The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

Twenty miles out of Lahore, just before another hill, Sandhya’s father stopped. “He had been having difficulty with the cart. He would grunt as he tried to pull it one minute, then push it from behind when that didn’t work. My mother suggested giving away some of the wares, but he would not hear of it. ‘Each pen that I carry will buy one more kilo of flour for us when we get to India.’ He rested for a few minutes, then pushed the cart all the way to the top of the rise without stopping.

  “He was just about to start down, when Anand noticed that Chandini was far behind. ‘Please, Pitaji, can’t she ride on the cart instead?’ I remember him asking. By now dust had covered over the red of his cheeks. But you could still make out how plump they were underneath.

  “‘Don’t worry, she’ll catch up with us,’ my father said, and began guiding the cart down the slope. He wove it between the people as it began to pick up speed. He was almost at the bottom when the right wheel hit a rock. The handles were wrenched from his hands and the axle broke in two.

  “We all crowded around, first to stare at the damage, then to try and save the boxes being stepped on by the crowd. It was Chandini who noticed that Anand was not helping. He was sitting where he had fallen off, his head bent slightly forward. It looked like he was examining the Persian paperweights, which had rolled out around him.

  “My mother called out his name, but he did not speak. She ran over, the crayons she had been gathering still in her hand. When she touched his shoulder, he fell over to the ground. We watched silently as he lay on his side with his eyes closed. His small chest rose and fell as if he was in a deep sleep. I remember the paperweights around his head shining in the sunlight. One of them had split open neatly into two halves. The flower inside was simply a curl of plastic.”

  Sandhya’s father tried to stop the people going past. “He called to them to take what they wanted from his handcart, if only they could help. Notebooks that sold for four annas, crayon sets for eight, he offered for the price of a bandage. But what use were such items to people fleeing? They kept going past with barely a glance. Their only response was to circle around the area marked out by the paperweights. My father even tried to get the truck drivers to stop, especially the ones going back toward the hospitals in Lahore. He thrust brand-new diaries and expensive fountain pens through their windows. But they, too, drove on.”

  Finally, a doctor coming from Amritsar did an examination as best he could. “He must have been Muslim, but we didn’t ask. ‘The boy’s still breathing, but the injury’s gone to his brain.’ He parted Anand’s hair and showed us the thin red line starting above his temple. ‘He won’t last long—there’s nothing you can do.’

  “By morning, my brother was dead, as the doctor had said. We went searching for wood, but there was only scrub around. So my father broke up his cart and used that for the cremation. As the fire began to crackle, his eyes turned to Chandini, and I saw what he was thinking. If only he had let her change places with Anand. Then it would have been his daughter’s body being eaten by the flames, not his son’s.

  “It was at that instant that I had a revelation. Arun and Alok, the two brothers who were born before Anand—surely my father must blame me, too, for not dying instead of them. The years of anguished looks from him, the bursts of anger for no reason. Suddenly, they all seemed to make sense. I stood there by the side of the road, watching my last brother burn. I vowed to make things up to my father by not letting myself become a burden when we got to India. As the smoke rose into the air, tears came to my eyes for Anand and even for Chandini. But I did not allow any for myself.”

  I put down my sifter and silently took Sandhya’s hand in my own. Sandhya curled her fingers around mine. The uncleaned wheat lay forgotten, spilling out from its gunnysack.

  “We remained there for hours. My mother had lost the will to move. In the end, a truck driver stopped. Perhaps he spotted the tiny pyre and felt pity. He let us squeeze into the crowd of people already in the back of his truck. When I looked at my parents, they stared back sightlessly. Their eyes were as empty now as those of the refugees from Muridke who had been beaten. Chandini was crying to herself, so I took her in my lap. I started telling the same stories about the Grand Trunk Road that my mother had related to Anand.

