The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Read online

  Dedication

  To my dad and stepdad

  Epigraph

  Hermia: O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.

  Lysander: Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

  War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,

  Making it momentary as a sound,

  Swift as a shadow, short as any dream . . .

  The jaws of darkness do devour it up.

  So quick bright things come to confusion.

  —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Map of India

  Map of Mumbai

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue: Mumbai, 2014

  Devotion: Maya and Veer, 1999 to 2009

  Produce a Child, and God Smiles: Shahzad and Sabeena, 1983 to 1998

  A Suitable Match: Ashok and Parvati, 2009 to 2013

  Illusions: Maya and Veer, 2010 to 2014

  Fire in the Heart: Shahzad and Sabeena, 1999 to 2013

  Skywatching: Ashok and Parvati, 2013 to 2014

  In Time: Maya and Veer, 2014 to 2015

  Moving House: Shahzad and Sabeena, 2014 to 2015

  The Family Line: Ashok and Parvati, 2014 to 2015

  Epilogue: Mumbai, 2015

  References

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  Nine years ago, at the age of twenty-two, I moved from Chicago to Mumbai in search of adventure and a job, knowing no one in the city. I lived there for nearly two years. During that time—because I was restless and homesick—I stayed with half a dozen couples and families across the city and met many more. This is where my interest in the Indian love story began.

  In Mumbai, people seemed to practice a showy, imaginative kind of love, with an eye toward spectacle. Relationships were often characterized by devotion, even obsession, especially if two people could not be together. This kind of love played out on the movie screens, but it was also deep in the bones of India’s stories, in the Hindu scriptures and the Bhakti and Sufi devotional poems. I was young, and drawn to the drama.

  It was also a kind of love I admired, because it seemed more honest and vulnerable than what I knew. My parents divorced when I was very young, and after watching my father’s two subsequent marriages fall apart, I thought that perhaps this devotional quality was what they’d been missing. When I arrived in Mumbai after my dad’s third divorce, the city seemed to hold some answers.

  Out of all the people I met in Mumbai, three couples stood out from the rest. I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers. They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention. They seemed impatient with the old middle-class morals. And where the established rules for love did not fit their lives, they made up new ones.

  I began asking them questions about their marriages. I had no defined goal at first. Eventually, though, I quit my job at an Indian business magazine to write about them, drawn in by their love stories. I wanted to write about them to understand how their marriages worked.

  * * *

  The American journalist Harold Isaacs, who chronicled Asian life in the mid-twentieth century, once complained that Americans had only a few impressions of Indian people: as exotic (snake charmers and maharajahs), mystical (holy men and palmists), heathen (cow and idol worshippers), and pitiful (leprous beggars and slum dwellers).

  Isaacs was writing fifty years ago, but it seems that not much has changed since. The same tired stereotypes are still trotted out by Westerners. With a country as large as India, it is tempting to oversimplify. And in Mumbai, City of Dreams, it is easy to overromanticize.

  In reality, India is too big and diverse for generalities. It is home to a sixth of everyone on Earth and a bewildering array of languages, religions, castes, and ethnicities. And Mumbai is an unpredictable city. I was reminded of this when I returned five years after my accident and found things were not as I remembered.

  At home in Washington, DC, I had regularly questioned whether I was fit to write a book about Indian marriages. I wasn’t Indian, or married. But as the years passed, I saw that the book I wanted to read about India—that I wanted Americans to read about India—did not exist. Ultimately I decided to approach the subject the only way, as a reporter, I knew how: to go back to Mumbai armed with a dozen notebooks, a laptop, and a recorder.

  When I landed in Mumbai in 2014, the city, save for its skyline—which had more malls and high-rises—looked much the same. The people I knew did not. Their marriages did not. They were calling old lovers. They were contemplating affairs and divorce. And the desperate attempts they were making to save their marriages, by having children, in at least one instance, were efforts I recognized from my own family.

  Within each couple, one partner had begun dreaming of a different life while the other was still moved by old ideas. Where before their love stories had dazzled me, now they struck me as uncertain. I tried to make sense of what had changed. “Cities don’t change,” an editor in Mumbai told me with a sigh. “People do.”

  It was not just them. Indian historian Ramachandra Guha said that India is undergoing not one, but multiple revolutions: political, economic, urban, social, and cultural. In Europe and America, these revolutions were staggered. In India, these changes in cities and in people are happening all at once. And they seem to be upending the Indian marriage.

  Nowhere are these shifts happening faster than in Mumbai, India’s most frenetic city. And in no part of society is it causing more pain than among India’s middle class, which does not have the moral freedom of the very rich or very poor. Certainly, for all three couples I followed, the opinions of family, friends, and neighbors mattered very much. People will talk was a phrase I often heard when I asked why they didn’t do what they wanted.

  That, and: What you dream doesn’t happen. And yet I found our conversations would often end in dreaming, as they spoke of hopes for a bigger house, a better job, a trip to Kashmir, getting pregnant, falling in love again, or moving somewhere far away. Or they spoke of how their dreams had been deferred but would surely someday belong to their children.

