The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai

by Elizabeth Flock

  Maya puts down her phone and plugs it in to charge. She turns off the lights in the kitchen and living room, where no breeze comes in, not now, when a thick heat sits over the city. And not this far from the sea, where the reversal in winds will one day bring the rain. The monsoon is still days away. And then she walks into her bedroom, where, careful not to wake the sleepers, she climbs into the empty space in bed.

  Shahzad and Sabeena

  It is the start of Ramadan, and Shahzad strides toward the mosque in the lightly falling rain. Sudden showers like these keep surprising the city, but the full force of the monsoon has not yet struck. Shahzad’s left leg lags behind the other, and he tries to pull it along more quickly. At this downtown mosque, at the southernmost tip of Mumbai, even the men who work in corporate offices answer the call to prayer on time.

  At the entrance, Shahzad removes his chappals and ducks inside to join the rows of men with heads bowed. They touch their foreheads to the ground, murmuring in prayer. For several minutes, Shahzad dutifully mouths his prayers along with them, touching his forehead, nose, hands, knees, and feet to the ground, playing at being a good Muslim. But then his thoughts begin to wander.

  Shahzad thinks of a beautiful woman he once saw on the street, and then another. He thinks about all the beautiful women he can remember: a buxom French woman with whom he sometimes does business, a half-Goan, half-Nigerian woman with siren red lips he used to know, and a platinum-haired woman he has only seen in photos online. He does not think of his wife, Sabeena.

  He knows what the Prophet said: “Whenever any one of you comes across some attractive woman, and his heart is inclined toward her, he should go to his wife and have sexual intercourse with her, so that he might keep himself away from evil thoughts.” The Prophet does not say what a man should do if he cannot have proper sex with his wife anymore.

  For Ramadan, Shahzad has stopped taking the horse pills, the ones the doctor says will make him more like a man. Instead, the pills only make him feel hot inside. Or maybe that is just the swelter of the city. Even now, kneeling on the mosque’s cool tiles, made wet by rain, the pills seem to have some power over him. He cannot stop thinking of other women.

  The other day, on a very hot morning, Shahzad hugged the French woman and became excited as she hugged him back. Afterward, he went to confess to a local priest, who told him, “Unless you feel like something is coming out . . . the fast is there. It’s okay.” But Shahzad still feels guilty. He looks around and sees the other men praying with total calm. He forces himself to try harder.

  Head to the ground, Shahzad asks God, as he always does, for a son. He thinks of how the conservative mullahs sometimes say that those who “have more wealth and more children . . . will not be punished.” They don’t say what a man should do if he becomes old—old enough to henna his hair to cover the gray—and still a child has not come.

  The afternoon wanes, and Shahzad knows he needs to get home. Sabeena will start cooking soon for the breaking of the fast at sundown. For a moment, Shahzad considers stopping at the downtown market to bring home bhajias: spicy, crispy fritters wrapped in newspaper; their heat and oil taste so good in the cold rain. It has stopped drizzling, but the sky has gone dark as if it is about to pour. But he worries Sabeena will scold him for squandering money, so he doesn’t buy anything at all.

  As Shahzad enters his apartment, he can smell the sickness in it. His mother, a gaunt woman with thin lips and carrot-orange hennaed hair, lies in a bed of crumpled sheets in the main room. Cotton balls are stuffed in her ears. Shahzad looks around for his bucktoothed, bright-eyed niece and nephew, who usually greet him at the door. But the house of twelve is quiet.

  A moment later, Sabeena arrives, dressed in the black burqa she wears outside when she runs errands. Her arms are laden with groceries. “Hi, maji,” she says, greeting Shahzad’s mother in her deep, raspy voice, her round cheeks flushed from the walk. She gives a perfunctory nod to Shahzad. After removing her burqa, she moves quickly around the kitchen in her thick salwar kameez, chopping vegetables, boiling water, and tossing red chiles, cumin, and coriander into pots. As her scarf falls from her hair, Shahzad stares at her. It has been so long since they made love.

