The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  Things came to a head when I told him about the class picnic to Elephanta Island. “Why not?” he said. “I can take the third-class train to Jogeshwari for voice lessons while you cruise off to the island. Perhaps in Freddy’s own private yacht—does Mercedes make yachts as well?”

  “If you don’t want me to go, just say so.”

  “Since when have you needed my permission for anything? I thought you only asked your father for that. And why wouldn’t I want you to go?—it’ll be nice for you to cavort with all your friends from college, especially the men.”

  My first impulse was to respond in kind, to show I would not be cowed. But things had not been going well lately for Dev—despite his perseverance at lessons, even the newer music directors had turned him down in tryouts of his revamped singing style. Besides, there was my pledge to conform. I decided I would approach Freddy to explain that I was different from other students—being married, I could only go along on a picnic if my husband was invited as well.

  “Oh, please bring him along. The more the merrier,” she said. Perhaps I imagined the heavenward look she seemed to exchange with her friends.

  We left for the island at 10 a.m. on Sunday, a boatload of English-medium college students and Dev. “Who’d like to sing a song for us?” Freddy asked, and Dev volunteered before I could stop him. He burst into “Awara Hoon,” one of the new Mukesh songs his guru had been teaching him. People clapped politely when he had finished, but while he was singing, nobody joined in. “Who else—in English this time?” Freddy said, and I felt doubly mortified because Dev kept smiling without realizing the slight.

  It was a long climb up the hill from the jetty to the temple caves. The weather was unseasonably warm for December—each step we ascended seemed to offer us up closer to the sun, to be withered by its rays. Dev appeared to have developed an obsession for Freddy in the time taken to make the water crossing. He hurried me along to keep pace with her, a foolish grin fixed on his face in case she happened to look back. Every time we passed a group of monkeys, he loudly mimicked their growls in the hope of attracting her attention. At one point, he asked me if I thought she might be thirsty, if he should buy her a glass of water from the girl winding her way down the steps with an earthenware pot on her head. “Freddy only drinks water that’s been boiled,” I informed him.

  We had lunch before going into the cave. There were circles of people forming on the grass, and of course Dev wanted to sit in the one with Freddy. “Would you like to try some kidney pie?” she asked us. “Daddy had our cook take lessons from the chef at the British Embassy.”

  I didn’t want to accept, because we had only the usual jam sandwiches to trade in return, but Dev helped himself to Freddy’s offering. “It’s very good,” he said, even though I knew how he hated non-Punjabi fare. “Tastes a little like mutton samosa,” he added, and some of Freddy’s friends tittered into their napkins.

  Surely even Dev must have noticed the glances and winks that passed between Freddy and the other girls. He chose to ignore them all, lumbering on with his attempts to make an impression. Although clearly mocking him, Freddy made no effort to disengage herself from Dev’s transparent courtship. Rather, she preened and flaunted herself under the attention, as if it was a waterfall cascading over her body. “Some more pie?” she purred, holding out the plate.

  As we gathered at the entrance to the caves, Dev slipped away from the group. I spotted the shine in his eyes at once when he returned—I knew he had taken a few nips to fortify himself. I stood there mortified—what if Freddy or one of the girls smelled his breath? Fortunately, there was no obvious bulge or outline of a flask visible through the pockets of his pants. “Shall we go pay our respects to Shiva?” Dev asked, as if the congregation had been marking time just for his return.

  One of the girls from my history class, Aarti, led us through the courtyard and up the stone steps. “My father’s brought me here so many times that not only every panel but even the story behind is chipped permanently into my head.” She paused at the top of the steps, each arm pointing towards one of the enormous reliefs flanking the entrance. “The two most opposite aspects of Shiva, as my father always declares. All his energy and action in the dancing Natraja on your right, and the stillness of his yogi pose on your left.”