  * * *

  This is a work of nonfiction. I began writing it when I first met these people in 2008, but the bulk of the reporting was done when I returned to them in 2014 and 2015. For months, I lived, ate, slept, worked, and traveled alongside them. We mostly spoke in English, though sometimes in simple Hindi. They spoke in both languages and others among themselves.

  I was present for many of the scenes detailed in these pages, but the majority that took place in the distant past were reconstructed based on interviews, photographs, e-mails, text messages, diary entries, and medical and legal documents. I interviewed each couple separately and together, formally and informally, over hundreds of hours.

  Even when I was not in India, we spoke constantly. So much that their intimate world in Mumbai often felt more real to me than my life in DC or New York. Despite the vast physical and cultural distance between us, it felt as if we were still in the same room. It was rare that I did not hear from one or several of them every day, often in a flood of messages: recent medical reports; news of a fight at home; photographs of children clowning around before bed.

  All the names of the people I wrote about in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. The names I’ve used were either chosen by them or are analogous in some way to their real names. In India—as in many places—names carry meaning.
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  In all instances, I have favored the Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and other foreign-language spellings that the people use themselves. I have also used the English translations of the Quran, Mahabharata, and other religious and sacred texts that they keep at home.

  This book could not have been written without the generosity of these three couples. In Mumbai, people will discourage you from saying thank you, but I am enormously grateful for how they opened their homes and their lives to me, even when it did not make them look good or wasn’t easy. I hope that this book honors their trust in me.

  In the end, these are three love stories among millions. I cannot pretend that they represent the whole of India, of Mumbai, or even of the city’s contemporary middle class. But, as a well-known Dushyant Kumar poem says, it is when pain grows “as big as a mountain” that walls quake, foundations weaken, and hearts change. I am certain these couples are not alone in their pain, or in their dreaming.

  Map of India

  Map of Mumbai

  Cast of Characters

  Maya and Veer, Marwari Hindus

  Maya, a school principal, also called Mayu

  Veer, a businessman, nicknamed Kancha

  Janu, their child

  Pallavi, the family maid

  Veer’s cousin and business partner

  Veer’s father and brothers, also partners in business, and Veer’s stepmother

  Maya’s father, a businessman, and Maya’s mother, a homemaker

  Ashni, Maya’s friend, a vice principal and, later, a shopkeeper

  Raj and Anika, Veer’s friends

  “The other Maya,” Veer’s former girlfriend

  Subal, a businessman and friend of Maya’s

  Shahzad and Sabeena, Sunni Muslims

  Shahzad, a chicken seller and, later, a real estate broker

  Sabeena, a homemaker

  Shahzad’s father, a landlord of Byculla Market, and Shahzad’s mother, a homemaker

  Sabeena’s father, a sexologist, and Sabeena’s mother, a homemaker

  Atif, a karate instructor and Shahzad’s closest friend

  Diana, a woman known around Byculla Market, who works in advertising

  Farhan, a teacher and, later, a mobile phone technician, and his wife, Nadine, a homemaker, who are Shahzad’s extended family

  Mahala and Taheem, Farhan and Nadine’s children

  Mamoo, a priest

  Zora, a salon owner

  Ashok and Parvati, Tamil Brahmin Hindus

  Ashok, a journalist and aspiring novelist

  Parvati, a student and engineer

  Parvati’s father, an engineer, and Parvati’s mother, a homemaker

  Ashok’s father, a jack-of-all-trades Anglophile, and Ashok’s mother, a homemaker

  Nada, works at a British company

  Mallika, a filmmaker

  Joseph, a student and engineer

  “The US boy,” works at a tech corporation

  Prologue: Mumbai, 2014

  pune: The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM)’s first experimental real-time monsoon forecast for this year predicts delayed monsoon advancement over the country. Scientists said that consequently the first spell of rainfall will be inadequate and scantier than normal. They said a low pressure system over the Arabian Sea is absent . . .

  The Times of India, May 21, 2014

  Maya and Veer

  In Mumbai, people say the monsoons make everyone fall in love. But this year the rains are late and the June nights are hot. So are tempers. Maya and Veer fight in the early mornings inside the bedroom of their eleventh-floor apartment, in a colony of concrete apartment buildings in a far-north suburb of the city.

  One morning, they fight so loudly it agitates four-year-old Janu, who is playing with his toys in his bedroom down the hall. He pushes the door open to their room to see his father, in dress pants and no shirt, shout and point a finger at Maya, who is seated on their low bed. “Do not raise your voice with my mother,” Janu says, in his grown-up way of speaking. “I do not like that. Say you’re sorry.”

  My superhero, thinks Maya. To her, Janu looks every bit the part, even though he is so little, with his dimpled chin and gelled hair combed off to one side, a single lock falling onto his forehead. Maya once thought Veer also looked like a superhero, with his glossy hair, open face, and irresistible smile. She didn’t even mind his six toes or lazy eye, which he said were signs of extra specialness and good fortune.

  “I’m sorry,” says Veer, not looking at Maya, as he gathers Janu up in his arms.

