The Two Krishnas (44 page)

When Ravi Kapoor came to, he felt as if his head had been seared by a branding iron. Moaning in pain, he began to slowly move his body on the cold floor, a mollusk pried off its shell and coiling into itself. Even before his eyes would permit light, he heard the sounds, not any of the screaming—his last memory before everything blanked out—but something much more racking; muffled sobs, whimpering smothered by raucous laughter and grunts. Momentarily he thought he must be waking up from a dream, that he was still at home in bed and, as was characteristic of nightmares, he would awaken to the real world with the renewed gratitude and relief that a man who had visualized his personal Armageddon would feel. When the light bored into him at last, he wished he were dead.

Suchitra lay stripped and splayed on the dining room table in front of him, not a whimper from her bleeding lips. Her sari lay in a puddle of broken glass and food on the floor. Her disarrayed face was turned to him as if she had been waiting for the moment he would awaken and she would be helpless to shield him from what he would see. She remained expressionless, the light gone completely from her as if she were already dead, even as one man dismounted and another prepared to take his place. Her hair, always either oiled and rolled in a bun or plaited with a sprig of jasmine tucked into a tightly woven knot, now flowed over the edge of the table in a long, dark wave of black, emanating as if from the bruised vermillion mark on her forehead.

As more of Ravi’s faculties mercilessly returned, bringing the house and the sounds being choked from it into focus, he realized also that the cries, like those of a wounded animal caught in a steel trap but still clinging to life, were coming not from his wife who lay in front of him, but from one of the bedrooms. He tried to clamber to his feet but managed only to crawl on the floor toward the sounds, his body leaded and revolting against his will. His only thought, however fantastical now, was that he could still do something to save his daughter from more pain.

He saw Suchitra’s head slowly turn away from him and toward the wall on the other side, her body long having given up on resistance, still jouncing under the stranger, and it confirmed to him all at once that yes, she was still there, enduring all of this in the face of their complete powerlessness. Ravi’s body went into convulsions. It was as if the mind, unable to accept what it was witnessing and having rejected the idea altogether, was now followed by the physical body also, so that there was nothing it could do but try and vomit the poison it had been administered. Spasms of gagging, each one a long, soul-excising retching, disgorged parts of him onto the floor. He had barely managed to crawl over his mess when one of the men, who had just buckled himself back up, strode forward, and, grabbing some artifact that lay in his path, swung it at Ravi, knocking him to the ground and banishing the light from his eyes.

* * *

Time was unfathomable. In times of crisis, it is said the consciousness focuses on a single point so intensely that even a moment can seem to last entire minutes, hours, a lifetime. Had she been there for hours now or a whole day? Paralyzed by her fear, Pooja had no idea anymore. She squatted in the dark, dank toilet of the servants’ quarters; the stench now had no effect on her. She could hear only drops of water from a leaking faucet plopping into a wash cup somewhere beside her.

Drenched with sweat and trembling uncontrollably, she remained in that same fetal position long after she had heard the riotous sounds of the men swarming away from the house, their cruel, loathsome laughter, the vile, dissolute remarks about how they had violated the
muhindi
women who always thought they were too good for people like them. She prayed desperately, remembering the suffering of Draupadi at the hands of the Kauravas, how Krishna had thwarted her public humiliation by spooling out yards of fabric to keep her covered.
Keep your hand over me, Krishna. Don’t let them find me. Preserve my honor as you did Draupadi’s.

Why the same God or any one of his avatars hadn’t come to the rescue of those that had been trapped inside the house she couldn’t bring herself to question. Nothing could make her move, to come out from her hiding place. It was a decision that would come back to haunt her over the years because as she had remained there, clinging to life and safety, Suchitra Kapoor rose from the obdurate wooden table as if she had risen from death itself, and prepared to resolve their degradation the only way she knew how.

Covering her tortured body with the soiled chiffon sari from the floor, Suchitra managed her way out of the main house with determination, pausing just for a moment to look at the silent, humped, blood-soaked body of her battered husband only yards away and her whimpering daughter in the bedroom. It was this sight that almost brought her to the verge of feeling again as if her body had been impaled upon a wall of thorns. She had, after struggling mightily, yielded to their tormentors but Kiran had maintained her anguished pleas through much of it, like someone who, in their impossible innocence, still hoped to preserve or protect something of themselves from complete annihilation.

Suchitra came out into the open where the sun had retreated behind a billowing rampart of clouds, plunging the earth into darkness. She could taste her own blood in her mouth as she crossed over to the garage. Stumbling, and falling once from the pain that seemed to cut her body into pieces, she thought of Pooja. Seeing no sign of her, she assumed that her daughter-in-law had suffered an even worse fate and been taken away by the men.

Upon entering the dark garage perfumed with toxic fumes, she found them lined up against the wall in the dark. Leaning over them, she felt around for the lightest one, choosing a can that was only half-full and easier to carry back to the main house.

Nobody can know of this. Not a trace can remain to taint the family name, she thought, tottering back to the house. We are not the only ones who have endured. Even Sita had leapt into Agni’s embrace to prove herself to Raam. We feel closest to God when tragedy strikes us. And in such times, His words resound within us like a temple bell, waking us up to action, to live up to the kind of heroic deeds that we have only read about and heard recitals of, stories which have become the foundations of our belief but which we, until faced with calamity, never thought we’d be called upon to reenact.

She was the strongest one of them all, Suchitra had always known, and she wouldn’t let them down now that the time had arrived to summon courage.

She stopped in the kitchen for a box of matches before going into the room. Kiran lay in a fetal position upon the bed, a bloodstained sheet barely covering her naked body which heaved as she hiccupped as if still trying to urge the tears that might cleanse her.

