The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  Parvati had a difficult time talking to the other students at IIT Chennai, one of nearly two dozen institutes of technology for the best and brightest in the country. It wasn’t because she was unintelligent, or haughty, or shy. It was because of what she lost at the end of college, which she could not forget.

  The first loss was her best friend, who was short and bubbly with buckteeth and big, shining eyes—Parvati’s physical opposite. During their senior year, her friend had grown jealous of Parvati’s relationship with a Jacobite Christian boy at school. On the last day of college, she had called Parvati a “cheat” in front of everyone, accusing her of betraying their friendship for a boy. “I know you’re not the kind of girl who would marry a Christian guy,” she said. They hadn’t spoken since.

  The second loss involved the boy. When the Jacobite Christian told Parvati he wanted to marry her, Parvati had said no. She had always known she couldn’t marry him. She was a Hindu and a Brahmin, and Hindu Brahmins didn’t marry Christians—at least not Hindu Brahmins from Trivandrum, a small and conservative city. Her parents might disown her if she did. Still, she thought they’d remain friends. But after she turned down his marriage proposal, he had also stopped speaking to her.

  At coffee now with Joseph in the university canteen, the conversation turned to religion. Parvati’s parents had always told her: “It’s a privilege to be a Brahmin, because it’s top class.” Brahmins were first. Brahmins were pure. Brahmins were the most educated and intelligent. It was said that this idea came from the Vedas, because in the ancient Hindu scriptures the Brahmins were the priestly class. But the Vedas could be twisted all kinds of ways to suit all kinds of purposes. Parvati had repeated that Brahmins were superior, or something like it, and now Joseph challenged her: “It’s not good to have this kind of opinion,” he said. “You should not judge someone based on this, just because he’s not a Brahmin.”

  Parvati’s thoughts flashed to her father, who was a devoted Brahmin. Every week he met with other members of the community to chant the Vishnu sahasranamam—all one thousand names of Lord Vishnu—which took a half hour to complete. It was considered one of the most holy and powerful stotras. The ancient warrior Bhishma, from the Mahabharata, the epic story that taught man how to live, had said this chant could transcend sorrow. It was said it could unlock the universe. Though it was a chant available to any Hindu, the temple priests were mostly Brahmins, and some believed this made the caste superior.

  But what Joseph said now made sense. It was a flaw, for example, that Brahmins thought so highly of themselves. She remembered how in college an outside professor had once come in to grade papers and failed every student in the class. Parvati’s father, tall and imposing, had marched into the principal’s office to complain. When he came home, he told Parvati the papers were graded unfairly because the professor was “scheduled caste.” Parvati knew what scheduled caste meant—that, according to the constitution, there were officially disadvantaged groups, including the dalits, or “untouchables,” and the adivasis, India’s tribal people. That many government jobs and seats in schools were reserved for them. She understood in a vague way that these people had been neglected, exploited, or worse. She also knew that many Brahmins disliked the idea of such reservations, because they believed the scheduled castes were stealing their jobs. Her father was no different.

  “That’s why he did this, for revenge,” he told Parvati. Parvati held a different point of view. Even if the professor had failed the students as some kind of reprisal, her father had not considered the man’s motivation. She thought that to mistreat lower castes over time, and, when they responded in anger, point fingers, was not the right approach at all.

  Parvati realized that she had always found Brahmins lacking. Maybe she even had when it came to boys. She had chosen the Jacobite Christian boy over many Hindu Brahmin suitors, because no one else had seemed as mature or intelligent. She told Joseph she’d think about what he said.

  The next time they met for coffee, Parvati told Joseph, “What you said about Brahmins is right.”

  Parvati still didn’t know Joseph well, but she saw that he had the power to change her views. He spoke persuasively but was not pushy, always using reason to make his points. And in every conversation, he came across as more perceptive and knowledgeable than the other boys at school. She wanted to spend more time with him. But he was leaving soon for a nine-month research project in Germany to study the applications of inorganic chemistry, which impressed her.

