The Two Krishnas (47 page)

It was then that she thought of the Internet and looked across the room at Ajay’s laptop sitting on the kitchen counter. Pooja brought the laptop to the couch. She flipped it open and was greeted by ethereal northern polar lights on the desktop. The sky, lit up with green and red strokes, made her think of the gods in their heavenly abodes. She heard Ajay’s voice in her head, asking her to verify the fan-like icon in the top margin of the desktop before clicking on the logo of an orange fox circling the globe to connect to the Internet. Pooja had used the computer occasionally to research recipes, read up on Kenya, Bollywood, but mostly when Ajay or Rahul had been around. It was the reason for her using it now that made her nervous this time.

She stared at the search engine, feeling like she was about to step into another dimension, one from which she may not return the same. Never in a million years would she have thought she would need a computer to better understand her husband, yet here she was, a book on Persian poetry lying next to her, Charlie’s words in her mind.

She searched the words “gay” and “Indian” and was bombarded with hundreds of responses, the first one being a two-minute video of standup comedian, Vidhur Kapur. The last name, though spelt differently, panicked her. She clicked on him and was transported to YouTube, where Ajay had once surprised her with a selection of Bollywood videos. The bald-headed, animated man was armed with a microphone and pranced around the stage, bemoaning his fate as a gay Indian immigrant in America. Pooja found herself amused, even impressed momentarily, by his flawless imitation of old, gossipy Indian matriarchs. She confirmed to herself with some satisfaction that yes, this is what a gay Indian looks like. Same last name or not, Rahul and he couldn’t be more dissimilar.

Barely a minute into the video, Pooja used the go-back button and cut the comedian off, returning to the list of responses, all of them confirming India’s disapproval of homosexuality. She tacked on various other identifiers: “religious text,” “holy books,” and even “Is it okay to be,” but each time the response was unequivocal and condemning. Then she remembered Charlie’s mention of the
Padma Puranas
. She searched again.

At the top, she was shocked to discover a gay and lesbian association for Vaishnavism, a monotheistic tradition of Hinduism that worshipped a supreme God who was known by different names according to his avatar or perspective. On this site, she also found a glowing review of a book about same-sex marriages. Discounting this as an isolated case, Pooja returned to the responses, searching deeper, and stumbled upon several Hindu-based sites that not only supported the gay lifestyle, but also provided caches of ancient texts to justify it. Among these, she found
Behind the Veil
, a thesis by two academics, Rani Seth and Vinod Basu, revealing the prevalence of homosexuality in their religious texts and culture.

Suddenly, Pooja found it difficult to breathe or believe her eyes as they fell upon an italicized fragment in the center:

…And when Aswatthaman asked Krishna for his discus, Krishna replied: “Phalguna (Arjuna) than whom I have no dearer friend on earth, that friend to whom there is nothing that I cannot give including my wives and children has never made such a request.” (Sauptika Parva, XII)

Pooja flinched, looking away from the screen, perturbed by Krishna’s grandiose yet callous willingness to sacrifice everything for his friend. What kind of friendship—divine or otherwise—could take precedence over a marriage, children?

Like all devout Hindus, she knew only too well about the profound friendship between lord Krishna and the Pandava warrior Arjuna, the famous pair on whose battle-side discourses at Kurukshetra the whole
Bhagvad Gita
was based, but she had never encountered such ancient texts, never let them assume such personal impact. The Gita, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were the foundation of Hinduism but what was all this? She read some more, about Krishna’s last night at Hastinapur before returning to his city, Dwarka:

“…
all of them entered the respective apartments. Krishna or great energy proceeded to the apartments of Dhananjaya (Arjuna). Worshipped duly and furnished with every object of comfort and enjoyment, Krishna of great intelligence passed the night in happy sleep with Dhananjaya as his companion”
(Aswamedha Parva LII)

I’m being stupid,
Pooja thought,
taking all this so personally, reading so much into all this.
Often indivisible, Krishna and Arjuna were often thought of as divine and human aspects of every being, born in the world to fight against unrighteousness. They were a metaphor, surely, for the love between God and his devotees.

She put the laptop aside, over the book, and leaned back into the sofa, its beaded thorns now abraded. She looked up at the white speckled ceiling, her confrontation with Rahul in the kitchen echoing. Could she have said something to change the way it had all turned out? What if she had maintained her silence, refused to confront him even when pressured to do so, would he still be here then?

For a moment all thoughts left her mind and the ceiling, an opaque sky that seemed to have suspended its fall just short of crushing her, offered her complete nihility. But the respite, like the elusive dip into infinity during meditation, passed and she wondered, as she often had as a little child, what the world would be like if it were turned upside down. If the chandelier, instead of hanging upon her, stood erect like a stalwart guard and she had to walk around it; if the ceiling offered ground and the ground provided shelter. If, instead of feeling pain as a constant, she felt more of nothing, a merciful numbness, and the pain became intermittent.

Where was her Krishna when she needed him?

Why hadn’t he come to her aid?

He could give his friend Arjuna anything, including his wives and children so why couldn’t he give her—his devotee—her husband back?
Why can’t you help me? Why won’t you give me what I want?
she demanded.
What else can I do? What words should I employ?
And then, she thought about her mother praying in their
puja
room back home, of the countless heroines of Hindu lore that had been tested, and she thought,
I must remain strong. Miracles happen, intervention occurs, but so many times only at the very last second and not a moment before that.

