The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  I tried to delve into this, the night you insisted you wanted to sleep close to your Roo auntie again. “You’ve certainly put the charm on Ashvin. All those presents, all this attention—he’s going to think that you’re his mother, not I. Are you trying to steal him away?”

  Perhaps I was reading too much into things, perhaps this was the way an aunt normally behaved, perhaps I was being too jealous or possessive, like Dev always complained. Roopa didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m lucky to have such a wonderful nephew,” she said, brimming over with a sweetness that made my jaw ache. “He reminds me so much of you, and a little bit of Dev.”

  THE DAYS GO BY, much too fast, like the pages flying off a calendar to denote the passage of time in a movie shot. A jumble of memories, photos spilling from a brimming album, overwhelming me each time I try to keep the years apart. There you are, peeling litchis by the half dozen, trying to shoot them out of your Ping-Pong gun. Squatting by the Ashoka pillar at Hanging Gardens to have your picture taken, smiling enigmatically, like Mona Lisa might, because you are secretly doing number two in your shorts. Is that on the same page that you dance on the bed, your very own moon surface, as the radio announces the first step by Neil Armstrong? Or the day that Montessori begins, when I stand outside listening to you howl, then go back in, defeated, to take you back into my arms?

  Perhaps the pictures are arranged by theme, not chronology. With an entire section reserved just for all the times you land in trouble. The week you steal into the bathroom and cut your face while trying to shave like Daddy. The time you spray pedestrians with color left over from Holi as they pass below our balcony. The afternoon you wrestle with Pinky and she breaks your tooth accidentally, the dog at Sharmila’s house that bites your thigh when you try to ride it like a pony. How many times alone did you fall from the swing to bloody your chin at Mafatlal Park?

  And next the images that include your father. The night we found ourselves huddling together in the hotel bed in Khandala under a single frayed mosquito net. We had barely enough room to balance on the edges of the bed without falling off, the way you had your arms and legs splayed. Neither of us could sleep, with the heat and the lack of space, and the mosquitoes diving unhindered through the holes in the net. Then you made a sound so alarming and strangled it made us both sit up. We looked at each other and began to laugh—we had just heard you snoring for the first time.

  The album has another section, one I have named the “bamboo house,” in which this image could have also fit. The section with the three of us always cozily absorbed together in some activity, every frame a tinted photo capturing an instant of domestic harmony. We are playing the Ganesh game before your bath, or negotiating the waves at Chowpatty, and in the background above us, the bamboo eaves hover protectively. Riding the giant wheel at the Dassera fair, or tucking into a Cream Centre sundae with three spoons, the slats of bamboo all polished and gleaming like ivory.

  Did I imagine our future would look like this? The pages of this section fluttering open one after the other, ready to archive, to celebrate, every incident in our lives?

  But then other images come into focus, and I see a darker reality emerge. One in which bamboo houses simply get blown away and even the Beatles split up. This flurry of scenes is from a different part of the album, one marked by confrontation, conflict. The occasions when Dev gets so drunk that I send you in to plead with him to stop. The nights he stays out somewhere and you keep waking up to ask if he has returned. The fights over tilaks smeared on your head each time Dev drags you to his Dadar guruji. The time he slaps you when you break the clock, and I warn him never to touch you again.

  The last scene remained fresh in my mind for weeks. I hugged your head, trying to leach the hurt away with my body, and kissed your eyes, your cheeks, your nose. I sat on the bed and rocked you in my arms—you looked into my face and neither cried nor spoke. I kept you by my side that night—Dev slept on the sofa, something he did more and more as time went on. You touched my face as I kissed you good night, and unfurled your fingers to show me they were wet. For a moment I couldn’t believe it—my vow of so long ago not to cry—even though this time, it was for you, not myself. I tried to turn away, but you tugged me back by the arm and told me that I had to close my eyes. I felt your mouth dab the spot under my eye—uncertainly at first, but then with more assurance. You pressed tiny kisses like an angel might, first into the left cheek, then the right. I squeezed my eyelids shut tighter together, forcing out more tears for you to scoop up. Each fleeting contact so soft and pleasurable that I didn’t want the sensation to end.

