The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  MY SUGGESTION MUST HAVE planted the idea in his head, because Dev soon decided not to sing for you alone. He announced that, having gained his munna as a fan, he would try again to break into playback.

  While your father focused his efforts on his voice, you concentrated on taking your first steps. I trailed you wherever you went, keeping track of the daily distance covered as if training you for an Olympic event. “Now that Munna’s learning to get around, he can be my good-luck charm,” Dev said, as you stumbled across the room. “I’ll take him to the tryouts at the studio later this month.”

  Unfortunately, the plan to use you as a mascot didn’t work, that time or the next. Dev returned home early on each occasion, irritated, undiscovered. “He didn’t stop crying for one second. Thank God Sagar’s wife was there to help with him, otherwise I don’t know what I would have done.”

  Dev’s new attempts allowed him to snag a few more choral parts, but not much else. One morning, he called us both to the studio, saying he wanted his son to witness “a historic occasion”—the music duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal had finally given him his break. But the song recorded as I stood with you in my arms outside the glass partition had embarrassingly little of Dev. Two lines in the beginning, and then one at the end, and a few “tra-la-la’s” trilled in the refrain.

  Confronted by his renewed failure, Dev cast around for targets to vent his frustration. “It’s the music directors who’ve become spineless, pandering to the lowest depths of public taste,” he railed. Another day he blamed Auntie. “I curse the night that she-devil entrapped me in her web of evil wares.” He did not, however, reduce his visits to her speakeasy.

  Then his discontent found an unexpected outlet. Dev had always appeared immune to the astrological dictates that governed life in Nizamuddin, the superstitions and old wives’ tales. Perhaps he had subliminally absorbed them over the years, though, because now they suddenly burst forth and began to rule everything we did. The lunar calendar became indispensable to our very existence. No activity could be planned without a consultation, and one moonless night, he almost burst into tears imploring me not to take you out. Thursday was the most auspicious day of the week and Tuesday the least, I learnt—the former when new projects were to be embarked upon, while on the latter, it was dangerous to even get a haircut. Most bizarre of all, he developed a strong antipathy towards the ganga—not because of inefficiency or uncleanness, but because she was four feet seven inches tall. “Can’t we get rid of her? Babuji always says that short people, and tailors, are repositories of bad luck.”

  It did not end there. A fellow musician introduced Dev to a holy man at Dadar who reputedly could turn around anyone’s kismet. Dev started visiting him regularly. The guruji first decreed that no meat be eaten for a month to counter the evil eye. When this proved too austere, Dev gave up fish (which he had never been particularly fond of) instead. Next, the guruji prescribed a series of exacting poojas to be performed at home. Dev anointed each idol with a solution of saffron in milk and shopped for the correct flowers and fruits to hang as offerings. He gathered the ash from spent incense in a special pouch blessed by the guruji, transferring it into a brown paper bag every Thursday to consign to the sea at Chowpatty. Whereas before he occasionally came home with a discrete mark on his brow to indicate a temple visit, Dev now smeared, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, enormous red and white tilaks on his forehead of the size a sadhu might wear (the ones with grains of rice stuck in them made me particularly queasy). One day, I returned home to find you ravaged by these religious marks—not just on the forehead, but even all over the chest and arms. I forbade Dev, in no uncertain terms, from involving you in any such future attempts.

  But involve you he did. He came back from Dadar one evening and announced that Guruji had diagnosed the problem. “We’ve been remiss in our religious duty—there’s only one way to change our luck. We have to perform Munna’s mundan—shave the hair off his head.”

  chapter twenty

  FOR A LONG TIME AFTER YOUR INITIAL FUZZ FELL OUT, YOU REMAINED completely bald. When the new hairs finally emerged, I tracked their growth every morning, as if they were seedlings in a balcony pot. Just when I could imagine a field of long, flowing tresses, something unexpected happened. The strands began to curl.

  Not curls easily straightened or weak of will, but the kind that shot out to wind snakelike around fingers straying too close. And stray close is precisely what fingers did in your presence—everyone, even strangers at the bus stop, felt a compelling attraction to your hair. They not only touched it, but luxuriated in it—feeling its suppleness, marveling at its gloss, losing themselves in the light leaping around to animate the whorls. I actually witnessed a tiny hand reach out from a pram parked next to yours and try to stroke your head.

