The Death of Vishnu (22 page)

The questions descend again to torment Vishnu. How can he be a god if he has no power? Could he just be a man, the man he has been his whole life? If this isn’t divinity he is looking at, if it isn’t immortality, then what is it?

This is not the time to think of answers, Vishnu tells himself. His task, for now, is to keep ascending, and not waver until he reaches the top.

W
HEN HE WAS
first told the seriousness of Sheetal’s illness, Vinod was devastated. Not only by what the news meant for Sheetal, but also for him. The future he had constructed so painstakingly over the past few years in his mind would crumble, now that the person around whom he had built it was to be taken away. He sat in the hospital waiting room and felt the resentment grow underneath the sorrow—why had he been treated so unfairly by fate? He found his mind wandering to thoughts of what his life might have been had his parents married him to someone else.

By the time he started caring for Sheetal at home, Vinod’s inital shock had subsided. As the weeks went by, he found he was able to look deeper into Sheetal than ever before, to glimpse into her very soul, and see the strength that, even as she wasted away, held up the spirits of everyone else. “When I get well, I want to go to Kashmir,” she would say. Or, “We’ll go to Nepal for our second honeymoon.” It was always some place in the north, some place cold, some place far away from the Bombay where she knew she would be spending her remaining days.

The month she died, Vinod felt his love for his wife had become so strong that a part, maybe all, of him would die with her. He wondered if he would want to live after Sheetal. What if he decided not to? How would he kill himself? He started appropriating some of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed for Sheetal, taking one or two at a time, and storing them in an opaque brown bottle that he hid in the dressing table.

A few days before her death, Sheetal saw him take one of her pills. “I know what you are doing,” she whispered, her eyes half closed. “But it’s not your turn yet. Wait until your turn comes.” She fell asleep.

That evening, he flushed all the pills down the toilet. He went down to the rocks at Breach Candy and threw the empty brown bottle into the sea. In the days that followed Sheetal’s death, he often regretted his decision. But he did not try to reverse it. Sheetal’s command had been one of the last things she had said to him, and he would obey it.

His mother tried several times to get him remarried. But he had closed the door to this possibility. He felt he had already experienced whatever there was to be experienced between a husband and a wife, that he had shared a part of himself with another person in a way too profound to be duplicated. There was a reason fate had brought him to this spot. It would be up to fate now to lead him somewhere else.

With nothing else to do, Vinod immersed himself in his work. Over the next fifteen years, he was promoted to manager and then senior supervisor. The flat had already been paid for by his father, and with the simple needs of his single life, he didn’t need much. Then, one after the other, his parents died, leaving him their old apartment, which by now was worth a large amount of money. At the age of forty-five, Vinod found he had enough wealth to last him his whole life. He resigned from his job.

A
T FIRST, VINOD
stayed home. He found it a relief to stop pretending he was really interested in his work, that his job was anything more than activity with which to fill his day. Colleagues from the bank called in the beginning, but the phone soon stopped ringing. He began spending his days in bed, getting up for food, or to play his record.

What would happen, he started thinking, if he just remained in his flat? Ate less and less, and waited for his existence to end? Who would find his body, how long would it take? Probably Tall Ganga, he decided—she still stopped by occasionally to ask if there was something he needed. He wondered if this was what had been ordained for him—if tired of forging the corridor that was his life, the stars had simply decided to seal it off.

He was surprised to feel guilt at these thoughts, guilt at the listlessness in which he had allowed himself to be enveloped. All around him were reminders of activity—the knock of Tall Ganga at his door, the smell of tar from the resurfaced street outside, the call of vegetable hawkers, the dust and din of traffic. What gave him the right to stop, to surrender his existence to such self-indulgent rumination?

On the other hand, what did he have left to pursue? What goal could he conjure up to validate the rest of his life? Perhaps it was outside himself that he should seek the answer—some external cause, a good and noble one, in which he could discover meaning again. He had never thought of himself as an altruist, a social worker, but the idea began intriguing him. Surely a city like Bombay must be teeming with unmet needs, waiting to bestow well-being on the person who filled them. He contacted Mr. Wazir, an old philanthropist friend of his father’s. Upon Mr. Wazir’s recommendation, Vinod was invited to join the board of the Greater Bombay Social Cooperative.

