The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Page 13

Parvati called him. She wanted him to say the three words, though she knew she shouldn’t. She longed to hear them, savor them.

  In the Hindi film Dil To Pagal Hai, which came out when Parvati was a child, when she first started watching Bollywood films, a line of dialogue went: “Have you ever . . . even for a day . . . even for a moment . . . loved me?”

  “Yes, I think I love you,” Joseph said, finally, into the phone. In the movies, lovers often overcame the objections of their parents. Parvati knew real life wasn’t the same way.

  “I love you too,” said Parvati, though she knew this was the path to trouble.

  * * *

  Ashok got a new job and a promotion. He was relieved but mourned the long expanse of days he’d had to concentrate on his novel, which followed a dysfunctional married couple, who—the husband too ambitious, the wife too shallow—face a string of bad luck. It had a complex narrative, with interlocking story lines; he did not know where all the ideas in it had come from. Now, he could only work on it on weekends and at night.

  Sometimes, people in the newsroom made good fodder for the book. He based a female character on a buxom journalist he knew. She was a lot like the American girls he saw on TV, but he was also certain he could not have pulled off her sex appeal without the real woman in mind.

  The job and the promotion also meant it was time for marriage, which he knew, though he tried to push away the thought. He had a job and a steady income. There was no excuse left. I’m ready for it. I’m game, he told himself, like a mantra, as if saying it would make it true.

  Ashok’s father responded to his son’s renewed interest with excitement, inundating him with girls’ profiles, all of them Hindu, Tamil Brahmin, and Iyer. There was never a Christian or a Muslim in the mix, because, as his father explained again, distinctions of caste and religion were essential in marriage. Ashok might like to think this was changing in the country, but his father told him he was wrong.

  Sometimes, Ashok wondered why he was so shy with girls. He wondered why, when others chose to go out, he stayed at home with his books. Perhaps it was in his nature. He had been shy and bookish from the start. But he also wondered if it had a little to do with the episodes that came before.

  The first time was in Chennai, when he was about eight or nine years old. His dad had run a company that produced English-language tapes and employed many local men. A chai-wallah there used to dote on Ashok, taking him out of the office to buy him little treats. On one of these excursions, he tried to touch Ashok in places he shouldn’t. He took Ashok out a second time, and again he did it. After the second time, Ashok told his father. His father shouted at the man, who was never seen in the company building again.

  It happened again in Trivandrum, when Ashok was almost eighteen. He had gone alone to see an American movie called Boys Don’t Cry at a seedy movie theater. It occurred to Ashok that he shouldn’t have gone to see that kind of movie there. A man sat down beside him and after a little while slipped his hand between Ashok’s legs. Ashok waited, unmoving, praying it wouldn’t go further, and then took the five-minute intermission as an opportunity to run. The man shadowed Ashok as he ran into the bathroom and tried to follow him once he left it. After he lost the man in the crowd, Ashok took a new seat in the darkened theater. That night, feeling his sense of order and calm shaken, he buried himself in a book.

  Ashok had not yet learned about sex. But he knew men were not supposed to touch him that way. When he grew up, a government study would find that one in two Indian children—boys and girls both—had been sexually abused. But this was much later, and Ashok had mostly forgotten about the incidents by then. And yet still he could not talk to girls. He just wanted to be at home with his books and his writing. Any day, he’d prefer to be with Martin Amis, who wrote that fiction was “the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.” Fiction made him feel safe.

  * * *

  Ashok decided to give up on the marriage search. He remembered when he was younger, watching scenes in Tamil and Bollywood movies, which had made marriage seem simple and light. The Tamil hero would touch the girl’s arm, and the girl would say, in a hokey sound effect, “haaa-aaan,” and the studio audience would laugh. Or the Bollywood hero would dance and sing to her in exotic locales, like Fiji, Switzerland, or Morocco. Now, it was obvious marriage was nothing like that—that it was instead a complicated and heavy affair. Though Ashok was no longer picky, it seemed harder than ever to find a match.

