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

by Elizabeth Flock

  Veer saw himself as a bit of a philosopher, though nowhere near Osho’s level of understanding. He liked to wax poetic while having a cigarette on their tin-roof porch, where Maya often joined him. It was a nightly tradition he called “dam,” which was Urdu for “life breath” or “moment.” He smoked fake Marlboros imported from Pakistan, which were said to be mixed with cow dung. He joked that it made the cigarettes more holy.

  On the porch, smoking, the city at his feet, Veer came up with new names for Mumbai. To him, the City of Dreams moniker wasn’t quite right. Mumbai was more like a slap or a punch in the gut. It overwhelmed people, shoved them down—or at least knocked them off their balance. Dreams were squashed in the city, rebuilt, and squashed again. Mumbai was the Maximum City, like one author had written, but Veer also found the name too positive. “The city of everything,” he said. Yes, that was better, and Maya agreed. A great maw of a place that could swallow you up but that could also make you into a star. A city in the aggregate: of both good and bad and everything in between. Satisfied, he tossed his cigarette butt off the porch and went inside, the ash scattering in the night breeze.

  Veer also liked to find metaphors to describe their relationship. When he and Maya reminisced about their early days, when they had constantly messaged between Hyderabad and Mumbai, running up phone bills they couldn’t afford, he said: “That was when things were biryani.”

  Like biryani rice. Wild, with a lot of spices. A dish you only have once in a while. Maya nodded, and joked back, “And now, now it is all white rice.”

  “It’s still biryani,” he countered. “But only sometimes.”

  “And who wants to eat biryani every day? No one,” she said.

  As Veer’s family business grew, and he began to travel more, he tried out his philosophizing in other countries. He bragged to Maya that in Africa he kept a client up talking until six in the morning, a client who told Veer he was like a “great prophet.”

  In China, Veer said, he persuaded a woman selling handbags on the black market to sell him an imitation Louis Vuitton for one-hundredth of her quoted price. He told Maya he convinced her using a philosophical explanation of the market.

  Maya found these stories amusing, as well as the way her husband carried himself in their apartment building. Instead of saying “namaste,” he greeted neighbors in the lobby with “Allah Hafiz,” which made people think that he was Muslim.

  “What are you even saying?” Maya, laughing, would ask Veer after the elevator doors closed, leaving a perplexed neighbor behind. Veer would only grin at this.

  Sometimes, while Veer was at work, Maya took little trips into the city by train, so that she wouldn’t get bored at home. When she did, she tried to arrive early to the station so that she could board the women’s compartment, where men could not go. If she arrived late, she’d have to get on the general train car, which wasn’t considered safe for women. It was said that a disabled girl had recently been gang-raped on a Mumbai train, while the other men in the car sat doing nothing.

  That kind of assault might be rare in the city, but Maya knew harassment was not. Some men grabbed between a woman’s legs on a crowded train car so that it wasn’t clear to whom the hands belonged. Others groped or grazed a woman’s chest and then disappeared into the crowd. And still other men—many of them—liked to make a “chh chh” sound of appraisal at a woman’s backside and, when the woman turned around, greet her with a leering face.

  All of it was lumped together as “Eve teasing,” a term many women in the city didn’t like. Its very name suggested that women were temptresses and that the harassment was the woman’s fault. The right-wing politicians said women wouldn’t have a problem if they didn’t go out on their own. But Maya knew she’d go mad if she didn’t.

  * * *

  For years, Veer had worked in the family aluminum foil business with his father and brothers. But now he also became business partners with his cousin, a hard-drinking, hardworking mountain of a man with a proclivity for wild business schemes. He was the kind of new Mumbai man who believed karma was dead and that you made your own destiny.

  Together, they decided to open a pharmaceutical business in Africa, which had lost trust in Chinese drugs because they were so often fake. Africa wanted better-regulated pills now. They thought they could easily sell antimalarials, blood tonics, and anti-acidity drugs to African buyers, which the family business could help package.

