The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

  “Where is your daughter, Mrs. Asrani?”

  “She’s asleep. Why?”

  “Not a cricket fan, I see.”

  “Only when certain cricketeers are playing.”

  “Could you wake her up, please?”

  “Is that really necessary? She’s only a child.”

  “I understand she’s—” The inspector consulted his notes. “I understand she’s eighteen and a half. Do you consider that a child?”

  Mrs. Asrani tried to peer into the inspector’s notebook, to see what else was written there, but the inspector shielded his book and looked at her sternly.

  “I’ll go get my daughter.”

  Kavita was sitting in her room, her face ashen, when Mrs. Asrani unlocked the door and walked in.

  “You can’t keep me prisoner here. I’m an adult now. I’ll tell the inspector. I won’t be forced into marrying Pran. I’ve already told you I want to become a film star. Why don’t you listen to me? Why don’t you ever let me do what I want?”

  “Now look here, you disobedient girl. You’re in a lot of trouble already. Mr. Jalal tried to kill Mrs. Jalal because you ran away with his son. Then he tried to commit suicide himself. Almost succeeded. And all because of you. Whom are you going to kill next with your waywardness, your mother and father?”

  Kavita started sobbing.

  “You listen to me now. If you don’t want to end up in jail. If you ever want to be able to show your face outside again. You tell the inspector you were here last night. All of last night. It’s what the cigarettewalla and the paanwalla have already said. They’re doing their best to stop the scandal from spreading. For our sake. For your sake. And remember, you don’t know anything about the Jalals. Understand?”

  “But I wasn’t here. I was with Salim. He’ll tell them that when he comes back, when they ask him. We’ll be in trouble—the police will come and arrest us.”

  “What will they do, arrest the whole building? What is the word of one Salim-valim, compared to all of us put together? Whom do you think they’re going to believe?”

  “But the truth will come out.”

  “What truth? I just told you, the truth is you’ve been here all along. And you don’t know anything else. Now you get that into your head, if you ever want to show your face in public again. Sneaking out God knows where in the middle of the night.” Mrs. Asrani checked herself. She took a deep breath.

  “I told the inspector you were asleep.” Mrs. Asrani wiped Kavita’s eyes dry. “Try to look as if you’ve got up from sleeping, not from crying.”

  When Mrs. Asrani returned to the door with Kavita, she found the inspector at the entrance to the Pathaks’ flat, interviewing Mrs. Pathak. Who, coincidentally, had also been watching the test match since morning.

  “And your husband?” the inspector asked.

  “Oh, he’s a complete fanatic,” Mrs. Pathak said, fingering the necklace she had hastily put on over her house clothes when she had seen the inspector through the keyhole. “He hasn’t even gone downstairs since the match started—not even to the cigarettewalla, believe it or not—that’s why we have no idea what happened. It’s impossible to pry him away from the TV, even though ordinarily on Sunday mornings he goes to the temple. Cricket before God, I guess.” Mrs. Pathak raised her shoulders helplessly to the inspector, who did not smile.

  “Should I get him for you?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary.”

  The inspector turned to Kavita. “And you, miss, have you been watching cricket as well?”

  This was it. It was her chance to act. She would prove to her mother that she was a natural, a born actress, who should not be kept from her calling.

  Kavita yawned. She stretched her neck, and languorously brushed her fingers against her lashes. “I’ve been asleep,” she said, running her fingers through her hair and yawning again, giving a picture-perfect performance of One Who Has Just Awoken.

  “And why are you so sleepy, miss?, Were you away doing something last night?”

  “No, I’ve been here, at home. Where would I go?”

  “Mr. Jalal says your dupatta was left behind on the landing last night.”

  Now it was time for One Who Has Just Experienced Shock. Kavita’s eyes expanded in astonishment, until they were the size of four-anna coins. Her mouth opened to the perfect aperture of surprise mixed in with dismay. Her hands fluttered agitatedly, but uselessly, by her side.

  “Why in the world would he say that?”

  “That’s not all,” the inspector said, looking hard at Kavita, then Mrs. Asrani, then Mrs. Pathak. He had been saving the mention of Mr. Jalal’s version of events until now. “Mr. Jalal also says that a mob including the cigarettewalla and the paanwalla and the electrician broke into his flat to question him about your whereabouts. They hit his wife on the head with a lathi, then threw him off the balcony.”

