The Two Krishnas (51 page)

* * *

The next day he drove to Atif, lying in a room smelling not of the tuberoses that he had enjoyed but formaldehyde and antiseptic. When the white sheet was pulled from Atif’s face, for a moment Rahul thought that by some miracle, he might actually start to breathe again. That everything that had happened, that was bound to happen, would be overturned. He thought that if he could only touch, stroke, lick, caress the flesh that once burned against his own, in which he had found and to which he had once given pleasure, it would stir to life. Surely lovers had a memory of each other, one that transcended time and even death.

But the black and purple lesions, the history of bruises on Atif’s body belied this fantasy. All of Atif’s spirit, the love and yearning, and the memories stored in the meridians of his body, had been scourged from it. Rahul couldn’t be sure how long he had stood there alone as the vengeances, memories, wishes—some which had come true and those that now never would—passed through his mind. In them he saw the tender smiles in which Atif had suppressed his pain, and heard his crying, the undignified pleading when they had been apart, the ecstasy with which he called out Rahul’s name when they made love, the graveled voice with which he recited Rumi. What must have been the last thought that went through Atif’s mind? Did he beg, try to reason with Ajay? Did he recognize the end, give in to it like Hanif with the tides?

Rahul clasped his hands together and pressed them against his mouth, more from grief than the intent to speak or pray. He would have liked to pray but the words, quelled for decades, did not spring to his lips automatically. He would have liked to apologize, but the regret, impotent in bringing his lover back or reversing the suffering, felt trifling in the face of such loss. Instead he thought, and almost said, “I love you,” and heaved into tears. Then he prayed silently for the first time in decades, asking that if there was an afterlife, then they would meet again, that Atif would find a lasting love, a loving family.

Slowly, he touched the scar on Atif’s upper lip, realizing now that he had never asked its origin. He bent over Atif’s face so that their lips were a hair’s breadth apart, and caressed his thick black hair. He delivered a favorite poem that Atif had recited on their nights together, his words crackling and bruised by the force of his anguish:

If anyone wants to know what the spirit is,

or what God’s fragrance means,

lean your head toward him.

Keep your face there close.

Like this.

With that, Rahul kissed him one last time on the lips, a tear falling upon Atif’s cheek.

* * *

All day she slept in Ajay’s room, unkempt, a mother in mourning. For periods of time she pretended to herself that nothing had changed. Her son was just away with that friend of his, perhaps a new girlfriend, and with the night he would return with that sheepish face that could melt a mother’s heart, his red mobile trilling away incessantly at the hip. She would insist that he eat and when Ajay would ask for the flavorless slabs of chicken breast, dusted with salt and pepper, or his protein shakes, she would make a needless fuss only to prepare him just what he had asked for.

But then, as the hours crawled by in his room where Pooja stared endlessly at the basketball trophies, collection of CDs, hamper of soiled clothes, she realized her son was not coming back. Her eyes would never rest upon his magnificent form nor would she hear his robust laughter or catch the potent smell of his sweat mingling with deodorant when he playfully hugged her. All that had already been reduced efficiently through a furnace and pulverized into the ash that his father had brought home and placed in a corner of the room like an unobtrusive artifact to decorate the home.

For two days, Rahul placed little plates of food that he had thawed from the freezer on a tray and tried to talk her into eating something but she wouldn’t. Once, she looked up at him and nodded with a smile, the delicately shaped face now so arrested by grief that her deep eyes looked like they had been reduced to impassive motes in a statue, but when he returned hours later, the plate remained untouched. When she finally ate a morsel or two, at the end of the second day, she did so grudgingly, contemptuous at every grain that sustained her. On the third day, he heard the bedroom door creak open. He heard the doggerel of existence –Pooja blowing her nose, the water running, flushing, little knocks and thumps. Then she descended, like Ganga rebuked, broken, but unlike the river, without the strength to bear up under the weight of man’s transgressions.

