The City of Devi

by Manil Suri

  I wipe it off, noticing Chitra’s frantic shake of head too late. My action enrages the girl. “How dare you wipe off my blessing? Don’t you know everything from me is holy, is prasad?” She rises from her chair to lunge at me when Chitra and Guddi intervene.

  “Forgive her, Devi ma, she didn’t know. Next time, she’ll bring the bonbon biscuits you like.” They force my forehead down to scrape it at the girl’s feet.

  “Get her up,” the girl commands, and the two pull me up and hold me between them. For an instant, I think I will be blessed with Devi spit again, but instead, she shakes up the Coke bottle and sprays the froth at me. Seeing me dripping with cola, she bursts out laughing. Then she hurls the bottle at my face. I hear it whiz by my ear and smash on the terrace behind. “What else do you have for me besides biscuits?”

  “She’s brought a pomegranate, Devi ma,” Guddi says, and I turn to her sharply. The fruit fell out when I changed out of my wet sari, but I scooped it back up quickly and didn’t think anyone had noticed. “Go on, let Devi ma see how red it is.”

  I have no intention of squandering it. “It’s actually for my husband. I’d be happy to offer it to Devi ma, but first she must help me find him.”

  The girl flares up instantly. “What do you think, you can bargain with Devi ma? Give it to me, at once, or I’ll have you flung off the terrace.” She shouts for the guards when I don’t move. Guddi starts pleading with me to give it up as two Khakis trot over.

  Reluctantly, I hand over the pomegranate. The Devi girl tosses it in a little juggle between her three hands, then presses at it with the nubs of her club to test its ripeness. Before I can stop her, she bites in as if it’s an apple. “It’s bitter!” she exclaims, spitting out seeds and skin and pith and flinging the fruit away. I almost throw myself after it as the pomegranate bounces across the floor and falls off the edge of the terrace. “I’ll have you drowned in the sea for this. I’ll have you trampled under the elephants.”

  Both Guddi and Chitra are begging the girl to show me mercy when Jaz intervenes. “Devi ma, wait. That pomegranate wasn’t for you—the actual present my friend brought is with me.” He rummages around in his many pockets, then finds what he’s looking for and extends it to her in outstretched palms. “For days now, my friend has been saying that this is what the Devi ma craves, this is what she will eat.” To my horror, I see he is offering her the Marmite.

  The girl looks at the jar suspiciously. “How do I know it’s not poison?” The fingers in her extra hand curl warily, like question marks.

  I try to think of some way to stop Jaz, impress upon him the lunacy of expecting the girl to find such a foreign taste appealing. But he has already opened the jar to demonstrate it’s safe by eating some. “Mmm… wait till you taste this chutney. It’s so nice and salty.”

  Her curiosity aroused, the girl sniffs at the jar, then straightens one of her bent fingers to scoop some out. “It’s so black.” She puts it in her mouth. I wait for her to spit it out, to summon the elephants, but she has a thoughtful expression on her face. “It’s like no chutney I’ve ever had.” She takes another fingerful, then grins shyly, toothily, at Jaz. “It tickles my throat. Devi ma is pleased.”

  JAZ INSTANTLY SEEMS to acquire the status of most favored disciple. The Devi girl allows him to touch not just her feet, but his limb of choice at will (even letting him rub the nubs on her appendage). She undoes her hair and sweeps it playfully over his face, declaring it to be a special blessing she’s invented just for him. She insists he feed her pieces of samosa with his own hand—he ingratiates himself further by dipping each bite in Marmite. They take big swallows from a shared bottle of Coke like pals in a TV commercial, giggling as the bubbles come out their noses. As a special gesture of appreciation, she regurgitates some of the samosa and offers it to him in her palm as prasad—Jaz has no choice but to swallow it with love (delight, even) writ all over his face.

  When it’s time for her next show, Devi girl insists Jaz (who she’s christened her horse, her “Gaurav-ghoda”) carry her on his shoulders to the turret. An attendant opens a small gate at the end of the terrace beyond which a walkway runs across the top of the building along the crenulated parapet. Jaz, the merry porter, proceeds down this with his joyful load. At the turret, he personally helps the girl into a saucer-shaped stand of sorts, while a cluster of attendants stand by and watch.

  “My, aren’t we the Devi’s pet?” I remark when he returns.

