The Death of Vishnu (23 page)

V
ISHNU STANDS IN
front of Vinod Taneja’s door. He has checked the entire landing, looked into every nook and cranny, searching for ants. He is glad he hasn’t found any, glad they have not made it to this level, glad he has risen above them.

He wonders who has been running Mr. Taneja’s errands while he has been ill. Who has been buying the toothpaste Mr. Taneja likes, the biscuits he eats with his tea?

Vishnu remembers the first time he went shopping for Mr. Taneja. It was for soap and a packet of blades, and Vishnu inflated the price by a good half rupee. He expected to be challenged, but Mr. Taneja just gave him what he asked for. Soon he was overcharging Mr. Taneja two or three rupees each time, and still, Mr. Taneja did not say anything.

Then the unexpected happened. Vishnu started feeling guilty. He tried telling himself that Mr. Taneja had enough money and would hardly miss a few rupees. Or that Mr. Taneja had certainly caught on by now, and must knowingly be paying the inflated prices. But the feeling persisted, and Vishnu was forced to roll back his add-on, first to a rupee, and then to half of that. Which did not eliminate his guilt, but made it recede to a tolerable level.

Now he feels ashamed of what he has done. Especially for a god, to act like that. Even if that was in his more forgivable human state. Perhaps he will come back down the stairs to apologize to Mr. Taneja. Surely this is someone that Kalki will save.

Only the last flight of stairs, the one to the terrace, remains. Vishnu takes the first step.

T
HE CROWD WAS
silent. Mr. Jalal stood at the door. Behind him was Mrs. Jalal, poised to pull him in if there was trouble. She wondered if she could risk leaving him alone for a few minutes to call the police. The phone, unfortunately, was in the front room, in full view of the door, and she was afraid that if she attempted to make the call, someone would try to stop her.

Mrs. Jalal stared at the faces of the people assembled. They were the same faces she had seen for years, yet they seemed so different now. The eyes, especially—all those years she had looked into them and seen only good-naturedness. Where had this brazenness come from, when had they filled with such contempt? Had it always been there, hiding behind all those greetings of “Namaste, memsahib,” watching, growing, until an excuse like this presented itself? How would she ever look at these people again, how would she ever walk past their shops, without a shudder running through her body?

For a while, nobody said anything. The cigarettewalla and paanwalla had not expected to actually confront Mr. Jalal and were unprepared to interrogate him. They stared at each other, and at the floor, shuffling their feet, and secretly wishing they were in the back of the crowd. Finally, the electrician asked, “Where is the Asranis’ daughter?”

“I have no idea,” Mr. Jalal replied, his brow unfurrowed, his voice calm. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”

“What did your son do with her?” the paanwalla asked, getting his voice back.

“What did
you
do with her?” the cigarettewalla demanded in a louder voice, spurred out of silence by the paanwalla.

“My son is visiting a friend. When he gets back, I’ll ask him. And I’ve already said I haven’t seen Miss Asrani for a long time.”

“Liar,” someone shouted from behind the cigarettewalla. “What were you doing with her dupatta around your face, then?”

“Yes, how did her dupatta leave her shoulders and find its way to your head?” the cigarettewalla added, determined not to let anyone hijack his leadership.

“That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about,” Mr. Jalal said, and murmurs of surprise rippled through the crowd. “I spent last night sleeping on the landing. With Vishnu.” There were more murmurs, and Mrs. Jalal put her sari worriedly to her face. “The dupatta was already on him when I came. I have no idea how it got there.”

Mr. Jalal paused to scan the crowd. The cigarettewalla, the paanwalla, the electrician—everyone was looking at him intently. How quickly fate had operated to bring him his audience. Surely this was another sign urging him to assume the role for which he had been chosen. He would make the most of it—he would try to win over the entire assembly, with this, his first sermon.

“This has been a long and difficult journey for me,” he began, “and last night my quest brought me to Vishnu.”

Mr. Jalal related his story. “A walnut, a walnut this big,” he exclaimed, holding up his fingers in front of the cigarettewalla and paanwalla’s faces, “right into my forehead.” He made his hand into a fist and slammed it into his head, noting with satisfaction the way their eyes widened. “That’s what allowed me to see.”

He recounted the vision. “Imagine a body with so many arms that it could pluck every one of you from where you stand. Imagine a being with so many mouths that it could crush you all between its jaws.” The cigarettewalla took a step back as Mr. Jalal grimaced and flung his arms into the air. “With smoke in its nostrils and flame in every breath.”

