As I tried yet again to think of some artfully camouflaged way of bringing up the girlfriend question, Karun stopped. “Look, it’s the Trimurti.” He pointed to a three-headed tableau in the sand. The sculptor had already completed two of the faces and was preparing to carve the third. “Vishnu the caretaker and Shiva the destroyer—my father had an interesting take on who should occupy the final spot in the trinity.”

Wary that the evening’s investigative opportunities might get sidetracked again, I didn’t respond. But Karun pressed on. “Go ahead, take a guess—who do you think should rightfully be called the creator of the universe?”

“Not Brahma? Isn’t he the one who blows everything out in a single breath?”

“Ah, but creation comes from the womb, not the mouth—a simple matter of anatomy, as my baji would say. So logically, the true third should be the mother goddess, Devi.”

“I think your baji was just pulling your leg. It’s Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, everyone agrees.”

“Not everyone. Majumdar was one of the first to point out that Brahma’s inclusion wasn’t quite so successful, and other scholars have agreed. The fact is, few worship Brahma—not compared to the millions of Devi followers. Just think of all the temples she has in even the remotest spots of the country.”

“So we should tell sculptors everywhere to forget about Brahma, to compose their Trimurtis based on a popularity contest?”

Karun laughed. “Absolutely. In a way, it’s already happened. All those paintings and statues you’ve probably seen—it’s always Shiva fused with Vishnu, or Devi fused with Shiva, or half Vishnu, half Devi. They’re always trying to complete themselves, Baji said—find the attributes they’re missing, the ones they crave. Brahma rarely gets invited to enjoy such intimate couplings.”

Sensing the conversation veering away on a tangent, I tried to turn things to my advantage by squeezing out more information about Karun’s family. “Was he quite religious, your baji?”

“By most standards, yes, but more than religion, I think he loved mythology. He’d relate a legend to me every night—the sea of milk that churned up jewels, the giant fish Matsya who saved mankind during the flood. It was such a magical way to understand the world.”

“But not a very scientific one—not the best training for a physicist.”

“Actually, he often added a scientific twist. Like relating the flood in Matsya’s story to actual periods on earth when the oceans rose. Or using Vishnu’s incarnations—first fish, then reptile, then mammal, then man, to tell me about evolution—I still remember that.”

“So he was a scientist as well?”

“No, not really, though he probably would have made an excellent one if he’d received the opportunity. Family problems forced him to leave college after the first year—he ended up as a purchaser for a construction firm. But he never lost his interest in books, his curiosity—he dabbled in so many things. Gardening, for one—we actually had a pomegranate tree growing right there on our balcony. Mythology and science were his favorites, though—he found all sorts of colorful ways to combine them. For instance, he’d say that three was the magic number of the universe, its most intrinsic configuration—not just because of the triad of primary colors or our three space dimensions, but also because of all the trinities in different religions, especially the Trimurti. He was convinced that everything derives from the basic building blocks of Vishnu, Shiva, Devi. Pseudoscience you might say, or mystical nonsense, even—but it had a charming ambitiousness to it, sort of a layman’s Grand Unified Theory. Perhaps that’s why I went into physics—to get the training Baji never received.”

Brahma had begun to emerge from the sand, and with him, a fundamental question arose in my mind. “And what about you—do you believe at all? The religion, the mythology—did you inherit any of that from your baji?”

Karun watched the sculptor pat one of Brahma’s eyebrows in place. “When I was a child, I accompanied Baji in everything. The incense, the temples, the praying—it was such an essential part of my life. But things began to change soon after he died—I began to question more, notice contradictions I couldn’t reconcile. Now it would be hard to feel the same, even if I tried. Take this carving. I know people might worship it as the Trimurti but I can’t help think of the individual grains of sand of which it is made. Of the multitudes of molecules and atoms and electrons in each grain, the drama being performed invisibly at the levels we don’t see. A trinity of gods emerging from the sand is one way of interpreting the universe’s wonders, but perhaps other, more subtle ways can explain it all more usefully.”

“So you’re an atheist, then?”

“I suppose I fit that old physicist cliché of equating God with the laws of the universe—who said it first, Einstein? Baji’s myths, I know, will never play out before my eyes, but as metaphor, they’re still enchanting. Devi emerging resplendently from the sea, these sand carvings miraculously coming to life, even Baji’s obsession with the number three. Which the universe seems to endorse, he’d be pleased to know—there are exactly three generations of fundamental particles that make up everything.”

He asked about my family, so I related how my mother was the religious one, how Uma claimed to be an agnostic yet went to the temple regularly, how my father, at the opposite end of the spectrum, still ranted, all these years later, against replacing the secular “Bombay” (which he was only too eager to explain came from the Portuguese for “good bay”) with the goddess-inspired name “Mumbai.” “As for me, I’m somewhere in between—some days I call it Bombay, other days, Mumbai; some days I pray, other days, I don’t believe.”

“A probabilistic approach—how very apt. A statistician through and through, I see.”

“Not quite. One day I’ll tell you about my disastrous management degree.”

The sun had begun to turn the waves orange by the time we left the beach. Perhaps it was the imminence of the 123 bus whisking me away, like it had every evening this week, leaving me again unfulfilled about Karun’s romantic background. But as we walked to the bus stop, the question eating away at my mind abruptly broke free. “Did you leave behind a girlfriend back in Delhi, Karun?” I blurted out, then stared at the ground, mortified.

“No,” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he’d taken offense.

