The City of Devi: A Novel (4 page)

Afterwards, we played rummy. In an effort to make Karun win, my mother kept discarding cards she thought he might need. “Such good technique and yet such unfortunate hands,” she clucked, as he ignored the latest offering she laid in front of him, the ten of spades. She frowned as Uma picked up a joker from the deck and declared once again. “My daughters seem to have sucked the air dry of luck today,” she remarked, hoping to end our winning streak by throwing us the evil eye. But the cards (and Uma and I) refused to cooperate. “I’m getting bored of this,” my mother finally announced, as Uma counted up the points in Karun’s tenth losing hand. “Why don’t we try something else?”

So we switched to sweep, which wasn’t much better. We played flush and gambler, and Anoop even taught us poker at my mother’s insistence. No matter what we tried, Karun continued to lose.

“You’re not very good, are you?” Uma remarked.

“There’s more important things in life than cards,” my mother snapped.

“Perhaps he’ll be lucky in love,” Uma leaned towards me and whispered.

Worried about Karun’s losses, my mother tried to distract him by asking about his work. “Anoop says you manufacture quartz,” she ventured.

“Quarks,” Anoop corrected. “And Karun doesn’t go around manufacturing them, he studies them.”

“It’s all so fascinating,” she said. “That man in the wheelchair—something Hawkings—not sure if he’s still alive—he’d come to India once—did you ever meet him?” Karun shook his head.

“Poor bechara, though Mrs. Dugal says not to go by his upside-down face—that he’d make mincemeat of Einstein in a match of brains—is that true?”

Uma rescued Karun from my mother’s question. “What exactly are quarks?” she asked.

So Karun started talking about the building blocks of matter, the fact that even protons and neutrons could be split, the six “flavors” of quarks with names like “up” and “charm” and “strange.” His face took on an expression of wonder, like that of a child transported to a zoo, a circus, an amusement park. My mother’s features began to relax as well, the drowsiness from her sandwiches and parathas rose in her eyes. She struggled briefly with it before succumbing in a corner of the remaining shade. “Don’t mind me, it’s the heat,” she murmured, stretching out and covering her face with a handkerchief. “It’s very interesting, all these flavored particles—like little sweets.” Soon, she was snoring politely.

“Let’s all go into the water,” Anoop said.

THE WOMAN WITH
the boy tries to attract my attention. I do my best to ignore her, but she is too determined. “Excuse me.” She tugs at my shoulder. “He really is very hungry.”

I cover the pomegranate with another fold of my dupatta and close my hand protectively over it. “It’s always harshest on the children.” I hope the compassion in my voice will be enough to appease her.

But the war has sharpened her senses too much. Her vision can slice right through cloth and flesh—she knows the position of my pomegranate, she can probably tell me its size, its weight, the number of seeds it contains. “It’s always been his favorite fruit. If you could just share it with him.”

“Share what?”

“The pomegranate. The one you have in your lap.” She makes the assertion loudly enough for people around us to hear. Her voice is bold and righteous, even tinged with indignation.

What am I to tell her? That I need to offer Karun the entire fruit, not one with a segment rattling around in her boy’s stomach? That I have searched all of Crawford Market for it, given up my mangalsutra for this chance? That I would have liked to help her—it is not due to heartlessness or greed I will not? “It’s for my baby at home,” I finally lie.

“All I’m asking for is a small piece, memsahib, as one mother to another.” She appraises the bulge in my lap and I can see the primitive calculation in her eyes. “There’s more than enough there for two—why just save your own child, when you can also save another?”

Emboldened by his mother’s words, the boy advances his small brown fingers towards my lap. “Don’t touch it,” I hiss at him.

“How dare you,” the woman cries. “How dare you talk to my son like that.” She pulls his hand back, and he bursts into tears. “Do you think we’re beggars, untouchables, that you can treat him like that?” She spits next to my foot, creating a fiery orange betel juice streak on the ground. “A curse on you and a curse on your pomegranate.”

People turn to look at us. The woman lifts her hands into the air towards them and begins to wail. “Look how she has insulted me. Look what selfishness the war has raked in from the gutter.” A maid sitting nearby gives me a dirty look before edging away.

The woman’s son keeps crying. “Pomegranate,” he repeats, between sobs.

For a moment, I waver. I almost give it away. What does it matter in the grand scheme of things? We’re going to be annihilated by the end of the week anyway. But then I think of Karun, standing waist-deep in the sea. The water beading on his face and neck, foam sliding down his skin. The sun is so strong that I cannot make out the expression in his eyes. From the shore behind me come the sounds of crashing waves.

