The Age of Shiva (37 page)

I escaped by sending you to summon Pinky from her flat to come tell him he was needed at home. In the morning, Mrs. Dugal seemed unsurprised when I apprised her of her husband's visit. “Oh, he just likes to come by and chat—don't mind anything he says.”

“This wasn't just chatting—he was drunk, and sitting on my floor.”

Mrs. Dugal laughed as if it were all a big misunderstanding. “No, no—he only has a tiny peg at night, so he can sleep. Don't worry, it won't happen anymore.” She couldn't quite hide the embarrassment in her eyes.

The next evening Mr. Dugal was back, but this time I was more prepared. “Your wife told me she just bought a big bag of sugar for you this morning,” I said, and closed the door.

THE ONE PERSON,
surprisingly, who didn't cast his lot in with these crude attempts was Arya. He started writing to you soon after we came back from our 1972 Independence Day trip to Delhi. He wrote his letters in Hindi, because it was important to know the national language, he said. Since you hadn't learnt to read in Hindi yet, I read them aloud to you when they came.

In the beginning, his letters were routine and dry. He updated us on Babuji's condition and the construction of the new Nizamuddin station. He spent whole paragraphs enumerating everyone who sent their love from Delhi. At the end was a checklist of questions to fill up the page—what sports you were playing, how your studies were faring.

But he soon opened up, writing about things that he thought would interest you—a trip with Rahul and Tony to Connaught Place, the new children's train inaugurated near Okhla station, the red-haired dog that came by every evening to eat leftover scraps. How these days he was learning a new subject, cooking, from Hema auntie, to give Mataji a break on some evenings. He told you about the role of Dashrath he had agreed to play for the reading of the Ramayana during the Dassera festival—he was having difficulty memorizing his lines, he confessed. His letters arrived from such far-flung states as Orissa and Tamil Nadu, where he traveled to set up new offices for the HRM. “Today I sat in the train all day with my Ramayana in my lap and watched this vast nation of ours go by. Sometimes I imagine I'm truly one of the characters in the epic, making the same journey as our Lord Ram did.” All the travel was exhausting, he wrote. He wished he could turn the clock back to conducting the recruits in their morning exercises as he used to long ago. “There's nothing I miss more than the mud and sweat of the wrestling pits.”

For a while, he related stories about your father. “He was always such a happy baby, laughing more than he cried in the crib.” Even when he was a boy, their parents invited the neighbors to come hear Dev sing. “On some Sundays, my mother used an old sari to convert the balcony of our flat into a stage. Your father held his head under a stream of cold water—to awaken the music cells in his brain, he said. He emerged on the balcony with his long wet hair curled into a knot like a prince, and gave the signal for the curtain to be raised. A cluster of people gathered on the street, and soon there would be twenty or thirty or even fifty spectators watching the concert from two floors below.”

The lyricism that emerged in Arya's letters surprised me. He described a field trip to Kashmir with his colleagues and spoke of flower-strewn lakes and valleys carpeted in green. He filled an entire page writing about a misty mountainside in Assam, where women appeared and faded “like angels” as they harvested tea. He started adorning his text with snippets of poetry. Sometimes he became reflective and wrote of the vagaries of life and perseverance in the face of tragedy. “People change all the time, but it's up to those around to recognize this. Your uncle is no longer the same person he was ten years ago, or even five.”

These last philosophical musings, I guessed, were meant for me. They were written in a refined and flowery Delhi Hindi which even I had trouble deciphering. Living in Bombay for all these years, where people spoke a pidgin version, had stultified my vocabulary. I brought in a dictionary once I went back to the translation agency, to keep handy while reading his letters.

When it came time to reply, it was once again I who had to transcribe the response for you. Each word I formed, each page I filled, further wore down my resistance, made it feel less bizarre an idea to be corresponding with him. I addressed the letters to Yara uncle and signed them “Ashvin,” but it was impossible to ignore that it was my handwriting on the paper, my sentences running down the page.

Must Arya have become as used to my letters, as I did to his? The cream-colored prepaid envelopes with the embossed blue stamps—must he, too, have learnt to recognize them instantly when the mail came? Were there bundles of old letters saved for some reason, sitting in a box on his cupboard shelf as well?

