The Death of Vishnu (19 page)

They were finishing breakfast one morning when Vinod noticed the untouched omelette on his mother’s plate. He asked if something was wrong.

“She’s put onion in it,” his mother said sadly, in a whisper loud enough for Sheetal to hear. “She knows I’m not allowed onion on Wednesday because of my fast.”

“Why didn’t she remind me?” Sheetal asked from the sink, without turning around. “What kind of fast is this, anyway, that one can eat meat and egg but no onion?”

“See the way she talks to me? This is how I’m treated day after day while you’re away.” His mother’s eyes had misted, and a tear was threatening to roll down one cheek.

“Tell her not to pretend so much. It’s all for your benefit. We’ve all seen what her tongue is like—it could cut holes through cloth.”

“Sheetal!” Vinod exclaimed, getting up from his chair, as his mother dissolved into sobs.

“I’m tired of trying to satisfy her. She’s never happy with anything I do. Tell me why she can’t make her own eggs, if she doesn’t like the ones I cook for her.”

His mother’s sobs rose to a wail, and Vinod found himself striding to where Sheetal stood. He felt a sting in the fingers of his right hand, saw a flash of disbelief light up his wife’s eyes. Then, head lowered, hand pressed against her reddening cheek, Sheetal left the room. Behind him, his mother blew her nose into a handkerchief.

Afterwards, Vinod went to work as usual. He sat at his desk the whole morning, his head burning as if ravaged by some disease. He returned home early, bringing along two cups of ice cream in the flavors Sheetal liked best, choconut and pista. His mother was taking a nap in the living room, and he crept past without waking her. Sheetal was not in the bedroom. A stack of his clothes, neatly ironed and folded, lay on the bed.

He put the cups on the dressing table and went to the kitchen to look for Sheetal.

“She’s gone,” his mother said. She had awoken, and was sitting on the couch, preparing herself a paan. “She went to her mother’s, I expect.”

“But why didn’t you stop her?”

“What am I, crazy, to stick my nose between husband and wife? Don’t worry, she’ll be back when she cools off—she only took a few clothes.” His mother cracked some betel nut between the blades of her nutcracker. “Today’s girls. Such temper. Such arrogance. We were taught to touch our husbands’ feet and thank them whenever they saw fit to teach us a lesson.”

His mother folded up her paan and popped it into her mouth.

Sometime that evening, he remembered the ice cream he had bought. It had all melted, so he put it in the freezer.

Sheetal did not return for seven days. His mother kept assuring him that she would come back, and that he had done the right thing.

“It’s best to make things clear from the beginning only,” she said. “That way, they don’t get out of hand.” He nodded in agreement, but every night his spirit grew wearier as he made his way to the empty bedroom.

One week after the slap, Sheetal’s father escorted her back in the evening. His mother received them in the living room, as she would any guests, and his father talked to Sheetal’s father about the price of petrol. Her father did not stay for dinner but hugged Sheetal and left at about eight o’clock. No mention was made of the slap.

Dinner was quiet and tense. Sheetal didn’t look up once, eating everything with her eyes lowered towards her plate. His mother started to say something once or twice, but caught the warning glance in Vinod’s eyes and kept silent. Afterwards, his parents cleared out of the room more quickly than usual. Sheetal took the dishes to the sink and started wiping the food off them.

“You don’t have to do that,” Vinod said, coming up behind her. “The ganga will do it in the morning.”

Sheetal did not turn around. She turned on the tap and started washing a plate.

“Leave them and come with me,” Vinod said, wrapping his arms around hers.

“Let me do the dishes first. After all, isn’t this why you married me?” Sheetal turned around. The accusation was so strong in her eyes that Vinod had to look away.

“Isn’t it?” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, then said it again. “I’m really sorry. I’ve missed you. I’ll never let it happen again. Please forgive me.

“Please forgive me,” he repeated. His voice felt so weak that he wondered if he was going to cry. “This has been the worst week of my life.”

She softened but didn’t forgive him, not quite then. When he brought out the two cups of ice cream, she ate the pista one first, then the choconut one as well, not offering him any, and not smiling when he joked about the crystals formed because of refreezing. That night in bed, she maintained a gap between their bodies, shifting away with a start whenever he touched her, even accidentally.