  “All to get your husband back,” he reminds me.

  The fireworks start—rockets whiz by, fire fountains burst into life all around us. With cascades of sparks tumbling from every ledge, I’m surprised the hotel doesn’t burn down. Large lotuses blossom from the Devi’s extra hands—Chitra has inserted a stem into a cleft in the left. “We’re trying to get her to memorize the words so she can address the crowd in her own voice,” she tells us, as Devi girl lip-synchs to the prerecorded words piped in through the speaker system.

  Chitra gives a signal to the man at the control panel, and the saucer holding the Devi girl begins to rotate. “Watch this,” Chitra says as streams of sparks issue from the base of the saucer, which slowly lifts into the air. It occurs to me that this might be the machine from Mehboob Studios that Sequeira said he’d had to give away. I blurt out the obvious question: If Devi ma is real, shouldn’t she be able to levitate on her own? Why does she need such aids?

  Guddi, shocked, urges me to renounce these blasphemous thoughts before Devi ma strikes me down, but Chitra holds up her hand. “Why, indeed, would a real devi not show off her flying powers?” She looks at me, then Guddi and the rest of the assembly, as a teacher might at a sluggish class to elicit a forgotten lesson. “The answer, remember, is simple: That’s the wrong question. Rather, ask yourself why anyone might still doubt Devi ma after she’s taken the trouble to grace us in this girl’s avatar. What’s the true test? Healing the countless invalids who seek her help, or performing tricks like a circus animal? Count again the number of arms she has, then tell me what more evidence you could want.”

  I stifle the impulse to point out that not all the limbs in question are whole, that their sum doesn’t quite total up to four. The attendants all gaze raptly at the spectacle, now certified authentic, but I cannot tell where Chitra stands herself. Was her speech merely for her minions’ sake, does she truly believe in Devi ma or not?

  The show ends differently than the one we witnessed from the beach. As the girl reaches her zenith, an enormous buffalo effigy, hoisted from the ground at the end of a cable, swings into view. I’ve seen these as part of the City of Devi celebrations—an enactment of the Devi myth where the goddess slays the buffalo demon. “I am the demon Mahisha, who neither Vishnu nor Shiva has been able to vanquish,” a voice intones over the speakers. “I am the lord of the three worlds, and you will marry me.” A series of threats from both sides follows, with the Devi promising to cut off the demon’s head and drink its blood. Finally, a trident appears in her hand, one that shoots laser-like rays of light through the air to ignite the buffalo. Strings of firecrackers go off in its belly, red and green flares emerge from its mouth and tail. A tremendous cheer rises from the crowd as fire engulfs the animal.

  “What’s that?” Inside the metal ribcage of the buffalo, I think I make out a shadowy form, one that writhes and shivers in the flames. I point it out to Jaz, but clouds of smoke come in the way before he can see it.

  “It’s the spirit of the buffalo demon,” Chitra says. “Being purified at the hands of Devi ma.”

  “It looked like something trapped inside. Or someone.”

  “Just a spirit. And Devi ma has liberated it.” Her face is serene in the light from the flames.

  After the show, Gaurav-ghoda fetches Devi girl back on his shoulders and deposits her on the throne. It’s time for the blessing of the pilgrims, at least the wealthiest ones. Chitra points out the matinee idol Roop Kumar, who reluctantly leaves behind his entourage and bows down alone at the
throne. A round and suited gentleman, who Chitra says is the owner of the Mumbai Cricket League, follows, after which the president of Mody Industries himself (instantly recognizable from the newspapers) touches the girl’s feet. By the time the nightly slot to receive less exalted devotees rolls around, the Devi is quite cranky. Most have some ailment or other that needs curing—she sends them on their way after a perfunctory laying of hands on the affected part. “Only one disease per person,” she snaps at a woman who has cancer as well as diabetes. A man who refuses to leave without a handwritten note for his crippled son at home irritates her so much that she stabs him with his own fountain pen through the arm.

  “I think it’s time to end the session,” Chitra whispers. “We don’t want her to start putting people to death like she did last night.”

  On Chitra’s behest Jaz hitches the Devi on his shoulders again and carries her around the terrace to restore her mood. She pulls off his turban and perches it on her own head, guffawing when it droops down to her nose. “Will Devi ma grant one more boon tonight—for her loyal horse this time?” Gaurav-ghoda asks. “Help me find the person we’re looking for, the one my friend was talking about.”

