The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

  As he had followed the throng of people up the steps to Mahalakshmi temple, Mr. Jalal had felt like a masquerader himself. His heart had pounded as he walked barefoot across the stone to the shrine. This is the way Akbar would do it, he told himself, and boldly sounded one of the brass bells suspended from the carved ceiling. Then he waited, fidgeting, in the line to walk past the idols. He seemed to be dressed like, to look like, the other people. But he worried nevertheless—could they tell he was a Muslim, were they able to sense his ignorance, his unease?

  The woman in front of him was carrying an elaborate offering on a polished metal thali. Several bananas, a coconut, strings of marigold, and to crown it, a large lotus flower. Mr. Jalal stared at the vermilion splashed over the whole arrangement and mounded generously around the edge. What was the significance of this bright red powder? he wondered. Was it the same powder with which married Hindu women lined the parting in their hair, so that their skulls looked freshly cracked open in neat red lines? Could the red be related to blood, like the blood from animal sacrifices, like the blood of Christ? Even though they didn’t sacrifice animals anymore—perhaps this was a remnant from a more ancient ritual?

  He was pondering which of his books at home might contain the answer when he saw the woman hand over her thali. He realized they were inside the shrine already, and he was standing empty-handed in front of the idols. Panic gripped him as the priest turned and extended a hand towards him. From behind the priest, the three incarnations of Lakshmi regarded him dubiously with their six questioning eyes. He was beginning to stutter some excuse, some apology, when the priest thrust a disc into his palm, the line moved along, and he found himself outside, blinking and free in the sunlight. He opened his palm and looked at the peda nestling there, round and golden like some forbidden fruit. The other worshipers were reverentially putting their pedas into their mouths, but Mr. Jalal hesitated. Although he regarded all religions to be equally irrelevant, he had never actually participated in a rite from another faith. What would Arifa say if she saw him now, with this Lakshmi-blessed food poised in his fingers, ready to be brought to his lips? But he could already smell the flowery scent of the peda in his nostrils, then feel it crumbling between his teeth, then taste its intense milky sweetness against his tongue. A sweetness, an incriminating sugariness, that spread purposefully down his throat, and insinuated itself through his entire body.

  Mr. Jalal made his way to the rocks behind the temple, climbing down to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, and he had to retrace his steps to a higher rock, to avoid being sprayed. He looked across to the middle of the bay, where the masjid of Haji Ali rose from the water. As a child, he had often accompanied his mother across the stone path that made the masjid accessible during low tide. Now he watched the waves break over the stones and submerge the bases of the lampposts that lined the way. It would be some hours before the path was traversable again. He imagined Akbar, sitting where he was sitting, surveying the religious landscape of his kingdom. The temple on the hill behind him and the mosque surrounded by water in front.

  Hadn’t Akbar experienced a vision of some sort as well? Mr. Jalal found himself back in the shadows of Vishnu’s landing, trying to recall the accounts he had read. Akbar had been riding in the forest, hunting for tigers, when it had happened. His soldiers had come upon him laughing and dancing among the trees and shearing off locks of his hair. Could that have been the catalyst for the new religion he had created? His Din Ilahi, his grand, doomed experiment, to reconcile opposing philosophies and unite his Hindu subjects with their Muslim brethren?

  The hairs on Mr. Jalal’s arms suddenly stood up. Could it be possible that he, Ahmed Jalal, was poised on the brink of something equally grand? What if he was going to be the next great unifier, the one whose destiny it was to change the land? Was that the sign he had just received, the message he had just been given, the one that would bring people together across the country? After all, wasn’t he born a Muslim, just like Akbar—could that be why he had been chosen by Vishnu?

  Mr. Jalal peered at Vishnu. Yes, that was a smile of acknowledgment on his face, a smile of encouragement, a smile that indicated great things were in store. Vishnu was giving him the blessing he had come for, telling him to go forth and heal the world. Perhaps he should descend this very minute, go downstairs and convert the cigarettewalla, the paanwalla. Knock on every door he could find, stop at the shops in the adjacent building, go to the church across the street, to Mahalakshmi, to Haji Ali.