BY THE TIME
I got to the water’s edge, Uma had already entered the waves and was cavorting with Anoop some distance away. Unlike her, I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, so I pulled my salwaar up my legs as high as the openings would allow, and wrapped my dupatta around my waist. Karun stood with his back to the sun, the red of his shorts flaring in the tide. “I can only come in up to my knees,” I called out to him, but the wind blew my words away.

I raised my hand against the sky to shade my eyes, but the glare from the water was too strong to make out his face. Waves broke against him, their foam encircled his waist. He stood where he was, his darkened form emerging like the statue of a deity from the sea. Didn’t they used to say a woman’s husband was her god, her swami, didn’t people still believe a spouse embodied divinity? Was I standing on the sands on the floor of Karun’s temple, were those blessings that rippled across the water from him to me?

I waded in deeper. Coconuts bobbed and rolled on the water surface, their husks black from days at sea. A wave brought in a garland of brown marigold and wrapped it around my legs. I bent down to untangle it and watched it float away towards shore. Who had offered it to the sea, and why? Had someone been born, had someone expired, was it part of a marriage ceremony? A fisherman and his bride maybe, come to solicit a blessing from Mumbadevi? The goddess after whom the city was named, who some believed made her abode in this very sea?

I waved to Karun, but he still did not acknowledge me. I could see now that he’d folded his arms across his chest, holding them close to his body as if guarding against a chill. A chill which couldn’t exist, the sea being as warm as bathwater. “Karun,” I called, waving again, and this time, he waved back.

But he did not come to me. I stood there, wondering whether to venture in deeper. The water had already crept up my salwaar to my waist—any further, and it might begin the climb to my chest. I imagined the ride back home on the train, my clothes sticking to my skin, the outrage on my mother’s face as men crowded around to leer. I turned, half expecting her to wade in after me, all thoughts of her own clothes getting wet lost in the attempt to rescue me from shame.

Nobody stopped me. A group of children paddled by on a raft, in pursuit of a boy holding a basketball high above his head. A fully dressed woman swam purposefully through the waves, the folds of her sari ballooning around her like the whorls of a jellyfish. On the shore, I could make out the red and white segments of the umbrella under which my mother slept. In the distance, the figure of a lone child emerged from the smiling mouth of Mickey Mouse and slid down his inflated tongue.

I took another step in. A large wave, its head irate and foamy, slammed into my groin. I staggered, and for an instant wondered if I should fall. Surely then Karun would have to run to me. I would be drenched, but the distance between us would be dissolved. Would he reach into the water and pull me up in his arms?

Before I could further evaluate this ploy, he came sloshing up to me. “Do you like to swim? It’s something I’ve loved ever since my teens.”

Could this be the criterion he’d set for a spouse—someone aquatically adept? I thought back to all those wasted swimming sessions at school, spent splashing around in the shallow end of the pool. “I never did learn.” The confession brought with it that sinking feeling of having skipped over a topic, only to find it on the test.

Karun contemplated me silently. “I could teach you,” he finally said, and I felt myself flush. Perhaps he didn’t mean more than his offer stated. But how could he not see what an intimate invitation this was to extend to an unmarried woman my age? Fortunately, a wave thundered down upon us to hide the redness of my face. I fell over backwards, felt the sea squeeze into my ears and nose, tasted salt at the back of my throat. For an instant I was completely submerged—sand swept into my sleeves and packed itself in my hair. How would I face my mother now? I wondered, imagining the men on the train ogling me in my waterlogged clothes.

The water cleared to reveal Karun’s face. The wave had knocked him over as well, his body covered mine. He tried to disentangle himself, but stumbled, and fell face forward into my chest. The tip of his nose plunged into my bosom, as if trying to sniff out some scent, dark and hidden, from deep between my breasts.

He sprang back up before I could react. “Sorry,” he stammered, staring pointedly away.

A volley of small waves whitened the water around our knees. He looked so perturbed, I wanted to soothe his hand in mine. “It was the tide. It’s too strong.” He nodded but did not turn. “Have you taught many people before how to swim?”

He raised his head and regarded me without speaking. Was he having second thoughts—could our physical contact have made him change his mind?

Perhaps Mumbadevi herself sent in the next wave to set things right. She didn’t topple me, not quite, just made me stagger and thrust my hand out blindly through the foam. She knew Karun would grab for it by instinct, hold on to it so I didn’t fall. Prudently, she withdrew this time, without forcing an embrace like in her clumsy previous attempt.

“The tide’s a lot less rough farther out,” he said, as I tried to wipe the salt water off my eyes. “They’re just ripples there—they only swell into waves as they near the shore.”