  I tried to concentrate on the images, to tear my attention away from Freddy and Dev. Here was Shiva the yogi, seated in such a way that his lap seemed to be both emerging from and dissolving into the rock. Both his arms were missing and the stone was worn away from his nose and lips—his obliviousness to these mutilations only accentuated the trance he was in. And on the other side, another trance-like expression, but now the king of dance jumping out of the relief. Arms flailing around, legs crossing and uncrossing, his body in such exquisite balance that motion had to be inevitable. “The reason he looks so serene even as entire cities and continents are being obliterated under his feet is that he knows destruction will simply give him a chance to create once again,” Aarti explained. Surely if I held my breath, and stared at Shiva’s poised hand, I would catch a stirring, at least at his fingertips.

  “Which one is your Dev more like?” Freddy asked, breaking my spell. Dev’s face spread into a delighted grin—there was a chorus of giggles from her friends.

  I tried to stay next to Dev as we followed Aarti into the cool interior of the cave. But it was as if Freddy had trained her friends, like a captain might his team for a soccer match—I found myself blocked at each step, and gradually, deftly, displaced to the outskirts of the group. “It’s so dark in here. So romantic, isn’t it?” Freddy said.

  Aarti took us back and forth across the cave, showing us the tableaux on the walls in chronological order. Shiva marrying Parvati after years of asceticism, with Vishnu and Brahma and gift-bearing angels floating in to celebrate their cosmic union. The married couple playing dice, with Parvati closing her eyes to let Shiva win by cheating, so that he wouldn’t sulk and stalk off and darken the universe. Shiva as the destroyer, teeth bared, sword raised, eyes white with anger, impaling his own son Andhaka for falling in love with his mother Parvati and trying to carry her off. “What Shiva’s really destroying is the lust in Andhaka’s heart—giving him an opportunity to conquer his passion and redeem himself. Which Andhaka does, finally, after a hundred thousand years of penance.” Dev murmured something into Freddy’s ear, and I saw her smile and coyly shake her head.

  “And this is where the goddess Ganga descends from heaven and Shiva catches her in the locks of his hair. Notice the trace of unease Parvati displays at the arrival of her rival Ganga, who she knows will become Shiva’s other wife.”

  Parvati’s expression wasn’t uneasy, but rather knowing, graceful, wise. She stood to one side of Shiva, her body arching elegantly away from him, a hint of indignation in the tilt of her head, and on her lips, the barest of smiles. “What I want to know is whether there’s someone here for me as well, to catch me should I fall,” Freddy said.

  The most imposing statue in the cave was a giant trimurti next to the Ganga relief, towering several times taller than the copies I had seen made by the sand sculptor on the beach. Even Freddy and her friends interrupted their banter to gaze up at the three faces, crowned with intricate headgear rising into the darkness. Aarti reached up with her hand to show how she could barely touch one of the beads in the necklaces carved into the breast. “People sometimes claim that this shows the trinity of Shiva with Vishnu and Brahma, but it’s really three images of Shiva alone. See the right face with the mustache, the lotus poised next to the one on the left—they’re Shiva’s two sides, masculine and feminine. And in the center, he’s at his most contemplative, eyes closed, face devoid of expression, looking deep within himself. Imagine—he’s been here since the seventh century—watching dynasty after dynasty pass by, his face always turned sightlessly towards the same patch of sea. Waiting for the right era to start participating in the universe again, when his eyes will finally open and he
’ll spring free.”

  I hung back as Aarti led the crowd away to see the image of Shiva as half woman, half man. The chatter died down and I was left alone with the trimurti. I looked at the diffused light burnishing a soft glow on its cheeks—was it trying to communicate a lesson to me? Remain unperturbed by what might be happening, it seemed to say—accept my gift of serenity. Even if Dev and Freddy grew more adventurous when they noticed I was no longer trailing them, why, the trimurti asked, should it really matter to me?

