The City of Devi: A Novel Read online

  “The bloody rascals,” the man in the tan safari suit says. “Three years we gave them work, and they walked out, the whole lot of them, the day after the war started. Nobody’s interested in service anymore.” With his short hair and starched mustache, he looks like a colonel.

  “Least of all cooks and gangas. And don’t even mention drivers,” a woman who might be his wife adds. Her sari is bright red with gold paisleys embossed on the border. Could she have been interrupted on her way to a wedding?

  Another man, also in a safari suit, shakes his head in despair. “I thought at least our generation was safe, that it would be the next generation, our sons and daughters, who’d have to deal with this kind of disloyalty. But even if there was a smidgen of reliability left, this war will have killed it. God knows what we can look forward to—how much these bounders will ask for once they return.”

  “What about you? Have all your servants fled as well?” the woman with the jewelry asks. She is still only half-smiling, still erring on the side of caution.

  “Oh, there’s only two of us, so we’ve never really needed a servant.” As soon as I blurt this out, I realize my blunder. The colonel coughs, the woman’s expression turns to one of frightful regret. “Though the ganga who cleans the dishes did stop coming last week.”

  But it’s too late, I’ve failed the test. A pall falls over the group, and the women dab themselves with their handkerchiefs. Their gold flashes at me in reproach for setting my sights too high. I throw out my question about the train to Bandra anyway, but am greeted with silence. “We don’t have much occasion to go to the suburbs,” one of them finally responds. “Certainly not by train.” Conversation only normalizes after I meekly edge away.

  I exile myself to the far side of the room—I will enjoy the unassuming company of the beakers and flasks. A man in sneakers and jeans sidles up. I ignore his throat-clearing, his fidgeting, the flurry of movements to attract my attention. In the midst of this air raid, could he possibly be trying to pick me up? “Hello,” he says, in an accent that might be an attempt to affect a film star. Despite myself, I look up.

  My fears are immediately confirmed. He is handsome, with lady-killer eyes and a very flattering haircut. His body, though compact, looks like it may have gone through hours at a gym to attain such definition. He probably sees me as fair game, now that my mangalsutra is gone. I give him a short and cauterizing glare, then turn away at once.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you. I was just wondering where you—”

  I walk away mid-sentence. With all the problems I’m already juggling, a proposition is the last thing I need. I find a spot to sit on the floor, making sure a moat of ayahs surrounds me, to discourage my potential Romeo.

  The woman closest to me sits cross-legged with a boy in her lap. She wears a coarse cotton sari with a red and green border, looped between the legs in the style followed by washerwomen. Perhaps I should befriend her for added insurance against my would-be suitor. How worthy I would feel for crossing the class barrier—a welcome distancing from the rich socialites’ nastiness. The woman’s son is clad in pants frayed to the calves, and a T-shirt so dirty that the picture on it is barely visible. I peer at his chest and make out a crudely done likeness of Donald Duck.

  “Why are you staring at him like an owl?” the woman asks me in Marathi. She squirts a stream of betel juice out on the ground. Flecks of betel nut stain her lips orange—I notice a quarrelsome tilt to her jaw.

  Would it be terribly elitist not to acquaint myself with this woman after all? As I try to negotiate this ethical conundrum, a loud banging at the door silences the room. The orderlies look nervously at each other, their menace evaporated. They proceed up the steps where one of them fumbles with the keys. Some of the khaki-clad men pick up chairs, ready to defend us against the Pakistani threat, apparently advanced to our very door.

  The lock is turned, to reveal an ebullient group of doctors and nurses. They’ve risen to the call of duty, they proudly announce, by sticking with an operation even after the siren sounded in the middle. I look for a stretcher bearing the patient, but they’ve left him upstairs in his room. His appendix is out, so he won’t succumb to it, but whether or not he weathers a bomb attack isn’t in their purview.

  The drama successfully concluded, the orderlies return to their scowling and the khaki-clad men to their strategies of defending the motherland. I can sense the woman still staring at me—I try not to look at her, but find my gaze pulled in. Her expression is no longer hostile but a mixture of amusement and craft. “Raju, say hello to Auntie,” she says, not taking her eyes off me. “Auntie wants to know who that is on your shirt.”

