The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  In the film, the rudaali befriends a woman whose life has been nothing but misfortune. The woman has suffered so much hardship that she can’t cry, not even when the rudaali tries to teach her. She doesn’t cry even when she realizes her lover is gone.

  * * *

  As Janu grew, Veer tried to make things better for Maya. He began paying for a full-time maid named Pallavi, a young and able woman from a nearby shanty. Most middle-class families had at least one servant, if not a maid, cook, and driver, and Veer decided they now could afford a maid, who could help cook, and also a driver. In the morning Pallavi made breakfast, cleaned dishes, and washed the clothes. In the afternoons she folded laundry, swept the house, and put out the trash. She had a slender but strong frame, wore flowery but functional saris, and kept her hair tied back in a long braid. She was warm and full of energy and good with Janu. She had a laugh like a bell. After she arrived, the house began to run more smoothly.

  Like many maids in Mumbai, Pallavi was married to a husband too lazy to find work. Maya tried to help by giving him a job as a security guard at the preschool, but before long he stopped showing up. Pallavi was not surprised. The two women did not tell each other much about their personal lives, but both knew when the other was troubled. Maya noticed it in the food Pallavi made, which was tasty or badly spiced depending on her mood. Pallavi saw it when Maya and Veer fought in the mornings as she moved quietly about the house. On these days, she sometimes made Maya special green tea or folded her clothes extra neatly. And she always tried to distract Janu from the fighting, by picking him up and singing to him. “Pallavi-ji,” he began calling her, as soon as he learned to talk. Pallavi would laugh at this nickname, a sign of respect for a maid. She spent as much time or more with Janu than with her own children.

  One evening, Veer came home with a BlackBerry for Maya, a gift he thought would make her feel less alone.

  Maya downloaded BlackBerry Messenger, an app that promised to “keep you connected with friends and family.” There was even a little check mark that showed when the person read your message. Maya thought it would make it easier to reach Veer at work. But it also opened up a new world of conversation, with half friends and acquaintances. Among them was the T-shirt maker, Subal.

  On Subal’s birthday, Maya sent him a message. After that, they began talking regularly. With the messenger app, it was easy to continue the conversation.

  At first, they chatted about their days and their work. He asked what she liked and didn’t like. Then they began talking about family. As they spoke, Maya found him charming and perceptive and saw that he gave good advice. She began to ask for his guidance on small matters, and then bigger ones, related to her preschool or Janu. After several weeks of messaging, she found herself confiding to Subal how often Veer was away.

  Before long Subal also told Maya about his wife, how they’d had a love marriage across religions—he was a Hindu, and she a Catholic—which hadn’t been an issue. But he said there were other problems. On Facebook, Maya found a photo of his family: a rotund little boy, a stout little girl, and a wife who was commandingly tall. Maya thought she was unpleasant-looking, with a shrewd smile and a horse-shaped face, though she did not tell this to Subal.

  As the weeks passed, Subal also began to ask Maya more personal questions—probing ones she didn’t want to answer. She wanted to remain somewhat of a cipher to a man she assumed she’d never meet. But she’d already told him some things she hadn’t told her closest female friends or family, whom she couldn’t always count on not to judge her.

  One day, months after they’d started exchanging texts, Subal implied in a message that Maya was just a typical Indian housewife: a woman who stayed at home and didn’t know much about the world. As Maya read his message, she was overcome by a fierce, almost irrational fury. That bastard, she thought, and was surprised by her anger at a man she’d never met. I’m going to show him who I am.

  For the first time, Maya sent Subal a photo of herself. In it, she wore glamorous sunglasses, a pastel pink blouse, and a short navy blue skirt. She stood barefoot in the surf in Goa, a region of white sand beaches and coconut trees. Veer had taken the photo. She sent it just as Subal took off on a plane home to Mumbai after a business trip. She wanted it to be the first message he saw when he landed.

