The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  I was having difficulty breathing. My jewelry felt heavy and constraining, the wedding outfit from two months ago tight and suffocating around my chest. My scalp was on fire, as if I had used chili powder, not vermilion, to decorate the parting in my hair. Even the bindi on my forehead itched so fiercely, I felt like scratching it off.

  I sank down unsteadily on the special seat between Sandhya and Mataji to which Hema accompanied me. Round us sat the other women, and beyond them, the men stood about or watched from the charpoy. Thalis laden with offerings were circulated for everyone to admire, and my head swirled as I tried to follow the fruits and bangles and saris being passed from lap to lap. Mrs. Pota launched into a song about not sewing on Karva Chauth, and the women responded in a chorus about losing your husband if a stray needle were to prick him and drive him away.

  There followed other songs, about a girl who fasted to bring back her beloved after he had been eaten by a crocodile, and about Savitri, who rescued her husband by tricking Yama, the god of death. Biji seemed to remember some of the words herself—I saw her swaying and clapping and singing along with the other women.

  At some point, the singing stopped and the story of Karva Chauth was related. I tried to concentrate, even though by now my mind was listing and swirling. The tale was about seven brothers, who, moved by the suffering of their sister on Karva Chauth, shone the light of a lamp through a pipal tree so that she would break her fast early. She mistook the light for the moon as they had hoped, but the instant she took her first sip of water, her husband drowned. Fortunately, Parvati heard her cries of sorrow up in heaven. She came down to investigate, even though Shiva, her husband, sulked about being ignored over some weeping girl. When Parvati discovered how the men had interfered with this most sacred rite of womanhood to trick the girl, she was enraged. She threatened to assume her Kali image and destroy everything in sight. Shiva had no choice but to intervene with Yama, who reluctantly brought back the husband to life. It all sounded very familiar—hadn’t Biji related a similar story to us years ago?

  The women were just finishing a song in praise of Parvati when Sandhya squeezed my hand. “Any second now. The moon will be unveiling itself.”

  I found it difficult to keep track of the ensuing flurry of activity—the lighting of the earthenware lamps, the pouring of water into the karva, the offering of rice and gram, the dabbing of red powder around the pestle placed on the ground. One of the women took out a small stone statue of Parvati which she had brought from Rajasthan. I did as the others did and used the third finger of my right hand to anoint it with vermilion.

  “It’s risen,” Hema shouted, interrupting the ceremonies. “I can see it, over there, next to that house.” It was indeed the moon, its rounded edge already beginning to clear the treetops—we had been too absorbed in the rituals to notice its stealthy ascent.

  A hush fell over the congregation. Since I was the newest bride, it was my honor to be the first to break my fast. Sandhya helped me get up and bent down to arrange my foot on the center of the pestle. It felt cold and smooth against my arch, its convexity reassuring as I curled my toes around. Mataji handed me the sifter, and I held it up against the night. My vision swam as I did so—the moon looked a dirty white.

  I took the glass of milk from Sandhya and prepared to pour my offering to the moon. But I couldn’t summon up the silent words that were to accompany this action. The women watched me and waited for their turns as I stood poised with the glass. Should I turn around to ask them what I should be praying for?

  Sandhya touched me at the shoulder and gently tilted my glass. I watched the thread of milk spill out and connect me to the earth. Dev loomed up in the sifter, his features curiously warped by the weave of the mesh. His nose seemed longer, his forehead too wide, the hollows under his eyes more pronounced. I looked at the blurred outline of his mouth and heard again the directions he had whispered. “Don’t worry about Paji—I’ll catch you in my arms before you can bend too much. It’ll look quite natural—instead of touching my feet, we’ll end it in a hug.”

  Sandhya exchanged the sifter and glass of milk in my hands for the fruit-laden thali I was to offer my mother-in-law. All that was required of me now was to follow Dev’s instructions. He would catch me before I could complete my bow and feed me the first morsel to break my fast. Paji would nod approvingly from the charpoy upon seeing that Dev’s feet remained untouched. Down at the station, the Frontier Mail would pull into the platform, ready to bear us away. Steam issuing out of its raring engine like from the nostrils of an impatient mare.

