The Two Krishnas (50 page)

Ajay and Nicky bounded to the right of Montana Street, neither one noticing that the area had been sectioned off with armed police officers poised strategically around the block and alley. Three more officers had swarmed the apartment and found Atif’s bloodied body. Nicky, a few paces behind Ajay, was the first to hear, “Police! Stop!” and froze at once but Ajay heard nothing and continued to sprint toward a church, its steeple piercing into the night sky, still clinging to the bloodied candle holder under his arm. By the time he heard the warning for the first time as it was repeated, he had reached almost the end of the block.

He continued to run, envisioning only a vacant street around the corner and driven now not by the unearthly rage that had possessed him only minutes ago, but by the terror of his deed. His mother’s admonishment of his unrestrained temper over the seemingly trivial incidents in the past now gained the full power of their prophecy and flashed through his mind even as he recognized the irrevocability of what he had just done.

An officer, his gun at Ajay, appeared from around the corner and onto the pavement like an apparition and commanded him to stop. His mind a blank sheet of terror, Ajay decelerated, his arms flying up reflexively. But then the candleholder escaped him and Ajay swooped his right arm back down and under his side in an attempt to catch it. A thousand spikes of light pierced him from behind, stealing his breath, pinning him in the air. He crumbled to the ground where the candleholder had rolled away from him, staining the magnolia-strewn cement with blood.

A small crowd of bystanders had gathered behind the barricade of police cars and bright yellow tape—neighbors who had left their TV shows halfway and rushed out onto the street to investigate the commotion, pedestrians who had paused on their way to a nearby pub so they could view the public spectacle of private disaster, and at least one bedraggled homeless person who had hitched up his overloaded grocery cart of brown paper bags by the curb to survey the scene with the look of indifference only a person on an intimate basis with tragedy could muster.

Rahul came down Montana Avenue and approached the barricade slowly, smoking his cigarette. At first it all felt distant, like he was part of an audience witnessing a tableau of crime in the movies, but with each step he took toward the apartment building he had left only minutes ago his eyes fixed upon the landing behind the cordoned off area where ambulance men, investigators and police swirled in a flurry of activity. His heartbeat quickened to a frenzy. He tossed away the smoke and maneuvered his way through the crowd until he got to the front where he dipped under the yellow crime scene tape to cross the barrier. He was immediately forced back by a burly mustachioed officer.

“Wait, but I live here,” he protested, pointing at the building.

“I don’t care where you live,” the officer responded gruffly, pushing him back behind the tape. “Nobody’s going anywhere right now.”

“But what’s happened? What’s going on?”

“Sir, we’ll let you know as soon as we’re giving interviews, okay? Please get back!”

Rahul checked his pockets for his cell phone and was dismayed to find he had left it in the apartment. He looked around frantically, feeling helpless and not seeing anybody in the crowd he recognized. He asked around the crowd in case someone knew what had happened and was told by a woman in a pink housecoat with rollers in her hair that apparently someone had been robbed and attacked but that thankfully they had caught the assailants.

He walked over to a pay phone on the corner of the street, from where he could still keep an eye on the scene, and called the apartment with the loose change from his cigarette purchase. There were a few eternally long rings, during which he found himself desperate enough to pray that Atif would answer the phone; by the time someone finally answered—a strange male voice—Rahul’s eyes had spotted something else through the filigree of commotion across the street. He could see the strangely familiar, slumped figure of the person they had apprehended in the back seat of the police car parked in clear sight all along. The prick of recognition made his stomach lurch and the receiver, still emitting the sounds of someone from the other end, escaped his hands and thrashed against the brick wall.

He started walking back to the scene, his eyes fixed on the hulking person over and through the band of bystanders, as terror webbed up his legs and covered his entire body. Each step turned the axis of his world upside down. He pushed through the crowd roughly, his only thought to get to the car and nullify the vision forming in his eyes.

