India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  ‘Now our place is party central and all our friends are following suit,’ adds Garima.

  Garima tells me that she was the focus of neighbourhood opprobrium for a while. She heard people whispering not so discreetly about the slut who lived in the divorcee’s apartment, who smoked cigarettes on the balcony. She, being a woman, bore the brunt of the abuse. Suketu was regarded as a bystander, even a victim.

  ‘It’s been six months now, and we have been accepted by the community. It’s typical Indian schizophrenia. While something is hot they go crazy over it, and they’ll forget about it just as quickly, especially when you send them birthday cake or Diwali sweets,’ says Garima.

  As for parents, they both shrug, and Suketu says, ‘We have our own lives now. They live far away and can’t really dictate our lives. I don’t talk to my parents about my personal life. And they don’t really ask.’

  Today, unmarried couples living together is not the norm. Instances like Garima and Suketu’s are still rare, but they are common enough for laws to be changed. In early 2010, a landmark verdict by the Supreme Court legalized live-in relationships in India. The apex court stated that if two sound-minded adults of the opposite sex wanted to live together without getting married, it was not a crime. This verdict was reached in response to twenty-two charges of criminal offence filed in 2005 against South Indian actress Khushboo after her statement to magazines supporting live-in relationships and premarital sex in India. The argument of the counsel was that her endorsing premarital sex would adversely affect the minds of young people, which would lead to the decay of the country’s moral values. The response of the three-judge bench was that two people living together was not an offensive act. They justified their stance saying that according to Hindu mythology, even Lord Krishna and Radha lived together.

  The Supreme Court went on to state that a live-in relationship qualified as a ‘relationship in the nature of marriage’, if four requirements are met. First, the couple must hold themselves out to society as being akin to spouses. Second, they must be of legal age to marry. Third, they must be qualified to enter into a legal marriage, and fourth they must have voluntarily cohabited for a significant period of time. Such a relationship would come under the jurisdiction of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, and the Hindu Marriage Act of 1976 would allow for children from such a relationship to be legitimate, establishing succession and property rights.

  Most Indian parents believe that live-in relationships are anathema. Even after two people get engaged, meetings between them are monitored because the widely held belief is that intimacy creates contempt. You risk learning about the deficiencies of your partner, and you may opt out, whereas after marriage you won’t have any choice but to adjust. Perhaps the most significant issue is that of the woman’s chastity. Most Indian parents feel a perverse sense of duty towards their daughter’s chastity and fear greatly that it may be lost. Live-in relationships bring their worst fear to life.

  Today in urban India, many young Indians are questioning the views of their parents. They watch television shows like Friends, and they wonder how they can spend the rest of their lives with someone without a thorough understanding of their habits, their peccadillos, and their peculiarities, which only comes with intimate knowledge of one another. Kareena Kapoor, a Bollywood star, and an icon to millions of young people recently spoke out in public in support of live-in relationships. She said, ‘we shouldn’t try to be traditional when we are living in a modern world… We only claim to understand the modern values in our society, but unfortunately, in our minds, we are still stuck in a time frame of years ago.’248

  The age-old formula of marry first and then love will follow is being questioned as people become keenly interested in romance, love, self-discovery and exploration. People are becoming increasingly experimental, and marriage is competing with new relationship paradigms—dating, live-in relationships, and even more brazen options such as open marriages. And if somewhere love follows, elsewhere it fades. Ninety-four percent of Indian couples say they’re ‘happy’ in their relationships, but the majority of the same sample group say they would not marry the same person or marry at all if given a choice again.249 ‘Unless we’re ready to discard our new notion of marriage as a personal domain rather than a cultural or familial one, we’d better get used to its vulnerabilities, which are entwined with these higher standards of love and empathy.’250

  New relationship paradigms are emerging because of a change in middle-class morality and decreasing stigma. A greater number of working women are able to withstand social pressures due to their relative economic independence. As more and more young people move away from home to study and work there are greater opportunities for experimenting with relationships other than marriage. There is also a slow change in the idea of marriage providing a ‘happily-ever-after’. Another significant aspect that has affected relationships is the loosening of the belief that the most significant form of sexual relationship is the one that relates to reproduction.251

  I met Garima while conducting interviews for a research assistant to help me with my book. Garima, twenty-six at the time, was finishing up her PhD, and was a lecturer.