He was keeping their attention—they were hanging on his every word. A few of them had even set down their lathis and were squatting on their haunches, rapt in what he was saying. Why had he never recognized before this talent he had? This power to convince, this ability to hold an audience? As Mr. Jalal spoke, the crowd before his eyes began to multiply, until it was thronging down the steps and through the streets, all the way to Haji Ali.

“And I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that there is only one course of action that can save us all—to follow the directive that Vishnu has asked me to convey to you. Wake up and recognize him, before it’s too late.”

Mr. Jalal ended his account with a flourish. He beamed roundly at the assembly, like a politician finishing the speech that will get him reelected.

Silence hung over the crowd. The cigarettewalla rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

Then the electrician hissed, “You bastard.”

People turned to look at him. The triumph on Mr. Jalal’s face gave way to confusion.

“You damn bastard,” the electrician hissed again. “How dare you.”

“Yes, how dare you,” the cigarettewalla hissed as well.

“That was no dream. That was the Gita. The eleventh chapter. Did you think no one would recognize it? You made it all up about your dream, didn’t you? To save your own skin.”

Mr. Jalal gaped at the electrician. He had no idea what the man was talking about.

“How dare you make fun of poor Vishnu. How dare you throw our own Gita in our faces like that. What have you come here to do, you Muslim bastard, reveal Krishna to us?”

A seed of recollection blew into Mr. Jalal’s brain. Yes, there was something in the Bhagavad Gita—something about Krishna revealing himself—to Arjun, was it? It had been so long since he had read it—but yes, there was a familiar aspect to the dream, now that he thought about it. “But I
did
dream it,” he said, “even if it
is
in the Gita. This just proves my point—it had to be Vishnu speaking, not me.”

“Liar.” “Blasphemer.” “Cheat.”

The voices from the back were getting louder, so the cigarettewalla decided he had better assert himself. “How dare you even think of quoting our holy book to us, you unbeliever,” he said, even though he had little personal knowledge of the Gita, having never had it read out to him. “What kind of fools do you make of us? We’ll take you to the police.”

“Take him to the police?” the paanwalla said. “What rubbish—we’ll deal with him ourselves, right here, right now. What are you, too scared to punish this scoundrel yourself? If you can’t use that lathi, give it to someone who’s less of a coward.” With this, the paanwalla snatched the cigarettewalla’s lathi from his hands and gave it to a lathi-less person standing behind.

The cigarettewalla, angered by this abrupt usurpation of his authority, lunged for the paanwalla’s lathi, managing to catch one end of it. As the two were fighting over the bamboo, Mrs. Jalal, taking advantage of the diversion, pulled Mr. Jalal inside, and whispered to him to call the police.

Mr. Jalal was still trying to sort out the hostile reaction to his account. It was a reaction that had been completely unexpected. He had imagined his words would inspire the crowd to lay down their lathis, inspire them to rush downstairs and prostrate themselves at Vishnu’s feet. The preparations of the crowd to assault him were bewildering. Now, as his wife whisked him into the flat and pushed him towards the phone, he tried to recover his equilibrium and make sense of what was happening.

Obviously, the crowd had rejected his message. But why? He couldn’t see what the objection was, why having a dream about the Bhagavad Gita should disqualify the directive he was conveying. If anything, this should prove that his vision was grounded in ancient revelation, that it was authentic, and more than just a dream. What more evidence could they require?

It was then that Mr. Jalal looked through the living-room window, at the church across the street. A big white cement cross formed the front of the building. That was the answer, Mr. Jalal realized. He had not suffered. Prophets had to pay to be believed. They had to be tortured, they had to be flayed, they had to be crucified, and only then would people accept their message. Blood was the only watermark of revelation, suffering its only currency.

Mr. Jalal stood by the phone. He was close enough to pick it up, to dial a one, a zero, a zero. It would take five seconds, ten at the most. He saw his wife gesticulating to him, her eyes widening as she urged him to hurry up. He saw the paanwalla and the cigarettewalla stop their fighting and look up, the paanwalla’s nose flaring as he caught sight of the telephone within Mr. Jalal’s reach.

Surdas picked up the knife.

Mr. Jalal saw words form in his wife’s mouth, and did not hear anything.

It was a small ornamental knife, with a sharp, curved blade.

The paanwalla had come in through the door, and Arifa was screaming at him.

It had a wooden handle, with three diagonal marks on it.

