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

by Elizabeth Flock

  Maya’s mother came to visit soon after the move and sat her daughter down for a talk. With her square cheeks and thinning hair and rolls of fat, she was what many dutiful Indian mothers grew into—and what Maya didn’t want to become.

  “You have to take things in stride, and don’t get so mad,” her mother told her. “Thoda compromise karo.”

  Maya had heard the phrase many times before. She knew that Indian women were conditioned to compromise. But she didn’t think there was such thing as “a little compromise.” Even small compromises chipped away at what a person held dear, until much had been taken from her.

  In moving to the new apartment, though, Maya had gotten what she wanted. Veer saw that his parents and Maya could not live under the same roof, even as he was haunted by something his father had said years before, just after his mother died of cancer. “We men must stay together,” Veer’s father had told his three sons. “But watch out, because there will be people who will try to break us up.” And yet, in the first few months, in the time of settling and nesting, their new home felt as auspicious as if they had followed vastu shastra in its design. The two-bedroom, two-bath apartment was roomy and airy in a city without space. It came with an AC unit that was a decade or two old but made them feel removed from the city’s blur of heat. They bought an LG TV and TV unit, tall Godrej dressers, and two low beds. They inherited deep leather couches and wooden tables from Veer’s family home. And they made plans to buy a washing machine, and someday hire a maid, which would decrease Maya’s daily workload. Water came on for just an hour in the morning and evening, but it was their water. Best of all, there were two tin-roof porches that overlooked the city and wavy hills beyond. The apartment signaled their arrival to Mumbai’s middle class, which had been growing steadily, along with India’s economy. Foreign investors were flocking in. India is on fire, India is the next superpower, India will overtake China—this was what all the papers were saying. Veer thought there was no better time to be a Marwari.

  Maya decorated the apartment to make it feel like theirs. Over the dining room table she hung a painting of Krishna and Radha, showing the lovers seated side by side on a swing. Lord Krishna, blue-skinned and handsome, was painted in a turban and golden harem pants, while the milkmaid Radha wore a long braid and flowers in her hair. The swing itself was garlanded, and the lovers were positioned facing each other, their knees touching and foreheads close. Krishna gazed in rapture at Radha as she looked out into the distance. To Maya, it portrayed companionship and comfort—what she thought it must be like when you were with someone for a long time. When he moved, you moved with him.

  On the living room shelf, Maya placed a framed photo from their honeymoon in Mussoorie. By the front door she hung a sign that read “Sukhtara” or “happy star”—a name for their new home.

  Over time, Maya also placed teddy bears she’d kept from ex-boyfriends in different corners of the house. Button-nosed and glassy-eyed, the bears were reminders of bad endings and of men less perfect than Veer. Veer didn’t buy Maya stuffed animals because he said he didn’t see any life in them. Once, before Maya had learned this, she bought him a teddy bear that was pink and fluffy. Now it was kept in the apartment’s second bedroom, which they hoped would someday be the bedroom of their first child.

  They didn’t have a timeline for when Maya might get pregnant, but they prepared for a baby anyway. Maya wanted a baby in part because of how often Veer was away. He worked harder than ever now at the family business, and they both agreed Maya would go to work only after they started a family. Veer wanted a baby because that’s what came next. He had suffered from epilepsy since childhood and had some attacks as an adult, which worried him, so he thought it would be better to have a baby sooner than to wait. He also thought that having a baby would make Maya feel less alone.

  In the second bedroom, they placed a tall dresser for clothes, a wooden cabinet that could be used for children’s books or toys, and a low single bed with two mattresses for comfort. But they did not buy toys or blankets in pink or blue, because it was bad luck to prepare for a baby before the child was born. Even in big cities with good hospitals, many children did not survive.

  A few months later, over Diwali, festival of lights, Maya found out she was pregnant after she missed her period. She was twenty-four now, which was considered old for a first pregnancy; the average age for first-time mothers in the country was nineteen. But women in cities were waiting longer to have children, and Maya was glad she did not live in a village. When she called Veer at work to tell him, she said she was worried because she’d recently taken antibiotics. “What if it harmed the baby?” she said.

