The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

  Now the crowd would witness the payment he was prepared to make, Mr. Jalal thought. The initiation he was willing to suffer for their sake. There would be pain, for sure, but the infliction of it would not be under his control. He would finally feel its beauty, the sheer experience of it. And he would not have to worry about when it would start, how it would be administered, or when it would stop.

  The paanwalla was drawing within striking distance of him. The lathi had stopped rotating, and was now rising, ever so slowly, into the air. The paanwalla’s eyes were flickering, calculating—judging the speed of the lathi, estimating its distance from his body, adjusting for the amount of force with which he wanted it to land.

  And Surdas went to the door and opened it. He turned his face to the horrified people assembled there.

  The lathi had reached its apex, and was swinging down now, still in slow motion.

  And said to them, Now I am free.

  Mr. Jalal could hear the lathi whistling through the air. He braced his chest for its impact.

  Now I am free, Mr. Jalal thought, as he saw the wood make contact with his body and waited for the pain to register in his brain.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN MR. JALAL’S nerves signaled to his mind the impact of the blow, he was transported once more to a familiar place. It was the same place he had visited when he had tried to read the Koran with his hand on the flame, the same place he had found himself the time he had joined the Muharram procession. Mr. Jalal was surprised, he was shocked, he was amazed, at the sheer painfulness of pain.

  But this time was different, Mr. Jalal thought to himself, this time he really did not have control over it. Everyone who does penance must have to go through with this. It would be good for him, he would bear it, he simply had no choice, no escape.

  The second blow landed. Thoughts about penance and martyrdom dissipated quite briskly with it, and were fully beaten out with the third. All Mr. Jalal could think of by now, all that every cell in his brain screamed, was ESCAPE. Mr. Jalal flailed around in the living room for the telephone, toppling the delicate table on which it was perched.

  By the fourth blow, Arifa had come to his rescue, and was grappling with the paanwalla, holding his lathi-wielding arm and trying to bite it. Mr. Jalal was dimly aware of the paanwalla screaming out an epithet, and his wife saying through blood-stained teeth, “Run, Ahmed, run—to the bedroom.” He saw the electrician swing his lathi behind Arifa, and tried to warn her, but his mouth seemed filled with wool. As Mr. Jalal turned around to flee, he had a glimpse of Arifa sinking to the floor, a thin red line forming at her temple.

  He was about to enter their bedroom when he remembered there was no latch on the door. So he swerved into Salim’s room instead, and slid the heavy metal bolt across—the one Salim had insisted on having installed for privacy. Almost immediately, there was the sound of pounding. Mr. Jalal heard the paanwalla say, “Let us in,” in a very reasonable tone.

  The door seemed to strain and bulge. Mr. Jalal backed away from it, but the bolt held fast. He looked around the room, and found a chair to put under the doorknob. There was no other door in the room, only two windows and the balcony. Unlike the one in the other bedroom, this balcony did not open onto the street, but onto the courtyard at the back of the building. He wondered if someone in the courtyard would hear his cries and come up if he shouted for help. Then Mr. Jalal remembered that everyone from downstairs was already in his living room, and they were, in fact, the ones trying to break down the door.

  The door heaved. How much time did he have before it gave? There was only one thing to do. Mr. Jalal went to the balcony and looked down.

  The first floor had no balconies. He would have to jump all the way to the ground to escape. He studied the courtyard two floors below. The cement looked extremely hard, and Mr. Jalal wondered whether cracks would form in the surface when his body hit the ground.

  Perhaps he should go up, instead of down. Mr. Taneja’s balcony overhung his own, perhaps he could pull himself up to it. Mr. Taneja, he was sure, would protect him—he had a phone, and they could call the police. That seemed to make more sense than to risk being injured in a jump to the ground. And then, as he was lying there, having the mob descend on him to finish him off.