  Kavita was trying to decide on the next vignette in her performance when her mother burst in. “See this? See how they lie? Forever their son has been an eve-teaser after my daughter, and now these stories. I ask you, inspector, is it fair? Is it fair to ruin my poor girl’s name, to implicate her in this mud?”

  Encouraged by the inspector’s silence, Mrs. Asrani continued.

  “Day by day that man has been getting worse, and nobody did anything. ‘Take him to a hospital, before he does something,’ I told Mrs. Jalal, but who is she to listen? Now that the fruit they have got is rotten, look how they’re trying to dump it in other people’s plate. Look how they’re trying to drag us all in. And the poor cigarettewalla and paanwalla—if they hadn’t responded to Mrs. Jalal’s screams, if it hadn’t been for them bursting in, I’m sure he would have finished her off.”

  Kavita began to say something, but her mother still wasn’t finished. “Just one thing I want now, and that is not to let my daughter’s name get mixed in with all this. Just now only the proposal has come for her marriage—and now this. Do you have daughters, inspector sahib, that you know how easily their reputations can be ruined?”

  The inspector said he was unmarried. He had written down everything Mrs. Asrani had related. “And you, Mrs. Pathak, do you also think Mr. Jalal has been acting crazy?”

  “The ganga woke us up this morning. Told us to come downstairs. It was Mr. Jalal. Sleeping next to Vishnu, can you believe it? All night he must have spent there, instead of in his flat. When he wakes up, he claims we should worship Vishnu because he’s the real Lord Vishnu descended to earth. Then he grabs my arm as if he’s going to molest me. With my husband watching, no less. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.”

  “This Vishnu person—is he the one lying dead on your steps?”

  “Dead?”

  “We’ve radioed for the morgue van to come take him away. How long has he been dead, do you think?”

  “He was alive yesterday…” Mrs. Asrani ventured.

  “And today, when we went down and Mr. Jalal was sleeping there. I thought he must have been alive then,” Mrs. Pathak said. “Though I didn’t check his pulse.”

  “Yesterday evening when we returned—he must have been alive then, wasn’t he, beti?” Mrs. Asrani asked her daughter.

  Kavita did not reply. So it had happened. He had died, as she had worried he would. She wanted to grieve, she wanted to cry, but why were her eyes suddenly so dry?

  “Did you know him well?” the inspector asked.

  “Very well.” Mrs. Asrani shook her head mournfully. “I used to bring him tea every morning. My family depended on him, we really did—in fact, Kavita grew up playing with him. We’re going to miss him—a lot. In fact—”

  “Actually, inspector, we knew him better,” Mrs. Pathak interjected. “I used to feed him chapatis every day. He was like a family member to us. The same food I used to cook for my own family, I used to feed him also—”

  “Yes, yes, but three days late. When they were hard as rocks, were her chapatis. In fact, I’m sure if you ask a doctor to do a
postmortem, he would say that’s what made him sick—he’d find a big undigested chapati piece stuck in his bowel—”

  “Excuse me, but we did bring in a doctor. And we were the ones who paid for him, too, I will have you know. Not anyone else who is claiming to be so close and dear to Vishnu now, just to impress the inspector—”

  “You liar. Didn’t we pay half of that useless ambulancewalla your husband insisted be called? More than a hundred rupees we paid for that, and for what, I ask?”

  The inspector held up his hand. “Do either of you know who his next of kin might be?”

  “Maybe the ganga does. She’ll be here tomorrow morning.”

  “Then tell her she’s to come to the police station. Any other information you can give me?” the inspector asked.

  No one said anything, so he examined the notes in his book. “There’s a lot of discrepancy here with what Mr. Jalal says,” he said, looking up thoughtfully. “Which could become quite important,” he paused and eyed everyone in turn, “in the event his wife dies.”

  He shut his notebook with a snap, as if he had just trapped an insect between its covers. “Well, your statements have all been recorded—I’ll have them typed and ready to sign by tomorrow.” He put an elastic band around the notebook. “Of course, we’ll locate the son and see if he has any more relevant information.” He slid the notebook into his shirt pocket. “Now if there’s nothing else—”

  “Wait,” Kavita said, “I have something to add. About Vishnu.” This was it. The Sad Scene. It was her chance to prove herself. She had to produce a tear, it was the least she could do for poor Vishnu. “When I was little,” she said, trying to think of the games they used to play.

  Her mother recovered from her look of alarm, and bulged her eyes warningly. Kavita ignored her.

