The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

by Elizabeth Flock

  After the divorce went through, Sabeena’s brother quickly found a new wife. His position in the community was secure. Shahzad was proud of his role in safeguarding it. But he also couldn’t help thinking back to the doctor’s report. It is no wonder he could marry again so quickly, he thought. With a sperm count that high, a man was capable of anything.

  A few weeks after his marriage, Sabeena’s brother and his docile new wife came to Shahzad and Sabeena’s house for a meal. Sabeena bustled around the kitchen. She rarely had the opportunity to serve her extended family at home. But before long Shahzad’s father appeared.

  “Why did you all come here?” he shouted from a corner of the room. “Who called you?”

  As Shahzad’s father stood and glared at them, Sabeena’s brother and new wife stayed silent.

  “Go away,” Shahzad told him, finding a voice he did not know he had. “You are mad,” Shahzad continued, his shaky voice growing stronger. “You don’t know anything about how relations are. You go inside.”

  Surprised, Shahzad’s father retreated. But the meal was already ruined. “I’m very sorry,” Shahzad told Sabeena’s brother. “No, don’t worry,” he said, as they stood up to go. “I know your father, Sabeena told me.”

  After this incident, Sabeena was dejected for days, and Shahzad made it a point to get her out of the house more often. He was sorry he hadn’t done so more in the intervening years. They began going to Chowpatty Beach again, though not by scooter, because in all those years Shahzad’s driving had not improved. Instead they went by taxi, with the windows down, so they could feel the fresh air.

  At Chowpatty the water was dirty with the debris of past festivals and neglect. Garbage collected at the place where the Arabian Sea met the sand, and the water was unsuitable for swimming. And yet many couples went parking at Chowpatty, because the breeze was always cool after a scorching Mumbai day. The view of the city was also magnificent as the darkness set in. By this hour, the lights of Marine Drive began to gleam like pearls, a sort of mirage that gave the road its nickname, the “Queen’s Necklace.”

  One night, as Shahzad and Sabeena sat at the beach’s edge, looking out at fellow beachgoers, they considered their life together. It had been a hard stretch of years, but Shahzad thought maybe things were getting better. It is so nice to do timepass like this, he thought.

  Sabeena also felt content. She had always loved Chowpatty, and now, with the breeze on her skin and the wind pulling at her dupatta, she felt at peace. They didn’t need to speak. It was enough to sit in silence, gazing out at the churning sea.

  The beachgoers that night were mostly teenage couples, looking carefree as they stood on the sand eating falooda, kulfi, and butterscotch ice-gola, the liquid streaming down their arms. But dozens of kids also ran along the beach, circling the balloon sellers and other toy hawkers and digging deep holes in the sand. They screamed with excitement as they rode the miniature Ferris wheel. And they begged their parents for ice-gola or to go swimming in the murky water.

  As Shahzad watched the children, he felt a rising anxiety, more than usual. He could not bear to look at them and hear them laugh and scream.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Shahzad told Sabeena. “Please.”

  After that, they did not make the trip to Chowpatty Beach again for a long time.

  * * *

  Shahzad began visiting doctors again. They all gave him the same report as before—low sperm count, no other problems—with the exception of a female doctor, who had a different take. “Your body is perfect,” she said. “Maybe it’s your brain.”

  The female doctor recommended seeing a psychiatrist, which was becoming less taboo in the city, though suicide remained a crime and confidentiality was poorly regulated. The government had begun warning that many millions of Indians needed counseling and weren’t getting help. Shahzad decided to see the psychiatrist but not tell anyone outside of his family. The doctor was a handsome, thin man with a beard, a fellow Muslim, who gently asked Shahzad what was on his mind.

  “How can I forget her?” Shahzad blurted out.

  Diana. He had not meant to say her name. But then he told the doctor everything, ending with how their friendship fell apart.