  I turned towards the mouth of the cave to align myself in the same direction as the trimurti. Light filtered in from the outside and made the faintest of impressions against my shut eyelids. I followed this light, padding towards it through the dark, opening my eyes only when I heard the people admiring the reliefs at the entrance. Then I went down the steps and walked past the wooden fence, all the way to the railing that overlooked the motley collection of islands strewn across the water. Somewhere above me, a monkey made a strange rhythmic noise, like a bird chirping, then swung away through the branches. I stood there in the breeze, waiting for Aarti to lead the group out of the cave.

  Dev and Freddy were the last to emerge. I watched as my husband offered his hand to steady Freddy, who seemed to be suddenly having trouble descending the steps. All through the boat ride back, she kept laughing at whatever Dev said—I had never told her my husband had such a sense of humor, she declared to me. I consoled myself that it didn’t matter—I had been through more with Dev and Roopa, managing to keep myself above jealousy. “What was that expression again on Parvati’s face?” one of Freddy’s friends threw into the group, and I felt my cheeks turn red.

  “Did you have to be so obvious?” I asked Dev when we got home.

  “At least you could have wiped the strings of drool off your mouth periodically.”

  “What a filthy mind you have,” Dev replied. “Is that all you can think?” He went to sulk in the other room. Later on, I heard him hum the same Mukesh song from the boat to himself.

  THAT WEEK, FOR THE first time since I had started going to college, Dev showed up after classes to pick me up. “I thought I could also thank Freddy, in case we see her, for that round samosa she brought, made of kidneys.”

  We ended up going to the Cream Centre for tea with Freddy’s group. It was just like at the picnic—Dev as oblivious as before, Freddy leading him on, and the entourage giggling—not only at him, but now at me as well. I kept dreading another attempt by Dev to burst into “Awara Hoon,” but to my relief, it didn’t materialize.

  I’m not sure how he got the time off, but Dev started showing up every second or third day after that. One afternoon, he came with us for lunch—on another, he accompanied us to see An Affair to Remember at the Regal. (“Next time we’ll try to find you a movie with more songs in it,” Freddy promised.) There came an evening when I glanced out of the balcony and saw him being dropped off at ten by the white Mercedes.

  “It’s really nothing,” he said when I confronted him upstairs. “Freddy wanted to see the studio, so we waited, but the recording didn’t end. We’ll try again on Saturday—I have the morning off—you can come along too, if you care.”

  I fumed all night. I would search out the boy who followed me last year, I told myself. Show up together at the studio on Saturday to let Dev know two could play the flirtation game. I actually looked for my stalker the next day in college—surveying classrooms from the outside, peering into the men’s canteen, searching nooks in the library, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  On Saturday, I told Dev I did want to be present at the studio. “As you like,” he said, checking his nostrils in the mirror and tamping down a curl of hair behind his ear. He fastened his sleeves with cuff links in the shape of miniature eagles, then dabbed on the last drops from a bottle of Godrej after-shave.

  The air-conditioning was off in the studio lobby. Dev’s Godrej fragrance dissipated within the first half hour of waiting. Circles of sweat formed at his armpits, but he did not unthread the eagles to roll up his sleeves. “Perhaps the traffic is jammed at Nana Chowk,” he conjectured when an hour had passed. “I should have told her the A-1 chip factory—her driver must be having a problem with the address,” he said at 1 p.m. “There could have been an accident—I hope to God Freddy’s not been hurt.”

  Freddy never showed. My first instinct, that Dev was not somebody she could be interested in, proved correct. Like a swirl of butterflies taking to the air simultaneously, Freddy and her friends left him behind, in search of the next bush on which to alight. The invitations to badminton courts and the Cream Centre ceased abruptly, the Mercedes stopped rolling around the corner of our street.

  Although I was relieved to be no longer one of Freddy’s projects, Dev took it very hard. I could tell he blamed me for somehow sabotaging things. He put away the eagles and didn’t replace the bottle of after-shave for many months. On some nights, he seemed so forlorn that I wondered if I should be cheering him up—even, perhaps, trying to broker a meeting with Freddy. His ego had become more fragile, his confidence readily shaken, after months of drubbing at the recording studio. He stopped going to Jogeshwari not too long after, discontinuing his voice lessons without telling me.

