Manil Suri - The City of Devi

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.

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?