  Mr. Jalal hoisted himself onto the railing of the balcony. With one hand on the wall of the building, he balanced himself with both feet set on the railing. He called Mr. Taneja’s name several times for help, but there was no response. Then, trying not to look down, and amazed he was doing this, Mr. Jalal advanced along the railing and reached towards the overhang of Mr. Taneja’s balcony with his free hand.

  LET ME TELL you, my little Vishnu, let me tell you a tale. A tale about the yogi-spirit Jeev born again and again and again. About how one can rise to be a Brahmin, and then fall down to the level of a monkey again.

  His mother’s words come down the remaining spiral of steps. Vishnu always feels sorry for Jeev in this story. He wonders if he should be careful himself, not to fall, now that he has climbed so high.

  It was bad luck, really, that brought Jeev tumbling down. Though the problem also lay with the village in which he was born. A village where the castes were still very separate—not like today, here in Bombay—and Brahmins, especially, were expected to enforce all the old rules. The lowest castes were not to let their shadows fall over the path of a Brahmin, they were to carry a broom everywhere to sweep the ground clean after their feet contaminated it, and they were punished for the slightest mistake.

  Jeev might not have found himself agreeing with all the rules, had he stopped to weigh their fairness or lack of it. But he followed them like everyone else in the village. They had, after all, been around for centuries—who was he, a newly realized Brahmin, to argue with such wisdom? He was expected to treat the lowest castes with rigor, to contribute to the squalor of their days. Didn’t this, in fact, help them grow, prod their souls through a painful but necessary phase? A phase he must have endured himself to have reached this station, so where was the unfairness, where was the harm?

  One day the village jamadarni happened to straighten herself from the gutter she was cleaning just as Jeev was walking by. Without thinking, she looked right into his face, even began to wish him good morning, before realizing what she was doing. But it was too late—several villagers had witnessed her error, and the remedy was clear—she had to be beaten. Jeev could have had her pardoned, but a beating was no great penalty, and since there had been such a clear violation, it didn’t even occur to him to meddle with the established rules.

  The first few blows the jamadarni bore well. But then the stick fell against her backbone in a way that made her scream out loud. And here was where luck stepped in—who should be looking down that very instant, and hear the jamadarni’s cry, but the king of heaven, Indra himself.

  Of course, Indra didn’t intervene—the king of heaven can hardly be expected to waste his time on such trivialities. In fact, all he did was observe aloud, “Is a stick really necessary, wouldn’t words have been enough?” before turning his attention to other matters. But a lesser god, hearing this, decided to try and please Indra, in the hope of being promoted. He arranged for Jeev to be reborn as a monkey, and sent to earth with the memory of his Brahminhood intact.

  That’s how Jeev ended up in a forest. Swinging through the trees, subsisting on whatever nuts and fruits he could find, whiling his days away in contemplation of his dramatic fall. There wasn’t a breath he was able to take without being reminded of the position that had been snatched away so unfairly from him.

  One morning, Jeev opened his eyes to see a mesh floating down through the air towards him. Before he could react, he was surrounded by the net. He felt his body swing through the air, and turned around to see the tree trunk just before his head smashed into it.

  When he awoke, there was a leather collar around his neck, so tight he could barely breathe. Running from a loop in the collar to a peg in the ground was
a rope. All around were huts and small buildings—the trees of the forest were nowhere to be seen. Jeev struggled with the clamp around his throat, but it would not come off.

  “No, my little bandar. The collar is here to stay.” It was Mittal, Jeev’s new owner, holding one of those tiny drums that bandarwallas play. “Your only worry now is to learn to dance. Come, let me teach you.”

  Mittal raised the drum into the air. Ta-rap ta-rap came the sound, as the stones tied to the periphery blurred through the air and struck the drum at the ends of their strings. “Dance, bandar,” Mittal commanded, and pulled forcefully on the rope, so that Jeev fell headfirst to the ground.

  Jeev felt himself jerked upright repeatedly, hard enough to almost snap his neck, and then dragged to the ground again. As he tasted the mud in his mouth, resistance began to spark up within him. He was a Brahmin, not a monkey. He would not be humiliated. He would not dance. There was no other choice, really—to succumb was to accept his new lot in life and forever abandon his claim to his rightful Brahminhood.

