The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  Now, if she made a new friend, Joseph objected, saying she shouldn’t see the same person more than once. Parvati told him she wouldn’t but felt confused. Joseph had always been right about everything, but now she had the feeling he was wrong.

  To her surprise, she began to count down the days until he left for Germany, when he’d have to sign on to Skype to ask her where she was or where she’d been.

  From Germany, Joseph pestered her to tell her parents about him and ask their permission to marry. Sometimes, Parvati thought she should. She missed him. Over the phone, he would talk of all the places they had gone together in Chennai. He would tell her of all the places they could go in Europe. He’d send her pictures from Germany—of a shop bursting with color, or of Germans eating giant wheels of cheese. Parvati knew that young people with means often went abroad to work or study, and she thought maybe she should too.

  But when Parvati applied for a position in Germany and didn’t hear back, she felt not disappointment but relief. The balance of power had shifted since IIT Chennai. The farther away Joseph was, the more he clung to her. And she didn’t like how it felt.

  Still, the next time she went home to Trivandrum, Parvati decided to tell her mother about him. She couldn’t keep the secret anymore. Her mother didn’t even know Joseph existed, though her sister did. Sometimes, Parvati’s sister supported the affair, and other times she told Parvati she was foolish. At home in Trivandrum, as Parvati waited for the right moment, Joseph texted her: Did you tell?

  Finally, as she packed her bags to go back to Bangalore, Parvati began, her voice tentative, “Amma, I’m in love with this guy.” She told her mother he was a Christian, and that she didn’t know what to do. “What do you think?”

  Her mother’s fury was immediate and fierce. This was the moment when all the years of careful rearing fell apart. “If you don’t want to marry this guy, why did you even bother to tell me this story?” she said. “You could just have finished it yourself.”

  Stunned, Parvati began to cry.

  “Never talk about this again. Don’t tell Dad. Let’s just close this topic. And forget him,” her mother said.

  With that, the conversation was over.

  The next day, at the airport, Parvati’s mother looked at her daughter and smiled. Perhaps it was a kind smile, but more likely it was coercive, meant to ensure her daughter did as she was told. “Just remember what I said. Close the chapter,” she said.

  Parvati relayed her mother’s response to Joseph, who told her she hadn’t approached it the right way. He said he was going to e-mail her dad and ask for her hand in marriage.

  Parvati knew her father would say no. Like many Hindu Brahmin fathers, he believed a girl should marry not only within her religion but also her caste and gotra. And she knew that Joseph asking for her hand by e-mail would infuriate him. Her father was a man who valued propriety, and this was not the way it was done.

  Back at work in Bangalore, Parvati couldn’t focus. She sat at her desk at the auto company and grew fidgety, and then listless, waiting for her father’s call to come.

  But it was her mother who telephoned, and told Parvati that her father was not angry but heartbroken. She said he was so upset to receive the e-mail that he could not speak. She said she was worried about how sad he was and how many feelings were in his mind. This was not what Parvati had expected.

  Parvati’s sister called next, and said that their father had also called her. “It’s better not to tell you what he said,” she told Parvati. “Horrible stuff. Anti-Christian.”

  Parvati didn’t want to know.

  Later, her father would tell her that he’d responded to Joseph, that he had written a clear, unequivocal: “No.”

  But Joseph said he never got a reply and wasn’t giving up.

  Parvati would never know who was telling the truth.

  After the e-mail from Joseph, Parvati’s father vowed to marry her off without delay, and her parents set up a BharatMatrimony.com profile. Though Parvati was Malayali—born, proudly, in the state of Kerala—her family’s roots were in Tamil Nadu, and so her profile was placed in the section for Tamil Brahmins. Her father quickly identified a suitable Tam Brahm boy. He was in the United States, working for a big tech corporation, and, luckily or unluckily for Parvati—whom the astrologer warned had terrible stars—the US boy’s horoscope matched her own.

