The Death of Vishnu

reserved for the very elderly, or the very sick.
    She was still debating about the doorbell when the song started. The music welled up in waves, and riding the crests came the first of the lyrics. Short Ganga imagined Mr. Taneja standing over the gramophone, alone in his room. She knew this song, knew for whom it was played. Today, she decided, would not be the day after all.
    Short Ganga left the tiffin box next to the door and walked back silently to the steps.

    V INOD TANEJA LISTENED to the words.
    The night will come and cool our bodies, the rain will come and sprinkle our skin;
    You and I will become just one, on this, the first night of our union.
    For years after Sheetal had gone, he had played the song at the same time, day after day. He still remembered to play the record at least once a week. Sometimes he stood next to the gramophone, but often he went to the balcony and let the music waft out to him as he looked at the cars and the buses three floors below.
    The flowers will open and sing to us, cats will purr and meow in our ears;
    You and I will be forever just one, from this, the first night of our union.
    Little had he known, when he had first listened to the banal lyrics, that over the years, every note on the record, every word, every sound, would become an indelible part of him. It had been Sheetal’s favorite song from the last movie they had seen together, and he had wandered into a music store a few weeks after her death to buy it. He watched it now, the red label in the center a little faded with age, but the dog-and-gramophone logo still clearly visible, the surface of the disc almost as unscratched as the day he had first played it twenty years ago. Of course, the grooves had dulled over the years, but the sound was still so surprisingly clear.
    The sun will dip into the ocean from the sky, the owl will hoot from its branch on the tree,
    Together on the sands of time we will run, on this, the first day of our union.
    The record had been a journal that had charted his recovery after Sheetal. Day after day, year after year, he had taken his emotional pulse as he had listened to it. In the beginning, there had been no pulse. He had performed each task dutifully: cranking the handle, placing the record on the turntable, setting the needle down, receiving the notes transmitted. But these had not added up to the experience of listening to the song. It had been some weeks before he had actually sensed the music, and even more time before he had heard the lyrics. Then, one day, it had happened—suddenly, he could see Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari on the CinemaScope screen, feel Sheetal’s hand resting under his own in the cool darkness of the movie theater. That’s when he had begun to cry, his tears so big and splashy that he had shut the gramophone lid, afraid of getting them over the record. For months, he had been able to listen to only part of the song before breaking down.
    A year later, it was only anguish he felt when he heard the song. A deep, penetrating, physical anguish, the kind that comes when a dentist drills too deep into a tooth. Over time, this anguish had gradually dulled, leaving behind only the memory of pain; a quiet, almost sweet numbness which lingered in the hollow where the ache had been rooted. Now, even that numbness was fading.
    Look at the moon, see how he smiles from the sky; see the stars, how they wink from up high;
    We’ll wave at them from here on the ground, on this, the first night of our union.
    This was the part, the part near the end, that always took him back. Back across the fading nights and days, filled with dimly remembered happiness and pain; back through all the doorways traversed, both alone and hand in hand with Sheetal; back through the ravaged map of his existence, with the stars that drew it burning triumphantly above. Vinod looks at the record and waits to see her, he looks at the rotating blackness of the disc, and waits for her image to emerge.

    O N THE DAY Vinod passed his Bachelor of Commerce exam, his father announced they had found a suitable match for him. Would he have any objection to marrying Sheetal, the niece of his uncle’s wife, who had been at Paplu’s birthday party last week?
    Vinod remembered seeing her there. He hadn’t paid her any special attention, nor had he tried to talk to her, although he was sure he had said hello once at a previous family function. She was not the most beautiful woman he had laid eyes on, but on