The City of Devi: A Novel

by Manil Suri

  “The tide’s a lot less rough farther out,” he said, as I tried to wipe the salt water off my eyes. “They’re just ripples there—they only swell into waves as they near the shore.”

  “It must be very deep.”

  “The drop is quite gradual, actually. I can take you. You just have to hold on.”

  Somewhere from the beach came the call of a man selling shaved ice. “Gola, gola,” he cried, “limbu, pineapple, ras-bhari.” I pictured the two of us sharing a raspberry gola, taking turns to suck the syrup from the ice. The line between Karun’s lips getting darker with each intake, the same intense crimson as mine. When the ice was gone and only the stick remained, I would press together our lips. Not to kiss, but to see how the curves fit, his crimson aligned against mine. For who was to say this wasn’t the match that really mattered, more than horoscopes and birth charts and palm lines? That the compatibility between two souls couldn’t be reduced to this question of geometry, of mathematics?

  “We don’t have to go if you’re afraid.”

  In truth, I was a little nervous of water, had been since my school swimming pool days. But the iceman was far away on shore, my experiment there would have to wait. “As long as you think it’s safe.”

  “It is,” he said. Then he took my hand and started swimming backwards towards the horizon, pulling me along into the ocean, past the coconuts and the garlands, past the woman with the billowing sari and the children diving into the breakers, past the point I could hear the iceman’s call or touch sand with my feet, until the waves were shorn of their foamy manes and the sea swelled silently against our chins.

  2

  A SCUFFLE BREAKS OUT IN A CORNER OF THE BASEMENT. THE Khakis have accused a man of being Muslim, they proceed to beat him. I see a doctor swing his stethoscope above his head like a whip, two women in nurse’s uniforms wield umbrellas and try to elbow their way in. Even the woman next to me does her share, hurling insults at the victim across the room. “Son of a pig sisterfucker,” she says, and aims a stream of spit in the direction of the commotion.

  Although aware of the city’s partition along religious lines, I’ve never witnessed the hatred fueled by this division firsthand. I now understand the advice my watchman tried to impress upon me so emphatically this morning: only the very brave or the very foolish venture into the wrong area of town anymore. Still, this is a hospital, I feel like shouting—even if it lies in a Hindu sector, does that mean the only treatment administered to Muslims is this kind of battering? Had we been at Masina hospital in Byculla, would I be the one meted out such violent medicine instead?

  They claimed this could never happen. Bombay was too cosmopolitan, its population too diverse, its communities too interdependent to ever become another Beirut or Belfast. “Just think of the financial give-and-take alone,” my father would say. “Without everyone’s cooperation the economy would simply dry up.” He’d point to the language riots of the fifties, the communal campaigns of the sixties and seventies, the waves of bomb blasts since the early nineties that blew up hundreds as they sat in trains or buses or offices. “Bring on whatever havoc you will—the city will remain united even if the rest of the country splits apart.”

  For a long time, he was right—even the Pakistani guerrilla attack in 2008 seemed to only increase the city’s cohesive resolve. “See these people holding hands?” he asked, at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. “They’re neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first.”

  I try to summon that spirit of unity now as I listen to the screams of the man being pummeled. How could we have fallen so far so quickly? Especially when Mumbai was on the verge of becoming such a world-class metropolis? The dazzle and architectural chic of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the City of Devi campaign that would fast-track us to international fame—who could have predicted that the seeds of our doom lay therein? I try not to loop once more through the arc of events that’s led us to our ravaged state, try to tune out the muffled crunch of metal meeting bone through cloth and skin. I must become more hard-hearted for survival’s sake, learn to channel my mind back to the memory of more pleasant days.

  MY MOTHER’S REACTION to the swimming lessons from Karun disappointed me. I had hoped for tantrums, for drama, perhaps even a curfew, like my parents tried to enforce on Uma when she first started spending evenings late with Anoop. “It looks like a pillowcase,” my mother declared upon seeing me in my high school swimsuit. “Can’t you get something that better shows off your figure?” I realized then how old thirty-one was, how dire my prospects must seem to her.

