“You’ve seen that routine already.”
Ray Power’s PR crew has chivvied the herd onwards; Vishram and Govind are alone in the corridor. Govind’s grip on Vishram’s hand is tight.
“Our father would be proud but I still maintain that you will run this company into the ground, Vishram. You have flash, you have charisma, you have showbiz and there is a place for that, but that is not how you run a business. I have a proposal. Ray Power, like the Ray family, was never meant to be a house divided. I have verbal agreements with outside investors but nothing is drawn up, nothing is signed.”
“A remerger,” Vishram says.
“Yes,” says Govind. “With me running the operational side.” Vishram cannot read this audience.
“I’ll give you an answer in time,” he says. “After the demonstration. Now, I’d like you to see my universe.”
“One thing,” Govind asks as their leather soles click softly on the inlaid maple. “Where did the money come from, eh?”
“An old ally of our father’s,” Vishram says and as he subliminally hears that most feared of sounds to a comedian—his own footsteps walking off—he realises that in the scripts he rehearsed and never used, there was never one for what he would do if he had stood up behind that diamond table and died the death.
They find a small space on the floor by the door, beneath the carriage attendant’s pull-down berth. Here they barricade themselves in with the blue impact-resistant suitcases and huddle against each other like children. The doors are sealed, all Parvati can see through its tiny, smoked glass porthole is sky the colour of its own rain. She sees through the partition door into the next car. The bodies are pressed up against the tough plastic, disturbingly flattened. Not bodies; people, lives like hers that cannot continue in any meaningful way back in that city. The voices drowns out the hum of the traction engines, the rattle of the rails. She finds it amazing that anything so monstrously overloaded can move at all but the tug of acceleration in the well of her belly, the small of her back against the ribbed plastic wall, tells her the Raipur Express is picking up speed.
There is no staff anywhere to be found on this train, no ticket collector in her smart white sari with the wheel of Bharat Rail on her shoulder of the pallav; no clanking chai-wallah, no cabin attendant cross-legged on the bunk above them. The train runs fast now, power pylons blur past the tiny rectangle of smoky sky and Parvati panics for an instant that this is not the train, this is not the track. Then she thinks, What does it matter? Anywhere is away.
Away. She presses against Krishan, reaches for his hand beneath the drape of her stained sari, surreptitiously so no one will see, no one will be tempted to speculate on what these two Hindus are doing. Her fingers encounter warm wet. She jerks them away. Blood. Blood spreading in a sticky pool in the space between the bodies. Blood clinging to the ribs of the plastic wall. Krishan’s hand, where it failed by millimetres to meet hers, is a clenched red fist. Parvati pushes herself away, not in horror, but to comprehend how this madness is happening. Krishan sags across the wall leaving a red smear, props himself up on his left arm. From just above his hip down his white shirt is red, soaked through with blood. Parvati can see it pumping through the fabric weave with every breath he takes.
That strange sigh, when he pulled her up on to the train, away from the firing on the platform. She had seen the bullets ricochet from the steel stanchions.
His face is the colour of ash, of the monsoon sky. His breath flutters, his arm quivers; he cannot support himself much longer and every heartbeat pumps more of his life onto the carriage floor. The blood pools around his feet. His lips move but he cannot shape words. Parvati pulls her to him, cradles his head in her lap.
“It’s all right my love, it’s all right,” she whispers. She should call out, shout for aid, help, a doctor but she knows with terrible certainty that no one will ever hear in those jammed carriages. “Oh Krishan,” she murmurs as she feels the wet, sexual blood spread under her thighs. “Oh, my dear man.” His body is so cold. She gently touches his long black hair and twines it in her fingers as the train drives ever south.
This is Mr. Nandha coming up the stairs of Diljit Rana Apartments, jogging up one flight two flight three flight four in the cool cool light of the morning. He could take the elevator—unlike the old projects like Siva Nataraja Homes and White Fort, the services are operational in these government housing blocks—but he wants to maintain the energy, the zeal, the momentum. He shall not let it slip, not when it is so close. His avatars are threads of spider silk spun between the towers of Varanasi. He can feel the vibration of her energy shaking the world.
Five flights, six.
Mr. Nandha intends to apologise to his wife for upsetting her in front of her mother. The apology is not strictly necessary but Mr. Nandha’s belief is that it is a healthful thing in a marriage to give in occasionally even when you are right. But she must appreciate that he has made a window for her in the most important case in the Ministry’s history, a case that, when he has completed the excommunication, will elevate him to Investigative Officer First Rank. Then they will spend happy evenings together looking through the brochures for Cantonment new-builds.
The final three flights Mr. Nandha whistles themes from Handel Concerti Grossi.
It is not in the moment he puts his key in the lock. Neither is it when he sets hand to handle and turns that handle. But in the time it takes for him to push that handle down and open the door, he knows what he will find. And he knows the meaning of that epiphany in the predawn Ministry corridor. It was the precise instant his wife left him.
Scraps of Handel float in his auditory centres but as he crosses the lintel his life is as changed as the raindrop falling one millimetre to one side of a mountain peak ends up in a different ocean.
He does not need to call her name. She is utterly, irretrievably gone. It is not an absence of things; her chati magazines lie on the table, the dhobi basket sits in the kitchen by the ironing board, her ornaments and gods and small votives occupy their auspicious places. The flowers are fresh in the vase, the geraniums are watered. Her absence is from every part; the furniture, the shape of the room, the carpets, the comforting, happy television, the wallpaper and the cornices and the colour of the doors. The lights, the kitchen utensils, the white goods. Half a home, half a life and entire marriage has been subtracted. Nature does not abhor this vacuum. It throbs, it has shape and geometry.
There are noises Mr. Nandha knows he should make, actions he should perform, feelings he should experience proper to the discovery that a wife has left you. But he walks in and out of the room in a tight-faced daze, an almost-smile drawn on his lips, as if preparing defences against the full of it, like a sailor in a tropical storm might lash himself to a mast, to dare it to break over him, to turn into its full rage. That is why he goes to the bedroom. The embroidered cushions that were wedding gifts from his work colleagues are in their places on respective sides of the bed. The expensive copy of the Kama Sutra, for the proper work of a married couple, is on its bedside cabinet. The flat-worked sheet is neatly turned back.
Mr. Nandha finds himself bending to sniff the sheet. No. He does not want to know if there is any blame there. He opens the sliding wood wardrobes, inventories what is taken, what remains. The gold, the blue, the green saris, the pure white silk for formal occasions. The beautiful, translucent crimson choli he used to love to see her wear, that excited him so much across a room or a garden party. She has taken all the padded, scented hangers, left the cheap wire ones that have stretched into shallow rhombuses. Mr. Nandha kneels down to look at the shoe rack. Most of the spaces are empty. He picks up a slipper, soft-soled, worked with gold-thread and satin, runs his hands over its pointed toe, its soft, breast-curved heel. He sets it back in its position. He cannot bear her lovely shoes.