The Death of Vishnu

couldn’t do this to Salim. She needed to find another way. But where was the time? Already her sari had been secured to the wedding cloth trailing behind Pran, and the seven circles around the fire were about to start.
    Suddenly a voice rings out across the hall. It carries the authority of a thousand wedding scenes past, declaring the sentence that has been inescapable since talking movies began.
    “This marriage cannot take place!”
    Conversation stops, and people look up, shocked. The priest drops his holy spoon in the fire. Pran tries to get his headdress off, but can’t.
    It is Salim, astride the same white mare that carried Pran to the hotel earlier. He gallops through the ballroom of the Oberoi, vaulting over tables laden with food. Guests scatter in his wake, and he rides up to the very mandap itself.
    With one stroke of his sword, he slices the knot binding Kavita to Pran. He scoops her up with his other arm, then waves at the speechless onlookers. He spurs his mare, and they stride up the stairs. They burst through the lobby, and into the night outside. They gallop past the Air India building, past the Oval Grounds, past Flora Fountain. In the distance, Kavita sees Queen Victoria standing above her railway station. Holding her beacon high above her head, lighting the way to escape, to victory, to freedom. The train waiting inside, steam rising from the nostrils of its rearing engine.
    She would do it. She would elope with Salim. It was meant to be. She would try not to think of the forlorn figure removing his headdress in the empty Oberoi hall.
    “Mummy,” Kavita said, and Mrs. Asrani shushed at everyone for quiet. “Mummy, I think—I think I might like to say yes.”

    T HE SUN HAS set. The stairs are dark again. The sounds have stopped. Below him, Vishnu can see the first-floor landing.
    Music wafts down the stairs to him. You did, oh yes you did, it was you who did, who stole my heart with a trick… The words are muffled and faint.
    Vishnu listens to the lyrics. I don’t know how you looked at me, but my heart started going tic, tic, tic… They are coming from the next landing, the one between the first and the second floors. He follows them up.
    …tic, tic, tic, tic…
    It is Radiowalla, sitting hunched on his landing, a sheet draped around his shoulders. The radio is cradled in his lap, his head bent forward at an angle, as if trying to catch the sounds of an infant. The volume is turned so low that it is only Vishnu’s new, heightened sense of hearing that makes it audible.
    Perhaps Radiowalla senses Vishnu’s presence, because he draws his arms around his knees, curtaining off the radio with his sheet. He turns his head this way and that, then dips his face into the chamber he has created, pulling the sheet to his neck to seal off the music. Vishnu can still hear an occasional tic, but the rest of the words remain trapped inside.
    Radiowalla rears his head back from his chamber, like a dog looking up from a bowl. He scans the landing once more, then bends forward, pulling the sheet right over his head this time. He sits there in the dark, covered by the sheet, his body motionless underneath.
    The first time Vishnu met Radiowalla was years ago, when Vishnu had just moved to the building. Back then, Radiowalla, having not yet acquired a radio, was still Nathuram. Nathuram, the cart pusher, whose single burning ambition in life, declared to Vishnu the day they met, was to own a transistor radio, the one sitting in its own glossy brown leather case in the Philips showroom window at Kemp’s Corner.
    Since Nathuram did not have his own cart, work was somewhat erratic, and he would sit for days on end at Gowallia Tank with the other cart pushers, waiting for his turn. But every time he was paid for a job, Nathuram would save something, even if it was only a twoor three-paisa coin, putting it in a large cloth bag strung around his neck, which jingled his arrival on the steps. And when the coins added up, he would exchange them for a rupee note at the cigarettewalla, who provided the service free of commission, as long as Nathuram bought a beedi in return (two beedis for exchanging one-rupee notes to a higher denomination).
    “Eleven rupees today,” Nathuram would say to Vishnu. “Fourteen rupees.” “Eighteen.” “Twenty-four.” The tally went up month by month, year by year. Vishnu would sit with Nathuram at the bottom of the steps and listen to him talk about how wonderful it would