The City of Devi: A Novel

by Manil Suri

  Sarita lands another score, zapping me on the cheek. This time I strike back, and she yelps in surprise as a shower of sparks cascades down her body. She recovers quickly, and flies back at me, the end of her sari coming loose and swirling behind her like an incandescent cape. I dive towards her as well, swinging myself just out of the way in the last instant before we collide. Our lasers connect, creating a tremendous outburst of light and energy—the effect is dazzling, even if our choreography falls short of the finesse in swashbuckler movie swordfights. A crowd of onlookers below eggs us on, hoots and hollers, begins to take sides. Immersed as we are in our aerial duel over the one we both seek, Sarita and I barely notice their cries.

  I HAD EXPECTED our goodbye meeting to resemble one of those sad old Hollywood romance endings—music swelling in the background, sepia cinematography, a wistful sense of drama. But seeing Karun ignited me—I felt five and a half years of buried emotion, of stifled passion, burst forth from deep within. “Karun,” I said, wanting to kiss and crush and engulf him with my body. Only my guilt restrained me.

  He stood at the door and gaped. I noticed, through my euphoria, that he looked different—not exactly older, but more cognizant, as if he’d experienced more of the world. The weight he’d put on had helped fill out some of his most conspicuously skinny parts. Even his ears no longer stuck out as flagrantly. “I thought you were in Hyderabad,” he responded finally.

  So he’d received my letters to Karnal. But not written back. “I returned to Bombay just a little while ago. Perhaps we were meant to meet again—our destiny.”

  My comment flustered him. “How did you find me?”

  “From your university. Can I come in?” He didn’t move, so I asked again. Still he didn’t respond, remaining there silently. “Karun?”

  “Things have changed.” He looked down at the floor, then back up at me. “I’m married now.”

  To my credit, I didn’t do anything outrageous. I didn’t call him a fool and storm away, or remind him of his predilections and guffaw in his face. In fact, I may have even congratulated him. “Are you going to call her out and introduce us, or do you keep her hidden behind a veil?”

  Karun shifted uncomfortably, and I realized he hadn’t told his wife anything about us. “She’s visiting her mother until late this evening.”

  I decided I’d set his mind at ease. “You don’t have to worry—I just came by to say goodbye. I’m moving with my parents to Switzerland in a bit.”

  All through the elevator ride down, I kept playing the scene through my mind. The pat on his shoulder I’d contented myself with, the awkward way he had reciprocated. The disingenuous promise he’d made to keep in touch by email. I felt a sense of déjà vu as behind the door swinging shut, I saw him wave goodbye. Hadn’t he tried to pull the same escape at his hostel room the day after we’d met? I’d hammered at his door and spoken loud enough to force him to accompany me downstairs.

  So I pressed the seventh-floor button again. I banged on Karun’s door, and when he opened it, pushed him aside and strode right in. He came running up behind me and I turned around and grabbed his shoulders. Summoning up Cary Grant and Clark Gable, I pulled him to me and kissed him.

  Perhaps he hadn’t seen those black-and-white classics, because instead of melting, he broke free and staggered away. I caught up and kissed him again. This time when he struggled, I pulled him down to the floor and pinned him under my body. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you crazy?” He turned his mouth away.

  I wanted to rip his clothes off and take him despite his protests. Perhaps a part of him wanted the same. But I could see the determination in his mouth, the stiff set of his neck. He got up as soon as I rolled off.

  We sat across from each other, the dining table between us presumably buffering him against further attacks. He waited for me to exhaust my apologies, then told me he’d already seen them all before in my letters. “I don’t think you ever understood, Jaz. All through my mother’s illness—whether I was mopping up her vomit or her blood or her feces, I’d take my mind off her misery and my own by thinking of you back in Delhi, waiting for me.”