  Perhaps my inventory of images contains nothing so egregious to justify a future so bleak. A lawyer pleading Dev’s case might claim that by no means have I proved he deserves his fate. Except doesn’t the album contain yet another section in the back, its pages yellowed, its edges all bleached? With something dark and unformed beginning to stir again unseen?

  I know, of course, of this section’s existence—I have clasped it firmly shut to lock away the memory it contains. Of the sibling who went before you, the twin to your Ashvin, the one with whom you share your name. Somehow, after all this time, I can feel him reawaken inside me, preparing to press his claim again.

  It takes a while before I realize what is happening. That he is the one whispering to me silently, all those times my lips start quivering unexplained. That it is his presence, wafting silkily through my being, which makes me want to get up each time I am joined in bed by Dev. We are laughing over some joke, the three of us, and I suddenly want to stalk away. Dev brings home a tandoori chicken, or my favorite pakodas, and it is all I can do not to throw them away.

  I never quite understand why he has reappeared. Perhaps to guard against forgiveness, to mount a campaign against the past being erased. Perhaps we are becoming too much of a family, and he wants to ensure I don’t sign on to the bamboo future with Dev. I find myself fighting your father on trivial matters, getting more contentious over every decision that has to be made. The emotion overloading my nerves, the resentment ratcheting up inside, until I am ready to turn you against Dev.

  But right now let me show you a scene from the front of my album—a walk on the beach to search for Ganesh. We are on the sands at Chowpatty, on the morning after the annual festival has ended. You run along the edge of the water, pointing at the bits of colored clay that have begun to wash up already. We have done this for the past few years—joined the crowds to watch Ganesh and his entourage of gods and leaders and film stars immersed. And then, come back the next day, to look for what the waves have put on display, what the tide has returned. You find a few small parts—a trunk with a tusk attached, an upturned palm imprinted with an auspicious swastika, the tapering ornamentation of a head. But you seek something more awe-inspiring—the truncated bust of a movie-star hero, or perhaps a half-dissolved face, still recognizable as a Gandhi or Nehru.

  Today, though, the waves are big and foamy and leave little behind. We should have come when the tide was going out, not flowing in. The sand is smooth and cleanly swept—even the sculptor has not resumed his carving after yesterday’s crush of people. You pick up a shell and toss it into the water, disappointed by the paucity of the treasure on the beach. “Let’s go to the aquarium,” Dev suggests, and you cheer up at this prospect.

  We never make it. About halfway on the walk there, we encounter a cluster of people on Marine Drive. Some are milling around on the pavement, others stand on the parapet, still others watch from vantage points atop the concrete tetrapods shoring up the land. Dev pulls us through the people to see what they are gesturing at. An enormous Ganesh idol, twice as large as life size, reclines faceup on the tetrapods down by the water. The two right arms have broken off, the lower extremities dissolved, but otherwise the statue appears remarkably intact, with the conch still in its lower left hand. A look of serenity graces its face, as if oblivious to the people around or the waves breaking at its base, it is completely engrossed in
contemplating the sky. A small bird perches on the belly, equally absorbed in its rumination of the sea. The bird pays no heed when someone tries to shoo it away.

  Nobody seems to know how the idol could have got there. “It must have been lying here since dawn, it must have floated in overnight,” an onlooker says. “Clay is too heavy, it can’t float,” someone counters. “Even if it could, how did it reach so high?” “Not to mention so far from the beach where it was immersed.”

  “This is Ganesh we’re talking about,” a young man in a loincloth says. “Remember, he can do whatever he wants.”

  People are even more divided about the meaning behind this sighting. A good omen, some claim, that Ganpati has returned to bless the land a second time. Others are so disturbed by the unsuccessful immersion that they clamber down to the statue, braving the waves to try and pry it loose. You strain to join them, so Dev raises you on his shoulders to afford you a better look. Between waves, somebody attempts to lift the statue by one of its remaining arms—the clay is so wet that it crumbles off.

