The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  What troubled me more was the issue of my own reaction. I lived in a vacuum, untouched by anyone except you. Which meant there was only you to keep my need for physical connection satisfied. What if I enjoyed these accidental caresses more than I should? Could there be some part of me getting aroused, some unspeakable desire deep within being gratified? I could almost feel Roopa sear these questions into my mind.

  I kept a vigil for the slightest sign of stimulation in my body. I resolved to disengage myself from any contact the least bit titillating. The pleasure I derived from cuddling with you would remain innocent, beyond reproach. It would strictly be my maternal needs being fulfilled.

  To my relief, nothing improper turned up in my scrupulous monitoring. There were no embarrassing flushes, no heat spreading dissolutely up my body. The sexual part of me that I had locked away so long ago remained caged, safely hibernating. I began to relax about our sleeping arrangements. The specter of my sister’s disapproval faded from my mind.

  THE CHANGES, WHEN THEY OCCURRED, crept up on me. Your face never ended up against my neck or my shoulder anymore—it zeroed in on the cleft of my bosom with unerring regularity. Each time I eased away, you tossed and turned and returned to the same position, often with a hand falling across my breast as a further provocation. Once, I awoke to find you splayed out on my chest, like a conqueror resting atop an edifice he had climbed.

  And yet I couldn’t muster the will to sunder the beds once again. Even if you were aware of what you were doing, what, really, was the harm in it? Why should there be any impropriety in physical closeness? It wasn’t as if Andhaka could have taken over already, as if lust could possess a heart so young.

  Perhaps I let myself get too used to the feel of your body against mine, to the reassurance of its weight, like that of a snuggling pet. Each night transported us to our own private island, cocooned us in the sheets, separated us from everyone else. You turned eleven, then twelve and thirteen, and we continued enjoying our closeness in bed.

  I was slow in recognizing the signs of puberty. You had always been private while disrobing or preparing for your bath—now you became painfully shy even while taking off your shirt. Still, I caught a glimpse of you once while handing you a towel through the bathroom door—the nascent wisps of pubic hair shocked me. In bed, you clung on to me sometimes, and were aloof at others—demanding a separate sheet one night, and the next, wanting to nuzzle beneath the covers.

  Perhaps it would have been easier had Dev been still around, had I grown up with brothers as siblings. There was nobody to educate me about the changes you were going through—it was not something I could brush up on through an article in Eve’s Weekly. One night, while you were asleep, I felt your puberty asserting itself against my thigh. I reacted so strongly that you awoke at my recoiling.

  In that one moment, my ignorance was dispelled. I would pull the beds apart come morning. Then I saw the confusion on your face, its sleepy innocence. I remembered how distraught you had been the last time I separated the beds. I decided to keep things as they were, not call attention to what had happened.

  There came mornings when you tried to cover the evidence of dreams that had played out wetly, and I tried my best to feign unawareness. Sometimes I would find a pillow awkwardly arranged in the center of your bed to hide the stain underneath. On other days, the first thing you would insist on upon waking was to go to the bathroom and wash your pajamas yourself. At times you were responsive, nuzzling at my neck as before, melting into my embrace. But there were also nights when you seemed to resent my very presence, when my endearments only made things worse.

  On these occasions, you shut your eyes tightly, and reclined on the edge of your mattress farthest from my bed. Nothing stirred you—not the stickiness of the air, not my exhalations or sighs. I lay awake and tried to distract myself from the rejection I felt. Drops of perspiration dampened my back and I wondered if you were sweating as well. What always surprised me was how physical was my longing, as if someone had taken away a favorite pillow I was addicted to hugging to myself.

  But eventually, even if it was after a few days, you always returned to my side. I let you cover my face with kisses on these nights. Did it ever occur to me that these tokens could have been for my benefit, not yours? That you might have been guiltily trying to compensate for my deprivation? The monsoons came and went, the weather grew cool, then warm, then once again wet. For months you maintained your back-and-forth, and I was too wrapped up in my own presumptions to realize what you were going through.

  “What a bizarre practice, to sleep together like that.” Zaida was not talking about the two of us, but Gandhiji—there had been an article in Blitz about his virgin experiments. For years, it seemed, the Mahatma had slept next to women, some of them teenagers—the motive being to hone his abstinence, to put his celibacy to the test. “Who knows what must have gone on under the covers? What he, or the women, must have really felt?”

  I felt tempted to counter Zaida, to offer the example of our own nightly practice, in Gandhiji’s defense. But something stopped me from making this revelation. Was it because my views on motherhood were too hard to explain, too unconventional? How would I articulate my central idea—that pure intentions always guaranteed the purity of the experiment?

  That October, when you were fourteen, your Sharmila auntie came to visit. After Roopa’s fall from favor, she had become the most popular aunt, the one with whom you spent the most time on Delhi vacations. You developed your love for science from her—she talked to you about chemistry and physics for hours. On her last Bombay trip, you had campaigned unsuccessfully to sleep between us—this time, to my surprise, you volunteered to take the living room couch without being asked.

