by Manil Suri
Both Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani had been most unhappy at this return. They had just completed negotiations with Short Ganga, promising her the first-floor landing if she agreed to lower wages. (Short Ganga had, in turn, paid off the paanwalla and the cigarettewalla to quell potential claims, and rented the landing to Man Who Slept on the Lowest Step, at a profitable rate.) However, neither Mrs. Pathak nor Mrs. Asrani had been willing to tell Vishnu he could not return; they had nagged their husbands to do it. The plan hadn’t worked: Vishnu had been reinstated, much to their chagrin.
He had fallen extremely ill almost immediately. “He was coughing quite badly this morning,” Mr. Asrani said to Mrs. Asrani one day.
“TB,” Mrs. Asrani whispered to Mrs. Pathak that afternoon. “He was coughing blood when I took him his tea.”
“We’re all going to be infected!” Mrs. Pathak screamed at her husband that evening. “Blood all over my sari when I went to feed him!”
But the doctor Mr. Pathak had called in, at Mrs. Pathak’s hysterical urging, had said there was no sign of tuberculosis, and further tests would be needed to diagnose what it was—tests that cost money, and which Mrs. Pathak quickly declared out of the question, it being bad enough that the doctor had charged his full fee and didn’t these doctors have any heart, even for people who slept on the landings?
And now that Vishnu had soiled himself on their steps, on the very day that she was hosting her kitty party, what was Mr. Pathak going to do, and hadn’t she warned him?
Mr. Pathak thought about continuing reading his paper, but he knew this would only infuriate his wife further. He put on his glasses to better appraise her anger. “I could call an ambulance…” he ventured.
At this, Mrs. Pathak got very excited. “An ambulance! An ambulance! We don’t have money to send Rajan to a boarding school, and you’re going to order an ambulance! For Vishnu!” For a second, Mr. Pathak wondered if he had provoked his wife into her occasional ritual of removing the gold bangles from her arms and telling him he might as well sell off her dowry. Fortunately, his infraction had not been serious enough, for Mrs. Pathak’s anger seemed to quickly veer away. “We’ve already paid for a doctor—if anyone pays for an ambulance, it should be them!” She spat out the last word at the wall separating their flat from the Asranis.
“Go talk to them,” Mrs. Pathak ordered. “Tell them it’s their responsibility now.”
Wearily, Mr. Pathak folded his newspaper. Summer weekends were the worst. The monsoons were still two months away.
IT IS A different red. He knows this color well. It is the red of her room: the ceiling, the walls, drip red. The girls are dancing downstairs, a film song rises through the floor. She dances with back toward a freestanding mirror, her arms swaying above her head. Her fingers caress the chameli on her wrist, they undo the string that holds them. She looks up at the flowers as they cascade over her face. Her hand slides down her arm with the music, her fingers move to her breast. She pulls open a clasp, her dress parts down the front. Rounded flesh peeks out from the cloth, the skin between is powdered white. Vishnu hears the ghungroos on the dancers’ feet below chiming to the music.
She turns around quickly and the dress falls to the floor. She grabs a side of the mirror with each hand and presses her body against it. Her back is swaying in front of Vishnu, he has still not seen her breasts.
Slowly, she peels her body off the mirror. Her breasts rise from the surface, like moons emerging from a pool. Her hair swings free, her body arches back, and her nipples turn into view—they ascend into the air, crowning the twin mounds of her body. Vishnu stares at them in fascination: drops of blood against white flesh, they are painted a bright iridescent red.
“Squeeze them,” Padmini says, and Vishnu’s fingers close over each nipple. He rubs them and the red comes off on his fingertips.
“Taste them,” she says, still bent backwards. Vishnu leans over. His tongue traces a path up her white breast and he tastes the chalkiness of the talcum. It reaches the nipple. The red feels sticky on his tongue, it is sweet colored syrup. She laughs as he bites her gently.
“On the bed,” she says, and he lifts her up and carries her to it.
“Down below,” she whispers, loosening the string of her skirt. Vishnu pulls down the cloth. Her thighs are powdered white, between them Vishnu sees a triangle of garish red. “Slut!” he whispers.
“Do it!” she says.
