The Age of Shiva (32 page)

“We're going to wrestle, you and I,” I announced, in a tone I hoped sounded playful. I grabbed your legs to swing you around, but my own legs came in the way. When I attempted to lock you under my body, you offered so little resistance that I rolled right over. You lay on the floor, your face turned to the ceiling, your arms limp and splayed.

“Don't you want to wrestle with Mummy?” I asked. “Come, it will be fun.” I knocked with my knuckles against the door of your chest, like I'd seen Dev do. In reply, you began to cry. Soft tears at first and then sharp convulsing sobs that thrust deep within my soul.

I took you, still crying, into my lap. You turned over to hide your face in my leg. I draped my muddied sari over the two of us like a tent. The Ovaltine cooled silently on the table, thunder sounded periodically outside. I kept my body curled tightly over yours, rocking you ever so slightly, waiting for your tears to be spent.

Afterwards, I threw away the Ovaltine and made some coffee instead. We sat together on the floor, tented again in my sari, and alternated sips from the cup. When it was empty, and you had licked the rim clean, we went into the kitchen to look for some dinner for your snails. The spinach was all gone, and there were no leaves left on the cauliflower, so I peeled some carrots into a plate.

We watched the snails together all evening, leave behind their glistening wakes as they crawled along. You attached each one to a carrot strip, then put your ear to the glass—to hear them chew, you said. “Will their caca be orange tomorrow?” you asked, just before going to bed.

BY THE END OF JULY,
the monsoon was still setting records in Bombay, even though many regions of the country teetered on the brink of a drought. A cartoon in the
Times of India
showed a man drowning in the rain from a solitary cloud hanging over him, while all around, people crawled about with bulging eyes and parched tongues. “Why don't you come to Delhi to get away from it?” Paji suggested. “It's 1972, remember—they're having a special ceremony for twenty-five years of independence at the Red Fort. With all the money I've been donating to the Congress Party, they had better give me seats in the box reserved for Indira Gandhi herself.”

I recognized this as another of Paji's efforts to resettle me in Delhi. He had been tactful and restrained in his campaign, making his first attempt only a full four months after Dev's passing. I had parried all his invitations. I knew I needed time to be alone, and didn't want to risk being sucked in by venturing too close. I also wanted to decide first on how to proceed with the insurance policy. Should I confront him with it, or should I leave the money untapped, in reserve? Right now, Paji took care of all our needs with the check he sent every month. Wasn't there a danger in making a demand for the money—that he might use the excuse of my self-sufficiency to cut off all future assistance?

As it turned out, my response to Paji's latest invitation was determined by something totally unrelated. While cleaning the aquarium, I forgot to replace the lid, allowing most of the snails to escape.

The first inkling of the getaway came when I sat on one of them. It had somehow dragged itself all the way to the sofa to meet its doom, and made a soft crumpling sound, more felt than heard, under my weight. After that, we located snails all around the room—sometimes trailing slime along the edge of a book, sometimes clinging to shirts or underwear, but much too often by the telltale crunch when they perished underfoot. You became so distraught that you stopped talking to me. At night, you stalked away from bed—whisking the dusty covers off your old half-mattress in the corner of the room to lie down.

I pleaded for you to come back to bed, but you pretended to be asleep. I sat on the floor in the dark for more than an hour, but you did not relent. Finally, I got my pillow and stretched out on the tiles next to your mattress. When I awoke at dawn, you were lying curled up next to me on the floor, your head against my chest.

That day, I braved the rain all afternoon to search for snails while you were at school. There were none to be found at Bhatia Hospital, so I prowled around the neighborhood, sneaking into the building compounds to scour the walls. The watchman at Sheetal Towers came running up to shoo me away, but then joined in the search when I explained what I needed. By that evening, I had your aquarium stocked again.

