The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  Dev, meanwhile, tried to placate me, but after an insultingly short period, gave up and returned to Bombay. I lingered on, unable to transport myself back to my failed experiment as dutiful wife.

  Biji was horrified, and kept trying to coax me to return, but Paji lost no time in enjoining me to stay. “You know I’ve sworn off trying to influence my daughters, but this much I feel it’s my duty to say. Even the sturdiest of fabric unravels over time—there comes a point when it can no longer be mended, it has to be replaced. Just think of all the empty rooms in this house with all three of you gone away. What better gift could a pair of old parents expect than to have one of them reoccupied?” He began enumerating all the jobs in his publishing agency that were mine for the asking. “You could even try a different one every day of the week, until you find the one that’s just right. Just make a clean break of it for your twenty-seventh birthday.”

  I was surprised by how easy my anger made it to decide. I bought a round-trip ticket to Bombay, to retrieve my belongings and leave Dev.

  At Bombay Central, however, there was no sight of Dev on the platform. I sat in the taxi, fuming at him for having ignored my telegram (in which all I had intimated were my arrival details). The flat was a mess when I walked in—trash on the floor, clothes and paper strewn everywhere, cockroaches lounging amidst the plates and glasses as comfortably as guests in a hotel lobby. In the bedroom was Dev, his eyes open, his lips dry, his forehead burning from the typhoid raging through him.

  In the days and nights that followed, as I squeezed out ice water from handkerchiefs and laid them on Dev’s head, the same thoughts went through my mind over and over again. Could this be some sort of ploy on Dev’s part, could he have divined my intentions and purposely infected himself? But then I stared at his ravaged body, his gaunt face, the uneaten rice gruel beside him, and felt guilty. “Meera,” he murmured through his delirium one afternoon. “I couldn’t find the lightbulbs. It’s good that you came.”

  It took him a long time to gain back his strength, and he needed me every step of the way. Each time I toweled him after a sponge bath, or walked him to the toilet, I wondered if he was pretending, and then felt ashamed at myself again. One evening, I came home to find him sitting on the bedroom floor, crying to himself. He had discovered the suitcase in which I had been secretly packing my saris, pulling it out from its hiding place under the bed. “You saved my life,” he said, averting his head from me. “Don’t leave me—without you, I’d be dead.”

  I didn’t promise Dev anything. Even when he started suggesting that we have a child, I was careful not to commit myself. “Sometimes, when I see a baby being wheeled around in its pram by its parents, I feel so guilty. That could have been Meera and me, if only I had had more confidence, if only I had had more courage, I think to myself.” He launched into these self-recriminations every evening, singing “Sleep, Little Baby Princess,” and other Saigal lullabies—for his own sake or mine, I couldn’t tell.

  I took long walks through the city to clear my head. Sometimes, lost in my deliberations, I walked all the way to Colaba or Worli, and had to take the bus back. Every time I passed the intersection at Nana Chowk, a part of me always wondered if the nameless boy who had followed me in college might still be lurking around somewhere. I would see him dart between the buses and sprint down the street, but this time, I imagined myself running hand in hand with him. One day, after Dev had started venturing out of the house again, I brought down the smaller suitcase from its perch atop the cupboard and started stuffing my remaining clothes into it. But the sight of my toothbrush nestling next to Dev’s in the bathroom made me lose my determination, and I unpacked everything before he returned.

  As usual, it was Paji, finally, who precipitated my decision. His letters had become increasingly agitated after I had informed him about the delay in my return. I almost felt sorry for him—he had waited so long, and victory had been so tantalizingly within reach. I made the mistake of writing to him about Dev’s proposition to become parents. The reply arrived that very Friday from Delhi, as if propelled in record time across the country by Paji’s outrage. “Can’t you see what the man is doing—this gush of paternal feeling that he’s suddenly discovered within himself? You might as well let yourself be handcuffed to the bedpost, if you’re going to submit to being impregnated by him.”

