by Manil Suri
Vishnu remembers his battles with the ants. How many times has he woken on his landing, to see the lines swarming over his blanket, his possessions, himself. He remembers the box of sweets he bought for Padmini. He has wrapped it in plastic, and buried it deep in his pile of belongings, hoping the ants will not discover it. But by morning, they are swarming all over it. He sets the box in the sun and waits for the light to drive them out, then presses their bodies one by one into the ground with his thumb. Before giving the box to Padmini, he examines every sweet, and carefully pinches the remaining ants out.
The first thing he remembers Padmini saying upon opening the box is “Look, an ant.” She pulls a piece of barfi out, and there, sprinting across the silver leaf coating, is the tiny black insect. Vishnu feels the guilt rise to his face, and waits for Padmini to throw the box down. But she is amused. She flips the barfi upside down as the ant reaches an edge, then watches it race across the top to the other side, before flipping it again. Finally, she tires of the ant and flicks its body into the air. She puts the piece into her mouth and takes out another. “Any more, my little darlings?” she says.
Vishnu wonders how many ants he has killed. All those bodies he has crushed, did they all have voices? He lifts his foot to clear the ants on the landing, then stops. His animosity has vanished, he will not bring it down. He watches the cheese move along the thread, it is almost at the door of the kitchen now.
Voices come through the door. Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak are discussing his body. How curious, he thinks, when he is right outside, listening to them. How surprised they will be when they see him standing there.
It is Mrs. Asrani who comes out first. She looks straight at him, but does not see him. Mrs. Pathak is right behind her, carrying her cup of tea as well. Her gaze falls upon the ants, her eyes widen at the sight of the cheese. “Damn ants,” she cries, and kicks the cheese across the landing. She lifts her sandal and brings it down repeatedly on the convoy.
The screams are so loud that Vishnu covers his ears. He thinks of children run over by cars, families crushed by buildings, people burnt alive. He covers his ears to keep the agony out, but the screams claw them apart and burrow into his brain.
THE LAST RAYS of evening light are filtering through the window when Vishnu sees the image. A man is standing over his body on the landing down below. He kneels besides him, and pulls back the sheet. With one hand, the man touches Vishnu’s cheek; with the other, he presses the forehead and brushes the wisps of hair off the eyes. Fingertips trace across Vishnu’s lips, then down his chin, and to his chest, where they rub against his heart.
The man has his eyes closed. His neck is arched, head tilted upwards, lips reciting silent words. Vishnu has seen this silhouette before, he knows he should recognize the crouching figure.
The man’s eyes open. Their whiteness reaches through the dark. They are large and milky, staring up through the air, through the ceiling, through the stone, at some point outside in the sky. Vishnu looks at them and is unsure if they are filled with reverence or fear.
The eyes blink, the fingers caress the tufts of chest hair, the lips open and close. Soft words float slowly up from the upturned face. Vishnu sees the gray hair, sees the bulbous nose, sees the pockmarks on the cheeks. Recognition floods in finally. He peers down at Mr. Jalal on the landing, crouching next to his body, staring up through the darkness towards heaven.
CHAPTER FIVE
MR. JALAL READ from his book.
The eyes. Surdas’s eyes.
The two fountains of sight.
It would have to be the eyes, Surdas decided.
The eyes are the windows to the world, and to the soul.
The sin he had committed, through those eyes.
The sins we all commit. Not the same, but the gravity, the gravity of the sins.
Surdas looked at his eyes. His eyes in the mirror.
The sin, the hierarchy of sin, like roots and a trunk and branches and twigs, a network of sin.
He said, With these eyes have I sinned, and with these shall I cleanse myself.
Surdas the poet, the greatest poet in the court of Akbar, the greatest king. He had sinned. He had sinned with his eyes. His poetry would not be enough to save him.
These eyes shall be my freedom. These eyes shall be my penance. With these eyes shall I attain salvation.
