by Vivek Shraya
Destruction has a reputation for being chaotic and random, but the wisdom of Shiva tells a very different story. I know this better than anyone.
A long time ago, an uncomfortable alliance was established between demigods and demons. They were in search of the omnipotent nectar that was buried deep in the Ocean of Milk, a nectar that could restore some of the brilliance they had lost after years of battling each other. They understood, without fully grasping its breadth and mystery, that it was a risk to disturb the Ocean, but their thirst was greater than their caution. They churned the stubborn waters for days, and many surprises and secrets emerged, including the Wish-Fulfilling Tree and even Goddess Lakshmi. But no one had anticipated their search would trigger the release of the ancient poison that guarded the nectar, although, when I consider it now, it makes sense that the Ocean wouldn’t surrender its greatest treasure without a fight. The mission halted as everyone panicked, understanding the danger they all faced if the poison wasn’t contained. Then Shiv appeared and, without deliberation, drank the poison, holding it in his throat. Just like that.
Centuries later, during the Great Drought, the children of the Earth begged for Mother Ganga to descend from the heavens. Knowing that the planet was not strong enough to withstand the force of her passage from sky to land, Shiv agreed to be an intermediary between the two worlds, carrying Ganga’s crushing, crashing weight in his hair.
Why do you always say yes? Why do you always show up? I once asked him.
Death must happen in its own time, my love, he responded. Until then, I remain vigilant.
This is why he spends so much time alone—because he is. No one, including myself, can comprehend the burden he carries, the balance that he holds, gracefully and without complaint. Has he ever thought of letting go? If he were to open his mouth and release the venom, take a break from the burning for just one day, everything would end. My body and all of my creations would ignite.
Today is the first day I have seen him cry.
Around the time his friends and family began to comment on how often he mentioned her—Her this and She that—she proposed that they meet outside of work, off campus. Hours before their meeting, he phoned his friend Geoff for a pep talk. Geoff listened as he swooned in phrases that sounded stolen from early ’90s R&B slow jams:
I can’t get her out of my head.
I can’t wait to see her.
She’s so lovely.
But it’s not a date or anything, Geoff interrupted.
No. She has a boyfriend.
No, I mean, you can’t actually like her, like her, right?
I guess not? I don’t know. I can’t get her out of my head.
He arrived at the coffee shop on Jasper Avenue exactly sixteen minutes before she did and took a seat facing the door so that they could see each other the moment she entered. But when she arrived, he looked down to give the impression that he was preoccupied with a very important thought. He slid his hands under his knees.
He looked up when her scent reached him. She smiled, and he jumped up to embrace her, a standard greeting amongst his friends, but when their jackets briefly touched, it felt more than friendly.
They sat down, and before she was able to unwrap herself from the layers of Edmonton winter-survival gear, the words stumbled out of him:
I just want you to know that I dig you.
There it was, sitting on the table between them, exposed for all of its unromanticness—the word dig. A teenage confession that prompted mutual teenage giggling for the next five minutes, but without eye contact. That kind of intimacy in this moment could heighten a dig to a like. And yet, his flushed cheeks revealed to him that he did, in fact, like her. Like her, like her. This was no friend crush.
Once the moment had passed and their faces stabilized, conversation flowed as effortlessly as it did when they were at work. But his confession had irreversibly changed how they looked at each other, or rather, enhanced it. The wool scarf around her neck, for instance, was suddenly indistinguishable from her skin and was completely irresistible to him.
Uma! Uma! Uma!
I rush over to where Ganesh is sleeping.
Bad dreams again, dear one?
I rock him back and forth in my arms. He barely nods, still half asleep.
What happens in these dreams?
Someone is hurting me.
After he falls back asleep, I hold him a little longer and then carefully ease myself up.
I turn around and see Shiv close behind us, pacing.
Parvati, there is something I haven’t told you. Something you haven’t asked me.
I know.
You do?
I do.
Why haven’t you asked?
Because it doesn’t matter, he is still my precious boy. At least, it didn’t matter …
I think you need to know.
I think you are right.
As you know, I had been in a battle … that day.
We both wince. We have been trying to forget that day. Perhaps this is another reason why I had not yet asked the most obvious question.
I was informed by the forest dwellers of an elephant king west of the mountains who had become greedy, claiming more and more of the land as his own. They said that his mind had turned black.
Shiv, no. NO.
I went to reason with him and to restore order. But—
NO. My son! But … how?
Do you recall that I wasn’t able to reattach his original head? I didn’t know what to do. I immediately thought of the last head …
That villain’s head! You put that savage’s head on my son’s body?
I was desperate. I had to do something.
You had done enough! None of this would have happened if you had only …
He tries to put his hand on my shoulder, but I step back.
But that still doesn’t make sense, I continue. Why was the union successful? How did he come back?
I don’t know.
You don’t know?
I honestly don’t know. I think there was something about the energy in the room at the exact moment when head and body were put together.
Why don’t I remember?