The period of probation lasted for a month. One day, soon after that, she came into his arms. “Let’s look for a place of our own,” she said.

O
NCE THEY MOVED
into the flat above the Jalals, Vinod noticed a new softness begin to flower in Sheetal’s personality. Day after day, night after night, she became more relaxed, even more receptive in bed. Some evenings she even allowed herself to be led into the bedroom before they had eaten dinner. A trace of color began to show in her cheeks, and she put on some weight, though Vinod still worried that she looked too thin. Her relationship with his mother became cordial, almost loving, except when his mother raised pointed questions about why it was taking so long for them to produce a grandson.

Sheetal adored the flat, despite the three flights of stairs that had to be walked up to get there, and despite the church in front of their building that cut off the view of the sea that could have otherwise been theirs. It was close enough to Vinod’s bank that he could come home for lunch every day. On some afternoons Sheetal would pack the food in his tiffin box and they would carry it downstairs to eat in the shadow of the pipal tree spreading over the church courtyard. They both looked forward to Wednesdays, when Tall Ganga arrived earlier than usual, bringing along a freshly killed chicken, which she cooked into a curry under Sheetal’s supervision.

Sometimes Vinod wondered about Sheetal’s days. She shopped and cooked, he knew; she talked to Mrs. Jalal from downstairs and listened to Vividh Bharati in the afternoon; she hung up curtains and changed the sheets and watered the flowerpots on the balcony. But was that enough? Was that enough to occupy her, to make her happy, even, dared he ask, to fulfill her?

“It’s not so trivial,” Sheetal said, when he brought the question up one evening. “I’m a woman with a flat to run, not some girl playing house.”

They had seven happy years there. Then, at the insistence of his mother, they went to the hospital near the income-tax building to find out why Sheetal had not become pregnant yet. By then, as the specialist from Bangalore explained to them, the cancer had already spread beyond the uterus. A hysterectomy was performed, and Sheetal underwent various other treatments and therapies. When the doctors were finished with her, she was allowed to come back to spend her last six months at home.

Sheetal’s illness was so unexpected that for a while Vinod felt as if he were in one of those melodramatic tearjerkers, the ones that always completed silver jubilees at theaters like Roxy or Opera House. Suddenly his life became one long undulation of visits to the chemist and the temple, of hours spent blankly at work, of nights passed watching his wife’s face as she rested. Then, before he could prepare himself, the routine ended—the dressing table was cleared of prescriptions, the extra blankets were packed away, and all that was left of Sheetal was a photograph on the wall, its frame adorned with a single strand of marigolds.

For a long time after she died, it seemed as if she was still around. As if she had been in the room with him a minute ago, and just gone downstairs to the store. She hated doing that, and would often wait until he came home from work rather than shop herself, even if all she needed was some coriander to complete the night’s dinner. “And get me a paan, too,” she would say, “if you’re going down anyway.”

Sheetal loved paan. Not the plain kind, but the sweet ones, with lots of coconut and candied betel nut and all the minty pastes and mixtures that the paanwalla kept in silver boxes around the circumference of his tray. “You missed that one,” she would say sternly, when she went down to get the paan herself. “At least don’t cheat your most regular customer.” And she would watch to make sure he did not shortchange her on the tiny silver candy pills which were her favorite ingredient. The paanwalla adored her, and asked after her every day when she fell ill. Even in the last few days, when she could barely chew or swallow, she insisted on having her paan. “It helps me relax,” she would say, as Vinod put the paan gently between her teeth, and for a moment, the familiar orange paan stain on her lips would be a blossom that brightened her face.

“Remember what you need to do after I’m gone, Vinod. Remember your promise to me, whatever you do, don’t forget,” Sheetal would gasp, as she tried to chew her paan, and Vinod would be by her side, kissing her hand, assuring her he would keep his promise, and wondering how he would.

For what Sheetal wanted, what she had become obsessed with in the last half year of her life, was to get into
The Guinness Book of World Records.

