The Age of Shiva

by Manil Suri

  I tried to imagine you smearing your thin body with mud from this real India, locking chests with streetwise youths in the wrestling pit. Your groin wrapped in the same kind of langot they wore, made with cloth so coarse it could have been woven on a village spinning wheel. Every muscle straining to find the slightest advantage over your opponents, the sweat from your skin mingling with theirs. (What did it smell like, this sweat of theirs? Cheap groundnut oil, rude curry mix?) And afterwards, the pats on your back, the tousling of hair, the communal shower to wash the dirt away. Were these the rugged games you felt you had to play to prove your manliness, the kind of rough camaraderie you craved? And what about the other wrestlers who were being so welcoming—how could they not notice your gentility, not recognize you were an outsider in their midst?

  Even more baffling was how you could have been swayed so easily by the crude propaganda of the HRM. The fabrications you swallowed, then spouted back at me with such conviction. Couldn’t you see they were aimed at the poor and disaffected, meant for their consumption? “Just take a walk through the Muslim colony—even the most run-down hut will have a fridge and a television set,” I’d hear you insist. What dissatisfaction in your life could such notions possibly prey upon—you, who were so educated, who had grown up amidst so many Muslim neighbors? “They’ll take over the whole city, the whole country, before we know it. We have to go into their colonies and have it out face to face.”

  “Is that what your Yara uncle is teaching you? That you have to go fight Muslims? I don’t care what that man thinks or does, but I’ll not have my own son joining in. You’re not returning to Byculla—I’ll see how he fills your head with such hate.”

  For an instant, your eyes lit up, as if you were going to challenge me. What would I do if you walked out, declared you were old enough to make your own decisions? But your defiance subsided into sullenness. “Yara uncle doesn’t hate Muslims,” you mumbled. “I must have overheard someone else. Next time I go to the gymkhana, I won’t listen.”

  Perhaps your rants were for my ears—a repudiation to distance yourself from me, a rebuke to remind me of your lingering resentment. Or perhaps it was more straightforward than that—you were simply trying to impress your uncle, in an effort to create a more comfortable fit for yourself in his HRM. I knew I had to sweep away this pretense, penetrate the façade you had built around yourself. But how would I compete with the vast machinery of the HRM? I had no virile activities to entice you with, no battle cries with which to divert your attention. The lone arrow in my quiver, trite and unsharpened, was my affection.

  Spring was approaching, its arrival soon to be celebrated with Holi. I would use the festival to put my affection to the test.

  YOU HAD NOT EVEN turned four when Dev initiated you into your first Holi celebration. He pulled out a squeeze bottle and sprayed you with colored water as you sat at the breakfast table. For a moment, you simply looked down at your shirt, shocked by the red soaking into the cloth—the streams running down your arms, bleeding into your eggs. Before you could cry (and before I could stop him), Dev wrapped your hands around the bottle and showed you how to pump—the squirts landed all over his front. It took mere moments for you to learn the rest—smearing yellow and blue and green powders on Daddy, reloading the bottles from the buckets of red and purple water in the bathroom. I ran around the room trying desperately to cover the furniture with newspaper, but mayhem erupted before I could finish. At some point, the two of you decided you had chased each other enough, and turned your attention on me. Instead of trying to dodge the streams of color, I spread my body protectively in front of the walls and allowed myself to be sprayed.

  Despite my efforts to save them, neither the walls nor the furniture came through unscathed. The purple dye turned out to be particularly stubborn, tinting our nails and the edges of our scalps for several days (you were delighted to go to your nursery school thus marked). The next year and the year after that, I had us all wear the ruined clothes from the first Holi, and laid down strict rules on taking the celebration to the corridor outside. You discovered in Pinky a perfect victim—she ran screaming lustily up and down the steps as you attacked her, without ever being able (or willing) to escape.