Although you accepted the new brood, you remained wistful for the ones lost. Surely a week in Delhi would make a good apology, I thought, especially since it meant an unexpected week away from school. We left the aquarium with Zaida, who invented an excuse why you couldn't take it along. “Snails don't like being in a train because the rocking makes their caca get stuck,” she said.

I packed only white for the trip—not to appease my in-laws, but for Paji's benefit. At the station, I noted with satisfaction his shock at seeing me dressed in the tradition of a widow. To his credit, he kept his dismay to himself. I had not seen him after Dev had passed, and he hugged me with a warmth I had not realized he could muster. “It's at times like this that I envy the believers among us,” he said. “They can blame it all on God's will.”

Biji had been checking the windows of the train on the other end of the platform. Arms outstretched, tears streaming, she walked, then ran towards me. “My Meera, my darling, how could life be so cruel?” she said, wrapping me in her embrace. “Already in white for your thirty-fifth birthday—it breaks my heart to see you in these clothes. Every morning I awake and think, what has life left you with?” She burst into full-fledged weeping, refusing to be consoled when I tried to convince her my fate wasn't quite that tragic.

I took you that very afternoon to Nizamuddin. A flock of maudlin feelings arose in my heart when I spotted the top of Salim Fazl's tomb from the taxi. The station itself was in the throes of renovation, new buildings being built and a sleek new bridge rising over the tracks. In the midst of the construction, the familiar garbage pile, with its obligatory attendant cow, had migrated to despoil a fresh wall.

Mataji had deteriorated as much as Hema had warned. Her left eyelid drooped, her mouth curled in on itself, her frame bent into a startling S shape with a pronounced central hump. She was surprisingly composed. “There's only so much sorrow one can show—I learnt that when Sandhya died. After a while, the tears simply take care of themselves—they learn to drop quietly inside. Still, I should have gone before Dev—it was a shock no mother should have to bear.” A visible twitch ran through her body as she spoke her son's name.

She took us in to say hello to Babuji, who lay in a charpoy with his mouth open, his hands twisted at the wrists against his chest. “It's Meera,” she called, as if shouting down a well. “Dev's wife. She's come from Bombay with your grandson.” He did not respond. You pulled at my sari to get away from the smell of feces and urine. After all the care Babuji used to take to tighten the knots every week, the ropes of his charpoy were now depressingly slack. “Arya offered to hire a ganga to take care of him, but I refused. I'd lose the one focus of my life. All the time I have—what would I do with it?”

Mataji shuffled outside to the kitchen to make some tea. “Remember this?” she asked, pointing to the center of a row of blackened pots above the gas. I saw it was the pressure cooker from my dowry. “Hema wanted to take it when she married, she had been coveting it for years. But I told her it was to this house that it had come, and refused to give it up. Arya likes his mutton, so I still use it from time to time. He's been looking forward to seeing you both—he should be here very soon. It'll be good if you can get his mind off his aging parents for a while.” She looked up at me, and I noticed her left lid no longer drooped as much, that the cloudiness in her eyes had cleared.

Fortunately, Arya showed up not alone, but with Hema. He had bought a car, a secondhand Fiat, and Rahul and Tony sat in the back. Everyone clustered around you—Hema kissing you repeatedly all over your face, Tony shaking your hand with grave formality, and Arya lifting you up into the air. Rahul darted around with his pea-shooting gun, taking aim without firing, at each person in turn.

Your cousins whisked you away to show you a pack of wolves they'd found living down the street. “Don't worry, they're only dogs—puppies, really,” Hema said. She looked at me, then Arya. “I'll go help Mataji, let the two of you catch up.”

The frown on Arya's face stopped her. “Why don't you show Bhabhiji where she can rest instead?” he said. “I'm sure she must be tired after her train.”

