The Two Krishnas (17 page)

Then, finally, at the age of fifty-three, Zainab had gone and done it again.

Vanished.

* * *

Pooja shut the door behind her and faced the standing full-length oval mirror in the bedroom. Her home, silent now that Ajay had sprinted off with his friends, became a charterhouse again, a place where belongings lay everywhere but nobody but herself seemed to reside anymore. Without the pandemonium of TV, or a soundtrack of music, you could hear the ghosts, their phantom sounds marking past moments of shared laughter.

She began to unwind her sari, keeping her eyes on her reflection. Folds of chiffon fell without protest on the carpeted floor, a pond of gold paisleys in an ocean of saffron. She continued to shed endless yards of it, thinking of Draupadi, whose honor Krishna had defended when her five husbands, the Pandava brothers, had gambled her away to their Machiavellian half-brothers. She unhooked her blouse, stepped out of her
gagra
and stood naked with only the gold bangles on her slender wrist, the voluptuous earrings dangling against the velvety mane of her black hair, the almost glowing bindi on her forehead.

She stepped closer to the mirror and looked at herself, drawing her uncertain hand over her skin. Her flesh broke out in little goose pimples. By all accounts, she was still a beautiful woman, able to turn heads wherever she went. She should have seen that her skin was still smooth and soft. The few wrinkles that traced through her tea-colored skin were more like beautiful rills racing across a seastrand, the curves in her body like sensual dunes in which to lie.

But she could see none of this.

Instead she saw Rahul’s rejection, how time had carried out its careless dalliance with her body. She saw the brackets etched permanently around her full mouth, no longer just an indention from the smiles she had reserved for Rahul. She saw—not the ampleness of her breasts or the tamarind in her nipples—but their weight and slump. She ran her hand over her belly, no longer the taut landscape of a young girl but that of a mother, soft and fleshy.
Is that when it stopped?
she wondered
. Did he stop wanting me, looking at me the same way after I gave him his son? Or did it begin before that, after the nightmare back home?

She summoned more strength and let her fingers traverse further, into the thatch of hair where she wanted him again, recalling the last time he had come to her, angry, grueling, backbreaking. Yes, she would take him any way he would come to her, especially if he was suffering. He was her husband, her lord, and the years had done nothing to dissipate her desire for him. After all this time, she still burned for Rahul.

All her life, someone had needed her. For a while it had been Rahul, during those nightmarish days that they had struggled to forget and which they never spoke about. Then Ajay had tugged at her with all the need of a growing child, and while Rahul had drifted from her—more meetings, client appointments, longer hours at the bank—this had given her gravity. Suddenly, she was left without purpose.

While she had tried, as any self-respecting Indian woman would, to let her husband initiate their lovemaking, to be there for the taking and not to take, she simmered with desire for him and the passing years, instead of quelling her desire, only seemed to encourage it like a consistently fanned fire. Pooja remembered how in
Bhagavata Purana
, it was said that when Krishna’s beloved Gopis danced with him on the moonlit banks of the Yamuna, they assumed the outward form of all his masculine qualities. Even though by nature they were not the lovers but the object of their lord’s love, the women became so aroused that they changed into men.

Her fingers dug into her, in the moist and primordial regions of her being, alien even to herself. Her body began quivering, her eyes filled up. Somewhere she could hear a dog barking, children playing. Pooja closed her eyes, let her head fall back and she saw Rahul more than twenty years ago, like in a dilapidated film, dressed in white, walking across a cricket field to her, his eyes boring holes into her skin.

She summoned her husband, her
Shyam
, her personal god but as hard as she tried, he began to dissolve into a faceless lover, the celluloid spooling in her mind plagued with dust and scratches.

Home embraced Pooja. It cost a lot more to dial direct but the convenience and ease shocked her. Savita Bhatt sounded tired, the age creeping into her voice, and this depressed her. “Ma, are you alright? You don’t sound okay.”

“Yes, yes, we are all fine,
beti.
Don’t worry about us.”

“You are sure,
na?
Nothing wrong?”

