Later, Shiva Prasad would know that it had been a palpable, even divine, force of retribution; that the power of Lord Shiva had in fact entered him and illuminated the route to purity and forgiveness, to the assuaging of Shiva Prasad’s own failings as a father, to the avenging of crimes against innocent Hindu populations, to revenge against the barbaric Muslim man who had taken virginal Urvashi as his nautch girl.
But at the time he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, or about where he was. He thought only of the girl, and how he had her in his power, how he could turn her round, strip her of her clothes, bend her in half and break her, if he chose. First he pulled her down on the couch so that the tray she was carrying fell to the ground with a desperate little clatter. Then he pulled apart her legs, observing to himself to what delicate advantage the synthetic fabric of her dupatta draped itself over the contours of her young and perfect body, and as she began to whimper pathetically he spoke for the first time. ‘Don’t complain,’ he said, and he held his hand against her throat as he unwound his dhoti and yanked down her salwar and pressed his penis inside her. Shiva Prasad, who hadn’t performed the sexual act for years, who had assumed that this chapter of life was closed to him, was amazed. He was overcome by an emotion stronger than any feeling he had ever felt when conjoined with his wife, a feeling which rushed through him, suffusing him with a warmth that spread quicker than any poison. His climatic moment came quickly, too quickly, and all the humiliations he had suffered at his own daughter’s wedding seemed to have been transported somewhere very far away. As he came, he cupped the girl’s face in his hands and cried the name of his Unmentionable daughter. Afterwards, as the girl lay there on the couch, he stood, rearranging his garments, feeling like Arjuna, the ascetic Pandava brother who, after years of austerities, finally embraced a woman – the Pandavas’ shared wife, Draupadi. This act, too, had been a mystical experience.
The girl whimpered again, and on hearing that noise – like something emitted from a small hurt animal – Shiva Prasad remembered where he was, and what had happened, and he hurried out into the hallway of the house without looking back at her. The last thing he did before pulling the front door shut behind him was to reach out a hand and knock over a large turquoise water pot that stood on a table in the hall. It fell to the marble floor with a satisfying smash and Shiva Prasad felt sure that it had broken into at least a thousand pieces.
The car was still there in the road but his driver, oddly, was nowhere to be seen. Shiva Prasad paced up and down, growing worried that Vyasa might return at any minute and find him. At last there was a clang of the gate and the driver emerged from the garden of Vyasa’s house, smoking a cigarette. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. But Shiva Prasad wasn’t to be appeased.
‘You,’ Shiva Prasad said, ‘go back to the wedding grounds and see if there is anyone else who needs collecting. The pandit, for example. Give me a lift to the market. I’ll take a taxi from there.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The man opened the door, and Shiva Prasad settled back into the seat with some relief. His dhoti was only slightly soiled.
By the time Shiva Prasad arrived home, his wife was asleep. He took off his clothes in the bathroom, sloshed water over his naked body, and lathered himself all over. His hands moved carefully over his skin, investigating each crevice and crack, hunting out sweat and juices and the salty traces of sex.
chapter 15
Sunita sat in the wedding car, half-happy, half-afraid – a married woman – as Ash and Ram walked across the tarmac and into the lobby of the Taj Man Singh Hotel. So far everything had gone perfectly. Ram had driven them here from the wedding as planned, making only a few jokes about the joys that lay in wait for Sunita on her wedding night. Ash had held her hand tightly and given her shy smiles. She was now waiting for her husband to come round to her side of the car, to pick her up and carry her over the threshold as if he was the hero of a film and she, his fair-hued heroine. She had seen this scene many times, in many different films, with many different casts and costumes. But Ash did not come to collect her. She could see him through the glass doors, looking at Ram and laughing at something as they walked over to the desk to collect the room key. And so, in the end, Sunita got out of the car, walked across the tarmac, and entered their wedding-night hotel alone.