  But first he would try once more with Arifa. She was his wife, Salim was his son. Before he saved anyone else, it was his duty to save them.

  Mr. Jalal looked at the mango next to Vishnu’s head. The offering had pleased Vishnu. There was no need for flowers or incense.

  MANGOES. SO FULL, so sweet, so scented, the oranges and yellows of sunlight. So this is the food gods get offered, Vishnu thinks. Ah, mangoes.

  From the orchard mist she emerges. The mango goddess. Her figure lush with mango leaves as she makes her way across the shadows of trees. She stands in front of Vishnu and lets her cloak of leaves drop. Her body is bountiful with fruit underneath. Mangoes, ripe and perfumed, grow from her bosom, they swing from her arms, hang heavily from her thighs.

  Vishnu brings his face to her neck and breathes her fragrance in. He touches a mango attached to her breast, and traces the curve of its smooth skin. His fingers linger at the node at the base, swollen, and yielding to his touch. He closes his hand over the mango, she quivers as he plucks it off her skin. Sap oozes out of the rupture, he puts his lips on her breast to stem the flow. She presses her arms around his head and lets him taste her essence.

  She directs him to another mango, growing between her thighs. He touches it and pulls on it, anticipation plays on her lips. He detaches it with a snap, and sees pain twinge across her face. Sap flows out again, more abundant, more fertile this time, filling his mouth with her feminine nectar.

  One by one, he plucks all the mangoes from her body. When he is done, she stands before him naked, clothed only in the scars of her harvest. He spreads her cloak of mango leaves on the ground and she lays herself down upon it. He kneels between her legs, and kisses a scar still wet with sap.

  She guides his body into hers. Tears moisten her eyes. As he fills her with seed, she arches back her neck to face the dying sun.

  Afterwards, he drapes the cloak around her. He watches her tread to her orchard through the twilight. Underneath the leaves, he knows, her scars are already beginning to sprout. With buds of fruits barely visible, fruits that will grow and ripen in the next day’s sun.

  He looks at the mangoes she has left behind, scattered on the ground. They will sustain all his creatures, they will sustain the universe until she returns.

  THIS GODLY WAY with mangoes. Vishnu is not impressed. What about the act of eating to which mortals are accustomed? The essence of mangoes, their taste, their feel. The satisfaction of separating pulp from peel by scraping slices between the teeth. He wonders if gods are allowed only heavenly bliss, if earthly pleasure is beyond their reach.

  He sees himself lying naked with Padmini under the sheets. It is the summer his brother has sent him a mango basket. He has brought it to Padmini, she has invited him in.

  Padmini turns over on her stomach and drags the basket to the bed. “So many mangoes,” she says, gazing at the basket. She looks up. “Are you sure they’re all for me?”

  “Every one of them,” he says, exhilarated by the greed he glimpses in her eyes. He feels the pang of a familiar longing. How many baskets would he need to make her forever his own?

  She rolls a mango between her palms to soften the insides. “Lajjo says the foreign mems eat mangoes with spoons, can you imagine?” She laughs. “Maybe that’s what I should do—be your English memsahib.” She bats her eyelids and puckers her mouth into an exaggerated kiss.

  “Maybe you should,” he says. He wills the longing to disappear. He has given up the idea of po
ssessing her, he reminds himself, he has resolved to be satisfied with what she gives.

  “Why, is my skin not fair enough for you?” she pouts, lying back on her pillow and bringing the mango to her lips. She peels the skin off the top with her teeth. “I used to have so many mangoes, growing up in Ratnagiri.” Juice dribbles out as she sucks at the mango, it trickles down her chin and pools beneath her throat.

  Vishnu wants to follow the trail of juice, blot it drop by drop off her skin with his tongue. This is what he has taught himself to be content with—the pleasure of her body, when she allows it, and nothing more. He believes then that his visits will continue forever, a string of lightbulbs glittering through the reaches of his future.