Lifting her head, her eyes fell on the lit screen again. She hesitated momentarily, placed the computer on her lap, scrolled down the page, found more:

“…My wives, my kinsmen, my relatives, none among these are dearer to me than Arjuna. O Daruka, I shall not be able to cast my eyes, even for a single moment, on the earth bereft of Arjuna…Know that Arjuna is half of my body” (Drona Parva LXXIX: 153)

Riled, she scrolled further down, trying to escape the electrifying declarations of ardor between the two superheroes of Hindu lore. And what of Radha? What of Meera? What of Rukmini? she wondered. Or any one of your sixteen thousand wives? Your children? You can live without them? Do they mean nothing to you? Why only him? How was she supposed to find solace in a friendship that discarded all other relationships?

Page after page, the thesis only confronted her with more of the same. Her eyes, trying to find something of the love between Krishna and Radha, or the ink-skinned god’s love for his
Gopikas
with whom he had multiplied himself at the banks of the river, encountered only Krishna’s passion for Arjuna and, in one startling passage, even the god’s transformation into a woman called Mohini so that Krishna could marry the Lord Aravan and help save the world from another catastrophe.

This must be what Charlie was talking about; all this was nothing new, it had been there since the beginning of time, in us, in our gods. But what the hell did these people know? It was just like them, those daft white people, taking something sacred and twisting it to suit their own depraved thinking! The thought—no matter how well-intentioned—that some ashram-trotting, nirvana-starved
gora
was manipulating the gods to justify Rahul’s depravity, threw her into a furor. He could go and brainwash all those yoga-addicts with his exotic brand of Hinduism but she was not stupid. Somehow she managed to ignore the fact that the authors of the thesis were Indian, and diverted her anger to Charlie.

She clicked a button and closed the window, sending the information into a void. The heavens came back into view, her gods still hiding behind the aurora borealis. She shut the laptop and cast it aside, promising herself to give Charlie a piece of her mind, not even realizing that she was crying again.

Where was the Krishna chasing the milkmaids, loving the cow girls, reuniting with the neglected Radha, rescuing Draupadi, giving his sermon at the battlefield, stealing butter?

This was not her lord.

* * *

That evening, Ajay came home to a house engulfed in darkness, his mother asleep on the sofa downstairs with her arm thrown across her face to shut the world out. She had been wearing that same dress for the last two days. She didn’t even stir as he made his way through the living room and for a moment, it seemed as if life itself had seeped away from her. He stood over her in the dark and when he saw the almost imperceptible movement of her chest, he was relieved. Her face was turned away from him and into the sofa like that of a punished child who had cried herself to sleep.

Ajay had always known how much his mother loved his father, her demonstration of it as heady and potent as his father’s was repressed and veiled, but this display took his breath away, and gripped him with red, hot rage. He hated himself for being unable to protect her and he hated her for her devotion to a man unworthy of it. Now, as he pulled the scarlet Kashmiri shawl over her, he was overcome with feelings so powerful and discrepant they were nearly primal, and he knew, in that instant, that he would do anything to protect her.

Who was this cunt that had bewitched his father? What did she look like? How had she made him forget all else?

While Ajay and his father had never spent as much time together as some of Ajay’s friends did with their fathers—at Dodgers’ games, throwing down beers, working around the house—he had never doubted his father’s affection for him, that special brand of distant yet irrefutable love which was felt more than seen. But now that Rahul had moved out literally overnight without even telling him or expressing any regret, without giving Ajay the chance to tell his father how he felt, it became obvious to him that he and his mother meant nothing to Rahul, that his father’s lack of demonstration was not just a personality trait but an expression of his inability to love them.

He looked at his mother one last time, then tiptoed his way quietly up the stairs to his room, determined to find out where and why his father was hiding.

* * *

For once in her life, Pooja wished that the person she was dealing with hadn’t been another Indian. While the young, green-eyed, handsome Dr. Arvind Patel did nothing to make her feel in the least bit self-conscious—none of the lingering looks that Indians gave one another or any kind of personal inquiries like what part of the motherland you or your family came from—she still felt embarrassed at being there. The fact that he shared her maiden name didn’t escape her either, as if the moment he was done with her, he was going to get on a long distance phone to let everyone in the community know about her apparent breakdown. Being there, not for an infection or physical pain, but because she was unable to cope with her husband’s abandonment of her, was a clear sign of defeat, a failure on the part of all the powers that were supposed to sustain her.

What would her own mother have said if she could have seen Pooja here like this, sitting on some examination table just because she couldn’t stop crying? Why hadn’t her fastidious upbringing buttressed her more? Why hadn’t her prayers, if they couldn’t move mountains, at least given her the strength of one so that she hadn’t ended up here, crumbling and crying in a cold room with reproductions of Monet on the walls, as if the pale, sun-faded water lilies were going to bring her any kind of ease.

Dr. Patel sat on a low stool and looked up at her on the table. As he spoke, asking general questions about her medical history that were obviously meant to elicit insightful responses as to her present malaise, Pooja noticed the chipped nail polish on her toenails and curled them into her sandals like snails recoiling from an attack. Dr. Patel, noticing this, paused in mid-sentence only momentarily before catching himself, and then to prevent further embarrassment, continued, “How’s everything at home, Mrs. Kapoor?”

She reacted ambivalently, shrugging and nodding at the same time as if her body was caught between two responses. Then, feeling awkward because of this, she managed to sound just as confused. “Okay, I think.”

“How much sleep are you getting?”

“Some…well, actually none, not at night, none at all.”

“I see,” he said, forming a tight smile. “And how are you feeling these days?”

She began to speak but then stopped, afraid her voice would break and that tears would gush from her eyes. She looked around the room frantically. Then she grew suddenly angry at his insipid questions. She was there, wasn’t she? So shouldn’t he know? What exactly did he expect her to say? “No, no, this is all a mistake. I mean, I’m not even supposed to be here,” she said and started to get off the table, the thin tissue cover tearing under her.

Dr. Patel raised his hand and said appealingly, “Please, Mrs. Kapoor, please just stay a few minutes. We’re talking, that’s all.”