By now she was very tired. It had been a long and sweaty evening, and the initial yearning she had experienced at the wedding – to climb out of her heavy wedding clothes and extra-heavy wedding jewellery bought for her by her extravagant father, to wash herself in clean running water, to step into a cool, breezy kurta-pyjama – had returned. Sunita was studded, wrapped, enveloped in gold. There was gold around her neck and on both wrists. The American-style engagement ring with its triple diamond spray, which Ash had slipped onto her finger three months ago, glittered on one hand. A thick traditional Indian gold wedding ring was connected by a fine chain to a thick gold bangle. There was a gold tikka in the parting of her hair, and long gold drop earrings in her ears. The gold diamond-studded nose-pin which she wore was linked by a fine gold chain to the earring, which in turn was joined to the tikka. Round her neck was a Rajasthani-style choker. Her clothes – the tight bodice blouse, the full lehenga with its beads and layers of silken tissue, the heavy embroidered dupatta – had been hand-sewn with golden thread. On her feet was a pair of golden high-heeled slippers and she no longer noticed the blisters they gave her. Her hair had been curled and styled, and the jasmine flowers with which it was clipped and plaited had been falling against her skin, lodging under the neck of her blouse, all evening. Her face, painted with several layers of fairness cream, kohl, eyeshadow, powder and lipstick by an irritable woman with bad breath from the Ashoka Hotel, had become sore from smiling.
At the wedding, after sitting still for an hour (and for four hours in total), Sunita had tried to imagine cool buckets and showers of clean water trickling over her. She imagined scooping and pouring, lathering and scrubbing, rubbing and rinsing. She looked over at Ash and imagined him as a part of her bathing ritual. For he, too, was finding the flower garlands irritating; he kept scratching at the skin of his neck with his finger, where the white flowers were rubbing.
Then Uncle Hari’s wife fainted, and during the ensuing commotion, Sunita was suddenly made aware of the fact that she didn’t know where she was any more. It was dark now, and the wedding garden – so full of lanterns and fairylights, of tasteful white loops and bunches of silk-effect awning draped along the hedges, of sprays of flowers, of tables of food, of red-velveteen chairs, of guests, above all, so many guests in shiny and sparkling saris, expensive jewels, colourful wedding turbans – no longer resembled the place it had been before. ‘Mother,’ Sunita whispered, after Uncle Hari’s wife had been carried away, her face strained with the pressure of being a bride, ‘can I have one of those painkillers you mentioned?’
After she swallowed the pill her mother gave her Sunita stopped caring about these inconveniences – the weight of her garments, the sweat trickling slowly down her legs and her breasts, the video cameraman and the light boy, who hovered and buzzed, darted out behind the wedding guests, swooped back again to leave her dazzled and perspiring, swarmed around another configuration of wedding guests, and then returned to the stage where Ash and she sat, to dazzle her once more. Whatever it was that Mother gave her brought the tender and innocent smile back to her face, and as she greeted wave upon wave of shining and congratulating, long-life-and-many-children-bestowing relatives and wedding guests, she drifted away, flying up through the wedding garden, out above the club, and across the city, skimming the top of India Gate, flying on through Old Delhi. And as she flew, she became the goddess Sita: spotless, mythical, cleansed and pure as snow.
Piano music was playing quietly in the hotel lobby as Sunita and Ash – husband and wife – said goodnight to Ram and walked towards the lift. They were staying in a Deluxe Room on the second floor. When the lift doors closed behind them, Sunita stared across into the mirr
ored wall at her husband. He smiled at her, and when they reached their floor, stepped out of the lift before her, crossing the landing and opening the door of their bedroom with a flourish. Entering the room after him, Sunita saw the big double bed, and the bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates on the table by the window. She sat down on the bed. ‘Will you help me take off my jewellery?’ she said.
She thrilled to the touch of his fingers as he unclasped the choker, tenderly pulled out the tikka, unhooked her bracelets, undid the watch, slipped off her rings, and even removed the golden slippers. Sunita was respiring with excitement by this stage. She felt as if they had never before sat so close together.
‘Your feet are all swollen!’ Ash said as he placed the slippers carefully on the floor.
‘All swollen!’ she echoed.
‘Why don’t you have a bath,’ he suggested.
‘A bath!’ she said.
‘And I’ll go and order us a drink?’
‘A drink?’
He kissed her on the forehead and left the room.