  So that weekend, Uma helped me pick something suitably revealing from a boutique in Colaba. Its blue and white stripes stretched over my breasts to remind me of yacht sails, of beach umbrellas. I imagined emerging from the showers like a Danielle Steel vixen, the water trickling down my neck and beading on my bosom as I walked seductively towards Karun. But at the pool, my courage evaporated as soon as I left the locker room. I covered myself with my arms as best as I could and scurried across to the shallow end.

  Karun stood against the swimming pool wall, his knees bent, so that the water lapped against his throat. Sunlight set his body ablaze, the tiles burned blue and bright all around him, ripples spread glittering towards and away from his chin. “Come in,” he said. “The temperature’s nice.” Although his gaze flickered over my swimsuit, he didn’t comment on my new nautically themed breasts.

  As usual, our bodies hardly touched. Each time I thought they would, he managed to skirt contact without making it look like a purposeful move. Today, we worked on the dreaded amphibian kick—he demonstrated the entire sequence without even grazing my leg. Was it just shyness that kept us so chastely separated, or lack of interest on his part? Where was Mumbadevi to transport me back into his arms?

  “You worry too much about sinking,” Karun announced. “Let’s try it with a life ring around your waist.”

  For a while I paddled around like some hapless circus animal stuck into a prop for an aquatic trick. Finally, after slipping out for the fifth time, I voiced the obvious. “Don’t you think it would be better if you kept me afloat with your arms?”

  He touched me then, setting his palms against my stomach, sparking off all the right chemicals in my brain. I sensed a delicacy in the way he handled me, as if, made of china, I might drop to the bottom of the pool and break. This decorum worried me—how distressing if the only outcome of these lessons turned out to be my learning to swim.

  We walked over to the beach at Chowpatty afterwards. I’d waited in vain each evening for Karun to take my hand—he didn’t do so today, either. More than hand-holding, though, I felt the greatest longing towards the couples sharing snacks at the food stalls. Swimming left me ravenous, but it seemed too forward to suggest we split a bhel puri or dosa.

  “Should we get something to eat?” Karun asked, and I almost swooned. I steered him to the vegetable sandwiches—the safest, I figured, given the staidness he projected. “I know from the picnic how much your family adores sandwiches,” he said. “But would you mind if we tried something spicier, like dosas?”

  The dosas tasted so good with their fiery coconut chutney that we ordered a second round. I boldly suggested we finish with kulfi, even deciding on the flavors—mango and saffron. The kulfiwalla rolled the frozen metal cones deftly between his palms to loosen the ice cream inside. He unmolded them on the same leaf for us to share, the intimacy of which prospect made us both blush.

  We strolled along the beach, scooping up bites of the kulfi from the leaf with our plastic spoons. Karun ate more of the saffron, leaving the mango for me, since it tasted better. “I haven’t had kulfi on the beach like this in ages, not since my college years in Bombay.” He shook his head when I asked him if he’d kept in touch with his friends from then. “They’ve all moved away—things never remain the same.”

  Of course, I really wanted to ask him about girlfriends—here in Bombay, or back in Delhi, or
even while growing up in Karnal. But I couldn’t formulate a subtle enough way to pose the question. In three days, I’d ferreted out almost no useful information—Uma and my mother were appalled at my lack of data mining skills. We talked about such neutral topics like his research in particle astrophysics (studying quark densities to understand the origins of the universe) and the reason I chose statistics (all those exotic-sounding curves, from Gaussian to gamma to chi, I sheepishly confessed, drew me in).

  As I tried yet again to think of some artfully camouflaged way of bringing up the girlfriend question, Karun stopped. “Look, it’s the Trimurti.” He pointed to a three-headed tableau in the sand. The sculptor had already completed two of the faces and was preparing to carve the third. “Vishnu the caretaker and Shiva the destroyer—my father had an interesting take on who should occupy the final spot in the trinity.”