  “Calm down, Maya,” he said. “We’ll go to the doctor.”

  The doctors told Maya the pregnancy would be a difficult one. Not because of the antibiotics, but because Maya had ovarian cysts and other gynecological problems. They ordered her on strict bed rest until the baby was born: no going out, no exercise, and no strain. Maya was scared, but Veer kept saying there was nothing to worry about, that she was “perfect” and nothing would go wrong.

  A month or so into pregnancy, Maya began to bleed. She and Veer had just gotten home from a wedding ceremony, and she called the doctor in a panic. “What color is the blood?” the doctor asked. “Bright red or dark red?” “Bright red,” said Maya. “Nothing to worry about,” the doctor told her. “Some people just bleed throughout their pregnancies.”

  The next day, she began to bleed again, and this time a local doctor gave her a painful injection, after which Veer brought her home to rest. “I’m going to the office,” he said, turning his attention back to a problem at work. “You call me if you need anything.”

  Half an hour later, Maya began to hemorrhage again. Maya’s doctor told her to go to a hospital downtown, at the very tip of the city, because all the beds in the nearby hospital were full. It was an hour-and-a-half drive south from their apartment in traffic. On the way Veer insisted they stop at his parents’ house to pick up his stepmother, so another woman would be with them. Maya remembers his stepmother dawdling as she bled in the car.

  In the days that followed, the doctors did sonogram after sonogram to try to identify the problem. On the third night, they told Maya they would do a CT scan in the morning and told her to go to sleep.

  But Maya couldn’t sleep, and when she got up to use the bathroom that night, she felt something drop out of her. It was small, fleshy, and reddish purple in color, a tangled mass that she caught in her hand. She tried not to think about what it was. She kept it, and later the doctor came and swiftly took the mass away.

  In the morning, she prepared for her CT scan. Veer came in and held her hand. “Am I going to do the CT now?” she asked, looking up at him.

  “No, we’re going for a D and C. Not a CT,” he said, his voice quiet.

  A D and C. Maya knew what that meant. A dilation and curettage was a procedure that would dilate her cervix and scrape her uterus of tissue.

  “You already miscarried, Mayu.”

  “I won’t do the D and C,” Maya said, and began to cry. “I’m not going to let go of whatever is left inside me.”

  “You have to. It’ll be toxic.”

  To do the procedure, the doctors had to hold Maya down while she screamed and cried. After it was over, Veer told her there was nothing to worry about. “You’re very young, we can try again,” he said.

  Veer was upset but told himself not to go overboard with his emotions. Emotions don’t help us much, he thought. He remembered back to something he had once read, that if a child was not competent to survive in the world, it wouldn’t join it. This was better than the child being born unable to cope. Veer held on to this thought as comfort.

  * * *

  Outside the gates of Maya and Veer’s apartment colony, past the security guard who often dozed, there was a long, potholed lane that led to the main road, filled with people on foot and bicycles, in rickshaws and cars. It was bordered by a dozen
shops and chawls.

  Maya frequented the shops for necessities. There was a ladies’ tailor, a chai-wallah, milkman, eggman, and shoe cobbler who sold glittery Kolhapuri sandals. The corner stores stocked sugary biscuits, cheap water bottles, and plastic bags of salty channa to cater to the nearby chawls.

  The chawls were several-story structures that charged little in rent, and the walls between neighbors were often thin and temporary. Inside, the kitchen sometimes served as the dining room or bedroom or all three, which led to ongoing mini-dramas. Out front, there were clothes on the line, children playing naked in the dirt, and men passed out from cheap liquor early in the day. The women who lived there came to Maya’s apartment to ask for money, because she was kind, and their husbands had drunk it all away.

  And there were dogs in the lane, dozens of them, which Veer had to navigate around carefully on his way home from work. Many had been struck by cars or rickshaws. They had been hit as puppies, before they knew better, or when they were older and didn’t have time to run. Some had three legs, or walked with a limp, or dragged a lame limb behind.

