The Death of Vishnu

believe?”
    “But the truth will come out.”
    “What truth? I just told you, the truth is you’ve been here all along. And you don’t know anything else. Now you get that into your head, if you ever want to show your face in public again. Sneaking out God knows where in the middle of the night.” Mrs. Asrani checked herself. She took a deep breath.
    “I told the inspector you were asleep.” Mrs. Asrani wiped Kavita’s eyes dry. “Try to look as if you’ve got up from sleeping, not from crying.”
    When Mrs. Asrani returned to the door with Kavita, she found the inspector at the entrance to the Pathaks’ flat, interviewing Mrs. Pathak. Who, coincidentally, had also been watching the test match since morning.
    “And your husband?” the inspector asked.
    “Oh, he’s a complete fanatic,” Mrs. Pathak said, fingering the necklace she had hastily put on over her house clothes when she had seen the inspector through the keyhole. “He hasn’t even gone downstairs since the match started—not even to the cigarettewalla, believe it or not—that’s why we have no idea what happened. It’s impossible to pry him away from the TV, even though ordinarily on Sunday mornings he goes to the temple. Cricket before God, I guess.” Mrs. Pathak raised her shoulders helplessly to the inspector, who did not smile.
    “Should I get him for you?”
    “No, that won’t be necessary.”
    The inspector turned to Kavita. “And you, miss, have you been watching cricket as well?”
    This was it. It was her chance to act . She would prove to her mother that she was a natural, a born actress, who should not be kept from her calling.
    Kavita yawned. She stretched her neck, and languorously brushed her fingers against her lashes. “I’ve been asleep,” she said, running her fingers through her hair and yawning again, giving a picture-perfect performance of One Who Has Just Awoken.
    “And why are you so sleepy, miss?, Were you away doing something last night?”
    “No, I’ve been here, at home. Where would I go?”
    “Mr. Jalal says your dupatta was left behind on the landing last night.”
    Now it was time for One Who Has Just Experienced Shock. Kavita’s eyes expanded in astonishment, until they were the size of four-anna coins. Her mouth opened to the perfect aperture of surprise mixed in with dismay. Her hands fluttered agitatedly, but uselessly, by her side.
    “Why in the world would he say that?”
    “That’s not all,” the inspector said, looking hard at Kavita, then Mrs. Asrani, then Mrs. Pathak. He had been saving the mention of Mr. Jalal’s version of events until now. “Mr. Jalal also says that a mob including the cigarettewalla and the paanwalla and the electrician broke into his flat to question him about your whereabouts. They hit his wife on the head with a lathi, then threw him off the balcony.”
    Kavita was trying to decide on the next vignette in her performance when her mother burst in. “See this? See how they lie? Forever their son has been an eve-teaser after my daughter, and now these stories. I ask you, inspector, is it fair? Is it fair to ruin my poor girl’s name, to implicate her in this mud?”
    Encouraged by the inspector’s silence, Mrs. Asrani continued.
    “Day by day that man has been getting worse, and nobody did anything. ‘Take him to a hospital, before he does something,’ I told Mrs. Jalal, but who is she to listen? Now that the fruit they have got is rotten, look how they’re trying to dump it in other people’s plate. Look how they’re trying to drag us all in. And the poor cigarettewalla and paanwalla—if they hadn’t responded to Mrs. Jalal’s screams, if it hadn’t been for them bursting in, I’m sure he would have finished her off.”
    Kavita began to say something, but her mother still wasn’t finished. “Just one thing I want now, and that is not to let my daughter’s name get mixed in with all this. Just now only the proposal has come for her marriage—and now this. Do you have daughters, inspector sahib, that you know how easily their reputations can be ruined?”
    The inspector said he was unmarried. He had written down everything Mrs. Asrani had related. “And you, Mrs. Pathak, do you also think Mr. Jalal has been acting crazy?”
    “The ganga woke us up this morning. Told us to come downstairs. It was Mr. Jalal. Sleeping next to Vishnu, can you believe it? All night he must have spent there, instead of in his flat. When he wakes up, he claims