The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

  “Sorry I’m late.” She brushes off the dress she’s wearing, as if it were covered with dust. “Mai, what a crowd. How did you ever get the tickets?”

  As they go through the entrance of the theater, she puts her hand on his. “Finally, a proper theater,” she says.

  Vishnu buys her a cold drink and a samosa. She eats the crisp part first, then the potatoes. “Ooo, nice and spicy,” she says, pulling out a whole chili from the filling and putting it in her mouth.

  The movie starts. Vishnu’s mother comes on the screen. They are in their hut together, and she is singing a song to him, about the games he will play when he meets the baby Krishna. Suddenly, a storm breaks out, and lightning and thunder and rain start lashing the hut. The door opens, and lightning crackles as Vishnu’s father walks in. It is Pran, the villain, his eyes red and bloodshot, the muscles in his jaw twitching, his lips set in a thin, cruel line.

  “Oh, ma,” Padmini says, and draws closer to Vishnu in her seat.

  Vishnu can feel her hands gripping his arm as the Holi scene appears on the screen. He sees himself singing and dancing as he plays Holi with his mother. The screen fills with color, and then shifts to his father drinking bhang. Padmini’s leg rests next to his, and he detects a tremble running through it.

  Slowly, Vishnu puts an arm around her chair, then raises it so that it barely brushes the nape of her neck. She is too absorbed in the movie and does not notice. He lets his arm ease around her neck. Her cheek brushes against his shoulder. She nibbles the last of her samosa, the empty wrapper clutched between her fingers in her lap.

  Kavita is played by a newcomer, Usha Bahaduri. Vishnu likes her very much. During the Divali song on the staircase, when Usha climbs up and down with phuljadis in her hands, he starts clapping his hands along with the music, as others are doing in the audience. Padmini looks at him disapprovingly.

  But then Reshma, playing Padmini, comes on the screen, and Padmini sits back in her seat. “She should have lost some weight for the role,” she sniffs to Vishnu, “though her acting, thank God, has improved.” There are several songs that Reshma sings, and this makes Padmini happy.

  “Do you think she’s doing me justice?” she asks with concern during the interval, and Vishnu assures her she is.

  “She’ll get a Filmfare award, you just wait and see,” he says.

  Padmini asks Vishnu to buy her an ice cream, so they go to the lobby. He leaves her by the cardboard cutout of Reshma and Amitabh, but when he comes back with an orange bar, she is no longer there. She returns a few minutes later, her face flushed. “I went to see what the ladies’ room looks like. Do you know they have those English-type seats there?”

  Padmini takes the wrapper off her orange bar. “Let’s go see the balcony,” she says. Vishnu follows her up the stairs, into the dress circle. Padmini looks down at the screen, then turns to look up at the rows stretching all the way to the top. “It’s so nice up here,” she says. “These seats must cost a lot more.” She licks her bar wistfully.

  The movie starts again, and Vishnu is engrossed by the love triangle Kavita finds herself in. Tears come to his eyes as Kavita bends down next to him on the landing and bids him farewell. He tries not to let Padmini see that he is crying.

  There is another song, in a flashback sequence of Padmini and him in Mr. Jalal’s car, driving along Marine Drive. They go to Hanging Gardens and the love scene in the car follows. “Chhee!” Padmini says, averting her head, as Vishnu appears entwined with her on the screen.

  The story progresses and Vishnu sees himself ascending the steps. He wishes the movie would be more clear about what he is climbing towards. Whether he is the god Vishnu, or just an ordinary man. He is almost at the terrace door when Padmini gets up suddenly, excusing herself to go to the ladies’ room. Vishnu feels like warning her to wait, they are near the climax, the movie is almost over.

  The terrace door opens. Vishnu leans forward in his seat. He has not seen this part, he does not know what comes next. He wishes Padmini was watching with him. But her seat is empty. He looks at the seat on the other side, and that is unoccupied as well. He looks around, and row after row stares emptily at the screen.

