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

by Elizabeth Flock

  All is right, Shahzad thought, as the ceremony wound down. I made the right choice. He was sure everyone in his community would tell him, “Oh, how beautiful your wife is.” He looked over at her now, sitting shyly in an ornate wooden chair, and felt happy. She wore a thickly embroidered pink and white sari and garlands of pink roses and white carnations around her neck. She was weighed down by gold: an ornate jhumar ornament on her forehead, a heavy necklace and earrings, and a thick stud in her nose. Her hands were darkly hennaed.

  During the ceremony Sabeena, who had stolen a glance at her husband, decided she had also made the right choice. To her, he resembled Amitabh Bachchan, the handsome, brooding actor from Coolie. He looked like a man with a lot of emotion locked inside him, a man with whom Sabeena would not be bored.

  But after the ceremony Sabeena’s best friend pulled her aside. “I saw Shahzad’s mother scolding someone,” she whispered. “She was hyper and shouting. Your mother-in-law is very tough. You’re gone.”

  “What?” Sabeena whispered back. She had heard stories of dangerous mothers-in-law, the kind who threw plates against the wall if the food wasn’t made right. These were the mothers-in-law of the saas-bahu TV soaps, which girls across India watched in terror. Suddenly, her life ahead with Shahzad seemed uncertain. Her friend disappeared into the crowd, but her words echoed in Sabeena’s ears: You’re gone.

  * * *

  They married in January, on a day that happened to be the diamond jubilee of a local religious leader, and so the whole road to the wedding hall was lit up with lights. “What kind of wedding is this?” the guests asked in wonder.

  Again, Sabeena felt lost in a dream. As was tradition, she had not seen Shahzad for three years. Her family brought her into the wedding hall with her face covered by a veil of the finest fabric. She wore a thick red Benares sari and flower petals strewn over her hair. The photographer asked her to sit on a pink throne to pose for photos. Sabeena had been to many weddings but still had not anticipated this level of pageantry.

  In their community, the father of the groom had to give his son permission to marry before the ceremony, but Shahzad’s father was nowhere to be found. Shahzad knew where his father must be: at home, with his cars, having forgotten all about the wedding. And so he rushed home on his scooter, cursing his father as he navigated through the crush of traffic. He was going to be late to his own wedding. When Shahzad made it home and found his father in the garage as expected, his phone was already ringing. “Come soon, Shahzad. The priest is waiting for you for the ceremony to begin.”

  Shahzad arrived just in time, with his father in tow, and his permission. The hall was filled with a throng of guests—some three thousand people from the community. Sabeena’s father began delivering the gifts: a bed, cupboard, fridge, TV, and gold. Every item was carried through the hall for the guests to see. The dowry was not so extensive as at a Hindu wedding but still enough to impress. Shahzad stood smiling in an expensive dark blue suit brought from Dubai by his brother, who had moved there for work. As the gifts paraded by, Shahzad felt he was living up to his princely name at last.

  And as the ceremony began, Shahzad felt another swell of confidence, because his best friend, Atif, sat beside him. Like Shahzad, Atif was built thin like a reed, and had an equally long mustache. But he was taller and more muscular, and ahead of Shahzad’s wedding day, Atif had worked to make his friend strong. He’d taught him weight lifting and karate and taken Shahzad to the gym, where with each punch he made him repeat in Japanese: “Ichi. Ni. San. Shi!” They’d done knuckle push-ups until Shahzad worried the skin on his middle finger would fall off. Now, as Shahzad sat on his own throne-like chair, with Atif beside him, he thought it didn’t matter that his father had forgotten the day.

  “Do you accept Sabeena as your wife?” the priest asked, breaking through Shahzad’s thoughts. “Yes,” Shahzad said, three times, as was required. Afterward, Shahzad’s family gave Sabeena’s side five thousand rupees, a generous amount, and she and Shahzad were both asked to sign the marriage contract. They recited the Quran, which guided the Muslim wedding ceremony.

  As the wedding ended, a very sad song by Mohammed Rafi was played, and Sabeena began to cry. For the first time that day, she thought again about leaving home and her father, about her difficult mother-in-law and the great unknown that lay ahead. As her sister came over to comfort her, Sabeena wiped her tears with the edge of her dupatta, and her father enveloped her in a hug.