  But then, a profile had come along: a girl named Nada who lived in Bangalore, who was Tam Brahm and worked for a British company. In her photos she was good-looking, with an easy smile, prominent nose, and fair skin, almost like a firangi. She and Ashok connected over the website and later talked on the phone. A visit to Bangalore was scheduled. A visit to meet her parents was scheduled. When there was a match, the process moved forward quickly.

  Before he flew to Bangalore, Nada told Ashok, without a hint of embarrassment: “When you come down to see me, I might have pimples.”

  “That’s okay,” Ashok said. No superficiality was going to stop him now.

  But when he came down to see her, her skin was clear, and she told him she had paid for a miracle treatment, along with other information Ashok found too private to share with a stranger. As they sat at the local Café Coffee Day, she told Ashok how much she liked to steal. “I mean stealing small stuff, like when you check in and out of a hotel. From the lobby, things that would escape notice,” she said. She told him she did it for fun. When they went out to eat, she grabbed a toffee from the host stand of a restaurant and whispered to Ashok that she’d stolen it. “You can’t really steal things if they are free,” Ashok said dryly. He tried to focus on how Nada had appeared when he first saw her, driving up on her scooter in a Western-style top and capri pants.

  Later, they went to Cubbon Park, which was so green in contrast to Bangalore’s pollution that it was called the “lungs of the city.” Sitting under the thickets of trees, Ashok tried to ask her about books, but she did not read. They had little to say to each other, and Nada played with her phone. Ashok’s eyes were drawn to the cheap, clunky jewelry on her arms. His thoughts about her weren’t very charitable, but he was determined to press on.

  Ashok and Nada got engaged on a rainy day in August, in a big hall attached to a three-story house, which seemed to Ashok like a mansion. His parents had rented it from a landlord they knew. Before the big day, Ashok had met Nada’s father, with whom he found he got along better than his daughter. The two talked of Tamil poetry. It’s going so well between the two of us, Ashok thought, and wished Nada was as intelligent or well-read. After this, Ashok had kissed Nada in his apartment in Mumbai, and it was a decent kiss, not sloppy or clumsy. But then she had begun talking again.

  As the engagement date approached, both of them tried to pretend they felt something, sending sappy notes over Gchat.

  Nada: Just 4 more days ☺ . . . Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all day.

  Ashok: can never be tired of you. But yeah, generally, I am.

  Nada: love you soooooooooooooo much

  Ashok: Love u 2 bits

  Nada: 2 bits?????????

  Ashok: It’s an expression.

  Even the sappy notes didn’t work.

  A day or two before the engagement, Nada sent Ashok an e-mail, and he was surprised to find she was as reluctant to get married. “I see no great chemistry between us,” she wrote. “Do you want to take it forward?”

  Ashok wrote a long e-mail in reply, insisting they could make it work. He worried this was his last chance to get married, and if this didn’t work out, he’d die alone. It didn’t matter if their connection was a stretch. He couldn’t afford to let her go.

  “I have a feeling that everything will be alright,” he wrote. “Our crazy frequencies match. Our involvement in our families . . . The occasional trespass (eating non-veg or getting a tattoo), all these are what I think will make us a rare couple
in an otherwise humdrum Brahmanical clan . . . As you rightfully said that not everything is going to be perfect in a relationship.”

  Some one hundred people came for the engagement party, including most of Ashok’s close relatives and family friends. There was a three-course meal, with puri and bhaji and subzi, and afterward, chai, coffee, and sweets. There was no meat or alcohol, since the purity of the Vedas had to be maintained, along with the reputation of a Tam Brahm’s piety. Ashok’s family brought Nada expensive silverware and fine clothes. The priest spoke, Carnatic music played, and a date was fixed for the wedding. Through all of it, Ashok felt in a daze. In total, his father had spent a mind-numbing forty thousand rupees on the ceremony.

  When it was all over, Ashok panicked. Oh my god, he thought. This is not the girl. And my dad has just spent a lot of money.

  As the wedding date grew closer—only a few months away—he was of two minds: marry her and save his father’s name, or call the wedding off and pretend it never happened. Ashok decided to honor his father. He would marry her. He had to.