  Now Mittal was not a cruel man. But if he couldn’t train Jeev to dance, to go around and beg for money from the people who stopped to watch, then neither of them would eat. So he started feeding Jeev less and less, and training him with a stick. Striking him lightly at first, but with increasing force as Jeev’s obstinacy refused to soften.

  As one week passed, and then another, the welts grew on Jeev’s body. The sound of the drum hammered into his brain so persistently he began hearing it even when Mittal was not around. He would awake terrified at night, the sweat cold on his starved body, and the sound would be there, as predictable and enclasping as the collar around his neck.

  “Don’t fight it, little bandar,” Mittal said to him one day. “Learn to accept it.” The words filtered in as if through a fog, and Jeev looked up. He trembled as he ate the banana Mittal offered him, then fell into an exhausted sleep.

  He awoke to the drum rapping as usual inside his head. But the notes seemed less harsh. Their stridency was tempered now by a tunefulness he had not noticed before. Had this underlying pattern always been there, he wondered, and if so, how could he have missed it?

  The sound stopped, and Jeev looked up. Mittal was staring at him, arm suspended in the air, stones still twirling around the stationary drum in his hand. Slowly, Mittal resumed rotating the drum, not taking his eyes off Jeev’s face. The ta-rap ta-rap started up, and Jeev found his limbs unfurling. He felt his shoulders begin to move, his hands wave through the air, his feet slide across the ground. The rhythm tugged at his body like the strings of a puppeteer.

  Once he began to dance, nothing seemed more natural. The ta-rap ta-rap awakened some primeval response in his body, some ancient consciousness in his brain. As long as the drum sounded, there was no room for thought, only motion. Under its spell, he forgot who he had been, and what he aspired to become.

  The days went by, and the welts on his body began healing, then disappeared one by one. He started traveling with Mittal through villages and cities, dancing and begging for money wherever an audience could be found.

  Once in a while on their journeys they would stop outside a temple. Jeev would notice a knot of priests in the audience. He would stare at the holy marks on their foreheads. Their Brahmin’s threads would shimmer in the afternoon sun.

  That’s when Jeev would come to a halt. A gentle tug on his collar would remind him of the dance that still had to be done.

  He would gaze an instant more, at the sky beyond the temple. Then the sounds would restart. His tail would loosen, his feet would begin to move. He would raise his arms and feel the rush of air through his fingers. The audience would clap, and whistle their appreciation. The priests would blend into the ribbon of faces around. Jeev would dance, oblivious to everything but the rapture of the drum.

  TWO DAYS AFTER the party, Vinod mailed in his resignation from the board. He was frustrated by the continuing problem of the contractors, who by now had arrived at a coordinated strategy to slow things down whenever they wanted more money from Mrs. Bhagwati. The project had been dragging on for years before he joined, and there seemed neither doubt nor concern on the board that it would continue for another decade. He was troubled, also, by questions of his own involvement: Why was he doing this? Who were the slum-dwellers to him? Did he really feel empathy for them, or was this just activity to fill his time? Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer, to which he wrote a very cordial (and separate) letter of declination, only hastened his decision to leave.

  Once he was back at home, Vinod felt the loom of inertia again. There in the corner was the bed in which he lay; up above, the ceiling at which he stared; on the table, the record he would play every day. Had he done the right thing in resigning? Should he have considered Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer more seriously? What did he want the remainder of his life to be?

  He tried to look inward through meditation, which he had learnt in college, but never practiced since. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the bridge of his nose, as the guru had taught him so many years ago. He pictured the syllable om, and waited for its vibrations to sound silently through the passages of his body. But om proved elusive, flitting about unrestrained in his mind, discovering twigs and nubbles of thought on which to alight. Thoughts of Dharavi, thoughts of Mrs. Bhagwati, but mostly thoughts about Sheetal, which Vinod felt he should have long been over by now.