“It must be very deep.”

“The drop is quite gradual, actually. I can take you. You just have to hold on.”

Somewhere from the beach came the call of a man selling shaved ice. “Gola, gola,” he cried, “limbu, pineapple, ras-bhari.” I pictured the two of us sharing a raspberry gola, taking turns to suck the syrup from the ice. The line between Karun’s lips getting darker with each intake, the same intense crimson as mine. When the ice was gone and only the stick remained, I would press together our lips. Not to kiss, but to see how the curves fit, his crimson aligned against mine. For who was to say this wasn’t the match that really mattered, more than horoscopes and birth charts and palm lines? That the compatibility between two souls couldn’t be reduced to this question of geometry, of mathematics?

“We don’t have to go if you’re afraid.”

In truth, I was a little nervous of water, had been since my school swimming pool days. But the iceman was far away on shore, my experiment there would have to wait. “As long as you think it’s safe.”

“It is,” he said. Then he took my hand and started swimming backwards towards the horizon, pulling me along into the ocean, past the coconuts and the garlands, past the woman with the billowing sari and the children diving into the breakers, past the point I could hear the iceman’s call or touch sand with my feet, until the waves were shorn of their foamy manes and the sea swelled silently against our chins.

2

A SCUFFLE BREAKS OUT IN A CORNER OF THE BASEMENT. THE
Khakis have accused a man of being Muslim, they proceed to beat him. I see a doctor swing his stethoscope above his head like a whip, two women in nurse’s uniforms wield umbrellas and try to elbow their way in. Even the woman next to me does her share, hurling insults at the victim across the room. “Son of a pig sisterfucker,” she says, and aims a stream of spit in the direction of the commotion.

Although aware of the city’s partition along religious lines, I’ve never witnessed the hatred fueled by this division firsthand. I now understand the advice my watchman tried to impress upon me so emphatically this morning: only the very brave or the very foolish venture into the wrong area of town anymore. Still, this is a hospital, I feel like shouting—even if it lies in a Hindu sector, does that mean the only treatment administered to Muslims is this kind of battering? Had we been at Masina hospital in Byculla, would I be the one meted out such violent medicine instead?

They claimed this could never happen. Bombay was too cosmopolitan, its population too diverse, its communities too interdependent to ever become another Beirut or Belfast. “Just think of the financial give-and-take alone,” my father would say. “Without everyone’s cooperation the economy would simply dry up.” He’d point to the language riots of the fifties, the communal campaigns of the sixties and seventies, the waves of bomb blasts since the early nineties that blew up hundreds as they sat in trains or buses or offices. “Bring on whatever havoc you will—the city will remain united even if the rest of the country splits apart.”

For a long time, he was right—even the Pakistani guerrilla attack in
2008
seemed to only increase the city’s cohesive resolve. “See these people holding hands?” he asked, at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. “They’re neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first.”

I try to summon that spirit of unity now as I listen to the screams of the man being pummeled. How could we have fallen so far so quickly? Especially when Mumbai was on the verge of becoming such a world-class metropolis? The dazzle and architectural chic of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the City of Devi campaign that would fast-track us to international fame—who could have predicted that the seeds of our doom lay therein? I try not to loop once more through the arc of events that’s led us to our ravaged state, try to tune out the muffled crunch of metal meeting bone through cloth and skin. I must become more hard-hearted for survival’s sake, learn to channel my mind back to the memory of more pleasant days.

MY MOTHER
’
S REACTION
to the swimming lessons from Karun disappointed me. I had hoped for tantrums, for drama, perhaps even a curfew, like my parents tried to enforce on Uma when she first started spending evenings late with Anoop. “It looks like a pillowcase,” my mother declared upon seeing me in my high school swimsuit. “Can’t you get something that better shows off your figure?” I realized then how old thirty-one was, how dire my prospects must seem to her.

So that weekend, Uma helped me pick something suitably revealing from a boutique in Colaba. Its blue and white stripes stretched over my breasts to remind me of yacht sails, of beach umbrellas. I imagined emerging from the showers like a Danielle Steel vixen, the water trickling down my neck and beading on my bosom as I walked seductively towards Karun. But at the pool, my courage evaporated as soon as I left the locker room. I covered myself with my arms as best as I could and scurried across to the shallow end.

Karun stood against the swimming pool wall, his knees bent, so that the water lapped against his throat. Sunlight set his body ablaze, the tiles burned blue and bright all around him, ripples spread glittering towards and away from his chin. “Come in,” he said. “The temperature’s nice.” Although his gaze flickered over my swimsuit, he didn’t comment on my new nautically themed breasts.