  As Sabeena cried, Shahzad began to have second thoughts of his own. Perhaps the diamond jubilee lights were not a beautiful addition to the wedding. What if they were a bad omen instead? He worried that there could be a nazar, or curse, on their marriage. Superstition guided Shahzad’s perception of the world, as it did for many of his community’s religious leaders. Before the wedding, a local priest had advised Shahzad’s mother that Sabeena change her name in order for the marriage to succeed, saying the two S sounds were not a good combination. The priest said that with a different name, the connection between them would be stronger. But that felt wrong to Sabeena, who told Shahzad’s mother in a rare show of obstinacy: “My father gave me this name. You call me this.” Shahzad agreed, and her name had not been changed.

  As the clock ticked past midnight after the wedding, Shahzad nervously looked for other signs of bad luck. When Sabeena went to her apartment and said good-bye to her mother, everything went smoothly. There was no trouble when Shahzad took her to his family home, showed her the elaborate British-built exterior, and brought her upstairs to their small but private room. But when his family set up a wedding game—a bucket of water with a ring dropped inside for the new couple to find—it was Sabeena who located it. Shahzad searched and searched, but his hands grasped at water.

  Shahzad’s anxiety continued to rise as the end of the festivities approached, because Atif had not taught him one thing. His best friend had not taught him about sex, because Atif was also unmarried, and sex before marriage was haram. Shahzad knew he had to perform on the first night, but he had no idea what that entailed.

  Shahzad pulled aside a family friend. “How do you fuck a woman?” he whispered, hoping the desperation wouldn’t come through in his voice. “Back side or front side?”

  “Are you feeling sleepy and all? Wake up!” his friend told him, laughing, and sprayed soda in his face. “Of course the front side, pagal.”

  Later, Shahzad would learn that anal sex was also haram in his community, along with oral sex, sex during menstruation, and sex during fasting times. Now, he only worried about doing it wrong, Sabeena laughing at him, and other people overhearing his struggle. In his community, women often came and pressed their ears to the door on a couple’s wedding night. It was almost 3 a.m., and Shahzad prayed the women would be too tired to listen in.

  But it was Shahzad who was exhausted as he climbed into bed beside Sabeena. His eyes had never felt so heavy as they said their nightly prayer. Sabeena was also tired, glad to be able to take off her thick sari and heavy jewelry.

  Front side, front side, Shahzad told himself.

  Within minutes, they were both asleep.

  * * *

  Sabeena knew that Shahzad would try to initiate sex soon, and that she would have to comply, despite her fear. She would have to continue complying for years and years, any time he wished. It was what a good Indian wife did. Even the Indian Penal Code said sex between a man and his wife was never rape. But maybe Shahzad would not be a demanding husband that way. For the last day or so, they had simply relaxed in the apartment, which, like most middle-class apartments in the city, was modest and utilitarian. Still, it was far nicer than hers. From morning until night, they had listened to Mohammed Rafi songs on the record player, surrounded by all their new things. They had lain in the double bed for hours in their tiny room that faced out onto the street. Outside, Sabeena could hear the rumble of train tracks and the call of a pair of pigeons that liked to land on their windowsill. Nearby was a bright green d
argah devoted to a saint who could levitate. And there was new construction for a Haj House nearby, a place where pilgrims could stay en route to Mecca. Sabeena hoped she and Shahzad would one day take the trip, which had long been government subsidized. Beyond the Haj House and the dargah was Crawford Market, where she knew Shahzad liked to go. It was all very romantic to Sabeena, and not the worst place to make love. Still, Shahzad did not make a move.

  On the third day after the wedding, Shahzad worked up his nerve. Front side, front side, he told himself again. It was not as complicated as he thought. As he moved, Sabeena told Shahzad he was hurting her a little. But she also said it felt good. Afterward, they had to go wash. Their community was very strict on the requirement of ablutions after sex. As Sabeena got up, she was alarmed to find that there was no adjoining bathroom. She would have to walk outside to take a shower, and everyone in the family would know. But Shahzad’s family was discreet and did not comment.

  After that, they continued to spend their days relaxing, talking, and listening to records, because Shahzad had taken a month off from work. Over and over again they played Mohammed Rafi’s song “Janam Janam Ka Saath Hai,” which was about living many lifetimes together. People said his voice was magic, and that no one sang a love song the way he did.