  He also told the doctor about being childless. He talked about the shame he felt around his neighbors and the burden of not being able to give a child to Sabeena, which sometimes felt too much to bear. And he went back further, to his uncle’s death, their fight, and how everyone had blamed Shahzad. “If you think about it this way, it will come again and again in your mind. The fact is we will all go inside someday,” to heaven, the doctor said.

  Shahzad told the doctor about the hand washing too, how he did it compulsively, often before or after eating. He told him how he still felt the dirt from his uncle’s grave beneath his nails. Sabeena had begun to complain because Shahzad asked her to scrub the house even when it was clean. After Shahzad finished talking, the doctor prescribed him a multipurpose drug for depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. “It will calm your mind,” the doctor said. “Just for now. Come back again, and next time I will reduce it.”

  A few months after Shahzad started the medicine, Sabeena noticed a change in him. He seemed less anxious. He began sleeping better. And he washed his hands less frequently. He even told goofy jokes more often, such as: Husband: Do you know the meaning of wife? It means “without information fighting every time!” Wife: No, darling, it means “with idiot forever!” After telling a joke, he’d laugh his infectious laugh until Sabeena joined in. She suspected he was also growing more confident, because, after years of trying, his real estate business was thriving.

  Shahzad mostly showed flats to local Muslim families. But being downtown also put him in contact with dozens of firangis—from England, France, the United States, and all over the world. As India’s economy expanded, expats had begun flooding in. Shahzad made friends with many of them, winning them over with his off-color jokes, florid style of dress, and oddly accented English. “He is an Englishman now,” Sabeena joked to the family, as he spent more and more time with firangis. But Shahzad had been fascinated by foreigners since his school days, when he’d studied French and first learned English. Sabeena’s English had never come as easily.

  As a real estate broker, Shahzad was not always good at his job. He arrived late to show houses, and keys often went missing. He showed people flats that didn’t fit their specifications. But he saved himself, as he always had, by being more honest than the other men in the business.

  Shahzad felt that showing flats showed him the whole world. He found flats for rich women and poor men, for Hindus, Muslims, and Catholics. One day, he found a house for a man who had transitioned to become a woman. Shahzad was familiar with hijras, which he also knew as eunuchs, a common sight on the streets of Mumbai. As far as he knew, these men were not really men and liked to parody women. They also cursed you if you did not pay for their blessing. But the woman he found the flat for was different. She lived like any other Muslim and was married to a man. And she had very specific needs for Shahzad: a dark house with plenty of privacy. She told Shahzad she had been teased as a child in Mumbai, gone to America to transition, and was now back to care for her mother. She worked as a makeup artist in Bollywood, where being transgender was more accepted, but otherwise did not go out in public much. She did not want neighbors watching her. Shahzad took her request to heart and found her the most private house he could.

  Before long, Shahzad expanded his brokerage business into a tourist business, offering all-India package tours or Mumbai darshans. He asked the firangis to meet him in his dingy office, which was on the second floor of a convenience shop in the Colaba tourist district downtown. He often started his darshans with a slum tour of Dharavi, once Asia’s largest slum and still India’s biggest, and where his family had property. There, the foreigners could feel a mix of pity and awe at all the poor, resourceful people and take photos of young, wiry men at sewing ma
chines or bent old men treating leather in a tannery. They were always amazed that these goods would find their way West. Afterward, Shahzad took them to the dhobi ghats, where they marveled at the endless rows of laundry and at how even the poor wore well-pressed clothes. Next, to lighten their mood, Shahzad brought them to the Bollywood studios, which he visited with the help of the transgender makeup artist. At the studios, the foreigners laughed at the dance numbers, calling them “cheesy,” and compared them to old Hollywood movies before they evolved beyond song and dance. To finish, Shahzad took them on a night tour of Marine Drive and Chowpatty, where the lights of the Queen’s Necklace gleamed. Often, they spent the whole day getting in and out of an air-conditioned car, which blocked out the heat and stench and poverty but cost a whopping four thousand rupees to rent for the day. Shahzad was amazed by how foreigners lived.

