Manil Suri - The City of Devi

There’s another reason I want to make the trip: it’s the only way to definitively break away from Karun. I feel I should walk the streets I strolled with him, frequent the same beaches, the same restaurants and coffee places—most of all, revisit the shikar grounds where we first met. This is the catharsis I need, the pilgrimage that will set me free.

The more I think about it, the more the idea appeals to me. I seek out Afsan, still stranded in Diu for lack of fuel. He’s spent his time refurbishing the ferry as a sailboat—as expected, he’s itching to get back on the sea. He’s not too keen on Bombay, though—not without more evidence of its safety. Yes, he knows the debris the sea carried in turned out to come from Karachi, that Vincent hasn’t heard any convincing reports of a Mumbai strike despite two elapsed months already. “But the risk is still too great without firsthand testimony—we should wait to hear it from the mouth of a refugee.” He finally agrees to venture as far as Daman, where we could stop to reevaluate the situation.

Leaving Sarita proves harder than I think. She cuts off her pleas, stops talking to me. I expect her to enlist Sequeira to exert pressure on me, but she keeps scrupulously mum about her pregnancy. At night, she lies on her back and stares at the ceiling—sometimes, I notice her gently rub her belly. I rush to assist when she falls between the tables one afternoon, but she picks herself up, refusing my hand expressionlessly. Her silence makes me feel so guilty that I start spending my days away, stealing away from the house before she awakes.

Early one morning, I head down to the waterfront to check on Afsan’s progress with his ferry. I’m surprised to see a small crowd already gathered at the beach along the way, pointing out at sea. An enormous rectangular box-like object tosses in the waves—some cry out it’s a truck, others a shipping container. The edges rise high above the water, then crash back with great bursts of spray. For a while I think it will just lurch off, perhaps to heave up on another shore somewhere. But then, as if tired of playing with this toy, the waves lift it one final time and send it hurtling shoreward.

It comes to rest on the beach—a compartment from an electric train, as can be seen from the pantographs still attached to the roof. My heart lurches when I see the “Western Railway” logo on the peeling brown and yellow paint—indisputable evidence that it’s from Bombay’s suburban rails. For a while, I peer through the broken windows, at the metal floors and empty seats. I feel vaguely dissatisfied, as if a bottle has been delivered, but without the requisite message inside. Then I realize the message is the car itself, telling me I will not be returning, the city has not escaped. Curiously, the paint hasn’t scorched so much, so perhaps there’s hope that Mumbai has fared better than Karachi.

I walk along the water for much of the morning, thinking of Karun, seeing our story play out against the Mumbai vistas again. Then I go home and tell Sarita I will stay.

IN SHORT ORDER, the Jazter molts his curmudgeonly crust and gets more intrigued by the coming baby. Perhaps not as excited as Sequeira, who goes around touting it as the miracle child, the new seed for Hindu-Muslim unity, a symbol of religious tolerance to set us free. He somehow manages to procure all sorts of fruit—bananas and guavas and yes, even her obsessively coveted pomegranates, which I peel and de-seed and sometimes juice for Sarita. Her teeth turn crimson, her eyes tear a little each time.

On nights when the dusty haze rolls in to fill the air, I cover Sarita with a dentist’s X-ray apron Sequeira has found, to protect the unborn baby from any lurking radiation. She lies under it, sweating in the dark, and I fan her with an old newspaper to cool her off. Sometimes, she gets so warm that I have to sponge her forehead with a wet towel. It’s probably overkill, we both realize—we simply don’t want to take a chance. The heat is good, I tell her—she’ll hatch her egg more quickly, like a chicken. She must be developing a sense of humor (Allah be praised), because she laughs.

For the first time, I get a sense of her physical self. The sense that eluded me when I lay next to her on our “suhaag raat” at Sequeira’s club (even sniffed her, as I embarrassedly recall). I feel the familiarity in her touch as she holds on to me for support, the intimacy in her gaze as she waits for me to lay the apron over her. Her expression expectant, her body compliant, like someone being packed in sand at the beach for a play burial.

Sometimes, while she sits up to read in bed, I can glimpse what Karun might have seen in her. Her brow smooth as she gazes at the page, her skin lustrous in the window light. The curve of her neck leading like a fluid brushstroke to the roundness of her breast, the rise in her belly. A certain shy voluptuousness she may not even be aware of, which I can envision Karun may have found appealing. Of course, in the rosy bloom of her pregnancy these days, she simply radiates beauty. The Jazter blushes at his former ungenerous assessments—made, he sheepishly admits, in the heat of jealousy.

Every so often I imagine hugging Sarita as we lie together at night. Not in a sexual way or as an erotic experiment, but just because I think her softness would feel nice. I remain on my carefully separated mat, however—I suspect it would confuse her otherwise. As it is, Sequeira hints that given the country’s probable need for repopulating, we should already start thinking of having more children (an entire litter of mixed-breed pups, why not?). I stay on the lookout for opportunities to convey my lack of romantic intentions to Sarita. Fortunately, the Hindus have endless brother-sister festivals like Rakhi, perhaps to express precisely such sentiments.

Tonight, I squeeze her hand and pat the apron over her belly. She’s been pining not only for Karun, but also her parents and sister and infant nephew in the south somewhere. I reassure her they should be fine, that she will see them soon enough one day. Perhaps it’s the surging hormones, but she keeps latching onto thoughts that bring her down. “All that haze outside. Won’t it reduce our life spans?”

“Perhaps. But it’s a lot better than being dead. Besides, if everyone’s going to live a month or two shorter, what of it? Aren’t statisticians supposed to look at the average?”

On the contrary, she informs me somewhat severely, it’s the standard deviation that’s needed, to figure out what percentage might get shortchanged at the left end of the curve. “ If , that is, the distribution is Gaussian,” she adds in warning, as if I’m raring to go out and commit a statistical crime.

I tell her it doesn’t matter. “We’re six hundred kilometers away from Karachi, three hundred from Mumbai. Where we still don’t know what happened, incidentally. If anything, you’ll be at the favorable end of the curve, with all the care Sequeira’s expending.”

This also makes her morose. “All the fruit he brings, this shelter, this safety. When so many are dead—I feel so guilty.”

I point out that the only alternative to survivor’s guilt is eternal serenity: the clear and happy-go-lucky conscience of a corpse. “Besides, why don’t you think instead of all the people saved? Lahore to Calcutta, Chennai to Rawalpindi—Vincent’s determined that every single one of the remaining cities came through all right. Remember, by then even Mumbai and Karachi had almost emptied. The Pakistanis got a warning too, just like we did—think of the ninety percent or more who fled in that fortnight.”

I do a quick calculation for her: the loss cannot be more than 0.4 percent of the combined population of the two countries, 0.08 percent of the world count. “It might sound callous, but one has to think of percentages at a time like this.”