it out to Jaz, but clouds of smoke come in the way before he can see it.

“It’s the spirit of the buffalo demon,” Chitra says. “Being purified at the hands of Devi ma.”

“It looked like something trapped inside. Or
someone
.”

“Just a spirit. And Devi ma has liberated it.” Her face is serene in the light from the flames.

After the show, Gaurav-ghoda fetches Devi girl back on his shoulders and deposits her on the throne. It’s time for the blessing of the pilgrims, at least the wealthiest ones. Chitra points out the matinee idol Roop Kumar, who reluctantly leaves behind his entourage and bows down alone at the throne. A round and suited gentleman, who Chitra says is the owner of the Mumbai Cricket League, follows, after which the president of Mody Industries himself (instantly recognizable from the newspapers) touches the girl’s feet. By the time the nightly slot to receive less exalted devotees rolls around, the Devi is quite cranky. Most have some ailment or other that needs curing—she sends them on their way after a perfunctory laying of hands on the affected part. “Only one disease per person,” she snaps at a woman who has cancer as well as diabetes. A man who refuses to leave without a handwritten note for his crippled son at home irritates her so much that she stabs him with his own fountain pen through the arm.

“I think it’s time to end the session,” Chitra whispers. “We don’t want her to start putting people to death like she did last night.”

On Chitra’s behest Jaz hitches the Devi on his shoulders again and carries her around the terrace to restore her mood. She pulls off his turban and perches it on her own head, guffawing when it droops down to her nose. “Will Devi ma grant one more boon tonight—for her loyal horse this time?” Gaurav-ghoda asks. “Help me find the person we’re looking for, the one my friend was talking about.”

“You mean her husband—that woman who tried to poison me?”

“She brought you that chutney you liked so much, remember? Her husband is closer to me than any brother could be.” The statement sounds so heartfelt, it alarms me.

Devi girl gives me a nasty look as Jaz explains about the bus that’s picked up Karun and his colleagues. “I know Devi ma gives her blessing to so many people that it’s not possible to remember them all these days later. But with her permission, my friend and I would like to look through the hotel.”

The girl thinks for a moment, then agrees. “But first take Devi ma around the pool and the palm trees.” Jaz gasps as she grips his freshly unturbaned hair, like she might the mane of a horse, and pulls sharply. “Faster this time.”

JAZ

13

WE
’
VE ALMOST MADE IT TO THE DOOR WHEN THE WICKED LITTLE
witch of the east calls me back. “Another ride for my Devi ma?” I say, and she nods her fat little head. I remember to brace myself as she clambers on this time—the Jazter has learnt that Devi flesh weighs more per unit volume than the heaviest element known to man. “Once more?” I ask after we’ve galloped all the way to the turret and back, and to my dismay, my divine porcinity nods yes.

The Jazter has never understood religion, but if this is what the citizens believe will save them, then maybe they deserve to be dead.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on her Marmite-ship. Lying at her feet all night, I have listened to her tale of pauperdom to popehood, destitution to devi-nity. It behooves me as even-handed raconteur to present the sympathetic side of even the most trying characters I encounter. Who would fail to be moved by the deep scar on her left appendage? The gash where her mother tried to simply hack off the extra arm, failing only because her slum dweller’s knife was too blunt to cut through bone? Not to mention the other marks of abuse—the scars on her back, the lacerations on her neck, the cigarette burns on her legs—all of which she displays to me as proudly as stigmata. “To think I might still have been begging outside the Sion post office,” she says, choking up a little at the poignancy of her own discovery. Her tears dry quickly, though, vaporized in the heat of the rancor she has stored up inside. “All the people who spat at me, the dogs who laughed at my extra arms, not realizing these were the signs of Devi.”

