The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Read online

  “I thought YOU might find a girl on your OWN,” his father told him, in his oddly punctuated English, where the emphasis was always on the wrong word. “And spare ME the trouble.” Ashok’s father and mother’s marriage had been a love marriage. They’d married despite the disapproval of her family. They reasoned that if they had had a love marriage back then, surely Ashok could find a girl in today’s Mumbai.

  But as the years passed and Ashok approached thirty, he still hadn’t found a girl. He had gone on few dates since the disastrous date with the Gujarati girl, the yellow marigolds left behind wilting in his apartment. And so his father and mother intervened. They put up a profile for Ashok on BharatMatrimony.com, which boasted of having “millions of brides.” They hawked him under the section on the site for Tamil Brahmins, called “Iyer grooms.” Iyer came from a word meaning “respectable” or “noble.” Better. Being labeled a Tam Brahm and Iyer implied that you were educated and conservative. It meant that you were pious and pure. In marriage, Ashok’s father reminded him, it was essential to claim the privileged caste.

  This was the way it had always been, or had always seemed to be. Brahmins first, others below, and dalits so low as not to be included in the hierarchy. Caste divisions were said to have originated in ancient India’s four main specialized professions, with priests at the top, then warriors, traders, and lowly laborers below. These divisions were only further encouraged and solidified under colonial rule, with the British urging Brahmins like Ashok’s family to see themselves as superior.

  Ashok found the assumptions associated with Brahmins misleading. He was not that conservative; he had eaten meat and drunk alcohol before. At times, he felt like a pseudo-intellectual, talking with confidence about subjects he did not understand. This was what many Indian journalists did, that and adding their own masala to stories. None of that went into the profile.

  Instead, Ashok’s parents checked the box for “upper middle class,” though “middle class” would have better described them, with all the money Ashok’s father had lost over the years. “Lower class” wasn’t an option. They did not provide a number for Ashok’s salary, which was nowhere near that of a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, and would hurt his chances. And then they screened girls using their own parameters: she should be Tam Brahm, at least three years younger, beautiful, vegetarian, a nondrinker and nonsmoker. They preferred that she be educated yet conservative, a tricky balance to strike. And, of course, her horoscope must match his own.

  “She’s YOUNG, she’s not bad-looking, she has a JOB, but making slightly less than what my SON is making,” said Ashok’s father, scrolling down a girl’s profile on the matrimony site. “THAT will mean Ashok has the upper HAND.”

  For a man who had lived abroad, had many foreign friends, and spoke like a Brit, Ashok’s father still went about the arranged marriage business with the gusto of any desperate Indian father. It was as if he had forgotten he wanted Ashok to find a girl on his own.

  After a year had passed and they still hadn’t found a match, Ashok’s father began to worry. “Ashok,” he said, “let’s find a girl who is maybe NOT from a small town, who won’t MIND marrying someone older.”

  What he meant was it was time to widen the search.

  But Ashok was surprised to find that he was picky. At first, a lot of girls reached out to his profile, and he said no for the slightest of reasons. If a girl weighed more than him—which was easy, since he had not even the hint of muscle—he said no. Or if she was wearing glasses, no, even though he also wore specs. Big nose: no, no, no. He knew he was being shallow. They’d reach out, and he would reply: “You know, I’m focusing on my work of fiction, I might not be ready for marriage right now.”

  “Ashok, just say YES to the girl we throw up in FRONT of you,” his father said, accusing him of setting a bad example for his unmarried cousins. But Ashok couldn’t just say yes to any girl.

  In Mumbai, Ashok tried hard to find a wife on his own. After the Gujarati girl, he went to a speed-dating event hosted by the Bombay Expats club and bought an expensive blue collared shirt for the occasion. The girls were foreign, fascinating, and beautiful—everything the girls on BharatMatrimony.com weren’t. But he found himself telling them all the same boring spiel: “I want to be a writer. I work as a journalist. I stay in Bandra.” Next.