The paanwalla was revolving his lathi above his head. As Mr. Jalal looked, the lathi seemed to move slower and slower, until it hardly seemed to be moving at all.

Now the crowd would witness the payment he was prepared to make, Mr. Jalal thought. The initiation he was willing to suffer for their sake. There would be pain, for sure, but the infliction of it would not be under his control. He would finally feel its beauty, the sheer experience of it. And he would not have to worry about when it would start, how it would be administered, or when it would stop.

The paanwalla was drawing within striking distance of him. The lathi had stopped rotating, and was now rising, ever so slowly, into the air. The paanwalla’s eyes were flickering, calculating—judging the speed of the lathi, estimating its distance from his body, adjusting for the amount of force with which he wanted it to land.

And Surdas went to the door and opened it. He turned his face to the horrified people assembled there.

The lathi had reached its apex, and was swinging down now, still in slow motion.

And said to them, Now I am free.

Mr. Jalal could hear the lathi whistling through the air. He braced his chest for its impact.

Now I am free,
Mr. Jalal thought, as he saw the wood make contact with his body and waited for the pain to register in his brain.

W
HEN MR. JALAL’S
nerves signaled to his mind the impact of the blow, he was transported once more to a familiar place. It was the same place he had visited when he had tried to read the Koran with his hand on the flame, the same place he had found himself the time he had joined the Muharram procession. Mr. Jalal was surprised, he was shocked, he was amazed, at the sheer painfulness of pain.

But this time was different, Mr. Jalal thought to himself, this time he really did not have control over it. Everyone who does penance must have to go through with this. It would be good for him, he would bear it, he simply had no choice, no escape.

The second blow landed. Thoughts about penance and martyrdom dissipated quite briskly with it, and were fully beaten out with the third. All Mr. Jalal could think of by now, all that every cell in his brain screamed, was ESCAPE. Mr. Jalal flailed around in the living room for the telephone, toppling the delicate table on which it was perched.

By the fourth blow, Arifa had come to his rescue, and was grappling with the paanwalla, holding his lathi-wielding arm and trying to bite it. Mr. Jalal was dimly aware of the paanwalla screaming out an epithet, and his wife saying through blood-stained teeth, “Run, Ahmed, run—to the bedroom.” He saw the electrician swing his lathi behind Arifa, and tried to warn her, but his mouth seemed filled with wool. As Mr. Jalal turned around to flee, he had a glimpse of Arifa sinking to the floor, a thin red line forming at her temple.

He was about to enter their bedroom when he remembered there was no latch on the door. So he swerved into Salim’s room instead, and slid the heavy metal bolt across—the one Salim had insisted on having installed for privacy. Almost immediately, there was the sound of pounding. Mr. Jalal heard the paanwalla say, “Let us in,” in a very reasonable tone.

The door seemed to strain and bulge. Mr. Jalal backed away from it, but the bolt held fast. He looked around the room, and found a chair to put under the doorknob. There was no other door in the room, only two windows and the balcony. Unlike the one in the other bedroom, this balcony did not open onto the street, but onto the courtyard at the back of the building. He wondered if someone in the courtyard would hear his cries and come up if he shouted for help. Then Mr. Jalal remembered that everyone from downstairs was already in his living room, and they were, in fact, the ones trying to break down the door.

The door heaved. How much time did he have before it gave? There was only one thing to do. Mr. Jalal went to the balcony and looked down.

The first floor had no balconies. He would have to jump all the way to the ground to escape. He studied the courtyard two floors below. The cement looked extremely hard, and Mr. Jalal wondered whether cracks would form in the surface when his body hit the ground.

Perhaps he should go up, instead of down. Mr. Taneja’s balcony overhung his own, perhaps he could pull himself up to it. Mr. Taneja, he was sure, would protect him—he had a phone, and they could call the police. That seemed to make more sense than to risk being injured in a jump to the ground. And then, as he was lying there, having the mob descend on him to finish him off.

Mr. Jalal hoisted himself onto the railing of the balcony. With one hand on the wall of the building, he balanced himself with both feet set on the railing. He called Mr. Taneja’s name several times for help, but there was no response. Then, trying not to look down, and amazed he was doing this, Mr. Jalal advanced along the railing and reached towards the overhang of Mr. Taneja’s balcony with his free hand.

L
ET ME TELL
you, my little Vishnu, let me tell you a tale. A tale about the yogi-spirit Jeev born again and again and again. About how one can rise to be a Brahmin, and then fall down to the level of a monkey again.

