The Death of Vishnu

commanded, taking away his half-eaten jam sandwich.
    Shyamu kept crying at the table, so Mr. Asrani returned his sandwich to him. Between sobs, Shyamu started putting pieces of jam-spread bread in his mouth.
    “God help you if she’s run away with that cockroach. God help you if you have a black tongue,” Mrs. Asrani thundered. “And you, jee?” she said, turning her attention on Mr. Asrani. “Are you going to just sit there and sip tea, or are you going to try and find your promising young daughter?”
    “I’ll go look in her room, to see if everything is still there,” Mr. Asrani said, glad for a chance to be out of range of his wife.
    He came back a few minutes later. “Everything is intact,” he said. “There’s nothing missing, and even her suitcase is still in the cupboard. She must have gone out while I was not looking—she should be back soon.”
    “I knew it was too good to be true,” Mrs. Asrani lamented, her anger temporarily diffused by despair. “Her saying yes and everything. What are we going to do? What will I say to Mrs. Lalwani?”
    “Calm down, Aruna. Nothing’s happened. She’ll be back—”
    “You,” Mrs. Asrani snarled, replugging into the socket of her anger. “This is all your fault. From when I have been predicting this, and all you can say is ‘Calm down, Aruna. Calm down, Aruna.’ Now do you see the result of letting your daughter climb on top of your head?”
    Mr. Asrani was silent. He knew, from experience, that the safest course of action when things reached this stage was one of abject contrition, like that expected from an errant schoolboy. He sat at the table and tried to look as wretched as Shyamu.
    “What are you so silent about now? Is some magic genie going to pop out of your tea cup and tell you where she is?”
    Mr. Asrani did not look up. Shyamu, still sniveling, but tired of his sandwich, started breaking the bread into crumbs and mashing them on his plate.
    Mrs. Asrani looked from her husband to her son, and back to her husband again. She was suddenly uncertain about what point she had been trying to make. But it was apparent she had gotten it across. She took a deep breath.
    “Now listen everyone, and this means especially you, Shyamu. If she comes back in a little while, good. But until she does, I don’t want either of you telling anyone—and I do mean anyone —that she’s gone. Especially not the next-door neighbors. Who knows, maybe they’re the ones who even put some sort of nazar on her.” Mrs. Asrani cast a baleful eye towards the Pathaks’ apartment.
    “And if, God forbid, our Kavita actually has run away with that cockroach, then we just have to wait. Wait till she comes to her senses, wait till she comes back, and not breathe a word about it until then. It would be ruinous if people came to know what has happened.
    “Understood?”
    Shyamu flattened the remainder of his sandwich and watched the jam squeeze out.
    “Shyamu, I’m talking to you. Understood? ”
    With a look dripping with misery and remorse, Shyamu nodded that he had understood.

    M R. JALAL LAY on his bed and tried to make the cricks in his back disappear. He had several months’ worth of them to work on. Now that his travails had paid off, now that he had received his sign, there seemed no reason to deny himself small luxuries, such as returning to his bed. He pressed his neck muscles into the mattress, then the ones in his back, feeling the cotton stuffing yield to fit the contours of his body. Ah, the softness—so pleasurable, so decadent—no wonder people didn’t get revelations every night as they slept on their pillowed and padded beds. Something in Mr. Jalal’s spine released with an audible pop, and the relief that flooded into his brain almost made him swoon.
    As he had waited for Arifa to let him in, there had been only one thought burning in his head. The directive that Vishnu had given him. He had to spread the word, inform people, impress on them that Vishnu was a god. He had braced himself at the door like an athlete at the start of a race. He would sprint in straight to the telephone, call all the people he knew, even contact the Times of India .
    But a peculiar incoherence had possessed him. His words had not seemed to convey their message. “Enlightenment does come in a walnut,” he had insisted, and the Pathaks had discreetly taken their leave. “Thousands of hands and feet,” he had said, waving his arms around to simulate Vishnu’s