  “We crossed the border at Wagah. I don’t know what I had been expecting. Blue rivers and green plains, tigers and elephants, forest-covered mountains. All the wonders we had been promised about the Indian side. But the landscape didn’t change. It had the same scrub and wild brush, the same dirt and heat. There were no sentries or guns or even a gate. All I saw were poles stuck into the ground, as if waiting for flags, and a row of upturned barrels painted white. Still, I felt a lump in my throat as we went over the line. I wanted to shout along when the cries of ‘Long live Hindustan!’ went up in the truck. But my parents didn’t join in, so neither did I.”

  They stayed with the truck all the way to Delhi. “The refugee camp at Kingsway had too many people waiting, so we ended up at a smaller one on the other side of the Yamuna. Even then, they were out of tents, since so many refugees had already arrived. All that was left was a bare stretch of land, on which one of the camp workers marked out a rectangle in chalk for us. For the first week, we simply sat and slept in this rectangle, this piece of our new country. We let the rain soak our clothes and the sun dry them out, and waited for a tent. Little by little, we managed to gather pieces of wood and cardboard and tin and rope to build a small shack as the other refugees had done. Our plot turned out to be one of the worst ones, right next to the open field which served as the latrine for the whole camp. Even now when I press my nose against my skin, I think I can still breathe in the smell.” I squeezed Sandhya’s hand again, and she squeezed back.

  “Twice a day, we lined up to receive our rotis and dal. I remember wishing I had some mango pickle for taste, or even a piece of raw onion. The drinking water was so dirty there was always the fear of cholera. Neither of my parents seemed surprised when Chandini fell seriously ill. They seemed to regard her worsening condition as part of her fate, as something to be expected. My father even talked about having a special ceremony at her cremation, where Anand’s soul could be prayed for as well. But then some medical supplies were donated to the camp. Chandini’s fever went away like magic with just a few pills.

  “That’s when I first saw Arya—he was the volunteer who brought the medicine to us. When Chandini recovered, my mother had my father search out Arya and invite him to our shack for tea. She paid a neighbor one paisa to borrow a teacup, and even managed to find a laddoo from somewhere to serve on the plate. When Arya came, Chandini was taken outside to show how well she’d recovered thanks to him. My mother told me to stay indoors for modesty’s sake. I peeked through the rubber flap that served as our window. It was like being back in my father’s shop and spying on the tawaifs again. I noticed how Arya took bites of just the right size, so that his laddoo lasted exactly as long as his tea did. Afterwards, he took out his handkerchief and carefully brushed the crumbs off his mustache. Even though the stool was too small for him, he sat on it with his back perfectly straight. Compared to everyone else in the camp, he looked very clean.”

  Arya seemed to adopt their family. “By now it was clear no tents were coming, so he would drop by with things for our hut. A piece of piping, a length of electric wire, and once, best of all, a sheet of plastic to stop the roof from leaking. I kept my face veiled during these visits and crouched in a corner with my mother. But it was impossible to keep my eyes from straying while he performed his repairs. A few times, when he caught me looking at him, I was unable to break my gaze. He had this way of drawing me in.

  “It wasn’t as if I started imagining I was in love. That was too far and fantastic to even enter my mind. My goal, what I thought about all the time, was to get married. I wanted my parents to be free of responsibility for me. If that couldn’t be arranged, I had decided I would run away. Even if it meant ending up like one of the tawaifs who use
d to come to my father’s shop. I knew there were a number of families like us who had lost everything in the Partition and were facing the same problem. It would take years to save up for a new dowry to get a daughter like me married. Many months back, my mother’s cousin had written to us about a possible boy for me in India. However, that family had taken over a flat left behind by a Muslim neighbor in Delhi. This had greatly increased their worth, so a match with them was now out of the question.”

  Arya was the one who told them about a scheme being started by the HRM. “It was a marriage service. They were trying to match up unmarried girls with boys from the same community, to lessen at least this one worry of the refugees. My father didn’t think anything could come of it, but I insisted he put my name in. Not surprisingly, there were many more daughters than sons whose names ended up on the list. Being completely uneducated, I had next to no chance of being picked.