  The day before Joseph flew out, they had coffee one last time in the canteen. Parvati told him about her college relationship with the Jacobite Christian boy, who had believed that he could marry her. And Joseph told Parvati about a prior relationship with a Hindu Brahmin girl. He said her parents had initially agreed to a marriage with Joseph but later changed their minds. He said that he still loved her.

  * * *

  Ever since coming to Mumbai, Ashok had been thinking about girls. He was twenty-eight and had never kissed a girl, but now he lived in Mumbai, the most permissive of cities. Mumbai, home of Bollywood romance, dance-bar girls, and lovers’ points along the sea. He had never been to a dance bar, but he’d heard of the girls who used to twirl in saris for piles of rupees until dance bars were banned in the city, and many of the girls went into prostitution instead. Still, there was talk of the bars reopening. And sex scenes in films were now getting past the censors—scenes that made it clear what transpired. This would never have happened when he was a boy. He sometimes walked past the lovers’ points along the ocean, where couples sat and French-kissed on the rocks, and didn’t seem to care who saw them. To Ashok, Mumbai seemed like a place where he could be young and loose and free.

  Ashok’s background wasn’t his problem with girls. He came from a good middle-class family and had received a good education. He also didn’t think it was about his appearance. He was tall (medium height, depending on who measured), lanky (some would say pencil thin), and had pale skin (theek hai, maybe it was almost wheatish, but pale sounded better). He had big cheeks and soft brown eyes and round glasses that worked their way down his nose. He wore his jet-black hair slicked over to one side and collared shirts that were often wrinkled. People said he looked younger than he was.

  And, though he was a Tamil Brahmin, born a Hindu Brahmin and (partly) bred in the state of Tamil Nadu, he spoke with an unusual, almost British accent, one that girls seemed to like. It was an accent acquired from his father, who had the same odd way of speaking, and whose own father had been a postmaster in British India. The British had only left India sixty years ago, and evidence of their influence remained everywhere—in the schools and infrastructure, the common law and penal code, their liquor and language. It was fashionable to speak with a bit of a British affectation. The accent had always helped Ashok get jobs. But though it also attracted girls, a conversation was where it always ended.

  Ashok had been exposed to all kinds of girls, thanks to his father’s itinerant lifestyle and career choices, which mostly involved teaching English or selling English-language tapes. The first girl Ashok had a crush on, another Brahmin, was in a Protestant school down south in Tenkasi. Ashok used to stare at her during class until she complained and the principal reprimanded him and several other boys. Then there were the girls in Trivandrum, the highly literate town of coconut trees where his father brought them next. In Trivandrum, some of the girls were bold, sitting alongside the boys in campus protests for local politicians. Others came from small towns and were quiet in class, their goal only stable jobs in the government. But Ashok paid little attention to any of these girls, because this was around the time he discovered books. He would often cut class just to sit and read alone in the university library, which smelled romantically of withered books and damp plaster.

  Mostly, Ashok remembered the firangi girls, who came later, also in Trivandrum, and whom his father would recruit off of beach resorts to do voice-overs for documentaries. Afterward, these
foreigners—Brits, Jews, and many Americans, a second wave after the initial Peace Corps arrivals—would come to Ashok’s house for authentic Indian food. Ashok’s mother would cook up sambar and rasam, made with sweet-and-sour tamarind, along with cabbage, spinach, beans, and papadums. The firangis loved the papadums best, which were crunchy and smelled pungently of mustard seeds and daniya. After they finished eating, Ashok’s father would play Tamil and classical Carnatic music and expound at length on Indian history, literature, and music. Sometimes, these firangi girls would stay for weeks after they finished their voice-overs, preening for his father. Firangi, depending on which local language you used, could mean either “foreigner” or “a double-edged sword.”