“So, how is he? And my little grandson how is he also?”

“Not so little anymore, Ma.”

“And Rahul?”

“Okay. He’s okay,” she said, smiling but only to camouflage her sadness. “Busy, very busy. I’ll send some new pictures.”

“Hanh, hanh
, but that’s what you always say,
na?
‘I’m sending photos, I’m sending photos’ but where are they? You are sure you have the right address? You must be posting them to the moon because so far, we are not receiving anything. So long it has been since we have seen you,” she clucked her tongue. “What, do you think we have no feelings?”

Pooja smiled at the sudden emotional vigor in her mother’s voice, even if out of hurt. “Promise. I’m sending next week only,” she said. “You know, Ajay, he has this new camera. It’s digital and it takes such good photos. You can actually see the pictures then and there,
fata-fat
, right after you take them and, if you don’t like any, you can erase, just cancel them also.”

“Hanh, hanh
, don’t cancel-bancel anything! Just send!”

“And Papa?”

“He is here. Where else? Sitting outside in the verandah, cracking his finger joints. Papa is fine too, not to worry. Always eating my head everyday with his same old
bhashans
. Only now you are not here so I have to listen to everything,
na?
” She laughed. “Day and night there is something he must lecture about. Should have become Minister or something. Just his legs are hurting,
bas
. Arthritis,” then, without warning, she switched to reminiscing about just the two of them. “
Beti,
you remember our time together? Remember when you used to insist I sing
Jaago Mohan Pyaare
for your Krishna? How you wouldn’t stop eating my head until we brought the little one into the temple?” Even as a grown man, Krishna was best remembered by some as the mischievous little butter-thief of Vrindavan. The first statue they had installed in the puja room had been of cherubic Krishna caught red-handed with butter. At least this, Savita had reasoned, had been before the god’s more amorous phase.

Pooja smiled sadly. She could see herself sitting in front of the dressing table again, under her mother’s watchful eye, applying the bindi to her forehead, and hear them singing in the
puja
room. She felt the tears rising again but was thankful that she had already cried earlier, emptying herself out, so that now she was able to control herself a bit more easily. So much she wanted to say. That she was tired, lonely, homesick. At what point do daughters become mothers, the roles reversed, so that it’s no longer easy to admit your weaknesses for fear of worrying those who once took care of you?

“And you,
beti?
How are you?” Savita asked.

“You should see the demand for the
kaju
barfis
, Ma. Your recipe. Such a hit they are with my customers.”

“
Barfis
are good, I already know. But how are you?’

She gave a short laugh. “What’s wrong with me? I’m fine, just fine. Look, what about coming for a little holiday? We can send tickets for you and Papa.”

Savita did not answer immediately because she could already sense everything in her daughter’s voice and she did not ask why they couldn’t come and visit. She knew better. “Oh, Pooja, we are much too old now,” she said. “Sometimes I think it is better that you are there, you know. Lately, things, they are…so bad here,” she said, clucking away with her tongue. “And,
Hai Ram!
Everything is so expensive! There, you are at least safe. Your friend, that Rukhsana, you remember her, the one that cried every minute? Only God knows what has become of her. After marrying that boy Sajid, you know the one you all went to school with? That very quiet, nice boy? Well, he is going with some other woman now. She has left him now but I don’t think she is ever going to be okay, you know, up there. But, you know, she doesn’t cry anymore.
Bas,
just like that. Can you believe it? She doesn’t cry. Now that it makes sense to, she has run dry!”

“I miss you. I miss everything,” Pooja said, her voice quivering so that her hand went to her chest.

“Beti,”
Savita Bhatt started carefully. “We also miss you. Be strong.”

Pooja’s tears spilled over. She could feel her mother’s arms around her, smell her comforting perfume, and again her life in Los Angeles felt like an exile instead of the promising future it had once seemed.

Suddenly, her father’s voice came through. “Your Krishna is still here,” he said. “Fluting away in the
puja
room! Now, when are you coming home to save us from his deafening music,
henh?”