“Slut!” he says again, and begins to rise, but she pulls him back into the red.
SQUATTING ON THE floor in front of the dressing-table mirror, Mrs. Asrani was in the midst of applying Tru-Tone to her hair when the doorbell rang. “Can you get that?” she shouted to Mr. Asrani. “If it’s the meatwalla, buy a kilo—and don’t let him give you all bones like he did the last time.”
Around and under Mrs. Asrani, the floor was covered with pages of the Times of India. Six years ago, when she had started dyeing her hair, Mr. Asrani and the children had quickly learned that to venture into the territory delineated by the newspaper was to risk terrible consequences. As Mrs. Asrani’s ire at her aging had grown, so also had the area she staked out. These days, she was up to the entire Saturday edition.
The dye was not behaving today, it didn’t look viscous enough—perhaps she had not mixed the two components in the right proportion. She dipped the old toothbrush wrapped in gauze into the saucer of black liquid by her foot and ran it over her hair. Black drops rolled down onto the faded towel around her shoulders. Her hair was getting grayer, she could tell: time was that a bottle of Tru-Tone lasted her a year, but now Mr. Asrani had to be sent down to the chemist for a new bottle every two months.
Mrs. Asrani sighed. How many more bottles of Tru-Tone would she go through before she finally decided to quit? She hated the whole process—the chemical smell of the dye, the way it stained her fingers, the long wait for it to set while it seeped out into her skin. No matter how hard she scrubbed afterwards, the marks remained for days on her forehead, crude enhancements of her hairline that someone might have painted on to form a more decorative frame for her face. She wasn’t even sure why she did it anymore—whom was she trying to fool, whom was she trying to impress? Certainly not Manohar—all he seemed to care about was his gods and his drinks. He had not commented on her looks for—how long had it been? In fact, when was the last time he had even brought her a string of jasmine—the blossoms she had come to expect every evening in those early years, tied around her hair by his own hand? The buds would glow creamily in her tresses, black as kohl back then, and he would squeeze the petals between his fingers to release their fragrance and perfume her hair.
But that had been before her hair had turned, before her looks had thickened, before her body had begun to spill around her every time she sat down. Why had it happened to her? Manohar was no more plump than the day he first came to look at her—hair mostly gone, it was true, but the baldness only accentuating his babyish looks. And Mrs. Pathak, right next door, giving birth to her two children in the same two years she had—how had she retained the slimness of her figure, the immaculate blackness of her hair? It was all so unfair.
She could feel the anger descending again, a curtain falling around, enveloping her insides in its folds. She wondered if it could be a chemical in the dye that caused this reaction month after month. She really had to give the whole thing up. She had tried to do so once last year, going an entire two months without using the Tru-Tone. Squiggles of white had sprouted all over her head, like some crawling infestation, but she had not reached for the bottle. The squiggles had turned into gaping patches, and she had tied her hair tightly into a bun to hide them. But Mrs. Pathak had taken to shaking her hair loose tauntingly every time she came into the kitchen, and she had finally succumbed. She had even tried using henna once, since it did not have a chemical base, but it had turned her hair a bright orange and she had ended up looking like one of the old Muslim ladies who came to visit Mrs. Jalal on Saturdays.
V
oices from the door brought her out of her reverie. “…and since he’s in such a bad state, we thought….” It was Mr. Pathak, not the meatwalla—what was he talking about? Mrs. Asrani put down the toothbrush and held her breath, to make sure she heard every word.
“…really should do something before Vishnu gets….” Of course. Vishnu. The steps outside. She should have told Mr. Asrani—it was Mrs. Pathak’s fault—who’d ever heard of giving such dry chapatis to someone in that condition—her chapatis would make even a well man sick! Tell them they should pay for cleaning up, she felt like yelling to Mr. Asrani—what a mess—her head half covered with dye.
“…and since we paid for the doctor, we think it’s only fair that you pay for the ambulance.” What a preposterous suggestion. Of course, Mr. Asrani would politely but firmly correct this silliness. The woman must be mad, to send her husband to say this. Poor Mr. Pathak—Mrs. Asrani felt a twinge of sympathy for him.