Now that these limbs have attained the status of sacred relics, only the chosen few dare touch them without risking severe bodily harm. The Jazter, most favored member of this club, has discovered the right sequence of knuckle-nubs to press (like finger buttons on a trumpet) to make her coo softly. Thus lulled, into a stupor almost, she discloses her debt to Baby Rinky. “They tried to get her first, even though she was only a make-believe screen devi. Had her mother not insisted on leaving Mumbai when the war worsened, they might never have discovered me. I was so thin then—they had to fatten me with laddoos for a week.”

She breaks off, looking up at the sky dreamily. “What I want to do someday is star in my own movie. Would they like me, do you suppose? After all I
am
the true Devi.”

“They’d love you, Devi ma. You’d be a much bigger hit than Baby Rinky.”

She laughs, and reaches with her toes to affectionately stroke my cheek. “Don’t worry—I wouldn’t leave you out—we’d find a role for you to play as well. Vishnu’s horse, in fact—wouldn’t that be the perfect part? Always running and moving and jumping—tell me, my Gaurav-ghoda, what do you think?”

Somewhere in the midst of a long list of things we’ll do together (ride through the sky in a magical chariot, eat the same flavors of ice cream on the moon as Baby Rinky, kill lots of bad people with big big guns) she dozes off. The Jazter would have never believed it, but she actually looks innocent—her breath emerges rhythmically through her lips, her cheeks bulge as cherubically as a baby’s. Disengaging the curls of my hair clutched so lovingly (if painfully) in her fingers, I stretch out on the floor next to her lounge chair and fall asleep. In the morning, she greets me with a glass of nectar. “Amrit. I made it for you myself.”

Except it’s not nectar, but urine—still steaming a bit. I tell her I can’t possibly accept when the long-suffering devotees behind their chain of guards have been waiting so patiently for prasad. “Devi amrit,” they cry, and take a joyous sip each. The Jazter doesn’t quite get it—
chacun à son goût
, must be a Hindu thing.

Fortunately, before my personal prasad factory can manufacture something more solid from all the samosas it has processed overnight, a summons arrives from downstairs. Pooja is at nine and Devi ma must preside as idol-in-residence to be worshipped. Between bites of laddoo, she gives me her blessing to go sniff for scientists. I am to be extended every privilege, all through the hotel, with Chitra and Guddi and Sarita to accompany me. At farewell time she wavers—wouldn’t it be fun if she came along for the ride? She means this literally—Gaurav-ghoda carrying her around from room to room—after all, she’s never much explored the hotel, really. But vermilion and incense and clamoring devotees call from downstairs—not to mention, good God, the promise of more sweets. “Come back quickly,” she warns, and for the time being, I am free.

NOW THAT I
’
VE
secured my
Laddoovielfraß
’s permission to look for Karun, how do I actually find him? I can’t dial the front desk or switchboard operator and simply furnish his name. Chitra is dismissive when I ask where they store their occupancy information. “Devi knows where even the tiniest ant in the hotel lives. She doesn’t need to consult a list.”

“Yes, but
you
do. When she demands to see someone, for instance—how do you know which room it is?”

“We ask the clerks. They write down the room number of everyone who comes to visit her.”

So we go to the desks outside the suite. The clerks are ferociously protective of their ledgers, and make resentful grinding noises in their throats when Chitra invokes Devi ma’s authority to examine the pages. Karun’s name doesn’t appear anywhere. “Could you have made a mistake?” I ask the clerks, and their grinding turns into outright vituperation. Chitra quickly shepherds us away.

Why is Karun not listed? Doubts, as sharp-eyed as hawks, instantly begin to swoop in: Karun never made it to the hotel, the van took him to some other destination, who knows if he’s even in the city still? I dispel these thoughts with one inescapable notion: Karun
has
to be here, since it’s the only way we will ever meet again.