  “Bimal Batak.” Bimal the duck. I remember the new coalition government’s edict to mollify their loony right fringe: all cartoon characters must now have traditional Hindu names. Bugs Bunny has become “Khatmal Khargosh.” Superman was first dubbed “Maha Manush,” but with Superdevi’s success, gets by as “Supermanush.” Archie and his gang have been banned altogether for being too culturally subversive.

  The boy starts complaining he is hungry, and his mother’s gaze falls to my lap. Too late, I realize the reason for her sudden friendliness—she has spied the pomegranate. I quickly cover it with my dupatta. “I’m hungry, too,” I tell the boy, and it’s true. These days I am always hungry, we all are. For now, though, I have given up on fish. Suddenly, it’s Marmite I crave.

  THE MORNING OF THE PICNIC, I saw my mother rummage in the fridge for things to add to the chicken. We had eaten the bird the night before in a curry—just the skeleton really, since my mother had stripped the bones clean for the sandwiches. Not quite satisfied with her pile of shredded meat, she found some leftover coriander chutney to mix in, half an onion, chopped cabbage to pass off as lettuce, and the secret ingredient without which the taste would be incomplete: a generous dollop from the jar of Marmite in the corner of the vegetable bin.

  Uma and I were raised on Marmite, we craved its saltiness, its aroma, its pungency, more than chocolate or ice cream. Even a trace mixed in stimulated us to eat foods we normally abhorred. Marmite could make us overlook the blandness of cauliflower, forgive the mealiness in chickpeas. My mother always dirtied two separate spoons while adding it to a dish, so that Uma and I didn’t fight afterwards over who got to lick the tar-like residue clean. I remember the day after my ninth birthday, when we found the Marmite lying open on the dining table. We took turns spooning it into our mouths, in such voluptuous quantities that we were able to actually bite into each gob. Our mother found us lolling light-headed on the ground that evening, our faces all black and sticky and smeared, the jar between us licked clean. After that, she used elaborate hiding places to store her jars (including a half-full one she forgot about in the blanket chest, which Uma only found, and polished off, several years later). She continued to hide the Marmite in the vegetable bin out of force of habit, even after we grew up.

  The first bite that day on the beach was perfection—the dark yeastiness of the Marmite rose into my nostrils and swirled into my mouth. Uma appeared entranced as well, taking small nibbles of her sandwich and rolling them around slowly with her tongue. Then I looked at Karun’s face and saw his dismayed expression, noticed the way he tried to gulp down his bites without chewing. In the effort to impress him, my mother had added too much.

  “Everyone loves these,” my mother said, taking a bite of her own sandwich and nodding in agreement with herself. “It’s the secret ingredient I add. Though I can’t reveal it, since then it would no longer be secret.” She tittered girlishly. Karun smiled at her, then bravely swallowed.

  Afterwards, we played rummy. In an effort to make Karun win, my mother kept discarding cards she thought he might need. “Such good technique and yet such unfortunate hands,” she clucked, as he ignored the latest offering she laid in front of him, the ten of spades. She frowned as Uma picked up a joker from the deck and declared once again. “My daughters seem to have sucked the
air dry of luck today,” she remarked, hoping to end our winning streak by throwing us the evil eye. But the cards (and Uma and I) refused to cooperate. “I’m getting bored of this,” my mother finally announced, as Uma counted up the points in Karun’s tenth losing hand. “Why don’t we try something else?”

  So we switched to sweep, which wasn’t much better. We played flush and gambler, and Anoop even taught us poker at my mother’s insistence. No matter what we tried, Karun continued to lose.

  “You’re not very good, are you?” Uma remarked.

  “There’s more important things in life than cards,” my mother snapped.

  “Perhaps he’ll be lucky in love,” Uma leaned towards me and whispered.

  Worried about Karun’s losses, my mother tried to distract him by asking about his work. “Anoop says you manufacture quartz,” she ventured.