  Dev’s proposal for a mundan left me aghast. I had seen the tonsuring performed on the son of one of Dev’s cousins in Delhi. The boy, only two years old, screamed through the whole ceremony. He squirmed so much that his scalp became bloody from razor cuts. “If you think that’s why we’ve let Ashvin’s hair grow, you’re wrong. I’ll see how anyone harms even a lock on his head.”

  “It’s to make it healthier when the hair grows out again,” Dev said. “Every family I know has it done—it’ll ensure that fortune always smiles on him. It’s not cruel or barbaric, not like the foreskin Muslims slice off. According to Guruji, it’s even prescribed in the scriptures—a harmless haircut, that’s all.”

  “I don’t care what your guruji says or your scriptures. I’m happy with my son’s hair as it is.”

  “He’s my son as well.”

  Hema wrote me a letter to try and sway me. “At that age, they don’t even realize it’s gone. You should see the photos of my Tony—Rahul, too—afterwards. All bald and grinning, like happy old men.” She detailed all the calamities that could befall you, that could ruin the family, if we didn’t perform the ceremony. “Remember Pushpa, whose parents bought the Kelvinator? Her mother-in-law committed suicide after her brother-in-law drowned. All this bad luck, they finally realized, from delaying their four-year-old son’s mundan too long. Unfortunately, it was too late—just as the barber raised his razor, the boy suddenly became bald—all the hairs decided to drop to the floor in one big suicide plunge. They’ve been to a hundred doctors, a hundred temples, but not a strand they’ve been able to coax back yet from his scalp.”

  Of course, Paji weighed in as well, framing his advice, predictably, in terms of Indira Gandhi. Ever since Shastri had died and Indira wrested away the prime ministership from her horde of rivals, he had worked her into almost every letter. “Truly a daughter worthy of Nehru—she’s going to put India on the map,” he declared, when she appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “All the chatter about women’s liberation in the West—look who even this Betty Friedan person is lining up to interview now.”

  He began sending me articles about Indira in which he circled paragraphs in red—paragraphs which showcased her intelligence, or independence, or one of the other qualities of her character he felt I should emulate. Once, after being hit by a rock while campaigning in Orissa, I received a newspaper photograph of Indira’s face masked in enough bandages to make her look like Batman (as she herself pointed out). “If only every woman could be half as courageous as her,” Paji wrote on these clippings, as a helpful hint. Each time Indira foundered, however—perhaps with a disastrous session in Parliament, perhaps with the inability to quell a rice crisis, the tone of his letters abruptly changed. “Thank God Nehru’s not alive to hear people curse him for not giving the country a son. Maybe she is a goongi gudiya after all—the dumb doll that all those people call her.”

  When the mundan question came up, Paji’s chart had Indira’s star on the upswing. A few months before, a group of right-wing Hindu parties had launched an agitation for a country-wide ban on the killing of cows for beef. Some commentators called it a transparent attempt to create a vote-garnering issue for the co
ming elections. A mob of naked trident-carrying sadhus attacked Parliament House as part of a massive demonstration, quickly leading to looting, arson, and half a dozen deaths. Indira, though, did not capitulate. India was a secular country, she declared, and the poor had a constitutional right to this important source of protein. Beef would stay.

  “All this religious nonsense, all these superstitious claims—if she could stand up to them so firmly, I hope my daughter will be able to do the same. Now is the time, too, before your husband’s family gets their claws fully into Ashvin.”

  For a while, it looked as if for once, I would grant Paji his wish. I would emulate Indira’s steadfastness, not let Dev prevail. Then I answered the door one evening when the doorbell rang. The first thing I noticed was the toy elephant—the one Sandhya had told me she bought years ago at the Baisakhi fair in anticipation of becoming a mother someday. Arya held it. “I’ve come to see my nephew,” he said.