  His cousin’s other business was sex toys, which Veer was not actively involved in, though it operated out of the same office. Within India, his cousin sold toys with the label massager to avoid attracting government notice. The sale of sex toys was suspect, if not illegal; the Indian Penal Code barred the sale of any object that was “lascivious” or that “appeals to the prurient interest.” Dildos, lotions, and gels were sold in open-air markets and online anyway. The most popular product Veer’s cousin sold was a gel that delayed ejaculation. This was not surprising to them, because it was found that half of all men in the country struggled with premature ejaculation due to anxiety or inexperience. Veer’s cousin saw the demand and produced more.

  Since the launch of the new businesses, Veer was home less and less. He worked six days a week, and then he began working seven. When Maya called him now, she often got no answer. He spent long hours at his family office, a cramped two-room space that he, his father, and two brothers rented inside a residential building not far from home. The office was nothing extravagant: two dusty rooms, a few desktop computers, and documents stacked to the ceiling. When the business had crashed years ago, they’d learned the importance of being frugal. In the corner of the office was the only decoration: a sepia-toned photo of Veer’s mother, taken when she was very young.

  Veer was also often out of the city, on visits to his aluminum foil factories, which were scattered across rural Maharashtra. He most regularly visited a factory several hours north of Mumbai that smelled like daaru, or bad moonshine, combined with gum and wet tar. It had big boilers that stank as they burned. The malarial mosquitoes that swarmed outside were as big as a child’s hand. But the tribal men who worked there were used to them and did not mind.

  Outside the factory, warthogs ran through the grass. Flamboyant pink and blue butterflies gathered and fluorescent bugs glittered in the night. Veer didn’t notice any of this. When he was at the factory, he worked nonstop. Sometimes, he stayed for ten days straight, sleeping on the dirt-stained floor. During his long absences, Maya grew anxious and upset.

  And over time, as the pharmaceutical business grew, Veer also spent more time at his cousin’s office, which seemed to smell of new money with its recessed lighting and blasting AC. Their business in Africa was already booming thanks to the antimalarials, which were intended to cure, not prevent (three doses of shots plus a pill). Antimalarials were desperately needed in African countries where nearly the entire population was at risk. Soon, Veer and his cousin began traveling to the continent for weeks at a time. On these trips they met local businessmen in hotel bars and drank too much as they closed deal after deal. The trips invigorated Veer and made him want to work harder.

  If Veer ever felt lazy, he thought of his grandfather. For the last seven months of his grandfather’s life, when he had been very sick, Veer was his primary caretaker. In long afternoons at the hospital, his grandfather had sung Hindi ballads to Veer, which he never did with anyone else. Veer had sung him back the old songs he knew.

  In the last weeks of his life, Veer’s grandfather also stressed to Veer the importance of hard work. Historically, the business of their family’s subcaste was moneylending to kings, but his grandfather had diversified into pharmaceuticals and become rich. It allowed him to pay for the weddings of all five sons, plus nearly a dozen other people. Veer felt ashamed that few remembered his generosity now. This much is true, if you do something good, no one will remember, he thought.

  After his grandfather died, Veer vowed to honor him by making just as much money a
nd giving as much away. To do this, he knew he would have to work night and day.

  But Veer often promised Maya he’d be home in time for dinner. For hours, she’d cook his favorite dishes and then sit alone at the kitchen table, watching them grow cold. She’d call him a dozen times to ask where he was and, caught up in something at work, Veer wouldn’t answer the phone. When, exhausted and stressed, he finally arrived, he would eat the cold meal and pass out within minutes, not even asking about her day.

  And though Veer watched his cousin sell sex toys with beguiling names, he also told Maya he was no longer much interested in sex. Maya would joke, a little bitterly, that it was illegal in India not to have sex with your spouse; the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 mentioned the “conjugal rights” of a spouse several times. She wondered what happened to the man with whom she had steamy phone sex from Hyderabad to Mumbai.

  In the mornings, Maya began to make Veer’s tea and put out his work clothes in silence. As she handed him his tiffin for lunch, he would nod at her, talking into multiple cell phones at once, like many businessmen in the city did. He talked in loud, exaggerated tones of Hinglish. And then, tiffin in hand, he’d walk out the door.

