The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  Or did my passion spring from the knowledge that for once I would matter the most in someone’s life? Perhaps Biji and Paji had loved me, perhaps Dev did too. But with them, I could never be first, they had cared for Roopa more. You were going to be the star to reignite my universe, the light I was promised so long ago. As soon as you learnt to love, it would be me whom you loved the most.

  You roused something else in me—the confidence that the years of marriage had dimmed. It was not just pride I felt at having created you, but also power. Each time you suckled, I became potent, invincible, an Amazon infusing you with strength. With you at my breast, we were a team of two, ready to challenge the world.

  It must have been due to this solidarity that my thinking became no longer my own. Whenever I directed a thought to myself, it emerged addressed to you instead.

  IT WAS ONLY NATURAL that I began to pay less attention to Dev. A shirt not ironed because of the diapers I had to wash. Rice not made fresh, or bread instead of chappatis, because you were not feeling well. A night turned away in bed so that I could check if you needed to be fed. Day by day I distanced myself from my old routine of chores.

  Dev took it all good-naturedly, indulging me as never before. When I didn’t cook dinner, he brought hot onion pakodas wrapped in newspaper with two kinds of chutney. When I was moody, he plied me with coconuts or squeezed oranges (once, even mangoes!) for juice. He made a chicken curry one day, which stained my teeth bright yellow from all the turmeric he added. At night, he took you from the cot and put you between us on the bed. He liked to play with your limbs, to pivot them about as if they were the movable parts of a robot.

  It had not occurred to me that I would be competing for your affection with your father. Now, as I saw him kiss you on the nose or sing his nightly lullaby, I felt the first grinds of jealousy pepper my heart. On Thursdays, he marked ash from his pooja on your brow, then whispered special blessings from Sai Baba and Ganesh over your head. Perhaps it would be worth it to share you, perhaps we would really become a family of three in our own bamboo house, I consoled myself. Still, every time he held you, I made sure to pull you to my bosom afterwards to remind you how you were fed.

  Dev’s promise not to drink amazed me. He rounded up all his bottles of Indian whiskey (with names like “Diplomat” and “Aristocrat”) as well as the brightly colored fruit concoctions bought from Auntie’s speakeasy. He even fished out a quarter of gin hiding behind the sofa. He packed them all in an empty cardboard box which he hoisted onto the highest shelf in the bathroom. “A new start, for Munna,” he declared. “And for you.”

  It didn’t last. As he kissed you one night, I detected Listerine on his breath. Perhaps he had just gargled with it, I tried telling myself, but he seemed to gargle with increasing frequency after that. When I confronted him, he pulled down the cardboard box of bottles and showed me they were still filled. “I just like my breath to be fresh.”

  Of course, once my suspicions were aroused, he couldn’t hide it much longer. I found an empty quarter bottle in his pant pocket, I noticed an unwashed glass smelling of alcohol by the sink. I sneaked out one night when he thought I was in bed and caught him pouring from a large bottle of fluorescent green sweet lime in the kitchen. There were no words exchanged. He looked at me, stopped, then lowered his eyes and resumed pouring.

  THE FIRST TIME I ventured out with you in my arms, Mrs. Azmi, from the flat directly below, stopped to admire you on the steps. “All these years we’ve just been saying hello—what a darling baby you have.” It wasn’t only her, but the whole building, which, face unveiled, introduced itself. Dr. Kagawalla offered the name of a pediatrician, Mrs. Karmali and Mrs. Hamid invited us for tea. The Hussains, on the third floor, promised their son’s old tricycle for when you were tall enough to pedal.

  A second Hindu family had moved into the building, occupying the flat down the hall. Mr. Dugal, whose hair was prematurely gray, looked at you through large sad eyes as his wife patted your head. “So darling they are, at that age at least, reminds me of my Pinky in the first few weeks,” Mrs. Dugal said. She thrust her daughter forward. “Tell Auntie how old you are.” Pinky smiled chubbily, but didn’t say anything. “She’s three, but recites ‘Jack and Jill’ so well, you’d swear she was ten.” Whenever we met after that, Mrs. Dugal attempted to make her daughter break into a nursery rhyme without success.

