The City of Devi

by Manil Suri

  Abruptly, his father dropped out. The lines on his mother’s face deepened, and Karun smiled more uncertainly now, if at all. Hair sprouted on his lip and chin, a mustache appeared, then disappeared. He still projected the same innocence, but the expression in his eyes became harder to read. The last photograph showed him holding up a framed degree, his mother standing proudly next to him.

  My snooping didn’t offend Karun—in fact, he found it amusing. Each day, I pulled out something different to ask about when he returned from work: which was his favorite board game? how old were his parents when they married? what prompted him to buy a pair of pants so parrot green? I took these opportunities to also tell him more about me. We pored over our albums together and compared his birthday photos with mine. One evening we forgot all about dinner, assembling the Lego into a giant structure resembling the Gateway of India (even though we had aimed for the Taj Mahal). I talked about my specialization in epidemiology, the drug tests I’d statistically analyze for Sandoz in the job starting next month. Karun tried explaining his dissertation—the gist (as far as I could tell) was the analysis of data from particle splitting to predict resulting instabilities.

  The simplicity of Karun’s past, its lack of surprises, comforted me. How endearing to discover a story so manageable that the boxes accommodating it fit under only half the bed. I imagined my own story rubbing containers with his, taking up the room left. “He’s really like a child,” I updated Uma. “We’re only sleeping, so there’s no pressure at night.”

  Except I always had an eye open towards advancing physical intimacy. By now, I’d learnt enough to be indirect, to tread delicately. Each night, I pulled Karun’s waist to my pelvis with the subtlest of motions, cradled his buttocks, pressed in against the back of his thighs. Once I knew he felt comfortable, I reversed our positions as a gentle invitation for him to reciprocate. I made a game of everything—rolling across the bed in an embrace, snuggling at the abdomen so that our belly buttons “kissed,” measuring distances on his body with my lips (six lip-lengths between his nipples, twelve from his Adam’s apple to his waist). I convinced him to teach me yoga, for which it seemed natural to suggest undressing down to our underwear once the mornings turned humid.

  It felt a bit like getting swimming lessons again, without the water this time. Each morning before breakfast, Karun coaxed out the correct arcs from my body, adjusted the lines of my limbs. I learnt quickly—my knack for yoga greatly exceeded my aptitude for aquatics. Warrior pose became my favorite—I tried to sneak a peek in the mirror each time we performed it. The two of us reaching towards the open window as if in a ballet, sunlight streaming in to warm our faces and splash down our necks.

  Sometimes we went through an asana with our bodies touching, pretending we were one person. The shared intensity of holding the position together led to a heightened awareness of the points of contact between us. We started performing tree pose this way, so that Karun could support my upraised hands to correct my frequent bouts of imbalance. Standing flamingo-like necessitated pressing the heel of one foot high into the split between the legs. Every tiny adjustment translated into a movement we both felt at our groins—it was difficult to ignore the rub and push at this focal point.

  Calming asanas like corpse pose could be even more provocative. With my body limp over Karun’s, my consciousness kept returning to the contact below our waist. The stirrings I detected were not just my own, but I scrupulously resisted the urge to act on them. Instead, I let the asana work its magic, leaving Karun increasingly charged by my body pressed into his.

  My patience paid off the evening Karun announced he’d found the wedding bottle of champagne hiding for months in our fridge. “Perhaps I’ll experiment with something Italian for dinner to accompany it.” The cacciatore sauce he served over spaghetti tasted suspiciously like his chicken curry, but went agreeably enough with the champagne (which, devoid of bubbles, still packed enough alcohol to dissolve away most of his inhibitions). As I snuggled up to him in bed that night, I noticed he wore neither pajamas nor underwear. “It feels nice—why don’t you do the same?”

  He was right—it did feel nice, especially when he allowed me to cradle his exposed self between my thighs without shrinking at the contact. He played with my breasts, taking the nipples into his mouth as I’d taught him, but with a curiosity I’d not sensed before (I now had an objective gauge of his enthusiasm against my leg). The next night, though we no longer had the benefit of champagne, he seemed even more engaged, kissing me in elaborate circular patterns across my nipples, my stomach, my waist; tonguing my belly button as if scooping honey from it. I found an old diary in which to start a tally, drawing a star next to the date of each such notable interaction.