  He decided he could no longer spend his days in the flat. He started walking to Breach Candy in the mornings, and sitting on one of the wooden benches there. There were no vendors hawking sugarcane or children riding ponies at that time. He would sit there undisturbed and if the time of the month was right, watch the tide go out in the sea behind. When the rocks were all uncovered and the water was a distant green, he would rise and walk back home. On some days, he went to the beach at Chowpatty instead, but the benches there were not as comfortable and he found the stretches of sand less interesting than the rocks at Breach Candy.

  The paanwalla told him of an ashram run by a holy man in the distant suburb of Kandivili. One day, when the sun was too hot to sit outside, Vinod took the train there. A group of barefoot women clad in the white saris of widowhood were getting out of a taxi when he arrived. He followed them in through the open gate, past some gardens, to a large bungalow surrounded by mango trees. The sound of a devotional bhajan being sung came through the open door.

  The women seated themselves on the floor at the edge of the gathering inside. He was about to sit behind them when someone came up and ushered him to the men’s side of the room. For a while, he was thankful to be immersed in the anonymity of the singing, thankful that the people around were too engrossed to pay attention to his presence. He did not sing himself, partly because he did not know the words, but also because he felt awkward participating in such public worship. As the rhythm of the bhajan began to relax him, though, he remembered his childhood visits to Mahalakshmi, remembered the marble floor of the temple, where he would sit and sing along with his mother. Then the congregation came to their last song, and suddenly Vinod realized he knew the lyrics. Om Jai Jagdish Hare, he began to sing, unable to keep the words trapped inside.

  Vinod started taking the train there daily, in the late morning, once the office crowds had subsided. He would sit at the back of the assembly, observing the other devotees, singing bhajans with them, but never conversing with anybody. Sometimes he spent the afternoon sitting in the verandah, watching the parrots in the mango trees lunge at the unripe fruit with their hooked red beaks. On other afternoons he remained in the bungalow after the bhajans, listening to the inspirational programs that followed. Occasionally he spent the entire day there, taking the train back only after partaking of the simple dinner of lentils and rice that was offered to all who came.

  The first time Vinod had come to the ashram, he had worried about the exposés of godmen and gurus that had been appearing in the newspapers. He had read about the outrageous demands
for donations, the bizarre religious philosophies preached, and the sensational rituals, even orgies, forced upon devotees. To his relief, Swamiji, as the holy man was called, did not fit the image suggested by the articles. Swamiji was a small man, perched on tiny toy legs, with a long gray beard, and a saffron-colored sheet wrapped around his loins and upper body. The overall impression projected, as he stood on the large white dais, like a candy figure decorating the top of a cake, was not of potency or stature, but comicality.

  When the Swamiji spoke, however, his voice carried a calm authority that radiated from the dais and spread persuasively through the room. He began every sermon by talking about the stages of man.

  “How long can man live for himself?” he would ask his audience. “How long can he allow the rule of the jungle to govern him? Plundering the pleasures he fancies, acting on every pinprick of desire, a slave to the promise of wealth, a puppet to the callings of the flesh?

  “And yet. If he doesn’t sate himself at this stage, he will never graduate to the next. He must drink from the pool of selfish gratification until he is sure he will be thirsty no more. Until he realizes that his body and all it desires is just maya—no more real than the reflection that stares back from that very pool from which he is drinking. It can take many lifetimes, but I have seen it done in a single existence, or even half an existence.”

  Vinod would watch the other followers rapt in the Swamiji’s message. He himself was content just to be there, to be someone faceless in the crowd, surrounded by the tranquillity of the ashram. Swamiji’s words floated in and out of his attention. He had heard this message so many times before—the maya, the illusion, that was the medium of all existence, like an endless movie in which all their lives were embedded; the journey the soul was supposed to embark on, to break free of the constraints of maya, rising through gratification, through selflessness, to the final goal which all creatures lived and died again and again for.