  Soon, a spicy-sweet smell fills the apartment. Where are the children? Shahzad wonders again. As if hearing him, Shahzad’s nephew, eyes ablaze, comes charging out of his bedroom. “AHHHHHHHRRRRRR,” he shouts, waving his arms in the air.

  Shahzad’s mother cries out and clutches her sheets, and Shahzad’s nephew, sensing easy prey, leaps onto her bed. He bounces on it once and rings a bell on the wall above her. “Masti matkaro,” she yells, “Stop it.” Her sallow face twists into a scowl. He leaps off the bed onto the floor and throws his arms up theatrically. Shahzad laughs, forcing himself not to clap. His niece, who has run into the living room to watch her brother’s antics, laughs along with him, her tight braids shaking.

  Sabeena watches the scene from the airless kitchen, where the pots have begun to boil. The heat is so oppressive the monsoon must come soon. Marriage is like a laddoo, or heavy sweet, she thinks. If you eat it, you’ll cry, and if you don’t you’ll cry too. This was true whether or not you had children.

  On the porn websites Shahzad sometimes visits surreptitiously, the videos of the heavier Indian women have that tag: laddoo. He hides these videos from Sabeena, as many husbands in the country do. And he does not tell the priest about them.

  As Sabeena watches him from the kitchen, Shahzad thinks again of the pills he is taking. He considers doubling the dose. The clock turns 7:24 p.m.—time to break the fast and pray—and Shahzad looks up at his wife, but then, embarrassed, looks away.

  Ashok and Parvati

  The morning the sky opens, Parvati steams flimsy idlis for breakfast and curses as they stick in the pan. She wishes she were a better cook. A Post-it note with one of her mother’s recipes scrawled on it detaches from the wall. It is sticky and close in their apartment in north-central Mumbai, where many of the buildings are tall—so tall they seem to touch the clouds, almost—but she and Ashok don’t live in one of those. It always gets hot before the rain.

  As she finishes the idlis, peeling them out of the pan one by one, the downpour comes all at once. It gives off a thunderous sound. From the kitchen window, she cannot see the cloud-high buildings through the sheets of water. For many days, the forecasters had promised rain, and the Hindu temples prayed for it, chanting mantras. But each day, it had not come.

  Parvati does not like the monsoon. To her it means clogged roads, ruined shoes, and that her thick hair goes frizzy and wild. In Trivandrum, down south where she is from, there are two smaller seasons of rain. In Mumbai there is just one big fury. In both cities the sea grows rough when the monsoon arrives.

  In the living room, Ashok reads the newspaper on the couch. As Parvati hands him breakfast, he says, “Hey, Chiboo,” and looks up at her over his nerdish glasses, which have slid to the tip of his nose. “Let’s spend our Saturday riding the new metro from one side to the end and back.”

  He is actually serious about this, she thinks, and shakes her head before disappearing back into the kitchen.

  That Saturday, they drive to Khandala instead, two hours southeast of the city. Khandala is in the Western Ghats mountain range, and Parvati hears it will be gorgeous in the rains. With a little thrill, she realizes how much her father will disapprove of this. He will say something like: You’re new to the place, don’t take any risks, why did you drive so far? But he cannot tell her how to behave anymore.

  There was a time when Parvati loved the monsoon, when she was little, and she and her sister would play outside in muddy pools after school. They would stay out until their father got home from work or temple, and he would scold them to go inside. She loved it when she was at university too, and she and another student, Joseph, would kiss in the lab as the rains lashed the building outside. After the downpour ended, they always walked their bicycles across a campus that felt cool a
nd clean. Joseph’s kisses felt illicit, electric.

  “It’s responding to my touch, like it wants me to drive,” Ashok says, as they get on the highway to Khandala. Parvati rolls her eyes. But she already feels better leaving Mumbai’s city limits. Ashok rolls down the window and sighs. “The air is just rarefied,” he says.

  The road to Khandala winds through the mountains, which are lush and unblemished and fantastically green. It is full of switchbacks and vista points. “Look,” says Parvati, pointing. A deep fog is rolling in.