  The following month, Ashok and Nada broke up over the phone. Nada initiated it, saying she had feelings for an ex-boyfriend, a boy who was not a Tam Brahm and whom she had met on her own. But first she had gotten philosophical with him. “Hey, Ashok,” she said. “You touch your heart, ask yourself this question if you want to get married to me, and tell me how you feel about it . . . I feel we are not connected. And if we get married despite this we might end up fighting a lot and getting divorced within a year.”

  The word divorce hit Ashok. I don’t want to get divorced. I don’t want to fight, he thought. A marriage was supposed to last seven lifetimes, and divorce was to be avoided at all costs. Once he heard the word divorce, he knew their engagement was over.

  When Nada told her father, the man fell off the cot he slept on, broke his arm, and dislocated his shoulder.

  Ashok dreaded telling his father. But Ashok’s father already knew, because Nada’s father had written him a terse e-mail that said the marriage was called off, with “mutual incompatibility . . . the reason for the cancellation.”

  Once, after another failed match on Bharat Matrimony, Ashok’s father had shouted at him: “Ashok, you’re just a WASTED guy, you can’t FIND a girl.”

  This time, his father did not shout. Instead, he flew to Mumbai to comfort his son, fearful of the effect the broken engagement might have on him. He knew boys did pagal things over failed engagements: they castrated themselves, jumped in front of moving trains, and hanged themselves from trees. And so the entire time Ashok’s father was in Mumbai, he kept spouting encouragement: “You DON’T have to feel bad for yourself. Things will work OUT for you.” And: “Don’t worry, Ashok. You will find a GIRL. It’s just a GIRL you’re looking for, not the Holy GRAIL. The right GIRL will come along.” And, the one that discouraged Ashok most of all: “You’re NOT doing badly enough yourself. You have a JOB and a studio a-PART-ment.”

  What a joke. Ashok thought he might die alone in his apartment with his stacks of books and unfinished novel.

  But after Nada, he began to write. He had written before, but not like this. Before, his sentences had been funny, optimistic, even blithe. His novel had hung together through its show-offy quality, verbal loops and hoops, and mimicry of great writers he’d read. Now he wrote to get through the fog. Soon, the families in his novel became more dysfunctional, the language more honest, and themes existential. Ashok felt an urgency to write in a way that he hadn’t before. There was a mismatch in the tone of the novel from beginning to end, but Ashok did not care. Life was just as uneven.

  * * *

  Parvati didn’t know how it was possible, but she had almost reached the end of the master’s degree. The last year had been far different from the other three, because it had been filled with Joseph. They worked together, drank cups and cups of milky chai and South Indian filter coffee, and, after that first kiss on the anniversary of his ex-girlfriend’s death, surreptitiously made out in the lab after the other students went home. They never went further than kissing, though sometimes Parvati wanted to. This was why she never let their day trips turn into overnights. On campus, where boys and girls weren’t allowed in each other’s dorm rooms, it was impossible for things to get out of hand. And so Parvati and Joseph took long, leisurely walks across campus, often pausing under the school’s ancient banyan tree. It was a tree so old that no one could identify the original roots, which had long ago disappeared into the ground.

  And they went into the city, where they ate crispy sada dosa and went shopping, and Parvati spent money on herself for the first time. She even bought a designer handbag, a lavish purchase her father would never permit. Like many fathers, he railed against the increasing consumerism in the country—how young people did not save and spent more than they earned on new gadgets, cheap clothing, and afternoons at the mall, like the young people in the West did.

  When Parvati and Joseph took day trips, they often rode buses to faraway places, such as Pondicherry, the French-settled city by the sea. Around this time, they also watched the movie Up together. When the montage played of Carl and Ellie’s relationship—first marriage, then a house, then dreams of babies and travel, and, best of all, growing old together—Joseph said this was how their life would be.

  Before school ended, they wanted to have one last excursion: to watch the sun rise over a Chennai beach. It wasn’t something Parvati could experience in Trivandrum, or Joseph in his hometown, because both cities were on the western side of the country.