  He talked about how he lit his mother’s pyre and sorted through the ashes afterwards for intact bone shards. “I remember thinking that the flames had not only consumed her body but the very link that connected me to the world. I felt as if I’d just been released into a vacuum to spend the rest of my life in solitude. Except I wasn’t alone, I had you to moor me. All through the journey back, I contemplated our future together—not the easiest choice, but one I was ready to commit to. Imagine my shock when—”

  He’d thought about writing back to me a few times, but one simple fact stopped him. “If you’d sunk so low as to do it with Harjeet, it stood to reason that you’d done it with others as well. Who knew what a future with you would hold? The only remedy was to look for someone else.”

  I began to apologize again, but he held up his hand. “An even more chilling thought struck me—how could I ensure this ‘someone else’ wouldn’t be just as unreliable? For all I knew, this might be business as usual for you and your friends. That’s when everything my mother had been pushing for over the past months began to make sense. She knew, of course—she could see right through me. She recognized the risk, which is why she wanted me to try the other sex.”

  The Jazter listened to it all in stoic silence—how Karun met his wife three years after we broke up, how they dated and fell in love. Cruel and unusual punishment—being subjected to a list of the ten million angelic qualities this Sarita had. “I see now the gift my mother bequeathed me—a chance at fulfillment, at tranquillity. The opportunity to be a father, to give someone the childhood I never had. I’ve discovered myself, Jaz; I’ve discovered who I’m meant to be. More than that, I’ve found the one person who’s perfect for me. I can only wish you get as lucky, Jaz—that you find someone as right for you in Switzerland.” Not quite satisfied with his speech, Karun thrust a wedding album into my hands.

  Let’s just settle the most burning question right away—in the looks department, the Other Woman simply did not make it to the Jazter’s league. (And we won’t even mention fashion sense—whom did she take along to help select that wedding sari, her cleaning lady?) Perhaps I’m being too prejudiced, perhaps she had some plain and mousy kind of appeal—hadn’t Karun mentioned, after all, that she was an analyst or librarian or something? Snarkiness aside, I noticed something quite intriguing—Karun’s strained expression in several of the photographs. I knew him well enough to recognize the forced cheer, the eyes that didn’t smile—in a flash, everything he claimed about his discovered utopia seemed suspect.

  But how to confront him? I could probe into his sex life, but that would be too intrusive. Asking point-blank if he’d mentioned me to his wife might simply make him hunker down in defense. Threatening to tell her if he didn’t comply with my wishes would be blackmail. And then a perfectly devious strategy struck me. “Let’s have a final dinner together. That way I can meet Sarita before I leave.”

  He hemmed and hawed about schedules and availability, but I suggested we call Sarita right away to see when she was free. We agreed tentatively to meet at my flat in a week—with Pakistan recently joining the war, not to mention the continuing terrorist attacks, a restaurant seemed unnecessarily risky. The fact that my parents would be there reassured him. We exchanged phone numbers—as expected, he gave me his personal cell number, not the one for his home landline.

  THE RE-SEDUCTION OF Karun Anand commenced at seven p.m., when he arrived alone at our flat (Sarita had to go again to her mother’s, he lamely explained). His nervousness pleased me—hadn’t Casanova himself attested to the ease of conquest once the fear of being seduced is already present? “How many years has it been, my physicist friend?” my father boomed as if on cue, dissipating some of Karun’s skittishness. My parents left soon after on their goodbye rounds, leaving us alone in the flat.

  At first, we simply talk
ed about how China had been forced to withdraw four days ago to avoid a massive embargo. “Did you hear them rage against the UN? The Youth League must be gnashing its teeth—I’m sure the entire invasion was at its behest.” The Pakistani communiqué threatening nuclear attack had surfaced within hours, but we both thought the war would end well before their announced D-day. I nodded when Karun wondered if my parents would be safe going around in the blackout. “They know how to take care of themselves.”

  One should never really risk Phase Two in the bedroom, but that’s where I led Karun. His apprehensions all melted (as per plan) upon seeing the train set assembled on the floor. “Do you still have the boxcars with the candles?”

  “Of course. I packed every piece myself in Delhi when I moved.”

  We sat amidst the tracks and set up our first collision in years. Not only did the candles ignite the paper we crumpled under the bridge, they also launched the wave of nostalgia I’d counted on (Phase Three). Once I figured he’d been sufficiently softened, I pulled him in a friendly hug to myself.