  But then, in 2008, the terror attacks on Mumbai happened, and the foreigners stopped coming. On Shahzad’s TV, a newscaster said that men were on the ground with guns in Mumbai, in multiple locations.

  Leopold Cafe, where all the tourists went for beer, was among the first targeted. Eight people in the café were killed. Two bombs also went off in taxis in the suburbs; downtown, young men wielding AK-47s opened fire in Mumbai’s famed Victoria Terminus, not far from Shahzad and Sabeena’s home. As they sprayed bullets across the open hall, commuters screamed and ran and fell. At a Jewish center, the gunmen took hostages. They tried to enter a women and children’s hospital, but the nurses had turned off the lights and locked the doors to confuse them. The gunmen also stormed the Taj Mahal Hotel.

  The Taj sat, proud and opulent, across from the Gateway of India, on the shore of the Arabian Sea. People described it as a wedding cake, with seven tiers of Gothic windows and hanging bays in tan and cream. The hotel employed some 1,600 staff and boasted 565 bedrooms and 11 restaurants. It was where dignitaries and rich firangis stayed, but it also had a grand lobby where anyone could sit, which Shahzad sometimes liked to do.

  Terrorist attacks were not a rarity in India, but this one was different. It was larger in scale and ambition. The gunmen had entered the city on a rubber dinghy at a fisherman’s village, not far from the Taj, as if attacking the city was easy, like a joke. And they targeted the places foreigners liked to go. The attack also took place over Thanksgiving in the United States, and so for three days Americans watched their TVs in horror as Mumbai was under siege. The terrorists took out men, women, children, rich, and poor. When the shooting and explosions ceased and the police had caught or killed the gunmen, the newscasters announced that 164 people were dead. The majority were Indian, but among them were some two dozen foreign nationals, six of them American.

  After the attacks, the foreigners stayed away. No one wanted to visit Mumbai, city of horrors. No one wanted to tour the slums or even play bit parts in Bollywood for a day. Shahzad’s brokerage and tour guide businesses suffered. But he was hopeful the tourists would return. And he held on to the firangi customers who stayed in Mumbai, though some of them talked about leaving. They said that a coordinated attack like this would be the first of others.

  India held Pakistan responsible for the attacks, but Pakistan denied it had played a role. Rumors flew that sweets had been distributed in Pakistan to celebrate the siege. But that same year Pakistan had forty terrorist incidents, and Shahzad knew there was plenty of blame to go around. Mumbai’s attacks, which began on November 26, became known as 26/11—like 9/11, which took place in America seven years before. And extremists were still trying to plot attacks on American soil. To Shahzad, it seemed that attacks could now happen anywhere, in rich and poor countries alike. This idea scared him—that violence was possible even in the places you would not expect.

  * * *

  It was after this that the Dictator got sick. First, he stopped wanting to eat. Then, he was unable to clean Byculla Market. At his hospital downtown, the doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Shahzad’s family went to another hospital, and a third, until they were told it was cancer.

  For more than twelve months, the Dictator was confined to his bed. This was a difficult year, not as much for Shahzad, who often came home late from work, but for Sabeena, who took on the role of her father-in-law’s maid and live-in nurse. Her days were already overscheduled, with endless laundry to clean, meals to make, and prayers to perform. Now, on top of all her duties, she also had to tend to the Dictator’s health and whims. When his appetite returned, he demanded food from Sabeena at odd hours, calling out in the middle of the night: “Cut me an apple!” and “Make me fish!”

  Sabeena always did what he asked. But she worried about Shahzad’s mother. It was a fine line to walk—tending to her father-in-law’s needs while not making his wife jealous. She worried Shahzad’s mother would grow upset.

  One day, as Sabeena sat next to Shahzad’s father to keep him company—though his company was very poor—Shahzad’s mother became suspicious. She looked at Sabeena beadily and shouted: “You are making like you are a sweet dish at my husband, a gulgule.”

  Sabeena controlled herself and did not reply. If she did, she knew there would be a fight. Later, she and Shahzad laughed about it, whispering in their bedroom in the dark. Gulgule! Like a sweet dish. Her mother-in-law was a genius.

