The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  It was surprising how the distance between the two cities proved so much more insurmountable than an overnight railway journey. Despite all of Hema’s letters threatening her arrival in Bombay on the next train, she, too, had never managed to visit. Sensing Dev’s reluctance regarding family reunions, Mataji declared trains unfit for travel by a young unaccompanied woman. Besides, there was the task of finding a groom, which first had to be completed. Once the marriage was set, Hema started making all sorts of plans to come down with her mother before the ceremony—to shop where Bombay brides did, and visit all the shrines around the city for special blessings to ensure her firstborn was a son. The trip did not materialize.

  Sharmila actually did visit once on a college trip with her classmates, though she didn’t stay with us, and only spent a few hours in my company. Roopa’s letters from Visakhapatnam (when not vaunting the adorable perfection of her offspring, a boy and a girl) occasionally mentioned that her husband would be transferred next to Bombay. Much to my relief, they landed in Madras instead, a posting still sufficiently far away.

  The only person who came quite regularly to Bombay was Arya. He made a trip or two every year, first to establish a Bombay division of the HRM, and then to oversee it. On one of his visits, he even showed up at Wilson College, helping one of the vernacular groups set up a booth on Activity Day for recruiting students into the HRM. He always stayed with us on his visits. I tried to linger away from home when he was around, but it was impossible to completely escape him. Every morning when I came into the kitchen to boil the milk, it was as if I was back in the bedroom in Nizamuddin, stalked by his hungry look, and the smell of overripe fruit. The only reason to look forward to his coming was the hope that he would bring Sandhya along one day.

  Although the intensity with which I missed everyone else eased over time, my longing for Sandhya only grew deeper. Perhaps it was because the only news I received about her were the occasional scraps Hema deemed important enough to send. Even though the words Sandhya scrawled out at the end of Hema’s letters had, over the months and years, begun to clump together into the awkward sentence, it was hardly enough. On the one occasion that we had arranged to speak with Dev’s family over the phone, she had been too overcome with emotion to say more than hello.

  At my urging, Dev always asked his brother to bring Bhabhiji along the next time. But I knew these efforts were in vain. Arya would never want his wife around—she would just be in the way of what he still hoped to attain.

  THE DAY WE ARRIVED for the wedding, Hema wasn’t there to greet us at the station. “She’s been practicing being mature the last few days,” Mataji explained. “Like a married person should be, she says. You’ll see.”

  Sure enough, when Mataji ushered us into the bedroom, Hema sat demurely on the bed, being measured for a new set of salwar kameez suits. She looked up with the barest of smiles, as if this was all she could muster, given the gravity of her situation. “Bhaiyyaji, Bhabhiji,” she addressed us formally, “It is my hope that you had a comfortable journey.”

  Watching her walk was truly unsettling. She carried herself like someone with a very long neck, her body held in a stiff line and inclined slightly back, her feet apparently never leaving the ground. The effect was that of a statue being wheeled around at a stately tilt—one of a goddess or queen, perhaps. Mataji suggested she show us the thermos and cutlery set that would be part of her dowry. “It’s this way,” Hema said, leading us to the kitchen, as if we were guests unfamiliar with the layout of the house.

  It had taken the four years since we’d left to find a groom for Hema. Babuji had rejected several suitors during the dowry negotiation stage. “When did everyone become so greedy?” he lamented to us. “Isn’t it enough anymore to be from a respectable home?” He took a sip of his whiskey and shook his head. “If only I’d agreed when she was still eighteen—we could have escaped with half of what we’re now paying.”

  Although the first ceremony was only the next evening, bushels of lightbulbs had already converted the lane outside the house into a glittering fairyland. Or rather, a movie set, what with loudspeakers tied to lampposts broadcasting film music to the whole colony. “It’s going to be even grander than your wedding,” Babuji boasted to me. “The most lavish Nizamuddin’s ever seen.” Gopal, the groom, was one of Arya’s friends from the HRM, and the wedding enclosure was being set up on the same field where all the organization’s events were held. “What’s nice about having the ceremony so close to the house is that nobody in the entire colony can miss it. We’ll parade the horse through each of the streets, and invite everyone to join the procession behind the band. Arya’s going to have the HRM tent put up, under which the brahmins will cook food for five hundred guests.”