I took you to Delhi during almost every vacation now, where Arya remained as proper and formal towards me as before. But the letters communicated a more intimate set of feelings. “Every person harbors an image of perfect beauty within,” he wrote once. “It's only when that idea is captured that the person can become truly fulfilled.”

IN ONE LETTER, ARYA
pointed out a curiosity he discovered in the English spelling of your name. One could rearrange the first five letters in “Ashvin” to form “Shiva.” But also, replacing the first letter
A
with a
U
, your name became an anagram of “Vishnu” instead. He wove elaborate tales about Shiva and Vishnu competing to claim you as theirs. Each time you were lost in your own world, Shiva would point out that you were meditating, to be more like him. But then Vishnu would counter with occasions when you were energetic, even mischievous, in emulation of his own incarnations.

Your favorite story had the two gods descending to Tardeo to have a fight over you. Shiva grew even taller than the building we lived in, so that with one foot planted in the street in front, the other foot reached all the way to Bombay Central. He struck his trident into a cloud to charge it with lightning, so that he could envelop objects in giant fireballs just by pointing the prongs at them. Not to be outdone, Vishnu appeared as an enormous eagle, whose wings stretched from Colaba to Mahim. He attacked Shiva with his talons, tried to rip him apart with his beak—in the ensuing fight, half of Tardeo was destroyed. In the end, neither god won—each realized he was fighting himself, they were simply two faces of the same being. “That's why Ashvin should be so proud that be brings Shiva and Vishnu together in his name,” Arya wrote. After that, you insisted on “Ashvin” whenever Paji tried calling you “Ace.”

I
FOUND MY JOB AT MR. HANSI'S EASY BUT NOT VERY COMPELLING—
translating cartoon blurbs could provide only so much variety. Coupled with that, my male coworkers continued harassing me—I felt myself worn down brushing off their advances. As it turned out, I didn't have to work there very long. Four months after I started, the
Indian Express
published an exposé on the thriving copyright infringement industry in India. In response, the police raided the sidewalk hawkers selling pirated Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins novels near Flora Fountain. They also appeared at lunchtime one afternoon, to arrest Mr. Hansi and close down our office.

After the
Indian Express
exposé was forgotten, with Jacqueline Susann back on the street, I learnt that Mr. Hansi had diversified into book pirating himself, at his reincarnated outfit in the faraway suburb of Bhayander. Just as Paji was looking for another job for me, your school offered to hire me as a teacher for their new program of nursery classes. The hours were about the same as yours, which meant we could ride together on the public bus. Even more appealing, I would face no more leers—the only male teachers were Jesuit fathers.

Perhaps all my motherly instincts had been expended in bringing you up, because I found other people's children a lot less endearing than my own. One of the tots got into the habit of flinging his notebooks at the board—another had an accident in his pants like clockwork every day after lunch. I especially hated accompanying them downstairs to the playground—the way they swarmed around me like a shoal of tadpoles, bumping into my legs, pulling at my hand, using my sari to wipe their sticky palms. A coworker suggested I ask to be transferred to a class with older children, but for that one needed qualifications I didn't possess.

Still, I kept at it until the term ended in April. I managed to procure a key to the terrace above the statue of St. Xavier's, and that's where we began to go for lunch. We sat on the shaded part of the parapet, looking over the top of the mango tree, the shrieks of the children playing in the compound below barely reaching us. You enjoyed my parathas the most—peeling them apart and finishing all the potato filling first, then rolling up each half and eating it dipped in ketchup.

I never gave back the key to the terrace. Long after I quit my nursery school job, we continued to sneak up on the days I brought you lunch. Sometimes, after a rain shower, we sighted rainbows over Metro Cinema, shimmering in the sun as they rose and plunged. The city sparkled before us, the air itself smelling as if it had been scrubbed.

Finally, one day, our lunches on the terrace ended. We carried our parathas to the top, and found a new lock in which my key no longer worked.

BY THAT SUMMER,
the student violence from Gujarat and Bihar had swept over the whole country. I read about riots almost every day in the newspaper—sometimes sparked by high prices, sometimes unemployment, sometimes corruption (the news on TV carefully omitted all such reports). For the first time that I could recall, a strong and charismatic leader had emerged from the opposition—Jayprakash Narayan, or JP as the former freedom fighter was called. “Total revolution,” he declared, a struggle which would not end until Indira was removed from power. He managed to form a coalition that outlandishly combined both Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists. Paji fired off enraged letters, complaining how Biji had outdone herself in ruining his reputation by participating in the JP protests. No denial by Biji came in the mail—she didn't seem to have time to dictate her letters to Sharmila anymore.