You were stomping, dancing hard, and everything was falling apart. Everything. But there was a distinct smell that cut through the air. Once I recognized it, I felt hopeful.
What smell?
It was you, my beloved. It was life.
The office needs a Christmas tree, she announced.
The declaration came as a surprise to him because they had talked about how her family didn’t celebrate Christmas and about her acute preference for all-inclusive holiday greetings at this time of the year. That he was one of the only staff members in the office when she made the announcement convinced him that this tree project was just an excuse for them to spend more time together, so he quickly volunteered to assist.
Maybe because this was something he had only ever done with his family, or because he was so particular about the tradition, but he felt there was something intimate about putting up a tree together—the careful winding of the screws at the base so the tree itself stood centred and the precise placement and distribution of the decorations to ensure that the lights were visible but the garbage-bag-green wires concealed. Thankfully, he had brought his copy of Christina Aguilera’s My Kind of Christmas. Gleefully listening to her vocals, somersaulting higher and faster, reduced any tension between them.
They backed away from the small artificial tree, now lit and tinselled.
We did it!
It’s so beautiful.
It really is.
His arm extended itself around her shoulder. She responded by putting her arms around his waist, and in this sideways embrace, they began to sway to the music. His body gradually turned in to face hers, their bodies clasping each other, growing into each other to form another tree. Limbs for branches, adrenaline for lights. They said nothing.
At the office holiday party, th
e memory of their special afternoon helped keep his jealousy at bay as he watched her boyfriend dote on her and, later that night, dance with her. After what felt like a respectful amount of time had passed, he asked her for the next dance. She accepted with a curt okay, as though she was doing him a favour, as though he was a worker asking his boss to dance at a holiday party. He responded by keeping as much distance between them as he could within the constraints of a slow dance. He didn’t pull her close, and she didn’t make eye contact. But he made her laugh by imitating his co-workers’ clunky dance moves.
After their dance, they gave each other a forced smile, and he politely said Thank you.
She walked back to the table where her boyfriend was sitting. Morty looked at her curiously, as though he was seeing something he’d never noticed before.
You know, if he wasn’t gay, I would be really jealous right now.
The first time she put her hand on his bare chest, he winced. And the second time.
They were under her desk, lit by the sparse glow of the computer screen above. Her playlist was on shuffle and by now had run its cycle at least three times. He wasn’t paying close attention to the songs themselves, but each repeated song signalled the progression of a night he didn’t want to end, even though his eyes were tightly closed and his legs trembling.
She had been slowly working at taking off his shirt, kissing the back of his neck as she rolled up the light blue fabric, and had finally succeeded. He felt as though all of his bones, his entire rib cage, were exposed.
After high school, his clothing had become a second layer of skin, a necessary fabric that protected his body from other bodies, a layer he removed only to change or shower or at the dreaded annual check-up with his doctor. But lying beside her, he drew courage from her body, her presence in every part of it. She did not possess the awkwardness he had witnessed in others, the uncertainty of their steps or the teenage stumbling that surfaced when they were faced with the inconvenient or unexpected. There was no apparent divide between who she was and her expressions, gestures, and movements; everything synced together in a gorgeous rhythm, like the perfect score to a perfect moment in a perfect film. Even her thoughts were clearly represented. In his spare time, he had been compiling a dictionary of all of her faces:
a.single arched eyebrow: subject is unimpressed, skeptical. If in midst of joke, recognize its failure to be humorous and change subject. If in midst of disagreement, abandon hypothetical data and reframe with fact.
b.fluttering eyelashes, eyes widened: subject is in a state of wonderment and will shortly follow with a flurry of questions, but they are mostly rhetorical.
c.closed eyes: subject is not necessarily asleep, but rather potentially hyper-awake, as her true vision exists in her mind. Resist feeling neglected; subject is savouring.
d.
He had made comments about wanting to see the drawer where her underwear slept and wanting to photograph her nude. This was how he flirted with her—speaking outlandishly to test, push, and flatter, but always meaning it. Perhaps it was those comments that made her now gesture to her chest:
Do you want to see them?
Of course I do.
They are big …
Of course they are.
No. Like really big.
Warnings like this were given because he was gay. In a couple of weeks, he would, in turn, warn her that This is not going to be a conventional relationship, not really knowing what he meant, but trying to create some semblance of self-preservation in the event that he didn’t measure up to the type of boyfriend with which she was better acquainted.
I’ll admit that Morty really knows what he is doing, she had once mentioned.
Oh? he had replied, hoping that he sounded adequately interested, which he was. And wasn’t.
That’s pretty much why I keep dating him.
He tried to remind himself that her breakup with Morty was evidence that heroic sexual prowess was not paramount for her. But despite a lifetime of primarily female friends and a fondness for all-female-cast films like Boys on the Side and Waiting to Exhale, he was beginning to realize how little he knew about women, particularly about their anatomy. The Women’s Network and its soft but mostly concealing body shots did not prepare him for this moment.