The motto of the GBSC was “Through united hands we uplift the life of the slum-dweller.” The first meeting Vinod attended turned out to be a field trip to the Dharavi slum, where a project had been underway for several years to improve the water supply. Several of the residents were presented shiny brass taps, and Mr. Kailash, the GBSC president, promised pipes to attach them to, very soon. The slum children went around and garlanded each of the board members (including Vinod), after which the board retired to the bus for cold drinks.

“The beers are in the icebox in the back,” Mr. Kailash explained, as Vinod was trying to decide between a Limca and a Gold Spot. “We can’t take them outside because of the alcoholism project we’re sponsoring here.” Mr. Kailash introduced Vinod around the bus to the other board members, most of whom were industrialists. A few looked puzzled when Vinod said he had been a bank manager.

“But that’s why Wazir sahib recommended you,” Mr. Kailash said, pouring himself a Kingfisher beer. “We need someone we can trust. These bloody contractors are all thieves. They deserve a good thrashing, every last one of them.”

It seemed natural for Vinod to volunteer for the task of dealing with the contractors. With the nose he had developed at the bank for detecting irregularities, he was able to intercept and put an end to some of their tricks. But detective work was not enough. Vinod was eager to do more, to experience the satisfaction of labor, to distance himself as much as possible from the inertia of his month at home. He started spending his days at the construction site, busying himself with checks and inventories, offering assistance where needed, even helping to lay pipes once in a while. Night after night, he returned exhausted to his flat and put on a pot of water to boil for his bath. As he watched the grime from his body swirl across the tile and vanish into the drain, he tried to think of the day when water would flow just as freely for the residents of Dharavi.

One of the women on the board was Mrs. Bhagwati, who had taken over her husband’s seat after he had suddenly died of a stroke. When the weather got cooler, Mrs. Bhagwati started accompanying Vinod to Dharavi once a week. Vinod was pleased to have someone help with the contractors. Of late, they had grown very resentful of his presence, and they were staging regular slowdowns to embarrass him. Mrs. Bhagwati, with the vast soap-making fortune her husband had left behind, was quickly able to lubricate the gears and move things along.

A few months after her deepened interest in the slum-dwellers’ welfare, Mrs. Bhagwati invited Vinod, along with the other board members, to a party at her house. By now, everyone knew Vinod as the person who was going to turn the Dharavi project around, and Mr. Kailash even proposed a toast to “bank manager sahib.” Vinod was polite to the other guests, and to their conversation about factories and unions, but it was the buffet table which dominated his interest. It had been years since he had eaten so well, and when the servants carried in the main course of stuffed pomfret, he was quick to excuse himself and make his way to the table.

“Basmati with cashews,” Mrs. Bhagwati said from behind him as Vinod helped himself to the stuffing spilling out delicately from the pomfret’s belly. “I had a hunch you might like it.”

Towards the end of the party, Mrs. Bhagwati asked Vinod if he would mind staying until after all the guests had left, since she wanted to go over some questions about next week’s site visit. So as Mrs. Bhagwati bade her guests goodbye, Vinod sat by himself in the TV room, and a servant put on the video of a new movie,
Romeo in Bombay.

Vinod had not seen a movie for many years, not since
Jeevan
. He found this one quite interesting, since it had Reshma and Amitabh Bachchan in it, two actors he had heard about, but never seen.

A half hour into the movie, Mrs. Bhagwati came into the TV room. Vinod noticed she had changed into a salwar kameez, which was a lot less formal than the saris she always wore. He was surprised at how tightly the kameez clung to her body, how it pulled at the contours of her figure and thrust her bosom forward. He tried not to look at Mrs. Bhagwati’s breasts.

“Would you like a Scotch?” Mrs. Bhagwati offered “Black Label—I picked it up myself at the Singapore duty-free.” Vinod politely declined.

“Shall we discuss the visit now?” Mrs. Bhagwati asked, and Vinod had to make an effort to give up the movie, which had suddenly become very riveting. Reshma had been kidnapped by Shatrughan Sinha, who was a villain Vinod had also never seen before, and the hero was about to burst into the den where she was being held.

“Let’s go into the other room,” Mrs. Bhagwati said, and reluctantly, Vinod followed.

