The Death of Vishnu

thievery at him in front of his customers before he agreed to sell it back.
    And then had come the night when Ahmed had thrown off the covers, turned on the light, and started rearranging the furniture in their bedroom. She had watched, frightened, as he deposited all the chairs in the corridor outside, moved the desk against the wall, and dragged the heavy metal trunk clear across the floor. Then he put his shoulder against the frame, and with her still perched on it, started pushing the bed towards the wall in short, grunting thrusts, like some overstimulated beast of burden.
    “Ahmed, what are you doing? ” she cried, not knowing whether to get up and assist him or sit there and allow her body to be jerked sideways with each thrust.
    “Too soft,” he mumbled through his exertion. “Bad for the back.” He pulled a sheet out of the cupboard, and spread it out on the space cleared on the floor, then plucked his pillow off the bed and switched off the light.
    “Ahmed, come back,” she called to him in the dark, still sitting up in bed. “Why are you doing this?”
    But he did not answer. She waited until she could hear his breathing grow soft and regular before lying down and trying to sleep herself. Sometime during the night, Ahmed tossed his pillow back on the bed, and she awoke in the morning to find him stretched out on the bare floor, the sheet draped over his body and his head.
    The weeks went by, but he did not return. Although it had been years since they had done anything in bed but sleep, the presence of his body next to hers had always reassured her. She found now that if she happened to wake up at night (something that occurred more and more frequently as she grew older, or was it just her imagination?), she was unable to fall back asleep. Instead, she would lie in the dark for what seemed like hours, trying to lose herself in the sounds of his breathing, waiting for the dawn to paint its first strokes of pink across the ceiling.
    She had been unable to solve the mystery of his behavior. She had tried reasoning with him and pleading with him, tried subjecting him to great big luxuriant blooms of tears (both silent and racking), and even threatened to leave him, but to no avail. He had stubbornly returned the same responses, insisting he was doing everything for his health, and accusing her of wanting to cripple him every time she asked him to start sleeping on the bed again. His answers had frustrated her, then made her despondent. These days, she was just plain exhausted—Ahmed’s behavior had so sapped her that even a trip down the stairs seemed a major undertaking.
    Mrs. Jalal looked at the remaining bananas. How many more would she be forced to eat in her life? How many times again would the slime coat her tongue, the ripeness fester in her mouth? Her throat constricted at the injustice of it all. She was tired, so tired, of being the one. The eating, the fasting, the aloneness, the silence. How much longer, how much further, how much more was she supposed to endure? Tears, thick and salty, started flowing down her cheeks.
    It wasn’t her fault this was happening. Perhaps she should let it out, tell her story, confide in someone. She had kept everything bottled up for too long. Maybe she would make a trip to her parents’ house this very evening and reveal everything to Nafeesa. Let herself be ashamed no longer.
    The door slammed, and Mrs. Jalal heard Salim’s footsteps in the corridor. Quickly, she brushed off the tears with the back of her hand. There was no reason to get Salim involved in any of this—she would not let him find out.
    Mrs. Jalal smoothed out her cheeks with her fingertips to capture the last traces of moisture. “Salim dear,” she called out. “Come into the kitchen and have one of these bananas with your mother.”

    K AVITA A SRANI SLID the picture of Salim out from between the pages of the Eve’s Weekly she was reading. “Tonight, my sweet,” she said silently, and touched her finger to her lips, then to the picture. “Only a few hours left.”
    She had thought about taking some clothes, packing a bag. Now would have been a good time to do it, with both her mother and father on the landing outside, engaged in their weekly fight with the Pathaks. But she had decided against it. She wanted it to be just like it had been for Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh in Zahreela Insaan , for Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in Daag . It was going to be a new world, a new