The Death of Vishnu (17 page)

And was becoming heavier still.

A shiver ran through Short Ganga’s body as she felt the first thrill of scientific discovery. How could she have not noticed it before? All those years of carrying things, all those times she had panted and strained and barely made it to the top floor. She had always blamed herself, thought it was she who was tiring out. But how much more obvious was this new explanation, how much more intuitive and logical. It was the height that was to blame, not she, the height that added kilo after kilo to her load, as she trudged up the floors.

An intense curiosity awakened in Short Ganga. She found herself driven to perform experiments. Each day, she assessed the weight of her tiffin boxes, both on the ground and the top floor of every building she climbed. She did the same with her bottles of milk. One day, she even borrowed a ten-kilo measuring weight from the bania merchant and struggled with it up several flights of stairs, all for the sake of her science.

Every result confirmed her conjecture. Every object she experimented with became heavier—the higher she went, the more weight things gained. But her experiments left her dissatisfied, thirsting for more. She wanted more precision, she wanted to quantify the weight gain. She tried to borrow the weighing scales from the bania, but he refused.

It was then that she was confronted by an exception to her theory: her treasured pieces of Styrofoam. She retrieved them from between the saris in her iron trunk one day and carried them to the second floor of the Makhijani building. They did not feel any heavier. She went up to the third floor, then the fourth and the fifth, but the pieces did not feel different. No matter to what height she took them, they refused to put on weight.

For a while, Short Ganga lapsed into depression at this setback. But then she put things in perspective. On the one hand was the mountain of evidence she had assembled, on the other a solitary aberration. Why not just ignore the Styrofoam? It was stolen, anyway—perhaps that was what jinxed it.

She decided it was time to reveal her results. She would leave out the part about the Styrofoam. But whom should she talk to? The other gangas could hardly be expected to appreciate such sophisticated concepts. Besides, what if one of them decided to steal her discovery, to claim all credit for it? She had to be very careful. There might even be some money due to her for having made her scientific advance. Perhaps there was a government bureau to which she should be submitting a claim. It would not do to trust one of the gangas. No, it had to be someone else, someone knowledgeable and trustworthy, who would not take advantage. Someone like—Mr. Taneja, perhaps.

It had not taken long to decide on him. He was the most likable customer she had. One customer like him made up for a building full of Asranis and Pathaks. Short Ganga looked at the steps in front of her, cut so high she could barely mount them. Three floors of these she climbed every day, just to make sure Mr. Taneja got his lunch. She pulled herself up the last few steps and paused outside his door, waiting to catch her breath.

Would this be a good day to approach Mr. Taneja? She could tell him first about Vishnu being sick, then casually break her theory to him. Even offer to let him carry the tiffin box to the terrace so that he could have a demonstration. What would his reaction be?

Short Ganga’s hand hovered near his doorbell. Her instructions were simply to leave the tiffin box on the landing, but she sometimes rang the bell, just to catch a word with him, and make sure not too many days went by without anyone seeing him. Mr. Taneja was never upset when he was summoned this way to the door. Rather, it was she who felt guilty at the intrusion. His wife’s death had occurred years before she had come to the building. But people still behaved as if Mr. Taneja’s tragedy was fresh, as if his name had to be spoken in a whisper, and he still needed to be handled like someone fragile. Short Ganga often wondered about this—what was it about Mr. Taneja that prompted such a reaction? Perhaps it was the feeling one got even as one looked into his eyes and conversed with him that he was not wholly present, that a part of him was afloat somewhere else, lost in a private sea of contemplation. She herself could not stop treating him with the care reserved for the very elderly, or the very sick.

She was still debating about the doorbell when the song started. The music welled up in waves, and riding the crests came the first of the lyrics. Short Ganga imagined Mr. Taneja standing over the gramophone, alone in his room. She knew this song, knew for whom it was played. Today, she decided, would not be the day after all.

Short Ganga left the tiffin box next to the door and walked back silently to the steps.

V
INOD TANEJA LISTENED
to the words.

For years after Sheetal had gone, he had played the song at the same time, day after day. He still remembered to play the record at least once a week. Sometimes he stood next to the gramophone, but often he went to the balcony and let the music waft out to him as he looked at the cars and the buses three floors below.

Little had he known, when he had first listened to the banal lyrics, that over the years, every note on the record, every word, every sound, would become an indelible part of him. It had been Sheetal’s favorite song from the last movie they had seen together, and he had wandered into a music store a few weeks after her death to buy it. He watched it now, the red label in the center a little faded with age, but the dog-and-gramophone logo still clearly visible, the surface of the disc almost as unscratched as the day he had first played it twenty years ago. Of course, the grooves had dulled over the years, but the sound was still so surprisingly clear.

The record had been a journal that had charted his recovery after Sheetal. Day after day, year after year, he had taken his emotional pulse as he had listened to it. In the beginning, there had been no pulse. He had performed each task dutifully: cranking the handle, placing the record on the turntable, setting the needle down, receiving the notes transmitted. But these had not added up to the experience of listening to the song. It had been some weeks before he had actually sensed the music, and even more time before he had heard the lyrics. Then, one day, it had happened—suddenly, he could see Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari on the CinemaScope screen, feel Sheetal’s hand resting under his own in the cool darkness of the movie theater. That’s when he had begun to cry, his tears so big and splashy that he had shut the gramophone lid, afraid of getting them over the record. For months, he had been able to listen to only part of the song before breaking down.