  “No,” he said, stiffening and moving away.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be gone soon. I’m not after anything, so just relax.”

  Except I was after him, which meant it was time to move to Phase Three Alternative (nostalgia aborted, try alcohol instead). I took him into the kitchen. “I bought us some samosas—there’s a shop down the street which still manages to find all the ingredients. Plus my parents have been getting rid of all their wine before the move to Switzerland, so we can help ourselves.”

  He sipped warily from his glass as we sat on the couch. “This one’s a Merlot. I’ll open a Cabernet so you can compare the two.” Later, I had him try a Pinot as well, wondering just how amused my father would be to see all the half-drunk bottles from his collection. “Which one do you like best?”

  My man preferred the Cabernet, the most conducive choice (alcohol percentage 14.3 as opposed to the Pinot’s paltry 11.4), so that’s what I refilled his glass with. He rebuffed neither the arm that presently snaked around his shoulder nor the hand that casually patted his thigh. I tried again to kiss him, and this time he didn’t resist. The feel of his mouth transported me—through beaches and balconies, bedrooms and barsatis, all the spots I’d ever been with him. In an instant, this was no longer a farewell romp I was trying to engineer, but a replay of our entire relationship. A Broadway tribute, a Bollywood spectacular—the nights we’d spent, the years we’d shared. Karun’s face glittered from a giant screen which rose and stretched in all directions—I wanted to unhook it from its moorings and wrap it around myself.

  The Fourth and Final Phase called. “Let’s go back into my bedroom,” I whispered, taking his arm to lead him from the sofa. He freed himself from my grasp, and remained seated. I tried again, saying we’d be more comfortable, it would be cozier, but to no avail. “I can tell you want to, Karun. Besides, I’ll be out of your life for good soon.”

  For a while, he just sat there, breathing hard. Then he spoke in a quiet voice. “I shouldn’t have come. Even this, even what we’ve been doing—I feel so ashamed, every minute I stay.”

  “So I see you haven’t forgiven me yet. Do you want me to apologize again?”

  He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That part I actually get, Jaz. You are who you are—there’s little more to say. I can’t claim any surprise coming here today, only a little disappointment that after all this time you still can’t think beyond sex.”

  The words stung, they felt uninformed, unfair. How to get across the years of yearning I’d endured, not to mention the flood of emotion unleashed today just by kissing him? The sense of incompleteness that had dogged me, the day-to-day contentment I’d failed to regain? “So all the letters I wrote, all the efforts I made don’t count? You think they were just to get you back in bed?”

  “Isn’t that where you were just trying to lead me?”

  “Perhaps I only wanted to hold you. To remind myself of how your body felt. Anything further would still have been an expression of my love—it’s what completes the two of us. You have to forgive me, Karun, for missing you so much. For thinking ahead to Switzerland or wherever I end up. Perhaps you could give me something to cling on. If we’re never going to see each other again perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard.”

  He hesitated, but not enough to give me hope. “I’m sorry, Jaz. I can’t do it. Not to Sarita, I can’t. Thanks to you, I know exactly how it feels to be in her place.”

  “But why would she ever know?”

  “No, Jaz, that’s the way you think, not I.”

  “Really? And I suppose you’ve been completely honest with her, have you? Told her everything about us?”

  “That whole part of my life is done for—I left it behind when I met her. Marriage is about the future, not the past—I didn’t ask her about herself either.”

  “How perfectly convenient. I didn’t know it worked that way. You complain I’m still the same, but in my eyes, you’ve grown immeasurably, Karun—as a hypocrite. My great shining example. At least back then you only lied to yourself, instead of trying to delude your wife as well. Is that why you came here without her today—to work on your marriage?”

  “You’re right. It was a mistake.” He shot up from the couch and headed to the door. This time, I’d left the key in the lock, and he was able to open it.

  “Be sure to give Sarita my best,” I yelled, as he slammed the door behind himself.