  A volley of large waves come crashing over the idol, and water surges up through the tetrapods. The wind whips the spray all the way to where we stand. More waves churn in, like warnings from the sea to stand back as it pulls out all the stops in its high-tide display. The last few people trying to set Ganesh free retreat to the safety of the parapet. “He’s coming loose!” someone shouts. Sure enough, the statue, no longer encumbered by its arm, has begun to rock and shift. The bird teeters on the belly, trying to ignore this change in circumstance, then calls it a day and flies off. Another wave envelops the idol, and then the sea seems to lift it up. Ganesh rotates lazily, his head still gazing upwards, his eyes still focused at infinity, his trunk furled neatly above his mouth. For a moment, he rests on the last of the tetrapods, then begins his seaward journey. “Ganpati baba maurya,” the crowd calls out—someone throws petals, but they flutter back in the wind. The women all cover their heads with their dupattas—feeling self-conscious, I join in. “He’s going home, finally—look how buoyant he is.” Ganpati does appear to be floating through the waves, like a graceful swimmer doing the backstroke—perhaps it is a miracle after all.

  For some reason, melancholy, not happiness, engulfs me as I gaze at the departing statue. I try to cheer myself up, to tell myself that Ganpati is returning home, that he will venture far into the ocean and even seek out the goddess who lives in the sea. But I can’t seem to shake off the feeling of loss. All the bereavements in life—I think of my unborn child, of Sandhya, and even her baby Ganesh brother. Whom am I destined to lose in the future?—I hold my breath to stop myself from completing the thought. I tighten my grip on your arm as you stand between Dev and me, shouting “Ganpati baba maurya.”

  “Don’t think like that, Didi,” Sandhya tells me, whispering into my ear. “It’s an auspicious occasion, be happy like everyone else here.” Her presence wafts around me, I smell the herbal green soap she uses on her skin. “It’s a day to mark the passage of time. All three of you will return here to marvel at how much Ashvin’s grown year after year.” Ganpati rises above the water, the sun glinting off the edge of his golden crown, and the crowd cheers.

  But it is my premonition that is right, Sandhya’s optimism is misplaced. We will never see Ganesh immersed into the Arabian Sea again, not the three of us together, you, Dev, and I.

  chapter twenty-three

  PAJI FILLED HIS LETTERS WITH DRAMATIC ACCOUNTS OF THE COZINESS HE was supposedly developing with Indira Gandhi. First the invitations to her garden, then the talks indoors, then breakfast one day, lunch another, until he had garlanded himself with the mantle of someone in her innermost circle. “Good breeding always shows,” he enthused in one letter, going on ingratiatingly about her poise, her elegance, her appreciation for beauty. “Such a remarkable person—she could have been a poet if she hadn’t become prime minister.”

  In another letter, Paji boasted of inviting Indira to come visit them at home for dinner. “Your mother, can you believe it, asked Sharmila to help her prepare a list of questions on the economy. Instead of worrying about cleaning the house or planning the food, Mrs. Home Minister of Darya Ganj wanted to demand an explanation on how the country is run. Thank God Indiraji couldn’t come, otherwise I would have never lived down the shame.” Paji had started attaching a respectful “ji” to Indira’s name, ever since the possibility of his standing in an election had been suggested.

  That December, when Indira called a surprise midterm election for February 1971, Paji was all agog. “They’re trying to decide which constituency should be mine—whether they’d like me to run from a district near Patna, or some spot in Himachal Pradesh.” It soon became clear, however, that the Congress Party would extend no such invitation—they had earmarked the sizable donation extracted from Paji to fund someone else’s campaign. Paji hid his disappointment well, making it sound as if he had personally advised the party to get someone more experienced, for the greater good. “All these supposed freedom fighters like Morarji Desai, showing their true colors by jumping into bed with the HRM. When they chant for Indiraji’s removal with Indira hatao, we should shout back, Garibi hatao—Remove poverty—instead.”

  I never found out if Paji had really coined the “Remove poverty” phrase as he seemed to claim in his letter, or if he’d heard it from someone else. The juggernaut of Garibi hatao swept through the country, resonating with city dwellers and farmers, Hindus and Muslims, the poor and the middle class (but not, of course, the rich). It obliterated the HRM and the rest of the coalition that had tried to bring Indira down, handing her a victory so complete that she now had enough seats to even amend the constitution at will.

