The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  Sharmila’s studiousness didn’t end there. She went ahead and finished her master’s in organic chemistry in just two years and then became the first woman to enroll in the newly instituted Ph.D. program in the sciences at Delhi University. The Indian Express even published a photo with a brief interview, in which the main question seemed to be when, exactly, she planned to marry. “Eve chooses test tube over family” was the caption under her picture, much to Biji’s dismay.

  WHILE SHARMILA SLAKED her unexpected thirst for knowledge, I wondered what to do with my degree. At the time I graduated, Paji, engrossed in Sharmila’s M.Sc. efforts, distractedly suggested I get a job. “Why bother?” Dev said, each time I brought up the idea. “Surely what they pay me at Famous Studio is enough for the two of us.” For a while, I did nothing, but I was no longer used to staying at home or content with a daily stroll to Chowpatty. Paji put me in touch with a publishing agency near Opera House, for whom I started translating historical books from Hindi to English.

  It was not the most stimulating of jobs, but the proprietor, Mr. Hansi, was very solicitous. “Your father is an inspiration not only to every publisher, but every citizen in this country,” he said. “You’re lucky to be the daughter of such a great man.” He gave me a desk in the largest of the three rooms, a room I shared with the two typists. It was hard to ignore their sounds at first—the zip of the cartridge, especially, set my teeth on edge. I wondered if I would have to ask to be moved, but fortunately, the noise merged into the background after the first fortnight.

  Dev seemed unusually concerned that I not discomfort or tire myself. His solution, when I mentioned the typewriter noise, was that I simply quit. “Why get all drenched for a few rupees?” he said to me each time it rained. “Why go in at all, why can’t you just sit at home and translate?” I told him there were too many reference books at work that I needed, too many words and phrases I couldn’t process without Mr. Hansi’s help. It wasn’t the real reason and Dev was by no means convinced. “Be sure to let everyone know you’re married—nobody expects a working woman to be a wife. Especially the men you see day after day—who knows what goes on in their heads?”

  Dev’s apprehension made me keep everyone at arm’s length. I was always on guard, starting at even the most innocent of overtures as if an invisible line of etiquette had been crossed. I stole away each afternoon to the café in the courtyard of the Opera House movie theater to eat lunch by myself. There were tables set out under a canopy, and as long as I ordered a cup of tea, I could consume my jam sandwiches (egg on Wednesdays and Fridays) undisturbed there.

  The day dawned when I received my first pay—Friday, the twenty-eighth of September, to be exact. A peon went from desk to desk distributing khaki brown envelopes with employees’ names written across the top right corner in red. I tore mine open and counted twenty-five ten-rupee notes inside, two one-rupee coins, and sixty paise in change. I had started on the seventh, but Mr. Hansi had given me a full month’s wages.

  That afternoon, when the Opera House waiter brought my tea, I asked for a Mangola instead. He came back with my bottle and flipped open the cap, catching it expertly in midair. I opened my sandwich packet, and it being Friday, detected the slightly sulfuric aroma of egg. I had boiled it the night before, as I always did, and doused it with pepper precisely to reduce this smell. The thought of the chopped yolks and whites entombed in their mushy slices depressed me. It was quite profligate, I knew, but I had to call the waiter back. “Do you have pakodas on your menu?” I asked. “Or samosas, better yet?”

  At home, I waited until Dev was sitting at the dining table before setting the khaki envelope in front of him. He rubbed it warily as if testing the paper, as if apprehensive he might find something offensive about the texture itself. “What is it?” he asked, finally, without looking inside.

  “My first pay. Two hundred and fifty-two rupees.” I took out the money, not just to show him, but also because I wanted to feel the crispness of the notes between my fingers again. “It was two ninety-two sixty, but I spent eight annas on lunch and gave the waiter a ten-paise tip.”

  Dev stared at the empty envelope as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed, as if the paper had been revealed not only to be disagreeable, but toxic as well. “Two ninety-two sixty,” he said.

  “I’ve been ordering tea there every afternoon and I’d never given the waiter anything, so I—”

  But Dev had already put the envelope aside. “I have to get to the studio early tomorrow. The only time they could get both Lata and Rafi to show up for recording a duet was at eight a.m.”

