Manil Suri - The City of Devi

On our last visit, my father led me down a long flight of steps to show me the strip of beach at the rear of the mosque. Looking for a way to distance us from the stage, I spot the passage that leads to these steps—miraculously, they are unguarded. We climb down to the sand and have barely walked a few paces before we bump into the missing sentry zipping up his pants by a urine-stained wall. He tries to unsling his rifle, but to my surprise, I have faster reflexes. The gun magically appears in my hand, I am transformed to Jaz Bond in an instant.

Except I haven’t quite mastered the art of 006 dialogue yet, I can’t summon the lines I’m supposed to spout. After an awkwardly silent moment, Sarita has the presence of mind to order the Limbu to drop his rifle and raise his hands. She even waves him along through her burkha as if packing her own pistol under her chador.

We walk in a procession along the wall of the old Mahim fort. The sentry stretches his arms high into the air as if accomplishing this smartly is a point of pride for him. He’s almost my height, and about my age as well—doing an automatic shikari appraisal of his shoulders and back, even our builds appear the same. The thought flashes through my mind that our positions might have been reversed had our birth circumstances been exchanged. I try to imagine myself barefoot in a raggedy salwaar kameez like him, trading in the comfort of my Italian sneakers, the snugness of my designer jeans. What would it have been like to grow up in his place? Perhaps surrounded by religious zealots, perhaps hungry, perhaps illiterate? Would the Jazter have turned into a Jihadster? Might free will have prevailed, or was it solely a function of fate?

“A function of opportunity,” I hear my father say. He always maintained that the difference between the tolerant and the extremist was not so great. “Looking into the Other, we can always find something of ourselves within.” By which logic I, too, should have the power to reach out to this Limbu: plant a notion, sow a seed, that might influence him. Who knew what native intelligence lay under that scruffy exterior, what sensitive personality, what endearing face? I decide to share the fact that I’m Muslim—this will be the stepping stone towards establishing a connection.

“Lying dog!” He turns around and spits in my face. “I know you’re one of the Hindus who got away from the train. We’re all around—you’ll never escape.”

So I try to establish my Islamic credentials by reciting the opening of the Koran, not only in Urdu, but also in Arabic. This only enrages him further. “You’ll rot in hell for passing such holy words through your infidel lips!” He spits at me again, but this time I dodge out of the way.

Not only does my bridge-building experiment crash, it provokes the Limbu to get louder and more abusive. “Just try crossing the causeway—our guards will cut your pig-fucking bodies to bits.” Sarita pulls back her veil to register her alarm at his ranting—will I have to kill him to ensure we’re not found out? Except I know I can’t—the only gun this Bond has ever discharged is his own. What I do instead, as our captive brazenly starts calling for help, is to step forward and tap him on the back of the head with the butt of the gun. “Ow,” he says, turning around to look at me angrily, so I tap him again, a bit harder. This time, he staggers to the ground. Reluctantly, I tap him a third time, and to my horror, my hand comes up covered in blood.

We break into a run, clearing the ramparts of the fort, sprinting around a row of sheds whose corrugated roofs reflect the moonlight in strips. Thousands of bamboo poles lie stacked in front, more burst forth from wooden pens, like toothpicks rising from giant holders. Trucks loaded with bamboo stand abandoned all around, parked right on the sand. Looming ahead, I make out a pair of ghostly white cylindrical structures that remind me of the tanks of a petrol refinery. The sea to our left is calm—in the light of the moon, its surface looks oily. The tide is low, but the smell is worse—a blend of putrefying fish and sewage.

I slow down, then come to a stop. Sarita draws up beside me. The causeway is just visible beyond the cylinders—a shadow shooting off over the water towards the fabled shores of Bandra. From this angle, it seems a lot lower than I imagined, something one could almost leap up to grab and swing across by the rafters. Beyond such acrobatics, though, the only practical alternative seems to be to run the gauntlet of surface guards the Limbu has boasted about. “It’s not going to work, is it?” Sarita says. “We’ll have to find a way by sea like Rahim warned.”

So we start searching the sands for a boat. But other than some tarpaulin-covered vessels too enormous to move, our quest only yields two upturned scuppers, with visibly rotten wooden bases.

“I LOVE YOU.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed my luck with those three fateful words. Or perhaps the evil eye from the shikaris at Nehru Park did stick. Although we lived together for three more years, things between Karun and me began unraveling soon after that walk. It started when I accompanied him on a Sunday visit to Karnal to meet his mother.

All during the train ride, Karun kept rhapsodizing about her sweetness, her empathy, her gracious fortitude through the years of hardship she had endured. With the stories he’d related already, I expected someone with a halo over her head—a combination of Mother India and the holy Mary, who could whip up a killer curry to boot. She did, in fact, look ethereal when I first glimpsed her at the door—sunlight shining off her white sari and sluicing down her cascade of silver hair—a queen mother from a fairy tale.

Except she turned out to be more witch than fairy. “Karun’s told me so much about you—this spell you’ve cast on him. One day I’ll have to come and see for myself why you’re so special as a roommate.”

“It’s the flat that’s special, not me—since we’re so close to Karun’s college.”

“Surely not closer than the campus hostel? But I suppose if he moved you’d have to pay the full rent yourself.”

She had prepared the garlic mutton Karun always mentioned so reverentially. To me, it tasted quite acrid, with alarming chunks of gristle left in, to stretch the meat, perhaps. “Karun tells me you’re hoping to save money for your wedding. Who’s the lucky girl?”

“I haven’t found one yet, not exactly.”

“No girl? Aren’t your parents looking for one?”

“I’m just not in any hurry.”

“Why not? You’ve already got a job, so this is the time to settle down. Don’t wait too long—you know how people can talk. I keep telling Karun even he should marry, but perhaps he’s too taken by your example. Who better than a wife to look after him while he’s slaving over his physics? All the time he wastes on shopping and cleaning, not to mention these kitchen experiments with you every night. Besides, I’m fifty-five already—it’s time to give me a grandchild.”

She asked the obligatory questions about job and parents, being careful to display only polite surprise at my being Muslim. (“I didn’t realize Jaz stood for Ijaz —Karun’s never used your full name.”) Instead, she used her inquiries to peck away at the central riddle of why I was in Delhi, living with her son. “Didn’t your mother try to stop you when you chose to move so far away? Surely there are better jobs for you in Bombay with all the financial centers there?”

“I needed the change.”

“That’s the same thing Karun said when he applied for his Bombay scholarship. I’m not sure why everyone wants change so much—each time my life has changed, it’s been for the worse.”

After lunch, she carefully unfolded two ten-rupee notes from a tiny purse. “Why don’t you go get some jalebis from the sweet monger? It’s three, so they should be really fresh.” I rose to accompany Karun, but she waved me back to the sofa. “Not you, you’re the guest.”