The Death of Vishnu

It was so hard to remember. Surrounded as he was now by this whiteness, this serenity, though, could things have really not worked out well?
    He wondered if he should get up and explore heaven. On earth, he had never allowed himself to believe in it, but had heard people make all sorts of claims about it. It would be interesting to see if any of them were true—the pearly gates, the gold spires, the rivers of milk—probably none of these existed. What would be nice, though, would be a TV room, through which residents could monitor the progress of things on earth.
    He sat up and took a deep breath of the fresh heavenly air. Why did it smell of disinfectant? And was that the sound of car horns he heard through the window? And what were those casts doing on his legs? Suddenly Mr. Jalal started noticing a number of incongruities—the cupboard filled with jars and bottles, the blood pressure gauge on the table, the bedpan by the door. And the white apparitions gliding through the corridor outside—the ones he had thought might be ghosts—weren’t those nurses’ uniforms they were wearing?
    “How do you feel?” One of the apparitions had walked in the door and was taking his pulse. “You were quite lucky—jumping like that and breaking so little.”
    “Where am I?” Mr. Jalal managed to say.
    “Bhatia Hospital. Your wife’s on the next floor.”
    “My wife?”
    “They’re trying to do the best they can.” The apparition’s eyes narrowed and it looked at him with a hardness he found flustering. “Someone hit her quite hard, you know.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She may have bled inside.”
    The apparition put a pill in his mouth and a glass of water in his hand. “The police are waiting to record your statement, once the doctor has seen you,” it said, swishing briskly out the door.
    Mr. Jalal sat on the bed with the glass in his hand. The insistent note of a truck horn blared from the road below. He noticed the tattered border of the curtain, the dust on the windowpane, the buildings lined up stolidly against the cloudless sky beyond. He had not died. He was not a martyr. This was not heaven. He tried to make sense out of what the nurse had said. Why had all this happened? Was it all a result of undertaking his quest? Could this all be part of a test, part of the penance expected from him? Was this the price tag that accompanied faith?
    But Arifa? What had she ever done—why was she the one being made to pay? He wondered what was going to happen to her, what he was going to say to the police, what they would do to him. Would he tell them about Vishnu? Would he tell them about his vision? Was his faith strong enough to convince them? To convince himself?
    The pill began to dissolve in his mouth, and Mr. Jalal tasted the bitterness seeping into his tongue. Wasn’t medicine, ultimately, a matter of faith? Faith that the doctors knew what they were diagnosing, faith that their prescriptions would make you whole, faith that the tablet dissolving in your mouth would cure you, not kill you. Weren’t entire hospitals built on faith? The floors that supported the beds, the walls that held up the floors, the bricks and mortar and cement that composed the walls. And the patients sitting on the beds, clutching at their sheets and their blankets, shivering as the medicines entered their bodies, wondering what the pills were supposed to cure.
    For the second time that day, Mr. Jalal felt himself falling. But this time, there was no courtyard to break his fall, no ground to separate him from the blackness that opened below.
    This is the house she grew up in, this is the house she has returned to now,
    Who will dry the tears as her feet carry her back over the threshold?
    Kavita tried to remember the lines of the song. Was it Nutan or Meena Kumari who sang it? She could see the film now, the young widow turned out of her dead husband’s house, forced to make her lonely way back to the village where she was born.
    Of course, Salim wasn’t dead. Just incompatible. This much was clear after the night she’d spent with him. What a place to take her to, the waiting room at Victoria Terminus. At three o’clock in the morning, when the first train out to Jhansi wasn’t until six. Couldn’t they have just left later, she had asked, trying to make herself comfortable amidst the crowd of humanity. Especially the crying babies. Kavita had looked at their mother, a young Muslim girl in a burkha, not much older than