  Vishnu gets up. He is the only one left in the theater. The light from the projector strikes the top of his head and creates a void that stretches all the way down the picture. He walks towards the screen, and the shadow gets lower and smaller, until it is just a thumbprint at the bottom. He climbs the steps leading up to the stage. The movie continues in the empty auditorium, a succession of unseen images flashing through the dark.

  Vishnu walks across to the center of the stage, then turns to face the projector. The screen is a giant lit field extending above and around him. He tries to see the seats, but the light from the projector is too strong. For all he knows, they may be filled again, Padmini and the rest of the audience getting ready to applaud as he takes his final bow.

  He looks hard at the light. For an instant, he imagines the screen stretching out across the sky above the terrace. Then the image vaporizes in the blaze of the projector. He wonders what makes the light so strong. Why can he just see white when he looks into it? Where are the greens and reds that dance across his clothes? He looks at his body—it is drenched in color. His arms, his hands, his legs, are luminous, brilliant. He feels the brilliance being absorbed through his skin, saturating his flesh, flowing through his blood all the way to his fingertips. He starts radiating brilliance himself. Brilliance that illuminates each row of empty seats, brilliance that paints each wall a blinding white, brilliance that turns the curtains into sheets of light. As Vishnu watches, the entire theater becomes incandescent. He looks down at himself, but he can no longer tell where the light ends and his body begins.

  THE FIRST THING that struck him about heaven was the whiteness of it all. The ceiling was white, the walls were white, there were white curtains that shimmered in the breeze. It made sense, of course—white was the color of unbroken light—it symbolized a purity, a wholeness, an unblemishedness, and wasn’t that what heaven was supposed to be all about? Even the sunlight streaming in seemed so much whiter now—could this be because heaven was situated somewhere closer to the sun?

  So he had done it, Mr. Jalal thought. He had attained martyrdom, attained sainthood. He wondered what they must be doing down on earth. Had they rallied yet around his message, around Vishnu? Or were they still gathered around the corpse he had left behind, cursing their blindness, praying for redemption, straining to touch his face, his feet, any part of his holy body? Perhaps the cigarettewalla, or even the paanwalla, would take up his baton, be the new leader, spread the word. Mr. Jalal felt he should forgive all his tormentors, harbor no animosity in his heart. This was the proper attitude to adopt, now that he was in heaven.

  How relieved he felt to have made the right choice. For even though he had not managed to hang on, even though he hadn’t actually been beaten off the balcony as planned, he had made the effort. What counted was that at the instant he fell, the correct thought had been dominant in his brain.

  Or had it? Hadn’t he wavered, hadn’t doubt clouded up in his mind at the end? It was so hard to remember. Surrounded as he was now by this whiteness, this serenity, though, could things have really not worked out well?

  He wondered if he should get up and explore heaven. On earth, he had never allowed himself to believe in it, but had heard people make all sorts of claims about it. It would be interesting to see if any of them were true—the pearly gates, the gold spires, the rivers of milk—probably none of these existed. What would be nice, though, would be a TV room, through which residents could monitor the progress of things on earth.

  He sat up and took a deep breath of the fresh heavenly air. Why did it smell of disinfectant? And was that the sound of car horns he heard through the window? And what were those casts doing on his legs? Suddenly Mr. Jalal started noticing a number of incongruities—the cupboard filled with jars and bottles, the blood pressure gauge o
n the table, the bedpan by the door. And the white apparitions gliding through the corridor outside—the ones he had thought might be ghosts—weren’t those nurses’ uniforms they were wearing?

  “How do you feel?” One of the apparitions had walked in the door and was taking his pulse. “You were quite lucky—jumping like that and breaking so little.”

  “Where am I?” Mr. Jalal managed to say.

  “Bhatia Hospital. Your wife’s on the next floor.”

  “My wife?”

  “They’re trying to do the best they can.” The apparition’s eyes narrowed and it looked at him with a hardness he found flustering. “Someone hit her quite hard, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She may have bled inside.”

  The apparition put a pill in his mouth and a glass of water in his hand. “The police are waiting to record your statement, once the doctor has seen you,” it said, swishing briskly out the door.