“Of course.” The two words, in her husband’s voice, sent Mrs. Asrani into shock. But the situation was too egregious, and she was forced to quickly recover. She tried to speak, but the indignation made the word stick in her throat. “No!” it finally emerged, swinging through the corridor and speeding toward Mr. Asrani.
“No!” Mr. Asrani agreed, as soon as the missive reached him. “Tell them that the only reason Vishnu threw up is because of those chapatis they fed him.”
“The chapatis,” Mr. Asrani explained. “You see, he ate them and that’s what caused the problem. Perhaps you shouldn’t have fed them to him.”
“If someone is that sick, one can only expect—” Mr. Pathak began. “If someone is that sick, one doesn’t feed them food fit for the dogs,” Mrs. Asrani interrupted, still speaking only to her husband. “And if one does insist on feeding such things, then one must pay for the consequences.” Mrs. Asrani was trying to keep her voice low, but frustration at her temporary incapacitation made it difficult.
“Aruna, let me speak to Mr. Pathak,” Mr. Asrani said, trying, without much hope, to sound assertive.
“So really, they are the ones who should pay for the jamadarni even.”
“Surely you aren’t suggesting we should be paying for everything. We already paid for the doctor, you know.”
“And for what, ask them, for what? What did the doctor say, that he’s sick? I could have told Mr. Pathak that.”
“Aruna.”
“No, tell Pathak sahib that they are responsible. She is responsible. Tell him he should go to his wife and tell her—” Before she could finish her sentence, the door slammed.
By the time her husband entered the room, Mrs. Asrani was calmly applying the Tru-Tone again. “Did you have to be so rude?” Mr. Asrani demanded, the anger giving his face a cherubic flush. “You really should at least—”
“I should at least? Don’t tell me I should at least. You should at least. You know how much ghee she’s been stealing? Every day the level goes lower and lower, and I can’t say anything. I can never catch her. And you’re taking her side.” Mrs. Asrani’s voice faltered, as if she were about to cry.
“Aruna, Aruna, I’m not taking her side. Don’t be silly.”
“You said I should at least—” Again, Mrs. Asrani’s voice wavered, threatening to dissolve into a sob.
“All I said was Vishnu—the man’s dying—on our steps—we have to do something.”
“So let them do it,” said Mrs. Asrani, her voice hardening suddenly, like syrup cracking in water. “What good will it do now anyway? He’s too far gone, the poor bechara—any fool can see that. And what makes you such a saint? Coming home drunk at one o’clock last night. Face so red it could have been a traffic light.” Mrs. Asrani stabbed malevolently at the dye with her toothbrush. “Now can I please finish this?”
Mr. Asrani fumed out of the room, drawing back the door as if to slam it, but closing it gently at the last instant.
AS MRS. PATHAK dabbed at the sweat on her forehead, she wondered again why she had embarked upon the recipe for Russian-salad samosas. It was all Mrs. Jaiswal’s fault, of course—serving those strange Mexican things at the last kitty party—“tocos” she had called them. They had been nothing more than fried chapatis wrapped around salad leaves and cauliflower curry, but the woman had been shrewd enough to mix in lots of mango pickle and chili, and the ladies (including Mrs. Pathak, despite herself) had just gone wild over them. “Rohit tells me that tocos are very popular in Omaha right now,” Mrs. Jaiswal had crowed, lest anyone forget that her son was currently enrolled at the University of Nebraska, in the States. This had been particularly galling, given that Mrs. Pathak’s elder son, Veeru, had just failed his first-year exams at Bombay University.
Mrs. Pathak melted a quantity of ghee in a kadai, then quickly scooped out and added an extra two tablespoons from the plastic container on Mrs. Asrani’s side of the kitchen. She regarded this as compensation for all the water she was sure Mrs. Asrani pilfered from the tankie every day—the endless string of pots that boiled away for hours on the stove—the family seemed to do nothing but take baths all morning. Mrs. Asrani would mark the level of ghee on the container with lines and codes using an eyebrow pencil, but this only served to stimulate Mrs. Pathak, who had become addicted to this daily larceny.