  As Subal climbed into a rickshaw outside the airport in Mumbai, he opened the photo. He looked at it, and looked again. Could this really be the person I’ve been talking to? he thought.

  She was petite but shapely, and her hair was thick and unruly. Her skin was nearly as pale as the inside of a dragonfruit. But what struck him were Maya’s eyes, which were bright but sad and lined in dark kajal. She was a strange mix of the simple beauty of the girl next door with the mysterious glamour of a dance-bar girl.

  He typed a message: Should we meet?

  Maya read the message. She was twenty-eight. Janu was one and a half. The photos on the wall across from her desk showed him at different ages; over time, Janu’s eyes had grown bigger and his hair longer and wavier. There were still henna swirls on the linoleum floor from the Ganesh Chaturthi party. The painting of Krishna and Radha, two lovers on a swing, still hung above the kitchen table.

  Maya typed a response, hesitated, and then sent it.

  * * *

  On their fifth wedding anniversary, Veer forgot all about it. Or ignored it. Maya had flown from Hyderabad to Mumbai to be home in time to celebrate, but when she arrived, Veer didn’t mention the date. All day, he said nothing, until Maya texted him at work: Happy anniversary then.

  Do you want to do something? he wrote back.

  They made dinner plans, but Veer didn’t make it home until ten. When he finally walked in the door, Maya felt something snap in her. We can no longer ignore the elephant in the room.

  In the weeks that followed, Veer didn’t worry much about their colorless anniversary night. But it was all Maya could think about. At home, her thoughts ran. There’s nothing happening here. That formality thing doesn’t even exist. At times her resignation turned to a savage anger. Fuck this man. I’m not going to bother myself about it anymore.

  Maya and Veer began to fight whenever he was at home. Most days, they fought about banal, insignificant problems, like how warm the chai was or why Pallavi hadn’t shown up to work. But there were also bigger stressors: problems related to Maya’s preschool and Veer’s trips to Africa. Fights over how Maya needed more help caring for Janu. The most wounding questions—like why they had not had sex in almost a year, or why Maya made Veer feel like a wayward husband—flowed just under the surface but were not voiced aloud.

  Though they fought regularly, they tried not to shout in front of Janu. But Janu, who was almost two, was a precocious child, and it was possible he understood more than they realized. Sometimes, after they had a particularly bad fight, even with lowered voices, Janu would wet or soil his pants.

  Finally, Maya confronted Veer over dinner, as he sat eating under the painting of Krishna and Radha ecstatic on the swing. In a quiet, steady voice, she said she wanted a divorce.

  “There’s nothing between us, no physical relationship, no mental and emotional relationship,” she said. “Do you want to move on?”

  Maya knew that a divorce could cause her to lose her job, her home, and her reputation. She could even lose Janu; under the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, the natural guardian of a child over five was his father. While it was true that Mumbai’s unwritten rules for women were changing, she knew women could run into trouble if they overestimated the progress the city had made. More women were asking for divorce, but they never seemed to get the alimony money they were supposed to, and many were still so stigmatized they could not get or keep work. They lost friends. They lost family. They lost their money and property if they were in their husband’s name. But Maya decided it was worth the risk.

  After she spoke, Veer looked at her evenly, as if they were discussing cold chai. And then he said, “Take a year,
Maya. Wait it out another year and then see how you feel. If you still feel that way, then you can leave.”

  The clock with Hindi script ticked behind them. Veer spoke again. “And you can leave Janu with me.”

  Janu.

  His name had the desired effect. Maya got up and began clearing the dishes.

  The reasons a Hindu man or woman can ask for divorce are enumerated in the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955: religious conversion or entering a religious order; lack of cohabitation or lack of contact for years or death; an unsound mind or other mental illness; rape, sodomy, or bestiality; leprosy; adultery . . . and, as of an amendment in 1976: cruelty and desertion.

  Maya saw that none of these applied to them.