  Wary that the evening’s investigative opportunities might get sidetracked again, I didn’t respond. But Karun pressed on. “Go ahead, take a guess—who do you think should rightfully be called the creator of the universe?”

  “Not Brahma? Isn’t he the one who blows everything out in a single breath?”

  “Ah, but creation comes from the womb, not the mouth—a simple matter of anatomy, as my baji would say. So logically, the true third should be the mother goddess, Devi.”

  “I think your baji was just pulling your leg. It’s Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, everyone agrees.”

  “Not everyone. Majumdar was one of the first to point out that Brahma’s inclusion wasn’t quite so successful, and other scholars have agreed. The fact is, few worship Brahma—not compared to the millions of Devi followers. Just think of all the temples she has in even the remotest spots of the country.”

  “So we should tell sculptors everywhere to forget about Brahma, to compose their Trimurtis based on a popularity contest?”

  Karun laughed. “Absolutely. In a way, it’s already happened. All those paintings and statues you’ve probably seen—it’s always Shiva fused with Vishnu, or Devi fused with Shiva, or half Vishnu, half Devi. They’re always trying to complete themselves, Baji said—find the attributes they’re missing, the ones they crave. Brahma rarely gets invited to enjoy such intimate couplings.”

  Sensing the conversation veering away on a tangent, I tried to turn things to my advantage by squeezing out more information about Karun’s family. “Was he quite religious, your baji?”

  “By most standards, yes, but more than religion, I think he loved mythology. He’d relate a legend to me every night—the sea of milk that churned up jewels, the giant fish Matsya who saved mankind during the flood. It was such a magical way to understand the world.”

  “But not a very scientific one—not the best training for a physicist.”

  “Actually, he often added a scientific twist. Like relating the flood in Matsya’s story to actual periods on earth when the oceans rose. Or using Vishnu’s incarnations—first fish, then reptile, then mammal, then man, to tell me about evolution—I still remember that.”

  “So he was a scientist as well?”

  “No, not really, though he probably would have made an excellent one if he’d received the opportunity. Family problems forced him to leave college after the first year—he ended up as a purchaser for a construction firm. But he never lost his interest in books, his curiosity—he dabbled in so many things. Gardening, for one—we actually had a pomegranate tree growing right there on our balcony. Mythology and science were his favorites, though—he found all sorts of colorful ways to combine them. For instance, he’d say that three was the magic number of the universe, its most intrinsic configuration—not just because of the triad of primary colors or our three space dimensions, but also because of all the trinities in different religions, especially the Trimurti. He was convinced that everything derives from the basic building blocks of Vishnu, Shiva, Devi. Pseudoscience you might say, or mystical nonsense, even—but it had a charming ambitiousness to it, sort of a layman’s Grand Unified Theory. Perhaps that’s why I went into physics—to get the training Baji never received.”

  Brahma had begun to emerge from the sand, and with him, a fundamental question arose in my mind. “And what about you—do you believe at all? The religion, the mythology—did you inherit any of that from your baji?”

  Karun watched the sculptor pat one of Brahma’s eyebrows in place. “When I was a child, I accompanied Baji in everything. The incense, the temples, the praying—it was such an essential part of my life. But things began to change soon after he died—I began to question more, notice contradictions I couldn’t reconcile. Now it would be hard to feel the same, even if I tried. Take this carving. I know people might worship it as the Trimurti but I can’t help think of the individual grains of sand of which it is made. Of the multitudes of molecules and atoms and electrons in each grain, the drama being performed invisibly at the levels we don’t see. A trinity of gods emerging from the sand is one way of interpreting the universe’s wonders, but perhaps other, more subtle ways can explain it all more usefully.”

  “So you’re an atheist, then?”

  “I suppose I fit that old physicist cliché of equating God with the laws of the universe—who said it first, Einstein? Baji’s myths, I know, will never play out before my eyes, but as metaphor, they’re still enchanting. Devi emerging resplendently from the sea, these sand carvings miraculously coming to life, even Baji’s obsession with the number three. Which the universe seems to endorse, he’d be pleased to know—there are exactly three generations of fundamental particles that make up everything.”