A year later, it was only anguish he felt when he heard the song. A deep, penetrating, physical anguish, the kind that comes when a dentist drills too deep into a tooth. Over time, this anguish had gradually dulled, leaving behind only the memory of pain; a quiet, almost sweet numbness which lingered in the hollow where the ache had been rooted. Now, even that numbness was fading.

This was the part, the part near the end, that always took him back. Back across the fading nights and days, filled with dimly remembered happiness and pain; back through all the doorways traversed, both alone and hand in hand with Sheetal; back through the ravaged map of his existence, with the stars that drew it burning triumphantly above. Vinod looks at the record and waits to see her, he looks at the rotating blackness of the disc, and waits for her image to emerge.

O
N THE DAY
Vinod passed his Bachelor of Commerce exam, his father announced they had found a suitable match for him. Would he have any objection to marrying Sheetal, the niece of his uncle’s wife, who had been at Paplu’s birthday party last week?

Vinod remembered seeing her there. He hadn’t paid her any special attention, nor had he tried to talk to her, although he was sure he had said hello once at a previous family function. She was not the most beautiful woman he had laid eyes on, but on the other hand, he couldn’t remember any obvious physical defects either. Thinking about it overnight, he could come up with no particular reason to either reject or endorse the match. The wedding was negotiated that very week.

A few days later, he found himself at the house of his future in-laws. Sheetal’s mother brought out the sets of jewelry that were to be given with the bride and laid them out for his family’s inspection. His mother put on her reading glasses, and lifting the pieces from their red velvet boxes, started examining them one by one. Vinod watched the proceedings for a while, and then, with nothing to do, picked up a necklace himself, and held it up against his palm.

He was trying to follow a point of light as it skittered from stone to stone when his eyes met Sheetal’s. He was startled by the disdain in them, a disdain so keen he had to look away. He put the necklace down immediately, then tried to catch Sheetal’s eye again. But she did not look up, keeping her face properly lowered through the rest of the meeting.

He saw her next a few weeks after that, at their engagement. He wanted to talk to Sheetal then, but their eyes did not meet once during the entire ceremony. Even when he offered her the laddoo, Sheetal did not raise her head, but waited for him to bring it to her mouth, so she could take a delicate bite.

The period between the engagement and wedding passed by in a haze. Vinod spent the days at his new job in the bank, and his evenings as before, gathering with friends at the café near Churchgate. There were many jokes about his impending union, but somehow he managed not to think about how his life was going to change. The wedding always seemed to be at least a few days away, and Vinod occupied his hours without letting himself worry about it.

It was only when he saw his garments being tied to Sheetal’s that the enormity and irreversibility of the situation hit him. He was getting married, and he did not know why, or to whom. He looked up at the guests and relatives all around and heard them whispering and saw them smiling at him. He suddenly felt like protesting—there had been a mistake, it hadn’t sunk in, he hadn’t had the time to think about it, it had all been too hastily arranged. He saw the fire at the center of the gathering, the priest chanting and spooning ghee into the flames. The vapors were so strong he could taste them. He felt a gentle tug on his clothing, and realized that the seven circles had started. The fire always to his left, a hush spreading over the crowd, the priest reaching out to throw camphor into the flames, Sheetal behind him, tied to his body by her sari, destined to follow him forever. The fire seemed to grow more intense with each round, the flames jumped into the night air, and he wondered if they might leap out and set the knot that tied him to Sheetal aflame. Buds of white swayed and dissolved before his eyes as the curtain of flowers hanging in strings from his turban swung in front of his face. He wished the curtain was more impermeable, so that he could shut out the sights in front of him, so that he would not feel the heat of the fire he imagined on his face, or hear the priest’s stream of Sanskrit, growing steadily unbearable in his ears. On and on the circles went—three, four, five, six—and he wondered if he could quit before completing the seventh one, run through the guests and vault over the walls of the mandap to freedom. But then his feet had crossed the threshold for the seventh time, and then Sheetal’s feet, the edges stained orange with henna, were crossing it too.

And then he was entering their wedding-night room and closing the door; the sounds of giggling were left outside, and his bride was sitting on the petal-strewn bed. He had seen this scene so many times before—Raj Kapoor and Nargis, Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, the heroine always in embroidered silk, the groom in impeccable white, and when the hero pulled back the heroine’s ghunghat, she kept her eyes closed. He reached out to lift the cloth, and his hand wavered. What if Sheetal’s eyes were staring at his, defiant, with the look of that first day? But his wife must have seen the same films he had, because when he looked under the cloth, her eyes were closed, the dots painted in ceremonial white forming a serene arch over her eyebrows. For a second, he wondered if he should break into song as they did in the movies. Instead, he lifted her head slowly, and asked her to open her eyes.

In that first clear look into the eyes of the person with whom he was supposed to spend the rest of his life, he was relieved to find not defiance but curiosity, not disdain but unfamiliarity, not love but not dislike, either.

They sat there next to each other, the layers of clothing and ornaments they were wearing too intimidating to allow conversation, let alone intimacy. More daunting was the fact that they had met only twice since the engagement, that too under the supervision of a caucus of chaperons. The silence pressed around them, as oppressive as the heat and the humidity in the air.

Vinod cleared his throat, preparing to say something. But no topic of conversation suggested itself. He gazed at the new ring banding his finger. How were they going to fill all the minutes, all the hours, between now and the end of their time together?