The Death of Vishnu

backwards on the road, which pushed the metal further in. The procession pressed on, unmindful of his agony. He crawled through the tangle of legs into the bank of onlookers, to a man who pulled the buckle out.
    “Wait, your belt!” the man cried, waving it in the air after him, as Mr. Jalal staggered away through the crowd.
    He would never be able to inflict pain on himself. He would never experience its serenity, its sanctity, its purity. All he could do was read about it and fantasize. Mr. Jalal wondered wistfully why pain had to be so painful .
    He had chosen the next best thing. Deprivation. It had occurred to him during Ramzan. He had never fasted much before, except once or twice each year to appease Arifa. Even then, he would usually end his fast before the proper time. This time, Arifa had persuaded him to keep the first roza all the way to sunset.
    Perhaps it was the fact that he was in it for the full duration, but by midmorning, all he could think of was food and water. His mouth felt papery, his tongue dry and listless, and his throat scraped like leather when he swallowed. Hunger bored through the tissues of his stomach and spread like a fever to the far reaches of his body.
    It was in the early evening that a strange clarity opened up to him. The hunger and thirst were purifying agents, cleansing his mind of unnecessary thought, fortifying his body against the laxness to which he had allowed it to become accustomed. He decided he would continue subjecting himself to them, making them part of his existence, fasting every day of the Ramzan period, and continuing after that as well.
    He had been doing it now for three months. The problem was his body seemed to have become too used to hunger, and the exercise was in danger of not qualifying as deprivation anymore. He had tried fasting for longer stretches than the traditional sunrise to sunset, but the emptiness had made his head spin, forcing him to stop. The path to enlightenment for him, he had decided, could not be paved by pain or dizziness.
    Instead, he had tried to find new ways to deprive himself. He had given up reading the newspaper, then stopped listening to music, but these had seemed like minor sacrifices. He had tried not washing, but people had complained too much about his odor. He had started sleeping on the floor. Arifa had called to him to get up and join her in the bed, but only for the first few days. Lately, he noticed with resentment, she had been spreading out quite comfortably on his side of the bed as well, and snoring even louder than she normally did.
    In the past week, he had embarked on a new project. He would climb down the stairs late at night and sit in the dark next to Vishnu. Sometimes he would watch him for an hour before returning to his flat. Once, he fell asleep and only woke up at dawn, just in time to avoid Short Ganga on her morning milk run.
    Sitting there, he would play with a curl of Vishnu’s hair and reach out and touch Vishnu’s face. His mind would wander across all the little deceptions he had allowed Vishnu to get away with over the years. The compensations for injuries supposedly sustained while running errands, the reimbursements for prices purportedly inflated by shopkeepers. Perhaps it had been his years of laxness that had encouraged Vishnu to steal their car that one time. What a shock that had been to him. But it all mattered so little now.
    Mr. Jalal would move his fingers over Vishnu’s nose, his eyelids, his lips. The skin would feel hot against his cool fingertips, and he would try and read Vishnu’s expression using his sense of touch. Was the forehead furrowed in concentration, or was it from pain? Were the eyelids twitching from a fever, or was Vishnu experiencing a dream? Was it the sight of some fantastic vision that was making the lips tremble, the nearing of some profound unrevealed truth that fueled the urgent rasps of breath? Most important of all, was Vishnu still suffering, or had he transcended it, gathering momentum from its throes to launch himself to a higher, more tranquil plane?
    Mr. Jalal was fascinated by Vishnu’s current state. He felt there was something holy, something exalted, about being so close to death. He had almost died himself, when he was five. A case of smallpox had left him in a state of delirium for days. He had tried many times to recapture the memory of that experience, to feel again what it meant to be able to look over the edge.
    Sitting next to