  After that, Dev always became irritable on the last Friday of each month, when I was paid. We didn’t talk of what I did with my salary, though he must have known that I deposited it into our savings account. I ordered not just samosas from Opera House, but mutton sandwiches as well. Sometimes, when it was very hot, I even splurged on a second Mangola.

  One afternoon in January, I found the heavy iron gates to the Opera House compound were chained. Inside, I could make out the closed doors of the café—even the advance booking window for the cinema was shut. A watchman came up behind the gate and rattled his lathi against the bars. “There’s a strike,” he said, “haven’t you heard? All the movie theaters in the city are closed, to protest the new government tax.”

  The next evening, Dev was at home when I returned. The actors’ union and the musicians’ guild had voted to join the protest (adding their demands for higher pay to the list of grievances). The studios had all shut down, and the whole film industry was now officially on strike. Dev could be out of work indefinitely—it would now be my salary that was crucial for our subsistence.

  Dev took this as a direct blow to his ego. He started withdrawing my earnings in secret after I deposited them in our savings account, never asking for any of it directly. He became distant and moody, idling around in the dining room all day, drinking twice as much as before. A money order sent by Paji to help us out enraged him so much that he refused to sign the slip (I had to go to the post office myself the next day to retrieve it). Finally one morning, as I was about to leave for work, he barred my way by standing in front of the door. “I would rather dig ditches in the street,” he said, “than continue living like this on the charity of a wife who works.”

  “Why don’t you, then? It’ll be better than staying at home drunk all the time.”

  “I see they not only pay you at your office, but also sharpen your tongue for free. Is this why I allow you to go, so that you can learn how to speak back to me?”

  I tried to get past Dev, but he didn’t move. “What will you do, write to your daddy if I stop you now? He’s the one who first put this idea of working in your head, isn’t he? Do you have to be such a good daughter that you always have to please him?”

  “Don’t forget that if it weren’t for my father, you wouldn’t have this house—you’d be living on the street. If you can gulp down all his money without a burp, why such pretensions taking it from me?”

  “Yes, yes, keep telling me how worthless I am. How I’m a leech on you and your Paji—isn’t that what you think? And as for your respected father—” He didn’t complete his sentence, but slunk into the other room.

  I went to work that day and every day after that, weathering Dev’s taunts as best I could. My hope was that once his work resumed, he would calm down and revert to his earlier peevish but tolerant attitude.

  But I underestimated the rage he would store up in the ten weeks the strike lasted. As soon as he started getting paid again, Dev disappeared every evening, coming back at 3 and 4 a.m, long after Auntie’s had shut down. Thoroughly inebriated, he collapsed into the living room couch as soon as he returned. In the mornings, he was surly and ill-tempered and refused to answer the questions I posed. “It’s none of your business—think you can still wave your money in my face?”

  Finally, one night I confronted Auntie in her bar at 10 p.m. “What makes you imagine I keep
track of my customers’ whereabouts?” she snapped. Then she softened. “He only pops in here for a single drink these days—he spends most of the evening down the road, at Banu’s place.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s one of those kinds of establishments. I can’t believe I’m revealing this, but if we women don’t come to each other’s aid, who will?”

  “You mean it’s a brothel?”

  “Not quite that sordid—only some dancing, or so I’ve heard. But a full rupee per glass she demands, this Banu does—imagine if I started charging that. I suppose she can get away with it, the way she struts around putting everything she has on display.”

  So this was what Dev had sunk to. I imagined going to Banu’s place to retrieve him. Opening the faceless door to enter the hallway lit in garish pink. The drumbeat of a tabla starting up somewhere above, a woman clearing her throat and beginning to sing. Dev adding his voice to the suggestive lyrics, hands clapping, ankle bells chiming, a harmonium joining in. “Stop!” the hall attendant crying out, as I squeeze by the furniture and go running past him. My feet pounding on wood as I vault the steps, my breath coming in rasps as I part the strings of beads that screen the chamber upstairs.