She appeared in the unlit living room, ghostlike. It was dusk but Rahul had not yet bothered to turn the lights on, knowing that mourning a loved one required a gloomy setting. Lights were the emissaries of celebration. Even in the dark, he could see her suffering. Holding together a body, one in which grief had taken up residence was a long, arduous process. In time, the body would adjust to its inhabitant, form some sort of alliance, but until then, it would impinge upon the new terrain. Rousing from the sofa, he reached out for the lamp on the side table but she held up a hand, stopping him. When she turned and looked at the urn on a table against the wall to her right, he said, in a broken voice, “I’m sorry.”

It took a minute for her to face him, for his words to reach her. “Sorry?” she said, looking at him wildly.

He dropped his eyes.

She walked away from him, went in the direction of the kitchen but the pain must have been so strong that she stopped by the dining room table and leaned against the chair for support, grabbing the edges so tight, her knuckles went white. “You must leave,” she said, not turning around. “This time, don’t come back.”

“Pooja, I—”

But she shook her head, stopping him. She continued looking out through the window but she was much, much farther away than Sonali’s house. “There’s nothing here anymore for either one of us, Rahul. Whatever there was, you’ve already destroyed,” she said, her voice stony now, devoid of the tinder and debility of mourning. “You brought us into this exile. Then you betrayed me. Now Ajay…” her voice was derailed momentarily. “What else is there for you to do?”

And only now, as she turned around to look at him, the light from the kitchen illuminating her face spectrally, could he see that not only had she been crying but it also looked like she had been beaten physically so that he could barely recognize her. He would have liked to think that if he could have only reached out and touched her, placed his hand on her arm, taken her into his own, then all this would be erased. But it was too late for that. That was the remedy for another time, one that had come and gone. He rose to his feet and when she saw him approach her, Pooja shrank back. He touched her anyway. She threw her weak fists at him repeatedly, struggling to break free form the embrace she once sought.

“No!” she cried. “You did this. You took my son away!”

He overpowered her blows, clung to her.

“Bring him back! Please bring him back!”

“I wish I could, Poo. Please—”

“I want him,” she said, her nails digging into his arms, her eyes struggling to look away from the urn. “I just want my son back. I want Ajay back. Rahul, please bring him back!”

“I can’t bring him back,” he said, his tears escaping him. “I can’t—”

“He’s everywhere. Everywhere. If I close my eyes, I can hear him calling me. If I shut my ears, I can feel him kicking in my womb. It’s not natural, Rahul. It’s not natural for a mother to outlive her son. It’s not natural that I should live without him. Why won’t you listen? Why won’t they listen?” she said, looking in the direction of the kitchen altar.

Her mouth opened again but no sound escaped her. It was as if she was summoning all the uncried moments of her life from that hidden, secret place in her heart. The gravity of grief pulled them both to the ground as she buried her face lifelessly into his chest, covering it with tears and spittle, and finally let out a howl as if a thousand arrows had felled her.

* * *

As a child, her mother had told Pooja that our perceived misfortune was an inability to sense the wisdom behind God’s plan, a shortsightedness; we couldn’t see the better ending that was being prepared for us because we were too attached to
maya,
an illusion.

As a grown woman, this understanding had morphed into blind faith, something stronger so that Pooja, even after experiencing the horrors in Nairobi and the loss of her in-laws, believed in God’s mysterious ways. When Ajay had been born, so shortly after Rahul and she had come to America in a state of such devastation, she had in her own way, interpreted this as divine benefaction. Nothing would change the past but at least they could see the future.

But now the future had been expunged. At least Parvati had Shiva to reanimate their slain son with the head of an elephant that would then live on to even greater glory and be the scribe of the Mahabharata. But Rahul and she were mortals and in as much as she had accepted him as her god incarnate, he was helpless in bringing her son back to her.