  None of the foreign girls followed up with him.

  On the matrimony site, Ashok began to try harder. He found a few girls he liked, Indian girls who seemed worldly and cosmopolitan. He blamed that preference on his father, who had always made it seem like India was too small for them. As a child, Ashok had watched Remington Steele, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes on television. At his father’s urging, he had read Shakespeare and Shaw, and then moved on to the Americans: Roth, Hemingway, and Bellow. Bellow, who once wrote: “All a man has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.” When he was younger, getting a beautiful wife had looked easy.

  One girl Ashok liked on the site was a Tam Brahm professor in South Africa. He liked that she spoke and wrote well, and in English. But it turned out she wasn’t interested in Ashok and didn’t care that he was writing a novel. Over e-mail, she wrote that men raised in India were domineering and did not want women to work. She said they placed demands on their wives to be home with their children or relatives. While Indian men wanted Westernized girlfriends, in the end they wanted traditional Indian wives. Ashok tried to tell her he wasn’t that kind of man. He wanted a girl who worked and spoke her mind. But she soon stopped responding, and he saw she’d only talked to him to please her parents.

  Ashok also realized he wanted the other trappings of the characters on American TV shows, such as girls who wore lipstick or high heels. Indian girls did not often wear lipstick or heels. He felt duped by the mismatch of what he had expected and what was possible.

  New profiles were put up on Bharat Matrimony all the time.

  “My daughter is a confident, independent girl . . .” “My sister is very talented she is so sweet also . . .” “Am a jovial, helpful and humourous person with traditional views in life . . .”

  For each profile, there was a pile of data to review. Each applicant had answered more than a dozen questions, which might have been insulting if every Indian boy and girl hadn’t been asked the same questions since birth. Willing to marry from other communities or only the Brahmin Iyer community? Body type slim or heavy? Complexion very fair, fair, wheatish, wheatish brown, or dark? Physical status normal or physically challenged? Monthly income? Veg or non-veg? Joint or nuclear family? Star and moon sign? Have Dosham? And it went on.

  Ashok was glad he didn’t have to check the box for “Have Dosham.” A person with mangal dosha had a bad astrological combination, with the planet Mars in an inauspicious spot. A person with mangal dosha was such bad luck it was believed they could cause the early death of a spouse. And if Ashok had mangal dosha, it would be almost impossible to find him a spouse.

  At the end of every profile, there was also a section to “express yourself,” in which people talked about how “well-settled” their siblings were, how “homely” their daughter was, or how “humble” they’d be as a bride. “Origin of ‘humble,’” his father might say, quizzing him and his brothers on note cards, from the Oxford Dictionary of English: Middle English: from Old French, from Latin humilis “low, lowly,” from humus “ground.”

  Ashok felt turned off by the whole exercise.

  “I need a break, Appa. For at least a month.”

  Ashok had quit his job at the magazine without having a new one, which he hadn’t told his father. He couldn’t; his father would be apoplectic. Ashok had left to work on his novel, which he never had enough time to focus on, and because the effort of constantly looking at girls was rattling him.

  “Can we stop this for a year?” Ashok asked.

  “No,” his father said. He could have a break, but a short one. “After a little while, we are back AGAIN on the
HUNT.”

  On the hunt, a metaphor for a man’s quest for a woman, his father might say as he flipped over the card.

  Ashok hung up the phone.

  * * *

  It was the beginning of the third year of her four-year master’s program at IIT Chennai, and Parvati planned to drop out. She told this to Joseph as they sat at the university’s Café Coffee Day, drinking the expensive, bitter coffee that wasn’t as good as the canteen’s.

  “I’m glad your work is coming to an end. You’ve done all your experiments,” said Parvati. “But I am hopeless. I am at the same place I was. I might just quit.”

  Joseph listened to her and then said, in his careful way, “No, I see us graduating together.” It was a simple statement, and Parvati laughed when he said it. But after he did, Parvati knew they would.