As she waited for the ghee to heat, it occurred to her that her husband still hadn’t reported back from the Asranis. Perhaps he had gone downstairs, to have a cup of tea at the Irani hotel. She had never understood why he couldn’t just have the tea at home, instead of paying to have it in that tired old place. But at least he didn’t get drunk at the drinkwalla like Mr. Asrani did twice a week, so she did not object. She hoped the question of the ambulance had been settled—Vishnu had to be out of there before her kitty party guests arrived this afternoon. She could just imagine the remarks behind her back if Mrs. Jaiswal saw something like that.
Poor Vishnu. She felt bad he was going to die. She was going to miss his “Salaam, memsahib” every time she went down the stairs. Although his return from Nagpur had been a disaster, the years before had worked out well for the families in the building—even better than she had expected. Mr. Pathak had certainly been thankful he no longer had to stand in the ration lines or take the wheat to be ground. And both she and Mrs. Asrani had felt better having someone to look in regularly on Mr. Taneja cooped up alone in his flat upstairs. Even the steps and landings had acquired a cleaner look, once Vishnu had been weaned away from his habit of spitting paan juice on the building walls. She resolved to make an offering for Vishnu at the temple the next day, if he had passed away by then. They would have to decide about the landing, of course—perhaps Short Ganga would still be interested in the deal they had arranged some months back.
The ghee was hot, so Mrs. Pathak rolled back the bangles from her wrist and added the first batch of neatly folded triangular pastries to the kadai. The batter made a sizzling sound which pleased Mrs. Pathak, and her bangles clinked together as she petted some of the samosas encouragingly with her ladle. She was glad she hadn’t skimped on the ingredients as she usually did—a whole bottle of Dr. Writer’s mayonnaise the recipe had called for, and she had tried to ignore the price tag as she had mixed it in. It would all be worth it, though—just the expression on Mrs. Jaiswal’s face, as she brought in the platter piled high with her delicate, perfect, foreign samosas. Perhaps she’d even get another bottle of mayonnaise, to serve on the side. She had better hurry though, if she was going to go downstairs for the mayonnaise—she still hadn’t selected the jewelry she was going to wear, or even the sari.
Mrs. Pathak looked back into the kadai and gasped. The top of one of the samosas had unfurled. Peas, carrots, potatoes and the precious mayonnaise were being released into the swirling fat. Before she could do anything, the remaining samosas began unraveling as well, almost in choreographed succession, until the kadai was a bubbling mass of vegetables, batter, and rapidly vaporizing mayonnaise.
Mrs. Pathak stood by the stove, her bangles b
unching silently at her wrists. She stared impassively at the contents of the kadai. The Russian-salad samosas had disintegrated, they would not be debuting at her kitty party today. There was nothing left to do now but let everything crisp up. Then with lemon and pickle, it might yet taste good—she’d serve it as a side dish for lunch. And if nobody ate it, perhaps Vishnu was still well enough that she could give it to him.
THE RED IS darker, more viscous now. It oozes into the shadows of the hut. It lingers at the cut on his forehead, and darkens the edge of his eye bruised shut. Somewhere through the red he hears a snore, it is his father sleeping in a corner of the hut.
His sister enters through the doorway. She has brought a piece of ice from the market. She gives it to his mother, who wraps her dupatta around it.
“It hurts, I know,” his mother says, applying the ice to his swollen eye. “But you must be brave. Remember, you are Vishnu.” The ice feels cold against his eyelid, but does not quell the fire underneath.
“Vishnu of the ten avatars,” his mother says, pressing the ice against his forehead. “Rama and Krishna are part of you.”
Rama and Krishna, he thinks, and tries to remember the other eight incarnations his mother has taught him. Matsya the fish, Kurma the tortoise, Varaha the boar… His father suddenly snores loudly, and he stiffens.
“Vishnu the fearless, Vishnu the merciful,” his mother continues, “the Ganges flows from the feet of my little Vishnu. One day his Lakshmi will descend into his life, and Garuda the eagle will appear to fly them to Vaikuntha.”
Vishnu pictures himself with his mother riding the giant eagle above the clouds. In the distance lies their private paradise of Vaikuntha, gold spires glitter in the sun.
“You are Vishnu,” his mother tells him, “keeper of the universe, keeper of the sun. What would be the world without you?”