  He asked about my family, so I related how my mother was the religious one, how Uma claimed to be an agnostic yet went to the temple regularly, how my father, at the opposite end of the spectrum, still ranted, all these years later, against replacing the secular “Bombay” (which he was only too eager to explain came from the Portuguese for “good bay”) with the goddess-inspired name “Mumbai.” “As for me, I’m somewhere in between—some days I call it Bombay, other days, Mumbai; some days I pray, other days, I don’t believe.”

  “A probabilistic approach—how very apt. A statistician through and through, I see.”

  “Not quite. One day I’ll tell you about my disastrous management degree.”

  The sun had begun to turn the waves orange by the time we left the beach. Perhaps it was the imminence of the 123 bus whisking me away, like it had every evening this week, leaving me again unfulfilled about Karun’s romantic background. But as we walked to the bus stop, the question eating away at my mind abruptly broke free. “Did you leave behind a girlfriend back in Delhi, Karun?” I blurted out, then stared at the ground, mortified.

  “No,” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he’d taken offense.

  I should have stopped, but something about the lurid pinkness of the evening sky goaded me on. “I’m sure you must have had many girlfriends before, though.” This time, I looked up to gauge his reaction.

  His face fell, as if I’d exposed a hidden inadequacy. “No, not really.” He looked away, blushing. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

  Was that it, then? A past so uncomplicated that it could be summarized so succinctly? And why not? The history of my own romantic life was just as concise, containing a single entry, that too uncertain: Karun.

  Something opened inside me, much deeper than the girlish fantasies I had indulged in until now. I felt a swell of empathy towards him—at our shared lack of worldliness, at the inexperience that linked us, at the crushing mantle of studiousness he must have labored under as well. Sweat dampened his armpits, the hair at his temples looked inexpertly trimmed, a dark ring ran along the inside of his collar. I found each detail endearing, reassuring—the less perfect he was, the less I had to be. “I’ve never had anyone either,” I said, taking the palm of his hand in mine without thinking. “I’m glad you moved here from Delhi.”

  He didn’t say anything, but didn’t withdraw his hand either. Behind us, the sun s
meared and flattened at the horizon, losing all its fire as it sank. I didn’t look at him when the bus came, not trusting my face to hide the closeness I felt. Instead, I quickly squeezed his palm and clambered up the steps to the top deck. As the bus pulled away, I looked through the rear window to watch him weave through the hawkers on the pavement, the bag with his swim things swinging by its sash at his side.

  THE BEATING HAS stopped for the moment. The victim lies crumpled in a corner of the basement—from his groans I know he is still alive. The Khakis stand around, discussing what more to do to him. There is not much else to occupy them in the basement, so I know they will come up with something. A few of the children, including the one interested in my pomegranate, advance cautiously to the victim. One of them spits at him, another bounces a rock off his back. “Beat the sisterfucker,” the woman next to me urges.

  A doctor tries to get through, but the Khakis block his path. Nobody touches him, they snarl. “Do you hear, nobody touches the sisterfucker,” the woman next to me calls out. The doctor returns to his group. At least one of us tried, even if it wasn’t me, I think guiltily to myself.

  Someone finds a rope. I know what comes next, and feel sick that I’m going to just sit there and let it happen. I don’t want to look, but my gaze remains transfixed. At the rope being knotted into a noose, at the other end being slung over a hook in the ceiling (so conveniently placed—was someone anticipating a hanging?). The man protests unintelligibly as the Khakis drag him from the corner by his hair. I catch a glimpse of his face, it seems to have caved in—only a mass of red remains where one might have seen a nose, a mouth.

  He screams as they sling the noose around his head and begin to hoist him up. His feet leave the ground, and the screams turn to gurgles. His hands claw at his throat, then find the rope and begin to draw his body up it, so he doesn’t choke.

  “You fool, you forgot to tie his hands,” says one of the Khakis pulling on the rope. The body, released, hits the ground with a thud.