As usual, our bodies hardly touched. Each time I thought they would, he managed to skirt contact without making it look like a purposeful move. Today, we worked on the dreaded amphibian kick—he demonstrated the entire sequence without even grazing my leg. Was it just shyness that kept us so chastely separated, or lack of interest on his part? Where was Mumbadevi to transport me back into his arms?

“You worry too much about sinking,” Karun announced. “Let’s try it with a life ring around your waist.”

For a while I paddled around like some hapless circus animal stuck into a prop for an aquatic trick. Finally, after slipping out for the fifth time, I voiced the obvious. “Don’t you think it would be better if you kept me afloat with your arms?”

He touched me then, setting his palms against my stomach, sparking off all the right chemicals in my brain. I sensed a delicacy in the way he handled me, as if, made of china, I might drop to the bottom of the pool and break. This decorum worried me—how distressing if the only outcome of these lessons turned out to be my learning to swim.

We walked over to the beach at Chowpatty afterwards. I’d waited in vain each evening for Karun to take my hand—he didn’t do so today, either. More than hand-holding, though, I felt the greatest longing towards the couples sharing snacks at the food stalls. Swimming left me ravenous, but it seemed too forward to suggest we split a bhel puri or dosa.

“Should we get something to eat?” Karun asked, and I almost swooned. I steered him to the vegetable sandwiches—the safest, I figured, given the staidness he projected. “I know from the picnic how much your family adores sandwiches,” he said. “But would you mind if we tried something spicier, like dosas?”

The dosas tasted so good with their fiery coconut chutney that we ordered a second round. I boldly suggested we finish with kulfi, even deciding on the flavors—mango and saffron. The kulfiwalla rolled the frozen metal cones deftly between his palms to loosen the ice cream inside. He unmolded them on the same leaf for us to share, the intimacy of which prospect made us both blush.

We strolled along the beach, scooping up bites of the kulfi from the leaf with our plastic spoons. Karun ate more of the saffron, leaving the mango for me, since it tasted better. “I haven’t had kulfi on the beach like this in ages, not since my college years in Bombay.” He shook his head when I asked him if he’d kept in touch with his friends from then. “They’ve all moved away—things never remain the same.”

Of course, I really wanted to ask him about
girlfriends
—here in Bombay, or back in Delhi, or even while growing up in Karnal. But I couldn’t formulate a subtle enough way to pose the question. In three days, I’d ferreted out almost no useful information—Uma and my mother were appalled at my lack of data mining skills. We talked about such neutral topics like his research in particle astrophysics (studying quark densities to understand the origins of the universe) and the reason I chose statistics (all those exotic-sounding curves, from Gaussian to gamma to chi, I sheepishly confessed, drew me in).

As I tried yet again to think of some artfully camouflaged way of bringing up the girlfriend question, Karun stopped. “Look, it’s the Trimurti.” He pointed to a three-headed tableau in the sand. The sculptor had already completed two of the faces and was preparing to carve the third. “Vishnu the caretaker and Shiva the destroyer—my father had an interesting take on who should occupy the final spot in the trinity.”

Wary that the evening’s investigative opportunities might get sidetracked again, I didn’t respond. But Karun pressed on. “Go ahead, take a guess—who do you think should rightfully be called the creator of the universe?”

“Not Brahma? Isn’t he the one who blows everything out in a single breath?”

“Ah, but creation comes from the womb, not the mouth—a simple matter of anatomy, as my baji would say. So logically, the true third should be the mother goddess, Devi.”

“I think your baji was just pulling your leg. It’s Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, everyone agrees.”

“Not everyone. Majumdar was one of the first to point out that Brahma’s inclusion wasn’t quite so successful, and other scholars have agreed. The fact is, few worship Brahma—not compared to the millions of Devi followers. Just think of all the temples she has in even the remotest spots of the country.”

“So we should tell sculptors everywhere to forget about Brahma, to compose their Trimurtis based on a popularity contest?”

Karun laughed. “Absolutely. In a way, it’s already happened. All those paintings and statues you’ve probably seen—it’s always Shiva fused with Vishnu, or Devi fused with Shiva, or half Vishnu, half Devi. They’re always trying to complete themselves, Baji said—find the attributes they’re missing, the ones they crave. Brahma rarely gets invited to enjoy such intimate couplings.”

Sensing the conversation veering away on a tangent, I tried to turn things to my advantage by squeezing out more information about Karun’s family. “Was he quite religious, your baji?”