  Mr. Jalal sat on the bed with the glass in his hand. The insistent note of a truck horn blared from the road below. He noticed the tattered border of the curtain, the dust on the windowpane, the buildings lined up stolidly against the cloudless sky beyond. He had not died. He was not a martyr. This was not heaven. He tried to make sense out of what the nurse had said. Why had all this happened? Was it all a result of undertaking his quest? Could this all be part of a test, part of the penance expected from him? Was this the price tag that accompanied faith?

  But Arifa? What had she ever done—why was she the one being made to pay? He wondered what was going to happen to her, what he was going to say to the police, what they would do to him. Would he tell them about Vishnu? Would he tell them about his vision? Was his faith strong enough to convince them? To convince himself?

  The pill began to dissolve in his mouth, and Mr. Jalal tasted the bitterness seeping into his tongue. Wasn’t medicine, ultimately, a matter of faith? Faith that the doctors knew what they were diagnosing, faith that their prescriptions would make you whole, faith that the tablet dissolving in your mouth would cure you, not kill you. Weren’t entire hospitals built on faith? The floors that supported the beds, the walls that held up the floors, the bricks and mortar and cement that composed the walls. And the patients sitting on the beds, clutching at their sheets and their blankets, shivering as the medicines entered their bodies, wondering what the pills were supposed to cure.

  For the second time that day, Mr. Jalal felt himself falling. But this time, there was no courtyard to break his fall, no ground to separate him from the blackness that opened below.

  This is the house she grew up in, this is the house she has returned to now,

  Who will dry the tears as her feet carry her back over the threshold?

  Kavita tried to remember the lines of the song. Was it Nutan or Meena Kumari who sang it? She could see the film now, the young widow turned out of her dead husband’s house, forced to make her lonely way back to the village where she was born.

  Of course, Salim wasn’t dead. Just incompatible. This much was clear after the night she’d spent with him. What a place to take her to, the waiting room at Victoria Terminus. At three o’clock in the morning, when the first train out to Jhansi wasn’t until six. Couldn’t they have just left later, she had asked, trying to make herself comfortable amidst the crowd of humanity. Especially the crying babies. Kavita had looked at their mother, a young Muslim girl in a burkha, not much older than herself, and shuddered.

  And Jhansi? What kind of destination was that to elope to? Jhansi? All it was famous for was the Rani of Jhansi, but that had been in the previous century—or had it been the century before that even? Here she had been having visions of Kulu or Simla or Darjeeling, all places she’d dreamt about going, and to campaign for which she’d certainly dropped enough hints the last few weeks. But Salim had called these choices impractical, saying Jhansi was where he had a good friend, with whom he could start a car repair business.

  Didn’t people drive cars in other parts of the country, she had felt like pointing out. And a car repair business? All that grime and that grease and that oil—is that what she’d be looking forward to smelling every evening?

  “But I love cars,” Salim had said, and Kavita had tried to console herself with the idea that cars were bigger and more important machines than Voltas pumps.

  The girl in the burkha was having trouble feeding her infant, with a second child sleeping in her lap and another crying loudly next to her. She looked at Kavita helplessly, but Kavita looked away, staring instead at the announcement board with the names of the trains. But then the girl leaned forward and tapped Kavita on the knee, requesting her to take the sleeping baby from her while she fed the youngest one, and Kavita had no choice but to agree. She accepted the baby with a forced smile, and held its body awkwardly in her lap, wondering if it was sufficiently well insulated against leaks. Imagine traveling in a second-class compartment, that too, to Jhansi, in a soiled dress.

  Meanwhile, the oldest child was still crying, so the mother asked him to go stand next to aunty. Kavita felt her face turn red. She had never been called that before. She felt like protesting—she wasn’t old enough, thank you, to be anyone’s aunty. The boy came over, sniveling, and with the fingers of one hand in his mouth. He brushed up right next to her, and Kavita felt herself surrounded by an overpowering baby smell, tinged with traces of urine and vomit. The boy suddenly took the fingers out of his mouth and draped that arm around her neck, and Kavita tried not to imagine the saliva dripping down her dupatta.