  Padmini squeezes the mango to push out more pulp. But she presses too hard, and the whole seed slips out—it lands on her chin and slides down to her chest. She shrieks and tries to grab the seed, but it is covered with pulp and slips out of her grasp. She laughs as she chases the seed over her body, catching it finally at the base of her abdomen.

  “Give me that,” Vishnu says, and rubs it over her belly, as if it were a bar of soap. A swath of pulp glistens on her skin.

  “Everywhere,” she instructs, so he scrubs her waist, and lathers her between her legs.

  “My mango queen,” he says, when the mango is spent. Her skin is wet, pieces of yellow pulp stick to her breasts, her stomach, the hair between her thighs.

  He tastes her neck first. It is sweet with mango, salty with sweat. He moves downwards, capturing the dabs of pulp with his mouth, lingering at each nipple, stopping to sip the liquid collected in her navel. She gets saltier as he descends, and more aromatic, as if the mango is mixed with something pungent in the earth from which it has sprung. As he enters her, his tongue encounters a sweetness not encountered before in these folds. Lured by the sweetness, he dives in deeper, and then deeper still. Probing, caressing, tasting, but never retrieving, the tiny nugget of mango he knows is nestling there.

  So many earthly ways to enjoy mangoes. Vishnu is loath to give them up.

  AT FIRST, WHEN Short Ganga saw the mango, she was tempted to pick it up. It looked so ripe and delicious, and was one of those refined varieties, not the half-wild types that she occasionally was able to afford.

  But then she wondered who had left it there, right next to Vishnu, and why. She knew of all sorts of spells and nazars that people planted in pieces of fruit, nazars that could spring out and seize you if you even touched the piece. Lemons were particularly dangerous, and Short Ganga always made a detour when she saw one in her path, but mangoes might be even more hazardous, and it was probably not a good idea to gaze at this one for too long.

  Her skin began to crawl as she stood on the landing. First the ghost that had possessed Mr. Jalal, and now this. There was something unnatural lurking on this landing—perhaps it was the spirit that was waiting to take Vishnu away. Short Ganga shivered under her sari, then grabbed the tiffin box and ran up the steps.

  The final flights were always the hardest. Short Ganga wiped her brow as she clambered past the second-floor landing. She tried not to think about Vishnu or the mango. Instead, she concentrated on Mr. Taneja’s tiffin box, hanging by her side, growing heavier with each step she rose, absorbing weight from the air like a sponge drawn through liquid. It was to be expected, of course—it was normal—a law of nature, a physical principle, that she had figured out all by herself.

  Things grew heavier the higher they were lifted.

  It was a discovery she was proud of, a finding that had obsessed her for the past several weeks. It had struck her one day as she was huffing her way up the Makhijanis’ building—the one with the lift that servants were not allowed to use. On the ground floor, the tiffin box felt so light she wondered if the compartments had all been filled, if the food would be enough for both Mr. and Mrs. Makhijani. By the third floor, however, the box was heavy enough that she started cursing the Makhijanis’ appetites, cursing the gluttony of all the rich, whose swollen tiffin boxes left daily red marks where the handles cut into her fingers. It was as she was shifting the box from one hand to the other that the realization struck her. The box had put on weight. The lid, the containers, the handle, the food—everything had become heavier.

  And was becoming heavier still.

  A shiver ran through Short Ganga’s body as she felt the first thrill of scientific discovery. How could she have not noticed it before? All those years of carrying things, all those times she had panted and strained and barely made it to the top floor. She had always blamed herself, thought it was she who was tiring out. But how much more obvious was this new explanation, how much more intuitive and logical. It was the height that was to blame, not she, the height that added kilo after kilo to her load, as she trudged up the floors.

  An intense curiosity awakened in Short Ganga. She found herself driven to perform experiments. Each day, she assessed the weight of her tiffin boxes, both on the ground and the top floor of every building she climbed. She did the same with her bottles of milk. One day, she even borrowed a ten-kilo measuring weight from the bania merchant and struggled with it up several flights of stairs, all for the sake of her science.