The other room turned out to be a bedroom, and suddenly it struck Vinod that the questions Mrs. Bhagwati was interested in discussing might not involve slum-dwellers. He started feeling very uncomfortable, and Mrs. Bhagwati, being an industrialist’s wife, picked up on this discomfort at once.

“I’ll get to the point, Vinod—it’s one thing my husband taught me to do. It’s hard to look at twenty-five, thirty, or however many years we have left, hard to look at them and see only solitude. Fate may have decided we sleep in an empty bed night after night, but we don’t have to listen to fate.”

Vinod wished he had eaten less of Mrs. Bhagwati’s pomfret. Somehow, in spite of all the site visits on which Mrs. Bhagwati had accompanied him, he had not seen this coming. In retrospect, he supposed it had been quite naive of him to think she
enjoyed
going to slums, when she had such a nice bedroom and all the new actors to watch with a click of her TV.

“Here’s my proposal, Vinod. I’ve seen you on the board. I’ve worked with you, side by side, in the dirt and disease of Dharavi. I know you’re an honest person. I know you want to improve the lives of the slum people.”

Vinod tried, but could not recall having worked in dirt or disease with Mrs. Bhagwati. As for the rest, he supposed it was true, though of late he had wondered whether his motives were purely unselfish.

“Marry me, Vinod. We will make each other happy. All my wealth will be at your disposal, to spend on whatever little slums you want to improve. It’s not a small amount, Vinod—together, we can clean up the filth with our own four hands, clean up the whole city of Bombay.”

Vinod had a vision of Mrs. Bhagwati, dirt-streaked and sweating, digging canals and ditches all over the city. To bring water to the teeming residents and clear away the sewage from their homes. He looked at her, standing in the tight kameez, her hair unraveled from its customary bun, the silence broken only by the sound of Reshma singing faintly in the adjoining room. Mrs. Bhagwati was not an unattractive woman. He had not been with anyone for more than sixteen years.

Vinod went up and kissed Mrs. Bhagwati on the cheek. Mrs. Bhagwati made a small sound in her throat, and closed her eyes. He looked at her mouth and noticed that her lipstick made her lips look quite moist. They were slightly parted, and past them, Vinod could just make out the gleam of her front incisors.

He was about to kiss her on the mouth when behind her he noticed Mrs. Bhagwati’s dressing table. It was covered with jars and vials, and had a large mirror attached, just like Sheetal’s used to. He remembered the slots for lipstick, the compartments for makeup and jewelry, and at the bottom, the drawer where he had hidden the brown bottle with the pills. How long ago had he carried the bottle to Breach Candy? It had bobbed in the water for a while, and almost smashed against a rock, but then a receding wave had borne it out to sea. He wondered if it had ever washed ashore again, perhaps at Chowpatty or Juhu, where an urchin might have found it and added it to his bag of salvaged glass to sell to the recycler.

Vinod wondered if that day he had done the right thing. Had his life been worth living since then? He thought about this question as he walked home all the way from Colaba, where Mrs. Bhagwati lived. He had abruptly said his goodbye to her, leaving her standing in her bedroom with the TV room attached, where the Amitabh Bachchan–Reshma movie was still playing. He walked past the Gateway, and looked at the boats in the distance, their lights like oil lamps floating in the still, dark water.

He took the long way home, past Regal Cinema, past Nariman Point, down Marine Drive, past Chowpatty, staying next to the sea as far as possible. Looking for the occasional seagull that still flew by, wondering if the fish were still swimming about in the water. At Kemp’s Corner, he paused, and stared at the Air India billboard. The Air India maharaja was advertising flights to New York City. “Uncle Shyam wants you!” the sign said, with the maharaja wearing a hat with stars and stripes on it and pointing a finger at passersby. For a moment, he wondered if he should keep walking until he reached the airport at Santa Cruz, get on a plane there, and go to the United States. Leave Mrs. Bhagwati and the board behind, leave the slums where they stood, leave his life and just go away. Then he remembered he didn’t have a passport, or visa, or, for that matter, money with him to buy a ticket. He looked once more at the glint in the maharaja’s eyes, the expression that said it wouldn’t take no for an answer. Then, thinking about the sea behind his building, the water that stretched past the horizon, the lands, the countries, the continents, that lay beyond, and above them all, the sky, with its unexplored worlds, its planets, its moons, its sun, and its endless constellations of stars, Vinod continued his homeward journey.