The Death of Vishnu

begin to move, his hands wave through the air, his feet slide across the ground. The rhythm tugged at his body like the strings of a puppeteer.
    Once he began to dance, nothing seemed more natural. The ta-rap ta-rap awakened some primeval response in his body, some ancient consciousness in his brain. As long as the drum sounded, there was no room for thought, only motion. Under its spell, he forgot who he had been, and what he aspired to become.
    The days went by, and the welts on his body began healing, then disappeared one by one. He started traveling with Mittal through villages and cities, dancing and begging for money wherever an audience could be found.
    Once in a while on their journeys they would stop outside a temple. Jeev would notice a knot of priests in the audience. He would stare at the holy marks on their foreheads. Their Brahmin’s threads would shimmer in the afternoon sun.
    That’s when Jeev would come to a halt. A gentle tug on his collar would remind him of the dance that still had to be done.
    He would gaze an instant more, at the sky beyond the temple. Then the sounds would restart. His tail would loosen, his feet would begin to move. He would raise his arms and feel the rush of air through his fingers. The audience would clap, and whistle their appreciation. The priests would blend into the ribbon of faces around. Jeev would dance, oblivious to everything but the rapture of the drum.

    T WO DAYS AFTER the party, Vinod mailed in his resignation from the board. He was frustrated by the continuing problem of the contractors, who by now had arrived at a coordinated strategy to slow things down whenever they wanted more money from Mrs. Bhagwati. The project had been dragging on for years before he joined, and there seemed neither doubt nor concern on the board that it would continue for another decade. He was troubled, also, by questions of his own involvement: Why was he doing this? Who were the slum-dwellers to him? Did he really feel empathy for them, or was this just activity to fill his time? Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer, to which he wrote a very cordial (and separate) letter of declination, only hastened his decision to leave.
    Once he was back at home, Vinod felt the loom of inertia again. There in the corner was the bed in which he lay; up above, the ceiling at which he stared; on the table, the record he would play every day. Had he done the right thing in resigning? Should he have considered Mrs. Bhagwati’s offer more seriously? What did he want the remainder of his life to be?
    He tried to look inward through meditation, which he had learnt in college, but never practiced since. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the bridge of his nose, as the guru had taught him so many years ago. He pictured the syllable om, and waited for its vibrations to sound silently through the passages of his body. But om proved elusive, flitting about unrestrained in his mind, discovering twigs and nubbles of thought on which to alight. Thoughts of Dharavi, thoughts of Mrs. Bhagwati, but mostly thoughts about Sheetal, which Vinod felt he should have long been over by now.
    He decided he could no longer spend his days in the flat. He started walking to Breach Candy in the mornings, and sitting on one of the wooden benches there. There were no vendors hawking sugarcane or children riding ponies at that time. He would sit there undisturbed and if the time of the month was right, watch the tide go out in the sea behind. When the rocks were all uncovered and the water was a distant green, he would rise and walk back home. On some days, he went to the beach at Chowpatty instead, but the benches there were not as comfortable and he found the stretches of sand less interesting than the rocks at Breach Candy.
    The paanwalla told him of an ashram run by a holy man in the distant suburb of Kandivili. One day, when the sun was too hot to sit outside, Vinod took the train there. A group of barefoot women clad in the white saris of widowhood were getting out of a taxi when he arrived. He followed them in through the open gate, past some gardens, to a large bungalow surrounded by mango trees. The sound of a devotional bhajan being sung came through the open door.
    The women seated themselves on the floor at the edge of the gathering inside. He was about to sit behind them when someone came up and ushered him to the men’s side of the room. For a while, he was thankful to be immersed in