Manil Suri - The City of Devi

NOW THAT I’VE secured my Laddoovielfraß ’s permission to look for Karun, how do I actually find him? I can’t dial the front desk or switchboard operator and simply furnish his name. Chitra is dismissive when I ask where they store their occupancy information. “Devi knows where even the tiniest ant in the hotel lives. She doesn’t need to consult a list.”

“Yes, but you do. When she demands to see someone, for instance—how do you know which room it is?”

“We ask the clerks. They write down the room number of everyone who comes to visit her.”

So we go to the desks outside the suite. The clerks are ferociously protective of their ledgers, and make resentful grinding noises in their throats when Chitra invokes Devi ma’s authority to examine the pages. Karun’s name doesn’t appear anywhere. “Could you have made a mistake?” I ask the clerks, and their grinding turns into outright vituperation. Chitra quickly shepherds us away.

Why is Karun not listed? Doubts, as sharp-eyed as hawks, instantly begin to swoop in: Karun never made it to the hotel, the van took him to some other destination, who knows if he’s even in the city still? I dispel these thoughts with one inescapable notion: Karun has to be here, since it’s the only way we will ever meet again.

Might they record names at the restaurant counters where incoming devotees queue to check in? Chitra believes they did at one point, so we go down to investigate. The lobby hall is as busy as a bus terminal, with elephants arriving and departing in regular succession and attendants trailing after to scoop up their extruded bounty. The restaurant’s coffee bar now serves as a canteen for Khakis, dozens of whom mill around, dipping rusks of bread into tea. A mass of supplicants clamors at the counters—seeing the chaos, I realize no useful records can possibly surface, even if we manage to wade in.

Which means the hotel is one giant labyrinth we must scour inch by inch. The lobby and its surrounding arcades spilling with people, the guestrooms of which there are three hundred (though perhaps it’s four, Chitra thinks), the teeming grounds and corridors—a wall-to-wall dormitory has even mushroomed in the disco downstairs. Chitra asks if we want to start by checking out the audience gathered for Devi pooja outside. Her offer sounds wan, halfhearted—she already seems eager to call the search off, looking at her watch, muttering how busy she is.

I listen to the sounds of rapture stream in through the doors to the garden, imagine the congregation rollicking in worship. Somehow, I can’t imagine Karun in its midst. Nor do the rooms beckon with any special promise. I need time to mull through the sweep of search possibilities to see if anything activates my shikari instincts.

Sarita, though, has a determined plan—she wants to check out Room 318, which three years ago served as their bridal suite. “I know it sounds crazy, but I can still picture him lying in that very same bed.” For no better reason than to humor her along, we go upstairs. I feel a rush of misgiving as Chitra swipes open the door—after all, Karun’s wedding night marks when I unequivocally lost him (the suite practically qualifies as a crime scene for me). But I needn’t have worried. The interior is bloodless, untroubled by ghostly evidence—the linens, hospital-crisp, have not been slept in for weeks. Sarita hugs a pillow to her chest as if squeezing out nostalgia from it, then stands silently on the balcony to stare at the sea.

Now that we’re here, the third floor is as good as any to start with, so we check out the neighboring rooms as well. Chitra raps smartly at each door, waits for a scant half-minute (hardly enough for a response, it seems), then unlocks it with her magic swipe card. A plump middle-aged couple looks up startled from a plate of parathas in the first, an enraged film producer (one of the VIPs granted an audience with the Devi last night) chases us out of the second, while the third is empty, save, inexplicably, for a small goat tethered in the bathroom. “Can’t I take it to my room?” Guddi asks, and we have to tear her away from it. I can discern no order to the accommodations—next to the goat is a room crammed with workers squatting on mats, engrossed in a card game. Seeing us, they hasten to douse their cigarettes and squirrel their bottles of hooch away.

A few doors down, we enter a room piled ceiling-high with coconuts. Guddi has to run down the corridor to retrieve several that roll out. “Who authorized this?” Chitra fumes. “Somebody’s going to have to do some explaining.” She strides into the corners of the room and yanks off the sheets covering mounds of trinkets, pyramids of fabric, boxes of molding sweets. Even the bathtub is filled with fruit, much of it brown and rotting. “All the gifts people bring Devi ma—those lazy attendants stuff them into any room that’s free.”

As we prepare to leave, Sarita emerges elatedly from the bathroom. “Look what I found! To replace the one Devi ma tossed off the terrace.” She triumphantly holds up a pomegranate. “It’s still perfectly good—not even a mark on its skin.” I nod my felicitations at her, though in truth, I’m mystified by this karmic cycle of adopting and losing pomegranates she seems to be embroiled in. (And why pomegranates, why this obsession with them in particular? Why not apples or pears or better still cherries, which would be so much easier to tote along?) Chitra raises an eyebrow at this pilferage from Devi ma’s wares, but remains silent as Sarita ties the fruit into her sari.

Somewhere between the college Superdevi groupies colonizing Room 332 and the chanteuse singing a hymn to Mumbadevi for the cement tycoon in Room 334, it strikes me I’m not going about this search in the most intelligent way. What if we do come upon Karun? With Sarita at my side, how might I expect him to behave? If history is any indicator, he’ll keep his true desires firmly bridled, allow spousal loyalty to canter to an easy victory again. I need to ditch Sarita, in the hope I’ll discover Karun while searching alone—the only way to give myself a fighting chance with him.

Not that I expect to find Karun in these rooms. The occupants are too carefree, the atmosphere too festive, the smattering of Khakis don’t even pretend to be guarding anything. If someone forced Karun here at gunpoint, wouldn’t they keep him more tightly under lock and key? Otherwise, why wouldn’t he simply sneak out and try once more to return to the south part of the city? Surveillance at the gates of people leaving seems pretty lax—after all, didn’t Guddi decamp with an entire elephant?

What I therefore need to hunt around for (without Sarita) are areas of enhanced security. “I think we should split up. Devi ma might call us back at any time—we need to get through the rooms much more quickly.” Chitra rises in opposition to this idea but I hold firm, invoking the authority granted me by the Devi. She then tries to pair up with me—perhaps to keep me subtly off track, as I suspect she’s been doing. “Oh, but you and Sarita form such a great team,” I say. “Let Guddi accompany me.” Chitra’s eyes narrow when I ask for her swipe card—she silently fishes another one out from her pocket and hands it to me.

About to part, Sarita stops me. “How will you recognize Karun when you’ve never even met him?”

I look at her stupefied. How, indeed? How could the Jazter have missed something so obvious? “I guess I’ll just have to ask,” I reply weakly. Sarita’s mouth tightens—she has noted my blunder, added it to the tally.

Before anything else can crop up to scuttle my escape, I promise to regroup later in Devi ma’s suite, and cut out with Guddi.

AS A FIRST STEP, we visit the remaining floors in the wing to verify they are equally unguarded. I have to keep shushing Guddi, for whom stealth and unobtrusiveness seem like entirely alien concepts. “We’re looking for his friend,” she announces to everyone we encounter: cleaning staff, guests, Khakis. “We have permission from Devi ma herself.” She frisks through the hotel as if it were a giant amusement park—swinging down corridors, bouncing on the landing sofas, darting into every nook and corner on her eternal quest for cell phones. The escalator to the ground level fascinates her, though she’s unnerved by the floor swallowing its endless diet of steps.