The City of Devi: A Novel (7 page)

And yet, Uma had a point. Karun rarely put his innermost feelings on display. We hugged more than we kissed. I felt enkindled by his very presence, but the most passion he ever displayed arose while discussing physics.

“What’s the matter with you two?” Uma scolded us one day for passing up an opportunity to neck as we sat on the couch watching television. “Don’t you know the time before marriage is the best for romance?”

As I expressed mortification afterwards for my sister’s pushiness, Karun colored. “It’s I who should apologize. I’m not very good at doing what’s expected. Or even realizing what I should want. Sometimes I wonder if we’re being too hasty, if you know me well enough.”

I laughed off his words—the possibility that he might be having second thoughts alarmed me. Of course I knew him well enough—hadn’t we discussed where we’d live (Colaba), what we’d eat (home-cooked food, with lots of restaurant nights off), even how many children we’d have (exactly one—we had to create our very own trinity, after all)? Besides, didn’t millions of couples enter unions arranged by their parents, knowing each other even less? “We’re still not married,” I responded to each of Uma’s jibes. “How refreshing, for a change, to encounter someone with an excess of propriety on his part.”

To her credit, Uma ceased her doubt-raising once the day of the wedding dawned. She was the perfect sister, helping me with my jewelry and headdress, leading me to the ceremonial fire, ushering people away from the receiving line when they lingered too long. “Sarita, Sarita,” she chided, when I said goodbye at two
A.M.
to take the hotel elevator up to the third-floor bridal suite where Karun had retired earlier. “Don’t you know it’s the bride who’s supposed to go up first, sit waiting for the groom, blushing in bed?”

The door to the bedroom was ajar—Karun reclined on the crimson sheets draping the bed. White flowers, their petals creamy and luminous, lay scattered in a circle around his head. He must have dozed off waiting for me—he hadn’t taken off his pants, and even his shirt was still all crisply tucked in. Only his feet were bare—I noticed again the hairless ankle I’d glimpsed the morning we first met. This was the moment I’d imagined all evening as we stood on the dais, shaking hands and accepting envelopes filled with cash. Should I awaken him by gathering up the petals and sprinkling them on his face?

But he was not asleep. When I sat on the bed, he laid his head on my thigh. “Sarita,” he murmured, and opened his eyes. They were unclouded by drowsiness—instead, I noticed the sheen of anxiety in them.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes. Of course. It’s our wedding night, why wouldn’t it be? I was just resting my eyes.”

He slid along the bed to make room for me, and I reclined, also fully clothed, next to him. We kissed quickly. His jaw was tight, his lips stretched—I’d never seen the line between them communicate such nervousness. “It’s hard to believe we’re married now, just like my parents used to be,” he said.

His tenseness had a curious effect on me—it focused my attention on trying to loosen him, making me forget my own diffidence. “Did you see the priest’s stomach? Just his belly button looked the size of a one-rupee coin. And when he put the camphor into the fire—it was all I could do not to sneeze.” I chattered on about the food and the gifts tally and the guests, and finally got him talking about his aunt.

Rather than tension, I felt a mounting anticipation. I couldn’t wait for the montage running for weeks in my mind to commence. Shedding our clothes, pressing my face into his body, feeling his kisses on my breasts. As Karun described a holiday with his cousins, I gathered up my nerve and leaned forward to arch my bosom like a bridge over his chest.

He stopped mid-sentence and lay motionless, holding his breath. Only when I unfurled my sari did he think to unhook my blouse and bra to free my breasts. I shifted my weight so that they hung like fruit over his neck. He hesitated, then leaned up to plant a kiss on each of them.

They were more chaste than I would have liked, his kisses, but I sighed my appreciation. He responded with more, apportioning them equitably between my two breasts. When I moved higher, he kissed my stomach, then stopped to wait for approval. “These wedding garments are too hot,” I said. “Let’s take some of them off.”

The cycle of cues on my part and responses on his continued after we disrobed—me to my petticoat and Karun to his underpants. I was struck by my enterprise—what had happened to my inhibition, my lack of experience? We rubbed our bodies together—he even took a breast in his mouth with my encouragement. There was something endearing about his willingness to please but also something tempering—the thought that he might not be aroused evened out the bursts of passion I felt.