Might they record names at the restaurant counters where incoming devotees queue to check in? Chitra believes they did at one point, so we go down to investigate. The lobby hall is as busy as a bus terminal, with elephants arriving and departing in regular succession and attendants trailing after to scoop up their extruded bounty. The restaurant’s coffee bar now serves as a canteen for Khakis, dozens of whom mill around, dipping rusks of bread into tea. A mass of supplicants clamors at the counters—seeing the chaos, I realize no useful records can possibly surface, even if we manage to wade in.

Which means the hotel is one giant labyrinth we must scour inch by inch. The lobby and its surrounding arcades spilling with people, the guestrooms of which there are three hundred (though perhaps it’s four, Chitra thinks), the teeming grounds and corridors—a wall-to-wall dormitory has even mushroomed in the disco downstairs. Chitra asks if we want to start by checking out the audience gathered for Devi pooja outside. Her offer sounds wan, halfhearted—she already seems eager to call the search off, looking at her watch, muttering how busy she is.

I listen to the sounds of rapture stream in through the doors to the garden, imagine the congregation rollicking in worship. Somehow, I can’t imagine Karun in its midst. Nor do the rooms beckon with any special promise. I need time to mull through the sweep of search possibilities to see if anything activates my shikari instincts.

Sarita, though, has a determined plan—she wants to check out Room
318
, which three years ago served as their bridal suite. “I know it sounds crazy, but I can still picture him lying in that very same bed.” For no better reason than to humor her along, we go upstairs. I feel a rush of misgiving as Chitra swipes open the door—after all, Karun’s wedding night marks when I unequivocally lost him (the suite practically qualifies as a crime scene for me). But I needn’t have worried. The interior is bloodless, untroubled by ghostly evidence—the linens, hospital-crisp, have not been slept in for weeks. Sarita hugs a pillow to her chest as if squeezing out nostalgia from it, then stands silently on the balcony to stare at the sea.

Now that we’re here, the third floor is as good as any to start with, so we check out the neighboring rooms as well. Chitra raps smartly at each door, waits for a scant half-minute (hardly enough for a response, it seems), then unlocks it with her magic swipe card. A plump middle-aged couple looks up startled from a plate of parathas in the first, an enraged film producer (one of the VIPs granted an audience with the Devi last night) chases us out of the second, while the third is empty, save, inexplicably, for a small goat tethered in the bathroom. “Can’t I take it to my room?” Guddi asks, and we have to tear her away from it. I can discern no order to the accommodations—next to the goat is a room crammed with workers squatting on mats, engrossed in a card game. Seeing us, they hasten to douse their cigarettes and squirrel their bottles of hooch away.

A few doors down, we enter a room piled ceiling-high with coconuts. Guddi has to run down the corridor to retrieve several that roll out. “Who authorized this?” Chitra fumes. “Somebody’s going to have to do some explaining.” She strides into the corners of the room and yanks off the sheets covering mounds of trinkets, pyramids of fabric, boxes of molding sweets. Even the bathtub is filled with fruit, much of it brown and rotting. “All the gifts people bring Devi ma—those lazy attendants stuff them into any room that’s free.”

As we prepare to leave, Sarita emerges elatedly from the bathroom. “Look what I found! To replace the one Devi ma tossed off the terrace.” She triumphantly holds up a pomegranate. “It’s still perfectly good—not even a mark on its skin.” I nod my felicitations at her, though in truth, I’m mystified by this karmic cycle of adopting and losing pomegranates she seems to be embroiled in. (And why pomegranates, why this obsession with them in particular? Why not apples or pears or better still cherries, which would be so much easier to tote along?) Chitra raises an eyebrow at this pilferage from Devi ma’s wares, but remains silent as Sarita ties the fruit into her sari.

Somewhere between the college
Superdevi
groupies colonizing Room
332
and the chanteuse singing a hymn to Mumbadevi for the cement tycoon in Room
334
, it strikes me I’m not going about this search in the most intelligent way. What if we do come upon Karun? With Sarita at my side, how might I expect him to behave? If history is any indicator, he’ll keep his true desires firmly bridled, allow spousal loyalty to canter to an easy victory again. I need to ditch Sarita, in the hope I’ll discover Karun while searching alone—the only way to give myself a fighting chance with him.