  As Mohammed Rafi’s music played, Shahzad told Sabeena about his childhood and his father’s mistreatment. Sabeena told him his father sounded like a small man, who only wanted others to feel small. She also told Shahzad about her own father, how he was strict but good to her, and how her grandfather had been even stricter and not so kind.

  Shahzad understood that Sabeena’s father meant well. But he thought that keeping her indoors was akin to putting his daughter in a kundu, in a faraway village, isolated from the world. In a kundu, people didn’t go out and gain knowledge, and the knowledge didn’t come in. More people were moving to cities, but Shahzad knew the majority of the country still lived in rural areas, where TV had not yet arrived. In Mumbai, Shahzad had watched television and gone to movies all the time as a child, favoring the English-language spy pictures that starred Sean Connery and Roger Moore. His mom would give him the single rupee for admission, and they’d get mawa cake afterward. He couldn’t imagine a life without movies. For him—for most children and adults he knew—movies were everything. He thought that people who grew up walled in, away from films and news and the world, didn’t know how to think for themselves. He promised himself he would try to change that in Sabeena. Sabeena told herself she’d try to free Shahzad from the hurt of his father.

  In the big Hindi movies, which were often set in Kashmir, the heroes and heroines stood atop mountains as snowflakes fell onto their tongues. Or they floated across gentle lakes in boats made just for two. In the movies it was as if the fighting in Kashmir did not exist. Sabeena remembered what her father said about Kashmir: Madhubala, anywhere you want to go, you can go in a marriage. Those words echoed now in her mind. Sabeena imagined the trips Shahzad took her on would be as idyllic.

  But after Ramadan ended and their honeymoon approached, Shahzad’s mother interrupted that dream. She told them she was coming with them on their trip. Sabeena cried at the thought of it. How could she think she should come on our honeymoon? Shahzad reassured his new wife. His mother was confused because she was from a small village and had a backward mindset. “Just don’t answer her when she asks,” he said. In the end Shahzad’s mother stayed home.

  They set off first for Matheran, a tiny hill station in the Western Ghats mountain range, whose name meant “a forest on the forehead.” The train took four hours or so, and when they arrived Shahzad woke to find Sabeena asleep on his shoulder, a sea foam–colored scarf wrapped around her hair. A voice boomed over the loudspeaker, and he heard the sound of a dog’s bark. As they roamed around Matheran, they took photos of each other beside a river, under a gazebo, and atop a mountain, though it was not snowing that time of year.

  After Matheran they visited two more hill stations: Panchgani, where Shahzad rode like a hero astride a white horse, and Mahabaleshwar, where they went boating like the couples in the movies. In Mahabaleshwar, they stayed in a hotel called Anarkali, which meant “pomegranate blossom,” and was the name of the court dancer in Mughal-e-Azam. In the hotel, as they made love, their life felt just like a film.

  But on the train ride back to Mumbai, Sabeena asked Shahzad an uncomfortable question. Perhaps she had started to notice small details that suggested Shahzad wasn’t a serious man: how spit gathered at the sides of his mouth when he talked or ate, how his smile was goofy, or how he kept his shirt unbuttoned too low. Or she was just curious. “My father told me that if a woman sits next to a man, a man should get a current, should get excited,” she said. “Why isn’t that happening to you?”

  Shahzad didn’t understand. He couldn’t be excited all the time. They didn’t talk on the ride much after that. And as their train pulled into Bombay Central, a tooth in Shahzad’s mouth began to ache. When they got on the bus from the station, the pain continued to increase. By the time he got home, Shahzad had a toothache that made it hard to speak or think.

  The next day, he went to the doctor, who removed the tooth, but Shahzad couldn’t shake the bad feeling. It was like the nazar had followed them silently on the honeymoon and reappeared when they got close to home.

  * * *

  The photos of their first anniversary celebration, which Sabeena placed neatly inside their wedding album, show a blissful day at home. Shahzad chose a casual red-checked shirt for the party, which he buttoned to his chest, and American-style blue jeans. Sabeena wore an iridescent pink and white sari, her red wedding bangles, and white flowers tied in her hair. Both have the glow of youth. They look thin—so thin it seems that they could live on fatty laddoos and still remain this beautiful. In one photo, Shahzad’s father even lets them feed him a slice of cake. In another, Shahzad and Sabeena are laughing at something, and Sabeena’s veil is falling off, and tiny wisps of hair frame her face. In the last photo in the album, they pose side by side, and Shahzad’s arm is wrapped around his wife. There is a mirror behind them, and the camera catches it, so that the space between them is obscured by a flash of light.

