The Death of Vishnu

usual, bringing along a freshly killed chicken, which she cooked into a curry under Sheetal’s supervision.
    Sometimes Vinod wondered about Sheetal’s days. She shopped and cooked, he knew; she talked to Mrs. Jalal from downstairs and listened to Vividh Bharati in the afternoon; she hung up curtains and changed the sheets and watered the flowerpots on the balcony. But was that enough? Was that enough to occupy her, to make her happy, even, dared he ask, to fulfill her?
    “It’s not so trivial,” Sheetal said, when he brought the question up one evening. “I’m a woman with a flat to run, not some girl playing house.”
    They had seven happy years there. Then, at the insistence of his mother, they went to the hospital near the income-tax building to find out why Sheetal had not become pregnant yet. By then, as the specialist from Bangalore explained to them, the cancer had already spread beyond the uterus. A hysterectomy was performed, and Sheetal underwent various other treatments and therapies. When the doctors were finished with her, she was allowed to come back to spend her last six months at home.
    Sheetal’s illness was so unexpected that for a while Vinod felt as if he were in one of those melodramatic tearjerkers, the ones that always completed silver jubilees at theaters like Roxy or Opera House. Suddenly his life became one long undulation of visits to the chemist and the temple, of hours spent blankly at work, of nights passed watching his wife’s face as she rested. Then, before he could prepare himself, the routine ended—the dressing table was cleared of prescriptions, the extra blankets were packed away, and all that was left of Sheetal was a photograph on the wall, its frame adorned with a single strand of marigolds.
    For a long time after she died, it seemed as if she was still around. As if she had been in the room with him a minute ago, and just gone downstairs to the store. She hated doing that, and would often wait until he came home from work rather than shop herself, even if all she needed was some coriander to complete the night’s dinner. “And get me a paan, too,” she would say, “if you’re going down anyway.”
    Sheetal loved paan. Not the plain kind, but the sweet ones, with lots of coconut and candied betel nut and all the minty pastes and mixtures that the paanwalla kept in silver boxes around the circumference of his tray. “You missed that one,” she would say sternly, when she went down to get the paan herself. “At least don’t cheat your most regular customer.” And she would watch to make sure he did not shortchange her on the tiny silver candy pills which were her favorite ingredient. The paanwalla adored her, and asked after her every day when she fell ill. Even in the last few days, when she could barely chew or swallow, she insisted on having her paan. “It helps me relax,” she would say, as Vinod put the paan gently between her teeth, and for a moment, the familiar orange paan stain on her lips would be a blossom that brightened her face.
    “Remember what you need to do after I’m gone, Vinod. Remember your promise to me, whatever you do, don’t forget,” Sheetal would gasp, as she tried to chew her paan, and Vinod would be by her side, kissing her hand, assuring her he would keep his promise, and wondering how he would.
    For what Sheetal wanted, what she had become obsessed with in the last half year of her life, was to get into The Guinness Book of World Records.
    It was Vinod who had bought the book, as a present to celebrate her return from the hospital. Sheetal read it immediately and by that evening she had made up her mind—her name was going to be listed. She had never been truly exceptional at any activity. Now she would prove to the world that she, Sheetal Taneja, was in fact the best at something. The question was, what?
    She read and reread the categories in the book, but there was nothing in which she could remotely hope to win. Her only chance would be to create a new category. One morning, she announced that she had decided on it: dialogue. She had always had a knack for memorizing it. “What if I memorize the dialogue of an entire movie? Surely they will have to put me in the book for that.”
    She asked Vinod to fetch her the newspaper to see what was playing. There was so little time to lose. They would go the very next day.
    She chose Jeevan. Life. There was irony in the title, since it starred Meena Kumari, who, as in many of