Pooja smiled. The arthritis had not dampened his fire. She tried to explain that her place was with her husband and child, that they needed her and she couldn’t just get up and leave for a holiday; but all the time her eyes rested on the bare dining room table across from her while she craved to be back home, subjected to his endless lectures.

“And listen,” her father added as a final enticement. “I won’t even insist you eat any beef curry.”

Whenever Pooja had delicately remonstrated on the slaughter of the sacred beast at the dinner table back home, her father would declare, “
Arré
, that is all hogwash.” Savita Bhatt would continue laying out the food, cooked by Munao, the house servant they had reluctantly agreed to share with the Hajis family next door, and trying to ignore both obstinate husband and daughter. “Hindus, they have always eaten meat. Where this bullshit about raising cows to your head has come from, only your God knows!” Then he would spoon voluminous quantities of the
kheema
masala—ground beef curry accented with green peas—onto his plate with extra vigor, as if to underscore his point.

“Hari, please, come on now. Let it go,” Savita said. “I have already made something for her,
nah
? Some tasty king fish and roti.” She looked at her daughter with adoration. “Okay, Pooja?”

Pooja nodded eagerly, relieved that she had been rescued from the peculiar and somewhat savage gastronomical habits of her incensed father.

“Where does she get this from?” Hari said. “Where does she get this from, I ask? You and I are not like this! Even her grandparents ate meat!”

Savita refrained from pointing out that Pooja’s maternal grandparents did not and rarely did she, and even then only to appease him.

“People are starving in this world and she’s giving me lectures on cow conservation! Where do you think your shoes come from,
henh?
Tree bark? Where is it written that we are not supposed to eat meat?” and then unfailingly, his theory on what he considered the pragmatic rather than religious reasons for the observance would follow: “Do you know that there are temples in India where meat is also distributed as part of
prasad
?” Of course, Hari neglected to specify the whereabouts of the mysterious temples where meat was being offered as a blessing.

But thirteen-year-old Pooja couldn’t care less. The fact that her beloved Lord Krishna, known also as Gopala, Govinda, and Gorakshaka (all meaning protector of cows) was often depicted with a cow in
murtis
and paintings supplied further proof of its sacredness, and the incumbent role of the devotee to uphold Lord Krishna’s bulwark.

Of course, there was no stopping Hari Bhatt when he was on a rant; the veteran high school teacher in him, the one popularly feared by his overwhelmed students, took over. Between mouthfuls of roti and spiced meat, he explained how the Hindu scriptures did not specifically prohibit the killing or consuming of cows, that the cow was undoubtedly highly regarded, almost like a pet, but it was the beast’s ability to provide milk and till the land, not some Vedic mumbo-jumbo, that had secured its place in the home and not on the plate.

“Do
gopalan
and not
gopujan!”
Raise cows, don’t worship cows! Hari declared, freely plagiarizing his hero Veer Savarkar, the famous revolutionary and progressive mind. “
Aa che neh badhui Krishna na kaam chhe!”
This is all Krishna’s fault!

Even here Pooja was different from her parents. While Hari Bhatt had observed a respectful yet detached relationship with the gods—occasionally pulled into
puja
and compulsory sociability during religious celebrations by the craftiness only a wife could muster up—he prided himself in his ability to rise above religious orthodoxy. He was not above blaming the gods for their double standards, Krishna for his promiscuous dalliances and the resident Lord Rama, the object of Savita Bhatt’s worship, for being the most misogynistic and pompous of them all.

Mortals and near-sacred national heroes also were not beyond Hari Bhatt’s reproach. He was proud to harbor what he claimed were still revolutionary ideas, calling most Indians buffoons who couldn’t think for themselves and steeped in Bollywood and corruption. “Hunh! So much for the Mahatma! Did you know that even Gandhi, for all his concerns about fairness and reformation, was a firm believer that people should continue in their hereditarily ordained professions? For him Hinduism was all about remaining in your station: a cobbler must remain a cobbler, a sweeper a sweeper. So why shouldn’t the imperialists stay as such? They were born to loot the world! True? True?”