  It wasn’t just the building but the whole of Tardeo that saluted me for producing you. The street hawkers waved from the pavements as we promenaded by—my vegetable woman even learned your name. “Little Baba,” the shopkeepers cooed, and tried to wrap your uncoordinated fingers around candy that you were too young to hold, much less consume.

  Paji sent a money order for five hundred and one rupees the week after I brought you home. “What joyous news you have delivered,” he wrote. “Now that you too have made me a grandfather, only Sharmila has her duty left.” There was no hint of the distraught letters or the telegram he had sent. “When are you bringing Ashvin to Delhi?” he asked instead. Not until you account for everything, I almost dashed back.

  Perhaps his guilt opened the floodgates to his generosity, perhaps Paji had not forgotten the telegram after all. A second money order arrived the following week, to buy you a pram. Then came baskets of fruit, and a set of baby suits. Most extravagant of all was the offer to pay for an ayah. “Your mother was changing diapers for years—I want you to live your life without worrying about all that.” Dev managed to convince me not to send the money back.

  We went through a succession of ayahs. The first woman we hired was young and slovenly, with an alarming itch in her breast, which she kept scratching absently next to your face. The second attended to you with a wistful melancholy, as if having lost her own child, she was using you as a surrogate. She fussed over your booties longingly, like someone with a fetish, and finally disappeared with them one day, together with two of the baby suits Paji had sent. Maria lasted the longest. Clean, well-groomed, and Catholic, she told me that she had been taking care of babies in her family for fifteen of her twenty-five years. She knew exactly how to hold you, magically appearing to receive you from Dev whenever he attempted to pick you up in his clumsy way. You came out fresh and smiling every time she bathed you.

  Soon, though, with Maria there to look after you, I started wondering about my own usefulness. She didn’t like me watching while she washed you or changed your clothes, and often whisked you away to another room when I approached. Even feeding you, seemingly the only activity left for me, made her sulk. “Why do you have so much milk?” she demanded, when she saw me spontaneously wet my blouse. “It’s better from a bottle,” she remarked another time, and I told her it was no business of hers.

  “You’re being too possessive,” Dev said, when I complained to him. “You should be thankful, not jealous, that we can afford someone to take such good care of Munna.”

  Two weeks into her reign, I finally summoned the courage to tell Maria we wouldn’t be needing her anymore. She allowed a look of such contempt to flash across her face that I wondered how she had concealed it so long. “You memsahibs always think you can handle your babies, but you can’t. Don’t blame me if anything bad happens to your son.” She wanted to hug you before she left, but I withheld you protectively in my arms.

  Her threat echoed in my ears. I worried that she had cast a spell, that you would waste away with some incurable fever. I took your temperature twice a day and examined your body for spots. I watched you do pee-pee every morning to make sure the hole wasn’t blocked. A few times, I thought I saw Maria on the street and asked Dev if the police should be called. Twice, I rushed you to the doctor—once, because your feces didn’t seem the right color and the second time to demand why one testicle looked larger than the other.

  On my third visit, the doctor took me aside. “I know you’re a first-time mother, but these daily inspections have got to stop.”

  chapter nineteen

  WAR BROK
E OUT. EMBOLDENED BY INDIA’S RECENT ROUT AT THE HANDS of the Chinese, Pakistan trained its own hungry eyes across the border at Kashmir, which it always assumed would be part of its own territory. Exploratory August skirmishes escalated into a full-fledged confrontation on the first of September. Bombay came under a blackout, against the dark cover of which rumors began to streak and flare and pop. An enemy plane had been shot down over the city, spies had parachuted down in the suburbs, the Pakistanis had decided to target Tardeo first, and would be dispatching a phalanx of American-built jets to blow it up that very evening. Daily media announcements instructed us on how to crouch under furniture or in the corners of rooms to avoid being annihilated by bombs.