  From a young age, Ashok saw that his father was handsome and brilliant and a true polymath. For long hours, he would tutor his sons on a variety of subjects, but most often on English idioms, using flash cards. An Anglophile, like many of his generation, and his own father’s generation (even Gandhi and Nehru, fathers of the nation, had been English-schooled), Ashok’s father told his son that English was the path to success. Though Ashok did not grow up with the British, he could see for himself that this was true. He saw it in the call centers and tech jobs and multinationals popping up across the country, all of which required English. But though Ashok sometimes impressed the firangi girls with his English idioms—A penny for your thoughts? I don’t want to beat around the bush here—he was never able to kiss any of them.

  In the big cities there had also been girls, but Ashok had been too absorbed in his work to try courting them. He had been focused on becoming a man with a steady paycheck—a man unlike his father. Ashok secured his first job in Bangalore at a business process outsourcing firm, which were proliferating across India, and then as an English-language journalist and editor. This second gig paid less but lasted longer. Eventually, he moved to a publication in Mumbai, where he found a decent job and a decent apartment in a more-than-decent suburb of the city. On the side, he worked on a novel that he dreamed would be a bestseller one day. Still, he couldn’t get a girlfriend. It should have been easy in Mumbai, where the girls were assertive and provocative and oozed sex appeal. They were nothing like the girls down south. But somehow they didn’t seem interested in Ashok.

  Finally, a friend set him up on a date with a small-framed Gujarati girl. To his surprise, it went well, and for the second date he brought her flowers. They were yellow marigolds, because his friend had told him not to buy red, and definitely not red roses. Red was a sign you were in love. When he presented the girl with the flowers, he could tell she was surprised but pleased. But he was also anxious, hoping she wouldn’t expect the date to lead to something more. Like many boys of his age and background, he had no idea what that would be.

  On the first date, the Gujarati girl told him about her family—how her brother beat her, and how she didn’t have a father to intervene. On the second date, over coffee by the sea, they talked more and then went back to Ashok’s apartment. There, she asked Ashok if he would dance with her and taught him salsa. It was the first time Ashok ever held a girl. When they stopped dancing, he knew he was supposed to kiss her. But if he kissed her, he reasoned, he might have to marry her—especially if his family found out. And if he married her, he’d have to be with her forever. Ashok sat her down on the couch.

  “See, I might not be the right guy for you,” he said. The words came out in a rush. “I am from a traditional family, a Tam Brahm family, and I see myself not settling down in Bombay. I might be in Chennai. I’m not really up for dating now. I’m having second thoughts . . . And I’m new to the whole thing.”

  The Gujarati girl began to cry.

  After she was gone, Ashok’s mind ran. Who would give a bunch of flowers to a girl, take salsa lessons from her, and then that very same night break up with her?

  I’m freaked out.

  I should call my father.

  * * *

  Not long after Joseph left for Germany, Parvati walked into a hostel on campus and found a cluster of people sitting in strained silence. After a minute, someone spoke. “You know this guy?” Joseph. “His friend passed away.”

  Which friend?

  It was the Brahmin girl, the girl he had wanted to marry. The girl he still loved.

  After the girl’s parents rejected Joseph’s proposal, they started showing her to other boys. She had been keeping Joseph updated about the progress—what boys were coming, and how she felt about the arranged marriage—but then she stopped speaking to Joseph altogether. Joseph assumed she had fallen in love with one of the suitors, and that was why she didn’t call or answer the phone. But she had been in the ICU, sick with a heart disease he never knew she had.

  When Parvati called Joseph, he was crying.

  “It’s okay, we’re all there to support you,” Parvati said, unsure what else to say.

  For a week or two afterward, Parvati didn’t talk to Joseph, thinking she should give him space. But then they spoke again and started e-mailing and Gchatting. As they did, Parvati found her sympathy turned into affection. Soon, they were talking all the time. Later, Parvati worked up the nerve to ask him for a photo of the Brahmin girl and saw that she was not the kind of girl you noticed in a crowd. But she had very long, beautiful hair.

  Over the nine months Joseph was in Germany, he and Parvati spoke often. Sometimes, he told Parvati what he learned from living in a Western country. “Don’t stare when people are hugging or kissing. It’s a natural thing,” he told her. “It is not common in India, but in the West people do it.” A common joke: In India it’s okay to piss in public but not to kiss. Or, from a firangi’s Internet list about annoying things in India: #1: Why do you keep staring at me?