  By the end of a month, I had collected eight stars. Sometimes, our games brought us tantalizingly close to the act, and though Karun never followed through, I assigned an extra star for such occasions. The true breakthrough, when I finally conferred a third star, came in Jaipur.

  Karun’s conference there had been postponed due to a terrorist attack at tourist sites—we only had our Pink City honeymoon seven months into our marriage. The Hawa Mahal lay in ruins and the City Palace had been badly damaged, but Jantar Mantar still stood intact. We spent Karun’s free day roaming the observatory—the ninety-foot sundial fascinated him, as did the giant sunken hemispheres for measuring astronomical coordinates. That night, a colleague from Princeton treated us to dinner at his hotel in a restored palace—despite the bombings, the restaurant portion remained unscathed. After several glasses of wine each, Professor Ashton dropped us off at our much more modest guesthouse.

  I could tell from Karun’s spirited state that the night would get a star, perhaps even two. Before I knew it, we were both naked, with Karun swiveling around over my body, pretending to be the shadow of the sundial. “This is my path in the morning,” he said, bending over my head to kiss me in an arc across my breasts. “And this is where I reach at noon,” he continued, leaning forward to plant kisses along my waist.

  “And where do you fall after that?” I giggled as his hips pivoted above my face.

  “Right into the hemisphere!” he declared, tilting forward to kiss me between my legs. I screamed, then burst out laughing as he kissed me again. His nudeness swung above me, and I almost grabbed it to retaliate. But then I remembered the injunction against touching, so I ensnared him with my mouth instead.

  Fortunately, he found this uproarious, not distressing. We fell over on our sides, laughing so hard I had to release him. But he remained inches from my face, so with a cry of “Jantar Mantar,” I seized him again. At some point, I realized he had stopped laughing, that I was more tangibly aware of him in my mouth, that the tenor of our play had changed. He made a small gasping sound as he withdrew halfway, then slid in again.

  Although I did not manage to bring him to climax that first time, I could tell he enjoyed it. As did I, especially after he reciprocated in kind (which I allowed only because my self-consciousness had been neutralized by the restaurant libations). One of the first things to do upon returning home, I decided, would be to invest in a case of wine. Though we both seemed so amenable to this new diversion that perhaps we wouldn’t need to be inebriated next time.

  MAKING MY WAY ALONG the tracks under the bridge at Opera House, I feel it. It couldn’t be, I think—there’s no electricity in the overhead lines. But there it is, under my feet—the vibration, the rumble, that can mean only one thing. I force myself to keep walking without looking back. When the sound is loud enough to fill my ears, when I can smell the smoke and taste it in my mouth, I finally turn around. Puffing towards me is an old steam engine pulling two yellow and brown train compartments along the rails.

  “Sister, come,” I hear a female voice say as I jump aside onto the stones mounded against the tracks. A hand reaches out from the open door of the train—it is hennaed and bejeweled like that of a bride. “Come, I’ll pull you in, don’t be afraid.” Without
knowing why, I begin to run alongside. I run faster and faster, and manage to latch onto the steps hanging from the door, then reach up and grasp the proffered hand.

  5

  THE TERRORISM RESPONSIBLE FOR ABBREVIATING OUR SIGHT-SEEING in Jaipur wasn’t isolated. A series of attacks had continued ever since our wedding, with at least one set of bombs going off every two or three weeks in a different state. Other incidents of violence had increased as well—towns and villages all over India seemed afflicted by an epidemic of riots and rampages. Some explained this rising mayhem as a cycle of provocation and reaction engineered by the notorious Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, others pointed at Maoist insurgents or criminal syndicates. On the radio one day, I heard a news analyst trace the surge back to Superdevi, ascribing the blame to its climactic orgy of bloodshed.