  “Quarks,” Anoop corrected. “And Karun doesn’t go around manufacturing them, he studies them.”

  “It’s all so fascinating,” she said. “That man in the wheelchair—something Hawkings—not sure if he’s still alive—he’d come to India once—did you ever meet him?” Karun shook his head.

  “Poor bechara, though Mrs. Dugal says not to go by his upside-down face—that he’d make mincemeat of Einstein in a match of brains—is that true?”

  Uma rescued Karun from my mother’s question. “What exactly are quarks?” she asked.

  So Karun started talking about the building blocks of matter, the fact that even protons and neutrons could be split, the six “flavors” of quarks with names like “up” and “charm” and “strange.” His face took on an expression of wonder, like that of a child transported to a zoo, a circus, an amusement park. My mother’s features began to relax as well, the drowsiness from her sandwiches and parathas rose in her eyes. She struggled briefly with it before succumbing in a corner of the remaining shade. “Don’t mind me, it’s the heat,” she murmured, stretching out and covering her face with a handkerchief. “It’s very interesting, all these flavored particles—like little sweets.” Soon, she was snoring politely.

  “Let’s all go into the water,” Anoop said.

  THE WOMAN WITH the boy tries to attract my attention. I do my best to ignore her, but she is too determined. “Excuse me.” She tugs at my shoulder. “He really is very hungry.”

  I cover the pomegranate with another fold of my dupatta and close my hand protectively over it. “It’s always harshest on the children.” I hope the compassion in my voice will be enough to appease her.

  But the war has sharpened her senses too much. Her vision can slice right through cloth and flesh—she knows the position of my pomegranate, she can probably tell me its size, its weight, the number of seeds it contains. “It’s always been his favorite fruit. If you could just share it with him.”

  “Share what?”

  “The pomegranate. The one you have in your lap.” She makes the assertion loudly enough for people around us to hear. Her voice is bold and righteous, even tinged with indignation.

  What am I to tell her? That I need to offer Karun the entire fruit, not one with a segment rattling around in her boy’s stomach? That I have searched all of Crawford Market for it, given up my mangalsutra for this chance? That I would have liked to help her—it is not due to heartlessness or greed I will not? “It’s for my baby at home,” I finally lie.

  “All I’m asking for is a small piece, memsahib, as one mother to another.” She appraises the bulge in my lap and I can see the primitive calculation in her eyes. “There’s more than enough there for two—why just save your own child, when you can also save another?”

  Emboldened by his mother’s words, the boy advances his small brown fingers towards my lap. “Don’t touch it,” I hiss at him.

  “How dare you,” the woman cries. “How dare you talk to my son like that.” She pulls his hand back, and he bursts into tears. “Do you think we’re beggars, untouchables, that you can treat him like that?” She spits next to my foot, creating a fiery orange betel juice streak on the ground. “A curse on you and a curse on your pomegranate.”

  People turn to look at us. The woman lifts her hands into the air towards them and begins to wail. “Look how she has insulted me. Look what selfishness the war has raked in from the gutter.” A maid sitting nearby gives me a dirty look before edging away.

  The woman’s son keeps crying. “Pomegranate,” he repeats, between sobs.

  For a moment, I waver. I almost give it away. What does it matter in the grand scheme of things? We’re going to be annihilated by the end of the week anyway. But then I think of Karun, standing waist-deep in the sea. The water beading on his face and neck, foam sliding down his skin. The sun is so strong that I cannot make out the expression in his eyes. From the shore behind me come the sounds of crashing waves.

  BY THE TIME I got to the water’s edge, Uma had already entered the waves and was cavorting with Anoop some distance away. Unlike her, I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, so I pulled my salwaar up my legs as high as the openings would allow, and wrapped my dupatta around my waist. Karun stood with his back to the sun, the red of his shorts flaring in the tide. “I can only come in up to my knees,” I called out to him, but the wind blew my words away.

