The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  She saw this was the kind of boy who might upset her parents, and felt a flush of excitement at the prospect.

  As she scrolled farther down the page, she noticed extra text at the bottom, a personal note he had written for the girl, not her family: “I would give a free hand to my partner, and expect the same from her.” She paused. She liked the sound of this. He didn’t seem like the kind of boy who would keep tabs on her every movement.

  The next day, trying to keep her voice casual, Parvati told her sister and brother-in-law: “This seems to be an okay profile.” It was one of the first signs of interest she’d shown. And so the wheels of marriage were set quickly into motion: her brother-in-law informed her father, who, despite Ashok’s age and height and occupation, took their horoscopes to an astrologer. Parvati accepted this news passively. She didn’t expect the match to move forward. Out of the dozens of boys her parents and sister put before her, there had been few matches, because of her bad stars. And, despite her recurring dreams about snakes, she did not believe any amount of poojas to the snake gods would fix that.

  Improbably, Parvati and Ashok’s stars matched.

  Illusions

  Maya and Veer, 2010 to 2014

  “Once your lips were rosy, Krishna,

  now black as your skin they’re tainted . . .

  O God! God! Krishna, go away.”

  —Jayadeva, The Gita Govinda

  “Janu,” Veer said. “His name will be Janu.”

  Janu would be born the year the census was gathered, which would find that the ratio of girls to boys born in the country remained too low. It would find that the number of married people was falling and divorces were rising. And it would tally India’s population at 1.2 billion, so that one in six people in the world were Indian now. Janu would be named after Veer’s grandfather, who had worked hard all his life and sung old Hindi ballads to Veer as he lay dying. He would also be born the year Maya would meet Subal.

  The name Janu was derived from the Hindi word jaan, which meant “life.” Veer thought the name sounded strong, like his own; Veer meant “victorious.” It was unlike Maya’s name, which came from the Sanskrit and had a complex and double meaning, suggesting both “magic” and “illusion.” The concept of Maya was tied to the Hindu belief that the whole world was an illusion. Like how the ocean looks blue but isn’t—it just looks that way because of how the sea absorbs the sun. The sky looks blue but isn’t either. The concept of Maya suggested that the things to which we attach ourselves are like a mirage in the desert. They are beautiful, enchanting, even magical, at first. But in the end they are an illusion. The person who understands this becomes freer and edges closer to the truth of the universe.

  Maya loved the meaning of her name, but Veer wanted a name more like his own for the baby. Like most men, Veer was hoping for a boy but didn’t say so aloud. Based on the scan, which showed broad palms and feet like his own, Veer was certain they were having a son. It was illegal to learn the baby’s gender, because too many girls were still aborted.

  The doctors assured Maya her pregnancy would be easier this time around. It had been three years since she married and two since her miscarriage. This time, the tests did not detect ovarian cysts. Still, a few months before the birth, she flew to her parents’ house in Hyderabad, which was considered safer, and was tradition.

  Janu’s due date was in January, not long after Veer’s birthday. Veer flew to Hyderabad so that he and Maya could spend the birthday together, as they had years before, when she bought him a ticket with her treasured books and gold bangles. The baby was expected in a couple weeks. After the celebration, Veer planned to fly to Africa for an important work trip that had been postponed after he’d suffered several epileptic attacks. He had managed his epilepsy since childhood, but it sometimes reappeared in adulthood when he worked too hard. He promised Maya he’d be back in time for the delivery. “You won’t,” she said, getting upset. “Stay. You won’t be here for your son’s birth.”

  But at Maya’s checkup that day, the ob-gyn said neither of them was going anywhere. “The baby has a very low heart rate,” the doctor said. “We have to operate right away.”

  Instead of the rhythmic, steady dhakdhak dhakdhak dhakdhak, 100-plus beats per minute, the baby’s heart sounded like a slow, uncertain dhak . . . dhak . . . dhak.

  “Look, it’s my husband’s birthday,” said Maya. “Can we come back later?” She knew she was being selfish, even reckless, but she couldn’t help herself. I want to have one last quiet day with Veer before the baby is born, she thought. She wanted them to be able to celebrate the birthday. The doctor grudgingly told them to come back for a sonogram that night.

  By the time they returned to the hospital, Maya had begun to feel uncomfortable. When she lay down on the hospital bed, she was wheezing. After they did the sonogram, several nurses ran up to Maya, wheeling a stretcher. “Lie down. We need to operate right now.”

  “Where is my husband?” asked Maya.

  “He is with the doctor. We’re taking you there.”

  The heart rate had gone very low. Normal for babies was over 100. The heart rate on the monitor read 25.

  Maya remembers what happened next in fragments: A gown. An oxygen mask. A needle as long as her arm. A strange, sudden pain, way deep in her bones. The doctor yelling: “Don’t. Move.” They had to insert the needle four times because she kept moving. “Your baby’s heart rate is falling by the second.” The voice was very far away. The strange pain again and again, followed by a numbness. The first cut of the C-section, and the sensation that she was being unzipped from the inside. “Where is Kancha?” she asked. Veer was let in just as the doctor was about to pull out the baby. He didn’t watch the operation, because he worried it would have set off his epilepsy.