  At home alone all day, Maya read books she’d bought by authors she liked, including V. S. Naipaul and Chimamanda Adichie. On her laptop, she listened to ghazals, Indian classical music and old Hindi film songs. She read the newspaper and cleaned the house. After she exhausted all these activities, she cooked dinner and tried to show her love for Veer in other ways, some of them traditional. On Karwa Chauth, the holiday on the fourth day after the full moon, when a wife was supposed to fast for her husband to live a long life, Maya fasted from sunrise to moonrise. She wasn’t very religious or superstitious, but she liked the idea of practicing sacrifice. During her period, she followed the old rules that said she was unclean, because she knew the women in Veer’s family followed them. She also slept in a different bed, did not cook or enter the kitchen, and did not touch Veer at all.

  But Maya’s attempts were lost on him. He barely noticed her efforts, or commented on them. There wasn’t time to devote to both a wife and work. He chose work over Maya every time.

  It was after nearly three years of marriage that Maya remembered what her father had warned her about marrying another Marwari. Marwaris were money-driven. Marwaris cared about nothing but their work. A joke: What happens if you give a Marwari a corner in soccer? Oh, he’ll set up a shop in it. Especially a Marwari in Mumbai, where shops were sometimes constructed wholesale overnight. She and her father had slowly repaired their relationship, and they talked more often now, but she didn’t want to admit that he’d been right. She didn’t want to tell him that Veer was as absent a husband as he’d predicted or that she had begun to question her marriage.

  It was true that Veer cared mostly about money and work, but he always said it was for a larger purpose. He insisted that making money was their best chance for a life of azadi, or freedom. Making money meant that he could relax one day not far off. He imagined retiring at fifty-five and moving to a seaside town, where he would live in a small shack. He would sell beer, whiskey, and coconut water on the first floor to keep busy and live on the floor above. And he’d take royalties from his pharmaceutical sales in Africa to supplement retirement.

  Veer’s businesses, though booming, had not yet turned much of a profit. He assured Maya that soon his businesses would become more lucrative, and then he’d spend more time at home. Maya did not believe him.

  One night that winter, to test him, she walked out of their house, as she had once left his parents’ home, and Veer had to drive around the city to find her. When he picked her up in the central suburb of Bandra, he pretended as if nothing had happened.

  “Thoda compromise karo,” Maya’s mother had told her just after their move. Make a little compromise. Be patient. This was necessary in a marriage, she said. Maya did not believe her either.

  Soon after Maya walked out, a honeybee hive formed on their tin-roof porch. Veer told Maya it was a sign of good luck. He said bees foretold one of two events: a visitor or a big windfall of money. He insisted not a single bee be harmed.

  Left unchecked, the bees formed a giant, amorphous nest, from which a dull hum could be heard through the window. Dozens of bees circled the nest. Some died and fell in clumps on the porch. Others clung tight to the hive. While Veer waited for a big windfall of money, Maya desperately hoped for a visitor. She thought a visitor—in the form of a baby—might help solve the problems between them. A baby would mean she was no longer alone.

  Produce a Child, and God Smiles

  Shahzad and Sabeena, 1983 to 1998

  “The Prophet was asked: ‘Which type of woman is the best?’

  He replied: ‘When you look at her, you feel happiness.’”

  —Sunan an-Nasa’i, a collection of reports about the Prophet Muhammad

  Shahzad and Sabeena met in a drafty room on a bitter-cold day in December. It was a good year for India, the year the country won the Cricket World Cup. It was the year the so-called bandit queen, a Robin Hood–like figure, surrendered on her terms from a life of crime, laying down her rifle before a portrait of the goddess Durga. It was just after the Golden Age of Indian cinema had ended, and Bollywood had become fixated on new stories, big money, and assured commercial success. Coolie, starring the dark and brooding Amitabh Bachchan, was the year’s runaway hit. When Bachchan punctured his intestines filming a fight scene, the entire country prayed for his recovery. The high drama and romance of the silver screen regularly spilled into daily life.