  Mostly, the dogs did not want for food. The people who lived in the chawls and the shopkeepers all threw their trash into the lane. When not foraging, the dogs spent their days playing atop parked cars, lazing in the street in the sun, or rolling in the dust to keep cool.

  From the time they moved in, Maya was afraid of the bigger dogs, which she feared would attack her. She had seen wild dog attacks in Hyderabad as a child. But she liked the puppies, which kept being born in the squalid lane every season. She sometimes saw one learning to stand on uneven legs or yelping as it figured out how to play.

  One day, Maya was walking to catch a rickshaw when she saw a dead puppy in the lane. It had been raining for weeks in Mumbai—cold, heavy rains—and its body was swollen and bloated from the wet. Maya wanted to bury the puppy, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. She called several city offices and many animal NGOs, but no one called her back. Day after day, she passed the small, distended body, which the shoppers in the lane seemed not to notice.

  Finally, she begged the manager of the housing society to get someone to bury it. He agreed and asked a trash collector to take it away. The next time Maya walked down the lane, the dead puppy was gone, and there was nothing in the space where it had been.

  * * *

  Since losing the baby, it had been mostly peaceful between Maya and Veer. At night, they tried to eat dinner together or watch a movie or talk on the tin-roof porch before bed. But as Ganesh Chaturthi, the Hindu festival for the god Ganesh, approached, they found themselves fighting. They planned to bring home Ganesh in the form of a statue, hire a local priest, and invite their extended family over. After Maya had organized the party for weeks, however, Veer’s father said he was taking over the arrangements. Veer told Maya it was easier to give in. She and his parents had developed an uneasy but polite rapport since they’d moved out, and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. Maya disagreed, and spent the night on the couch to make her point. In the morning, her eyes had dark circles under them as if she’d slept in her kajal.

  On the morning of the party, Veer checked his text messages, which were holiday-themed greetings (Wishing you happiness as big as Ganeshji’s appetite, and life as long as his trunk!), while Maya went from room to room in agitation. She didn’t have to worry about food, which her father-in-law had ordered, including Veer’s favorite chole bhature. Do you know how much indigestion that gives you? she thought. But she had won control of the house, and wanted the day to be flawless. She purchased small idols of Ganesh to give as party favors to the guests. She painted the linoleum floor in henna with curlicue designs. And she hung garlands of fresh marigolds over the door. The statue of Lord Ganesh, with his long trunk and healthy stomach, presided over the dining room from inside a golden throne.

  Maya loved the story of Ganesh’s origins: how his mother, the goddess Parvati, asked him to stand guard while she took a shower, but then Parvati’s consort Shiva, god of destruction, came for a visit and chopped off Ganesh’s head. To remedy his mistake, Shiva replaced Ganesh’s head with the head of an elephant. She and Veer also loved what Ganesh stood for: remover of obstacles, god of new ventures and beginnings. And they thought of Ganesh not so much as a god but as a famous, real-life man who later inspired many myths—Beautiful stories to keep man close to religion, Veer thought. Hinduism, after all, was not really a religion but a way of life, driven by the idea of dharma. Of one’s duty to the universe. Duty to yourself, your ancestors, and your children. Duty to your fellow human beings and animals. And duty to society, to living a life of morals and faith. Fulfilling your dharma was more important than the worship of any god. Still, sometimes Maya and Veer asked Ganesh for help, just in case.

  As the guests arrived, Maya greeted them warmly. She glided around the room in her bejeweled sari, gold jewelry, and thickest kajal, making sure everyone felt at home. She made small talk and laughed gaily at the festival jokes. She poured tea for the men, who gathered in the living room to talk business. A few of them snuck outside to smoke a cigarette, where they made lewd comments about Maya’s good looks. She shepherded the children into the second bedroom, where she gave them sweets to eat. Maya avoided only the female guests, who gathered in her bedroom to gossip about her, inspecting her belongings and looking for dust or dirt.