  “What do you want—do you want a boy or a girl?” the doctor asked, as she reached down to lift out the baby. She directed the question to Maya. “I want a girl. But it’s a boy,” said Maya.

  “It’s a boy.”

  The doctor slapped him hard on the behind, and Janu began to cry. He had silky hair just like his father and big, stormy eyes like Maya. He had a good heart rate and a smooth complexion despite the appearance of jaundice. Veer was certain Janu had been born early so that he was there to witness his son’s birth. And so they were born on the same day. He already felt a special connection to his son. He thought Janu looked just like him.

  Maya was told to stay in the hospital for five days for observation. “Just don’t leave me,” she begged Veer, though she didn’t think he’d leave his new son.

  “No, I won’t,” Veer said, but after a day, or two, or five—they remember this differently—Veer left on his flight, certain that Maya was stable and in good hands at the hospital.

  The stability turned out to be fragile for both of them. Maya soon developed postpartum depression. She could feel almost nothing for Janu. She didn’t even want to hold him. She begged to be allowed to leave Hyderabad and fly home to Mumbai. At home, she thought she’d go back to normal.

  Back in Mumbai, Veer suffered an epileptic fit, and then another. Maya was sure it was because he was overworking himself and she was not there to call him to come home in the evenings. He also skipped meals when she wasn’t there to cook.

  Maya was supposed to stay at her parents’ house for several months, but by March she had returned to Mumbai. After she came home, her depression receded and she found herself wanting to hold Janu all the time. She was certain that she had never loved anyone or anything as deeply as she loved her new son.

  Veer’s epilepsy also calmed down. He came home early so that he could help get Janu ready for bed, and he left for work later so that he could play with him in the mornings. One day, Veer joked to Janu, “Who do you love more, Mom or Dad? Raise your right hand for Mom, left hand for Dad.” Janu raised both tiny hands, and Veer and Maya laughed together.

  Early on, Janu slept in a crib. But one night he tried to crawl out of it, and Vee
r woke up and caught Janu’s head in his hand. After that, they stopped using the crib, and Janu slept in the bed instead, nestled between both parents. Many children in the country slept with their parents; it was said this was why Indian men were closer to their mothers than their wives. Veer had slept in bed with his own parents until he was twelve. Some of his happiest memories were of sleeping beside his mother, who had always made him feel safe and calm.

  As a child, Veer thought his mother was the most beautiful and perfect woman on Earth. Unlike most parents he knew, she never hired a tutor for him but took his dictations herself every day after school. On top of that, she gave him two hundred rupees’ pocket change every week, which most mothers didn’t do, and which he didn’t think he deserved. He always stowed the rupees in a white box along with coins he’d collected.

  She died the night of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, when Veer was just fifteen. It happened after a long battle with cancer and much suffering, but still he could not accept that it was true. Curfew had been imposed on the city, because Rajiv Gandhi—who took office after his mother Indira’s assassination—had been killed by a suicide bomber, and police said it was not safe to go outside. Veer and his family defied curfew and went out to see his mother, who had fallen into a coma, anyway. In the hospital, Veer spoke to his mother as if she were awake. When she was pronounced dead, Veer had an epileptic fit.

  And after she died, Veer never opened the white box again. It still contained the last two hundred rupees she had given him. He never collected coins again either. He promised himself he’d never love another woman, a promise he kept until he met the other Maya, his distant cousin of the same gotra, who had been kind and warm just like his mother. But then she had also left him.

  Now that Janu had been born, Veer began again to think about death.

  Or rather, money and death, and whether Maya would have enough money to take care of Janu if he dropped dead. This was a new kind of worry—not the frantic, acquisitive mode he knew so well but a gnawing concern he’d never felt before. He was also diagnosed with diabetes, which only compounded his fears. And every moment he spent with Janu increased the anxiety.

  Veer saw a lot of himself in Janu. Their hair tufted across their foreheads in the same direction. Janu’s feet had the same raised arches, and Veer sometimes rubbed them in case they hurt like his own. At night, he sang Janu old Hindi lullabies, and in the morning crooned new Bollywood pop songs as he got him ready for the day. The old songs were poetic, heavy; the new ones were simple and light.

  Every day that Janu grew bigger, Veer worried more about money.

  For Maya, the year after Janu’s birth passed quickly, with no time for such anxieties. Between the baby, the lost sleep, and the housework, she hardly had a free moment to think. And before what seemed like no time it was almost Janu’s first birthday, and Veer’s thirty-sixth, for which she knew she should do something special. For days, she surfed the Internet in search for the perfect gift.

  Her idea was to get them matching T-shirts, customized, but she couldn’t find one in Janu’s small size. Finally, she came across a personalized clothing website, still in demo mode, that promised to “design anything, any size, anytime.”

  When she called the number on the site, a man answered in a baritone voice that was calm and steady. Maya already felt better. “Whatever you want, I can make it,” he told her. He said his name was Subal. He stayed on the phone with her for a long time, making sure she had what she needed.