  Though Garima was not the most qualified of the candidates I had interviewed, I felt like she was the most intelligent and understood the kinds of things that the job demanded—identifying interviewees, recording, and then transcribing the hundreds of interviews I would be conducting around the country. We got along well, and I could imagine spending an extended amount of time with her. Also, since she was the same age as me, I thought that she would provide an interesting perspective.

  Although Garima isn’t beautiful in the classical way, she is attractive, with her small, curvaceous body, her gamine haircut, her baccate nose and pixie-like face. She is a bright girl, and I can see how she may have had her way with men. When I had interviewed her, she had laughed and told me that she was a connoisseur of sex. I was sold, and I hired her on the spot.

  Over the months that Garima worked for me, I got to know her well, and many things about her lifestyle stunned me. She slept only three to four hours a night, she drank and got stoned regularly (I guessed ten times a week) and she missed thirty working days (of a part-time job) on account of either funerals or weddings.

  One day, two hours after her reporting time, Garima sauntered into my office. Her hair was in disarray, her face was coated with a layer of oil and dullness, and her breath stank of garlic. She was fretting because she hadn’t got her period yet and she was afraid she was pregnant. She was furious with Suketu for letting this happen. She told me that Suketu was a worthless guy, she was the one paying all of his bills, that all he did was lie on their couch and feed the kittens. If she was pregnant, who would pay for the abortion?

  She had asked Suketu to contribute to the household expenses, so he had finally taken up a job at a Cafe Coffee Day. He felt that this was below his dignity and that he was much too intellectual for this kind of work. She said that he preferred taking worthless courses billed to his parents and surviving at her expense. Now, to make it all worse, he had made her pregnant, because he disliked wearing a condom, because that too hurt his male pride. Garima was obviously in no mood to work.

  Suketu had just finished a master’s in psychology at Delhi University and was now doing a graphic designing course. He was unsure about what he wanted to do in terms of a career, but he wanted to build up his resume by taking short courses, standard approach used by students taking advantage of the booming and inexpensive private education industry in India.

  I found it ironic that Suketu’s parents paid for his classes, but he didn’t feel the need to tell them about his living arrangements. Not that he was very different in his attitude from many of his peers—many kids feel it is their parents’ duty to look after them as long as they are alive, and their parents seem to go along with it. As long as this equation continued, nothing would change.

  Technically, Gar
ima had had sex when she was twelve years old, with another girl, who stuck a finger inside her. Mamta was her best friend and they did everything together; they studied together, played cricket together and even bathed together. One day Mamta suggested that they play a new role-play game, not their usual favourites, doctor-doctor, or teacher-teacher, but mummy-papa. According to Mamta’s rules, based on keenly observing her parents, both of them had to take off their frocks, slips, and panties and lie naked together underneath the sheets. Mamta had kissed her on her mouth, touched her everywhere, stuck her pinkie finger inside her ‘pee-pee’, and Garima hadn’t stopped her. It had felt strange, and she had felt nervous, like she felt before her exams, and somehow she hadn’t minded the pain.

  Even though Garima’s first sexual experience happened early in life (though she didn’t realize it till much later), her first sex education came at the age of fifteen. She had been waiting in an auto rickshaw outside the bank while her mother ran in to deposit some cheques. There must have been a long queue because Garima was waiting for quite a while. The auto driver turned around and asked her if she knew how she was born. The auto driver was young, sixteen or seventeen, she remembers, and painfully thin, with a tiny head. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, so Garima didn’t think twice about chatting with him.

  ‘Yes,’ she had said, ‘I was born from my mother’s stomach.’

  ‘But how?’ he had persisted. ‘Do you know how?’

  ‘Yes, my mamma became pregnant, and then I was born.’

  ‘But how did she become pregnant?’

