The Death of Vishnu

has given up the idea of possessing her, he reminds himself, he has resolved to be satisfied with what she gives.
    “Why, is my skin not fair enough for you?” she pouts, lying back on her pillow and bringing the mango to her lips. She peels the skin off the top with her teeth. “I used to have so many mangoes, growing up in Ratnagiri.” Juice dribbles out as she sucks at the mango, it trickles down her chin and pools beneath her throat.
    Vishnu wants to follow the trail of juice, blot it drop by drop off her skin with his tongue. This is what he has taught himself to be content with—the pleasure of her body, when she allows it, and nothing more. He believes then that his visits will continue forever, a string of lightbulbs glittering through the reaches of his future.
    Padmini squeezes the mango to push out more pulp. But she presses too hard, and the whole seed slips out—it lands on her chin and slides down to her chest. She shrieks and tries to grab the seed, but it is covered with pulp and slips out of her grasp. She laughs as she chases the seed over her body, catching it finally at the base of her abdomen.
    “Give me that,” Vishnu says, and rubs it over her belly, as if it were a bar of soap. A swath of pulp glistens on her skin.
    “Everywhere,” she instructs, so he scrubs her waist, and lathers her between her legs.
    “My mango queen,” he says, when the mango is spent. Her skin is wet, pieces of yellow pulp stick to her breasts, her stomach, the hair between her thighs.
    He tastes her neck first. It is sweet with mango, salty with sweat. He moves downwards, capturing the dabs of pulp with his mouth, lingering at each nipple, stopping to sip the liquid collected in her navel. She gets saltier as he descends, and more aromatic, as if the mango is mixed with something pungent in the earth from which it has sprung. As he enters her, his tongue encounters a sweetness not encountered before in these folds. Lured by the sweetness, he dives in deeper, and then deeper still. Probing, caressing, tasting, but never retrieving, the tiny nugget of mango he knows is nestling there.
    So many earthly ways to enjoy mangoes. Vishnu is loath to give them up.

    A T FIRST, WHEN Short Ganga saw the mango, she was tempted to pick it up. It looked so ripe and delicious, and was one of those refined varieties, not the half-wild types that she occasionally was able to afford.
    But then she wondered who had left it there, right next to Vishnu, and why. She knew of all sorts of spells and nazars that people planted in pieces of fruit, nazars that could spring out and seize you if you even touched the piece. Lemons were particularly dangerous, and Short Ganga always made a detour when she saw one in her path, but mangoes might be even more hazardous, and it was probably not a good idea to gaze at this one for too long.
    Her skin began to crawl as she stood on the landing. First the ghost that had possessed Mr. Jalal, and now this. There was something unnatural lurking on this landing—perhaps it was the spirit that was waiting to take Vishnu away. Short Ganga shivered under her sari, then grabbed the tiffin box and ran up the steps.
    The final flights were always the hardest. Short Ganga wiped her brow as she clambered past the second-floor landing. She tried not to think about Vishnu or the mango. Instead, she concentrated on Mr. Taneja’s tiffin box, hanging by her side, growing heavier with each step she rose, absorbing weight from the air like a sponge drawn through liquid. It was to be expected, of course—it was normal—a law of nature, a physical principle, that she had figured out all by herself.
    Things grew heavier the higher they were lifted.
    It was a discovery she was proud of, a finding that had obsessed her for the past several weeks. It had struck her one day as she was huffing her way up the Makhijanis’ building—the one with the lift that servants were not allowed to use. On the ground floor, the tiffin box felt so light she wondered if the compartments had all been filled, if the food would be enough for both Mr. and Mrs. Makhijani. By the third floor, however, the box was heavy enough that she started cursing the Makhijanis’ appetites, cursing the gluttony of all the rich, whose swollen tiffin boxes left daily red marks where the handles cut into her fingers. It was as she was shifting the box from one hand to the other that the realization struck her. The box had put on weight. The lid, the