Eventually, my initiatives faltered—I ran out of places to explore. I could not summon up the courage to venture uninvited below his waist. We lay side by side caressing each other. “Let’s get some rest,” I finally said, when it became clear no fire would be lit tonight.

“It’s been a long day. I’m sorry I’m so exhausted.” He buried his face in my chest to hide his embarrassment—or perhaps relief.

I turned out the light. Somehow, I didn’t feel so dejected. Although I would have liked Karun to be more assertive, I had surprised, even exhilarated, myself by taking the lead to compensate. The gentle ebb and flow of the waves outside reassured me we had many days of married life ahead.

THE ALL-CLEAR SIGNAL
still hasn’t sounded, which worries me. Could the control tower for the sirens have been hit? Will people realize this and begin to eventually creep out of their holes? Or will they hunker in deeper to count out their days, convinced the silence outside heralds the end? The street lies completely empty—only an abandoned red double-decker bus looms ahead. Even the beggars who live under the bridge over Queen’s Road have disappeared—I miss running the gauntlet of their badgering voices, their pawing hands.

I mount the steps to the station. The way to tell whether trains still run is to examine the evidence left by citizens who have performed their business on the rails. Something has come by to flatten deposits, but not today. Walking looks like the best alternative, since there’s no electricity to feed the pantographs anyway. I pick my way over the tracks to the seaward side. The lawns of the line of gymkhana clubs are so unnervingly immaculate that I wonder if they still pay their gardeners to manicure each individual blade of grass. Perhaps this is the fabled sacred land the Khaki referred to, the one he dared the enemy to harm.

Further on, though, chunks of concrete litter the sidewalk—fragments from bolsters blown out of the seawall. One of these bolsters has sailed clear across the road to smash into a building—it sticks out like a missile fired into the ruined façade. In fact, every fourth structure along Marine Drive, the city’s cherished “Queen’s Necklace,” seems to have been bombed. Markets, theaters, and now art deco buildings—is it incompetent planning, or simply bad aim on the Americans’ part? Maybe it is the Pakistanis after all.

A gash in the land cuts off my path. Waves froth through the bolsters, up the gully, all the way to the ground floor of a building that still stands. Could a bomb attack have done this, or has the earth spontaneously split apart in protest? I remember the frustratingly impersonal chats with Karun after my early swimming lessons—didn’t he say such fissures may be caused by rising sea levels? A woman appears at a balcony on the top floor and shakes a bed sheet open. It unwinds down the side of the building like a large white flag, as if she is signaling her personal surrender to any planes still lingering around. I wonder how she gets up there, how she negotiates the gully and crosses the moat that surrounds her teetering building. Will she go down with it when it collapses, determined to cling onto her flat until property prices recover?

I head the other way, towards Chowpatty. The uneasy sensation of being watched prickles my neck. Could someone be following me? I spin around, but no Khakis skulk behind the lampposts. The deserted curve of Marine Drive stretches emptily into the distance, terminating at Nariman Point in a tangle of blackened skyscraper shards.

I stand there, trying to comprehend the skyline without its iconic Air India tower, when the anti-aircraft guns start up again. Shells pop unseen in the sky. My first instinct is to dive into one of the vehicles abandoned mid-road—perhaps the police jeep with the missing wheels. But then I tell myself not to panic—I’m much too insignificant a target, enemy planes will hardly waste their bombs on me. Sure enough, the arrowhead formation of jets that zooms in from the sea streaks by overhead without slowing. A second later, I hear another drone, this one more gravelly, as if the engine has sucked in a pigeon it’s trying to digest. This straggler flies on too, like the ones before, but then swoops around in a sharp arc to return. I watch in disbelief as he dives towards me, and run screaming down the road as fragments of asphalt kick up at my feet. He circles around for a third pass, chasing me all the way to the city aquarium nestling in its enclosure of palm trees.

I crouch in the vestibule, waiting for him to blow me up. It makes perfect sense: hospitals, art deco buildings, cinemas—surely aquariums come next. Only after several minutes elapse can I allow myself to breathe freely. The jet still executes its homicidal loop repeatedly in my mind, but I know I have escaped with a reprieve.