It was Vinod who had bought the book, as a present to celebrate her return from the hospital. Sheetal read it immediately and by that evening she had made up her mind—her name was going to be listed. She had never been truly exceptional at any activity. Now she would prove to the world that she, Sheetal Taneja, was in fact the best at something. The question was, what?

She read and reread the categories in the book, but there was nothing in which she could remotely hope to win. Her only chance would be to create a new category. One morning, she announced that she had decided on it: dialogue. She had always had a knack for memorizing it. “What if I memorize the dialogue of an entire movie? Surely they will have to put me in the book for that.”

She asked Vinod to fetch her the newspaper to see what was playing. There was so little time to lose. They would go the very next day.

She chose
Jeevan.
Life. There was irony in the title, since it starred Meena Kumari, who, as in many of her best movies, died in the end. What could be a better selection? Sheetal asked Vinod to borrow the new cassette recorder his brother had bought, the kind that could run on batteries. Vinod could record the whole soundtrack while he sat next to her.

It took her a full hour to dress. She wrapped her thin frame in the most cheerful sari she owned, and tried to cover the hollows in her face with makeup. Somehow, she steadied her hand enough to put on the lipstick, both on her lips and for the dot on her forehead. She asked Vinod to thread the earrings through her ears, and wore a necklace and gold bangles, even though they were only going to a matinee.

When the time came to go downstairs, she was unable to negotiate the steps. Eventually, she sat on one of the dining-room chairs, and Vishnu and the paanwalla carried her down, like a queen on a palanquin. Vinod took the two of them along to see the movie as well, so they could carry Sheetal upstairs to the balcony of the theater, where she had insisted on sitting.

They sat in the first row, right behind the railing. Sheetal watched most of the movie, though a few times when Vinod glanced over, her eyes were closed, as if she had lapsed into deep thought. Neither Vishnu nor the paanwalla had ever seen a movie from the balcony, and the paanwalla claimed several times that not only was the sound better up there but also the picture, because the screen was designed to send more light up to the expensive seats. It took three of the cassettes to record the two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack—Vinod was careful to reload the recorder during the songs, so that none of the dialogue would be lost.

The next day, Sheetal dictated a petition for Guinness, telling them what she proposed to do. Vinod took it to be typed by one of the professional typists in Tardeo, then mailed the letter himself at the post office, making sure the clerk canceled the stamps in front of him, as per Sheetal’s instructions, so nobody would take them off for reuse.

For the next two months, Sheetal lay next to the cassette recorder and memorized. Sometimes when the different roles on the soundtrack became too confusing, she recruited Tall Ganga to help her. “Don’t you have any shame, teasing girls like that,” she would berate Tall Ganga, who would slowly, awkwardly, mouth the hero’s response. Vinod would come home from work and hear Sheetal repeating “When I’m with you, my heart starts going
dhuk dhuk
—why do you think that is?” He would kiss her good night, and she would say, “Even if God forgives me, I won’t be able to forgive myself for what I have done.” Sometimes she would have a fever but still she would persevere, even if it meant memorizing only a few words that day.

Two months after seeing the movie, Sheetal made her first attempt. Vinod’s brother and sister-in-law were called in to act as witnesses, and everyone gathered around Sheetal’s bed to hear the recitation.

It was a disaster. Sheetal confused lines, forgot entire scenes, and became too emotional to continue when Dilip Kumar consigned his beloved’s ashes to the Ganges and watched them float away in the water. “This, the first night of our union,” Mohammed Rafi sang sadly on the tape as Vinod ushered everyone out of the room.

Sheetal grieved for days over her failure. She did not try again for almost three months. By then, she had deteriorated to a point where it was easy to convince her that she had done it, that she had managed to go through the entire movie. She went to sleep that afternoon already able to imagine her name in the book.

Three weeks before Sheetal died, the postman delivered a letter with a big blue-and-orange stamp from the United Kingdom. Sheetal got so excited that she forced herself to sit up in bed as Vinod opened the letter.

“Dear Mrs. Taneja,” Vinod read aloud, “Thank you for your recent petition regarding the creation of a new category for memorization of the dialogue of a movie. We regret to inform you that we do not anticipate adding this category at this time. We would, however, like to congratulate you on your most interesting achievement in this regard.”