  But then Dev died, and even though Pinky sauntered hopefully past our door each Holi, there seemed little motivation on your part to play. Some years, I did buy a half rupee’s worth of red powder on the day of the festival—we would brush it perfunctorily on each other’s cheeks and leave it at that. Even when we started observing Divali and all the other holidays, Holi remained uncelebrated, perhaps because of its close association with Dev.

  I decided, this year, to end the period of mourning. This year, I would lure you out of your aloofness and lead you back to the playfulness we had shared. On the eve of the festival, I went to the bania’s and bought the same Butterfly brand of red and purple crystals Dev used to get. I also asked for a scoop from every bin of colored powder they had in the shop, with a double scoop of the red. Dev would dissolve the crystals the night before—he said the water turned darker that way. Not wanting to tip you off, I filled the buckets but left them uncolored, and hid my purchases in the cupboard.

  In bed, I suddenly realized that the clothes from that first Holi would no longer fit you—we’d have to sacrifice a new outfit. It would have to be whatever you chose to wear that morning—I could hardly steer you to something old if I wanted the surprise to remain. Perhaps I’d squirt you at breakfast, just like Dev had that first year (this time leaving the eggs unstained). Then, before you could recover, I would rub you with handfuls of color.

  This was what I looked forward to the most—simply being able to touch you again. Everything had become so fraught between us that even the most innocent forms of physical contact had waned. The good-night pecks on the cheek had stopped—we no longer exchanged the slightest pat or caress. What I longed for was to hug you, and be hugged in return—to experience again the feel of your hair, your face, your skin under my palms.

  Tomorrow would be the day for it—Holi was the one time each year when the rules about who could touch whom were suspended. Longings given release and tensions spent, when even someone’s wife or husband could be daubed in play. Back in Rawalpindi, it was the only occasion on which we saw our parents engage in contact. Paji stiffly held out his face so that no powder spilled on his clothes when he was dabbed. But Biji lost all inhibition, dousing us with colored water, then running laughing up and down the steps. She allowed herself to be cornered in the verandah when all her mischief was spent, to receive the rubbing down and drenching she craved from us.

  I looked across the room now at the back I wanted to rub so much myself. Perhaps, as with Biji, the festival would make you forget your reserve—perhaps tomorrow we would reconnect.

  WHEN I AWOKE the next morning, the reflection from a vehicle on the street stained the ceiling red. Surely a promising sign, I thought to myself, an endorsement that I had been right to embark on this venture. Then I noticed your unoccupied bed. I looked for you in the living room and the kitchen, but did not find you there. On the floor of the empty bathroom stood the buckets of water, patiently waiting to be colored.

  You could have left for only one place, of course—to play Holi with your gymkhana friends. The thought left me deflated—you had defeated my plan without even giving me the chance to launch it. All morning, I wallowed in my gloom, taking out the colors twice from their hiding place to feel them slip through my fingers. I made several trips to the balcony, watching the revelers below get rowdier, their clothes acquiring a uniform reddish purple tint. A boy squirted color on them from a window in the facing building—he turned his gun on me, but I was out of range.

  “What are you waiting for?—go play Holi with your son,” Zaida ordered, when she stopped by to put the red on my cheek as she did every year. “And if there are others around him, why should you care?”

  I took a taxi to Byculla. The gymkhana, when I reached it
, looked deserted. I found a lone youth, his undershirt dyed a violent purple-green, snoozing in the wrestling pit. In the distance, two boys chased each other with water guns around the field. I wondered where everyone had gone.

  A troubling thought occurred to me. Holi was the easiest time of the year to ignite smoldering tensions—there were few more surefire ways to enrage people than by spraying color at them. What if Arya had led you all into the Muslim colony—hadn’t you mentioned something about a face-to-face confrontation? I remembered the riot at Mahim last year incited by a pack of youths who splashed worshippers emerging from a mosque with paint. A few well-chosen insults at the colony, a few provocative spurts of color, and it would be easy to send the whole place up in flames.