  They both knew what came next, after a year of marriage. For almost any Indian couple, a year meant it was time for children. Shahzad dreamed of having four, five, even six children, whom he imagined waiting for him at the door every night when he came home. They would all be smiling and plump and healthy. They would be mostly boys, and they would clutch at Sabeena’s long salwar kameez. Despite her father’s warnings that giving birth was difficult, Sabeena also wanted children.

  As they tried for a child, Shahzad took Sabeena out of the house as often as he could. He wanted to get her out of the kundu mind-set before a child tied her down. He took Sabeena out on his scooter. They drove past the old art deco movie theaters to the Oberoi, a luxury hotel so high it seemed to tower over the city. They sat at the seaside talking for hours, looking down at the concrete tetrapods that broke the ocean’s force. As Shahzad drove her home, he felt proud of his new scooter and the freedom it gave him. But he was not a good driver, and Sabeena swore she’d never go out on it again.

  After that, when Sabeena went home to her parents’ house for visits, Shahzad always picked her up in a taxi. As the taxi idled outside, Shahzad would shout her brother’s name up to her apartment window, because it wasn’t proper to call out for a lady. Shahzad’s voice always rose uncertainly through the hubbub of butchers, jewelry sellers, and street vendors. Sabeena’s brother would yell back, and after a little while Sabeena would come down, her head covered. And then they’d take a cab somewhere, usually to the sea.

  Shahzad also liked to take out Sabeena’s sisters, most of whom were younger and impressionable. Whenever the sisters learned Shahzad was coming, they got ready by four p.m., though he wasn’t arriving until five, and shouted with excitement: “Bhaijan is coming! Bhaijan is coming!” They rushed to do their
hair and makeup. After Shahzad picked them up in a taxi, they would drive to Apollo Bunder. There, they’d gaze up at the Gateway of India and, behind it, the Taj Mahal Hotel. Or he took them to Chowpatty Beach, where they sat and watched the waves for hours, ate bhelpuri and pav bhaji, and felt the ocean’s breeze.

  Shahzad had first learned about Chowpatty from Atif. As teenagers, he and Atif and two other friends, one a millionaire’s son with a flashy car, drove to Chowpatty every Sunday. They’d park and make masti and talk until the sun went down. Or, if it was during the Hindu festival of Navratri, they’d drive from Chowpatty to the grounds of Walkeshwar, where they would watch Hindu women—women they could never marry—do the garba, twirling in their colorful flared skirts.

  Since he had gotten married, Shahzad had seen less of Atif. He had attended Atif’s engagement to a good Muslim girl from the community. But after that Atif had been elusive. He had become a well-known karate instructor and had little time for anyone, even his oldest friend.

  But one day Atif reappeared to tell Shahzad about a problem. He had fallen in love with one of his karate students, a Gujarati girl. More problematically: a Jain, a religion that seemed to Shahzad far removed from Islam, because of how it emphasized renunciation. Atif wasn’t married yet and said he was going to break his engagement and marry the Jain girl instead. “But how can it be?” Shahzad asked him nervously. “She is a Hindu. Even worse, a Jain.” Atif just looked back at him. Atif always did what he wanted.

  After that, Shahzad did not hear from Atif until months later, when he saw him in a restaurant with ladies’ surma rimmed around his eyes. The Prophet had said wearing surma could be auspicious, but on Atif it looked like a disguise. “Oye,” said Shahzad, laughing. “You are looking very different.” Atif grabbed Shahzad by the shirt and brought him into a corner. “I ran away with that Gujarati girl and got married,” Atif said. “And the girl’s father is now looking for me.” He told Shahzad that the girl’s father had even given a local inspector ten thousand rupees to arrest Atif on a false case, to maybe even “encounter” him, which meant when you shot a person dead and made it look like an accident. Police in Mumbai used encounters to pick off members of the city’s underworld, but Shahzad knew parents sometimes resorted to desperate methods when their children married across religions. He was terrified for his friend. Atif said he was going to hide out at his aunt’s place for as long as he had to and, before Shahzad could say more, disappeared. After this, Shahzad did not hear from Atif for a long time.