His mother’s words come down the remaining spiral of steps. Vishnu always feels sorry for Jeev in this story. He wonders if he should be careful himself, not to fall, now that he has climbed so high.

It was bad luck, really, that brought Jeev tumbling down. Though the problem also lay with the village in which he was born. A village where the castes were still very separate—not like today, here in Bombay—and Brahmins, especially, were expected to enforce all the old rules. The lowest castes were not to let their shadows fall over the path of a Brahmin, they were to carry a broom everywhere to sweep the ground clean after their feet contaminated it, and they were punished for the slightest mistake.

Jeev might not have found himself agreeing with all the rules, had he stopped to weigh their fairness or lack of it. But he followed them like everyone else in the village. They had, after all, been around for centuries—who was he, a newly realized Brahmin, to argue with such wisdom? He was expected to treat the lowest castes with rigor, to contribute to the squalor of their days. Didn’t this, in fact, help them grow, prod their souls through a painful but necessary phase? A phase he must have endured himself to have reached this station, so where was the unfairness, where was the harm?

One day the village jamadarni happened to straighten herself from the gutter she was cleaning just as Jeev was walking by. Without thinking, she looked right into his face, even began to wish him good morning, before realizing what she was doing. But it was too late—several villagers had witnessed her error, and the remedy was clear—she had to be beaten. Jeev could have had her pardoned, but a beating was no great penalty, and since there had been such a clear violation, it didn’t even occur to him to meddle with the established rules.

The first few blows the jamadarni bore well. But then the stick fell against her backbone in a way that made her scream out loud. And here was where luck stepped in—who should be looking down that very instant, and hear the jamadarni’s cry, but the king of heaven, Indra himself.

Of course, Indra didn’t intervene—the king of heaven can hardly be expected to waste his time on such trivialities. In fact, all he did was observe aloud, “Is a stick really necessary, wouldn’t words have been enough?” before turning his attention to other matters. But a lesser god, hearing this, decided to try and please Indra, in the hope of being promoted. He arranged for Jeev to be reborn as a monkey, and sent to earth with the memory of his Brahminhood intact.

That’s how Jeev ended up in a forest. Swinging through the trees, subsisting on whatever nuts and fruits he could find, whiling his days away in contemplation of his dramatic fall. There wasn’t a breath he was able to take without being reminded of the position that had been snatched away so unfairly from him.

One morning, Jeev opened his eyes to see a mesh floating down through the air towards him. Before he could react, he was surrounded by the net. He felt his body swing through the air, and turned around to see the tree trunk just before his head smashed into it.

When he awoke, there was a leather collar around his neck, so tight he could barely breathe. Running from a loop in the collar to a peg in the ground was a rope. All around were huts and small buildings—the trees of the forest were nowhere to be seen. Jeev struggled with the clamp around his throat, but it would not come off.

“No, my little bandar. The collar is here to stay.” It was Mittal, Jeev’s new owner, holding one of those tiny drums that bandarwallas play. “Your only worry now is to learn to dance. Come, let me teach you.”

Mittal raised the drum into the air. Ta-rap ta-rap came the sound, as the stones tied to the periphery blurred through the air and struck the drum at the ends of their strings. “Dance, bandar,” Mittal commanded, and pulled forcefully on the rope, so that Jeev fell headfirst to the ground.

Jeev felt himself jerked upright repeatedly, hard enough to almost snap his neck, and then dragged to the ground again. As he tasted the mud in his mouth, resistance began to spark up within him. He was a Brahmin, not a monkey. He would not be humiliated. He would not dance. There was no other choice, really—to succumb was to accept his new lot in life and forever abandon his claim to his rightful Brahminhood.

Now Mittal was not a cruel man. But if he couldn’t train Jeev to dance, to go around and beg for money from the people who stopped to watch, then neither of them would eat. So he started feeding Jeev less and less, and training him with a stick. Striking him lightly at first, but with increasing force as Jeev’s obstinacy refused to soften.

As one week passed, and then another, the welts grew on Jeev’s body. The sound of the drum hammered into his brain so persistently he began hearing it even when Mittal was not around. He would awake terrified at night, the sweat cold on his starved body, and the sound would be there, as predictable and enclasping as the collar around his neck.

“Don’t fight it, little bandar,” Mittal said to him one day. “Learn to accept it.” The words filtered in as if through a fog, and Jeev looked up. He trembled as he ate the banana Mittal offered him, then fell into an exhausted sleep.