  In a year’s time, an amendment would be proposed to the Hindu Marriage Act allowing for divorce on the grounds of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage.” But it would not pass, because the populist politicians and the religious men would rail against it. They would warn of the breakdown of the Indian marriage, asserting that love marriages led to divorce. They would say that the world had entered the Kali Yuga, the age of vice predicted in the ancient Sanskrit texts. In the Kali Yuga, people sinned and lusted and left religion, lost their dharma, and broke their vows without care. They would point to how homosexuality had already been decriminalized, saying that India was being “disrobed” piece by piece by Western culture.

  There was no Hindi or Sanskrit word for divorce, because it was said even those who predicted the Kali Yuga had not conceived of such a practice.

  Veer did not want a divorce, at least not now. But he thought that the big disappointment of marriage was that a husband and wife did not stay friends. He and Maya had had an uncomplicated friendship before marriage. They spoke openly and laughed with ease. They shared their tensions with each other instead of creating new ones.

  When he considered their relationship now, he saw it in two lights: the “frank picture” and the “rosy picture.” The frank picture was that on the way home from the office, he often had to think about how he could avoid a fight. The frank picture was that their marriage took up so much time that could be spent working, and they laughed far less than they had before.

  But there was also the rosy picture: Maya was not like most Indian women. She did not misjudge people based on her own biases. She was not like the women who sat on folding chairs in hallways, gossiping the day away. Instead, she saw straight to the heart of people and their motivations, with an uncanny perceptiveness. She never gave a sugarcoated view. And she was supportive of Veer, even when he didn’t deserve it.

  Veer also knew that if he were not married, he might go out drinking with his cousin on weeknights and sleep out. He might drive himself into the ground with work, eat poorly, and his epilepsy could get worse. Maya was a reason to come home at the end of the day. Janu was very much a reason to come home at the end of the day. And on many nights, they still made each other laugh. The idea of divorce was unfathomable to him, at least when Maya still depended on him for money. He could not shirk that duty.

  But when Veer imagined life in the seaside shack, with a shop on the first floor to keep him busy, he didn’t always imagine Maya in it. He didn’t even imagine Janu there, who would be almost grown by then. Instead he imagined waking up alone to the sound of waves. He told himself he didn’t want to force Maya into his dream.

  * * *

  After Veer asked Maya for another year, she thought that maybe she had been mistaken, and that he did care for her after all. But then she found the messages on his phone. Maya remembers that Veer was in the shower, and she was in bed with a fever when she picked up his work cell phone to call a doctor.

  A text from the other Maya was on the screen. Disbelieving, Maya began to scroll through Veer’s messages. She found many messages from the other Maya, though they seemed to be forwards from Veer’s second phone, so they didn’t include the original messages he’d sent her. In her messages to him the other Maya called him “jaanu.”

  Jaanu. “Darling.” Like the English word: “baby.”

  Such as: Jaanu, I’m out of balance, I’ll call you in a little while.

  “What is this?” Maya asked when Veer came out of the shower. She showed him the texts on the phone.

  “There’s nothing,” he said.

  “She’s calling you ‘baby’ in the conversation,” said Maya. “That’s a little unbelievable.”

  He was quiet.

  “You call her right here in front of me.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Call her.”

  This wasn’t the first time. The year after they’d married, Maya had seen call logs that showed Veer was talking to her from the time he left work until the time he got home. Then, Maya had said, “Go ahead and talk to her, but don’t hide it from me.”

  “I’m not talking to her,” he’d said, and she let it go.

  Now, Maya saw that she’d been foolish. They hadn’t been talking as friends, or even as two people who once loved each other. They talked as if they were still intimate. Veer took his phone back, but later Maya sent the other Maya, who she knew was engaged to be married, a message from her own phone. Maya told her that what she was doing was not right.

  The message she received back was impudent; the other Maya said she’d never understand what they had.

  Maya, furious, replied: Let’s do one thing. I’ll forward these messages to your fiancé that you sent to my husband. If he understands then I’ll understand.