  By itself, the letter didn’t quite do it—by now, I had learnt to automatically discount everything Paji wrote. If anything, it was reassuring to note that he had been restored to his old pugnacity, that he had fully recovered from Nehru’s death. What caught me off guard, however, was the telegram that arrived a day later. THINK CAREFULLY, it exhorted. DON’T BE FOOLISH. SAVE YOURSELF. There were three exclamation marks, somehow transposed after PAJI, floating disengaged at the end.

  That very night, I moved to Dev’s side of the bed. His wrist still seemed frail when I took it in my hands, his cheek, when I stroked it, hadn’t regained its fullness yet. I knew I should wait, but the exclamation marks were still flashing in my mind. “Paji just sent me a telegram. He agrees we should have a baby,” I said.

  PART THREE

  chapter eighteen

  I ALWAYS IMAGINED YOU BORN OF THE SUN. AS THE SKY SWALLOWED THE stars, as Usha began to paint the dawn, as eagles were yoked once more to their celestial chariots and gods began to stir. The heavens would open up and beam a chute of rays down upon the earth. Vishnu himself would slide down, like a gold-decked movie star, bearing you in his muscular arms.

  Though you might arrive under the moon instead. With Shiva, not Vishnu, bringing you into the world. Your eyes closed, your breath even, the dab of blue on Shiva’s throat throbbing at yours as well like a brooch. Moonbeams, not sunlight, would transport you into my lap. You would open your eyes and gaze upon the twinkle of distant stars.

  One thing I knew was that you would be beautiful. Your limbs as fleshy and plump as the Glaxo baby’s, your cheeks as red as those of the infants chuckling from the calendar on the wall. I would press my lips over your mouth, your eyes, your nose, each perfectly formed digit of your hand.

  It didn’t happen that way, Ashvin. Bright day turned to twilight before you agreed to be born. I heaved and labored for hours, no golden chariot descended from the heavens to waft you down. Instead of the flapping of eagle wings, what I heard through the windows of Bombay Hospital was the rumble of trucks.

  And you looked nothing like the calendar photos. When the nurse first laid you on my stomach, I felt a mistake had been made. Your nose was too flat, the eyes and mouth all wrong, like features carved out hastily from a vegetable kept too long. Smears of something white clung like cheese to your wrinkled skin. Had they pulled you out too soon, I wondered, was this what all my effort had wrought? Where was the neatly wrapped bundle I was expecting to be eased into my arms?

  I lay on my bed exhausted, watching Shiva and Vishnu fade into the wall. Every tissue in my body felt sore, every muscle spent. The anticipation had all evaporated, what remained was the work stretching ahead. You lay so helpless and needy on my stomach, with your head elongated, your scrotum rudely swollen. What if I couldn’t clothe you, couldn’t feed you, couldn’t bear to put you to my breast?

  Waves of guilt, cold and briny, surged in over my despair. What kind of mother was I, to begrudge you my love? How could I deny you my milk? After what I had already lost, what if I lost you as well—wouldn’t that be just what I deserved?

  That’s when I first felt it. Your heartbeat, but just for a second. Could I have imagined it? I closed my eyes, and pictured myself as a giant scientific instrument, dispassionately scanning your presence. I held my breath and there it was, faint and frog-like again, a heart beating through your chest.

  Suddenly euphoria surged in. I felt lucid, I felt aloft, I felt myself borne along in its swell and carried over the edge. It was like diving through air, like plunging face-first down a waterfall, your visage shimmering in the pool below, emblazoned across the waiting eart
h. I realized how wrong I had been about your flaws—your skin was radiant, your nose the perfect size, your eyes shut tight communicated to me the peevishness you felt inside. I wanted to call out your name, to shout my love as I fell, I wanted to splash into your image and re-create it in a million sparkling drops.

  The feeling vanished as rapidly as it had appeared. You started crying, and your body suddenly grew much heavier on my stomach. The nurse came in and lifted you off. “I’m sure you can’t wait to feed him,” she said.