Mr. Jalal paused. What had he sinned with? His hands, certainly. His mind. His body. His tongue, perhaps? His nose? Had he sinned with his nose? Perhaps by smelling something he shouldn’t have? Mr. Jalal pondered this question, whether it was possible for a nose to be guilty of sin.
Surdas picked up the knife. It was a small ornamental knife, with a sharp, curved blade. It had a wooden handle, with three diagonal marks on it.
The handle with its marks pleased Mr. Jalal. Every account he had read said something different. In one, Surdas was said to have used a skewer, in another, a sword; still another had him pick up a razor, which Mr. Jalal considered the least attractive alternative, since who knew what beards the blade had scraped against? The ornamental knife in this book was much more deserving of the task. Mr. Jalal imagined it gleaming its purity, the mysterious marks on its handle transmitting a sense of ceremony to Surdas’s fingers as they closed around.
He slashed his left eye first. He had not meant to scream, but the pain was so intense that he must have, since they came to the door. Surdas, let us in, they pleaded. He saw the blood spurt out, run down his nose, collect at his lips. All this he saw with his other eye.
Mr. Jalal touched his own eyes. Surdas had coveted a girl he shouldn’t have. He had undressed her, drunk in her nudeness, made love to her, all with his eyes. Mr. Jalal tried to think—had he done anything to match that? There must have been something—his eyes couldn’t be innocent. Mr. Jalal decided to be on the safe side, and add them to the inventory of parts of his body with which he had sinned.
Surdas picked up the knife again. This time, he knew he would not see anymore. He stared at the blade calmly, so calmly, with such elaboration, knowing it was the last thing he would see. He took his fill of the sight of the blade like a man taking his last drink of water, his last breath of air. And when he knew the memory would forever be with him, only then did he bring the blade up.
The pain was much worse this time, but he was not surprised by it, and he did not scream. The satisfying, cleansing pain, his mouth filling with blood, a red, peaceful, calming night descending over everything.
And Surdas went to the door and opened it. He turned his face to the horrified people assembled there.
And said to them, Now I am free.
Now I am free.
Mr. Jalal stared at the words. The brown print stood like dried blood against the yellow of the paper. He ran his fingers across the letters, half expecting the clotted ink to come off against his fingertips, red and rejuvenated.
He imagined if he could ever pierce his own eyes. Find a knife just like the one Surdas had used, and watch himself in the bathroom mirror as he raised it to his face. See the blade, feel it, know what the first whisper of contact meant. Or perhaps cut off some other part from the inventory. Maybe all of them. (Had he decided yet about the nose?) Not so much because he felt guilty, like Surdas, but for the sanctity that penance bestowed. “Happy are those who have purified themselves,” the Koran said. Mr. Jalal wanted to be pure. He wanted to rise, to be enlightened, to be introduced to the rapture of faith. He yearned for it more than anything else.
Of late, he had been delving into the penance prescribed by different religions. The nuns and monks who flogged themselves to experience the trials of Jesus. The fakirs who lay on beds of ice in the Himalayas to overcome their attachment to the body. The flagellants who roamed the streets whipping their bare torsos with long, tapering ropes. Mr. Jalal would come to the balcony every time he heard the drums that announced their arrival. He would watch them as they danced with their ropes held high above their heads, and flinch every time they
cracked them across their backs.
The tragedy was that he had no tolerance for pain. He was terrified of the slightest cut or bruise—had always been, ever since he was a child. The sight of blood made him heave. He had often toyed with the idea of going downstairs and asking one of the flagellants the secret of their endurance.
Recently he had seen a man recite several pages of the Koran while holding his palm over a gas flame. He had decided to try it himself at home, but the gas, when he had turned it on, had burnt with a blueness that had been too intimidating. He had rummaged around the kitchen drawers and found a packet of birthday candles, which had seemed perfect to start with instead. He had lit one and lowered his hand over the flame. Almost immediately, the sensation had been too much to bear. He had experimented with the different colors, hoping that one of them (pink, he had guessed) would be less hot. But the candles had all burnt his palm with equal efficiency. Finally he had decided to douse the candles with his fingertips—even that had sent him running to the medicine cabinet searching for the Burnol.