  “When I was little,” she tried again, and the inspector put his pencil to his lips and regarded her gravely. Why was it so hard to conjure up those images of firecrackers, of phuljadis?

  “When I was little,” she began a third time, and this time, she felt it. The moisture welling up in the corner of her eye. Growing, coalescing, trembling—and then, when her lashes could support it no more, rolling. Rolling from the cup of her eyelid, rolling over the rise of her cheek, rolling across the lush sweep of her face, like condensation tracing down the skin of an apple, like a rivulet of morning dew. Each drop radiant with the glow of her youth, each tear a pearl around a grain of her sorrow.

  Kavita raised her face to her mother, she raised it to Mrs. Pathak, to the inspector; and as the sun shone in over the landing, she felt its energy glistening in her cheeks, its warmth caressing her face.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AFTER THE LIGHT comes darkness. Someone is playing a flute. It is so sweet, it makes Vishnu want to cry. He follows the strands of sound, they guide him like a rope through the darkness.

  He feels the trees before he sees them. Twigs brush against his face, fallen leaves rustle under his feet. The branches above sweep over his head as he walks past, like giant hands reaching down unseen to bless him.

  The darkness fades, and he sees the mist of a forest. Gradually, that clears as well, and the trees, green and stately, come into focus.

  Through the trees, he sees the boy. Beyond lies the meadow, a hut in the forefront, cows grazing on the grass behind. The boy is hiding behind a tree, watching a woman churn milk. As Vishnu comes up behind him, the boy turns.

  “Shhh!” he whispers, a finger to his lips, and Vishnu sees that the color of his skin is tinged blue. Vishnu creeps up beside him and they watch the woman together. She is singing a song, as she pulls the rope attached to the churn, first with the left hand, then with the right, in a rhythm that matches the tune.

  The boy looks at Vishnu. “Are you ready?” he asks. Before Vishnu can answer, the boy is off, running towards the woman. In one speedy bound, he reaches her, and knocks over the churn. Milk splashes onto the grass, a white sheet that spreads over the green. The woman screams as the milk cascades over her feet. The boy dips his hand into the churn, and runs back to the trees as fast as he went.

  “Wait till I tell Yashoda!” the woman calls out after him.

  Vishnu sees something white and creamy in the boy’s palm. The boy holds it out to him. Vishnu looks at it, but doesn’t move.

  “Don’t you want any?” the boy asks, plunging a finger across his palm and licking it clean. Vishnu does the same—it is butter. But butter so smooth and rich, such as he has never tasted before. They eat the butter, fingerful by fingerful, and then the boy licks his palm clean.

  “Would you like to play with me in the forest?” the boy asks. Then he frolics into the trees. Vishnu looks after him for an instant, then runs in behind.

  VISHNU HAS BEEN sleeping in the forest, tired from all the play with the boy. A melody awakens him—it is the flute again, as agonizing as before. He rises and follows the sound—it leads him deeper and deeper into the forest.

  He comes to a clearing. There stands the boy with the blue skin, his eyes closed, one leg bent at the knee, so that the tip of one foot touches the heel of the other. He is the one playing the flute, on his face is a look of rapture, so intense that Vishnu wonders if he is in pain.

  He stands near the boy and listens to him play. The notes continue for a while, then stop. The boy opens his eyes.

  “Who are you?” Vishnu asks, but the boy does not reply.

  “Are you Krishna?”

  The boy smiles. “You know who I am,” he says.

  The boy raises the flute. “You must be tired. Tonight I will play for you. Tonight, you can rest.” He puts the flute to his mouth.

  “And tomorrow?” Vishnu asks.

  “Tomorrow, you go back,” the boy says, and Vishnu hears the notes start up again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are several people I wish to thank. My family and friends for their support and encouragement and their comments on various drafts of the manuscript. Richard McCann, Matthew Specktor, and Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva for the interest they took and the guidance they provided at crucial junctures. Michael Cunningham for a life-changing workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. S. Siddarth and Devdutt Pattanaik for sharing with me their knowledge of Hinduism and Hindu mythology. My editor, Jill Bialosky, for all her feedback and her support of the book (and its author). My agent, Nicole Aragi, for being the best agent a writer could hope for. Larry Cole, above all, for making everything possible in so many fundamental ways.

  Sections of this book were written during residencies at the Virgina Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Their support is gratefully acknowledged, as is that of the Jenny McKean Moore Fund at George Washington University.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Manil Suri grew up in Mumbai (Bombay), India. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University and is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. This is his first novel.