  I LAY AWAKE AS you slept in your crib. The walls around reminded me of another green room somewhere. I tried to clear my mind, to look past the curls of paint flaking from the ceiling, all the way to the starry sky beyond. Somewhere in this sky were the Ashvin twins. Biji used to point them out as we gazed at the clear Rawalpindi nights from our terrace. They were not too far from Rohini, the constellation after which she was named. The Ashvins were always together, she told us, linked by a bond that time could not break. They gave light and energy to all the bodies in the universe, even the ones in the furthest reaches of space. It didn’t matter if you could only see one, since the other was always still there. The presence of the one obscured manifested through the brightness of its twin.

  I lay in my bed, too far to be heard, and for the first time, whispered your name.

  DEV TOOK US HOME in a taxi three days after you were delivered. Even though it was only the afternoon, I could tell he had poured himself a few. In the months since he had recovered from the typhoid, his strength had come back, and his thirst had too. As usual, he had gargled with Listerine afterwards—were you able to smell it too?

  When we reached our building, I was reluctant to hand you over. But the staircase rose ahead, daring me to negotiate it with you in my arms. I told myself Dev was only glazed, not drunk enough to drop you. Listerine breath or not, he was still your father. He scooped you up with one hand and charged up in his renewed self, taking the steps two by two.

  I felt strange, disoriented, as if I was dragging an unfamiliar body up to an unfamiliar floor. Dev came dancing up shirtless and handed me a balloon at the door. He had put on “House of Bamboo” on the gramophone, the only record in English he owned. Andy Williams sang about floors and walls and a roof all made of bamboo, and Dev sang along too.

  Dev started doing the twist. He pointed to the ceiling, the walls, the floor in turn and mouthed the lyrics in his Punjabi English, translating some of the words. His voice was deep and sonorous, all wrong for the tune. Don’t waste it like this, I wanted to tell him, don’t insult a voice made for K. L. Saigal, for songs like “Light the Fire of Your Heart.” But then I followed his hips swiveling from side to side, his shoes turning furiously on the floor, the snake on his chest black and glistening again, and lost my train of thought. I swayed uncertainly with the balloon in my hand and wondered if in my new body I, too, could dance.

  Dev’s eyes were shut tight in concentration. Was he trying to keep out everything but the music as he danced? Or was he conjuring up an image behind those closed eyelids? An image of the three of us, happy, protected, surrounded by the bamboo house he was going to construct. I wondered whether bamboo was a good material from which to build, whether such a house would endure. Perhaps I should have listened to the lyrics more carefully—maybe that’s what the song was about.

  Dev pulled my hands together and danced me into the bedroom. He took the balloon from my hand and fastened it to your cot. Balloons rose from ribbons tied all around the frame, bobbing up and down in the breeze from the ceiling fan. They looked like they were jerking their heads in tune to the music with Dev. He took me by the hands again and led me to the bed. Two balloons, one red and one blue, bobbed from opposite ends of the headboard.

  I did not want to lie down. The sensations I was trying to contain inside might bubble up if I did. There was nausea to be sure, and disorientation as well, but also a rising exhilaration, as radiant as peppermint in my throat. Stabbing me gently through these feelings were spasms of despair.

  I wanted to believe this was a new beginning. But the past was too unwieldy to hide, it intruded from every corner of my thoughts. “I’ve just come home,” I said. “There’s a thousand things to do, the baby to check.”

  Then I noticed the music still playing, and Dev’s lips touching mine. The Listerine had begun to wear off his breath. I let him kiss me, felt guilty, and clumsily kissed him back.

  Dev kissed my face to the rhythm of the lyrics. His lips moved down to my neck. I tried holding on to his head before he could descend lower but he darted out of the way. “Bamboo door,” he said, as he rubbed his face into my blouse, then pulled at it with his teeth.

  I looked at his head. It was always handsome with hair, thick and black, but now the beginning of a bald spot had started to spread. I saw the tip of his nose, just visible between my breasts. His lips pressed against me through the material of my blouse. I imagined them leaving a mark, red with lipstick like the first time I’d seen them. How long ago had that been? The days when he tweezed the line of each eyebrow into formation. Worked the Vaseline into his pompadour and covered it with a cap all morning to set it in place. I remembered the bright floral shirts with the tops left unbuttoned for the naag to peek through. The tightly ribbed pants that spread down his legs like sections of pipe cut to fit. Everything about Dev was so dazzling then. How absurd it seemed now that I had been so mesmerized, like a chicken distracted by color and shine. I looked at Dev’s hairless spot again and wondered how long he had before it claimed his head.