Arya kept up his careful politeness towards me all that evening—in fact, through all the times I came over to Nizamuddin on my visit. Hema and Mataji made increasingly blatant comments about how he and I had each lost a spouse, but Arya ignored them, thwarting all their attempts to leave the two of us together alone. I was never sure if he was simply trying to make a good impression, or getting my guard down for some future ploy. He did convince me of one thing—the affection he showed you was genuine—you were his favorite of the nephews. I felt some concern about the times he took the three of you wrestling at the HRM pits. But Hema assured me the military exercises for the cadets were held in the morning, that this was strictly for play.

If Arya put a smile on your face, Tony transformed you. I took you to Nizamuddin every evening at your urging, and as soon as Tony came home from school, he walked over the half mile from where they lived. The two of you were very furtive about your games—with secret codes involved, and a mysterious hidden fortress somewhere. You didn't even take poor Rahul into your confidence—he spent the time hunting pigeons with his pea gun or sulking by himself. Tony started you on the hobby of collecting stamps, and you reciprocated, much to Hema's dismay, by teaching him about snails.

I succumbed one evening to my memories. Mataji sent me to buy coriander and I found my feet treading the well-remembered path to the tomb. I did not know what self-destructive urge led me there, what irresistible temptation the place held for me. Hadn't I come to grief on every occasion I had blundered onto its inauspicious grounds—the time I saw Roopa stretched out on the grass eight years ago, the time even earlier when I first sealed my fate with Dev? The bougainvillea grew thicker than I remembered it, obscuring most of the structure that lay beyond. My breath quickened as I pushed through—
Turn back,
I thought to myself,
don't venture in
. Why did I feel so certain there would be some malignant new discovery lying in wait within?

The walls inside were less adorned than I remembered them—even the last remaining tile fragments having been gouged out in the intervening years. The ground had been colonized by a shadow-loving plant of some sort—I kept brushing against its luxuriant fronds. I waded in as far as I could into the interior, as if immersing myself ritually in a river. Memories of Dev came swirling up from the darkness to greet me—would I stumble into the grave in which we had lain?

I heard a tinkling sound, like a coin being dropped, and came to a stop. Was there someone else besides me—could Dev have somehow returned in ghostly form? Suddenly the tomb was filled with his presence, his breath traversing audibly through the air, his eyes gazing at me unseen from somewhere. I took another step in—tendrils of vegetation rubbed insinuatingly against my legs.

And then they came charging at me, two shapeless apparitions bursting across the floor. I screamed, then turned and ran, but was felled before I could reach the door. A glint of silver rose above me, a mask came off each head. Tony waved his toy sword triumphantly in the air, “Nobody enters the fort without the secret password,” you said.

THE EVENING BEFORE
Independence Day, I came back from Nizamuddin to find my parents in the midst of a tremendous row. “Next time, I'm going to let them leave you in for a few nights with your hoodlums,” Paji was saying. “To teach you that jail doesn't mean having tea and biscuits with the officers while you wait to be driven home in a limousine.”

“They're not hoodlums,” Biji shouted back. “They're college students from good families, with a conscience. They care about jobs and prices, they care about how your Indira Gandhi is ruining the nation.”

“And you? Have you started caring about prices as well? Answer me this, Rohini, have you shopped for vegetables even once in your life?”

“I'm a zamindar's daughter—it's my duty not to be selfish, to not think only of myself.”

Biji had gone that morning with a group of students from the college at which Sharmila taught to gherao the minister for home affairs. I was stupefied by this news—that Biji would participate in such a protest, with college students, no less. I imagined them surrounding their target, bringing all business to a standstill, shouting slogans and singing songs of resistance like Gandhiji had. There had been some puzzling references to student rallies in the letters Sharmila still wrote occasionally for Biji—could this have been what she meant?

“Last month it was to rail against foreign policy, and before that some crazy protest against nationalizing the insurance industry,” Paji said, turning to me. “This hobby of politics she's suddenly developed at sixty—ask your mother if she even has an inkling what nationalization means. Always some knee-jerk reaction against Indiraji, always something to embarrass me. Doesn't she realize these people are taking advantage of her just because she's illiterate?”