Her red scooped-neck shirt came off, followed by her black bra. They were big. He didn’t realize just how much work a bra did and felt envious of its duty and intimate proximity to her body. He didn’t want to stare and give her the impression that he was afraid or turned off, so he closed his eyes, cupped her breasts with his hands, and kissed them. He had read in the sex-advice column in Men’s Health that men spent too much time focusing on nipples, so he tried to lavish an equality along the entire breast. He listened closely to the sounds she made as an aural compass to what made her feel good. He listened to the non-vocal cues too, where her body shivered. She also gently directed him, and he was grateful, especially when she guided his hand toward her pussy, an area he did not have the confidence to approach on his own.
He was intimidated by the secrecy of it, its depth. A penis felt comparatively obvious, an extrovert that just needed constant attention. But once his fingers were inside her, the immeasurable wetness produced waves inside his own body, and he found himself wanting to merge both sensations.
The first time she came, she laughed uncontrollably, her head tilted back into the pillow and the back of her hand against her forehead.
Why are you laughing at me?
I am not …
Was it … okay? Did I do it right?
It was great! She laughed again.
Why are you laughing, then?
I just feel so fucking happy.
They were on the floor again, this time at her vacationing friend’s place, when they finally found themselves completely naked, side by side. Floors were easy to access, without parental supervision, and heightened the intimacy. Body and body and wood. Body and body and concrete. Body and body and carpet. Her touch was still painful to him, but now, instead of fearing it, fearing what her hands might discover—the ugly they might find, the coarseness of a terrain unclaimed or untravelled—he anticipated it. He desired it.
The first time he came, he apologized.
Why are you sorry?
Was that okay?
Well, was it okay for you? She squeezed his shoulder.
Yes. Yes. It felt amazing.
After years of hiding and being unseen, her touch was a deep thawing, a permission to feel, a memory of heat lost long ago.
When you were little, I was so worried you would end up fat like your dad, fat like an elephant.
He had often heard about his fat childhood from his mother, about how his auntie had nicknamed him “Butterball” when his ten fingers became so plump that they joined into two lumpy mounds at the base of his arms. His mom had panicked and taken heed of a co-worker’s advice that she switch his milk from homo to two-percent. Although his fingers separated again, her fear loomed over his teenage years, evidenced by her frequent descriptions of his childhood body as subtle warnings for his adult body. On the rare occasions he looked at himself in the misted bathroom mirror after showering, he cringed at the sight of his round belly, his mother’s foreshadowing ringing in his ears. He was convinced that the words fat and failure were synonymous to his mother because, in her arguments with his dad, she would first attack his weight and then list the rest of his inadequacies:
FAT
big-mouthed
overspender
selfish
careless
brainless
He tried to be stringent about what he ate, but when he visited his mother’s family, his aunties all said the same thing:
You are so skinnnnny! Doesn’t your mother feed you?
There was one body that caused him greater discomfort than his own—his dad’s. His dad would often commence undressing as soon as he walked through the front door, celebrating the end of the work
day by shedding layers of clothing throughout their home. Dad! he would whine, frantically picking up the discarded clothes, trying not to look as his dad marched around the house wearing only his torn-up, stretched-out briefs. Why can’t you change in your bedroom like everyone else?
Even though, by definition, his dad’s name, Sundar, meant beautiful, Sundar himself was repeatedly told otherwise by own mother:
Sundar is fat like an elephant!
Sundar had grown up in a home in which his mother was solely responsible for the food. Even though their servants were allowed to help by acquiring and grating and cutting and chopping and rinsing, the actual act of cooking belonged to her. This was more than just a sense of duty or birthright. In the kitchen, she could transform her love into something edible and sustaining for her six children. In the kitchen, her love was tangible and alive. Perhaps this was why Sundar felt closest to his mother here, watching her knead dough until it was smooth, roll it out into a perfect circle, and flip it on the skillet until lightly browned. Sometimes, before dinner was served to the family, she would secretly feed Sundar the rotis, wrapped around aloo mattar, with her bare hands. He felt guilty that his siblings had not yet eaten but, sensing his worry, she would smile and whisper, It’s best when it’s fresh.
Her smile receded as Sundar got older and his body expanded, mirroring her own enormity. Looking at him, she saw an animal, an elephant made of her own flesh, reflecting her own weight. She began to resent his constant need for nourishment and chastised him when he looked for food in-between meals. This only increased his hunger.
Sundar could taste the absence of his mother’s love in the food. The roti was bitter, the pilau dry, and, no matter how hot the food was when served, the warmth and taste of the sun was gone. But he kept eating, hoping to find to her love once more.
We don’t know how to be a family. Although I have forgiven Shiv, and Ganesh does not remember his beheading, the memory of violence lingers, a bloodstain refusing to be washed away. Shiv tries to earn our trust again by being more present, wandering off less, even in his own mind, and paying attention to our every word and need. Ganesh is still having nightmares, and Shiv is always the first to respond, singing songs about me to soothe Ganesh back to sleep.