Much worse was what had happened at Muharram. For years, he had watched the processions, snaking through the streets of Bombay. The men cried and wept, whipping their backs bloody with ropes and chains to lament the treatment of the Prophet’s grandson at Karbala. He would see people slash at their bodies with sharpened pieces of metal, see the blood well out of gashes on their chests and limbs. Sometimes they would fall to the ground, quivering in pain, but they always picked themselves up and continued again. He would marvel at the penitents’ faith—the faith that was said to heal their wounds overnight, no matter how deep or grievous. He would wait until the procession had passed, then follow in its wake, stepping his way carefully through the fragments of rope and metal, staring in fascination at the smears of blood drying darkly on the road.
He had gone to see the procession as usual this year. Through the crowd, Mr. Jalal had seen a young boy, no more than sixteen, lashing himself with a belt studded with pieces of metal. Each time the boy brought the belt down, the sun reflected off the metal edges as they whistled through the air. The boy’s back was bathed in a sea of cuts, but he kept whipping himself, his face contorting in pain, his lips never stopping repeating the name of Allah. The only concession Mr. Jalal heard was a sharp intake of breath after each stroke, the first syllable of “Allah” half swallowed, but still audible.
He did not know what happened next. He was moving along with the procession, staring at the bloody pattern on the boy’s back, trying to hear the sound of each “Allah,” when he found his fingers unbuttoning the shirt he wore and reaching for his own belt. He tied his shirt around his waist like some of the other men and stepped into the procession behind the boy. One end of his belt grasped firmly in his hand, the buckle end swinging by his side.
The mourners swelled around him, immersing him in their religious fervor. The metal-studded belt rose and fell in front of him. A streak of blood flew through the air and landed diagonally across his chest, like a challenge daring him to make his own mark. He lifted the belt into the air and swung it around, but the momentum was wrong, and the belt coiled itself around his arm. He tried it again, and once more the belt did not behave, flopping harmlessly against his shoulder. He wondered if the people around him were watching, if they had noticed his ineptitude, if they were whispering and pointing at the novice, the fake. Fresh droplets of blood rose from the boy’s back and spattered his face. He let the belt straighten under the weight of the buckle. Then he swung it in a wide arc, saw the buckle rise through the air and disappear over his head, and waited for the contact that would initiate him into the crowd.
The first sensation he felt was a stinging blow, like that of a pellet, aimed just below his shoulder blade. He had meant to shout Allah’s name like the boy, had the word at the tip of his tongue, waiting to be exhaled. But the pain that surged in at the next instant was so intense that all he could do was to scream out loud. He released the belt, and it swung from his back—the prong in the buckle had lodged in his flesh. He screamed again and again, and clawed at the belt, then fell backwards on the road, which pushed the metal further in. The procession pressed on, unmindful of his agony. He crawled through the tangle of legs into the bank of onlookers, to a man who pulled the buckle out.
“Wait, your belt!” the man cried, waving it in the air after him, as Mr. Jalal staggered away through the crowd.
He would never be able to inflict pain on himself. He would never experience its serenity, its sanctity, its purity. All he could do was read about it and fantasize. Mr. Jalal wondered wistfully why pain had to be so painful.
He had chosen the next best thing. Deprivation. It had occurred to him during Ramzan. He had never fasted much before, except once or twice each year to appease Arifa. Even then, he would usually end his fast before the proper time. This time, Arifa had persuaded him to keep the first roza all the way to sunset.
Perhaps it was the fact that he was in it for the full duration, but by midmorning, all he could think of was food and water. His mouth felt papery, his tongue dry and listless, and his throat scraped like leather when he swallowed. Hunger bored through the tissues of his stomach and spread like a fever to the far reaches of his body.