  Before long it was Bakri Eid again, and Sabeena had to help Shahzad’s mother with the preparations. After the cutting of the goats, and after the women cooked the meat, the men went out to distribute the leftovers to friends and family and the poor. A few hours after Shahzad had gone out, Sabeena got a call from the police.

  “Your husband has been in an accident,” an officer said. “It is a bad accident. Come to the hospital right away.”

  Sabeena, always the picture of calm, began screaming. It felt like the moment she had learned of her father’s death.

  Together, Sabeena and Shahzad’s mother ran to the government hospital where Shahzad had been taken. When they arrived, Shahzad was unconscious, with stitches zigzagging across his head.

  They were told Shahzad had been on his scooter coming back from Byculla Market when he collided with a Parsi man’s car. It was unclear who was at fault. But it was lucky it had been a Parsi, because Parsis, a tiny community of Persian origin, were known to be wealthy and conscientious. True to type, the Parsi man paid a visit to the hospital with his mother and father and even offered Shahzad’s family a watch or money as compensation. Though they were likely trying to avoid a police case, Shahzad’s family found it extraordinary they showed up at all.

  Meanwhile, Shahzad was not waking up. The whole night, Sabeena and Shahzad’s mother lay on the floor beside him, crying and praying for his recovery. They both slept in their salwar kameez, the folds of their dresses serving as blankets, and their dupattas too-thin pillows.

  In the morning, Shahzad opened his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Shahzad asked his neighbor, who had come to the hospital after hearing the news, and now stood over his bed. Shahzad turned to Sabeena. “What happened to me?” he asked.

  “You’re in a hospital,” Sabeena said. “You had an accident.”

  “You’ve just fallen from the bike and gotten a little hurt,” Shahzad’s mother said, gruff again now that it seemed her son would get well.

  And then Shahzad remembered. He had been out distributing meat on his scooter when he had seen Diana. Diana, whom he once distributed meat to every Bakri Eid, before she cut him out of her life. She had been sitting in a taxi. Through the window, he could see her fat cheeks, red lips, and cascading dark curls. He had blinked and then her taxi was gone. He’d been rattled but drove on to Byculla Market to give his lawyer a package of meat. After that, he’d headed toward home. And then he had seen Metro Cinema looming before him—he was close to home now—when the Parsi man’s car appeared. That was when everything went black.

  Diana, his good luck charm. And now look where he was. It was not Diana but Sabeena who had come to see him. It was Sabeena who sl
ept in her clothes on the floor. Later, when Shahzad got home from the hospital, his father shouted at him: “I told you not to go on the motorcycle. Why were you driving?”

  Even Shahzad began to wish his father would die.

  It was a searing hot day, six months after, when they got the call. The Dictator wouldn’t make it until morning. At the same time, the world’s seven billionth baby, Nargis, was born, an Indian baby chosen symbolically to represent the country’s swelling population. Every minute, fifty-one babies in India were born. Every minute, ten people in the country died. The doctors said the Dictator had stopped swallowing food, even after they had put a hole in his throat.

  But before this, Shahzad’s father had done something unexpected. He had told his wife he was sorry. He’d begun crying and said, “I made a mistake. I never looked after my children.” He even showed his hands, as if in a sign of apology. “I treated you all bad, I did not treat you all good.”

  He did not say this to Shahzad, but his mother told him afterward, which was enough.

  The apology reminded Shahzad of a moment in Mughal-e-Azam, when the Emperor Akbar seeks his son’s forgiveness. Akbar tells his son he is not an “enemy of love” but “a slave of my own principles.” Perhaps Shahzad’s father had been a slave to his illness or his cruelty.

  Now, Shahzad and the family crowded around the bed, where his father lay, unmoving. After a little while, Shahzad thought he saw a small movement beneath the sheets. “See, his stomach is still there. He’s breathing,” Shahzad said. “No, it’s the ventilator,” another family member told him. “He is already gone.”