  For the next few days, you were more animated than I had seen in a while. Sharmila brought you a large box filled with old equipment from her college—diode valves and an ammeter, vials filled with chemical salts, and even a Bunsen burner, which she managed to hook up to the cooking gas. Every evening, after you came back from school, she produced blue and yellow precipitates magically out of colorless solutions in the kitchen. One day, she showed you how to read the current in a circuit, the next, she helped you construct an erupting volcano to take to school. She bought you an expensive illustrated book on space exploration as a parting gift—“He’s the closest I’ll ever get to having a child of my own.”

  The evening Sharmila left, I was changing her sheets on your bed, when you casually mentioned you’d like to continue sleeping in the living room. When I asked why, you hung your head and said, “No reason.”

  “You know the sofa’s too soft. It’s not good for your back.”

  “But Daddy used to sleep on it all the time.”

  “Only because you were the one occupying his bed.” I fluffed up your pillow. “Don’t you want to sleep next to Mummy anymore?”

  You didn’t say anything, so I continued. “That’s called the living room, you know—because you’re supposed to live there, not use it to sleep every night. Besides, what would we do with the empty mattress by Mummy’s side?”

  Your face crumpled, revealing a flash of despair that made me stop. Suddenly all your ambivalence of the past several months was eloquently explained. You could no longer bear the thought of sleeping by my side—how could I not have seen it before? Was that pity I had glimpsed in your look? “Of course you don’t have to worry about Mummy,” I assured you. “You can sleep wherever you like.”

  The sofa did turn out to be unsuitable—there was no fan to keep you cool, and the springs were so worn that you almost rolled off some nights. I continued my game of movable beds, pushing them up against the walls again and bidding you to return. “It’s much better this way,” I said, pointing to the reinstated arrangement with a bright and shiny smile. “You here and Mummy there—everything will be fine.”

  It was obvious even to me that you weren’t quite taken in by my cheeriness. You slunk into the bedroom each night, kiss
ing me apologetically, examining me with concern, as if for signs of breakage, as if I was fragile. Every few days, you pressed your head into my bosom as before, or threw yourself atop me with apparent playfulness while I was in bed. Once you even presented your cheeks, adorned with pearl-perfect tears to kiss away, after you had cried. But it was not the same—I could no longer enjoy these bursts of affection at face value. There was always the nagging notion that this was a show for my benefit. That you were going along guiltily with a role you thought I wanted you to play.

  YOU SPOTTED THE ELECTRONICS kit in the window of a shop in Colaba, lying next to the board games of Property and Spell-O-Fun. We had gone there to buy you a new shirt for your fifteenth birthday. The set was obviously imported—on the cover were two boys with freckled cheeks and splendidly blond heads, pointing their screwdrivers in excitement at an incandescent set of electric tubes. “It might be rather expensive,” I cautioned, but you said you only wanted to have a look at it, and led me up the steps.

  Ever since Sharmila’s visit the previous year, your interest in science had increased steadily. The ammeter had been a favorite—once you even tried rigging it up with wires to my arm to measure electric currents through my skin. By now, you had acquired other odds and ends as well—mostly salvaged from Zaida’s old radio that no longer worked. You were already well beyond your just-completed ninth standard syllabus—even assembling a microphone, which when you spoke into it, chirped.

  The electronics set, at eight hundred and thirty rupees, was quite an extravagance. You nodded when I explained it was too expensive to get. All that evening, though, I felt a gnawing regret. This would be the ninth birthday observed deprived of your father’s presence.

  When you found the set under the wrapping paper of my present, you let out a gasp. We were having a small party—Zaida, the Dugals, and Mrs. Hussain from upstairs. Hema’s son Tony, whom you liked so much, had stopped by on his way to Poona as well. For a moment, you didn’t move, just stared incredulously at the box in your hands. The blond children still pink and elated on the cover, the electric components so radioactively aglow, they might melt through the cellophane. “It costs so much,” you said, looking up at me in wonder. You leaned your mouth forward to kiss me, and I bent towards you as well.

  Something happened, though, in that split second before our lips met. You slowed just inches from my mouth, then turned ever so slightly to miss my face and hug me around the neck instead.

  It was not significant, really, the pinprick that I felt. You were fifteen now, so of course I understood you wouldn’t want to show too much affection in front of Tony and the rest. I was quite willing, you must realize, to brush it off, to leave it at that. It was only after everyone had left, when you came up to kiss me several times on the mouth, that the guilt on your face made me react. When I found myself chafing at your presumption that I could be languishing for your kisses, that you felt obliged to dole them out as charity. “I’m your mother, you know,” I said softly. “You needn’t feel as if you have to reward me each time like that.”

  You looked up, startled, but the words kept issuing from my mouth. “You’re much too old anyway to be kissing me anywhere except on the cheek. A boy of fifteen should know enough not to touch his mother’s mouth with his lips.”

  I tried to apologize later, after you rushed out of the room and were lying facedown in your bed. “Sometimes mummy doesn’t know what she’s saying. What can she do to make up?” You brushed my hand off when I tried to rub your back.

  It took an hour of sitting contritely by your side before you allowed yourself to be held. You buried your head deep in my chest like you used to and drew your seat up towards my lap. It had been a long time since I had sensed such genuineness in your affection, such need, free of artifice, in your person. “You can kiss Mummy all you want, just like you used to, now or anytime you’d like. And if there are times when you don’t want to, she’ll understand that as well.”