A detective bounded over and grabbed him before Rahul could tear past the yellow tape and reach the car. Although Rahul couldn’t hear anything as he struggled against the detective holding him back, he felt that he must have been calling out because just then Nicky turned around and looked over his shoulder through the rear window at him. In that look of fear and penitence before Nicky turned away and hung his head low as if on the lunette of a guillotine, Rahul knew that all was lost.

* * *

He wished it were day instead of night. Somehow, the rays of sunlight, while not easing the pain, might have helped to at least provide a less morbid setting for it. God alone, if he even existed, thought Rahul, knew what still kept him on his feet—moving, speaking, breathing—even as he desired nothing more than to stop living. Perhaps it was the duty of this final act—of unleashing this catastrophe upon her—that prevented him from any kind of escape. After he had identified both Ajay and Atif, their bodies had been taken in for autopsies. By the time he used his keys and entered the house undetected to the sound of women laughing, it was past midnight.

She was in the kitchen, enjoying a late night cup of chai with Sonali when he showed up. It was good, he thought, that they had patched things up. They had bridged their separation and were talking about Greg’s obsession with Hinduism. Sonali was making a joke, how in Bombay a cow may be elevated to temple-worship but if it dared filch even a red onion from the street vendor, an avalanche of sandals would descend on its big rump, holiness be damned. It had been so long since he had heard Pooja laugh so openly, without the burden of pain that occluded mirth’s boisterousness, and he realized how precious it was. In all the years he had known her, she had never laughed so loudly, so openly, as if doing so connoted some flaw in decorum.

He walked straight into the kitchen, startling them. Seeing him, Pooja drew in her breath sharply. The room froze, both women surprised. For several seconds Pooja sat still on the wooden stool and looked at him, smiling uncertainly. He thought he detected a spark in her face, hope rearing its head, and before she could react more fully, he wanted to lift up his hand and stop her from coming to him and putting her arms around him, to tell her not to rejoice. It would make everything he had to say that much harder. He wasn’t coming back. He was not there because he missed her, just to snuff the last flicker of hope from an existence already laboring in the winds of life’s cruel vicissitudes.

As was typical of her, Sonali was the first to speak. “Okay, well, maybe I should go,” but she made no move to do so; this was much too juicy an occasion for her to miss unless she absolutely had to. She didn’t have to worry because Pooja put her hand out, asking her to stay if only to show her resoluteness. A coward who had managed up to this point, but unsure if he was equipped to handle the grief of a mother, Rahul was secretly thankful.

“Pooja,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.”

She slowly rose to her feet. The dread from his face seeped into hers, covering it like a shroud. He looked into her wide, trusting, amber-colored eyes, and felt a protective instinct so strong –even though ruthlessly delayed –that he could only compare it to what a mother must feel for her child. For a moment he saw her again as she was all those years ago, unsullied by his faithlessness, the woman he had systematically destroyed, then just as quickly the image vanished, and as a single tear spilled over and onto his cheek, he saw fear ripple across her upturned face.

“What is it?” she asked, touching his arm.

“He, Ajay, he went to see Atif, Pooja,” he said carefully, as if gathering shards of glass from the floor. “Something terrible…there was an accident.”

“Where is he?”

He shook his head, unable to look at her. “They’re both…gone.”

Sonali grasped his meaning but Pooja remained only dimly aware of what he had said. “Gone? Gone where? I don’t understand.”

Rahul, his head hung low, wished he could have given up his own life to prevent this moment. But it was too late now.

“Rahul?” she said, shaking him by the arm. “Is he okay? Is Ajay okay?”

He shook his head, the words stuck in his throat.

“Where…what…” she glanced at Sonali, back up at him, terrified.

“They’re gone, Pooja,” he said, his eyes finding her again. “They’re both dead.”

