The Death of Vishnu

containers, the handle, the food—everything had become heavier.
    And was becoming heavier still.
    A shiver ran through Short Ganga’s body as she felt the first thrill of scientific discovery. How could she have not noticed it before? All those years of carrying things, all those times she had panted and strained and barely made it to the top floor. She had always blamed herself, thought it was she who was tiring out. But how much more obvious was this new explanation, how much more intuitive and logical. It was the height that was to blame, not she, the height that added kilo after kilo to her load, as she trudged up the floors.
    An intense curiosity awakened in Short Ganga. She found herself driven to perform experiments. Each day, she assessed the weight of her tiffin boxes, both on the ground and the top floor of every building she climbed. She did the same with her bottles of milk. One day, she even borrowed a ten-kilo measuring weight from the bania merchant and struggled with it up several flights of stairs, all for the sake of her science.
    Every result confirmed her conjecture. Every object she experimented with became heavier—the higher she went, the more weight things gained. But her experiments left her dissatisfied, thirsting for more. She wanted more precision, she wanted to quantify the weight gain. She tried to borrow the weighing scales from the bania, but he refused.
    It was then that she was confronted by an exception to her theory: her treasured pieces of Styrofoam. She retrieved them from between the saris in her iron trunk one day and carried them to the second floor of the Makhijani building. They did not feel any heavier. She went up to the third floor, then the fourth and the fifth, but the pieces did not feel different. No matter to what height she took them, they refused to put on weight.
    For a while, Short Ganga lapsed into depression at this setback. But then she put things in perspective. On the one hand was the mountain of evidence she had assembled, on the other a solitary aberration. Why not just ignore the Styrofoam? It was stolen, anyway—perhaps that was what jinxed it.
    She decided it was time to reveal her results. She would leave out the part about the Styrofoam. But whom should she talk to? The other gangas could hardly be expected to appreciate such sophisticated concepts. Besides, what if one of them decided to steal her discovery, to claim all credit for it? She had to be very careful. There might even be some money due to her for having made her scientific advance. Perhaps there was a government bureau to which she should be submitting a claim. It would not do to trust one of the gangas. No, it had to be someone else, someone knowledgeable and trustworthy, who would not take advantage. Someone like—Mr. Taneja, perhaps.
    It had not taken long to decide on him. He was the most likable customer she had. One customer like him made up for a building full of Asranis and Pathaks. Short Ganga looked at the steps in front of her, cut so high she could barely mount them. Three floors of these she climbed every day, just to make sure Mr. Taneja got his lunch. She pulled herself up the last few steps and paused outside his door, waiting to catch her breath.
    Would this be a good day to approach Mr. Taneja? She could tell him first about Vishnu being sick, then casually break her theory to him. Even offer to let him carry the tiffin box to the terrace so that he could have a demonstration. What would his reaction be?
    Short Ganga’s hand hovered near his doorbell. Her instructions were simply to leave the tiffin box on the landing, but she sometimes rang the bell, just to catch a word with him, and make sure not too many days went by without anyone seeing him. Mr. Taneja was never upset when he was summoned this way to the door. Rather, it was she who felt guilty at the intrusion. His wife’s death had occurred years before she had come to the building. But people still behaved as if Mr. Taneja’s tragedy was fresh, as if his name had to be spoken in a whisper, and he still needed to be handled like someone fragile. Short Ganga often wondered about this—what was it about Mr. Taneja that prompted such a reaction? Perhaps it was the feeling one got even as one looked into his eyes and conversed with him that he was not wholly present, that a part of him was afloat somewhere else, lost in a private sea of contemplation. She herself could not stop treating him with the care