  Late in the afternoon came the pooja, and all the guests gathered to watch Maya and Veer recite a prayer before the local priest. The priest, who was dressed in a dhoti and kept a long sikha—the rest of his hair shorn close—had a pinkie finger that dangled as he spoke. People whispered that it made him more holy. As the priest led the prayer, Maya and Veer offered Ganesh laddoos, incense, and coconuts to appease him, and Maya looked at Veer with lowered eyes. Whenever she caught sight of the pinkie, she tried not to laugh.

  Later, after the last guests had left clutching their small Ganesh idols, Maya sat down in her bedroom and sighed, and Veer went out on the porch to smoke.

  Changing into a T-shirt and jeans, Maya began to take down the decorations. She used nail polish remover to remove the henna from the floor, though most of it wouldn’t come off. She threw the remaining chole bhature in the trash.

  But Ganesh would stay on his throne for another ten days. After that, Maya and Veer would join the many in the city who took their idols to the water to immerse them.

  Every year, thousands in Mumbai flocked to the Arabian Sea for the Ganesh immersions. The lines to see the largest Ganesh idols sometimes stretched kilometers long. Idols sat on floats, trucks, and thrones made with wheels. Some idols stood fifty feet tall, towering over the crowds. Others were as small as a child’s hand. In each iteration, Lord Ganesh looked regal and strong, with the ample stomach of a well-fed man and the crowned head of a mighty elephant. In five of his six hands he held a trident, ax, conch shell, laddoo, and lotus blossom; his sixth hand was upraised in beneficence. Garlands hung around his neck, and his trunk was covered in jewels. As people walked the Ganesh, or Ganpati, idols to the water, they sang loudly, voices straining, “Ganpati bappa morya!” along to the steady beat of drums. When they reached the sea, men waded, shirtless, into the murky, waste-filled water, carrying the life-size statues above their heads. Women trailed behind them, letting their saris get wet, and the children ran into the water splashing. As Ganesh crashed into the ocean, the crowd let out a guttural yell.

  The Arabian Sea was full of Ganesh idols from years past. For days after the festival, the statues would bob above the surface, until at last they sank into the muck. Over weeks, months, even years, the idols disintegrated slowly in the water.

  Before Maya and Veer immersed him, they both privately asked Ganesh, remover of obstacles, for the same thing. They asked him for another child.

  * * *

  In the weeks after Ganesh Chaturthi, Veer got up early, as always, to read the papers, and Maya to make him tea. ​If she was slow to get up, he would call out
to her in a singsong voice, both inhabiting and lampooning the role of a traditional Indian husband, until he heard the crackle of the gas stove turning on. Veer always read the Times of India first, which contained exciting headlines about local rapes (the numbers increasing yearly, though perhaps more women were reporting), the latest controversy with Pakistan (over land, over water, and over cricket), and India’s exponential growth (inching up on China, soon to surpass it, or so the papers said). He ended on page 3, which covered Bollywood celebrities and glitterati, who lived a world apart from middle-class families like theirs and from the poor. Unlike them, Bollywood celebrities could do what they wanted: actresses could wear skimpy skirts and have affairs, and a famous actor got away with a drunk driving hit-and-run. Veer liked to stay informed about both politics and entertainment, which he thought helped a man get ahead.

  After the holiday, he also reread Osho, the spiritual teacher and mystic whose controversial writings he had always appreciated. Though deceased, Osho had followers all over the world, people who liked that he challenged politicians and organized religion, that he embraced free sex and living and thinking, and that his beliefs had evolved over time. Veer loved Osho’s writings on how to live.

  Osho argued that the route to happiness was to worry about oneself, which aligned with Veer’s sense of the world. Osho also said people felt good or bad based on their unconscious. He said no one was responsible for anger or joy but you. And he said that if you did not realize this, you would live your life like a slave.

  Veer also liked that Osho had been a wealthy man. Osho collected a hundred Rolls-Royces in his lifetime and never apologized for owning them. He was rumored to never wear the same clothes twice. Every man deserves to find wealth, Veer thought. And every man deserves to be at peace.