Not that I expect to find Karun in these rooms. The occupants are too carefree, the atmosphere too festive, the smattering of Khakis don’t even pretend to be guarding anything. If someone forced Karun here at gunpoint, wouldn’t they keep him more tightly under lock and key? Otherwise, why wouldn’t he simply sneak out and try once more to return to the south part of the city? Surveillance at the gates of people leaving seems pretty lax—after all, didn’t Guddi decamp with an entire elephant?

What I therefore need to hunt around for (without Sarita) are areas of enhanced security. “I think we should split up. Devi ma might call us back at any time—we need to get through the rooms much more quickly.” Chitra rises in opposition to this idea but I hold firm, invoking the authority granted me by the Devi. She then tries to pair up with me—perhaps to keep me subtly off track, as I suspect she’s been doing. “Oh, but you and Sarita form such a great team,” I say. “Let Guddi accompany me.” Chitra’s eyes narrow when I ask for her swipe card—she silently fishes another one out from her pocket and hands it to me.

About to part, Sarita stops me. “How will you recognize Karun when you’ve never even met him?”

I look at her stupefied. How, indeed? How could the Jazter have missed something so obvious? “I guess I’ll just have to ask,” I reply weakly. Sarita’s mouth tightens—she has noted my blunder, added it to the tally.

Before anything else can crop up to scuttle my escape, I promise to regroup later in Devi ma’s suite, and cut out with Guddi.

AS A FIRST STEP
, we visit the remaining floors in the wing to verify they are equally unguarded. I have to keep shushing Guddi, for whom stealth and unobtrusiveness seem like entirely alien concepts. “We’re looking for his friend,” she announces to everyone we encounter: cleaning staff, guests, Khakis. “We have permission from Devi ma herself.” She frisks through the hotel as if it were a giant amusement park—swinging down corridors, bouncing on the landing sofas, darting into every nook and corner on her eternal quest for cell phones. The escalator to the ground level fascinates her, though she’s unnerved by the floor swallowing its endless diet of steps.

By the time we’ve finished with the wing, Guddi is bored—she suggests we go pay Shyamu a visit. “I’m afraid he might have caught a cold from that dip in the swimming pool.” When I inform her that elephant stables are not on our list, she gets downcast. “Can we at least catch the last part of the Devi pooja then?”

I block out her voice and concentrate on Karun. Ensconced in this hotel somewhere. The premise I must keep reinforcing in my mind, since without it (as any shikari knows) there can be no game. As far as this wing goes, though, Karun’s trail feels completely dead. The clerks took justified umbrage when I questioned their ledgers—the Devi and he seem to have never met.

Who ordered his kidnapping then? Clearly the same person who runs the show here: this sprawling temple to the Devi, the fireworks, the electricity, the elephants. With such a vast enterprise, it has to be Bhim. The great white Hindu hope, as deft at multitasking as Vishnu himself—whether it’s Muslims in need of massacring or the nation in need of saving. Though what he might want with a vanful of physicists, I can’t guess.

Why haven’t I discerned more evidence of Bhim’s presence at the hotel? Does he maintain a low profile to keep the limelight focused solely on the Devi? Is he holed up in a secret section along with his armory and his men? Wouldn’t locating him lead me to Karun as well?

I make a mental inventory of the parts of the hotel I haven’t explored: the guestroom floors in the towering front wing, the arcade of onetime salons and boutiques next to the lobby, the disco dormitory in the basement. Then there’s the half-complete annex behind the garden enclosure, which Chitra says has remained unoccupied ever since one of the shoddily built floors collapsed inside. A small conference center stands near the badminton courts, along with a shorter building, perhaps a gym, by its side. More structures under construction loom hazily in the rear—to check everything, my parole would have to last well into the night.