The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Page 22

  That said, Shahzad worried about the goon’s continued involvement in the property. He hadn’t forgotten the violence the party sometimes employed. The attacks against North Indian migrants in the city were still fresh—shop windows smashed, taxi drivers beaten till they bled. Shahzad had nightmares he’d be killed by the goon in the night. Even Sabeena, though she did not know all the details, began to fear for Shahzad’s safety. Whenever he was at Dharavi, she would call his cell phone and ask: “O, how long until you come home?”

  With his focus on Dharavi, Shahzad’s belief that Sabeena could still raise a child at last had begun to subside. His days were filled with court appearances, slum visits, and builder meetings rather than medical appointments. Yet his feelings of inadequacy were directed elsewhere—to his manhood—because as he had gotten older, he had not been able to make love to Sabeena the way he had before.

  When the performance problems started, Shahzad talked about them with his friends, the men he knew from Crawford Market and Bhendi Bazaar. They laughed and told crude jokes, which he did not mind. It made the problem seem less serious. Soon, they even came up with a code word for Shahzad’s manhood.

  “How is babubhai?” they’d say, jabbing each other, laughing at the idea of using bhai, a term of respect, for a sexual organ. “Babubhai is working or not?”

  “No, baba,” he’d say, shaking his head sadly. “It’s not working at all.”

  The men also had developed a code word for porn, which was strictly forbidden in Islam, haram. Of course they all watched porn, or “blue films” anyway; these videos were now available and shareable on their mobile phones. When they talked about the videos they’d call them “BP,” for “blue pictures.” Later, the code word evolved from “BP” into “Bashir Patel,” who was a member of Mumbai’s legislature. “Bashir Patel bhejna mera mobile pe,” one man would slyly request of another, and soon, a video message popped up on his phone.

  Shahzad thought these films were having a negative effect on Indian society. He read that India had some of the highest porn traffic in the world, and that at the same time sexual assault numbers were rising. He worried that the kind of uneducated man who stared at women in trains, or groped or “Eve teased” them on the street, was growing more aggressive from seeing these videos. It is because of all the naked women always playing in their minds, he thought.

  But Shahzad also watched porn, and felt little shame about it, though he did not tell Sabeena. Once, she found a gel he had been using to watch porn and asked him: “Yah kya hai?” “It is babubhai’s tonic,” he told her, laughing, sure she wouldn’t understand. But she did, because the Haj Committee had warned pilgrims that year not to bring such gels or pills to Mecca. She only shook her head. Still, Shahzad did not tell her about the photos of big-breasted girls he kept on his phone, in a secret subfolder called DIA, after Diana.

  One day, a nephew of Shahzad’s, who was just out of university, found out about the porn and the code. “Have you met Bashir Patel recently?” he teased his uncle. Shahzad, growing red, feigned innocence. “Kya?” he asked. “What do you mean?” Shahzad thought that boys must be growing up faster now because of the Internet. Taheem, who was in the room, and just eight years old, asked, “Who is Bashir Patel?”

  “Just a person going to stand election,” Shahzad said, and left the room. From his bedroom, he could hear his older nephew laughing.

  After that, Shahzad did not talk to his friends about his performance problems anymore. Instead, he began to visit doctors again, who told him that after forty, any man could have trouble performing. His low sperm count didn’t help, nor did his anxiety. But they said that half of all middle-aged men in India suffered from the same problem. This didn’t ease Shahzad’s mind. If he couldn’t be a father, at least he should be able to perform.

  Sabeena didn’t care how Shahzad was in bed. She would have told him this if he asked her. She had grown older now and felt it in her body. She didn’t want to be made love to like a teenager anymore. There may have been times she wanted to have sex and Shahzad couldn’t. But the Quran was clear on this point: a woman had to love, honor, and obey her husband, no matter what came. The Quran also said that Allah never placed a burden on a person greater than they could bear. And in her community, it was the men who ended marriages, pronouncing talaq—“I divorce you”—three times, as Muslim personal law prescribed, though some women were challenging this practice now.

  But Sabeena didn’t want to be like the women in the West, who in the morning were married and in the evening divorced, or who took a lover on the side. She didn’t want to be like the women who drank to keep themselves from being sad or to fall asleep, who wore short clothes or showed cleavage to attract men, or who didn’t look after their parents or in-laws as they grew old. And who did not know how to find strength in the best place of all: in God. She also didn’t want to be like the sex-addled women she’d heard about, who loved their husbands for what happened in the bedroom.