  Not long after, Parvati’s bosses in Bangalore told her they were sending her to Sweden for work. When Parvati told her father, he jumped at the opportunity. He said the Tam Brahm boy from the United States could meet her in Sweden, and that he would come along. Parvati called Joseph to tell him about the impending meeting, and Joseph said he’d also meet her there; it was just a short flight from Germany.

  It’s like a bad movie, Parvati thought, but she didn’t find it funny. She ran through terrifying scenarios of what might happen when she, her father, the US boy, and Joseph all converged in the same city.

  As the date of the Sweden trip approached, Parvati felt a loosening on her hold with reality. She began to cry while she walked to work, talk to herself, and write long diary entries and burn them. If one of the girls at the guesthouse spoke to her, Parvati would say darkly, “There is no point in this life.” But when a colleague spoke to her at work, she tried to give a calm response. She tried to smile. She thought she should try to hold it together at work, at least.

  In these months, Parvati also remembered old South Indian movies she had watched as a child—how the men were always in charge, and any woman who raised her voice was a villain. Watching these, she had believed men should do the thinking for her.

  Now she pleaded with her father: “Please don’t do this to me. Give me some more time.” But Parvati’s father told her that time had run out.

  She did not go to Sweden. Instead, she told the auto company she’d quit if they sent her there. She told herself she’d have a breakdown. She told her father the trip had been canceled. And she asked her sister’s husband to call Joseph and tell him to leave her alone. She stopped answering his calls, texts, chats, and e-mails. At night, she began to see snakes in her dreams. When she was a child, Parvati had been terrified of snakes. When she dreamed of them now, she also felt afraid.

  The astrologer had said there was a problem with her stars, and with one star in particular, a star associated with snakes. Now, her parents were doing poojas to the snake gods to offset it. They said the poojas would help ward off sin, which was in danger of attaching to Parvati. If it did, the astrologer said she might never marry or have children. And she was supposed to marry the US boy.

  But Parvati hated talking to him. She found him naive and overly nice, in a way that suggested he was being fake. In spite of his job at a big tech corporation abroad, which many girls would admire, she didn’t find him at all impressive. When they Skyped with her sister and brother-in-law beside her, she spent the entire call making funny faces he couldn’t see. Parvati’s parents assured her that marriage came first and affection would follow. But Parvati didn’t think she could ever love the US boy. When she thought of Joseph, she missed his smell the most.

  “I don’t want to proceed,” she told her sister, who told her father, who shouted into the phone. Parvati was twenty-five now and should already be married. Her father and the US boy’s parents fixed a date in late November for their engagement.

  On one call, Parvati told the US boy about Joseph. In telling him, she thought it might dissuade him from marriage, since it was shameful for a bride to have had a past affair. And if it did not dissuade him and she was forced to marry him, at least the truth would be out in the open. But she made him promise not to tell his parents, because she knew how it would be received. He swore to her he wouldn’t.

  Soon after that, Parvati’s parents went to visit the boy’s family, who also lived in Trivandrum, to plan the engagement. When they arrived, his family presented a long laundry list of demands for the ceremony. They insisted that Parvati�
��s parents go to a specific store in Bangalore to get her saris stitched. They maintained that they be the ones to place the garlands during the ceremony, which was tradition anyway. They asked that Parvati’s parents book rooms for all their family members at the pricey Taj Mahal Hotel. And at the end of the conversation they said, “You should understand we’re doing a favor for your daughter.”

  Joseph. Their son had told them. They knew.

  When Parvati’s mother relayed this to Parvati afterward, she also told her that her father had acquiesced to everything.

  Later, the US boy called Parvati, and Parvati confronted him. “Did you tell about my past to your parents?”

  “No, I didn’t say.”

  “Why are you lying to me?”

  He grew angry and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Parvati despised the US boy then. “I’m getting a headache just talking to you,” she said, and hung up.

  The next day, the US boy defriended Parvati on Facebook, and his relatives did the same. Parvati’s father called her and told her, sadly, “I think we are just calling this off.”

