The Death of Vishnu

Ahmed’s attention. At first, he was furious, railing at her for being unintellectual, calling her backward and brainwashed and bigoted. Then he tried appealing to her open-mindedness, her sense of fair play, arguing that a man should be able to discuss anything with his wife, that they were only words, not actions, so where was the harm? But she stood her ground, leaving the room whenever he brought up the subject, and for good measure, going to Salim’s crib and pressing him to her bosom to reiterate her threat. Ahmed gave up soon after, and the nightly discourses came to an end.
    It was several weeks before Ahmed’s imposed stoniness thawed. But a trace of formality crept into all his dealings with her, a perceptible guardedness, that over the years hardened into something unbridgeable between them. He started lapsing into periods of secretive behavior—days, sometimes weeks, when he would keep to himself and hide things from her. She remembered one night in particular, not long ago, when he refused to let her look at his back, even though she could see a spot of blood soaking through his nightshirt.
    Usually, though, the secrets he tried to keep were innocuous and easy enough to guess, and she would display just the right mixture of curiosity and consternation at his behavior to make him think he was getting away with them. What troubled her more, and what she blamed herself for, was the further deterioration in his observance of Islam. She watched in silent helplessness as his namaz-reciting dwindled month by month, as he started cheating at the one or two rozas he did keep and stopped going to the masjid altogether. Even more distressing was the fact that despite her best efforts, Salim was turning out more and more like his father. She reconciled herself to practicing her faith alone, and never being able to share this part of her existence with her family.
    So when Ahmed started observing the rozas so diligently this Ramzan, Mrs. Jalal was startled, and quite pleased. Perhaps he had come around, maybe he was going to be like all the other husbands and fathers after all. Maybe there would even still be time to influence Salim. She had risen before dawn every morning to have turmeric potatoes and freshly fried puris ready for their breakfast, and stood on the balcony each evening with Ahmed, to wait for the sun to set. It had given her such a sense of fulfillment, doing the shopping herself every day, making all his favorite foods, feeding him the first bite of mutton kebab or chicken biryani with her own hands. And to her relief, he had not brought up the old discussions of other religions. Even Salim, persuaded by their joint example, had been moved to keep a fast or two.
    But then the rozas were over, and Ahmed was still fasting daily. Sometimes he would keep them two days at a time, not eating from sunrise the first day to sunset the second. When questioned about it, he claimed it helped his digestion, or he needed to lose weight, or he was doing it in empathy with all the people starving in the world. Uncertain about how to respond to these assertions, and limited somewhat by the apparent absence of health side effects, Mrs. Jalal tried not to dwell on it.
    But it got worse. He started wearing the same clothes day after day, ignoring the fresh white kurtas she laid out on his bed every morning. She would have to sneak out with his dirty clothes at night while he slept, and hide them in the dhobi hamper. Which didn’t always work, since sometimes he would retrieve them the next day, and scold her for putting them there.
    He stopped bathing for a while and only resumed when his body odor was so ripe that even the cigarettewalla was prompted to ask what was happening to the sahib. The radio suddenly started bothering him, making him irritable whenever it was playing in his presence. He would try to turn it off when he thought she was not looking, and if she objected, storm out of the room in a huff. One day she came back from the market to find it had disappeared altogether. That afternoon, a tearful Short Ganga demanded to know why the sahib had sold the radio for ten rupees to the paanwalla, when the opportunity to buy it should have been rightfully hers, given all the work she did for them, and who was the paanwalla to them anyway, when they hardly even ate two paans a month, if that? It had taken Mrs. Jalal an hour of standing on the pavement outside the paanwalla’s stall and hurling accusations of