  THE ZURICH DIRTY BOMB attacks occurred on September 11, four days before my family’s departure to Switzerland. Explosions along the Bahnhofstrasse and at the university hospital left large swathes of the city uninhabitable. Similar strikes followed later that day in New York, London, Rome, Toronto, and Frankfurt. As if the choice of date weren’t incriminating enough, jihadi literature turned up near two of the bomb sites, and a video claiming responsibility, by a new Al Qaeda-like group, appeared on the internet.

  Those anticipating the next big terrorist incident for the past several years may have sighed with relief that it had finally occurred. They might have pointed out that despite widespread panic and disruption, the damage didn’t approach that caused by a single thermonuclear explosion. But the real destruction in this case, illustrating just how much this September 11 heir had evolved over its parent, came with the ensuing cyber attacks. The dirty bombs were merely the gunshot starting the race, signaling hackers with fingers poised over keyboards to launch their malware.

  Five weeks later, the Jazter still marvels at how quick and easy it was to unravel the order of the entire world. First came the news hoaxes, saturating the internet, whipping up the panic already frothing in place. A fake suicide truck attack on the hastily called NATO summit in Brussels was so convincingly reported that even CNN listed the names of heads of state supposedly felled. Warnings of an imminent electromagnetic pulse over the U.S. touched off hysterical runs on banks all the way down to Mexico and Belize. Meanwhile, the armies of cyber bugs on the loose found crevices to crawl through even the most impregnable firewalls. They invaded enough strategic nodes and sources to wrest control of the entire global news network.

  Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable?—people needed their daily fix. They would gladly swallow the most improbable rumors, the most outlandish fabrications, to quell the ravenousness within. Even the Jazter, always a voracious consumer of news, succumbed to this junk food urge.

  Not that some of these inconceivable scenarios didn’t turn out to be true. The viruses had gained cunning by now, learned to down bigger game. They sabotaged power stations and exploded gas lines, bewitched airliners over the Atlantic into executing suicide dives. People could no longer separate reality from fabrication, trust the ground they walked on, the world they lived in. Did Morocco actually invade Spain? Did a st
ring of reactors really blow up in France? The actual answers mattered less and less, as panic (and despondency) increased.

  But harking back to the early days right after September 11, the one irrefutable fact was that Switzerland immediately rescinded my family’s visas. Their government pushed through an emergency law overnight, banning all Muslim visitors. My father scrambled to find another country that would accept us, but similar bills popped all over, effectively shuttering the West. The only options that remained were Islamic states, particularly those in the Gulf.

  My parents already had tourist visas for Dubai, so that seemed the most promising choice. Unfortunately, well-heeled Muslims trying to escape India mobbed every consulate in Bombay (even the one for Pakistan, essentially manned only by the watchman ever since the ambassador fled). My father pulled every string he could to get my passport stamped, but the Dubai embassy informed him there would be a six-month wait.

  With time of the essence, and Dubai only a temporary destination, we realized the only practical solution was for my parents to go ahead without me. From there, they could more effectively lobby other Arab states for a permanent haven, and get me a visa directly to that country. The UAE itself seemed promising, since my parents had lectured in several of the emirates after the democracy rumblings generated by the Tunisian revolution. The Saudis might also be interested, having recently offered them both university positions. (Akbar’s underlying tenet of a divine right to power had appeared particularly attractive ever since the Arab Spring.)

  All of this looked quite bleak for the Jazter. Beggars can’t be choosers, but surely some alternative to the rampant repression against his ilk practiced in these places had to exist? Even if shikar was popular among Arabs as reports claimed, Riyadh or Sharjah weren’t exactly high on my list. I tried to find consolation in the reports that, compared to Iran, the Saudis had probably beheaded fewer gays.

  Since I would be staying behind, I needed a safer place. Fortunately, we managed to exchange apartments just two days before my parents left. The new residence was located in the Muslim quarter behind Crawford Market—a shabby flat, old and crumbling, with a shared pair of toilets at the end of the outside corridor. But the place was secure—or at least relatively so, compared to our previous address.