The Death of Vishnu

broke off the top section, and put it in her mouth. The ripeness made her gag, but stoically, she chewed on the mushy flesh.
    Ahmed. She’d resolved to stop obsessing about him, but the banana fumes had for some reason sent her mind down that track again. She couldn’t believe it had started all the way back with the fasts at Ramzan. How happy she’d been then, when instead of one or two half-kept rozas, Ahmed had decided to stick with them for the entire fasting period. She had always been distressed by his failure to assume the proper role in their family’s religious activity. Month after month, year after year, it had been she who had written out the checks for the due to the poor, who had made all the arrangements for festivals, and taken Salim to the masjid on Fridays. Upon prodding, Ahmed would sometimes join her when it was time for namaz, but usually he simply left the room, still reading his book, whenever she unrolled the prayer mat. Her father had warned her, had almost turned the proposal down. “He seems to have read a lot of books, this Ahmed Jalal,” he’d remarked. “Perhaps one of these days he’ll even accidentally open the Koran.”
    She’d realized, quite quickly after their wedding, that her father had been wrong about Ahmed. Her husband had read the Koran, in fact, he had read it frighteningly well, and could recite several passages from memory. The problem was his interest in religion only seemed to extend to reading about it, not practicing it. “Thought control,” he would call it, “something to keep busy the teeming masses.” Then, without looking up from his book, he would add, “Not to exclude you, my love,” and she would feel herself turn red at the blatancy with which he mocked her.
    Some nights he would spout passages from the Bible or a Chinese religious book whose name she could never remember. He would compare these quotes to verses from the Koran, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each text, unmindful of the fact that she was covering her ears to deflect any possible blasphemy. She especially dreaded the times he brought up the Din Ilahi, a sixteenth-century amalgam of Hinduism and Islam that the Mughal emperor Akbar had concocted to unify his subjects. “Religion revealed by man, not prophet,” their school mullah had contemptuously asserted, “is religion fit for no one.”
    Ahmed, though, was all for it, and regarded Akbar as a personal hero. “He really put the mullahs in their place,” he would say, as he looked for opportunities to taunt people. “Perhaps it’s time to give the experiment another shot—force everyone to convert to it, Hindus and Muslims alike. Just think of it—instant peace, instant harmony—the mullahs might have to share their masjids, but so what?”
    Statements like these made her wonder how many more she could afford to hear before being condemned to accompanying Ahmed into the fires of hell. An image from the Koran kept coming to her—that of Abu Lahab being consumed by flames, his wife bringing the firewood, a rope tied around her neck.
    For the first few months of their marriage, she had meekly listened to everything Ahmed said, without comment. But she soon learned that her silence elicited increasingly outrageous pronouncements, which let up only when he had succeeded in provoking her into an argument. She had embarked then into the next phase, the one where she believed that she would be able to change him, that the intrinsic virtue of her beliefs would shine through and banish the shadows from Ahmed’s mind. But she had found herself unequipped to match his prowess at debate—the keenness of his words, the onslaught of his ideas, the way he spun strands of her own arguments into webs around her and then watched in amusement as she flailed and struggled and tried to cut herself loose. She had felt the ground of her own faith begin to soften, and had realized the danger of allowing herself to be further engaged. That is when she had summoned up the courage to deliver an ultimatum—Ahmed was forbidden to talk about religion in her presence, or she would leave, taking Salim with her.
    Of course, Ahmed wasted no time calling her bluff, carrying on as usual, ignoring her threat. Until one night, in the middle of a lecture on the equality of all religions, she grabbed Salim and rushed down the stairs to the taxi stand. Although she returned soon enough (she had forgotten to take money for the taxi), it got