She grew tired of the games her mind played, dreaming that Ajay had come back alive and well at the end of the day, only to awake to a nightmare. She hovered around the aromatic altar of the nectareously smiling gods, growing resentful at their indifference, their seeming impotence. Her pain coiled around her neck, chest, torso, and pulled so tight, like a compactor, that it became hard for her to breathe, the pressure that unbearable and that oppressive. Ajay’s birth had been so painful that Pooja remembered it as if it was only yesterday, but nothing could compare to the pain of his passing.

In the morning she bathed, letting the scorching water slough away the grime of memory. She made a phone call to her parents but a new male servant answered and in her now-broken Swahili, she began to leave a message but then changed her mind and hung up. She thought momentarily about calling Charlie but couldn’t think of what to say and didn’t want to hear what he might say. Sonali had left a couple of concerned messages but Pooja felt resistant to any consoling. She had reached, even if only temporarily, a state of darkness in which she felt too numb for pain, too cold for rage, yet depleted of all verve.

When she came down to where Rahul had spent another night on the couch, she insisted on his leaving. He looked at her pleadingly, unable to summon words from the depth of his guilt. When he opened his mouth, she shook her head decisively, cutting him off. He packed up some of his remaining clothes, and told her he would come back the next day. He asked her to call him if she should need him but she smiled back at him calmly and even that faded almost as soon as it appeared on her face.

Before he walked out through the door, he paused to look back at her and she considered him one last time, broken just like her, only intermittent flashes of the man he once used to be, the one she had fallen so devotedly in love with, falling in and out of her view like quantum particles torn between two realms. She walked up to him as he lingered by the doorframe, still hoping she would ask him to stay. They had been on similar terrain before, where loss and grief cried for companionship and support. In spite of herself, she found some sympathy stirring within her. But it was an impotent kindness, one that permitted her to go no further than to acknowledge his torment. He had lost a son too and in time, if not now, would castigate himself for Ajay’s death. For Rahul, who had already known so much loss, the trial would continue.

She reached up and touched his face gently, the stubble prickling her fingers, and looked into his bloodshot eyes. They stood there only for minutes but entire lifetimes passed between them. Together they had traversed the terrain of life, its peaks and valleys, a youth full of promise and an aging filled with loss and despair. As a Hindu couple that had circled Agni’s fires, they may be bound together for six more lifetimes but in this one, she knew, the journey had come to an end. And it broke her heart to look at him and know that Rahul didn’t see this, that he was stilling clinging to the hope that in a few days, they would pick up and begin again, that now that they had lost everything, they might still have each other.

“Go,” she whispered.

When the house had been plunged into its familiar tombal silence, Pooja slowly and silently went to her son. Her hand touched the cold marble of the urn and she tried to listen for a sound, a breath. Her eyes fell upon a framed picture next to it—a plump, five-year-old Ajay gregariously posing on his new tricycle, one arm raised in the air at the photographer, who had been his father. He had ridden the engine-red toy so vigorously that within a year, the front wheel rolled off its axis and threw him to the ground. Hearing his cry, Pooja had hurtled down the flight of stairs from their old Culver City apartment and thank God, he hadn’t been hurt. The memory made her smile to herself but then black tears bubbled up her throat.

She picked up the urn, took it into her arms. It was lighter than she had expected it to be, most of its weight in the marble and not the remains of her once robust son. She carried it upstairs to his room and placed it gently on the nightstand, next to his iPod, gym wristwatch and a workout magazine with Herculean models on the cover. Suddenly she thought about his cell phone. Where must it be? Are people still calling it? Who would tell them?

She went into her bathroom and from the medicine chest, pulled out an amber-colored plastic container and twisted off the childproof cap. She emptied its contents into the palm of her hand, and cupping the glistening capsules to her mouth, wondered if there was enough there to take away the pain. All the pain. Life could hold no meaning anymore and although she could walk, talk, eat, breathe, it was all just empty ceremony like the bindi on her forehead and the vermillion in the parting of her hair. She turned on the faucet and cupping water into her mouth, swallowed the pills a few at a time until they were all gone.