  “You mean her husband—that woman who tried to poison me?”

  “She brought you that chutney you liked so much, remember? Her husband is closer to me than any brother could be.” The statement sounds so heartfelt, it alarms me.

  Devi girl gives me a nasty look as Jaz explains about the bus that’s picked up Karun and his colleagues. “I know Devi ma gives her blessing to so many people that it’s not possible to remember them all these days later. But with her permission, my friend and I would like to look through the hotel.”

  The girl thinks for a moment, then agrees. “But first take Devi ma around the pool and the palm trees.” Jaz gasps as she grips his freshly unturbaned hair, like she might the mane of a horse, and pulls sharply. “Faster this time.”

  JAZ

  13

  WE’VE ALMOST MADE IT TO THE DOOR WHEN THE WICKED LITTLE witch of the east calls me back. “Another ride for my Devi ma?” I say, and she nods her fat little head. I remember to brace myself as she clambers on this time—the Jazter has learnt that Devi flesh weighs more per unit volume than the heaviest element known to man. “Once more?” I ask after we’ve galloped all the way to the turret and back, and to my dismay, my divine porcinity nods yes.

  The Jazter has never understood religion, but if this is what the citizens believe will save them, then maybe they deserve to be dead.

  Perhaps I’m being too harsh on her Marmite-ship. Lying at her feet all night, I have listened to her tale of pauperdom to popehood, destitution to devi-nity. It behooves me as even-handed raconteur to present the sympathetic side of even the most trying characters I encounter. Who would fail to be moved by the deep scar on her left appendage? The gash where her mother tried to simply hack off the extra arm, failing only because her slum dweller’s knife was too blunt to cut through bone? Not to mention the other marks of abuse—the scars on her back, the lacerations on her neck, the cigarette burns on her legs—all of which she displays to me as proudly as stigmata. “To think I might still have been begging outside the Sion post office,” she says, choking up a little at the poignancy of her own discovery. Her tears dry quickly, though, vaporized in the heat of the rancor she has stored up inside. “All the people who spat at me, the dogs who laughed at my extra arms, not realizing these were the signs of Devi.”

  Now that these limbs have attained the status of sacred relics, only the chosen few dare touch them without risking severe bodily harm. The Jazter, most favored member of this club, has discovered the right sequence of knuckle-nubs to press (like finger buttons on a trumpet) to make her coo softly. Thus lulled, into a stupor almost, she discloses her debt to Baby Rinky. “They tried to get her first, even though she was only a make-believe screen devi. Had her mother not insisted on leaving Mumbai when the war worsened, they might never have discovered me. I was so thin then—they had to fatten me with laddoos for a week.”

  She breaks off, looking up at the sky dreamily. “What I want to do someday is star in my own movie. Would they like me, do you suppose? After all I am the true Devi.”

  “They’d love you, Devi ma. You’d be a much bigger hit than Baby Rinky.”

  She laughs, and reaches with her toes to affectionately stroke my cheek. “Don’t worry—I wouldn’t leave you out—we’d find a role for you to play as well. Vishnu’s horse, in fact—wouldn’t that be the perfect part? Always running and moving and jumping—tell me, my Gaurav-ghoda, what do you think?”

  Somewhere in the midst of a long list of things we’ll do together (ride through the sky in a magical chariot, eat the same flavors of ice cream on the moon as Baby Rinky, kill lots of bad people with big big guns) she dozes off. The Jazter would have never believed it, but she actually looks innocent—her breath emerges rhythmically through her lips, her cheeks bulge as cherubically as a baby’s. Disengaging the curls of my hair clutched so lovingly (if painfully) in her fingers, I stretch out on the floor next to her lounge chair and fall asleep. In the morning, she greets me with a glass of nectar. “Amrit. I made it for you myself.”

  Except it’s not nectar, but urine—still steaming a bit. I tell her I can’t possibly accept when the long-suffering devotees behind their chain of guards have been waiting so patiently for prasad. “Devi amrit,” they cry, and take a joyous sip each. The Jazter doesn’t quite get it—chacun à son goût, must be a Hindu thing.