He awoke to the drum rapping as usual inside his head. But the notes seemed less harsh. Their stridency was tempered now by a tunefulness he had not noticed before. Had this underlying pattern always been there, he wondered, and if so, how could he have missed it?

The sound stopped, and Jeev looked up. Mittal was staring at him, arm suspended in the air, stones still twirling around the stationary drum in his hand. Slowly, Mittal resumed rotating the drum, not taking his eyes off Jeev’s face. The ta-rap ta-rap started up, and Jeev found his limbs unfurling. He felt his shoulders begin to move, his hands wave through the air, his feet slide across the ground. The rhythm tugged at his body like the strings of a puppeteer.

Once he began to dance, nothing seemed more natural. The ta-rap ta-rap awakened some primeval response in his body, some ancient consciousness in his brain. As long as the drum sounded, there was no room for thought, only motion. Under its spell, he forgot who he had been, and what he aspired to become.

The days went by, and the welts on his body began healing, then disappeared one by one. He started traveling with Mittal through villages and cities, dancing and begging for money wherever an audience could be found.

Once in a while on their journeys they would stop outside a temple. Jeev would notice a knot of priests in the audience. He would stare at the holy marks on their foreheads. Their Brahmin’s threads would shimmer in the afternoon sun.

That’s when Jeev would come to a halt. A gentle tug on his collar would remind him of the dance that still had to be done.

He would gaze an instant more, at the sky beyond the temple. Then the sounds would restart. His tail would loosen, his feet would begin to move. He would raise his arms and feel the rush of air through his fingers. The audience would clap, and whistle their appreciation. The priests would blend into the ribbon of faces around. Jeev would dance, oblivious to everything but the rapture of the drum.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
the party, Vinod mailed in his resignation from the board. He was frustrated by the continuing problem of the contractors, who by now had arrived at a coordinated strategy to slow things down whenever they wanted more money from Mrs. Bhagwati. The project had been dragging on for years before he joined, and there seemed neither doubt nor concern on the board that it would continue for another decade. He was troubled, also, by questions of his own involvement: Why was he doing this? Who were the slum-dwellers to him? Did he really feel empathy for them, or was this just activity to fill his time? Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer, to which he wrote a very cordial (and separate) letter of declination, only hastened his decision to leave.

Once he was back at home, Vinod felt the loom of inertia again. There in the corner was the bed in which he lay; up above, the ceiling at which he stared; on the table, the record he would play every day. Had he done the right thing in resigning? Should he have considered Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer more seriously? What did he want the remainder of his life to be?

He tried to look inward through meditation, which he had learnt in college, but never practiced since. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the bridge of his nose, as the guru had taught him so many years ago. He pictured the syllable
om,
and waited for its vibrations to sound silently through the passages of his body. But
om
proved elusive, flitting about unrestrained in his mind, discovering twigs and nubbles of thought on which to alight. Thoughts of Dharavi, thoughts of Mrs. Bhagwati, but mostly thoughts about Sheetal, which Vinod felt he should have long been over by now.

He decided he could no longer spend his days in the flat. He started walking to Breach Candy in the mornings, and sitting on one of the wooden benches there. There were no vendors hawking sugarcane or children riding ponies at that time. He would sit there undisturbed and if the time of the month was right, watch the tide go out in the sea behind. When the rocks were all uncovered and the water was a distant green, he would rise and walk back home. On some days, he went to the beach at Chowpatty instead, but the benches there were not as comfortable and he found the stretches of sand less interesting than the rocks at Breach Candy.

The paanwalla told him of an ashram run by a holy man in the distant suburb of Kandivili. One day, when the sun was too hot to sit outside, Vinod took the train there. A group of barefoot women clad in the white saris of widowhood were getting out of a taxi when he arrived. He followed them in through the open gate, past some gardens, to a large bungalow surrounded by mango trees. The sound of a devotional bhajan being sung came through the open door.

The women seated themselves on the floor at the edge of the gathering inside. He was about to sit behind them when someone came up and ushered him to the men’s side of the room. For a while, he was thankful to be immersed in the anonymity of the singing, thankful that the people around were too engrossed to pay attention to his presence. He did not sing himself, partly because he did not know the words, but also because he felt awkward participating in such public worship. As the rhythm of the bhajan began to relax him, though, he remembered his childhood visits to Mahalakshmi, remembered the marble floor of the temple, where he would sit and sing along with his mother. Then the congregation came to their last song, and suddenly Vinod realized he knew the lyrics.
Om Jai Jagdish Hare
, he began to sing, unable to keep the words trapped inside.