  In Khandala, they get out at the base of the Bhaja Caves, ancient rock-cut shelters built by early Buddhists. They walk up the path and pass a waterfall, which cascades down a steep, rocky mountain. Brash schoolchildren scale the rocks to the falls and scream as they dunk in their heads. When Ashok and Parvati reach the top, they take cover under a mounded stupa, built long ago for meditation. Protected as they are from the rain, Parvati thinks, just for a moment, that the monsoon feels romantic. She rests an elbow on Ashok’s shoulder and does not think of Joseph at all.

  On the way back to the car, they get their photo taken, smiling at the base of the path. In Parvati’s smile there is just a trace of the six months of difficulty that came before. Months in which Ashok felt afraid of his new wife, who would rant and cry in the night and always blame it on her “past.” Months in which she kept a journal for all her dark and wild thoughts, a journal she did not let anyone see. Now, he thinks she has stopped writing in it.

  That night, on the drive home, Mumbai’s traffic and chaos feel unnerving after the quiet of Khandala. As Parvati guides their car over the wet city streets, the road unexpectedly splinters into five. She slows down and then accelerates through the light, and a police officer flags down their car.

  “License, insurance,” the officer barks at Ashok, though Parvati is the one driving. Parvati rifles through a pile of papers and hands them through her window. The officer, who is intimidating in his pressed khaki uniform, shakes his head as he walks around to take them. Ashok is not playing his part.

  “Baahar aao.” The officer’s tone is a warning now, and Ashok gets out of the car. After a short conversation, Ashok hands over the bribe, and the officer passes back the license in one swift, practiced movement.

  “Why did you give that?” Parvati demands once Ashok gets back into the passenger seat. “You could have told them you are a journalist.”

  “That doesn’t work,” he says, and feeling her glare, adds, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  Parvati says nothing to this. She grips the steering wheel. After a long moment of silence, Ashok bangs his fist on the dashboard. Their trip suddenly feels spoiled. “Fuck,” he says, and the statue of Ganesh on their dashboard jumps, the pearls around the Hindu god’s neck jangling. “Assholes. Fuck fuck fuck.”

  “You shouldn’t let them affect you like that,” says Parvati, primly, not looking at him. As she restarts the car, it begins to rain again. “You shouldn’t let them make you say those words and ruin yourself.”

  Joseph, a good Catholic boy, would never have sullied himself that way.

  Devotion

  Maya and Veer, 1999 to 2009

  “It was springtime: her limbs delicate as primrose,

  Radha roamed the forest, searching high and low for Krishna;

  More and more distraught was she in love’s feverish delirium . . .”

  —Jayadeva, The Gita Govinda

  Maya first saw him at a wedding. Her friend was marrying his brother in the southern city of Hyderabad, on the banks of the Musi River, which separated the old city from the new. It was the year India and Pakistan fought in Kargil up north. They had been fighting since Partition, but still it was a conflict to be remembered. It was January, and cool, the day before Republic Day, which celebrated India’s adoption of its constitution, when the country became truly free. It was held in a hotel alongside a garden. But Maya would not remember most of that. All she would remember of the wedding was that Veer was there.

  And that they were both seated on the stage during the saat phere, the seven circles of the sacred fire to the chant of mantras, and the sweet smell of incense. Around and around the happy couple went, holding hands, walking three times with the bride in front, and the last four with the groom leading. Seven times, because a circle’s 360 degrees cannot be divided by seven, and so the marriage was said to be indivisible. Maya, who was sixteen or seventeen and thin and gangly then, could not stop staring at Veer as the priest chanted steadily in Sanskrit, and the bride and groom repeated their vows: I will be Sama, you will be Rig . . . Let me be the Heaven, you be the Earth.

  Veer, who was older, had spoken a few words to Maya before the wedding, to ask her the location of a beauty parlor. He said he needed it for his cousin, but she hoped it had been an excuse to approach her.

  After the ceremony, as Maya stood in a group of friends across from Veer, she noted that he was handsome, though not in a traditional way. His hair was slicked over to one side, and he had big, full lips set in a smooth, wide face. But it was his eyes—which were large and expressive, and one of which was lazy—that she liked most. He looked intense, poetic, lost in space. He didn’t look like any man she knew. He also seemed to know his way around people, which she found impressive.