  “I’m glad your mother dragged me there,” Paji said to me during the music ceremony the next night. “It’s so touching to see how my money is coming in handy to spare no expense.”

  Hema maintained her regal reserve through all the events. She barely spoke to any of her friends, displaying an ostentatious seriousness through all their jokes. “What happened to the rich old husband you wanted, the one who would buy you a car and a phone?” Pushpa teased, and Hema stared her down with an unsmiling look. Even Mataji, when she tried to get her to dance to the tune of a popular wedding song, was primly refused.

  Thankfully, Sandhya found a way to get Hema down from her roost on the night before the wedding. She sneaked into Mataji’s cupboard and emerged wearing a resplendent gold earring and necklace set, the same one Mataji had lent Sandhya on special occasions like Karva Chauth, but had now pledged as part of Hema’s dowry. “How does it look?” Sandhya asked, turning around to model it for the assembled women. “Mataji said to wear it tomorrow—it’ll go well with my red wedding sari, don’t you think?”

  Hema’s reserve didn’t stand a chance. She shrieked, unfolding herself out of her cross-legged pose and lunging at Sandhya in one fluid move. “Don’t you like it?” Sandhya asked, running into the courtyard, with Hema bounding after her. Sandhya was able to take off the necklace just before Hema cornered her and toss it to Pushpa, who waved it in the air to get Hema racing, before relaying it on to Ranjana. Even Mataji got into the game, catching the necklace from one friend and lobbing it to another, while her daughter ran around screaming, trying to retrieve it.

  By the time Hema finally caught up with the missing piece of her dowry, she was much too agitated to resume putting on her airs. She tried sulking for a bit, but then realized the inconsistency this presented with her earlier stance of poised indifference. She seemed confused at what to attempt next, when Sandhya sat down beside her and lovingly threaded the gold earrings through her earlobes. “There’s nobody else on whom these could look better than my sister,” Sandhya said, and Hema burst into tears.

  After that, everything made Hema cry—the songs played, the sight of her wedding garments for the next day, the stray whistle of a train rumbling by, even the last mound of rice cooked by Sandhya, clinging to its tray. Watching Hema bravely choke down her dinner, Pushpa started sobbing quietly into her food as well, then Sandhya and Mataji and all of Hema’s friends. Only my eyes, as always, remained ungraciously dry.

  That evening Mataji cleared Arya and Dev out of the bedroom, telling them that the women would be sleeping together for Hema’s last night in the house. Sandhya pushed the charpoys to one side and we lined the floor with talais and sheets to create a giant bed. By now, Hema had stopped crying—instead, her eyes were round and wide with a dawning dread. She clung to each one of us for minutes on end, as if trying to get her fill of our presence, as if storing up our hugs to last her into the weeks and months and years of her marriage ahead. “How will I live by myself?” she said.

  “It’s not even a half mile away—I’ll come see you as soon as I can,” Mataji replied.

  “And Sandhya didi?”

  “I’ll bring her along.”

  “And Meera didi will come from Bombay?”
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br />   “Yes, yes, whatever you say. Don’t worry so much. You’re going to like it there.” Mataji laid Hema’s head in her lap and stroked her hair.

  “Remember your favorite story, the one of the princess who got married and never wanted to return home again?”

  “No. You never told me stories when I was little—you only made that effort for Arya and Dev bhaiyya.”

  “Silly girl, of course I did. But I’ll tell it again.”

  So Mataji related the story while Sandhya and I reclined next to Hema. It was a long tale, filled with brave deeds and princely suitors, a ravishing princess who bathed in the Ganges and a secret kingdom in the Himalayas. Hema’s eyelids fluttered drowsily just as the princess was being transported to the mountains in a magic doli. “I’ve always wanted to ride a doli….” she said, before falling asleep.