Sunita sat motionless for a moment, alone in their marital bedroom. Then she removed her clothes, folding them in a bulky pile on a chair. She left on only her knickers and her bra. Opening the bathroom door, she saw herself in the mirror, smudged make-up on her face, curled hair coming down in tendrils, and below that the breasts, encased in a lacy bra, the stomach which her husband would soon kiss, the parts below, which . . .
Sunita stood under the shower, letting the warm water stream over her body. In her imagination, she placed Ash next to her, under the same jet of water. As she soaped her body, she imagined soaping his feet with this floral-smelling soap, and his shins and calves, and his knees and thighs, and . . . But her mind could go no higher.
Sunita took a long time in the shower. She dried herself slowly. When she walked back into their bedroom, wrapped in nothing but a towel, she expected to see Ash, ready and waiting for her clean, pure, washed body. But the bedroom was empty, and so she searched in the bag that had been left out for her, chose one of the shorter nightgowns with revealing lace along the corsage (bought for her by her sister) and got into bed.
After a while, she heard a noise in the passage. The door opened and Ash entered, carrying a tray with two cups of steaming milk. He placed the tray on the table by the bed, and sat, smiling at his wife. Then he kissed her, very lightly, on the lips. Sunita remained still, her eyes closed in bliss.
When she opened them again, Ash was stirring the cups with a teaspoon. He handed her one, telling her to drink it all down. She found that it tasted a little sweet, a little sour, a little strange. ‘What is in it?’ she asked.
‘Whisky.’
‘Whisky!’ Her first taste of alcohol. She drank it all, and after it was finished, she handed Ash the cup, put her hand to her face, smiled lovingly at her husband, and leant back sleepily on the pillow.
Ash turned off the lights, lay down on the bed beside his wife, held her gently, and waited. He waited for a long time, even after she had fallen asleep (lulled by his inaction) and was snoring lightly. He lay and thought about her, and his marriage, and about her brother. He had no idea what was happening to him. Nothing like this had ever happened before. All he knew was that there were two Ash Chaturvedis: the normal, everyday one, lying here next to Sunita, and the other, midnight Ash who for over a year now had been having passionate conversations on the computer with somebody who called himself Man-God. And this evening, Everyday Ash and Midnight Ash had been forced to come together, and Everyday Ash knew for the first time that Midnight Ash was stronger.
Ash gave a violent shudder. Hitherto things had always been so simple. Midnight Ash was hidden from the world, from Everyday Ash, from Father, from Bharati, from all his friends, from everybody at the lab, from Sunita. Everyday Ash was the one who had decided to behave like everybody else and get himself married.
And he had married Sunita, and had done so to quash his hidden, midnight self, and his feelings for Man-God. And yet in some hideous, monstrous, marvellous way, this marriage, which was to have made everything straightforward and right, had only brought the midnight temptations closer.
Ash lay like this for nearly an hour, switching from Everyday Ash to Midnight Ash, trying to reconcile the one against the other. When he eventually got up from the bed, he half-hoped that Sunita would wake and stop him. But her snores went on uninterrupted, even when he tiptoed across to the door and opened it quietly.
As he stepped into the lift, he had another moment of hesitation – she had looked so innocent and sweet with her head on the pillow – but Ram was waiting, and Ram had been waiting long enough already. The lift stopped at the sixth floor, the door pinged opened, Ash walked along the corridor and knocked on the door of the room that Ram had booked in the name of Mr Manhattan, and there he was: Man-God, standing before him, not as some shadowy computer avatar but real and in the flesh. Beautiful Ram, his wife’s brother.
‘Eat this,’ Ram commanded; and the pill dissolved onto Ash’s tongue even before he got through the door of the bedroom.
‘Did you know beforehand, then?’ Ash asked. ‘Had you guessed?’
‘That stupid ice cream,’ Ram murmured, as he nibbled Ash’s nipple.
‘Oh,’ moaned Ash – Ram’s aquiline nose nudging his being with tremendous jolts of pleasure.