  Maya called Subal several more times to talk about the order. They also exchanged a few e-mails to ensure the design and product was perfect. Several weeks later, she received the order, just in time for the big day.

  At the birthday party, she snapped a photo of Janu and Veer in their new T-shirts and sent it to Subal, so he could see his handiwork. Both grinned goofily in the picture—Veer all teeth and Janu all cheeks, a miniature version of his father.

  * * *

  It was around Janu’s first birthday that Maya also proposed to Veer that she go to work. Though she was overwhelmed with the baby, she had an idea, long brewing, to open a preschool, and now felt like the right time to do it. She suggested setting up a franchised school, which would be easier. It would have up-front costs but could make them real money in the long term.

  Her school would be nothing like the ones she’d attended in Hyderabad, where the teachers taught in a mechanical fashion, without any nuance or empathy. And where the children often felt unsafe because a teacher or guard tried to touch them. This happened in Hyderabad, and it happened in Mumbai; perhaps it did in every village and city. In her school, she’d make sure no child ever felt that way.

  But from where will the money come? Veer thought. Perhaps he could ask his father. He knew that many preschools shut down within just a few years in Mumbai, a crowded market. And yet he also knew most of the schools weren’t any good. He had faith Maya could open something better.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  With the help of a loan from Veer’s father, Veer and Maya bought a two-story villa in a nearby suburb heavily populated by young families. They painted the building in soft colors and hung signs with photos of cherubic children’s faces out front. Maya hired about a dozen teachers, all female, and a male watchman who was not allowed inside the building. They planned for Janu to be one of Maya’s first students and expected to turn a profit within three months.

  The preschool was not successful in that time. Not even close. After a year, it was still not profitable, because they had not attracted enough students, and Maya had to ask Veer for more money. But she worked harder to advertise, and, after many months, she got her first full class. After that, the new students kept coming. And coming. Word spread about the new preschool that was different from the others, because it was upscale and clean and did not teach by rote. It combined Indian and international teaching concepts, and the teachers sang both English and Hindi nursery rhymes.

  Maya also hired teachers for their level of empathy, so that they could tell her how a child was doing and feeling. She wanted teachers who could guess what was happening at home—such as if a child’s parents were divorcing or a man in the neighborhood was a sexual predator. As she did paperwork in her office, she loved to listen to the teachers celebrate the children’s little triumphs or find creative ways to assuage their fears. When parents waited anxiously outside the fence at the end of the school day, they were greeted by mostly smiling children. The preschool soon became the most trusted in the area. Before long, Maya and Veer broke even.

  As the money came in, Veer felt his worries about death subside. If tomorrow I have to go and say Jai Shri Krishna, good-bye, he thought, I won’t be disturbed. I will be at peace.

  Maya was grateful for the money Veer had given her to open the business. But she soon saw his help would end there. She had assumed he would want to talk about the preschool with her. But every time she brought up a problem at the school, he told her, “It’s your work, Maya.” Or “It’s not my thing to be involved in at all.”

  Okay, so he’s not interested even in this aspect of mine, she thought. He was only interested in his own work. Even this school he doesn’t want to have a part in.

  Maya realized why he’d agreed to let her open the school. It was not to support her idea. It was to get her off his back. It was so she would not nag him at work. But she wasn’t going to let him off that easily.

  6 p.m.

  “Please come home, Kancha.”

  “I have to work.”

  “But Janu.”

  “I have to work.”

  “I feel lost here. Can you come home by at least eight in the night?”

  8:45 p.m.

  “Where are you? I have been calling.”

  “I’m coming,” he said. “Soon.”

  “Please come, Kancha. Just come.”

  10 p.m.

  “Where are you? . . . I need to cook. I need to do all these things
. There is a baby.”

  “I can’t make it. You have to manage by yourself.”

  “But I need you.”

  “Find yourself a maid,” he said. “Do what you want to do.”

  Veer didn’t understand why Maya couldn’t see he had to work. Sometimes, it felt like she was a flame that needed constant oxygen to keep burning. Once, he had been attracted to her passion, but now he found it suffocating. He wanted to make her happy, but it seemed like no effort was enough.

  He had wanted her to work not just for money but so she wasn’t idle. If you are alone, you are a devil’s mind, he thought. You have nothing to do so you make up stories about people in your own family, in other people’s families, and everything is in your head. He had thought that when she went to work, there would be less drama between them.

  At home, Maya wondered how, in the City of Dreams, she could sometimes feel so alone. Veer had recently told her he didn’t believe in romance. He’d said he didn’t believe in love. For him, he said, there was one language in Mumbai, and that was the language of money. “Shall I buy a dress with rupees on it to get you to love me?” she replied in a fury.

  Sometimes, when Veer did not answer her calls all day, and Maya felt especially alone, she played the song “Dil Hoom Hoom Kare,” or “My Heart Is Gasping,” from the old film Rudaali. The song was sung by Lata Mangeshkar, the most beautiful and haunting of the playback singers, over the sounds of flutes and drums. The film was about a rudaali, a female professional crier, of which there were many in Rajasthan, where Maya and Veer’s families were from. Rudaalis cried at the funerals for the people no one would cry for.