We went to Delhi earlier than usual, because of rumors of another railway strike. The city was baking when we arrived—several people had already died in the heat wave sweeping the north. The Loo wind seemed to have set its rudder to blow in from the Thar Desert precisely to the center of Delhi every day, its blasts wilting tree leaves as they hung from their branches, withering any patch of exposed skin. In the afternoons, normally bustling areas looked as if a curfew was in place—people emerged only in the morning, before the strong gusts started, or after the sun had set.

Despite this, Arya chose 4 p.m. at the Coffee House in the middle of Connaught Place to meet. He sprang the invitation on me one day in Nizamuddin, claiming he wanted to discuss something important. “Their cold coffee, you might still remember, is the best in the city.” Perhaps I felt the bond of our correspondence obligated me. There could be no harm in meeting at such a public place, I thought, and agreed.

By the time I found myself pushing open the door of the Coffee House, I dreaded what would transpire inside. The orchestration of letters over the years, the subtly endearing messages they contained—surely they pointed to only one motive. The air-conditioning made me feel a little better, as did the sight of the dark-cushioned chairs inside, the walls covered with the soothing coffee-colored drapes. Paji used to bring us here for special occasions—I recalled the square-tipped dessert spoons, the tall ice-cream-topped drinks.

“I wasn't sure you'd come,” said a man, walking up to me. It was Arya, clad in a suit and tie. My first reaction, which I managed to stifle, was to laugh. This person, who I had seen so often in loincloth and undershirt, who was most at home covered in mud from a wrestling pit, was attempting to make a good impression on me by becoming westernized (that too, in this heat). His tie was all wrong, his coat too tight and poorly stitched, and yet he managed to pull it off better than I would have expected. It was the gray temples with the clipped gray mustache, the rimless glasses he had begun to wear, which gave him a distinguished air. I half expected him to pull my chair back for me, but he led me to the table and gestured at it, then sat down before I did. “Their cold coffee is very good,” he reminded me again.

It was indeed very good, served with a generous scoop of ice cream floating in the frothy liquid. I tried to concentrate on what Arya was saying—for some reason, he wanted to give me an overview of the HRM. “People say we're against Muslims because we protest their special rights, or against Christians because we speak out when they convert villagers through bribes. But we're not against any group or sect—we're Hindus after all—a religion that's always believed in coexistence, never conversion. You must understand this—we're here to help people, not hurt them—protecting the rights of other Hindus, that's the only goal we have.”

He went on to enumerate the offices he had opened for the organization—it seemed like he had been to almost every state in the country. “After Sandhya died, I accepted any assignment that would take me away from here, take me away from her memory. I stayed in huts in Assam, ate what the tribals ate in Nagaland, traveled standing up in third class unreserved all the way from Nagpur to Bhopal. I carried an extra pair of laces in my pocket, because with all the walking I did, I was worried the ones in my shoes would break.” He told me he lost count of all the stomach ailments he suffered—for weeks, he was delirious with malaria in Bihar. “It's taken more than a decade, but now I finally feel the network is in place. And some of the offices I've managed to open have left even the people at our headquarters amazed. Seven in West Bengal alone—can you believe it, the Communist state? It just shows that even Communists can get fed up when they keep having their jobs stolen by Muslims from Bangladesh.

“The point is that I'm back now. As long as I was traveling so much, it was impossible to even conceive of a future for myself. But now—now, the time has come to stop running away. To let the wheel of my life stop spinning so I can ease into my place in the world again.”

I watched his hands as he spoke. They were thick hands, but their coarseness seemed curiously restrained, as if smoothed out by a manicure. Were these the same hands that had hit Sandhya hard enough to bruise her face? Could they have somehow reformed themselves, shed their brutality as easily as dirt being cleaned out from under their fingernails?

Perhaps Arya read what I was thinking, because he started to speak of Sandhya. “It's been twelve years now that she passed away. A week doesn't go by that I don't wonder if I could have done anything to stop what happened. I console myself that perhaps her need to provide me with a son was too great. Even when she was alive, I felt she sometimes wanted me to do the things I did, that it was the only way she could live with her guilt. Not that it's any excuse, or that I'm not ashamed.”