  I looked into Dev’s eyes and saw he could picture the Frontier Mail as well. Was Bombay within reach now, were his calculations proceeding as planned? Paji must surely have the same expression of self-satisfaction on his face. A daughter on her way to college, her life finally lived the way he wanted. Beside me stood Sandhya, her face shining with a serene beauty, like a moon bride descended to earth.

  I’m not sure what exactly triggered my divergence from the script. Perhaps I could pin it again on Nehru, on his directive to assert myself. A clarity—calm, incisive—emerged from my hunger to reveal the action I had to take. I stared into Dev’s eyes, and this time, his sureness faltered, his satisfaction dimmed. Realization flooded in and then alarm, as he followed the direction of my gaze.

  I bent down before I could be swayed by the pleading beginning to distort his face. Too late, he tried to grab me, but I dodged my shoulder out of the way. I descended so fast that an orange fell out of my thali and rolled into the crowd. Dev couldn’t pull back his feet even if he wanted to—there were too many eyes focused on them. He stood rooted where he was, his face ashen, his toes as vulnerable and exposed as a statue’s.

  I touched his right foot first, then his left, as Sandhya had instructed. The skin on his knuckles felt dry and surprisingly smooth. There was a quiver with each contact I made, as if my fingertips were delivering tiny electric shocks to him. I went through the motion of blessing myself by running my fingers through my hair.

  Then I rose, my head still bowed, ready to accept my father’s rage. Ready to accept the morsel that would release me from my fast for Dev.

  chapter nine

  HEMA DROVE HERSELF CRAZY TRYING TO PIECE TOGETHER WHAT HAD happened. She had read the letter from my father, but had been unable to decipher its significance. She had seen Dev so ruthlessly intercepted while trying to convey his respects to Paji. She had witnessed my father carry out his threat to storm out when I touched Dev’s feet. But taken together, what did it all mean? What was the request I had made to render my father “speechless,” the word he had used in his letter? What was his offer on Karva Chauth which had walked out the door with him?

  Although tortured by her curiosity, Hema couldn’t give in to the temptation of confronting me directly. That would mean admitting to having steamed open Paji’s letter, which would lead to severe repercussions from Mataji. She had no recourse but to try and ferret out the information indirectly.

  “If you had anything in the whole wide world that you wanted your father to get for you, what would it be?” she asked, mustering up all the innocence she could in her voice. When that didn’t work, she tried another approach. “It’s too bad your Paji had to leave so suddenly—wasn’t he talking about coming back with some sort of gift for you and Dev?”

  Somehow, she concluded that it must be an automobile I had cost the family. “On the one hand, it’s good she pays so much heed to our customs, but on the other, surely one can let things slide a little if it’s a car at stake.” She wove more and more elaborate fantasies about this car, right down to the brand (the larger Hindustan 14, not the more compact Fiat), color (sometimes silver, sometimes black), and even a chauffeur that Paji had supposedly agreed to. “There really wouldn’t be a place to put him up in our flat, but we could ask him to sleep in the car itself, as drivers do.” Even weeks after Mataji had ordered her to stop prattling on about this nonsense, Hema still made wistful
allusions to automobile trips we could have taken to see the Qutb Minar and even the Taj Mahal, had it not been for my rashness.

  Dev spoke to me in monosyllables. He stopped wearing the open-chested stripes and colored patterns he liked to flaunt so much, replacing them with dark, drab shirts which he buttoned up to the neck. At night, he lay on his talai with his back to me. Sometimes, he sobbed quietly in the dark, with inhalations deep enough for me to notice, but not so loud that Sandhya or Arya would hear. We no longer hugged or touched each other. Mataji asked me why he seemed to always be moping, to which I remained silent. “There’s friction in every marriage,” she said. “Men are too proud, it’s the wife that must adjust.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I tried to cajole him one day, “that you can’t even change that gloomy shirt. You’ve been wearing it so long that you look more tragic than Saigal playing Devdas.” Dev said nothing, just left the room silently.