  Three years ago, when the Chinese attacked, it had felt quaint, almost serene, to eat by candlelight and watch the cars glide below with blackened headlights afterwards. Now I experienced a fear I had not known before, not even while fleeing the riots of Rawalpindi during Partition. I obsessed endlessly about airborne dangers hurtling down to do your four-month-old body harm. Wheeling your pram along Marine Drive, I kept an eye on the horizon, making mental notes on how to dodge the missiles that enemy ships might launch. This is where we would jump should the parapet collapse around us, this is how we would duck as the concrete bolsters began to spin and pirouette through the air. I tried to feed you nine and ten times a day—the feel of your mouth at my breast was the only way to keep myself calm.

  Even more than the blackouts, I came to dread the wail of the air-raid sirens, so mournful that they may have been announcing the entire city’s extinction. Each time they sounded, my instinct was to curl my body protectively around you in a ball. “You’re going to suffocate Munna,” Dev said, as he sipped his drinks in the dark. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen—they’re either for practice or a false alarm.”

  The sirens set you crying as well—one night, you wouldn’t stop even when I offered you my nipple. Perhaps it was the setting of the blackout that inspired him, but suddenly Dev started singing “Light the Fire of Your Heart.” He had given up the song years ago, even before his singing lessons had failed. Now his voice emerged afresh, the lyrics as buoyant as before, the melody sweeping like a river through the dark. A river that flowed around the two of us, lapping us with its rhythms, soothing away your tears, washing away my fears. I waited till he hit the climax to light a candle, just as I had seen the audiences do in college so many eons ago. You stayed peacefully at my breast after the song ended, entranced by the play of candlelight shadows on the wall.

  Later, after the all-clear siren sounded, I carried you up to the terrace. Together, we watched the city emerge from the blackness, lights coming on dimly behind darkened windows, sounds blaring up from the horns of reawakened cars. Even though no shots lit up the Bombay sky, I imagined the atmosphere hazy, like after a fireworks display. For an instant, I even convinced myself I smelled gunpowder in the air.

  Dev started accompanying us to the terrace after his song, carrying his drink in a metal tumbler to conceal it from the neighbors. He never stayed very long, returning downstairs when he needed a refill, leaving the two of us above. On these occasions, I waited for the other neighbors to drift back to their floors as well, one by one. Then I uncovered a breast in the moonlight and put the nipple to your mouth. The brazenness of this made me tingle—baring myself to the city, to the stars and the sky. This ritual we performed so openly, in view of the other buildings, in view of anyone chancing through the door. I waltzed the two of us around the terrace, the night swirling around us, the music swelling joyously, the breeze vaguely sulfuric against my face. A thousand enemy planes could not have sundered us—we were awash in the moon’s protective rays.

  PAJI SENT ME AN ENVELOPE filled with editorials about the war, as if concerned I might miss all the coverage in the Bombay newspapers. “Kashmir shows that there can be no starker contrast between the secularism of India and the religious doctrines propping up Pakistan,” the Indian Express declared. “A territory indispensable to Nehru’s vision of the nation, living proof that Muslims can prosper side by side with their Hindu neighbors in their own majority state.” To which Paji added his own recommendation. “It’s time for the Pakistanis to remove the K they added for Kashmir to their name—come up with a different acronym, because that’s one territory which will never be theirs.”

  For years now, my father had given us a running commentary on the problem, as if delivering a play-by-play account of a football match between the two countries. “Foul,” he cried, each time the Americans tried to push India into another UN resolution tilted towards Pakistan. “All they can think about is their favored player in the Cold War. If it hadn’t been for the Soviets, they would have pried Kashmir out of our grasp and presented it to Pakistan as a penalty kick long ago.”

  The arrival of the war, after years of feints and scrimmages, energized Paji. He wrote almost daily, his letters filled with spirited analyses of the latest salvos on either side. His wrath at the U.S. grew with each successive report of American-made weapons being deployed against India. “All those Patton tanks that were supposed to protect Pakistan from the Communists—guess at whom they are being aimed now?”