  ‘Like all mothers do,’ she had replied coolly.

  At fifteen, she didn’t know much about sex, her parents never talked about, she never spoke about it with friends, nothing was shown on TV, and the age of the internet hadn’t yet arrived. The auto driver had put his hand on the bulge in his pants. ‘This goes inside your pee-pee. Touch it,’ he had said, and she had. This is when her mom hopped back in to the auto, and they had quickly buzzed away.

  What Garima experienced is not uncommon. Studies show that over 50 per cent of children in India are sexually abused, a rate that is higher than in any other country.252 In a repressive sexual culture with sex education almost non-existent, sexual abuse in India is becoming a serious enough problem that the government passed the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in 2012.

  Another evening, while playing chess at Garima and Suketu’s, I find myself caught in the midst of a heated discussion, the subject of which makes me feel impossibly old and behind the curve in terms of sexual knowledge. The discussion is based around how all of us are inherently bisexual, but that society’s contracts have screwed us up. I knew Garima had had several lesbian experiences, the most recent one with her first cousin. I hadn’t inquired about Suketu’s sexual tendencies, but based on the conversation, I gathered that he’d had at least a few homosexual experiences, as had many of their friends. I could not contribute in any productive fashion to this conversation since I had never had any of these experiences that they said were so common. I felt immobilized in amber and wondered if my attitude was retrograde. Suketu, Garima and I are all the same age, but it seems that the disconnect between us in terms of sexual experience is vast. I wonder how I’d got left behind, especially since I was the one who was the most widely travelled and exposed to the world.

  As I am mulling over this, a couple enter the apartment—a frail, pleasant girl, who drops off some groceries on the kitchen counter and smiles politely at me; she is with an equally pleasant boy. They go into Garima’s bedroom, shutting the door. A few minutes later the door opens to let Pugli in, and then a few minutes later, a bare arm sticks out to let in Pidi. A few minutes later, I hear what are the unmistakable sounds of tender intimacy, which make me increasingly uncomfortable. Suketu and Garima, though, do not flinch, and continue to discuss bisexuality. Sounds of violent lovemaking ricochet off my eardrums. The sounds are so overwhelming that I can’t help but visualize what is happening inside the bedroom. They don’t even seem to be trying to do it quietly, but except for me, no one here is self-conscious, not the frail couple nor their hosts. Suketu looks at me and smiles, ‘If you think this is loud, you should hear the couple next door. They break the bed.’

  I hear frantic shrieks, clearly the end is near, and then gasps, and then shortly afterwards, the cats are let out. Twenty minutes later, the frail couple emerge, they uncork beers and are unreserved about their satiation and delight, kissing each other tenderly in the kitchen. I can’t look them in the face after what I have heard, so I decide to leave.

  The sticky evening has melted into a deliciously cool, cloudless night. Everywhere there are people, crowds and crowds of people, miniature cars crammed with people, rickshaws, a family of four, sometimes even five or six on a motorbike meant for two, two children squeezed in between an overweight mother, and a father sitting on the tip of the nose-shaped seat. One tiny bump and he would so easily slide off.

  In this overcrowded country, places for physical intimacy are limited; parks are crucial sites, and so are cars, if you are lucky enough to own one. Few young people live on their own.

  Economist Abhijit Banerjee in a recent article alludes to the inequality of access to sex that he feels is leading to greater sexual violence. He writes, ‘If you are poor in urban India or even middle class and 25, you have be very lucky to have a room of your own in the family home, let alone a separate apartment that you can call your own. I remember walking home from our mutual adda one evening some 30 years ago in Kolkata with an acquaintance who lived somewhere in the neighbourhood, feeling slightly puzzled when he stopped on the way to have one more cup of tea before he went home. It was late, past dinnertime so I asked naively, “Tea this late?” He hesitated for a moment and then explained—he goes home after everyone else has eaten because there is no place to sit or sleep till they have all had dinner and gone to bed and the dining area is vacated. He was substantially older than me, perhaps 25 and had some kind of job, but clearly there was no way he could afford to get married—where would they sit together, where would they sleep?’253

