The Death of Vishnu

parents married him to someone else.
    By the time he started caring for Sheetal at home, Vinod’s inital shock had subsided. As the weeks went by, he found he was able to look deeper into Sheetal than ever before, to glimpse into her very soul, and see the strength that, even as she wasted away, held up the spirits of everyone else. “When I get well, I want to go to Kashmir,” she would say. Or, “We’ll go to Nepal for our second honeymoon.” It was always some place in the north, some place cold, some place far away from the Bombay where she knew she would be spending her remaining days.
    The month she died, Vinod felt his love for his wife had become so strong that a part, maybe all, of him would die with her. He wondered if he would want to live after Sheetal. What if he decided not to? How would he kill himself? He started appropriating some of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed for Sheetal, taking one or two at a time, and storing them in an opaque brown bottle that he hid in the dressing table.
    A few days before her death, Sheetal saw him take one of her pills. “I know what you are doing,” she whispered, her eyes half closed. “But it’s not your turn yet. Wait until your turn comes.” She fell asleep.
    That evening, he flushed all the pills down the toilet. He went down to the rocks at Breach Candy and threw the empty brown bottle into the sea. In the days that followed Sheetal’s death, he often regretted his decision. But he did not try to reverse it. Sheetal’s command had been one of the last things she had said to him, and he would obey it.
    His mother tried several times to get him remarried. But he had closed the door to this possibility. He felt he had already experienced whatever there was to be experienced between a husband and a wife, that he had shared a part of himself with another person in a way too profound to be duplicated. There was a reason fate had brought him to this spot. It would be up to fate now to lead him somewhere else.
    With nothing else to do, Vinod immersed himself in his work. Over the next fifteen years, he was promoted to manager and then senior supervisor. The flat had already been paid for by his father, and with the simple needs of his single life, he didn’t need much. Then, one after the other, his parents died, leaving him their old apartment, which by now was worth a large amount of money. At the age of forty-five, Vinod found he had enough wealth to last him his whole life. He resigned from his job.

    A T FIRST, VINOD stayed home. He found it a relief to stop pretending he was really interested in his work, that his job was anything more than activity with which to fill his day. Colleagues from the bank called in the beginning, but the phone soon stopped ringing. He began spending his days in bed, getting up for food, or to play his record.
    What would happen, he started thinking, if he just remained in his flat? Ate less and less, and waited for his existence to end? Who would find his body, how long would it take? Probably Tall Ganga, he decided—she still stopped by occasionally to ask if there was something he needed. He wondered if this was what had been ordained for him—if tired of forging the corridor that was his life, the stars had simply decided to seal it off.
    He was surprised to feel guilt at these thoughts, guilt at the listlessness in which he had allowed himself to be enveloped. All around him were reminders of activity—the knock of Tall Ganga at his door, the smell of tar from the resurfaced street outside, the call of vegetable hawkers, the dust and din of traffic. What gave him the right to stop, to surrender his existence to such self-indulgent rumination?
    On the other hand, what did he have left to pursue? What goal could he conjure up to validate the rest of his life? Perhaps it was outside himself that he should seek the answer—some external cause, a good and noble one, in which he could discover meaning again. He had never thought of himself as an altruist, a social worker, but the idea began intriguing him. Surely a city like Bombay must be teeming with unmet needs, waiting to bestow well-being on the person who filled them. He contacted Mr. Wazir, an old philanthropist friend of his father’s. Upon Mr. Wazir’s recommendation, Vinod was invited to join the board of the Greater Bombay Social Cooperative.
    The motto of the GBSC was “Through united hands we uplift the life of the slum-dweller.” The first