  Minutes later, he returned to the bedroom and indicated that I follow him outside. The house was empty—Arya and Babuji were at the station and the women had gone shopping. Dev held a small gunny bag, the type used to store rice. In the courtyard, he pushed aside the charpoy and slammed the bag down a few times on the ground underneath. He held it up and shook it to assess the damage to its contents. Not satisfied, he carried the bag to the toilet door and pounded it repeatedly against the cement steps. Then he handed it to me. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he said, before stalking out of the house.

  I opened the bag and looked at the shards of record pieces inside. A few of the fragments still had the labels attached, and on one of them, Saigal stood out in clear white letters against the red background.

  “EVEN GODS GET ANGRY SOMETIMES,” Sandhya said, as she took the lid off the pressure cooker from my dowry. The earthy aroma of moong wafted out. “But who can explain their motives? Look at Arya—you might not know it, since he always appears so calm when you see him, but even he can have quite a temper.” She laughed, as if at a private joke. “I don’t know what the problem is between you and Dev—everyone can see there’s something wrong—but I’m sure it will work itself out.”

  By now, the luster of Karva Chauth had faded from Sandhya’s face. She no longer glowed like a new bride—her skin, so smooth and radiant just days ago, had begun to reveal its imperfections again. The polish had rubbed off her nails, the bangles packed away in a box like Divali decorations for the next year. There had not been a single wait in front of the bedroom door all week. The one thing that hadn’t reverted to its previous state was Sandhya’s attitude towards me. If anything, she had become warmer, so that she was now the person I felt the closest to in the household. We had started sitting together on the charpoy every morning after bathing, to let the sun dry our hair. Sometimes, I read out from the newspaper for her (she especially liked the horoscopes and the matrimonial ads). On other days, I showed her the letters of the alphabet on a writing slate.

  Hema reacted to our friendship with dismay—a dismay somewhat tempered by the fact that I started to help with the cooking. Though I had never prepared rice before, mine came out so much fluffier that even Sandhya acknowledged it. “I don’t know what it is—I keep wishing I was able to do some things better—Arya deserves it.”

  It wasn’t the cooking that filled her with anxiousness, but her lack of children. She had been married for eight years already. “Sometimes I tell myself it’s because I pray to Devi Ma just for a son. I know that’s what Arya wants—a boy. So far, Devi Ma has only seen daughters in my womb, which is why she doesn’t let them be born. It has to be only a matter of time before she looks in the right nook inside to locate a boy.”

  On Mondays, Sandhya kept the fast for Shiva, and ate only once, to ensure Arya’s longevity. On Thursdays, she took no dairy products, to propitiate the goddess of fertility. She would go to the Lakshmi temple on Saturdays, and catch the train to Okhla to visit a holy woman on Sunday evenings. For a while, she had given up meat as a further inducement to the Devi Ma, resuming its consumption only when the doctor informed her that not eating it might actually cause her to become less fertile.

  I was never bold enough to bring up the time she had emerged with a swollen face from her night with Arya. “He’s my god,” she would tell me, as if aware of what was in my mind. “And surely gods have the right to do what they want, don’t they? Besides, it’s in the nature of men to let things out once in a while.”

  I wondered about her parents, and about the rest of her family. I had noticed she never went anywhere, and nobody came to visit her. One day, as we were cleaning the stones out of the month’s ration of wheat, she told me her story.

  “My father was never very well-off. He had a small store in Lahore, selling notebooks and paper and odds and ends. Have you heard of Heera Mandi, the red-light area, Didi? We were right next to it, so close that tawaifs would drop by in groups during the day. They would laugh and talk and hold up the pens like pieces of jewelry against their skin. Sometimes, a costly item like one of those new ballpoint pens caught their eye. Then they returned in the evening, all dressed up in silvery dupattas and bright red lipstick. They always brought along a customer on such visits, to make the purchase for them. Do you know what I always wondered? What possible use could they have had, Didi, for all those pens they bought?”