  The real danger lay not in American weapons, Paji said, but came from within, from all the guerrillas Pakistan had sent across the border to foment an uprising in Kashmir. “Listen to their talk of jihad—what they’re hoping is that every Muslim in the country will feel a solidarity for the struggle and revolt. Now we’ll finally see if Nehru’s experiment comes true. Whether allegiance depends on nationality, or whether religion will be the trump.”

  Hema put it more blatantly. “Arya bhaiyya says that if the Muslims in Delhi start rebelling, we’ll be the first whose heads they’ll chop off. Not just because we’re HRM, but because Nizamuddin’s swarming with Muslims—it’ll probably be the most dangerous place in all of Delhi. It’s going to be like Ghazni or Gauri or one of those other barbarian massacres all over again. Bhaiyya has been handing out swords to everyone, to keep next to our beds. You should have one too—isn’t your building crawling with Muslims on every floor?”

  Even Mrs. Dugal did her bit to fan the paranoia. She pulled me aside on the steps after the blackouts began and declared Mrs. Azmi to be a spy. “I saw it from my balcony last night—the light shining out from her window—she’s probably signaling to the hiding planes, sending secret messages into the sky. I’m not sure what to do—I didn’t know who else besides you to confide in—why she wants the building bombed and all of us blown up, I don’t know.” She wanted me to accompany her to the police, but I refused.

  Neither Hema’s fears nor Mrs. Dugal’s came to pass. The Kashmiris ignored Pakistani efforts to liberate them—for one, most of them didn’t even speak the same language. Rather than deepening communal cracks, the war unified the nation—both Muslim and Hindu soldiers died defending their country. “If only Nehru were alive to see his dream come true,” Paji wrote. “To see the nation he founded, the citizens he created, acquit themselves so.”

  Although the war ended in a stalemate, it had the effect of restoring the self-confidence of the military after their demoralizing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. Prime Minister Shastri became Paji’s new hero. “Who knew that this little postage-stamp-sized man would prove himself so worthy of following Nehru’s footsteps?” Paji found the fate of the American tanks particularly delightful. The gasoline-powered Pattons proved extremely vulnerable to fire, and perished in large numbers at the battle of Khem Karan. In fact, the U.S. soon announced it would stop manufacturing them. “How sad that we had to send all those American geniuses back to the drawing board,” Paji gleefully observed.

  On the last night of the blackout, with the approval of the UN cease-fire pact imminent, the terrace filled with people. Mrs. Hussain made kebabs, which she handed out to celebrate (“no beef,” she assured us), while Mrs. Azmi brought along little cups of rice kheer, still warm. Pinky gulped down two cups, and then
, with Mrs. Dugal’s encouragement, helped herself to a third.

  The sound of car horns trying to honk out film tunes came from the street below. People peeled the black panels off their windows and flung them off their balconies—all across the city, uncovered lights began to show. The Diana cinema even turned on the lights on its marquee. A small bonfire blazed on the terrace of the adjoining building—I could see the silhouettes of boys dancing around. There was the retort of firecrackers, and then a bottle rocket zipped into the sky.

  Dev took you from me and held you high in his outstretched arms. When you grew too heavy, he seated you on his head. “Look, little Munna. This is your country, this is your city.” He began to slowly pivot around, pointing out the landmarks floating out like ghosts from the night. “And there,” Dev said, looking towards a dark gap between the buildings beyond which lay Chowpatty. “There lies your sea.”

  More rockets rose into the air from some of the building terraces. Now that I actually saw fireworks, I couldn’t smell the gunpowder anymore. Dev lifted up your hand and with it traced the arc of one of the rockets through the sky. It ended in a tiny explosion, which I caught in the reflection in your eye.

  And then, the rockets, the people, the drama of the landscape spread out before us all coalesced in a wave of nostalgia. The only missing feature from my fantasy of years ago was the sound of Dev’s song. I felt a sudden urge to stroke the back of his neck. “Why don’t you sing?” I whispered instead.

  For a moment I thought he would re-create my vision and burst into song. That Nehru and Gandhi and the nautch girls would materialize from the dark and pick up their number from the Red Fort. Instead, Dev handed you back to me, and picked up his tumbler to empty it. “I only sing for Munna now,” he said, and walked away towards the steps.