I should have stopped, but something about the lurid pinkness of the evening sky goaded me on. “I’m sure you must have had many girlfriends before, though.” This time, I looked up to gauge his reaction.

His face fell, as if I’d exposed a hidden inadequacy. “No, not really.” He looked away, blushing. “I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

Was that it, then? A past so uncomplicated that it could be summarized so succinctly? And why not? The history of my own romantic life was just as concise, containing a single entry, that too uncertain: Karun.

Something opened inside me, much deeper than the girlish fantasies I had indulged in until now. I felt a swell of empathy towards him—at our shared lack of worldliness, at the inexperience that linked us, at the crushing mantle of studiousness he must have labored under as well. Sweat dampened his armpits, the hair at his temples looked inexpertly trimmed, a dark ring ran along the inside of his collar. I found each detail endearing, reassuring—the less perfect he was, the less I had to be. “I’ve never had anyone either,” I said, taking the palm of his hand in mine without thinking. “I’m glad you moved here from Delhi.”

He didn’t say anything, but didn’t withdraw his hand either. Behind us, the sun smeared and flattened at the horizon, losing all its fire as it sank. I didn’t look at him when the bus came, not trusting my face to hide the closeness I felt. Instead, I quickly squeezed his palm and clambered up the steps to the top deck. As the bus pulled away, I looked through the rear window to watch him weave through the hawkers on the pavement, the bag with his swim things swinging by its sash at his side.


THE BEATING HAS stopped for the moment. The victim lies crumpled in a corner of the basement—from his groans I know he is still alive. The Khakis stand around, discussing what more to do to him. There is not much else to occupy them in the basement, so I know they will come up with something. A few of the children, including the one interested in my pomegranate, advance cautiously to the victim. One of them spits at him, another bounces a rock off his back. “Beat the sisterfucker,” the woman next to me urges.

A doctor tries to get through, but the Khakis block his path. Nobody touches him, they snarl. “Do you hear, nobody touches the sisterfucker,” the woman next to me calls out. The doctor returns to his group. At least one of us tried, even if it wasn’t me, I think guiltily to myself.

Someone finds a rope. I know what comes next, and feel sick that I’m going to just sit there and let it happen. I don’t want to look, but my gaze remains transfixed. At the rope being knotted into a noose, at the other end being slung over a hook in the ceiling (so conveniently placed—was someone anticipating a hanging?). The man protests unintelligibly as the Khakis drag him from the corner by his hair. I catch a glimpse of his face, it seems to have caved in—only a mass of red remains where one might have seen a nose, a mouth.

He screams as they sling the noose around his head and begin to hoist him up. His feet leave the ground, and the screams turn to gurgles. His hands claw at his throat, then find the rope and begin to draw his body up it, so he doesn’t choke.

“You fool, you forgot to tie his hands,” says one of the Khakis pulling on the rope. The body, released, hits the ground with a thud.

They look around for more rope. The woman next to me produces some cord from her bag, “for the sisterfucker,” but it’s too flimsy. “Use his belt,” someone shouts, but he isn’t wearing one. So they rip off his pants, and for good measure, his underwear as well.

As they tie his hands with his trousers, one of them starts cursing. Apparently, the victim’s not Muslim—he isn’t circumcised. They decide to carry him back to his corner, where they prop him up against the wall. The noose still dangles from his neck. A Khaki tries shaking him awake to offer him a cigarette.


BY THE END OF MAY, I knew I had learnt to swim as well as I ever would, at least in this lifetime. I could make it to the deep end of the pool, splashing along at Karun’s side, using a medley of movements that bastardized both the breast stroke and the free style. Like someone learning a foreign language without concern for pronunciation or grammar, my swimming was free of grace or fluidity—I had found the crudest way of getting across without sinking.

We went to the beach after almost every lesson, eating our way through all the snacks (except the “cholera special” fruit plate). Sometimes, we sat on the sand to admire the sunset—every third day, we watched the sculptor embark on a new carving, tossing a five-rupee coin on the cloth he spread out on the sand. Karun would elaborate on his father’s own unique interpretation of the Trimurti—how Vishnu, with his sunny disposition, represented the dynamism to make things work, while Shiva personified introspection, solitude, the tendency to withdraw from life. Which left the rest of nature’s attributes for Devi to embody: since she received the power to create, she was the most versatile. “Baji said one of the three usually predominates in a person’s personality. He’d see a child full of fun and frolic, or mischievous like Krishna, and tell its parents, ‘You’ve got a lively little Vishnu there.’ Or call someone very dreamy, lost in his or her own little world, ‘a real Shiva.’” According to his baji, people went through the world searching for their complements. “A Shiva needs a Vishnu or Devi to pull him out of his shell so he can engage with the world, a Devi depends on a Shiva or Vishnu to provide her with seed, and poor Vishnu must constantly run after Shiva and Devi to ensure the universe keeps going. More than just pairing up, though, the universe needs the union of all three. When Shiva, Vishnu, and Devi find each other, when they all coalesce as one, then and only then is the circuit of the universe complete, its true power unleashed.”

“So were you his little Vishnu?”

“No, I guess I was more Shiva—too much the loner, even when little. The Vishnu in our trinity was definitely Baji himself—always on the move, always keeping my mother and me going. We’d enact out my favorite myth, where Vishnu takes the form of an enchantress to seduce Shiva into the swing of things. I’d pretend to meditate, but then roll around laughing the minute Baji sashayed by, draped in a sari.”