  Every result confirmed her conjecture. Every object she experimented with became heavier—the higher she went, the more weight things gained. But her experiments left her dissatisfied, thirsting for more. She wanted more precision, she wanted to quantify the weight gain. She tried to borrow the weighing scales from the bania, but he refused.

  It was then that she was confronted by an exception to her theory: her treasured pieces of Styrofoam. She retrieved them from between the saris in her iron trunk one day and carried them to the second floor of the Makhijani building. They did not feel any heavier. She went up to the third floor, then the fourth and the fifth, but the pieces did not feel different. No matter to what height she took them, they refused to put on weight.

  For a while, Short Ganga lapsed into depression at this setback. But then she put things in perspective. On the one hand was the mountain of evidence she had assembled, on the other a solitary aberration. Why not just ignore the Styrofoam? It was stolen, anyway—perhaps that was what jinxed it.

  She decided it was time to reveal her results. She would leave out the part about the Styrofoam. But whom should she talk to? The other gangas could hardly be expected to appreciate such sophisticated concepts. Besides, what if one of them decided to steal her discovery, to claim all credit for it? She had to be very careful. There might even be some money due to her for having made her scientific advance. Perhaps there was a government bureau to which she should be submitting a claim. It would not do to trust one of the gangas. No, it had to be someone else, someone knowledgeable and trustworthy, who would not take advantage. Someone like—Mr. Taneja, perhaps.

  It had not taken long to decide on him. He was the most likable customer she had. One customer like him made up for a building full of Asranis and Pathaks. Short Ganga looked at the steps in front of her, cut so high she could barely mount them. Three floors of these she climbed every day, just to make sure Mr. Taneja got his lunch. She pulled herself up the last few steps and paused outside his door, waiting to catch her breath.

  Would this be a good day to approach Mr. Taneja? She could tell him first about Vishnu being sick, then casually break her theory to him. Even offer to let him carry the tiffin box to the terrace so that he could have a demonstration. What would his reaction be?

  Short Ganga’s hand hovered near his doorbell. Her instructions were simply to leave the tiffin box on the landing, but she sometimes rang the bell, just to catch a word with him, and make sure not too many days went by without anyone seeing him. Mr. Taneja was never upset when he was summoned this way to the door. Rather, it was she who felt guilty at the intrusion. His wife’s death had occurred years before she had come to the building. But people still behaved as if Mr. Taneja’s tragedy was fresh, as if his name had to be spoken in a whisper, and he still needed
to be handled like someone fragile. Short Ganga often wondered about this—what was it about Mr. Taneja that prompted such a reaction? Perhaps it was the feeling one got even as one looked into his eyes and conversed with him that he was not wholly present, that a part of him was afloat somewhere else, lost in a private sea of contemplation. She herself could not stop treating him with the care reserved for the very elderly, or the very sick.

  She was still debating about the doorbell when the song started. The music welled up in waves, and riding the crests came the first of the lyrics. Short Ganga imagined Mr. Taneja standing over the gramophone, alone in his room. She knew this song, knew for whom it was played. Today, she decided, would not be the day after all.

  Short Ganga left the tiffin box next to the door and walked back silently to the steps.

  VINOD TANEJA LISTENED to the words.

  The night will come and cool our bodies, the rain will come and sprinkle our skin;

  You and I will become just one, on this, the first night of our union.

  For years after Sheetal had gone, he had played the song at the same time, day after day. He still remembered to play the record at least once a week. Sometimes he stood next to the gramophone, but often he went to the balcony and let the music waft out to him as he looked at the cars and the buses three floors below.

  The flowers will open and sing to us, cats will purr and meow in our ears;

  You and I will be forever just one, from this, the first night of our union.

  Little had he known, when he had first listened to the banal lyrics, that over the years, every note on the record, every word, every sound, would become an indelible part of him. It had been Sheetal’s favorite song from the last movie they had seen together, and he had wandered into a music store a few weeks after her death to buy it. He watched it now, the red label in the center a little faded with age, but the dog-and-gramophone logo still clearly visible, the surface of the disc almost as unscratched as the day he had first played it twenty years ago. Of course, the grooves had dulled over the years, but the sound was still so surprisingly clear.