  “When Arya heard that they had run out of grooms before getting to me, he told my father that he would offer his own name as a match. After all, he said, he had been a refugee himself only weeks ago. It was just luck that they had arrived early enough to be moved into a small flat while all we got was a bare piece of land. His family was not pleased with his decision. One of the conditions of these matches was that no dowry would be exchanged. Being the father of a girl who had to be married off herself, Babuji was naturally upset. My mother had saved some earrings, which was the only thing she could give me as dowry. She had some rings as well, but I told her to save those for Chandini.”

  They got married at the end of September, about a month after the border crossing. “My family had to leave for Jabalpur the very next week. That’s where the government had decided to resettle them—all my father had been able to do was delay it a little. I was the only girl married in the camp for whom a wedding procession came. There was no band or horse, just the doli—the same one in which you sat, which took me away.

  “I never saw my family again. I was supposed to go visit them four months after my marriage. Babuji had even managed to get a ticket for me. But a few days before leaving, a telegram arrived from the Jabalpur refugee office. My family’s cottage had burned down with all three of them inside. Neither my father nor my mother had ever recovered from the death of my brother. The job which the office had arranged for my father was that of a laborer—working to break stones for a new road. When I went there, the neighbors told me that the fire had started shortly after my father had returned that night. It was too early for the family to have been asleep, they said. The windows and doors had all been bolted from inside.

  “Arya came with me to Jabalpur. They had found some charred remains, and he was the one who lit the pyres. On the way back, he sat the whole way while I lay with my head in his lap. I didn’t sleep, but kept wondering what the point was of the long and difficult journey my family had made to India. Why couldn’t we have just stayed where we were in Lahore and been murdered there? Then I realized that there had been a purpose after all—to deliver me to Arya.

  “Now you see why it’s so important that I not let him down. That I complete the task for which I was brought here, for which I was saved. Sometimes I see Anand, lying there peacefully as if asleep, the paperweights twinkling like stars around his head. That’s when I know my duty is to create another image just like him. For my family, to show them all that they didn’t die in vain. For Arya, without whom I would have been in a brothel somewhere, or burnt to death along with Chandini in Jabalpur. I would gladly give him my life, but that’s not what he needs. What my Arya requires from me is a son to carry on his name.”

  chapter ten

  SOME WEEKENDS AFTER DIVALI, THE LOCAL HRM BRANCH ORGANIZED ITS annual exhibition event. We all went down to the public field behind the post office where Arya conducted his early morning exercises. Just two days before, the railway minister himself had come there to make a speech after inaugurating a set of new track relays at Nizamuddin, which Babuji had proudly informed us had been imported from Germany. Giant cloth hoardings with the minister’s face still stared down from the middle of the field, interspersed with advertisements for industrial machinery from companies like Tata and Godrej and Siemens. There was also a billboard for Bata shoes among them, with the picture of a farmer holding a scythe, next to his wife and two children, all clad in village clothes with shiny new plastic sandals on their feet.

  Large striped durries had been spread out over the grass. Sandhya led us to the very front, where a section had been marked off for special guests. I sat next to her, but Dev, still sulking, made it a point to sit next to Babuji, not me. Arya came over with a boy carrying glasses of tea, and I saw a quick flash pass over his face as he glanced first at his brother, then at me. “I’ll send out some hot samosas,” he said, and returned to the club building to see how the preparations were proceeding.

  By ten, Kartik Babu, the official supposed to deliver the inaugural address an hour earlier, still hadn’t shown up. Since the spectators at the edges of the sparsely seated durries were beginning to wander away, Arya gave the signal for the events to begin. The new recruits trooped out, gangly fourteen-year-olds in white undershirts and khaki shorts that looked like school uniforms. They did some marching exercises, but the recently planted billboards were a problem, and they had to keep turning around at the picture of the smiling minister. After the marching, they began performing calisthenics on the ground. Arya roamed through them like a general inspecting his troops, blowing the whistle in his mouth to indicate the count, occasionally prodding a boy’s buttocks or spreading a pair of legs further apart with his foot.