  What would I be greeted by? The scenes I had witnessed so many times in films? Clouds of attar-scented smoke, the gaudiness of painted-on gold, translucent curtains billowing in the wind. Courtesans reclining languorously around the room, customers leering drunkenly from the sidelines, musicians plying their instruments on the patterned linoleum floor. The thickly caked makeup on the dancing girl’s face, the tiny white buds of motiya braided with tinsel in her hair. And Dev—Dev at her mercurial henna-painted feet, so rapt in his song that he doesn’t even notice me there.

  “But you shouldn’t worry, Beti, he’s a good boy, your Dev, not some modern-day Devdas. I think he must go there for the chance to sing, that’s all it probably is.”

  Devdas. Could that be whom Dev was trying to emulate? The lovelorn alcoholic who was Saigal’s most famous characterization, the role people said he was born to play? Dev certainly had the drinking down pat. Roopa could be his Paru, his unattainable love, and Banu could be the courtesan Chandramukhi, in whose lap Dev already seemed to be drowning his sorrows. And I? There didn’t seem to be a part left for me to play.

  “Why don’t you just return home?” Auntie said. “I’ll tell Dev tomorrow that you were here. It’ll all be fine, just you see, your auntie will take care of it. You know you’re like a daughter to me.” I fought the urge to push away her hand as she stroked my hair.

  That night, after he had returned, I crept up to Dev asleep on the couch, determined to uncover evidence of his transgressions. He still wore the clothes in which he had left for work—I sniffed them for attar, but all I could detect was a faint curry smell. There were no seductively long hairs that showed up against the white of his shirt, no incriminating petals of motiya or broken ankle bells in his pockets. In fact, he looked childlike as he slept through my search—as innocent as a slumbering Devdas, I thought to myself.

  I never did act on my resolve to confront Dev at Banu’s place. I was too apprehensive of bringing the matter to a head by barging in. The scene I had imagined—what were the ways in which it could climax? Would Dev be contrite, ashamed, or would he humiliate me in front of everyone, order me to return home by myself? And what if he and Banu weren’t just dancing, but hidden behind another beaded curtain, locked in each other’s embrace?

  Perhaps Auntie kept her promise to tell Dev I knew where he went, perhaps she didn’t. For a long time, there was no change in his nightly absences. It was only when I was forced to take a fortnight off from work due to too much accumulated leave that Dev began returning earlier—still swaying and tottering, but at a more decent hour. At the end of my fortnight, I sent a note to Mr. Hansi saying I wanted to use up the rest of my vacation time as well. When the final week was up, Dev had still not reverted to his earlier behavior. I understood then the bargain he wanted to strike for staying away from Banu—I resigned from my job.

  FOR THE FEW DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I felt aglow at my decision. Dev became very attentive, coming home straight from work, taking me to a play at the Tejpal one evening, and the next, to the Soviet Expo at Cross Maidan. As an added bonus, Paji was beside himself with fury at my “self-destructiveness”—I waited eagerly for his letters to savor his gnashing. I didn’t miss my job too much—translating the same facts repeatedly had become quite monotonous. The reigns of the Mauryas and the Guptas, the waves of Gangetic invaders—the problem with history was it never changed. Even worse were the technical volumes Mr. Hansi asked me to render—treatises on industrial growth since Independence, mind-numbing tomes on the rise in the use of fertilizers.

  I was staggering home one morning, triumphant over the giant sack of onions I had haggled down to twelve annas, when a familiar white Mercedes drew up beside me. “My, so many onions,” Freddy said, wrinkling her nose. “Looks like you need a ride—come in and sit beside me.” The sack was heavy enough that I found myself accepting. “Only you, dear, not the onions—the driver will put those in the dickey.”

  Freddy was dressed immaculately in purple—right down to her fingernail polish and the scarf still tied dashingly around her neck. Since I had last seen her, the prosperity informing her features had acquired a patina of smugness—curiously, it suited her well. “I’ll have our cook send you the recipe for a soup that the French make out of onions—I didn’t know you were so infatuated with them.”