  And after this, Joseph began helping Parvati with her lab work. He went through her presentations with her point by point. Classes soon began to seem easier. Parvati started sleeping less and wearing better kurtas. She even looked forward to the lab, because Joseph was always there. They would work separately, and then he’d ping her online, saying, “Wanna come for coffee?” “Wanna come for tea?” They’d do this throughout the day: lab, coffee, lab, tea. And then they’d study together in the lab until late. Sometimes, Parvati’s parents would call at night and ask where she was, and she’d lie and say she was in her hostel getting ready for bed. She had never really lied to her parents before.

  Soon, Parvati and Joseph also began taking long walks across campus, meandering under the banyan trees with their aerial roots and wide leaves glossy from rain. On their walks, they talked about books, and Joseph urged her to read more widely. At first, they both read the same biographies of historical figures, but after a little while, Parvati moved on to fiction. She picked up Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which was said to be banned at home in Kerala, because it featured an affair between an upper-class Christian woman and a caste-less “untouchable” man. In it, Roy wrote of the unspoken “love laws” that dictated “who should be loved, and how.” Laws that demanded that differences in caste, class, or religion keep two lovers apart. After reading it, Parvati began to wonder why Indian society banned people from loving who they chose because of how they were born.

  Parvati also found Kamala Das, a fierce confessional writer who wrote plainly and without guilt. Kamala Das was a Hindu turned Muslim, a rarity in the country, and she was from Kerala, Parvati’s home state. Parvati started with her autobiography, which chronicled the tumult of Das’s inner life, the trials of her marriage, and her sexual and literary awakening. Das wrote fearlessly about taboo subjects and Hindu gods. In one poem, she recounted the famous story of the time Lord Krishna lay down on the riverbank with his lover, the milkmaid Radha. In Kamala Das’s telling, Radha “felt dead,” and when Krishna asked if she minded his kisses, Radha thought, “No, not at all . . . What is / It to the corpse if the maggots nip?”

  It seemed Kamala Das was not afraid to write anything. She didn’t care what her parents or husband thought, or that her writing was called “histrionics.”

  Reading her, Parvati felt for the first time that she could think as she liked about men, family, love, sex, and religion. If famous women—even Kamala Das, even Radha—had thought that way, why couldn’t she?

  You don’t have to just live the way your parents have told you, Parvati thought, and was surprised at her own defiance.

  Parvati had rebelled some as a teenager. Her grandmother, a staunch Hindu Brahmin who led her life governed by strict parameters, had always maintained that women on their periods were untouchable. The old Hindu rule was rooted in science, supposedly—a woman’s foul smell, the toxins in her blood, the simple fact that blood turned from red to black. Women on their periods could not enter the kitchen or go near the pooja stand. In Parvati’s house, they also couldn’t sit on the cloth seats in their living room; Parvati’s grandmother always made this very clear. In the old suppression of women, women sometimes led the suppressing. But when Parvati and her sister had their periods, they sometimes wouldn’t tell their grandmother and sit brazenly in all those places anyway. Or they would tell her, and wait for her fury to come, and then run away, giggling.

  This, though—this was not the same. This had bigger consequences. Now, Parvati and Joseph were taking walks so often that other students at their university began to talk. One girl told Parvati, “People think that you are seeing each other.”

  Unsettled, Parvati said to Joseph, “I don’t want this. I don’t want people to think this.”

  “Is this a reason to not hang out anymore?” he said, and she could tell he was upset. “Are you really going to care?”

  As always, he was right, and Parvati began ignoring the comments and whispers.

  Several weeks later, Joseph suggested they venture off campus. They took a rickshaw with a group of friends to a showroom to go shopping. Parvati and Joseph both ended up near the cash counter. She looked at Joseph, and he looked back at her, and they held each other’s gaze for a long time. Parvati was wearing a maroon-colored kurta and a white dupatta—details she would always remember, as if it were a still from a film. It seemed like Joseph wanted to tell her something. But then he lowered his eyes and they all piled in a rickshaw and headed back to school.