  It was understandable then that Garima and Suketu’s friends would come over to have sex, there were just three people listening. In the hostel where they lived, there are probably one hundred. After spending all those years in America, I believe in space, lots of it. I need my space, from my boyfriend, from my parents, sometimes even from myself, but the concept of personal space simply does not exist here. Most people have never had their own room growing up, they have never had their own hostel rooms, they have never lived alone, and they probably never will. So they learn to share everything, particularly, especially—space. Even the most intimate of activities, like having sex is done in shared spaces, with everyone around shutting their eyes and ignoring it, pretending nothing is happening. It is normal to have sex like this, they saw their parents doing it when they were growing up, muffling their moans with their pillows, and now they were doing it themselves.

  After six months of Garima’s employment, which consisted of hanging out in my small home office after arriving straight from long, hedonistic nights (the telltale signs showing), napping on my couch curled up in a little ball, and taking showers in my bathroom, I took the difficult decision of firing her. The ex-corporate in me demanded some modicum of propriety. Unfortunately, she was quite unhappy, but I had little choice. Most, if not all, of our attempts at ‘work’ had been futile. She had been hired to help me research my book, and had quite gratefully become a subject when I had asked her to, but she failed to strike a balance between subject and researcher.

  A few months later, I received a surprise phone call from Suketu asking me if I wanted to go for a motorcycle ride. He was persistent, and I was curious about why he wanted to meet me. The first thing Suketu told me when we met was that he had broken up with Garima. He had moved into a hostel, and she into a smaller, cheaper apartment. She was still teaching and had almost completed he
r PhD.

  That windy, silver-mooned night, Suketu opened up to me. He told me of his love for Garima, and how he had imagined living the rest of his life with her, wandering, learning, exploring. When they broke up, he felt he had to radically change his lifestyle to cope with the grief. He quit his job at the coffee shop, applied for a PhD, and visited his parents in his Kolkata. Shockingly, he admitted that he was even thinking of an arranged marriage.

  ‘She cheated on me, and I didn’t like that, that too with that ex of hers. I want to be with someone, but don’t trust my choice, so maybe an arranged marriage is better,’ he said with a resigned sigh.

  ‘That ex in Bangalore?’ I asked. Garima had spoken profusely of her divorced ex-boyfriend.

  ‘Ya, that dweeb. She went to Bangalore for some work and stayed with him. I didn’t like that, but it was okay because she didn’t have a place to stay. When she came back, she wouldn’t have sex with me for, like, two weeks, and I knew something was wrong. I read her journal, and well, you know. It was the beginning of the end,’ said Suketu.

  Garima was an avid journal-keeper. I remembered this from the time she was working for me. When she was supposed to be researching, I often caught her scribbling away in her candy-coloured notebook.

  After an ice cream at India Gate, Suketu dropped me home. I gave him a hug and asked him to stay in touch. I wasn’t sure why Suketu had called me. Maybe he thought that Garima still worked for me and I could give him some information about her. He had seemed disappointed when I told him that she no longer did. I was sad about Garima and Suketu’s break-up. They were happy together, at least most of the time. I also knew that they loved each other. Perhaps in the world of arranged marriages, they would have been long married, but that isn’t what they wanted. They wanted to be weightless, to travel through life without the excess baggage of permanent relationships.

  I found both Garima and Suketu to be in lock-step with their counterparts in cities like Los Angeles or London where there is a well-established culture of dating and alternative relationships. There, people travel on a road well-travelled by previous generations. In India, most of the previous generations have had arranged marriages and a large part of society, like the narrow-minded realtors, or Garima and Suketu’s parents, are not accepting of new sorts of romantic arrangements. This makes it more difficult for a young couple to stay together. The necessary support to nurture a relationship is missing, especially a relationship as difficult as marriage. That is why Suketu was now considering an arranged marriage. He had told me that he couldn’t handle the pain of another heartbreak. He had gotten used to living with a woman, he enjoyed it, so maybe marriage, even an arranged marriage, wasn’t so bad after all.