  Parvati was quiet on the phone. But afterward she rounded up her friends and colleagues to celebrate. And that night, she slept more deeply than she had in months. For the first time, no one would be calling her from Germany or the United States or Trivandrum. In Hindu philosophy, there were three forms of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and deep, dreamless sleep. After deep, dreamless sleep came turiya, pure consciousness, which was for the liberated. That night, for the first time, she felt free.

  * * *

  Ashok found Mallika on the site himself. She was about his age, lived in Mumbai, was a big deal in Bollywood—or so her profile implied—and was into art and books and movies. She seemed street-smart and sure of herself, qualities Ashok thought he lacked. She seemed nothing like Nada, with her cheap bangles and stolen toffees, except that of course she was also Hindu and a Tamil Brahmin.

  They met first at a restaurant along the sea, and later at her apartment. In her flat, Ashok was startled to find a three-level cabinet packed with liquor: foreign whiskey, Smirnoff vodka, and Kingfisher beer. He knew most of the country did not drink, and especially not Tam Brahms; the Vedas said intoxicants destroyed the intellect. Mallika offered Ashok milk tea instead and invited him back a second time to drink flavored vodka. The process rolled forward, and he went to New Delhi to meet Mallika’s mother. Over tea at the rotary club, her mother told him, “You’re the kind of guy my daughter has been wanting to marry. She has seen a lot of guys who are silly and immature. But you seem all sorted.” She seemed not to care that he was past thirty.

  As Ashok got to know Mallika, he thought that perhaps the guys she had dated had been more than just immature or silly. She was sure-footed and street-smart, this was true. But she also seemed distrusting, as if there had been an incident in her past, and now every man could be a potential offender. When Mallika came to visit Ashok at his apartment, he offered her a mango, but she said she didn’t like mangos, and so he offered her an apple, which she accepted only after watching him take a bite. When he kissed her and tried to go further, she recoiled, as if he were going to hit her. But then she had surprised Ashok and invited him to live with her—just for two weeks—as a kind of experiment before marriage. Ashok couldn’t help telling his father.

  “As long as it’s in Bom-BAY, where we don’t have any FAMILY members, go accumulate as many experiences as you WANT to,” his father said. “But DON’T breathe a word about it to ANY-one.” Emboldened, Ashok bought a packet of condoms and packed them along with his book, Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, and his flute, which he had taken up to play classical Tamil music. Mallika was a Bombay girl, and Ashok assumed Bombay girls were up for sex before marriage.

  But when he arrived, Mallika told him, “Okay, Ashok, although I’ve agreed to live with you, there will be no sex.” After this pronouncement, she went into her room and closed the door, leaving Ashok to sleep on a mattress in the hall.

  For two weeks, Ashok lived at Mallika’s, during which time they hardly spoke to each other. When he tried to initiate conversation, she ignored him or spoke in short sentences. Soon, he didn’t care to keep trying. Instead he practiced his flute and read Joseph Anton, which chronicled Rushdie’s life under fatwa and the dissolution of not one but three of his four marriages.

  “I’m not feeling quite right about this,” Ashok said on the last day, after entering Mallika’s room. “Do you think this is what we should be doing?”

  “Ashok,” she said. “When you see me, do you feel like talking to me?”

  Oh, thought Ashok, and he steeled himself to talk about the trauma in her past, to listen and unburden her, though he didn’t want to. He wanted to go home.

  “You have this face about you that is very busy,” he said, finally, “not encouraging people to say nice things to you. It’s like you have ‘fuck off’ on your forehead.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and seemed unsurprised. “I guess I have that.”

  After Ashok moved back to his studio apartment, they spoke just once more on the phone, and that was it. As Ashok finished Joseph Anton, Rushdie told him, unhelpfully: “It was always women who did the choosing, and men’s place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones.”

  After Mallika, Ashok’s parents began to send his profile to divorcées.

  * * *

  Joseph was engaged to be married. After Parvati heard the news, she quit her job at the car company in Bangalore and got a job teaching engineering in Trivandrum, where she’d live with her parents.