  Hema leaned forward in interest to watch the lathi duels that followed, her eyes widening each time the bamboo poles made a cracking sound. She seemed even more taken by the subsequent sword fighting, cheering at the more flamboyant thrusts, grabbing onto my arm when a boy got nicked. There was a wrestling display, for which the participants took off their undershirts and smeared their arms and chests with mud from a pit. Then came the last event, when Arya and one of the other instructors faced each other with lathis, bare-chested.

  Arya’s body, I noticed, was a lot thicker than Dev’s—no naag on his chest, just a mat of wiry hair. He seemed to seek me out from the audience each time there was a break in the maneuvers, though perhaps it was Sandhya he was looking for. The fight ended with Arya pinning his opponent to the ground between his muscular thighs. He raised his lathi high in the air, then brought its end down to within an inch of the instructor’s throat. This time there was no mistaking it—as he stood to take a bow, Arya’s eyes locked purposefully with mine.

  By now, Kartik Babu had arrived and the podium was dragged back to the front for his welcoming speech. He was older than I had expected, and was dressed in the saffron clothes of a sanyasi, with white ash marks on his forehead. “People ask why the HRM trains with lathis and swords. Why we make our boys get up before dawn and do push-ups on the ground. Why we teach them not to let the seeds of their life force spill out. The answer, I say, is freedom. We have to be vigilant and strong if we want to preserve the honor of our mother, this country.

  “But that’s not the Indian way, they say. We believe in nonviolence, they say, in turning the other cheek. To which my reply is to learn from the lessons of history. All the invaders who have swept across this country, from Mahmud of Gazni to Babar, from the Portuguese to the British, have been welcomed with turned cheeks. Cheeks that have been gouged time and time again. Remember this is our mother we are talking about. What kind of children are these who would stand by and see her bloodied and violated?

  “I’ll tell you who they are. These people living like parasites off our mother’s body. They are the people who should have left for Pakistan a long time ago. Instead, they are still here. Why? Because the government needs their vote, that’s why. The same government who forbids the HRM from going into politics, who says that rifles are too dangerous for us to practice with, that we should be content wi
th defending our mother with sticks.”

  There followed a tirade against Muslim Personal Law, according to which Muslim men could have up to four wives. “Why not six or twelve or a whole harem?” Kartik Babu railed. “The government could get even more Muslim votes that way. And with all those wives, what about all the children they keep producing? The whole country has become a factory for Muslims, a breeding ground where they can multiply like mosquitoes, like flies.

  “This year, the same government forced a Hindu marriage act down our throats that is a hundred times more restrictive. Next year, they plan to pass more. To preserve the rights of women that come from Hindu tradition, they say. Tell me, where in the Vedas does it say that widows should inherit their husbands’ property, that daughters cannot be married until they’re fifteen? And if they’re so concerned, why don’t they worry about the rights of Muslim women, instead of telling them they’re worth only one-quarter of a husband? Why this discrimination, why this special treatment? Is this what Nehru means when he crows about his secularism?

  “Which is why I say, learn to use your lathis. The enemy is all around. But there’s peace now, people say, there’s enough for everyone, there’s prosperity. That’s why we must be dormant now, like a datura seed buried deep in the ground, waiting to germinate when the rains return. The time may not be now when we need to wield our weapons. But it will come sooner than you think.”

  By the time the speech ended, I was dazed. Even more unnerving than the hatred gushing out of Kartik Babu’s mouth was the way Dev’s family seemed rapt at his words. Did Mataji and Hema, their brows furrowed in concentration, really subscribe to such ideas? What about Sandhya, with the glow on her face—surely her dreamy look wasn’t due to the speech, but the lingering memory of her husband’s lathi display? Only Dev was staring away in moody distraction, like a boy forced to attend school on a Saturday when he would rather be off playing cricket.