  THE LAST TIME I had lain eyes on my brother-in-law was five years ago, when he visited on one of his frequent missions for the HRM. The venture did not succeed. The Bombay groups he courted were too busy with their language agitations to care about the religious agenda of the HRM. This lukewarm reception, coupled with Sandhya’s death the following year, put an end to Arya’s trips—an end I hoped would be permanent. I resolved, in fact, to never see him again—even managing, by some miracle, to avoid him entirely during the family trip to Delhi last February (induced by Paji’s claim—false, as it turned out—that he had suffered a heart attack). “May I enter?” Arya asked, and I silently stepped aside to let him in.

  Dev rushed up to hug his brother, and you came toddling up behind to curl both arms around his leg. “Yara,” you said. For a few moments, I could only stare—the ease with which he picked you up, the familiarity with which he covered your face with kisses, the way you laughed as he blew into your stomach, your delight as he rubbed your nose with his own. Nobody in Delhi—not Biji, not Mataji—had treated you with such intimacy. It was as if Arya had been your “Yara” not for minutes, but decades. Except for the hair that had turned gray as Hema had lamented, his appearance hadn’t changed. A deepening of the lines around the neck, a thickening of the flesh around his waist, the shadow of unspoken menace still lurking behind his smile. I took you back into my arms and sniffed your hair to make sure you hadn’t picked up his papaya smell.

  “The hair a child is born with is unclean from the mother’s womb,” Arya said as I cleared the dinner dishes. All evening you had insisted on sitting in his lap, while I looked from his face to Dev’s, trying to decide whether Dev had invited him, whether the meeting Arya claimed to be attending was a pretext. “It’s to free Ashvin from the bonds of previous births that we must shave his head.”

  “Ashvin only had fuzz when he was born, not hair. And as far as I know, there are no previous existences listed on his birth certificate.”

  “It doesn’t matter—the head must be shaved. It’s a rite in our family that must be observed.” His voice was calm and patient, as if trying to help a child access something advanced. “Surely you agree that it’s our blood too that runs in his veins?”

  “Is that what you came here to ask?”

  Arya mussed your hair. You splayed your body against his stomach and smiled up at him. “Just look at this little one—he wouldn’t mind, would you, Ashvin? Tell your mummy you want your mundan so your hair can grow out thick and strong from your head again.”

  “Yara head ’gain,” you said.

  Arya turned to me. “It’s no business of mine if my brother allows you more freedom than he should in this house. But if he even forgets to remind you of your responsibility towards our only heir, then someone else has to pick up the task.”

  At first, Arya’s visit only hardened my resolve against the mundan. How dare the Arora clan think they could bully me into submission? Paji’s letters flared up in my mind—it was as outrageous as the Hindus trying to intimidate Indira into a ban on beef. But Dev seemed to go to pieces at the insult contained in Arya’s words, polishing off a whole bottle of sweet lime each night after his brother left. “What kind of wife are you that you want to see your husband fail?” he blubbered. “That you’re determined to make me a laughingstock in front of my own family? It’s only hair, you know, it’ll just grow back. When you know I love Munna so much, then why such stubbornness?”

  In the end, pity for your father made me relent. I hugged you to my chest and buried my face in your head. Hating myself for what I would allow to happen to your curls.

  ONCE THE PRIEST set an auspicious date for your mundan, I insisted we organize a big party for that day. I asked everyone to bring a present, two months in advance of your second birthday. I even went to Palmer’s and Co. at Kemp’s Corner to buy a birthday cake. I chose one in the form of a face, with pastilles for eyes and marzipan for ears. As a precaution, I had them create a hat out of icing, to tactfully cover the head.

  Arya had instructed Dev to have an achkan stitched for you with gold thread. You started crying the minute you put it on—the jacket was scratchy and unyielding, the collar so high that it cut into your chin. You looked beautiful in your sorrow—your feet fitted into gold shoes that tapered stylishly (but uncomfortably) at the toes, the white pajama with embroidered cuffs so stiff with starch that you could barely flex your legs. Crowning it all was the doomed black resplendence of your hair.