It was Ash’s grandmother who had triggered their coming together. Following the pleasant distraction of Sunita’s New York auntie fainting, the bride and groom had resumed the endless, thankless process of being snapped; their every movement, their slightest smile, their inadvertent grimaces recorded. Flash! The photographer’s light boy shone the lamp in Ash’s face. Flash! Behind him, Sunita’s father coughed, and adjusted the angle of his turban. Flash! Sunita’s brother Ram, a handsome young man with a curved nose and mischievous eyes and ruddy red lips whom he had met only once before, at the engagement party, changed his weight from one leg to another and shifted his hand to the arm of Ash’s chair. Flash! Both their grandmothers were sitting together, directly below the stage, eating ice cream. The old women were arguing about something. Ash’s grandmother was raising her voice and saying to Sunita’s: ‘It’s Nirula’s ice cream! I tell you it’s Nirula’s!’
‘No,’ said the other, ‘Sunita ordered it. Kishmish, badam, American-type name—’
‘Manhattan Mania!’ the first lady shouted. ‘Manhattan Mania, that’s his favourite.’ She pointed her spoon at Ash: ‘Isn’t that so, beta?’
‘Yes, Granny,’ he replied obediently, ‘Manhattan Mania.’
Suddenly, an unfamiliar hand moved to rest lightly on his shoulder. Flash! The hand tightened around his collarbone. Flash! Ash turned his head to see. Flash! Ram was staring down at him, smiling. ‘Ram?’ he said, and then, before he could stop himself: ‘Man-God?’ Flash! The look they gave each other was captured forever on a roll of Fuji Superior Colour Film.
‘So that was when you knew?’ Ash asked helplessly as Ram licked his way up Manhattan Mania’s legs towards his groin.
‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure . . .’ said Ram. ‘But the way you said those words, Manhattan Mania, it gave me such a shock, I couldn’t help myself. Sorry.’
‘You should never have told me,’ Ash said as he felt his limbs quiver and melt under the pressure of Ram’s tongue. ‘You should never—’ He broke off. ‘And what will I tell her? What will I tell Sunita?’
‘Come on, yaar. What does it matter?’ Ram drew back, looked up, and said: ‘Brothers-in-law. So convenient, na? Happens all the time. How do you think these marriages keep going? Because of this only.’
Then Ash felt Ram’s tongue on his naked skin again, and any further speech was muffled.
chapter 16
Her eyes ran over the lines of the text, the neatly enumerated lines, not understanding but striving to understand, taking comfort where best she could – in the familiar-to-India nouns: the garlic and lentils, the yellow cow, the gardens in whi
ch rivers flow – and trying not to let fear prevail at the rest: the lightning and thunder, Satan and the angels, the Book, always the Book, invoked like a warning; and, above all, there at the back and the beginning, beneath and above, poised and powerful, flexed like a cobra ready to strike, Almighty Allah, the unknowable entity to which she was seeking to entrust her battered heart.
Urvashi had opened the Qur’an in the evening after dark. Aisha had left for the Chaturvedis’ in the afternoon, and Humayun had gone before that to drive the Professor’s family to the wedding. Feroze was away at the printing press at least until nine. At first she had sat alone in the large hallway, in front of the window, watching the shadows slowly and painfully gather, willing the night to descend and clothe the house in darkness on this evening of her sister’s brightly lit wedding, indulging her misery with a roll call of the loneliness that had been visited on her since her marriage. Her mind shied away from thoughts of her family. Instead, she recalled a visit by her two best friends from school. She had not dared invite them when she was living in the old city, in the privacy-free haveli where Feroze grew up, with its legions of pale, languid cousins dropping in and out all day long, and the old aunts shelling peas on the roof terrace, and the teasing, familiar, young boy cousins who came by after work still dressed in their pant-shirt, to drink tea with Feroze’s Hindu Bibi and to spy on how she kept the house. She had not wanted to subject her schoolfriends to that – getting them to the house itself would have been difficult enough, for it was in the heart of Old Delhi, a ten-minute cycle rickshaw ride from the cinema on Daryaganj, through a warren of tiny streets, with only the occasional Hindu neighbourhood in evidence. But once Feroze and she had moved into their own house, in a respectable colony away from his family, and once she had looked around and approved of the paintwork and chosen the furniture, and generally ascertained that domestically speaking it was all just as she remembered it from the houses of her childhood, she rang up her two best friends, whom she had known since she was at least nine years old, and they both agreed to come over one Thursday lunchtime.
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