  Mataji rolled Hema onto the farthermost talai. “Right from birth, she could always fall unconscious in a second. I hope she manages to stay awake longer tomorrow, on her wedding night.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s late, I suppose we should turn off the light.” She stared at Hema, making no move towards the light switch. “All those years that she’s been here—I can’t believe this is the last night. That this old woman is sleeping with her little girl next to her for one final time.” She lay down beside Hema and stroked her hair, then arranged herself so that her arm was cradling Hema’s head. Sandhya waited for Mataji to pull a sheet over the two of them before turning off the light.

  I stayed awake, listening for the sounds of trains, but there were none. The moon shone through the window to create its familiar pattern on the far wall. The same enigmatic shadow that had intrigued me on so many nights before—was that a house that the dark shape surrounded by the moonlight represented, or simply a box? Or maybe it was an automobile?

  Today, I decided, it was a doli. The same doli that had brought me here on my wedding night, the very one borrowed by the groom’s family to transport Hema tomorrow. I imagined her clambering into its dark interior, enveloped by the smell of wood and sweat that I could still summon to my nostrils. Would it lead her to a life different from my own?

  “Are you awake?” Sandhya whispered next to me.

  “Yes.” I turned to face her.

  “I can’t sleep either. It’s so hard to imagine she’ll be gone tomorrow. She was not even eight when Arya first brought me here as a bride.” Sandhya stopped, her face rippled by the shadows, her expression unreadable in the darkness. A wisp of light fell across her nose. “But I suppose that’s how it has to be. One by one everyone leaves.” I reached through the silence and took her hand in my own.

  “Do you know, when you left, it took me months to be able to sleep again? Even when I did fall sleep, I would awaken in the middle of the night and stare at the blank space on the floor where you used to lie. I had become used to being reassured by your sleeping face—seeing it would make me doze off again. But now that you were gone, I started tossing and turning for the rest of the night. What I finally learnt was to imagine you asleep in your bed in Bombay. The bulbs from the movie theater you wrote about blinking on and off over your face, the sounds of the Bombay traffic rising up to your ears. I would hold my breath, certain that the light or the noise was going to wake you up. Only when I saw you remaining fast asleep through it all would I start to relax again.

  “You know what my fantasy used to be? That you and I would get pregnant together. That our firstborns would both be sons, that we would bring them up like brothers, like twins. That by some amazing coincidence, they would even have their birthdays on the same date. Can you imagine what that would have been like—your son and mine—with the love of two mothers to shower them, not one?”

  I pressed Sandhya’s fingers and felt her thumb graze my skin in response. “When I first heard you were expecting, I was quite dismayed,” she said. “I thought it was just jealousy, but it was really because my fantasy hadn’t come true. I hadn’t conceived like you. I suppose I had been wishing it so much that I had come to expect it. Forgetting that it was in my fate to never be so fortunate.”

  “Don’t say that. It’ll still happen, you’ll see.”

  “No it won’t. In fact, I sometimes wonder if what happened to you was because of me. Whether it was my inauspicious shadow that passed over your womb, whether it was—”

  I covered Sandhya’s mouth with my hand. She took my fingers away and kissed their tips. “Anyway,” she said. “You’re safe from my bad luck now, I’m glad you went away. It’s good that Hema is leaving too. Sometimes I think I should go away as well—go to Benares, beg for a living, become a sanyasin. But then I think of Arya, how that wouldn’t help him. I would want him to marry someone more fertile, more fortunate, but I don’t think he’d be able to, knowing I was somewhere, still alive.”

  “Now listen—” I began to say, but it was Sandhya’s turn to put her fingers on my lips.

  “Don’t worry. Don’t pay too much attention to what I say. I’m talking so foolishly just because of Hema’s leaving.”

  We slept under one sheet that night. It became quite chilly near morning, and I felt Sandhya get up to close the window. “I’m here, right next to you,” I murmured, when she got back under the sheet. “So you can go right back to sleep.”

  She touched my forehead, as if to reassure herself, then traced her fingers down my cheek. “Your face is so cold,” she said. “You’re not used to the Delhi weather anymore. Should I get us a blanket from the chest?”

  “No, we’ll just snuggle up.” I moved myself closer to her until my head was on her shoulder, just like Hema’s was on Mataji’s next to me. Sandhya unwound a part of her sari and covered my body with it. I pressed my face into her neck and felt her breasts, warm and comforting, against my own. “You’ll just have to come back with me to Bombay,” I said.

