The City of Devi: A Novel by Manil Suri Page B

wedding plans already?—just yesterday she asked if Karun had an uncle or aunt who could be approached with the proposal.” Uma stared thoughtfully at me. “Why don’t you take the initiative yourself, try to kiss him and see?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    Once articulated, though, Uma’s suggestion persisted in my mind. Why hadn’t Karun tried to kiss me? I had been the first to reach for his hand—could he be again waiting for me to take the lead?
    The day it happened, we almost didn’t go to the pool. The air had been turgid with the scent of the monsoon all day, and by evening, there were so many layers of clouds stacked above that the sky seemed to sag under their weight. And yet, no rain fell. As I emerged from the showers, a crack opened up between the crusty edges of two clouds and for an instant, buttery sunlight seeped out.
    The pool was almost empty. A group of teenage boys floated about listlessly on the shallow side like bloated seals. The lifeguard ignored the swimmers even more fastidiously than usual—he shuffled around the spectator section, pulling tarpaulins over the wooden benches. “Let’s sneak up the diving tower to catch the view,” I suggested.
    The tower had been kept cordoned off ever since a teenager struck his head against one of the platforms on the way down some years back. As we scurried up, our feet left smudged prints on the layers of salt and dirt on the steps. The clouds overhead looked even lower than from the ground, as if climbing a little more would allow us to reach up and poke holes to release the rain. More clouds, darker than the ones above, were massed near the horizon, like cars in a traffic jam, waiting to roll in.
    The view from the top was spectacular, the pool having been built right next to the sea. The arms of the city stretched out on either side of us, reaching out to embrace the bay. The water looked neither blue nor gray but some strange and violent color in between, as if plotting to rear up at an opportune moment and swallow the entire shoreline. We leaned on the railing and looked out for the monsoon, a giant ocean liner scheduled to lumber in at any moment.
    “I loved the monsoon so much as a child. Baji would take me up to the terrace of our building and we’d wave at the clouds. He said there were people in them watching us, emptying buckets of rain, waving back. When his heart failed, I couldn’t wait for the next monsoon, because I knew he’d be one of the people in the clouds. Even though I was eleven at the time, old enough to realize otherwise. My mother sat there in the tiny terrace shelter and watched me go back and forth in the rain, waving and waving at the clouds. It rained a lot that season, because of all the extra buckets Baji emptied, I thought, to let me know he was all right. It might sound silly, but even now I sometimes feel like waving when I see a rain cloud.”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “I do, once in a while, when nobody’s watching.” A wave crashed below us, and I resisted the temptation to wipe off a tear of spray on Karun’s cheek. “But one has to let go. One has to grow up and not stay attached to things. That’s what my mother said, especially once her cancer was diagnosed. She told me I could remember her for one year after she died, but then had to put her out of my mind. I think she saw the danger—the way I kept yearning, kept casting around even as an adult, to fill the void after Baji. Once she was gone, she knew the void would only double.”
    “Were you very close?”
    “It’s strange, but I remember little of her while Baji lived. I know she provided a loving presence, but his intensity overshadowed us all. She only really emerged for me when our perfect triangle collapsed, degenerated into a line. That’s when I began to cloister myself, when I saw her strength, her determination to pull me out of my brooding. Every once in a while, a flash of grief would dart across her face and surprise