The Death of Vishnu

the bar with his other hand. It worked—he opened his eyes to see his feet dangling over the courtyard below. Like those of a freshly hung prisoner swinging from a tree, he thought morbidly.
    Only the final step remained, to pull himself up. Mr. Jalal hadn’t done pull-ups since he had been in the eighth standard. He had never got very good at them, his adolescent body always flopping against the walls of the gym as he strained to drag it up. The PT master, Mr. Kola, used to go around and strike the back of the students’ legs with a switch if they couldn’t perform the exercise. Mr. Jalal’s calves would be red and welted at the end of every PT period.
    He remembered all the notes his father wrote out for him requesting he be exempted from PT. On some days, Mr. Kola would accept the notes, but on others, he would force Ahmed to run an extra lap around the field as punishment for trying to get out of PT. Mr. Jalal wished now he had not skipped any of the classes, and that Mr. Kola was there with his switch, to prompt him on to the next floor.
    He struggled to bring his eyes up to the level of his hands. But he couldn’t accomplish even that. He tried calling out to Mr. Taneja again, but his upstairs neighbor still did not come. Mr. Taneja, he knew, liked to sit in the other balcony, the one that faced the street. He had often seen him there from downstairs, head tilted back against his chair, eyes closed, lost either to sleep or to thought. He imagined his cries reaching through the upstairs flat and rousing his neighbor. Mr. Taneja’s hands appearing like miracles from the air above, to powerfully grab hold of his own, and pull him effortlessly to safety. Perhaps Mr. Taneja would insist they have tea together on his balcony, while they waited for the police. They would chat about this and that, and Mr. Jalal would nibble on a biscuit, waiting for the opportunity to slip in some detail of the message he was trying to spread. Surely Mr. Taneja, with his superior education and background, would be easier to convince than the people from downstairs clamoring so irrationally for his blood.
    But no magical hands appeared in front of Mr. Jalal. Perhaps, if he couldn’t lift himself up, he should go back to his other option, of jumping down. But to do that, he should be hanging from the railing of his own balcony, not Mr. Taneja’s, since the current position just added another floor to his fall. Now that he had launched himself off, how would he reverse the maneuvers that had left him suspended here? Mr. Jalal tried swinging his feet to reestablish contact with the railing, but all they touched was air.
    He was stuck. It would just be a matter of time before they broke down the door and found him there, like some insect stretched out in a web. Maybe he could plead with them. The cigarettewalla seemed a little more level-headed than the others, maybe he was the one to appeal to.
    What had happened to Arifa? He hoped she was not badly hurt, that they had not directed their anger on her when they couldn’t get him. How attentively she had listened to everything he’d said earlier when they had lain together in bed. He had thought he was converting her, not realizing her attentiveness had been driven by skepticism, by guile. She had tried to find inconsistencies in his story, to listen for discrepancies that would prove him wrong. He had been surprised, but heartened at this reversal of roles. Arifa, his wife, finally learning to use his own weapons against him.
    She had gone through so much at his hands. He was suddenly overcome with guilt—he had not been a good husband. Or perhaps he had just not been the right husband. Someone suitably matched, who could appreciate—who deserved —her innocence, her unspoiledness.
    And what about Salim? Had he failed him as well? Had he been inadequate as a husband and a father? Mr. Jalal hung from the balcony and took stock of his parenting years. There had been a distance he had felt from the start, a removal from the day-to-day upbringing of his son. Why couldn’t he have involved himself more? Learnt the names of Salim’s friends, gone to his cricket and soccer games, sat with him when he did his homework, not let all the years go by? Why had he allowed aloofness to become the hallmark of their interaction? He supposed he could always lay the blame on his own relationship with his father. That would be the traditional Freudian theory, wouldn’t it—a bit crude in this