The Death of Vishnu

so sure I was going to lose, too—Mrs. Pathak gets such big-big cards, and I only had a small little sequence.”
    The last of the notes disappeared into Mrs. Jaiswal’s big black purse, the one that always lay by her side, the one that Mrs. Pathak was convinced held the secret to her unnaturally good luck. She watched as Mrs. Jaiswal tucked the purse under the folds of her sari, and fantasized again about pulling it out and emptying its incriminating contents over the sheet.
    The kitty party had been a disaster from the start. The ambulance that Mr. Pathak said Mr. Asrani had called had not shown up. At one-thirty, only an hour before the guests were to arrive, Mrs. Pathak had sent frantically for the jamadarni, to have the mess around Vishnu cleaned up. The jamadarni had demanded—Mrs. Pathak still couldn’t believe it—thirty rupees! Thirty! The cheek of that woman, taking advantage of her when she was helpless! It had taken all Mrs. Pathak’s bargaining power to bring it down to twenty, with the Russian-salad samosas thrown in. (Mrs. Pathak had tried impressing upon the jamadarni that the mayonnaise alone had cost five rupees, but unfortunately, the jamadarni had not known what mayonnaise was.)
    After the cleaning had been done, there had been barely enough time to dress up for Mrs. Jaiswal. She had been unable to locate the pearl earrings that went with her necklace, and had been forced to put on a green pair that didn’t match. (“What delightful earrings Mrs. Pathak is wearing,” Mrs. Jaiswal had remarked loudly between hands. “They must be her lucky pair, that must be why she has them on with that white necklace.”) Minutes before the first guests arrived, Mrs. Pathak had remembered Vishnu again, and pulled out an old sheet which she’d been saving to give the jamadarni at Divali (but certainly not now ). She’d sent Mr. Pathak down to the landing with it to cover Vishnu up as best as he could. “Make it look natural!” she’d shouted after Mr. Pathak. “I want people to think he’s asleep, not something else.”
    But it hadn’t worked. The first thing Mrs. Jaiswal had said upon walking in was, “If I’d known I’d see a dead man on your stairs, I would never have come! On a Saturday, no less! How inauspicious!”
    “Oh, that’s Vishnu. He’s just drunk. As usual—we really can’t do anything with him.”
    “Drunk? You have drunk people on your steps? What kind of building have you brought us to here, that there are drunk people on the steps?”
    “He’s perfectly harmless,” Mrs. Pathak had tried saying, but Mrs. Mirchandani had started complaining that Vishnu had lurched towards her as she’d walked past, and Mrs. Ganesh had declared that he had grabbed her foot, and it had only been the sight of the kitty pouch, hurriedly brought out and dangled in front of the women by Mrs. Pathak, that had quieted them down.
    It had surely been a sign of terrible displeasure that Mrs. Jaiswal had not asked the hostess, as was the custom, to draw the week’s winner, but had assigned the task to Mrs. Mirchandani instead. And now, here was Mrs. Mirchandani, fawning over Mrs. Jaiswal as usual, begging her to repeat the story about how she had come to Bombay on her honeymoon, and been discovered by a film producer, and acted in three films. “Tell us again, Sheila, wasn’t one a silver jubilee?”
    “ Two of them, actually. And Haseena would’ve been a golden jubilee, ask anyone, if only the freedom movement hadn’t gained force.”
    Mrs. Jaiswal played with the streaks of henna painted in her beauty-salon-coiffed hair and adjusted the diamond pin in her nose. “They said that if I’d continued, I’d have been the next Meena Kumari.” Mrs. Pathak resisted the temptation to remark that at least Meena Kumari had been dead and gone for some years now.
    A sudden tickle started up in Mrs. Pathak’s right palm. She tried to ignore it, since it was a bad sign, portending more loss of money. While she was growing up, her mother had always called her “the lucky one,” the one destined to be married into riches, a bungalow and car. Instead, here she was at forty-three, with two children (one of them first-year fail at Somani College), living in a two-room flat with not even her own kitchen, trying to impress this woman with orange streaks in her hair, who still believed herself to be a film star. The earrings dangled greenly at Mrs. Pathak’s earlobes, the itch in her palm seemed to get