Manil Suri - The City of Devi

“Nonsense. It’ll only take a minute. After all this time, I’d at least like to say hello to your husband.”

After a few more attempts to shake me off, she reluctantly lets me follow her down the lane. We squeeze by the truck, which lies on its back with its wheels in the air, and find a flight of steps to clamber down towards the sea. I’m thinking some more of how Karun will react upon seeing the two of us when Sarita gives a cry and starts running. For an instant, I stand there dumfounded—does she really believe she can give me the slip this late in the game? Then I see the shambles of the waterfront—the twisted benches and utility poles, the charred, frondless palm trunks that line the yawning bomb craters. Otters Club seems to have vaporized; all that remains are a pair of tall metal gates secured with a profusion of chains and locks—a final attempt, perhaps, to keep the unwashed hordes out.

We run past the ruins of a park whose jogging track, still marked into neat lanes with white paint, cants into the water like the deck of a sinking ocean liner. Sarita veers into the road, then comes to a stop beside a space-pod balcony that seems to have alighted fully intact from the jumble of ravaged buildings around. “Karun,” she shouts, pausing after each call to see if he will emerge waving at her from one of the listing windows or doors.

But the wreckage remains silent. A wave crashes behind us, the water churning up a furrow in the land almost to the point where we stand. “It’s gone. It should have been right around here,” Sarita says, and in an instant, I feel harrowingly close to her, or at least to the panic rising in her face. She wanders down the road, still calling, and I follow.

Her memory turns out to be off by a block. “I’ve only come here once before—Karun says they use it mainly for conferences.” The two-story structure sits squatly next to the bombed remains of a formerly elegant apartment house. Perhaps the guesthouse’s government-bureau ugliness (complete with dingy, pigeon-splattered “Indian Institute for Nuclear Physics” sign) has spared it the fate of its neighbor. A folding metal grate, the type found on old-style elevators, is drawn across the entrance. The locking mechanism looks punctured, as if by a gunshot—a length of stiff wire, twisted tightly into a loop, serves as the jerry-rigged replacement.

Sarita rattles at the bars, then undoes the wire, and slides the grate open. We ease past the splintered remains of the front door, still hanging on by a single hinge. The lobby is dark and gloomy. An ancient framed poster that shows a welter of electrons swarming around a hive-like nucleus announces a particle physics congress held in April 1999. A sofa and two folding chairs sit next to an unmanned desk, but otherwise, the room is empty.

“Hello,” Sarita calls out, but nobody answers. “I wonder if they have a ledger.” I try not to look too interested as she rummages around in the drawers of the desk, even though I have a sudden, desperate desire to find Karun’s signature before she can. But the search doesn’t turn up anything. “All the guestrooms are upstairs, if I remember.”

Halfway up the steps, I start feeling very anxious. I’m totally unprepared for the coming confrontation, I need more time. If I could only steal a few minutes alone with Karun, perhaps things might work out fine. Sarita knocks on the first door, then turns the knob. What if Karun awaits inside?

But the room doesn’t seem to have been occupied for a while. The next two rooms look the same—curtains drawn, a thin towel folded tidily at the base of each bed. The fourth, though, has books and socks strewn around—the cupboard door hangs open, and a half-filled suitcase rests by it on the floor. “It’s not his,” Sarita declares, without stepping in for a closer examination.

About to follow her deeper down the corridor, I stop. It can’t be, I think, as faint notes of the raga waft in from somewhere. Karun would play this very same composition over and over again while we lived in Delhi—a few times, I actually had to request he turn it off. Sarita recognizes it too, because she spins around. “Do you hear that? It’s the Chandranandan . It seems to be coming from the other side.”

She dashes back towards the stairwell, continuing through the hall to the far rooms. She puts her ear against one of the doors, then another, stopping in front of the third. I come up as she runs a hand over her hair and arranges the edge of the sari over it. She takes a deep breath, then knocks. “Karun?” she says, as I try to position myself in the most visible spot behind her. Nobody answers, so she repeats her knocking more forcefully.

This time, the music cuts off. Metal scrapes against concrete as if someone’s risen from a bed. I hear a rustling, like that of curtains being drawn, followed by the sound of nearing footsteps. Panic seizes me—I don’t know how I look, I haven’t even shaved, while before me, Sarita is blossoming with an incipient glow again. I try to put on a confident face, try to conjure up the magic words that will make Karun mine. But it’s too late. The latch turns, the door begins its inward swing, and it’s showtime.

GAURAV. IJAZ. JAZ. JAZMINE. WITHOUT HIM, I CERTAINLY WOULDN’T have made it this far. And yet, how to trust someone when even his name is so hard to pin down?

I know he’s hiding something, but what? This much I’ve decided, he’s not on his way to Jogeshwari to see his mother. Even before the suspicious “uncle and auntie” bit, I found it difficult to swallow all the misfortunes he wove around her. And whatever went on between him and Rahim—when I asked him his preference, why didn’t he come clean? Did he need to deny his Delhi love interest so vehemently?

Most revealing of all were his fabrications on the ferry. His declaration that we’d just wed, his stories of our romantic travails. Why spin such reckless tales, what did he hope to gain? Perhaps it just comes to him naturally—the shifty wavelengths at which he operates.

Could he be a terrorist? Does that explain his slippery identity, the weapon he carries? Now that we’ve left the Muslim area, does he plan to infiltrate the Hindus by forcing Karun and me along as cover? Except I’ve seen his inexperience, his visible discomfort at even holding a gun. Surely the Pakistanis must train their agents better, select jihadis made of sterner stuff.

Since the ferry, I’ve wondered if he might harbor a more personal motive. Could our paths have crossed in the past, could something unbeknownst to me link us? The possibility sets my mind abuzz, but never for long. The random nature of our hospital encounter always brings my calculations to a halt.

Swooping through the air at Sequeira’s, I almost saw the pieces coalesce. The way we met, the reason he followed me, what he wanted, who he was. A flash of awareness so quick, so elusive, it vanished before I could hold on. All that remained was the realization I had trusted him too much. That his protectiveness didn’t flow from the pure goodness of his heart. I should have concealed this new insight, not succumbed to the angry laser thrusts that might have tipped him off.

Lying by his side in the Air India seats afterwards, I closed my eyes to shut out his presence. But I kept sensing a seeping curiosity on his part. Not amorous as I may have once feared, but still eerily physical. As if he was appraising me, gauging me, like an outfit hanging on a rack, before trying it on. Or perhaps, given Rahim’s revelation, an outfit meant for someone else. At one point, I could have sworn he leaned over to take a deep breath from my neck.

I squeezed together my eyelids even tighter to think of Karun instead. To imagine the two of us flying in our first-class seats to some exotic island in a faraway corner of the world. Except when I awoke, I knew I had dreamt about Jaz. That the plane had launched us on a journey together into a long and complicated future.