The City of Devi: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

mixed in stimulated us to eat foods we normally abhorred. Marmite could make us overlook the blandness of cauliflower, forgive the mealiness in chickpeas. My mother always dirtied two separate spoons while adding it to a dish, so that Uma and I didn’t fight afterwards over who got to lick the tar-like residue clean. I remember the day after my ninth birthday, when we found the Marmite lying open on the dining table. We took turns spooning it into our mouths, in such voluptuous quantities that we were able to actually bite into each gob. Our mother found us lolling light-headed on the ground that evening, our faces all black and sticky and smeared, the jar between us licked clean. After that, she used elaborate hiding places to store her jars (including a half-full one she forgot about in the blanket chest, which Uma only found, and polished off, several years later). She continued to hide the Marmite in the vegetable bin out of force of habit, even after we grew up.
    The first bite that day on the beach was perfection—the dark yeastiness of the Marmite rose into my nostrils and swirled into my mouth. Uma appeared entranced as well, taking small nibbles of her sandwich and rolling them around slowly with her tongue. Then I looked at Karun’s face and saw his dismayed expression, noticed the way he tried to gulp down his bites without chewing. In the effort to impress him, my mother had added too much.
    “Everyone loves these,” my mother said, taking a bite of her own sandwich and nodding in agreement with herself. “It’s the secret ingredient I add. Though I can’t reveal it, since then it would no longer be secret.” She tittered girlishly. Karun smiled at her, then bravely swallowed.
    Afterwards, we played rummy. In an effort to make Karun win, my mother kept discarding cards she thought he might need. “Such good technique and yet such unfortunate hands,” she clucked, as he ignored the latest offering she laid in front of him, the ten of spades. She frowned as Uma picked up a joker from the deck and declared once again. “My daughters seem to have sucked the air dry of luck today,” she remarked, hoping to end our winning streak by throwing us the evil eye. But the cards (and Uma and I) refused to cooperate. “I’m getting bored of this,” my mother finally announced, as Uma counted up the points in Karun’s tenth losing hand. “Why don’t we try something else?”
    So we switched to sweep, which wasn’t much better. We played flush and gambler, and Anoop even taught us poker at my mother’s insistence. No matter what we tried, Karun continued to lose.
    “You’re not very good, are you?” Uma remarked.
    “There’s more important things in life than cards,” my mother snapped.
    “Perhaps he’ll be lucky in love,” Uma leaned towards me and whispered.
    Worried about Karun’s losses, my mother tried to distract him by asking about his work. “Anoop says you manufacture quartz,” she ventured.
    “Quarks,” Anoop corrected. “And Karun doesn’t go around manufacturing them, he studies them.”
    “It’s all so fascinating,” she said. “That man in the wheelchair—something Hawkings—not sure if he’s still alive—he’d come to India once—did you ever meet him?” Karun shook his head.
    “Poor bechara, though Mrs. Dugal says not to go by his upside-down face—that he’d make mincemeat of Einstein in a match of brains—is that true?”
    Uma rescued Karun from my mother’s question. “What exactly are quarks?” she asked.
    So Karun started talking about the building blocks of matter, the fact that even protons and neutrons could be split, the six “flavors” of quarks with names like “up” and “charm” and “strange.” His face took on an expression of wonder, like that of a child transported to a zoo, a circus, an amusement park. My mother’s features began to relax as well, the drowsiness from her sandwiches and parathas rose in her eyes. She struggled briefly