  I raised my hand against the sky to shade my eyes, but the glare from the water was too strong to make out his face. Waves broke against him, their foam encircled his waist. He stood where he was, his darkened form emerging like the statue of a deity from the sea. Didn’t they used to say a woman’s husband was her god, her swami, didn’t people still believe a spouse embodied divinity? Was I standing on the sands on the floor of Karun’s temple, were those blessings that rippled across the water from him to me?

  I waded in deeper. Coconuts bobbed and rolled on the water surface, their husks black from days at sea. A wave brought in a garland of brown marigold and wrapped it around my legs. I bent down to untangle it and watched it float away towards shore. Who had offered it to the sea, and why? Had someone been born, had someone expired, was it part of a marriage ceremony? A fisherman and his bride maybe, come to solicit a blessing from Mumbadevi? The goddess after whom the city was named, who some believed made her abode in this very sea?

  I waved to Karun, but he still did not acknowledge me. I could see now that he’d folded his arms across his chest, holding them close to his body as if guarding against a chill. A chill which couldn’t exist, the sea being as warm as bathwater. “Karun,” I called, waving again, and this time, he waved back.

  But he did not come to me. I stood there, wondering whether to venture in deeper. The water had already crept up my salwaar to my waist—any further, and it might begin the climb to my chest. I imagined the ride back home on the train, my clothes sticking to my skin, the outrage on my mother’s face as men crowded around to leer. I turned, half expecting her to wade in after me, all thoughts of her own clothes getting wet lost in the attempt to rescue me from shame.

  Nobody stopped me. A group of children paddled by on a raft, in pursuit of a boy holding a basketball high above his head. A fully dressed woman swam purposefully through the waves, the folds of her sari ballooning around her like the whorls of a jellyfish. On the shore, I could make out the red and white segments of the umbrella under which my mother slept. In the distance, the figure of a lone child emerged from the smiling mouth of Mickey Mouse and slid down his inflated tongue.

  I took another step in. A large wave, its head irate and foamy, slammed into my groin. I staggered, and for an instant wondered if I should fall. Surely then Karun would have to run to me. I would be drenched, but the distance between us would be dissolved. Would he reach into the water and pull me up in his arms?

  Before I could further evaluate this ploy, he came sloshing up to me. “Do you like to swim? It’s something I’ve loved ever since my teens.”

  Could this be the criterion he’d set for a spouse—someone aquatically adept? I thought back to all those wasted swimming sessions at school,
spent splashing around in the shallow end of the pool. “I never did learn.” The confession brought with it that sinking feeling of having skipped over a topic, only to find it on the test.

  Karun contemplated me silently. “I could teach you,” he finally said, and I felt myself flush. Perhaps he didn’t mean more than his offer stated. But how could he not see what an intimate invitation this was to extend to an unmarried woman my age? Fortunately, a wave thundered down upon us to hide the redness of my face. I fell over backwards, felt the sea squeeze into my ears and nose, tasted salt at the back of my throat. For an instant I was completely submerged—sand swept into my sleeves and packed itself in my hair. How would I face my mother now? I wondered, imagining the men on the train ogling me in my waterlogged clothes.

  The water cleared to reveal Karun’s face. The wave had knocked him over as well, his body covered mine. He tried to disentangle himself, but stumbled, and fell face forward into my chest. The tip of his nose plunged into my bosom, as if trying to sniff out some scent, dark and hidden, from deep between my breasts.

  He sprang back up before I could react. “Sorry,” he stammered, staring pointedly away.

  A volley of small waves whitened the water around our knees. He looked so perturbed, I wanted to soothe his hand in mine. “It was the tide. It’s too strong.” He nodded but did not turn. “Have you taught many people before how to swim?”

  He raised his head and regarded me without speaking. Was he having second thoughts—could our physical contact have made him change his mind?

  Perhaps Mumbadevi herself sent in the next wave to set things right. She didn’t topple me, not quite, just made me stagger and thrust my hand out blindly through the foam. She knew Karun would grab for it by instinct, hold on to it so I didn’t fall. Prudently, she withdrew this time, without forcing an embrace like in her clumsy previous attempt.