  As evidence, he enumerated several instances of theatergoers, inflamed after a show, running amok. In Ahmedabad, they broke into a nearby market and ransacked Muslim shops, in Jhansi, they beat up worshippers exiting a mosque, in Nagpur, they set an entire Muslim colony aflame. Right-wing politicians, recognizing the potential for a national conflagration, had joined forces to fan these sparks, he asserted—after all, hadn’t the same type of religious chauvinism, engendered by the screening of the Ramayana on national television a few decades back, eventually swept them into power? A year after Superdevi’s release, free screenings (using bootlegged DVDs) were still being organized in thousands of rural venues, each followed by a fiery religious discourse on the film’s supposed message of “purifying” the country’s population. The Hindu Rashtriya Manch had recruited and armed a half million villagers, posting them in strategic outposts all over India for a promised battle against non-Hindus to uphold the Superdevi’s will. “The entire country is a powder keg waiting to explode,” the commentator declared. “People call Superdevi inclusive just because the producers contrived to give her a Muslim sidekick. But next time you see it, count the number of Islamic villains she kills. Every listener should demand an immediate ban on the film.”

  Bombay was the last place to call for such a ban. Not only were its audiences more sophisticated and harder to manipulate, but local entrepreneurs had dubbed Mumbai “City of Devi” to cash in on Superdevi’s success. By now I saw the name everywhere—on giant billboards, across the sides of buses and trains, even as a flaming pink neon spiral down the airport control tower when we returned from Jaipur. The moniker fit well—not just because Superdevi took place in the city (with the lead actress Baby Rinky a real-life discovery from the Dharavi slums) but also because Mumbai’s patron deity Mumbadevi had the most screen time out of all nine incarnations. With both “Mumba” and “Ai” words for “mother” in the local language, which other metropolis in India could even come close to claiming (and capitalizing on) the mantle of the mother goddess’s city?

  The idea proved to be a marketing coup. “City of Devi” tours, combining locales from the film with religious destinations, became so popular that even temples with only a stray idol or two of Devi dusted them off to vie for inclusion. Some managed to install video screens in their prayer halls, even THX stereo, from the inflow of tourist rupees (not to mention dollars, pounds, euros). Literary festivals, dance events, school essay contests, and the Taj Hotel’s “Best Avatar Costume” competition all bore the City of Devi logo: seven dabs of pigment (representing the seven original islands of Bombay) arranged into an artistically rendered image of Mumbadevi. The Mumbai Mirror published special pullout sections every Sunday on Mumbadevi myths—the demon giant vanquished by her, the devout Koli woman whose fisherman husband she saved, the time she brought fresh cotton to the city’s embargoed mills (this last one newly invented, like several others—Mumbadevi never having enjoyed top-tier goddess status, like Laxmi or Kali, before this). Anxious to regain advertising ground lost to McDonald’s, Pizza Hut came up with a computer mouse pad giveaway featuring the mother goddess smiling down benignly on various city sights. The promotion had to be hurriedly aborted when Muslims took umbrage at the image of Mumbadevi apparently blessing the entire Worli sea face, including the Haji Ali mosque clearly visible at one end.

  In fact, several citizens’ groups wanted to scrap the City of Devi designation entirely, on grounds that it violated Mumbai’s secular spirit (my father was positively apoplectic). The organizers dismissed these qualms—the campaign had a cultural, not proselytizing, aim. It promoted commerce, the true religion of the city.

  THE INTERIOR OF THE TRAIN compartment is unlike any I have ever seen. The walls are painted pink, with crimson banquettes and sofas lining the perimeter—light sconces bloom rosily from next to the curtained windows. A Kashmiri carpet stretches across the floor, all the way to a closed door leading to the rest of the compartment. Dressing tables flank this door, one on either side, with pink dupattas draped over their mirrors. I feel I have clambered into the boudoir of a traveling courtesan, the parlor of a mobile house of ill repute.