  By the time Shahzad and Sabeena met, Bachchan had recovered. Sabeena wore a deep purple dress, the color of a blooming iris flower, and a cloud-colored dupatta wrapped around her face. When Shahzad looked at her, she did not look back; shyness was expected from a prospective bride. Several women pulled down Sabeena’s scarf, so that he could see her better. He could tell how beautiful she was—like a movie star—just as his family had told him. Both families stood, watching and waiting for his answer. Still, he worried and wondered what to do. He did not feel ready to get married, though everything in his life, and in Sabeena’s, had led up to this moment.

  Shahzad had been born the year Mughal-e-Azam came out, a film so popular it ran in theaters for seventy-five weeks—what everyone called a “diamond jubilee”—and then it ran for seventy-five weeks more. His father named him after the main character, who was a shahzad, or prince, and whom Shahzad would not grow up to resemble. Instead, he was born a frail baby and grew into a scrawny boy with a nervous demeanor, bright eyes, big teeth, and a prominent nose; the wrong features stood out from his face.

  In the film, the prince falls in love with a magnetic court dancer against the wishes of his father, an all-powerful Muslim Mughal king. Their forbidden love affair sets off an epic battle between father and son. As Shahzad got older, people would joke: “Is your life story the same as the movie?” Shahzad always answered them seriously. “Yes, my father and I are divided,” he’d say. “But not like this.”

  They were not divided over a woman, and they were not royalty. They certainly were not Mughals, the Muslim emperors who’d once ruled India, before the British routed them and the Hindu kings. Today, Muslims like them were in the minority, just 12 percent or so of the country, and they held little power. Shahzad and his father’s war was not an epic one, complete with thousands of troops, horses, and camels. Still, Shahzad felt that his father had waged some kind of battle against him since birth, one he did not quite understand.

  During childhood, Shahzad often fell sick. When his mother asked his father for money for a doctor, his father would shout, eyes flaring, until she did not ask him anymore. Instead, Shahzad’s mother found resourceful ways to care for her young son. When Shahzad was four and came down with a heavy fever, his mother took him, crying, to the dargah across the street, placed him on the cool white marble, and demanded of the saint buried there: “You are going to cure him. Y
ou pray to Allah that he’s cured very soon.” Before long, Shahzad stopped crying and his fever subsided.

  But Shahzad did not remember much of that. The first time he remembered realizing that his father did not care for him was when he contracted mumps at age sixteen. First his throat began to hurt. Then, his Adam’s apple, bulging, seemed to grow larger and larger. Next his testes, still an unknown body part, also swelled. The viral infection grew more serious, and it had everyone concerned except Shahzad’s father.

  It was Shahzad’s uncle who ultimately took Shahzad to the doctor. People whispered that Shahzad must have caught mumps somewhere, but the real reason he contracted the infection was because he wasn’t being looked after properly. Even the neighbors knew Shahzad’s father, with his hard face, unkempt hair, and sad, distant eyes, was friendly enough outside the house but cruel to his family. They knew he was especially punishing to Shahzad, who was born frail and weak, the opposite of his namesake warrior prince.

  The apartment Shahzad grew up in—and lived in still—was dingy and overcrowded. But the building was sturdy and British-built, with giant archways filled with flowering plants. Their downtown neighborhood was also populated mostly by other Muslims, which Shahzad’s family preferred, and was not far from Victoria Terminus, the old, cathedral-like train station named after an old British queen. Most important, they were just a cricket pitch’s distance from Crawford Market, where Shahzad’s mother could buy anything she needed to make their meals that day. If only she could get the money. Shahzad’s father would always shout before handing a few rupees over.

  Crawford Market, one of the most famous bazaars in the city, and Shahzad’s favorite place, was a holdover from colonial times. It was housed inside a grand Norman and Flemish-style structure, with pointy roofs, vaulted entryways, and a big clock tower. Since the British had left, its skylights had grown dusty, and many of its windows had popped out of their frames. But inside the wonders of the sprawling wholesale fruit and vegetable market remained unchanged. The moment Shahzad’s mother entered the market, she was barraged by vendors loudly hawking their fruits and vegetables, as well as poultry, mutton, beef, candy, and cakes. Though this was before the economic liberalization of the early 1990s—when the Indian government opened up the country to foreign goods and markets—even then Crawford Market had green peas, leafy spinach, ridged okra, and Alphonsos, the juiciest type of mango.