The Death of Vishnu

him good morning, before realizing what she was doing. But it was too late—several villagers had witnessed her error, and the remedy was clear—she had to be beaten. Jeev could have had her pardoned, but a beating was no great penalty, and since there had been such a clear violation, it didn’t even occur to him to meddle with the established rules.
    The first few blows the jamadarni bore well. But then the stick fell against her backbone in a way that made her scream out loud. And here was where luck stepped in—who should be looking down that very instant, and hear the jamadarni’s cry, but the king of heaven, Indra himself.
    Of course, Indra didn’t intervene—the king of heaven can hardly be expected to waste his time on such trivialities. In fact, all he did was observe aloud, “Is a stick really necessary, wouldn’t words have been enough?” before turning his attention to other matters. But a lesser god, hearing this, decided to try and please Indra, in the hope of being promoted. He arranged for Jeev to be reborn as a monkey, and sent to earth with the memory of his Brahminhood intact.
    That’s how Jeev ended up in a forest. Swinging through the trees, subsisting on whatever nuts and fruits he could find, whiling his days away in contemplation of his dramatic fall. There wasn’t a breath he was able to take without being reminded of the position that had been snatched away so unfairly from him.
    One morning, Jeev opened his eyes to see a mesh floating down through the air towards him. Before he could react, he was surrounded by the net. He felt his body swing through the air, and turned around to see the tree trunk just before his head smashed into it.
    When he awoke, there was a leather collar around his neck, so tight he could barely breathe. Running from a loop in the collar to a peg in the ground was a rope. All around were huts and small buildings—the trees of the forest were nowhere to be seen. Jeev struggled with the clamp around his throat, but it would not come off.
    “No, my little bandar. The collar is here to stay.” It was Mittal, Jeev’s new owner, holding one of those tiny drums that bandarwallas play. “Your only worry now is to learn to dance. Come, let me teach you.”
    Mittal raised the drum into the air. Ta-rap ta-rap came the sound, as the stones tied to the periphery blurred through the air and struck the drum at the ends of their strings. “Dance, bandar,” Mittal commanded, and pulled forcefully on the rope, so that Jeev fell headfirst to the ground.
    Jeev felt himself jerked upright repeatedly, hard enough to almost snap his neck, and then dragged to the ground again. As he tasted the mud in his mouth, resistance began to spark up within him. He was a Brahmin, not a monkey. He would not be humiliated. He would not dance. There was no other choice, really—to succumb was to accept his new lot in life and forever abandon his claim to his rightful Brahminhood.
    Now Mittal was not a cruel man. But if he couldn’t train Jeev to dance, to go around and beg for money from the people who stopped to watch, then neither of them would eat. So he started feeding Jeev less and less, and training him with a stick. Striking him lightly at first, but with increasing force as Jeev’s obstinacy refused to soften.
    As one week passed, and then another, the welts grew on Jeev’s body. The sound of the drum hammered into his brain so persistently he began hearing it even when Mittal was not around. He would awake terrified at night, the sweat cold on his starved body, and the sound would be there, as predictable and enclasping as the collar around his neck.
    “Don’t fight it, little bandar,” Mittal said to him one day. “Learn to accept it.” The words filtered in as if through a fog, and Jeev looked up. He trembled as he ate the banana Mittal offered him, then fell into an exhausted sleep.
    He awoke to the drum rapping as usual inside his head. But the notes seemed less harsh. Their stridency was tempered now by a tunefulness he had not noticed before. Had this underlying pattern always been there, he wondered, and if so, how could he have missed it?
    The sound stopped, and Jeev looked up. Mittal was staring at him, arm suspended in the air, stones still twirling around the stationary drum in his hand. Slowly, Mittal resumed rotating the drum, not taking his eyes off Jeev’s face. The ta-rap ta-rap started up, and Jeev found his limbs unfurling. He felt his shoulders