  We stayed there for a while. I felt drowsy, but also curiously aware, as if something pleasantly stimulating had been released into my bloodstream. I wondered how the sensation of my body must seem to her, how my head and face and bosom must feel against her body. Was she surprised like me by how closely we could nestle, how each contour had an outline to unfold against? Did she feel the swath on her belly where the cloth between us ran out, where the bareness of my midriff caressed her uncovered skin? I imagined the two of us still enfolded in the liquid warmth of her sari, staring at the sky together through the window of a train. The stars watching our passage to a distant household where we could forever be with each other again.

  Sandhya kissed my forehead, then slid down to press her cheek against mine. “I wish the night could just go on,” she said.

  SANDHYA KILLED HERSELF three years later. Officially, everyone said it was an accident, that she must have not seen the train. “To live right next to the station and be so inexperienced crossing the tracks,” the stationmaster commiserated with the family on his condolence visit. It was true that Sandhya had just started delivering Arya his midday meal—she never had much reason to cross the railway lines before that. The empty tiffin box was found nearby in the grass, as if it was something precious, like an infant, that Sandhya had tried to save by throwing clear of the tracks.

  When I first got the news, the impulse to rush to Delhi struck up within me like a physical spasm. Perhaps if I hurried, perhaps if I took a flight, I could still save her, there was still time. Dev’s explanations that the body would have been already cremated, that I would be in no condition to see its mangled state anyway, did little to calm my irrational urges. It was only the arrival of Hema’s letter that gave me a compelling reason to remain in Bombay.

  Sandhya had been despondent for the past two years, Hema wrote, ever since Tony was born. When Hema’s second son Rahul arrived the year after, it seemed to get worse. “Mataji said not to tell you, but there was a disappearance for an entire week last month. Luckily, Shilpa auntie spotted Sandhya bhabhi sitting on the steps of the Kalkaji temple—wrapped from head to toe in saffron and singing a
s if she were a sanyasin. She refused Auntie’s attempts to get her to come back—Arya bhaiyya had to go fetch her himself.”

  Sandhya was disoriented and quite starved when she returned, according to Hema, and claimed not to remember how she got to the temple. There had been briefer unexplained absences in the past, and it was to keep tabs on her that Arya had suggested the daily trips to his office at lunch. “I should have guessed something was really wrong, when she suddenly became so impatient to learn to write. She always talked about how you used to show her the letters of the alphabet on a slate. She said she wanted to send you a complete letter—she told me not to tell you, that it would be a surprise. I asked Arya bhaiyya several times if he found anything, but he said no, she didn’t even leave a note behind.”

  I realized I had to wait for the mail, to see if it might contain a missing message from Sandhya, composed to me before she died. Each morning, I dragged a chair to the balcony to sit until the postman trudged down the street with his khaki bag of mail. In the afternoons, once the sun had crossed over our building, I returned to wait for his second delivery.

  Sometimes I glimpsed a woman from above with a red and perfectly straight line of sindhoor in her hair. Images of Sandhya would then swirl through my head. Here she was, shaking vermilion out onto the pooja platter, snipping hibiscus from the bush outside, waving incense sticks around Devi Ma. There she stood on Karva Chauth, balancing on the charpoy, as the sun turned the sky behind her red. I saw her emerging from her bath, her hair untied and dripping, her skin pungent from the nameless green soap Mataji bought in unwrapped blocks for the family. An herbal smell, a smell slightly oily, but nevertheless pleasant, that I still remembered from our last night, sleeping together on the floor. And with it, the moonlight in her hair, the contour of her breast, the soft heat of her belly as she snuggled with me. I imagined her practicing her vowels and consonants, drawing each loop of the aa and ka over and over again. Pulling out a piece of paper and putting the tip of the pencil in her mouth to moisten it, then beginning to carefully write out my name. Looking at her handiwork, deciding the strokes didn’t look steady enough, taking a new sheet and starting again. I tried to make out the expression in her eyes—was that sadness, or love, or serenity in her face? But as the words slowly formed on the paper, I could read nothing beyond the letters in my name.