  Sandhya did not come out in front of the tawaifs, she said, but peeped out of the back room when they came. “My father hadn’t forbidden me, mind you—I simply worried about what I wore. People sold parachutes in those days, left over from the war. I don’t know if you ever saw them, Didi, if they sold them as cheaply in Rawalpindi as well. My mother would buy one and make outfits from it for all of us. The material was so light and tightly woven that it was quite comfortable for shirts and salwars. But I was young and silly back then. I did not want the tawaifs to giggle at me if they recognized the cheap material my clothes were made from.”

  I tried to imagine Sandhya as she described herself. She always seemed so quiet and measured now, so serious. Could she really have been carefree, even frivolous, as a girl?

  “The morning we left Lahore, my father loaded all the wares he could onto a wooden handcart. Pens and pencils, diaries, bottles of ink, sets of crayons. Box upon box of all the things he carried, from key chains to batteries to glass paperweights—the kind with flowers stuck inside, that came from Iran.” The only thing he left behind was the paper. “Bundles of it, tied in brown wrapping, which he piled neatly outside the door. It was amazing, he said, that he hadn’t been looted like the other shops on the street. ‘The paper is too heavy to carry, so it’ll be an offering for all the luck we’ve enjoyed.’ He tied things down as best as he could on the cart and sat my brother Anand on top. As he rolled the handcart down the street, I kept looking back. I wanted to see the tawaifs come out from their buildings and make their way to the paper. Finally, they would have something on which to use all their pens, I thought.”

  “You never told me you had a brother.”

  “No, I never did, did I, Didi?—he was a darling little seven-year-old. I was seventeen then, the eldest child. After me had come two boys, both of whom died of typhoid the year I turned nine. That’s what made my mother have Anand—he was born ten years after me. He was the only son who lived, so naturally my parents doted on him. They treated him as if he was made of glass, as if he could break at any time. He was the picture of health though, always laughing and with the fat red cheeks of a Ganesh idol. My mother used to tell him that on his tenth birthday he would grow a trunk and then be complete. We all adored him, even my younger sister Chandini, born a year after Anand. She wanted to ride with him atop the cart. But my father said it would be too heavy to wheel them both, so she had to walk.”

  It took them the whole day to get through the smoldering streets to where the Grand Trunk Road left Lahore. “I still remember my first sight of the people. They were packed so close that I thought the road itself was alive. Like a snake crawl
ing, or rather, two snakes, sliding slowly over each other in opposite directions. One moving away from us towards India, and the other side, the Muslim one, entering Lahore.

  “The last time I had seen so many people was when we had made the pilgrimage to Katasraj temple on the day of Divali. Except that I knew nobody in this crowd was a pilgrim, they were all refugees. They walked along silently with their crying children. Sometimes a goat or dog followed behind. I saw people still bleeding from beatings they must have received on the way from Muridke. A few wheeled handcarts like the one my father pushed, even though everything they’d been carrying had been lost or looted. I could not bear to look at their eyes, so hollow and empty of life. There was a long line of trucks as well, filled with even more refugees. But the road was so jammed that it seemed faster to walk.”

  I thought of our own flight from Rawalpindi on the train. It was true, what Paji always said, about us being the lucky ones. Would we have ever made it if forced to walk?

  “Anand was the only one of us who actually enjoyed the journey. ‘Ganesh is sitting on his cart and being carried home,’ my mother said. She made the trip a game for him. She told him a story about how Ashoka had the Grand Trunk Road built a long time ago. She tried to remember the names of the cities that lay along its route—between Kabul and Calcutta, she said. Every few miles, she asked him if he was hungry or thirsty, and pressed her hand over his forehead, to make sure he hadn’t developed a fever. Whenever we came to a hill, she picked him up and carried him in her arms to lighten my father’s load on the cart. I carried Chandini as well, whenever she began to slow. But my sister could see it was too much weight for me, so she tried to keep walking without complaining. Anand asked to switch positions with Chandini a few times to give her a rest, but my father always refused.”