Arya stared at the ice cream melting into his coffee, his expression clouded—with repentance or self-pity, I couldn't tell. Then he looked up at me. “I asked you here to show you something. Something I've been carrying around for a long time.” He took out a folded-up piece of lined paper, the type one tore out of a notebook, and handed it to me. “Over the years, I thought several times of talking to someone about it—showing it to Mataji or Hema. But I was never ready—I knew what they'd try to force me into, I knew what they'd say. Of course, when Dev died, I thought of sharing it with you. It took all my self-control to wait until today.”

I could see the impressions in the paper from the pencil strokes on the other side, the writing arranged carefully between the faint blue printed lines. I felt uneasy unfolding the sheet—if Arya had concealed this for so many years, there would surely be something unpleasant waiting inside. To my surprise, the sentences confronting me were scrawled out in the uneven hand of a child.

“You do recognize it, don't you?” Arya asked, but I shook my head. “Look carefully at the handwriting.” I scanned over the lines—the letters were so raggedly formed that it was hard to understand the words. Then my name jumped out from the text, and I stopped. “It's Sandhya,” Arya said, something I realized the instant before he uttered the words.

“She left it under my pillow—I found it the day after she died. I remember how anxiously she was trying to learn to write from Hema—it must have taken her forever to form those lines.”

He took the paper gingerly from my fingers, as if it might crumble if not handled carefully enough. “See how she's erased the first line? She never called me by name, so she must have had a difficult time deciding how to address me—she left it blank, finally. Isn't it amazing—to be married to someone for all those years and never once hear your name in their voice?”

He handed the paper back to me. “She'd have wanted you to read it. I have it memorized, anyway—
I'm going away now. I want to meet Devi Ma and ask her why she didn't answer my prayers.
Look how much care she took—it might be hard to read, but the grammar, the spelling, are both perfect.

“Please forgive me for all the years I've disappointed you. Please forgive me for any mistakes I've made. After I've gone, please marry again. I know there are many sons still waiting in your future. This time, marry someone like Meera who's more educated than myself. It will make you happier.”
Arya stopped, and looked away. “Every time I read that line, I feel so ashamed. She must have known, mustn't she? Caught my stares in your direction, seen all along what I thought I hid.”

I read the last sentences of the letter myself.
I pray your life gets filled with as much happiness as you have filled mine with. I will always worship you as my god.
She had not signed her name at the end.

“There's not so much else to add,” Arya said, still not looking at me.

“I've already told you I'm no longer the person you knew from before. Loss has a way of mellowing you, making you more mature. What Sandhya would've wanted—what you can read her wishing in the last thoughts in your hand, is, as you must guess, what I want as well. You know I already think of Ashvin as my own son. That will never change, whether or not you decide to complete my world.

“I'm not proud of the side I've shown you in the past. I know I will never meet anyone as refined, as beautiful, as cultivated as you. The only way I can prove that I've changed is if you give me a chance.”

I could certainly not claim that his proposal took me unawares. Still, I was stunned by how easily the obliqueness of the letters had been stripped off in a few plain sentences. “I'm not sure what to say,” I managed to respond.

Perhaps Arya read the apprehension in my face, because he leaned towards me over the table—so far that the straw from his glass brushed against his jacket pocket without him noticing. “You don't even have to move to Delhi. I can start working for the Bombay branch of the HRM. Ashvin could continue going to his school, and you could keep the friends you've made. I'd have to find some way to look after Mataji and Babuji, but it wouldn't be so hard with Hema living a half mile away.”

He sat back in his chair and began toying with his glass, looking at me carefully, as if trying to decide if he could trust me with a secret. “I don't know if you've been keeping track of what JP has been doing for the country these days. It's just a matter of time, you know, before he forces Indira to quit. When that happens, the HRM is going to be in the forefront—we're one of the few groups, he knows, who's supported him since the beginning. All the years the government has tried to keep us down—the pot is going to finally burst from the pressure under that lid. I warn all the new recruits to be prepared for changes in this country that no one can even imagine. All this corruption you see now, this kowtowing, this favoritism—the HRM is going to simply wipe all of it away. I could tell you more about the plans we have, but perhaps it's bad luck to talk at this premature stage.” I was glad to have him to go on, glad for the chance to hide my distress, to bring a noncommittal expression to my face.