Slowly she pulled herself away from him. She felt completely removed from everything around her, as if she was from another dimension and the burden of emotion was the misfortune of an alien race. There were muffled sobs from someone standing somewhere behind her, the sound of a neighbor’s dog barking way in the distance as it was being taken for a night jaunt, and a name she felt she must respond to being repeated over and over again by the man in front of her. Then, the merciful hand that had plucked her out of the tableau of grief dropped back into it, and as her bones began liquefying, Pooja felt herself sinking to the ground.

* * *

Outside their bedroom window only the faint rustling of the jacaranda tree could be heard. It was quiet otherwise, almost four-thirty in the morning according to the digital clock on the nightstand to which he used to wake up each morning. Rahul sat by Pooja’s side as she lay lifeless but for the breath that moved her body almost imperceptibly under the red Kashmiri shawl. The room, stiflingly hot in the middle of July, did nothing to quell the iciness of her silence or how she felt within.

Even after Sonali had left, Pooja hadn’t asked how it had happened, as if by some uncanny sixth sense, she had already envisioned it, and had now, drained of all hope, slipped into the underworld where she must echolocate through permanent darkness. In time, she would want to know everything, every detail, but for now, she had entered that black hole of grieving into which all questions are devoured and answers, in their futility to reverse disasters, become insignificant.

When he had tried to explain to her that he hadn’t been there to prevent it, she had turned her head away to the other side of the bed and held up a shaking hand not to him, but to her own mouth, in the process silencing him, afraid that disrupting the silence of her grief with unavailing words might at once force her into complete disintegration before she could see her son again.

He remained by her side, minutes stretching into hours, wondering how he could have seen this coming, how he might have been able to barter his life for theirs. When she finally spoke with a flattened, shell-shocked drone, she said, “Take me to him.”

An image of Ajay, covered in blood, flashed through Rahul’s mind and he couldn’t bear the thought of letting Pooja see their son that way. “Tomorrow. Right now they have to…they’re taking care of things,” he said.

She looked up at him and the pain in her eyes revealed her estimation of how gruesome it must have been. “The boy…Atif, is it? Does he have anyone?”

“No,” he said, her kindness cutting deep into him.

“Then you must take care of everything.”

* * *

When they stood side by side over their son on a cold, metal table in a mortuary across town, Rahul thought that he heard her breath stop for what seemed like an eternity.

For minutes Pooja refused to move, her body moored so that the tides of her grief wouldn’t carry her away and sink her, and her eyes were unable to tear themselves away from the face in which so much of them both now lay frozen. Then, slowly she lifted a trembling hand and ran it over Ajay’s thick black hair, afraid yet hopeful that her touch would somehow revive him. She bent over his face—eyes still dry—and kissed him on the lips. His skin felt chilled, as if he had been out in the cold too long.

She looked at Rahul but he remained absolutely still. Something told him that he should move, express, utter something, but he found himself unable to react. In front of him was not just a son he had loved all his life yet never known, but also one who was lying there lifeless because of him. Pooja had been right all along, that he would hurt their son. And now here he stood, a bereaved father, a penitent killer.

Even in her grief, Pooja understood the currents of Rahul’s heart, so she touched him. When Rahul clasped his son’s hands over the white sheet, he thought about how small they had once been. Yet he couldn’t remember ever holding them, whether to cross a street safely or teach him how to play a sport.
These may have been the hands that cudgeled the life out of Atif,
thought Rahul.
But I moved those hands. I did it.

Later, in a modestly appointed office in another wing of the mortuary, the young, well-mannered funeral director told them that he had experience with Hindu cremations and that the funeral home had recently accommodated special requests such as allowing community priests to say prayers, tying sacred threads to the body, letting a relative witness the actual injection of the body into the retort.

Pooja sat quietly through it all. Before leaving, she and Rahul thanked him for his thoughtfulness, told him they would get back to him. When they had made their way out of the building and into the blinding sunshine that seemed to mock them, they were fully aware that along with their son, both had left something vital that was necessary to live a functional life behind. She said, “No ceremonies, Rahul. Just bring him to me when they’re done.”