  Freddy insisted on taking me to lunch at Kwality’s. With my onions held hostage in her trunk, she bombarded me with her post-B.A. accomplishments for an hour. The newspaper column she was writing, the speakers’ bureau she organized for the Rotary club, the gallery show in which she had been invited to participate (“even though painting’s just something I dabble in”). She had even formed her own theater company. “You remember Pesi and Keki and Judy from college—they’re all so fond of acting—you must come and see us.”

  It was good that she kept talking about herself, since I dreaded the prospect of having to reciprocate. “But enough about me—what have you been doing with your life?” she finally asked as the bill came.

  THAT EVENING, DEV dragged me to the Soviet Expo for one last visit before it closed. Clumps of people stood enthralled around the tractors and mechanical hoes, as if waiting for the machines to spring to life and start plowing the exhibition ground itself. There were gleaming models of MiG fighter jets suspended in a glass case, with a giant cloth backdrop showing Nehru and Khrushchev in a celebratory embrace. A woman sat at a desk in a stall, vending subscriptions to Soviet Life and Soviet Woman—twelve issues for a rupee, twenty-four for one-fifty.

  Dev hurried me past everything—as always, it was the Ferris wheel that interested him. The sign claimed it was Russian-made, though it looked like the usual giant wheel, with yellow canopies attached to spruce up the cars a bit. Dev helped me into the seat and secured the safety bar over our laps. We rose into the air in spurts, stopping each time for the loading of the next chair.

  “Look, you can see Marine Drive from here. And the Gateway, and the Taj Hotel.” Dev swiveled around to point, and our seat tilted back dizzyingly in the air.

  I followed the line of his arm, but the sights barely registered. What had I been doing with my life? I had mumbled something to put Freddy off, but her question still roiled in my mind. Why had I cut myself off from my job, from getting a taste of what independence meant? Why hadn’t I taken college more seriously, established my own circle of friends? Why, for that matter, didn’t I have my own newspaper column or theater company like Freddy had? I watched a trio of seagulls fly towards the sea, their white bodies receding into the dark. All my energy for the past few years had gone into resenting Paji or pleasing Dev. In the face of Dev’s misbehavior, of his bullying, why had I let him get away with it?

  Suddenly I no longer wanted to ride the Ferris wheel. I wanted to follow the seagulls an
d glide into the life I had not chosen. But the bar across my waist was locked in place, and the wheel had begun to descend, picking up speed. Dev squeezed my forearm and said something, but his words were lost before they reached me. The flags adorning the tractors came up to greet us, sickles and hammers waved in the breeze. I caught a flash of the attendant, his face a blur, his hand on the lever that controlled our speed.

  What if he forgot to ease off on the lever? Perhaps there was still a chance to be free. I imagined us spinning faster and faster, so fast that the wheel broke loose from its mooring. Bulbs exploding, canopies crumpling, riders trying to hang on, as we began to roll across the grounds. The juggernaut flattening tents and tractors and cars alike as it barreled down the road to Flora Fountain. Its swath extending all the way to the dockyards, where it splashed with a final bounce into the sea.

  But I remained where I was, unharmed and safe, but also undelivered to the liberating waters of the sea. The lights of Bombay kept swinging in their arc, approaching and receding under me. I lost track of the cycles—five, ten, fifteen—they seemed to stretch on to eternity. And through it all, as we whirled together through the air, Dev’s fingers retained their claim on me.

  “Wasn’t that wonderful?” Dev said as we began to slow down. “Let’s ride it again, shall we?”

  chapter sixteen

  FOUR YEARS AFTER WE MOVED TO BOMBAY, HEMA’S WEDDING FINALLY took us back to Delhi. I had tried, for quite some time, to get Dev to accompany me there, but he was always averse to it. “What will I tell them, with what face will I greet them, when I have yet to make the slightest mark to my name? Like a dog all beaten, returning with its tail between its legs, that’s what people will say.” Eventually I decided to go alone to see Biji, and twice requested Babuji to get a ticket from his railway quota. But perhaps Dev’s unsociability was catching, or perhaps I was simply not ready to face Paji again. I made it all the way to the station platform one time, but changed my mind before the train left.