“Stop crying, my child,” whispered Suchitra as she approached the foot of the bed gently. “Soon the pain will end. I promise you it will. You will not have to endure this shame. Always you will remain the dutiful wife, the adored daughter, the protected sister, a joyful friend. I will not let them steal this from you. I am your mother. I can take away your pain.”

When she flipped open the plastic mouth of the can, Suchitra thought she heard a ravenous gasp escape its lips and saw plumes of trapped spirits escape into the air and float upwards to the ceiling. Slowly she hoisted the can up and as the first few drops fell upon Kiran’s legs, searing the cuts on her flesh, her daughter cringed and looked up with terror.

“Ma?” she gasped.

Suchitra thought she saw her daughter hold up a protesting hand, her palm decorated with the rust filigree of henna, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure. Because in her bifurcating mind she saw something else also. She saw Kiran being rejected by her husband and in-laws, felt her daughter’s shame at being defiled by those men; she saw, like a film projected upon the screen of her mind, society’s painful and certain repudiation of them all. And suddenly it became clear to her that her daughter had accepted her fate and was in fact offering up her palm print, like the Rajput suttees who had left their marks upon the stone wall before climbing upon the pyre. Like Sita, who underwent the trial by fire to prove her virtue to Raam. Or Sati herself who had jumped into the fire of
yagya
so that she could be born again with dignity as Parvati.

As she struck the match, Suchitra’s hands did not tremble, just as she did not hesitate from embracing her daughter as they were engulfed by the flames of purification.

“Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss

without such trials as come to those that passed before you?”

The Holy Quran
(2:214)

NO MATTER HOW he tried, Atif could not deny that his dream was coming true at a cost to others. But when a broken Rahul had shown up unannounced at his doorstep at night, as if having survived a violent accident, in his hands the same suitcase that had accompanied them to their retreat in Ojai, Atif enveloped him in his arms while silently thanking God for yielding to his prayers. And through his happiness, like drops of blood that had seeped through a bandage fastened to restrict its flow, some sadness of how he had won his desire stained Atif’s elated heart.

Rahul sat on the leather reclining chair where they had made love so many times, wordlessly hunched over and looking into the ground as if he had lost something. It made Atif think of the Sufi parable of Mullah Nasruddin, who had lost a coin inside the house but was looking for it under a lamppost outside because the light there was so much better.

“I didn’t know where else to go. I don’t know what this means,” Rahul said without looking up, not wanting Atif to interpret this in any way as final, still grappling with his confrontation with Pooja.

“You don’t have to,” Atif replied, kneeling down and squeezing himself between Rahul’s legs.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to be alone.” He covered his face with his hand.

“You’re not.” Giddy inside, Atif tried to remain contained, another Urdu adage his father frequently employed streaming through his mind:
never forget that serpents haunt even sandalwood trees.
“And it doesn’t have to mean anything,” he added, uncovering Rahul’s face and taking it in his hands, hearing the lie escape his lips like beads rolling off an unraveling rosary.

* * *

Each day without Rahul felt like a lifetime to Pooja. A full week after the night Rahul had left, Pooja had driven out to his office in Westchester, hoping that the reason he had agreed to see her was that he had come to his senses and wanted to come back home where he belonged.

She had requested that he meet her outdoors, in the parking lot, where the planes descending upon the nearby LAX airport appeared so ominously close and cyclopean that they were like mythical creatures—Vishnu’s mount Garuda or Rama’s Hanuman—shaking the earth with a sonic boom and casting a penumbra over mortals. She had been uncertain if Rahul’s coworkers already knew about their rift. Unprepared for the sympathy it would arouse or, even worse, the pretense required to act as if nothing had happened in front of obsequious employees like his assistant, she felt it was best to avoid going in altogether.

When she saw him approach her with that characteristic gait of uncertainty, his broad shoulders drooping lightly as if under the weight of his own strong physicality, she felt the conflicting forces of desire and anger arrest her. There was nothing she could do or say to convince herself that this man she had committed her heart and soul to, whom she had followed to the ends of the earth, wasn’t still her husband and soul mate, that nobody could take him away from her. But having to see him here, in some parking lot instead of their home, made her want to scream. Ultimately though, it is impossible to shun those we love or to seek vengeance against those we pity.

They embraced—he tentatively, she ardently. If he had noticed how her anguish had begun to ravage her—the dark circles around her eyes, deeper lines cutting into her face and undisguised by makeup, the sheer nervousness of her being so that she appeared unstable between the love she still felt for him and the grievance it was also beginning to provoke—he said nothing. She looked up at him and although she wanted to touch his face she restrained herself, afraid that the gesture of affection would unravel her. “How are you?” she asked, the words sounding hollow, absurd, as if it had been she who had left him and brought them to this place.

Rahul nodded, gave a tired smile.

At the neighborhood pizzeria, he introduced her to the Italian owners without the slightest hesitation or awkwardness as his wife and when they excitedly reached over the counter to shake her hand, she caught a look, however fleeting, of pride and affection on his face. They had walked in right before the lunch crowd, sitting quietly at a corner table. She barely nibbled through a slice of thin-crust cheese pizza that the owner’s son had chivalrously provided at no charge to celebrate meeting her. She watched Rahul’s large hands as he salted and folded his slice before taking a healthy bite; strong fingers with neatly clipped nails, the tangle of veins, rising and falling beneath the skin matted with thick black hair as his fingers moved; she missed his touch. But then she thought about the boy, saw his face at the bookstore, considered how the same hands had touched him, were touching him, and the anger rose in her again.