  The clubhouse, when I scanned it, yielded no clues to where its members were. It was smaller than I had expected—a freestanding structure with a shingled roof, and a decorative floral molding above the doorway. Could this be a storehouse for lathis and knives, one of the HRM repositories for swords and guns? I looked at the cream-colored walls, the wooden window shutters, the geranium plant near the doorway. They lent an atmosphere of quaintness, like that of a hill station bungalow—there seemed nothing sinister about the place.

  I walked around the perimeter, trying to peer in through the windows, but it was too dark to see anything inside. I thought about trying the door, but something made me hesitate. You had always been secretive of this part of your life—simply walking in unannounced seemed too brash an intrusion to make.

  I turned around, and was about to leave, when behind me, I heard the door open. “I saw you walking around outside,” the familiar voice called out.

  “It’s been much too long, Meera, since we met,” Arya said.

  chapter thirty-four

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED WAS THAT ARYA’S NOSE LOOKED CLEARLY broken, not aristocratic as he had claimed in his letter. As he spoke, I realized he could no longer enunciate sounds like n and m properly. “Ashvin’s in the annex across the field,” he said, and it took me a few seconds to decipher his new pronunciation of your name. “Come, I’ll take you there.”

  I was surprised how unfazed he was upon seeing me, how naturally he seemed to behave. No hint of what had passed between us, or the way in which our last meeting had ended, troubled his face. “I’ve been asking Ashvin to call you here for weeks—I didn’t realize today was going to be the day. Had I known, I’d have arranged for a proper lunch and display.”

  “It wasn’t planned. I thought I’d come play Holi with Ashvin.”

  “Yes, he’s been here with the other boys, at it since morning. Look what they did to me.” He gestured at the extravagant splashes of green and purple on his kurta, then ran a hand through his hair to show me the cloud of color that arose from his head. I suddenly felt self-conscious about my unblemished sari, and wished I hadn’t washed off the red Zaida had rubbed on my cheeks. But Arya didn’t seem to notice, or at least didn’t try to use to his advantage the fact that I wasn’t the one you had stayed with to celebrate. “I had some papers to fill out, so I managed to sneak away here.”

  About to close the door, he stopped. “Would you like me to show you, inside?” Then, before awkwardness could set in at the thought of me accompanying him alone into the darkened interior, he laughed. “It’s mostly an office—there’s nothing really to it. Much more interesting is what we’re going to do here.” He swept a hand across the field. “The city had almost signed this over to us when the Muslims in that colony you see there objected.”

  A surreal feeling took hold of me as we made our way across the grass. Why was I out walking so nonchalantly with this man, the one by whom I had barely escaped being molested? I half expected us to be holding hands, like long-standing friends out on a stroll. “That’s where we hope to build a proper gym in the future,” Arya indicated, and I noticed again the meaty power of his palms. Surprisingly, they were not stained with color—perhaps he had used the ends of his sleeves to keep them tucked in.

  “We have to plan for the next decade or two,” Arya said. “The days of the old-style akharas with the guru and his wrestling disciples are numbered.” He began pointing out spots earmarked for various planned recreational facilities, as he might to impress a trustee on a site visit. I felt I should stop him, try to steer the conversation to something more substantial. Didn’t accounts have to be settled, apologies made?

  But I wasn’t able to cut in—so intent was Arya on his articulation that to interrupt felt somehow churlish. “Today’s boys get impatient when we ask them to build their bodies with stone joris and dumbbells,” he lamented. “They’ve peered through the windows of Tawalkar’s and the other private gyms sprouting all over the city, seen the sleek and dazzling machines inside—they want the same. Except they don’t realize how much all that shiny steel costs—we invest what we can, but that’s a lot of money to raise.” He looked earnestly at my face, and for an instant, I wondered if he was going to ask me for a donation. “Do you know, some of them even balk at entering the sandpit? They noticed wrestling mats at the Olympics on TV last year and want to know when we’ll start using the same.”