  “He likes you,” the mother said. “See, he’s stopped crying already. Say hello to aunty, Ijaaz.” The baby suckling at her breast made a gurgling sound. “Newly wedded, aren’t you? You’ll learn soon enough how to hold a baby properly, don’t worry.”

  The girl smiled, and Kavita noticed the two chipped teeth in the front row of her mouth.

  “Where are you going?” the girl asked.

  “Jhansi,” Kavita replied.

  “Jhansi? But that’s where we’re headed. It’s a wonderful town. Not so big and noisy like Bombay, no big buildings and film industry. Much more quiet.

  “I was born here, but I had all three of them once I moved to Jhansi. One after another, phut-phut. You’ll see.” The girl giggled.

  “Maybe we can sit together on the train—my husband doesn’t like me to travel by myself.”

  Just then, Salim came back from the ticket station. “You look so motherly with them,” he said, seeing Kavita with the baby in her lap and the boy clinging to her side.

  First auntyhood, now motherhood. This was too much to bear for one night. “Here, you hold them,” she said, thrusting the children at Salim. “I need to go to the ladies’ room.”

  They made it as far as Nasik. The girl with the children found seats with them and Kavita fumed the entire way at having to suffer the ignominy of an unreserved second-class compartment. At Nasik, she issued Salim an ultimatum. Either they traveled in first class or she was getting off and taking the next train back to Bombay.

  “And of course, whatever Daddy’s spoilt little brat wants, Daddy’s spoilt little brat gets,” Salim said.

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to live with a car mechanic the rest of my life.”

  “Don’t talk to your husband that way,” the girl, wide-eyed, admonished her.

  “He’s not my husband,” she replied. That shut the girl up.

  As Kavita stepped out of the train, she hoped Salim would relent and follow her. She hoped, as the whistle blew and the engine started up, that he would come to the door at the last minute and throw himself onto the platform for her love. Then she would consider taking him back—but only under some conditions—no Jhansi and no mechanic business. But the engine gathered speed, and the compartments started whizzing by, and she wasn’t even able to tell which compartment had been theirs. For a second, she was struck with panic at having left her luggage in the train, before remembering she wasn’t traveli
ng with any. Then thick, dark smoke started billowing out of the engine, the compartments disappeared one by one into a tunnel, and the only sign remaining of the train was the acrid taste left behind in the air.

  Now here she was, back at her building again. She couldn’t believe it had been only fourteen hours since she had left. The question was, how was she going to explain that absence to her parents?

  And more important, how was she going to explain her decision to them? Her decision not to marry Salim or Pran.

  No, she was going to become a film star. A heroine. A glamour queen. No one man could hope to possess her, only long after her on the screen. Her life would be one of the fabulous ones she read about in Stardust, in Filmfare.

  “Kavita memsahib? You?” she suddenly heard. She looked up to see the cigarettewalla gaping at her as she passed by his shop.

  “Of course it’s me. Whom were you expecting? Meena Kumari?” Kavita said, as she began mounting the steps.

  THE POLICE INSPECTOR stared at Mrs. Asrani.

  “You mean you’ve been here all day, and you haven’t heard a thing?”

  “No,” Mrs. Asrani said, and winced because it came out more forcefully than she had wanted. The trick was to just say it without any sign of nervousness. “No,” she said again, more calmly this time, “I’ve been watching the cricket test match on TV since morning.”

  “So you don’t know, for instance, that Mrs. Jalal was taken to the hospital in a coma, or that Mr. Jalal broke both legs from a fall into your courtyard?” The inspector emphasized the word “your.”

  “Are they okay?” Now Mrs. Asrani’s voice carried neighborly concern, the precise amount that would behoove someone living one floor down.

  “Mr. Jalal—he’ll live,” the inspector said. “But his wife—we don’t know yet how serious it is.”

  “That’s terrible.” Mrs. Asrani felt guilty about all the ill will she had directed towards Mrs. Jalal. She hoped none of this would boomerang back on her. She had not asked for this, she silently reminded whoever or whatever might be listening—even a bruise here or there would have sufficed as far as she had been concerned.