  They did not talk much about religion, because they didn’t want to fight. But one day, on the pretense of running an errand, Joseph got Parvati on the bus, only to tell her he was taking her to San Thome Basilica. She knew he expected her to get off or say she needed her parents’ or sister’s permission. San Thome Basilica was not close. But she surprised him. “Let’s go,” she said, and felt a little thrill in her chest.

  When they arrived, morning mass had just ended. Parvati stared up at the walls and paintings in wonder. She had never been in a church before. “This is one of the most important churches, because Saint Thomas is buried here,” Joseph told her. “There are only three churches in the world where a church is built over a saint. For Christians, this is a very huge thing.”

  He did not mention that San Thome Basilica was also built over the place where Hindus said a temple to Shiva once stood. Portuguese Catholics had apparently demolished it. But many holy places had changed hands like this, from Christians to Hindus, or Hindus to Muslims, and back again. And there had never been the same animosity between Christians and Hindus as Hindus and Muslims had.

  After that day at St. Tom’s, they ventured beyond campus all over the city. Joseph had always been up for adventures, and now Parvati was too. Chennai was a sprawling city, known for its long stretches of white sandy beaches, packed Carnatic music halls, and ancient temples with fantastic backstories. At one Chennai temple, a man’s vision was healed miraculously. Another temple brought a man’s daughter back from the dead, or so it was said. At a third, it was common knowledge that Lord Shiva had once appeared. Soon, Joseph and Parvati were taking day trips outside the city, including to Kanchipuram, famous for its silk saris and old Hindu temples. On these trips, Joseph sometimes talked of how much he admired Hindu chants or Carnatic music, especially songs that featured the mridangam, a double-headed drum. But they did not talk more seriously about Hinduism or Parvati’s beliefs. She was certain they’d stop talking if they did.

  Sometimes, though, they discussed with admiration the marriages they’d heard about between Hindus and Christians, or Hindus and Muslims, which were taking place more often in the city, despite the consequences. After one such engagement in Mumbai, the parents held a mock funeral for their daughter. The girl married the boy anyway. These people often had simple ceremonies, as if making the point that they did not need the pageantry and only wanted to make their love official. Their weddings were not at all like the lavish, many-thousand-guest weddings common among Hindu couples, which seemed designed to conceal any problems between the boy and girl with pomp and circumstance.

  On the one-year anniversary of the Brahmin girl�
�s death, Joseph told Parvati, “I don’t want to be alone tonight.” And so they stayed up late in the lab, until everyone else had gone home. In the lab, Joseph began to cry, and Parvati hugged him. He smelled powerfully of his Axe cologne, a smell Parvati would always remember. She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek; she would not kiss him on the mouth. A kiss just for comfort, she thought. The first kiss I am saving for my husband.

  After that, they began to text more regularly, starting as soon as they woke up and ending just before bed. Joseph had always gotten up early, and Parvati got up late, but soon they began waking up at the same time. The texts themselves were often just a simple Good morning, or Good night, but it was how they measured their days. One night, Parvati forgot to text Joseph and fell asleep. The next morning, Joseph was furious, a side of him Parvati had not seen before.

  “You have to promise to text me every night before you go to bed,” he said.

  Parvati promised, though part of her wanted to refuse. It felt as if he were trying to control her. But Parvati also thought she understood. They had not named their relationship, and so they were becoming very anxious with each other.

  Soon, though, they began texting about how they felt, putting voice to what those long walks and e-mails and conversations over coffee and in the lab added up to.

  Did you think that you would have ever fallen in love with me? Parvati texted Joseph, half joking, half hoping to provoke a real answer.

  If your parents did not have any problem with this, he wrote back cautiously, I would have seriously considered you as my partner.