  They stayed up all night in the lab, and very early in the morning, Parvati, Joseph, and another friend took a rickshaw to the beach. Joseph wore his Western jeans rolled up at the bottom, while Parvati wore a golden kurti the color of the morning sun. As the sun rose, they marveled at the array of hues in the sky and sea. As the light spread, it was infectious. They took goofy pictures: of Parvati pretending to hold the sun in her hand, their friend trying to swallow it, and Joseph jokingly pushing Parvati into the ocean. They played barefoot in the surf until the sun rose all the way. And they shared chai and idlis, and Parvati wrote her name in big, looping letters in the sand, then photographed it to remember.

  After college ended, Parvati was offered a job with an international auto company in Bangalore, which was just an hour plane ride west of Chennai but felt nothing like the wooded campus at school. Many international auto companies were opening up plants and offices in Bangalore, the country’s tech and business hub. Meanwhile, Joseph planned, as he always had, to go back to Germany, where he would earn his PhD in a small university town. They talked of Parvati moving there to join him later, maybe after a year or two. They talked of all the things they would do in Germany together, though Parvati didn’t know if they were being serious or playing pretend. Whenever Joseph brought up marriage, Parvati told him she wasn’t sure. She knew her parents would never agree. Perhaps they would even disown her. Some parents went so far as to kill their daughters for marrying the wrong boy, though Parvati knew her parents were not capable of that. Perhaps she could convince them—her sister first, then her mother, and finally her father, who had always distrusted other religions—that a Hindu Brahmin–Catholic union could be decent and good. But this, she knew, was wishful thinking.

  At times, Joseph grew angry that Parvati seemed unwilling to fight her parents to get married. But in the end they always let the conversation move on.

  On the last day they had together in Chennai, they visited a Hindu temple in the oldest part of the city, and then Joseph took Parvati to the station. As she climbed inside the train, he stowed her luggage by her seat. “Good-bye,” he said. They were surrounded by hundreds of other travelers and knew they could not kiss or hug. Instead they shook hands, like strangers.

  There were a lot of famous train farewells in the Bollywood films Parvati had grown up on. In Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, by far the most famous of these, both the boy and girl end up getting on the train
.

  Joseph promised to come visit her in Bangalore before leaving, but this felt to Parvati like the end.

  “Good-bye,” Parvati said, and as the train pulled away without him, she steeled herself not to cry.

  * * *

  On day one in Bangalore, Parvati felt overwhelmed. She had moved into paying guest accommodations with nine other working women, all of whom seemed unfriendly. Her rent was expensive, and she had no Internet or phone connection; her SIM card from Chennai did not work. It was easy to remedy these problems in the city, but she had never lived on her own.

  But then Joseph had come to visit before he left for Germany, and together they bought spices and utensils for the apartment. She started work at the auto company, where she liked her colleagues and the work. And she became close with one of the girls in the house, a girl who was sassy and silly and reminded her of Rachel from the American TV show Friends, whose reruns everyone her age seemed to watch. After a few months, Bangalore began to feel like home.

  Joseph had decided to spend three months teaching down south in Kottayam before he left for Germany, and during that time he often called Parvati. Too often, Parvati began to think, because any time she went out in Bangalore he’d ask where she was going. At night, when she was trying to sleep, he said he needed to talk. And when she had lunch with colleagues or friends he now grew suspicious, saying, “You just had coffee, why are you having lunch now?”

  Her parents already called every day to ask what she was doing. She did not need Joseph to do the same thing. It’s like since I moved to Bangalore I have no breathing room, she thought, and was surprised at how frustrated she felt.

  Joseph came to visit her a second time before leaving the country, and this time he tried to show his affection in public, the way couples in Germany did. Though they were in India, he argued that Bangalore was a progressive city—India’s Silicon Valley—and that few people knew them there. He would take her hand, sit very close beside her, or put his arm around her in a rickshaw—gestures Parvati began to hate. It’s like he’s trying to control me, she thought, just as at IIT Chennai, when he made her promise to text him every night before bed.