  Still, Gandhi, father of the nation, founder of the swadeshi movement to boycott foreign goods, might have been unhappy to see how Westernized India had become. The influence wasn’t limited to the British. Now, there were American chains like KFC and McDonald’s, girls pairing Italian jeans with traditional kurtas, and creamy peanut butter and flavored potato chips edging out masala channa on the shelves. The middle class and rich were going West to study and to marry. Bollywood songs had the overlay of hip-hop. Though both Hindi and English were the official languages, it was English that in many ways had taken precedence; most educated, moneyed people in cities were at least bilingual. And, despite the complaints of right-wing parties, couples were celebrating Valentine’s Day. Local politicians warned that couples would soon hug and kiss on the street, just as they did in Joseph’s Germany.

  Sometimes, Joseph told Parvati about how well his experiments were progressing abroad, and Parvati would feel dejected. She was not doing well at IIT Chennai, where the engineering classes seemed deliberately complex and confusing and where she was one of the only girls. The campus, a six-hundred-acre forested area filled with banyan trees and crisscrossed by wide promenades, was a lonely place without friends. Though about eight thousand students attended the school, the grounds sometimes seemed more populated by animals, including antelopes, deer, rabbits, and snakes. Some days, Parvati encountered only a wily troop of monkeys on her way to class.

  As the semester progressed, Parvati found herself sleeping all the time. She had never taken great care with her appearance or worn makeup; she was pretty and didn’t need to. But she now took even less time and care. She went to class in wrinkled kurtas, often in a dull saffron color. She stopped trying to tame her thick hair and let it go frizzy and didn’t bother to clean the smudged lenses of her glasses. She kept thinking that if she had chosen her master’s degree on her own, she would have never chosen engineering. She would have chosen art.

  In college, Parvati had made a number of elaborate line drawings of Hindu gods and goddesses, which the teachers and other students all admired. Once, she had spent seven hours sketching a dancer of Kathakali, a style of dance known for its intricate costumes and exaggerated facial expressions, and people told her it was a masterpiece. But whe
n Parvati’s father had discovered the line drawings, he told his daughter they were a silly hobby and to throw them all away. “Why are you wasting your time?” he asked. Even Parvati’s sister, who usually took Parvati’s side, agreed. “Oh, so this is the big thing you’ve been up to?” she said.

  Engineer, doctor, lawyer—these were the acceptable occupations for the wealthy and the middle class. They were stable and paid good salaries. They kept you out of poverty, which about a third of the country was still in. Indian aunties could often be heard muttering to an aspiring young artist in the family: “Arts? Arts lekar kya karoge?” “Whatever will you do with the arts?” Parvati’s father, a prominent engineer, had always expected his daughter would follow his path. But Parvati kept drawing.

  Now, Parvati told Joseph how much she wanted to quit IIT Chennai and study art instead. It didn’t help that her sister had just gotten married. Her sister, who had always been her best friend, but would now have her own family. “Just hang on,” Joseph told her. He was coming back to Chennai soon.

  When Joseph returned from Germany, he looked different from how Parvati remembered him. He had shaved off his mustache. His clothes were more Western. And he possessed a new, firangi style of confidence. Many of his views had changed. He also returned laden with gifts for the other students in his hostel. For Parvati, he brought a Japanese fan with a Michelangelo painting printed on it. Michelangelo, who had been both an artist and an engineer.

  * * *

  Ever since he could remember, Ashok had assumed he’d have an arranged marriage. It remained the most common form of marriage in the country. Studies varied widely but found between 60 and 90 percent of unions in India were arranged. Ashok told himself that even the British did it for centuries. An arranged marriage offered a set path and security. There might be more love marriages now, but people said these were behind the rise in divorces. To him, a love marriage seemed inherently uncertain and bound to come with expectations he’d never meet. His father had other ideas.