  On the evening of the victory announcement, we watched the revelers in the street, as they danced and set off fireworks and distributed sweets. The sense of jubilation became so infectious that I found myself doing the twist with you on the balcony. Down below, all traffic had come to a standstill, halted by a spontaneous rally that had taken over the road. “The mother of the nation,” a voice cried out. “Indira Gandhi,” the crowd responded. “The keeper of our destiny.” “Indira Gandhi.” We looked down at a man wielding a megaphone—behind him swirled a giant portrait of Indira sprouting enough weapon-bearing arms to rival Durga. “She’ll return us to prosperity,” he shouted. “Indira Gandhi,” came the chant from the crowd.

  As it turned out, that night marked the end of our prosperity, not the beginning. We were going to bed when Dev revealed to me that he had lost his job.

  IT WASN’T EXACTLY ACCURATE, the way Dev phrased it—he wasn’t let go or fired, but had stalked off after a fight. One of the music director duos who had kept promising to let Dev sing had decided to give the opportunity to someone else. Enraged, Dev told them to set up the recording for their new golden boy themselves. It took a week for his pride to run its course, a week he spent sitting at Auntie’s all day. By the time he was ready to apologize, Vasant, the studio owner, refused to speak with him, sending out his secretary to say they’d hired someone else.

  Although I immediately felt the grip of anxiety, Dev remained quite relaxed. “Where are they going to find someone who knows the ins and outs of the place, who can pull together a recording like I do every day? Wait another week or so and Vasant himself will be crawling up to me with an apology. That’ll be the time to inform him he’s not going to get me back without a raise.”

  The week turned into a fortnight, then two, and yet Dev didn’t seem too concerned. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not like there’s only one recording studio in the whole of Bombay.”

  But there might as well have been, because Vasant spread rumors all over the city—how Dev picked a fight with Kalyanji and took a swing at Laxmikant, how he spat at new singers coming into the studio and cursed at the high priestess Lata Mangeshkar herself. For all practical purposes, this finished Dev’s career in the music industry—he found himself blacklisted everywhere. “Why not go to
Vasant, plead with him to at least clear the air?” I suggested, a step Dev refused to take.

  He spent his days at home, as if on an extended vacation, with the living room sofa his hotel. Room service for breakfast, when I fried him an egg, followed by a leisurely bath and perhaps the newspaper, then room service again for lunch, and then a nap. He woke up in time for the two-thirty listeners’ choice program, asking me to turn up the radio for his favorites. In the evenings, he took some money from my purse to go to Auntie’s, returning only when he could barely find his way back.

  Each time I raised the question of our dwindling finances, he looked at me, offended, as if I had breached some rule of etiquette. “So hard I’ve worked all these years. At least don’t deny me this temporary rest. Besides, didn’t Paji say he might help?”

  As a side effect of all this rest (to which his body was perhaps unaccustomed), a host of ailments soon afflicted him. His neck got stiff, his gallbladder hurt, he massaged his kidneys daily to relieve the pressure in them. He stopped eating onions because they upset his stomach, coconut and yogurt gave him “the chill.” He spent hours in bed doing exercises to straighten his spine—it became a form of entertainment for him. He went to the doctor every third or fourth day, returning with bottles of chalky pink suspensions the compounder had mixed.

  But for you, he would have sunk into a complete state of torpor. You got into the same holiday spirit as your daddy, jumping on him while he napped, riding him like a horse around the room. He neighed when you pulled his hair, galloped when you tweaked his ears, and threw you off each time you dug your elbows into his back. Soon, he began taking you on walks downstairs, dropping you off and picking you up from school. In the evenings, you sat and played cards with him, and shared his tea and snack. You announced you wanted to wash up with Daddy every morning, even though ever since turning five, you had insisted on bathing without my help. I stood outside, listening to the two of you laugh and shriek—much more than I remembered when we played the bucket game.