  Freddy herself mostly ignored me after that, except for one brazen request to sign a petition against a move by the principal to hold some classes in Marathi. A few of her friends, though, took to making jokes about me. One of them even came up whenever she saw me, to address me as “Parvati.” I started delaying my entry into classrooms to the very last moment so I wouldn’t have to encounter the winking glances and knowing smiles. It occurred to me that I had three more years of joint classes with my tormentors ahead of me.

  I needn’t have worried. When the First Year Arts final exam results were posted that May, I found I had failed, and would have to repeat the year.

  chapter fifteen

  PAJI SENT ME A SLEW OF SCATHING LETTERS WHEN HE LEARNT THE NEWS. In the first one, he informed me that I had not only shamed myself, but humiliated him in front of Dr. Dastoor as well. “Were you too proud to ask his daughter for help just because she’s smarter?” When I couldn’t think of how to reveal the flirtations between Dev and Freddy, he accused me of failing on purpose, just to anger him. “If that’s how ignorant your thinking is, then just remember, you’re only hurting yourself.” I was composing a reply about how difficult my transition had been after the loss of my baby, when another missive arrived, listing all the money he’d spent on books and fees. “Perhaps I should have adopted a street urchin—I’d have been more appreciated had I sent him to college instead.”

  Something rose within me, something that made me tear up the explanation I had been trying to articulate. If that was Paji’s attitude, then fine, I would absorb his anger, savor it, even find ways to provoke him further. Perhaps this was the way to soothe the injury inside, that still hurt so much every time I thought about it. I resolved to sit on the beach through all my classes in the coming year, picturing the money wasted every minute. It was unfortunate that colleges did not insist on uniforms—I would have enjoyed the extra coins draining from Paji’s pocket.

  The person who deflected me from this headstrong path, was, strangely enough, Sharmila. It must have been Paji’s frustration with my performance that prompted him to turn to her in desperation. She had always been the least promising student of us all—lost in her own dreamy world, with an academic record as consistent as it was wretched. From the time she was little, she seemed serene in her vision of her future, one where Paji and Biji would hand over the baton of her care to a carefully selected husband. All she had to do was finish her schooling and matriculate, and the gentle burbling pleasures of a wife and mother would, soon enough, float her way. It was therefore a tremendous shock for her when this future suddenly vaporized in the intensity of Paji’s attention. Over Biji’s furious protestations, Sharmila found herself plucked from the living room viewings by prospective bridegrooms and deposite
d instead into the confines of Ramjas College (which just a few years ago Roopa had attended with Dev). Her letters to me were heartrending—filled with terror at this unforeseen turn of events, against which she had been too timid to protest.

  But then she surprised everyone, not least of all herself. She took to her studies like a wick to oil, absorbing knowledge from books, from lectures, even, it seemed, from the university air itself. She woke up every day at 5 a.m. to pore over her notes and talked about her favorite subject, chemistry, with a fanaticism Biji found horrifying. She did so well in her first-term exams (science, too, not arts) that the college declared her a role model for their fledgling class of females in the sciences and even talked about awarding her a special new medal. Her weakening eyesight (due to all the reading she was doing, Biji charged) led to a pair of glasses which lent her appearance an older, more studious air.

  The aftershocks of Sharmila’s transformation made their way to me across the country through Paji’s letters. “Can you imagine? She’s aced the prelim in Physics.” “My own daughter, a scientist—I can hardly believe it.” “Did I mention they’re going to fete her on Republic Day?” Suddenly his exhortations for me to study waned—he no longer seemed interested in my dangling promises to improve. “I’ll really have to think about it, Meera. Whether it makes any sense to pour in more money for another year if you happen to fail again.” The looming threat of being cut off made me abandon my notions of non-cooperation and return to my books. In 1962, the same year that Sharmila blazed her way to an honors B.Sc. in chemistry, I managed to squeak across the finish line with a third division history B.A.