  The record ended. Dev rubbed the sweat off his chest against my stomach and I felt him thicken against my leg. I grabbed his head in my hands as if to kiss it, then pushed it away from me. He looked up, startled at my vehemence. I kept my expression blank, though I was surprised as well.

  “The doctor said six weeks, don’t you remember?” I pressed my blouse back against my chest. “If you knew how sick I feel.”

  The drink began to falter on his face. Underneath the lingering bravado I saw the hope (or could it be fear?) he had been trying to hide. “I was just caressing you. I feel so good, so well again, as if I’ve got a second chance.” He kissed my hand. “Perhaps the typhoid is the best thing that ever happened to me. All these years, and now this shining light in our lives.”

  “All these years,” I repeated. “If he’d been born the year after we were married, he’d be nine now.”

  The keenness of my rancor surprised me. I studied Dev’s eyes carefully to make sure he understood, that my words killed the hope in them. If there was to be reconciliation, it would be extended by me, on my terms.

  The sound of the gramophone needle oscillating on the record came in from the next room. Now that the song had ended, faint strains of film music wafted in from a radio on some other floor. Not K. L. Saigal, but one of the newer ones, the upstarts, I noted.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Dev said. He buried his head against my chest, as if to speak directly to my heart. “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  Could I believe him? Did his words have enough heft to balance the weight of all I had endured over the years? He raised his head and I saw his eyes were wet. “Now that Munna is here, you’ll see. I’ll be a new person—we’ll all be new—we’ll have a new life.” He wrapped my arms around his head and sobbed into my breast.

  I looked up. The fan swirled cool air onto my face. A balloon had come loose and hung against the ceiling, just out of reach of the whirring blades. I watched its ribbon swish through the air like the tail of a dancing snake.

  I imagined the ribbon entangled in the fan, the balloon pulled in and ruptured by the blades. Fragments of balloon skin rain down, and Dev looks up in alarm. You awaken crying and I run to your cot.

  But every time the streamer got near enough to flirt with the blades, it darted away. I sat on the bed with Dev in my arms, looking at the balloon bob and push against the ceiling, but not come any closer to being ensnar
ed.

  AND THEN, SLOWLY, cautiously, I came under your spell. Night after night I responded to your silent summons, enticing me to the cot to admire your face. I watched the series of magic tricks you performed—the skin that cleared in the moonlight, the chin that miraculously emerged overnight, the head that resized itself to become proportional to your limbs. Sometimes, I felt an intense curiosity towards you, like a child might for a new pet or toy. I peered into your ears and nostrils, I counted your fingers and toes. I rocked you like a doll in my arms to see if your eyes flipped open and closed. The euphoria from the hospital returned each time I felt the tug of your mouth at my breast. The sensation of dropping, the feeling that your presence would transport me somewhere else. Sometimes, you opened your eyes while feeding and gazed at me with the sagacity (or was it lechery?) of a wizened old man. Secret smiles played on your lips as you slept afterwards, as if you knew you had me enmeshed in your wiles. I lost myself in these smiles, in these expressions of joy and sorrow and pique that shimmered across your face. My mood began to steady, my bleakness lifted, the stabs of despair went away. What emerged from the rustling shadows of those nights was an attachment I could almost not bear.

  From where did this love spring? Was it biology pure and simple? The bond I felt because you were my child, the oneness I experienced when your body touched mine? Each time you clambered over me in your uninhibited exploration, I marveled that something so wanton could be so pure. Sometimes, I imagined you were a part of me again, as if the cord between us had regenerated to unite us once more. I felt your hands and feet cling warmly against my skin, and fantasized of pouching you like a kangaroo to watch you grow. My abdomen would be your playground, my chest your bed, I would offer you a breast when you were hungry and use it as a cushion for you when you slept. In the morning I would wait to see your smile—the sun would rise from my body when you lifted your head.