  You raised your head and looked up at me shyly. “Like I used to? You won’t mind?”

  “No matter how big you become, you’ll always be my little darling.” I pressed my lips to yours.

  There was a shine in your eyes. I tried to scan your face, but you burrowed it again into my blouse. You started rocking against me. I put my arms around you and moved in unison, as if cradling you to sleep. It was nothing like I remembered from even a few years ago—you were taller than I was now, your body gangly, your feet dangling to the floor. But I continued rocking, ignoring the awkwardness, letting the childhood image of you blossom in my mind.

  It all happened so fast that I couldn’t have stopped it even had I been able to keep track. One moment, I was holding you in my arms, whispering a song in your ear, experiencing those same pleasurable sensations that used to dart through my body. The next instant, I realized your lips had found their way past my blouse to nuzzle against my breast. Before I could raise myself up from the mattress, your arms encircled my body. Your face pressed deeper against my flesh, your motion became more frenetic—so much so that I thought you would roll us right off the edge. I spoke out your name, but you didn’t hear me—I grabbed onto a side of the bed to try and steady myself. Moisture spilled from your mouth and smeared over my skin, you surprised me with your strength. You arched your head back and opened your mouth to draw in a deep and wrenching breath. A sob gurgled up from your throat, you loosened your grip and stopped rocking. Your eyes blinked open—unfocused, full of confusion, and then horrified realization.

  You sprang off me, sprang off the bed. There was a smear of wetness on your pajamas. Before I could say anything, you fled out of the room. The sound of the bathroom door slamming shut reverberated through the walls and the floor.

  THAT NIGHT I AGED more than on the evening I left my father’s house in a doli. The guilt spread through my body and solidified around the crystal of pleasure I had allowed myself to feel while rocking you—it formed a permanent lump of self-accusation in my being. I saw in horror all the precautions I should have taken, all the lapses I had allowed, all my foolish arrogance in thinking I could aspire to the example set by Parvati.

  What tormented me the most was the effect my lapse had on you. Whenever I tried to explain, a tremor appeared in your face. I didn’t dare broach the idea of altering our sleeping arrangements—your strategy for coping seemed to be that every routine be kept the same. Even the practice of our good-night kiss had to be continued, though on the cheek instead of the lips.

  The days went by and you remained remote—cut off, it seemed, from everything but your books and snails. One afternoon, near the beginning of the new school term, I showed up as the four o’clock bell rang. I caught you as you filed out of the building with the rest of the boys. “I came to pay the electricity bill, so I thought I’d ride the bus back with you,” I explained. You regarded me without emotion.

  We walked across the compound towards the path leading to the bus stop, and I pointed out the tree. “I know it’s past the season, but let’s go look if there are any keris left.” You vacillated for a moment, then followed silently.

  The few keris that hadn’t fallen had been gouged by parrots or shriveled to the pit. “Perhaps,” I offered, “we should go and get some mango ice cream instead.”

  “You know, all this is not necessary.”

  “I don’t understand. You like ice cream.”

  You looked down at the ground, and picked up a stone. Then you turned your gaze back at me. It was not quite withering, but carried an intensity that made me shift uncomfortably. You swung around and hurled the stone towards the tree.

  Had you been aiming at a keri, you couldn’t possibly have been so wide of the mark. The stone sailed clear past the nearest branch and crashed perfectly into one of the windows on the third floor of the rectory behind. “Run,” I said, and grabbed your hand instinctively to follow the children who were fleeing.

  But you didn’t budge. You looked at the ground, as if sear
ching for another stone to throw. You stood there nonchalantly, even as Father Bernard came out of the building, his cane swinging. “Stay where you are!” he yelled. He huffed up and caught you by the collar. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  The cane was making alarming sounds as Father Bernard swished it excitedly through the air. “He’s not the one,” I said. “I’m Mrs. Arora—he’s my son, he’s with me.”

  The vice principal turned as if noticing me for the first time. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?—I’ve seen you next to the mango tree. You know that this is a serious offense, breaking school property? If he didn’t do it, who was it?—there’s nobody else here I can see.”

  “It must have been one of the children who ran away. Now can we go, please?”

  Father Bernard released you and patted your head. He looked into your eyes as if about to share a confidence, and addressed you in his most avuncular tone. “Did you do it?”

  I felt a small surge of anger. “I already told you he didn’t. Don’t you believe me?”

  Father Bernard ignored my words. “Did you?”

  “Yes.” You looked at me as you spoke.

  Father Bernard smiled understandingly. He smoothed out your collar and patted you again. “You’re a bit old for this sort of thing, so come, we’ll settle this in my office.”

  I stepped forward. “He’s not going anywhere. I’m his mother, I told you. I take full responsibility.”

  “Perhaps Mrs.—Arora, was it?—perhaps you don’t realize what a serious offense this is. And what an example you’re setting for your son, lying like this. If you can’t teach him the proper way, then the school will. You can take him away if you want, but then don’t bother bringing him back.”