It was in the early evening that a strange clarity opened up to him. The hunger and thirst were purifying agents, cleansing his mind of unnecessary thought, fortifying his body against the laxness to which he had allowed it to become accustomed. He decided he would continue subjecting himself to them, making them part of his existence, fasting every day of the Ramzan period, and continuing after that as well.
He had been doing it now for three months. The problem was his body seemed to have become too used to hunger, and the exercise was in danger of not qualifying as deprivation anymore. He had tried fasting for longer stretches than the traditional sunrise to sunset, but the emptiness had made his head spin, forcing him to stop. The path to enlightenment for him, he had decided, could not be paved by pain or dizziness.
Instead, he had tried to find new ways to deprive himself. He had given up reading the newspaper, then stopped listening to music, but these had seemed like minor sacrifices. He had tried not washing, but people had complained too much about his odor. He had started sleeping on the floor. Arifa had called to him to get up and join her in the bed, but only for the first few days. Lately, he noticed with resentment, she had been spreading out quite comfortably on his side of the bed as well, and snoring even louder than she normally did.
In the past week, he had embarked on a new project. He would climb down the stairs late at night and sit in the dark next to Vishnu. Sometimes he would watch him for an hour before returning to his flat. Once, he fell asleep and only woke up at dawn, just in time to avoid Short Ganga on her morning milk run.
Sitting there, he would play with a curl of Vishnu’s hair and reach out and touch Vishnu’s face. His mind would wander across all the little deceptions he had allowed Vishnu to get away with over the years. The compensations for injuries supposedly sustained while running errands, the reimbursements for prices purportedly inflated by shopkeepers. Perhaps it had been his years of laxness that had encouraged Vishnu to steal their car that one time. What a shock that had been to him. But it all mattered so little now.
Mr. Jalal would move his fingers over Vishnu’s nose, his eyelids, his lips. The skin would feel hot against his cool fingertips, and he would try and read Vishnu’s expression using his sense of touch. Was the forehead furrowed in concentration, or was it from pain? Were the eyelids twitching from a fever, or was Vishnu experiencing a dream? Was it the sight of some fantastic vision that was making the lips tremble, the nearing of some profound unrevealed truth that fueled the urgent rasps of breath? Most important of all, was Vishnu still suffering, or had he transcended it, gathering momentum from its throes to launch himself to a higher, more tranquil plane?
Mr. Jalal was fascinated by Vishnu’s current state. He felt there was something
holy, something exalted, about being so close to death. He had almost died himself, when he was five. A case of smallpox had left him in a state of delirium for days. He had tried many times to recapture the memory of that experience, to feel again what it meant to be able to look over the edge.
Sitting next to Vishnu, he could sense it everywhere—a premonition of momentousness, a cognizance in the air, that floated through the dark and landed around his shoulders like a shawl. Mr. Jalal wanted to wrap himself tight within the feeling, he wanted to be irradiated by the energy spreading everywhere through the landing from Vishnu.
Tonight, he had decided, he would go one step further than before. He would spend the night with Vishnu. Stretch out on the landing next to him, and sleep right there beside him. He would be like Mother Teresa, like St. Francis, and embrace Vishnu as a brother. Not shrinking at the smell, the filth, or the possibility of infection. Perhaps someone would notice him, but he would not care.
Mr. Jalal returned to his book. His fingers trembled as they smoothed out the page in front of him. The time would soon be at hand. When he, too, would see.
IT HAD HAPPENED several years ago. It was not as if Vishnu had intended to steal the Jalals’ Fiat. “Pick me up in a motor, and I will let you drive me anywhere,” Padmini had promised. The only way to collect on the offer had been to borrow the car.
It had taken some effort, too.
“Sahib, I will be your driver from now on,” he had announced to Mr. Jalal on the staircase one day.
Mr. Jalal was taken aback at the offer. “Since when did you learn to drive?”