  Fortunately, before my personal prasad factory can manufacture something more solid from all the samosas it has processed overnight, a summons arrives from downstairs. Pooja is at nine and Devi ma must preside as idol-in-residence to be worshipped. Between bites of laddoo, she gives me her blessing to go sniff for scientists. I am to be extended every privilege, all through the hotel, with Chitra and Guddi and Sarita to accompany me. At farewell time she wavers—wouldn’t it be fun if she came along for the ride? She means this literally—Gaurav-ghoda carrying her around from room to room—after all, she’s never much explored the hotel, really. But vermilion and incense and clamoring devotees call from downstairs—not to mention, good God, the promise of more sweets. “Come back quickly,” she warns, and for the time being, I am free.

  NOW THAT I’VE secured my Laddoovielfraß’s permission to look for Karun, how do I actually find him? I can’t dial the front desk or switchboard operator and simply furnish his name. Chitra is dismissive when I ask where they store their occupancy information. “Devi knows where even the tiniest ant in the hotel lives. She doesn’t need to consult a list.”

  “Yes, but you do. When she demands to see someone, for instance—how do you know which room it is?”

  “We ask the clerks. They write down the room number of everyone who comes to visit her.”

  So we go to the desks outside the suite. The clerks are ferociously protective of their ledgers, and make resentful grinding noises in their throats when Chitra invokes Devi ma’s authority to examine the pages. Karun’s name doesn’t appear anywhere. “Could you have made a mistake?” I ask the clerks, and their grinding turns into outright vituperation. Chitra quickly shepherds us away.

  Why is Karun not listed? Doubts, as sharp-eyed as hawks, instantly begin to swoop in: Karun never made it to the hotel, the van took him to some other destination, who knows if he’s even in the city still? I dispel these thoughts with one inescapable notion: Karun has to be here, since it’s the only way we will ever meet again.

  Might they record names at the restaurant counters where incoming devotees queue to check in? Chitra believes they did at one point, so we go down to investigate. The lobby hall is as busy as a bus terminal, with elephants arriving and departing in regular succession and attendants trailing after to scoop up their extruded bounty. The restaurant’s coffee bar now serves as a canteen for Khakis, dozens of whom mill around, dipping rusks of bread into tea. A mass of supplicants clamors a
t the counters—seeing the chaos, I realize no useful records can possibly surface, even if we manage to wade in.

  Which means the hotel is one giant labyrinth we must scour inch by inch. The lobby and its surrounding arcades spilling with people, the guestrooms of which there are three hundred (though perhaps it’s four, Chitra thinks), the teeming grounds and corridors—a wall-to-wall dormitory has even mushroomed in the disco downstairs. Chitra asks if we want to start by checking out the audience gathered for Devi pooja outside. Her offer sounds wan, halfhearted—she already seems eager to call the search off, looking at her watch, muttering how busy she is.

  I listen to the sounds of rapture stream in through the doors to the garden, imagine the congregation rollicking in worship. Somehow, I can’t imagine Karun in its midst. Nor do the rooms beckon with any special promise. I need time to mull through the sweep of search possibilities to see if anything activates my shikari instincts.

  Sarita, though, has a determined plan—she wants to check out Room 318, which three years ago served as their bridal suite. “I know it sounds crazy, but I can still picture him lying in that very same bed.” For no better reason than to humor her along, we go upstairs. I feel a rush of misgiving as Chitra swipes open the door—after all, Karun’s wedding night marks when I unequivocally lost him (the suite practically qualifies as a crime scene for me). But I needn’t have worried. The interior is bloodless, untroubled by ghostly evidence—the linens, hospital-crisp, have not been slept in for weeks. Sarita hugs a pillow to her chest as if squeezing out nostalgia from it, then stands silently on the balcony to stare at the sea.

  Now that we’re here, the third floor is as good as any to start with, so we check out the neighboring rooms as well. Chitra raps smartly at each door, waits for a scant half-minute (hardly enough for a response, it seems), then unlocks it with her magic swipe card. A plump middle-aged couple looks up startled from a plate of parathas in the first, an enraged film producer (one of the VIPs granted an audience with the Devi last night) chases us out of the second, while the third is empty, save, inexplicably, for a small goat tethered in the bathroom. “Can’t I take it to my room?” Guddi asks, and we have to tear her away from it. I can discern no order to the accommodations—next to the goat is a room crammed with workers squatting on mats, engrossed in a card game. Seeing us, they hasten to douse their cigarettes and squirrel their bottles of hooch away.