  In the days that follow, Veer and Maya hold their tempers in check. On cooler days, it is easier. And on a Sunday morning not long after, when several fragile clouds arrive to mercifully block out the sun, Veer surprises his wife and tells her he won’t go to work that Sunday.

  Ordinarily, Veer spends Sundays as he does every day: working long hours at the family aluminum foil business. After he leaves, Maya and Janu often board the local train to go to Crossword, a chain bookstore Maya loves for its fiction and coffee shop, and Janu for its toys. The shopkeepers let Janu play on the floor for hours while Maya sits hunched over a book, often by Rumi or Haruki Murakami. They will do anything for the attractive mother with the big, kohl-rimmed eyes and petite but curvy figure. Madame, they whisper to each other, looks just like a movie star. When Janu gets bored of playing, Maya takes him on her lap and tells him fantastical stories.

  “Let’s go to Crossword, Mayu,” Veer says now, using his pet name for her, which he seldom does these days. “I’ll come along this time.”

  If you are a stupid woman, Maya thinks, you’d say, “Well, at least he’s around, baba.” But she knows he only wants to come for Janu.

  “Okay,” she says, and gathers up her purse and Janu’s backpack and checks that she has both her phones. A text from Subal pops up on her screen. She reads it and then quickly puts her phone away.

  At the sight of Subal’s name her mind often wanders to that first day they spent at Aksa. Aksa Beach is just thirty minutes away by auto rickshaw, but it feels a world apart from the city’s pollution and chaos and noise. It is nothing like her frenetic suburb, once a quiet village and now one of the city’s most congested areas. But most of Mumbai’s suburbs are like this—officially a part of the city, and just as noisy and crowded as the downtown. Within minutes along the drive to Aksa, by contrast, the roads become slow and winding. Along the route are small, quiet rivers, where local people fish and young boys swim. And at the end of the road stands a grove of trees, which opens up onto a magical seaside hotel. Whitewashed and sprawling and encompassed by green, the hotel is called: “The Resort.”

  The Resort is their place. It is where Subal tried to steal a kiss in December, when there was a mild breeze. They ate from the breakfast buffet and sat talking for more than an hour beside the pool. The water was a clear, still blue, and the palm tree fronds hung over them. Maya found herself drawing lines on his palms. They both wanted something but did nothing. Then she and Subal had gone back again in May. May was the “Big Bang,” or so they called it—the day when the energy and tension between them led to a kind of explosion, everything out in the open at last.

  “Come on, Mayu,” Veer says, and Maya refocuses on her husband, who is holding open the front door. He stands next to a colorful lettered sign that reads: “Sukhtara,” which means “happy star.” It is the name Maya gave their home when they moved in.

  To her surprise, their Sunday goes as comfortably as the family scenes in the Tata phone commercials. A quiet car ride, followed by lunch at Bombay Blue, a trendy, air-conditioned restaurant in a central suburb of town, and then to Crossword, where Janu plays as Maya and Veer talk over iced coffee. Veer reads aloud to Maya the juvenile messages he received from old school friends that week, and Maya tells him about a teacher at her school who comes in with hickeys from her husband. Veer laughs uncertainly at this.

  At Crossword their phones are left unanswered. Maya purchases Sacred Games, an
English-language cops-and-robbers novel that is a kind of love letter to Mumbai. It is a thick book, and it has that perfect piney smell. They buy Janu a soccer ball, which he clutches all the way home. As they drive, Veer puts on a CD of old Bollywood love songs, and he and Maya sing along.

  But then Janu spots a KFC.

  “Drumstick,” Janu says, pointing to the red and white sign. “I want drumstick.”

  After Crossword, Maya often rewards Janu with fried chicken or some other meaty treat, because at home the meals are all vegetarian. Veer doesn’t eat meat, or even garlic or onions, nonnegotiable beliefs passed down from his staunchly Hindu family.

  “What’s a drumstick?” Veer asks.

  “I don’t know,” says Maya, who shushes Janu, and begins singing along again with the song. Veer joins in, though he sings more softly now.

  When dark falls, Janu is asleep at the foot of his parents’ bed, drumsticks long forgotten. He curls his arms around the legs of his father, who is already snoring. Veer will work longer tomorrow to catch up on the hours he lost not working Sunday.

  Maya gazes at the two sleeping figures, one large, one small. She moves Janu, who is shivering in the air-conditioning after the heat of the day, so that his head is on a pillow, and brings a blanket up to his chin. She tucks them both in.

  Every night I do this, she thinks. How long will I?

  As Maya goes into the kitchen to clean up what is left of dinner, she sweats in the cramped room as the ancient ceiling fan circles. Unwashed dishes are piled high in the sink, but she is too tired to do them now. She allows herself a glance at her phone, where a message from Subal is waiting.

  Once again she is at Aksa Beach, on the day of the Big Bang, after which Subal had gazed at her from across the hotel pool. As Maya had looked back at him, she’d felt an unfamiliar sense of peace. It is one she has not felt with Veer in a long time. She knows that she and Subal will meet at Aksa again soon.