  Something about him made Maya think of the Hindu god Krishna, who was known to be compassionate and charming. Krishna also had a way with women. In his lifetime, it was said he had taken sixteen thousand wives. As Veer spoke, female wedding guests grouped around him in anxious clusters. Several times he made the entire wedding party laugh. Maya desperately wanted to go over and speak with him.

  But she wasn’t adept at conversation. It was a quality that as a teenager she hadn’t developed. And though people said she was pretty, with big, wistful eyes and silky hair that fell far down her back, she was certain that she was ugly. People also told her she had an intense stare and boyish figure. It didn’t help that she was smarter than almost every boy in school, which made her feel self-conscious around them. She didn’t dare speak more than a few words to Veer after the ceremony.

  As the wedding ended and the guests departed, several of the boys asked the girls for their e-mails. Maya gave everyone a wrong e-mail except Veer. She handed it to him on a tiny scrap of paper, just as he was preparing to board a train. “Don’t share this with anyone,” she said, letting her voice drop low.

  “Thanks,” said Veer, who gave her an easy smile.

  Maya decided then, though she knew it was foolish, that Veer would be the man she’d someday marry.

  After several months, Maya received a greeting card in the mail, with a picture of a bear sitting at a writing desk on the front, and the caption: “Thank you just doesn’t seem like enough.” Tucked inside was a letter.

  “It was a very nice time with you. Thank you so much for tolerating us, especially me. Hope I didn’t bother you too much,” Veer wrote. “I look forward to my next meeting with ‘YOU.’”

  The capital letters made Maya’s heart leap. Below it, he had written, “The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.” And a signoff: “With lots of luv and wishes, Veer (Kancha).”

  Luv.

  Kancha. A nickname.

  Maya tried not to get excited. She lived in Hyderabad and he lived in Mumbai, which was a full day’s train ride or expensive flight away. She had also heard he was seeing someone there. But she kept up the correspondence, hoping that if they built a friendship, someday it might grow into something more.

  Three years later, the casual letters between them finally turned into a second meeting and a kiss in Mumbai, which was a sprawling, thrilling place to Maya, nothing at all like home. Hyderabad, an old and crumbling city, was filled with monuments to lost dynasties, while in Mumbai, where Maya was visiting family, every day felt fevered and new. She and Veer met in the city’s crowded suburbs for coffee, and then went out to the movies, and finally ended up at a neighbor’s h
ome. There, Veer kissed Maya as she stood at a window, like a hero would in a Hindi film. Veer leaned in first, which Maya would always remember.

  Afterward, as they took a walk, Veer told her: “I don’t want to get into a relationship.”

  “Okay,” said Maya, who was not dissuaded, “but I think you’re the one for me.”

  After Maya flew back home to Hyderabad, she and Veer kept talking, but several seasons passed and they made no plans to meet again. When Veer’s birthday approached, Maya decided it was time to do something bold. She had filled out in the intervening years and had begun to line her eyes with kajal. At twenty, she now attracted attention from men all the time. She could easily hold her own at a party. And so it was without trepidation that she sent Veer a plane ticket to come visit her in Hyderabad for his birthday. Though the flight was only an hour from Mumbai, it cost 17,000 rupees, which was a few hundred US dollars then. Maya, who was still a student, sold a stack of her treasured books and gold bracelets to cover the cost.

  After she booked the plane ticket, she also found herself reserving a hotel room. While she had experimented a little with boys in college, she had never had sex. Almost all the girls she knew were virgins, or said they were; the kanyadaan, or giving away of the virgin bride, remained among the most important Hindu wedding rituals. And yet she continued to feel certain that Veer would someday become her husband, and for that reason it would be all right, though she worried that her parents might discover her sneaking out. She knew they’d be shocked if they did. Other girls her age were not so bold.

  On Veer’s birthday night, they made love in the hotel room as Maya had hoped. But while it was clear she charmed him, she saw that he did not love her. When she said that she wanted to marry him, Veer was kind but firm as he said no. “There is no future in whatever you’re saying,” he told her. “I’m too much in my past.”