  The other Maya did not reply.

  Maya showed Veer the message she had gotten from the other Maya, the one that said she’d never understand. “As long as I’m your wife I need to understand what’s going on here,” said Maya, trying not to panic.

  “I think you’re overreacting,” he said.

  To Veer, this was not cheating. He maintained he had only met the other Maya twice in his life. He had never seen her again after she’d ended things, which was many years ago. Yes, they texted now and again. Yes, he still loved her. He still thought of his relationship with her as the most perfect it could have been. But that also meant it was in the past. Their relationship was forever caught in amber. And he was married now.

  Eventually, Maya dropped the argument. She did not know what else to do. And she did not text the other Maya’s fiancé. Let at least one marriage be intact, she thought. But her thoughts about Veer ran like a tape. Did I force him to marry me? Is he ever going to get out of loving this girl?

  She saw now that the other Maya was the love of his life. And she thought she understood why. Veer valued family above all else, and the other Maya had sacrificed their relationship for her family. The other Maya was the virtuous one, while she, Maya—who had risked her relationship with her father to marry Veer—was immoral. She was like the girl who eloped in the film Omkara, who also defied her father. In the film, another character asks: “How can anyone trust a girl who betrays her own father?”

  Veer had never trusted her. Never loved her. Never would.

  And, if that were the case, then Maya thought she might as well give up thoda compromise altogether. She would no longer compromise her ideals, and that meant no longer following the old religious rules, such as not eating meat, not cooking with garlic or onion, or being unclean during her period. She no longer owed him anything.

  * * *

  A month after Maya asked Veer for a divorce, she had to go for a three-day training course to Powai, where Subal, the T-shirt maker, had his office. After he had asked to meet, Maya put him off for many months. But they kept messaging, moving from talk of their daily lives to deeper, more personal subjects. When Maya mentioned she would be in Powai, Subal offered to pick her up and drop her back home. She hesitated but told herself there was no harm meeting once.

  It was Maya who saw Subal first. From the side of the car, at an angle where he could not see her, she saw his brushy mustache and shock of sandy gray hair. What am I doing here? she thought. Sh
e noticed his thick stomach. Why can’t people just take care of themselves? She considered turning around. But he was searching the sidewalk for her, and she noticed a brightness in his eyes. Her phone rang.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  In Subal’s memory, it was raining that day, and Maya was holding an umbrella as she spoke to a friend across the street. She wore a gray T-shirt and jeans. She looked beautiful and young—too young for him. Could this really be her? he thought. Maya doesn’t remember any rain, or an umbrella, only that she had been talking with her friend. When she climbed in Subal’s front seat, she folded her legs underneath her and sat back, trying to act relaxed.

  On the ride home to her suburb, which was more than an hour in traffic, Maya and Subal didn’t talk much. The conversation wasn’t stilted, but it didn’t have the easy rhythm of their messages. Subal kept noticing how warm she was in real life. She smelled good, strange; she wore men’s cologne.

  “This is on your way home, right?” Maya asked.

  It wasn’t. Subal lived in Thane, which meant he’d have to drive an hour north to drop her off, farther north around the city’s sprawling national park, then south to Thane. He’d make a giant loop, covering almost all of northern Mumbai.

  When they arrived at her apartment complex, driving coolly past the nosy guard at the gate, Maya said, “Do you want to come upstairs and take a coffee?”

  He said he’d just like to come use the bathroom.

  Janu was upstairs with Pallavi. When Subal came in, Janu tottered over to him. Maya watched, amazed. Janu was not very friendly with men. Like many Indian mothers, she had taught him not to be. And yet he had welcomed Subal without fear. She went into the kitchen to rummage for something for Subal to take home and brought out chocolates for his children. She noticed how tall he was, almost a foot taller, and how when he spoke it filled the room.

  That night, Maya told Veer that a man had driven her from Powai to home, then back to Thane. “Is that guy okay?” said Veer. “And are you?”