It’s been several years since my visits here with my mother and Uma. The stone steps were smooth and polished then, the aquatic creatures carved on the walls didn’t have heads or fins missing. Most wondrously, a family of seahorses glided in a window by the entrance like some mythical aquatic tribe. Their display tank is empty today, the entry doors chained and padlocked.

About to turn away, I remember the fish and chips café in the compound, where we gorged on crisp pomfret after each visit. Is that why fate has spurred me here today, to satisfy my seafood craving? Uma always commented on how macabre the location seemed, as if the whole point of the aquarium exhibits was to stimulate viewers’ appetites. I tug at the handle and rattle at the chains, but the café remains securely locked. The door leading to the second-floor canteen, though, opens when I try it, and I scurry in.

Upstairs, the floor is covered with dust and broken glass. I walk into the kitchen and the pungency of fish assaults me almost at once. Am I imagining it?—has the machiwalli hallucination from the hospital returned? Or could years of frying have insinuated the odor into the walls? I begin to notice other things—the kerosene stove, the bottle of oil, and in the dark corner by the cupboard, the figure of a man lying curled up on a mat.

He awakens almost as soon as I spot him, and lifts himself groggily up on his hands. “How did you get in here? What do you want?”

He is barely twenty, but there is already a gauntness to him going beyond the war weariness I have seen in people’s faces. He looks as if he has been fighting an enormous personal battle, with little success. “Are you the cook?” I ask.

“The cook?” He scrambles up to a sitting position, umbrage clearing the sleepiness from his face. “Do I look like the cook to you?”

For an instant, I wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a Khaki, given his rumpled khaki shirt with the epaulets flopping unbuttoned at his shoulders. Then I notice the aquarium logo stitched over his pocket and realize he’s the watchman. He seems mollified by this. “I have a rifle downstairs, you know,” he adds, as if to impress on me the powerfulness of his position. He takes out a large ring of keys from his back pocket to display as further proof, whisking them away as if afraid I will try to touch them. “Why are you here?” he demands.

“I came looking for fish.”

A wary look springs to his eyes. “The display tanks are in the other building—”

“I meant to
eat
. Isn’t this the canteen?”

“The canteen? Does it look open to you? Can’t you hear the bombs falling outside? Where is the fish going to come from, fly into your lap from Chowpatty?” He shakes his head. “There’s no fish. Now go away.” He turns around and spreads himself out again on his mat.

I’m about to turn away when I spot a waste basket next to the cupboard. Sticking out from under its lid is a fish head, its eye dried open into a stare. “See?” I cry out, waving the lid in the air. “See, I could smell it. Someone
has
been eating fish.”

The watchman springs back up. “Are you accusing me? Are you saying I ate that fish?”

I’m startled at his vehemence. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“Anyone could have sneaked into the aquarium and pulled out a fish. How do I know who did it? Do I have ten heads that I can keep track of everything? And what am I supposed to eat—do you even know how long it has been since I’ve been paid?”

I wonder if he is asking for money. Perhaps I should offer him some of the notes tied in my dupatta. “Look, Bhaiyya. I haven’t eaten either. If you can bring me a fish, even a small one, I’ll give you two hundred rupees.”

Instead of calming him, my words make him flare up. “How dare you insult me with such a bribe? You think I’m going to hand over the very creatures I’m supposed to protect? You think I have no self-respect? Why did you come here, memsahib, just to spit in my face?” He wraps his arms around his sides and hugs his body, rocking back and forth slowly on his heels, as if to comfort himself after my calumnies.

“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away towards the kitchen door. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

I am almost at the door, ready to turn around and escape, when he looks up. “
Four
hundred,” he says.

AN UNDERGROUND PASSAGEWAY
connecting the two buildings leads us into the aquarium. Hrithik (not his real name, he confesses, but one he has decided to adopt after his favorite film star) tells me there might still be a few of my cherished seahorses around somewhere. “Though they’re not very tasty.”

The exhibits inside have no illumination, so Hrithik lights a candle. “These days, there’s only enough generator oil to run the filters,” he explains. “Not that there are too many tanks with anything left.” He shows me a panel behind which tiny candy drop fish make small kissing gestures as if thanking him for the light. “I never tried these, I was always told the colorful ones are poisonous.”