Manil Suri - The City of Devi

His leaving proved unlucky for me. When I told Harjeet I couldn’t imagine having sex with him again, he flew into a rage and punched me in the face, then kicked me several times as I writhed on the ground. It took six stitches to sew up my lip and several visits to the dentist to have a knocked-out tooth fixed. Just as the pain in my ribs subsided, I found my office locked when I arrived at work—the company had gone belly-up. I couldn’t find another job—the market dried up overnight due to the sudden economic downturn. My pocket got picked and someone (Harjeet, I suspect) broke into my apartment and stole my computer and television.

I moved back in with my parents in Bombay. I missed Karun intensely, feeling so depressed I couldn’t get up some days. Now that I had squandered my relationship, I wanted nothing more than to recapture it. Despite almost seven years together, something profoundly unfulfilled remained between us—as if I was on the cusp of absorbing a deep and personal message Karun had been trying to convey. I sent several letters to the Karnal flat, but received no reply. The prospect of frequenting my old haunts looking for release again felt sordid, pathetic. I didn’t quite understand this—hadn’t I been cruising the Delhi parks quite breezily just some weeks back? Karun’s memory rose like a pillar of light, emitting a radiant integrity I felt compelled to emulate.

I forced myself to go to gay events to find someone else. I met Sonal at a Gay Bombay disco night—he had his own tiny place at Andheri. For the four months we dated, I kept comparing him to Karun and coming up short. His body felt all wrong, his aroma didn’t intoxicate. He had no ambition beyond being a sales clerk, and talked incessantly about Bollywood films. Within a week, I felt I knew everything I needed to know about him—no reserve remaining to intrigue me, like the smile I gradually learned to tease out on Karun’s lips. I went out with other people as well, but none of them lasted as long.

After almost a year of unemployment, a financial advisory firm in Hyderabad offered me a position. I took it, determined to use the new surroundings to pull me out of my malaise. Indeed, the huge central lake soon set my dormant shikari radar abuzz again. I spent several agreeable evenings there, strolling the periphery to ferret out the activity spots, observing the intriguing new species of local prey. The vivid mix of the North and the South in their features, the Muslim and the Hindu, the fair and the dark—all packaged with a small-town innocence, an old-fashioned politeness, which I found particularly restorative. I never knew what language they’d lapse into when fucked—Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English). It occurred to me that such local delicacies, such spécialités du terroir , must exist in every state. Perhaps I needed to go on a therapeutic national pilgrimage (my very own Haj, my personal rath yatra) to sample them all in their natural locales. What better way to feel the pulse of the nation, to connect with the poor and the rich, to track all the shining progress new India had made?

But the only trips I took were to Bombay and Delhi for business, and these invariably plunged me into a melancholic state. I felt strangled by the nostalgia, by the memories of my days with Karun. I tried not to look up while walking the streets of the capital so as not to catch glimpse of a barsati. In Bombay, I took various detours to avoid the Oval, the university library, the Regal, all the landmarks across which our history had played. Each time I returned home, it seemed to take weeks before the hangover of my past life lifted. I threw away the photos I had of Karun and ceased my letter-writing campaign.

Work provided a welcome distraction. Recent political reforms had injected considerable excitement into the China-related investments I tracked (along with a majority of analysts at the office). The newly sanctioned Youth Democratic League, initially dismissed as a propaganda tool to voice aggressive, ultranationalist positions unofficially, had tapped into a country-wide generational vein that made its popularity surge well beyond the Chinese government’s control. Its rabid calls to pull the plug on the U.S. debt, teach Europe a lesson for censuring China over human rights in the UN, invade not only Taiwan but also Korea and Japan, had resulted in wild swings in the yuan, especially once the League demonstrated its clout by calling a successful one-day nationwide shutdown to protest their country’s kowtowing to the West. To my fascination, Indian stocks didn’t tank along with their Chinese counterparts as they historically had (along with much of the developing market). Rather, they went up: investors took shelter in India’s relative stability with each new alarming power gambit by the League. I also started noticing the converse: a bump in the Shanghai exchange each time a terrorist attack caused a drop in the Sensex, as if India and China had been locked into a zero-sum game. (Had I been a professor like my parents, perhaps I could have written a paper to christen this coupling the Jazter Phenomenon.)

By the end of my fourth year in Hyderabad, despite the bombings now seemingly endemic to major cities, the balance had still tilted dramatically in India’s favor. The Sensex almost doubled in that period, while Shanghai and Hong Kong showed respective losses of twenty-five and forty-five percent. The unsuccessful efforts of the old-guard loyalists to rein in the increasingly brazen initiatives by League hotheads made it difficult to say who really controlled China anymore—our office trade reports all forecast further upheavals as the country flailed its way towards a new political order. Before we could take much comfort in the future, though, the Mumbai bridge explosion came along to upend all the pundits’ predictions.

Much worse than the series of jolts to the market were the shockwaves that seemed to physically rip through the country. Hyderabad, in particular, dove eagerly into mayhem—perhaps due to historical grievances, or a population comparably split between Hindu and Muslim, or perhaps even because the Telangana separatists had found it beneficial to fan the flames. I stood in my balcony and tracked the plumes of smoke advancing every day—first the Old City in the distance, then the enormous emporiums along Raj Bhavan Road, and then the restaurants and bars around the lake. The city remained shut for six days, then several more when explosive-laden trucks demolished both the Birla temple and Mecca Mosque over the same weekend.

As Bhim’s forces embarked on their nationwide crusade, things started looking particularly grim for Muslims. My father announced he’d accepted a position in Geneva, and we were all moving to Europe. I quit my job (most financial companies like mine were on the verge of folding anyway) and flew back to Bombay for my visa interview, wondering how I’d fare living among the Swiss again (would they succumb to my new shikari skills?). As our plans progressed, we faced the question of what to do with the flat. The HRM had already begun clamoring for Hindu areas to be cleared of Muslims as a precaution against sabotage and ambushes. With the Siddhi Vinayak temple so nearby, our building had little chance of escaping inclusion in such a Hindu enclave. Some Muslim families set up exchanges with Hindus who owned flats in predominantly Muslim localities, but my father didn’t think it worth the trouble with us emigrating.

I decided to write one final farewell letter to Karun. With the envelope all sealed and stamped, I found I’d misplaced his Karnal address. In desperation, I wrote to his Delhi university to ask if they still might have it in their records. To my surprise, the physics department secretary wrote back. Karun, she informed me, had returned to finish his Ph.D., then moved on to Mumbai. I stared at his neatly typed Colaba address.