  Before he got engaged, Joseph had sent her a final e-mail, saying he was “waiting for a positive sign” from her, but Parvati hadn’t written back. Now she wished she had. He had also sent her a photo of the girl, who stood in a gazebo in the picture, looking sweet and small and innocent. After Parvati saw the photo, she went into her company’s conference room and cried. The girl he was marrying was a Christian.

  Now, Parvati had a month off before starting her new job in Trivandrum, and she tried her best to distract herself. She spent time with a girl in her Bangalore guesthouse who was loud and funny and loved to gossip. One night, they went out to a movie, and afterward Parvati saw Joseph had called. Later, he called her again.

  “The date of my marriage is fixed,” he told her. Fixed. In that moment, Parvati realized that she had not believed he would go through with it. She had expected the wedding to be called off, and for him to come to Bangalore and take her away as his bride.

  “But I’ve called off my engagement,” she said, the words tumbling out. “Is there a way we can be back together?”

  He paused, and said, in his cautious way, “I don’t think so. I have said yes to this girl and she is a very nice girl.” Parvati was silent. He went on: “She was supposed to get engaged to another guy, who turned out to be a drug addict. So her parents are scared, but they’ve found me okay, and I’ve given my word. I don’t want to break her heart.”

  If Joseph had given his word, Parvati knew he wouldn’t break it. Quietly, she hung up the phone.

  Joseph got married in January, after Parvati had moved back to Trivandrum and begun teaching. On the day of his wedding, she went to the charity house with her parents and distributed clothes to the poor. She knew Joseph would have liked that.

  Not long after, Parvati picked up the novel Balyakalasakhi, or My Childhood Friend, which was about two kids who fall in love but whose parents won’t let them marry. As the story progresses, the girl gets married off to someone else, but the boy never finds a bride. They live separate lives, grow old, and die.

  It was a beautiful book, written in plain and colloquial language by the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. As Parvati read it, she felt that the novel became her real life, and that her life became the fiction. After she finished and emerged from the spell of Basheer’s writing, she felt a little better about Joseph. Just because
you fall in love with someone doesn’t mean you have to marry him, she thought. It is not the end of your life.

  It was said that after Basheer wed, he was institutionalized twice for mental illness, for paranoia.

  Or perhaps, she thought, it was better not to marry at all.

  * * *

  The following month, when her sister and brother-in-law sent her the profile, Parvati thought little of it. Her family had been inundating her with online profiles, and she said no to every single one. Girls were being inundated across India, because as the matrimonial ad section in the paper had gotten thinner, the old aunties who did the arranging had learned to navigate the Web. The online marriage market was expected to triple in the next few years. Bharat Matrimony, the site Parvati was on, had recently run an ad in which a girl came home to be told by her mother that a boy was waiting in her bedroom—scandal—only to reveal that a boy’s online profile was open on the computer screen. But though Parvati was lonely, the loneliest she had ever been, she wasn’t interested in any of the profiles. None of them compared to Joseph.

  No, no, no, she thought now, as she sat in her room in Trivandrum, looking at the profile open on her laptop screen. It belonged to another Tamil Brahmin, who, though he had grown up partly in Trivandrum, now lived up in Mumbai. He had a boyish face and a natural look. He looked like an average Tam Brahm—like, in fact, her father. He is not looking good, she thought. I’m never going to say yes to this guy.

  The next day, her father brought her several engineers’ profiles, boring men, men who’d ensure her life would be tedious and small. Parvati saw he was going to force a marriage to one of these men soon, and she’d be powerless to stop him. That night, she revisited the profile her sister and brother-in-law had sent.

  The boy still looked like her father. She moved on to his stats. From her parents’ perspective, a weak prospect. This made her look more closely. Weak point 1: master’s in English. (Not an engineer, lawyer, or doctor.) Weak point 2: height, five feet ten. (In Parvati’s family, short. She was almost as tall.) Weak point 3: age, thirty-three. (Too old; Parvati was just twenty-six.)