The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri

prospects for advancement. The best Dev had been able to do with the B.A. in social studies he had received in July was a clerking job with Hindustan Petroleum. “If the country is supposed to be doing so well, how come they’re paying you so little?” Babuji had complained.
    The whistle blew, the guard raised the green flag, the Frontier Mail was preparing to slip away. There was only one way left to catch the train—follow Dev’s suggestion and ask Paji for help. Since I couldn’t telephone freely and wasn’t allowed to visit in person, it would have to be through a letter. I would explain everything, be honest about where the money went, and tell Paji that although not entitled, I was still coming to him with my apron spread. He could let me know during his visit on Karva Chauth if he had found it in his heart to drop in more.
    The sky opened up, the horizon came to focus once more, and along it, there was the Frontier Mail, whistling its way to Bombay again. Had I known the price I would have to pay for that train ride, I would have banished every trace of the letter I was already composing in my head.

chapter seven
    T HE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, WHEN HEMA AND I GOT TO THE RATION shop to make my allotted call, we found it closed. I was actually quite relieved to see this—ever since sending my letter to Paji, I had been dreading his response on the phone. “It’s only seven,” Hema said, looking at the shutters drawn across the entire line of stalls. “I wonder what could be going on?”
    As we were walking back, the silence rang in our ears—for the first time we noticed how deserted the street was. Nearing the bend that turned towards the colony, both of us instinctively broke into a run. As we approached our house, we began to hear muffled cries and smelled the acridity of smoke.
    Mataji was standing outside the gate, waving frantically to us to hurry. “Where were you, roaming around like you were on a stroll? Don’t you know there’s a riot going on?” She slammed and bolted the door. “Half of Nizamuddin is up in flames around us and you pick this time to go out to use the phone.”
    We stayed awake until late at night, listening to the sirens in the distance. Mrs. Ahmed relayed from across the wall between us that twenty-three people had died and the railway station had been destroyed, but Arya could find nothing on the radio. I had heard about riots occurring in poor, crowded localities far away from Darya Ganj, but never somewhere I was staying before.
    The newspaper report the next day was disappointingly low-key. It stated that there had been an argument at a meat shop in the morning over mutton gone bad. By afternoon, a rumor had spread that the problem wasn’t spoiled mutton, but beef disguised as mutton. People started saying that the butcher (a Muslim, like most others in the trade) had lured the brown and white cow that fed at the station garbage heap into the back of his shop and slaughtered it, then palmed off the meat as mutton to unsuspecting Hindu customers. He had fled for his life after being stabbed in the shoulder with his own boning knife, and his shop was torched along with four others (three of them Muslim, and one Hindu, by accident). The cow, however, was unharmed, the paper reassured its readers, and the rioters had dispersed peacefully once it had been sighted ambling near the post office dump later that evening. An editorial inside predicted that such communal incidents may soon become isolated anomalies. It pointed out that the tally of Delhi riots had steadily decreased every year since the Partition, ascribing this trend to an increase in jobs created by the government’s five-year economic growth plans. The piece ended with a quotation from Nehru, an ideal, it said, which the nation would always hold indisputable: “Let us be clear about it without a shadow of doubt…we stand till death for a