  Arya shook his head. “Do you remember that shakha I used to run at Nizamuddin? So simple, so basic, and yet so…” He left the thought uncompleted, as if it was a joint reminiscence we were sharing, as if I was aboard with him on magic memories floating us back to the same halcyon days. Again, I felt overcome by a sense of unreality. What would be the next step? Ice cream espresso at the Oberoi café? Sandhya’s letter pulled out to impress me with his sincerity again?

  We reached the annex to which Arya had referred—it turned out to be little more than a compound walled in on three sides, with a shrine to Hanuman in one corner. “It’s still not quite constructed yet,” Arya apologized. “All those Muslim objections….”

  The color-throwing phase of the day seemed spent—empty buckets lay strewn all over the place. A few youths, clad in wet scraps of cloth wrapped around their groins, took turns washing color off under a tap protruding from one of the walls. Several others, already scrubbed and clothed, lounged around on the benches at the far end.

  I spotted you instantly among them. “Look, Ashvin,” Arya announced, “look at whom I met.” You glanced up. Maybe it was my imagination, but your expression turned sullen. “Your mother’s come to play a bit of Holi. Do we have some color left?”

  You shook your head. “All the buckets are empty. We used the last of the powder to decorate Hanuman himself.”

  “Actually, I brought some with me.” I opened my purse and took out the newspaper packets in which the colors were wrapped. “There might even be some crystals for tinting water in there.”

  You stared at the packets without touching them. “But I’m done playing already. I’ve taken my shower.”

  “So what?” Arya said. “Every day is not Holi. You can take another bath for your mother, can’t you?”

  “But my clothes. These are the extra ones I brought—the clean set.”

  I felt foolish for coming. Even had you not washed as yet, you’d be embarrassed to play with me, surrounded by all your friends. “It’s fine, there’s no need to get dirty again,” I said.

  But Arya took you by the hand and led you aside. He cupped his palm around the back of your neck, and talked to you in a calm, patient way. I tried to ignore the stares from the youths on the bench. Even the ones under the tap had forgotten their showering and stood gawking unabashedly in their underwear.

  You returned from your conversation with your uncle, your expression no longer hostile. To my surprise, you opened the packets one by one, and examined their contents with interest. Someone brought buckets filled with water and you dissolved both the purple and the red crystals in them. Then, with perfect amicability, you asked me which powder I wanted to start with.

  In an instant, the decade of Holis we’d missed since Dev died came to an end. Color flew, streams of dyed water spurted through the air,
clothes turned green and blue, skin was tinted red. I squeezed my eyes shut as you launched your attack, but forgot to close my mouth—the powder tasted dry and chalky on my tongue. Although I could barely see, your shirt was suddenly in my grip—I held on to it as you struggled to escape, and managed to give you a good smearing around the head. Some of the other boys, seeing the engagement, forgot about their clean clothes and joined in as well. At one point, while trying to escape a spray of purple, I tripped and fell. You were astride me at once, rubbing the color over my clothes, on my body, into my hair. You looked a little maniacal, face painted like some warrior, laughing with your teeth streaked orange. Someone splashed us with the remaining colored water—first the purple, then the red.

  I could have remained there a long time. Your knees straddled against my sides, the weight of your body snug around my waist, drops of red-purple dripping onto my face from the wet locks of your hair. The color had an earthy scent to it, but surprisingly, I could still delve beneath it to detect the familiar fragrance of your sweat. You looked down upon me, your laughter subsiding to a half smile, then flickering behind something else—shyness or uncertainty, I couldn’t tell. We stayed there for a moment, enthralled in each other’s gravity—the moon and the earth, the earth and the sun. Then the spell broke, the grass around us began to reappear, and with it, the buckets and the benches and the people. You looked around, then rose and took a step back. I expected you to help me up, but it was your uncle who extended his hand.

  Arya beamed. “I’m glad you were able to do this with Ashvin. Next year, you’ll have to come earlier, so you can play with the rest of us as well.” He gestured for you to come stand next to him. “For now, though, since the color’s all gone—” He turned back your collar and ran his fingers through the patch of red powder on your neck. “May I?” he asked me, his fingers color-laden and outstretched.