The Age of Shiva Read Free Page A

flashed, but her words were lost in a blast of January wind that swept through the lane. It had rained the night before, and the cold had a penetrating dampness to it that made us tighten the grip of our fingertips around our toothpicks. I watched the stripes billow on Dev’s thin sweater, the kind with the sky blue V-neck which was being touted by street vendors all over Delhi as this year’s fashion imported directly from London. Dev stood facing the gusts, his shirt open casually up to the second button, as if he were a tennis player at Wimbledon positioning himself in a breeze on a hot summer day. “Are you cold?” he asked, as Roopa and I pulled at our shawls, trying to eke out enough material to cover our heads. “I could give someone my sweater.”
    I was almost taken in. But then as he spoke about moving to Bombay to become a playback singer for films, I noticed how his jaw tensed to keep his teeth from chattering. “Roopa says she couldn’t possibly leave Delhi, but I dream about it all the time. Imagine living down there next to the warmth of the sea, imagine never needing a shawl or sweater again.” He dug his arms in tightly against his lean frame to maintain the nonchalance of his pose as he said this. How endearing it was, I thought, that underneath his bravado, he too was freezing.
    Roopa wanted to buy cosmetics, so we walked down towards the fort, looking for the side street with the perfume shops. Everywhere was the smell of charcoal fires, mingling with the aroma of food being fried on giant iron griddles. The air was so heavy with smoke that it looked grainy, lights from the shops swirled and bled as though through a fog. Tiny paper flags sprouted from the ends of wooden sticks everywhere, like early spring blossoms heralding the arrival of Republic Day. Decorations for the celebration had been becoming more elaborate since the original one in 1950, and this year there were strings of bulbs festooned between the lampposts along the street. Just this morning, the newspapers had talked about how the wounds of partitioning the country into India and Pakistan were finally healing after eight years, how Hindus and Muslims all over the Indian side were ready to put the riots and the killings of the past aside and greet a united future.
    â€œLook at the fort,” Dev said, pointing at the arches that rose from the twilight ahead. “They say that Shah Jehan employed a hundred musicians, to play in the drum house five times a day. That’s the time I should have lived, in the days of the Mughals. When people like me were hired in the royal courts, when the soul of a singer was something even kings could appreciate.”
    I imagined Shah Jehan and his empress Mumtaz reclining at dusk in the fort on the cushioned interior of the Sheesh Mahal. Dev’s lyrics ushering in the evening candles one by one, each flame igniting a thousand images in the mirrors embedded in the ceiling and walls.
    â€œAll these centuries later, and everything still stands, just like the Mughals built it,” Dev said. “They’ve come and gone, the British, and these buildings will outlast us all.”
    The first time I saw the Red Fort was just before the Partition, when I was nine. My family had left behind the ancestral mansion in Rawalpindi, once it became clear the city would fall to Pakistan, and fled to Delhi. Paji took us to a different neighborhood every day to familiarize us with our new home. Darya Ganj, the part of Old Delhi in which we resettled, was filled with narrow streets and crowded bazaars. In comparison, New Delhi, with its wide boulevards and enormous edifices, was so different, it might as well have been London or New York. The immaculate white pillars and polished arcades of Connaught Circus had projected a symmetry, an order, that was unsettling. Biji in particular was so intimidated that she rarely ventured out of Old Delhi after that.
    What I remembered most