“By most standards, yes, but more than religion, I think he loved mythology. He’d relate a legend to me every night—the sea of milk that churned up jewels, the giant fish Matsya who saved mankind during the flood. It was such a magical way to understand the world.”

“But not a very scientific one—not the best training for a physicist.”

“Actually, he often added a scientific twist. Like relating the flood in Matsya’s story to actual periods on earth when the oceans rose. Or using Vishnu’s incarnations—first fish, then reptile, then mammal, then man, to tell me about evolution—I still remember that.”

“So he was a scientist as well?”

“No, not really, though he probably would have made an excellent one if he’d received the opportunity. Family problems forced him to leave college after the first year—he ended up as a purchaser for a construction firm. But he never lost his interest in books, his curiosity—he dabbled in so many things. Gardening, for one—we actually had a pomegranate tree growing right there on our balcony. Mythology and science were his favorites, though—he found all sorts of colorful ways to combine them. For instance, he’d say that three was the magic number of the universe, its most intrinsic configuration—not just because of the triad of primary colors or our three space dimensions, but also because of all the trinities in different religions, especially the Trimurti. He was convinced that everything derives from the basic building blocks of Vishnu, Shiva, Devi. Pseudoscience you might say, or mystical nonsense, even—but it had a charming ambitiousness to it, sort of a layman’s Grand Unified Theory. Perhaps that’s why I went into physics—to get the training Baji never received.”

Brahma had begun to emerge from the sand, and with him, a fundamental question arose in my mind. “And what about you—do you believe at all? The religion, the mythology—did you inherit any of that from your baji?”

Karun watched the sculptor pat one of Brahma’s eyebrows in place. “When I was a child, I accompanied Baji in everything. The incense, the temples, the praying—it was such an essential part of my life. But things began to change soon after he died—I began to question more, notice contradictions I couldn’t reconcile. Now it would be hard to feel the same, even if I tried. Take this carving. I know people might worship it as the Trimurti but I can’t help think of the individual grains of sand of which it is made. Of the multitudes of molecules and atoms and electrons in each grain, the drama being performed invisibly at the levels we don’t see. A trinity of gods emerging from the sand is one way of interpreting the universe’s wonders, but perhaps other, more subtle ways can explain it all more usefully.”

“So you’re an atheist, then?”

“I suppose I fit that old physicist cliché of equating God with the laws of the universe—who said it first, Einstein? Baji’s myths, I know, will never play out before my eyes, but as metaphor, they’re still enchanting. Devi emerging resplendently from the sea, these sand carvings miraculously coming to life, even Baji’s obsession with the number three. Which the universe seems to endorse, he’d be pleased to know—there are exactly three generations of fundamental particles that make up everything.”

He asked about my family, so I related how my mother was the religious one, how Uma claimed to be an agnostic yet went to the temple regularly, how my father, at the opposite end of the spectrum, still ranted, all these years later, against replacing the secular “Bombay” (which he was only too eager to explain came from the Portuguese for “good bay”) with the goddess-inspired name “Mumbai.” “As for me, I’m somewhere in between—some days I call it Bombay, other days, Mumbai; some days I pray, other days, I don’t believe.”

“A probabilistic approach—how very apt. A statistician through and through, I see.”

“Not quite. One day I’ll tell you about my disastrous management degree.”

The sun had begun to turn the waves orange by the time we left the beach. Perhaps it was the imminence of the
123
bus whisking me away, like it had every evening this week, leaving me again unfulfilled about Karun’s romantic background. But as we walked to the bus stop, the question eating away at my mind abruptly broke free. “Did you leave behind a girlfriend back in Delhi, Karun?” I blurted out, then stared at the ground, mortified.

“No,” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he’d taken offense.

I should have stopped, but something about the lurid pinkness of the evening sky goaded me on. “I’m sure you must have had many girlfriends before, though.” This time, I looked up to gauge his reaction.

His face fell, as if I’d exposed a hidden inadequacy. “No, not really.” He looked away, blushing. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

Was that it, then? A past so uncomplicated that it could be summarized so succinctly? And why not? The history of my own romantic life was just as concise, containing a single entry, that too uncertain: Karun.

Something opened inside me, much deeper than the girlish fantasies I had indulged in until now. I felt a swell of empathy towards him—at our shared lack of worldliness, at the inexperience that linked us, at the crushing mantle of studiousness he must have labored under as well. Sweat dampened his armpits, the hair at his temples looked inexpertly trimmed, a dark ring ran along the inside of his collar. I found each detail endearing, reassuring—the less perfect he was, the less I had to be. “I’ve never had anyone either,” I said, taking the palm of his hand in mine without thinking. “I’m glad you moved here from Delhi.”