The Death of Vishnu

uncoordinated in his head when he came down just now to buy cigarettes. In turn, Lowest Step told the jamadarni that a mental asylum ambulance had taken Mr. Jalal away. This was refuted later by the jamadarni, who heard from Mrs. Pathak about Kavita’s elopement with Salim, and Mr. Jalal’s mysterious part in it. The elopement quickly turned into an involuntary one, because of the illegitimate child Kavita was expecting, and then into a full-fledged abduction perpetrated by the Jalals. Mr. Jalal was said to have had a fight with Vishnu, who had recovered miraculously to try and save Kavita, but was then mercilessly beaten by father and son. A supporting version claimed Vishnu managed to knock Mr. Jalal unconscious before he was overpowered himself, and Kavita left behind her dupatta to implicate the true wrongdoers. Another theory had it that the dupatta was ripped off in an attempted rape, and that Kavita had been kidnapped to be part of a famous Muslim smuggler’s private harem. Nobody seemed clear about exactly what Mr. Jalal had said about Vishnu himself, though the jamadarni alleged he had called him a Hindu devil who deserved to die.

    M RS . J ALAL LOOKED at her husband, asleep on their bed. At the angle at which he was lying, the light from the window reflected off his cheeks, obscuring all the pockmarks, so his face shone unblemished as a child’s. She lay down next to him and cradled his head in the crook of her elbow. Her poor Ahmed, how hard he had tried, how hard he still tried, to transcend himself. She had never seen a person with such aspirations, such ideals. She reached out to brush the hair off his forehead. Was there anything she could say, anything she could do, that would stop him in his bizarre pursuit?
    Ahmed snuggled closer to her. “Arifa,” he murmured, his eyes still closed. He wrapped an arm around her and stroked her neck with the back of his fingers. “I feel so sleepy. But so much work to do.”
    “Shhhh,” Mrs. Jalal said. “Later.” She raised a hand around his face to block the sunlight that was dappling his eyelids. Instantly, the marks rose back to view on the surface of his skin. She looked at them and traced their unevenness with the tips of her fingers. She wondered what he thought about them, what he had felt growing up with his face all cratered like that. She had asked him once long ago, but he had not answered. Had people called him names in school? Had he been shunned by classmates who might have otherwise been his friends? Had he gone through life always conscious of this handicap, which captured attention with such cruel clarity at first meeting?
    She herself had never minded the marks. If anything, she was glad for them in her selfish way, because they balanced her own feelings of inadequacy. Ahmed’s skin was Ahmed’s skin, and these were just variations—variations in texture and color, that she was sure could be explained in terms of biological factors like nerves and blood vessels and pigment cells.
    It was what lay beneath the skin, inside his head, that she had difficulty with. Why couldn’t she learn to think of those differences too as biological variations? She had heard somewhere that all thought, and with it, feeling and belief, arose from a series of chemical and electrical impulses. How could something so unemotional, so scientific, be responsible for causing so much turmoil? Why had the paths in Ahmed’s brain arranged themselves in such perverse ways, so diametrically opposite to what she had been taught?
    Lying there now on the bed with him made these things seem less important. She drew her head next to his, and brushed his cheek with her lips. He kept his eyes closed, and continued rubbing his fingers against the nape of her neck. Nuzzling with him like this reminded her of the times she would lie next to the goat her father brought home every Bakr-Eid. She would wrap her arms around its body and pet its head, and bury her face in its fur. Sometimes she would lay her head against its chest and listen to its beating heart.
    The goat would be housed right outside the kitchen, where it could be fattened a little more with a steady stream of vegetable scraps. She loved feeding it herself, watching it nibble delicately at carrot tops and cauliflower leaves. Always, though, would be the thought in her mind that the day of Bakr-Eid was arriving. The night before Eid, she would lie in bed, knowing it was the last time she would fall asleep to