  I cared for it all morning. Washed it with Shikakai soap for the last time, savoring its thickness between my palms. Dried the whorls lovingly between towels, rubbed coconut oil into the individual curls. At noon, I fed you, then carried you into the living room where all the guests had gathered. The Dugals, the Azmis, several people from the recording studio, and the Hussains, who brought along their son’s tricycle.

  Dev lowered you into a dining chair decorated with flowers. He smeared ash on your forehead, then marked a tilak in vermilion. The barber picked up his scissors and waited for the signal to start. You saw the first few locks drop to the floor and looked at me, puzzled. Then you whimpered and tried to climb out of the chair. More hair fell past your eyes, in black clumps. Your whimpers grew louder, then subsided into sobs. I thought you might start kicking, but the gravity of the achkan and the faces around you prevented that.

  Tufts rose from your head, like stumps in a forest leveled by a storm. Hair slipped in through the neck of the achkan, and you squirmed as if you had insects crawling up your back. I looked at the lifeless curls building up on the floor and felt like weeping myself. Somehow, I managed a smile to encourage you on.

  The barber swept the loose hairs off your scalp. He selected the smallest razor from a set of three and sharpened it on his palm. I could see you wouldn’t be still for it, so I took you in my lap. You held on to my hands and convulsed silently under the blade. I felt the crinkly material of the achkan against my body, its sharp edges jabbing at me even through my sari. At one point, you screamed—the barber had nicked your skin. The red spread across the edge of his razor—he asked for some water to swish it clean. Dev ran to get his bottle of Listerine and swabbed some over your head.

  The barber finally finished shaving. I expected your scalp to gleam, but it looked bumpy and dull. Dev brought out the gold cap that matched the achkan and arranged it carefully to cover the cut. We tried to distract you with the face on the cake, wrapping your hand around a knife to cut into the hat. But you didn’t stop crying. Pinky jumped up and down in the piles of hair, then grabbed two pieces of cake and disappeared. The clapping of the guests drowned out your howls, the flash of the camera lit up your tears.

  The photographer kept clicking, eliciting louder crying with each flash. I picked you up and ducked into the other room. Pinky looked up creamily from the cake she was devouring on the bed. I shooed her out and closed the door behind her, then rocked you at my breast to arrest your sobs. I made clucking noises in my throat, and rubbed my nose against yours, but without success.

&nbs
p; I leaned forward to kiss your cheek when my lips closed magically around one of your tears. It felt round and pearly, briny as the ocean. I gathered these pearls, scooping them up with my tongue, tasting the bursts of salinity as they dissolved one by one. When I had harvested all the tears and could see no more visible on your cheeks, I ran my lips down the salty trails to absorb the moisture that still remained.

  Somehow this calmed you. You sniffled, then pointed towards the bed, where the presents lay. We unwrapped the gifts one by one—the tin of Cadbury’s chocolates, the building blocks from Mrs. Azmi, the dog-eared Mickey Mouse coloring book, partially filled-in, from the Dugals. (“What to do? It’s impossible to keep that girl out of anything,” Mrs. Dugal later said.)

  Back in the other room, the ceremony had degenerated into a drinking party for Dev and his friends. Mr. Dugal and Mr. Hussain had also been recruited. I cleaved through the group, billowing with fury, but nobody seemed to notice. Finally, on my third or fourth run, Dev intercepted us. “My wife and my son,” he grandly announced, sweeping a hand over us. He thrust his face forward to kiss my mouth, but I turned so that he caught my hair instead.

  “A picture,” he said, and everyone joined in, hooting and clapping. Dev tried to take you from my arms, but I didn’t let go. “With the two of you, then,” he declared, and pulled me down to the couch. He landed on one of his seated friends, and I lost my balance and fell into his lap. The photographer clicked before I could stop him, and the flash lit up your unsuspecting face.

  This time, you didn’t stop crying. I tried rocking you, and gathering your tears as in the bedroom, but you kept producing more of them. I seethed as Dev tried it as well, imitating what he had seen me do. As he passed you to Mr. Hussain, I snatched you back. There was one thing left that might quiet you, one thing Dev could not mimic. I took you to the bedroom, feeling the heaviness in my breasts, and coaxed you into being fed.