  However, the three women inside are dressed as brides, not ladies of the night. They shimmer in red saris, dots of decorative white pigment glittering along the borders of their faces, diamond pins in their noses sparkling promises of virginity. “Welcome,” the tallest one says. “I’m Madhu, and these are my fellow sisters, Guddi and Anupam.”

  “Madhu did said we’re going to be Devi ma’s new maidens from tonight,” Guddi breathlessly announces. Her face is heart-shaped, her eyes spaced apart wide—she seems the youngest, no more than sixteen.

  “Just see what they gave us,” Anupam adds, pointing to her necklace, laughing in excitement as she jiggles her earrings. “And this sari—I know it’s a secret, Madhu didi, but I have to tell her. It glows in the dark, just like Ooper-devi ma’s sari!”

  “Yes, just like Ooper-devi ma, in the final scenes,” Guddi chimes in. “We’re the first maidens to get them! Maybe we should show her—turn off all the lights and pull down the shutters. Can we, Madhu didi?”

  Madhu tells them no. “Don’t mind them. They’re very naïve—Mura recruited them from their villages only last week. I’ve had barely three days to give them their city training. We had another one, too—Nalini—but she couldn’t make it.”

  “Poor Nalini didi.”

  “She’d be so disappointed if she knew what she was missing.”

  “It was that time of the month for her,” Madhu says. “It seems they don’t keep such good track of these things in the villages, unfortunately. Mura’s wondering what he’s going to do, since he promised to deliver three of them this week. When I saw you walking along the tracks, it came to me that perhaps you could—”

  “Oh, that would be so terrific, if she could take Nalini didi’s place,” Anupam exclaims.

  “Yes, could she? Could we make her our sister as well? Please, Madhu didi, say yes.” Guddi takes my hand in hers and presses it to her breast.

  Madhu examines me closely, and frowns. “You seemed much younger on the tracks.” She speaks in an injured tone, as if I’ve misrepresented myself. “It’s hardly going to work if you look like their aunt instead of their sister—you must be already past thirty.”

  “But we could make her up, Didi,” Anupam says. “All those powders and lipsticks you showed us. We could make her look young again by rubbing that magic cream into her skin—the one you said foreign memsahibs use when they’re aging.”

  “And teach her to dance. Mura chacha wouldn’t be able to turn her down, then, would he?” Guddi raises her joined hands above her head and starts sashaying on the carpet, alternating between classical Kathakali poses and moves from popular films. “We can perform together for Devi ma, all four of us.”

  Madhu is still dubious. “I suppose we might as well give it a try. At least she’s not wearing a mangalsutra—if Mura saw she was married, that would be it.” Before I can correct her, she hustles me towards the dressing table. “We better hurry—the train will be at Santa Cruz before we know it.”

  My ears prick up—Santa Cru
z is only a couple of stations after my destination. “Actually, if you could have the train stop at Bandra, I could get off there—”

  “Oh, but that won’t be possible. The train driver’s in the engine—the only way to get word to him is by pulling the emergency chain.” Madhu says this with a regretful look, but can’t quite conceal the trace of glee that brightens her face.

  “Besides, we have to prepare you for Mura chacha, Didi,” Guddi says. “This is not a chance you want to miss. He’s resting back there, behind that door—he’ll be getting up any minute.” She sits me down while Anupam starts shaking a vial of white liquid. “It’s good we still have Nalini didi’s outfit—we can dress you in it.”

  Anupam starts to paint a series of white bridal dots along my brow, but I push her hand away. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what you’re doing. Forgive me, but I don’t want to be dressed up for your Mura chacha—I just need to get to Bandra.”

  Both Guddi and Anupam look at me in alarm. “Do you know what you’re saying?” Madhu exclaims. “It’s Devi ma we’re dressing you up for, not just Mura. The real Devi ma, the one who’s appeared at Juhu in person—not all these fakes people keep conjuring. That’s why we’re headed to Santa Cruz—haven’t you heard anything? You’re lucky to get this opportunity—only because Nalini can’t join us. Devi ma herself, you understand?—to serve as her personal maiden. Though in your case, not to be impolite, it would be more matron than maiden.”