  Still, Shahzad was becoming obsessed with this new problem, and Sabeena knew it was her job to stop him. She knew where this road led. She asserted herself, telling her husband in a firm, raised voice that he was acting pagal. But this only further upset Shahzad. He became convinced that Sabeena was becoming more assertive because of his problem in the bedroom—because she thought he’d become weak. She already controlled the house, and he worried soon she would control him. Many women in Mumbai controlled their husbands now. And so Shahzad continued to make appointments with every doctor he could, but none of them seemed able to help him.

  After Shahzad came home from another upsetting appointment, where the doctor told him nothing could be done, he carried on an inner monologue with himself: I am not gay. I have good hair. They say, “You are a perfect man.” They say, “Everything is normal.” Except this.

  Except everything down there. It had been the problem from the start.

  Would it have been different with Diana? he wondered. No. Diana had not loved him. He had wasted so much time being focused on the wrong things. The wrong woman. If only he and Sabeena could find a way to begin again, to go back to that cold and drafty room where he’d first seen her and Sabeena had not yet raised her eyes to his.

  Skywatching

  Ashok and Parvati, 2013 to 2014

  “My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl

  Be wife, they said . . .

  Choose a name, a role . . .

  Don’t cry embarrassingly loud.”

  —Kamala Das, “An Introduction”

  Ashok’s father called him at work, unable to wait until his son got home. There was a profile Ashok had to see. Her name was Parvati, and, despite her bad stars, her and his son’s horoscopes were compatible. This was what mattered in life, and in marriage; that same year, a Hindu saint called for the opening of a university in India to study astrology. “The stars are already MATCHED, Ashok,” his father said. Also important was that Parvati was the daughter of a prominent engineer.

  “I’ll look later, Appa,” Ashok said.

  When Ashok got home after midnight, he unhurriedly opened the profile on his desktop computer. He clicked through her photos one by one. I’m not too interested, he thought. Thick hair, open face, natural look—a typical South Indian girl.

  He scrolled farther. Parvati’s bio said she graduated with a master’s degree from IIT Chennai (okay, smart), that she played the violin and could sing and draw (artistic), and that she was working as a teacher in Trivandrum (kind). It wasn’t the worst profile he’d seen.

  “Okay,” Ashok told his father the next morning, though he wouldn’t allow himself to get hopeful. “Let’s see where it goes.”

  In Trivandrum, Parvati’s mother sat her daughter down and said, “He’s thirty-three, don’t you think he’s a little old for you?”

  “No,” Parvati replied, smugly. “You know it’s better not to judge.”

  When Parvati picked up the phone a few days later, she was surprised by
the warm and friendly voice on the other end. It sounded nothing like the boys her father had introduced her to—boys who kept stammering and letting out uncomfortable peals of laughter. “Hi,” this voice said, casually, as if he had known her for years. “I’m Ashok. In Mumbai.” She could tell that he was smiling on the other end.

  He also had an accent unlike any she had heard before. It sounded British but also Indian. It made him sound intelligent. He named the paper he worked for, one everybody knew and read. He made little money there but told her he was working on a novel. Parvati was impressed.

  As they talked, Ashok told her about how he was learning the flute, and Parvati spoke of her Carnatic singing, an on-and-off-again hobby since she was young. “So you can sing and I can play the flute,” he said. “Yeah, we’ll see,” said Parvati. She couldn’t decide if his enthusiasm was endearing or too much.

  “If on seeing you I don’t like you or vice versa, we should be free to say no.”

  “I agree.”

  After that, Ashok and Parvati Skyped with both sets of parents. It started off poorly, because Ashok’s father was so excited he kept interrupting his son. “Appa, Appa, it’s not like that, let me talk,” Ashok kept telling him. As the two bickered, Parvati and the rest of her family just stared at the screen.

  But then the parents let them talk alone, and Ashok played his bansuri, a North Indian flute with a sound that was strong and low. Though Ashok wasn’t an experienced player, and his notes and playing were uncertain, Parvati found his posture confident, almost sexy.

  “It’s good to put a face to your name,” Ashok said when he finished. “Your photo on your profile doesn’t do you justice.” Over Skype, he could see the pretty heart shape of her face, the warm flush in her cheeks, and how her expressions were more in her eyes than her mouth. For the Skype date, she had put on a green salwar kameez, rimmed her eyes with kajal, and even straightened her hair.

  “I’m not photogenic,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, and, to add a drawback of his own: “I work in the evening at the newspaper.”

  “That’s okay,” said Parvati. If she married him, she realized, she could have every evening to herself. She could live far away from her father and his demands. Her father would agree to the marriage—anything to get her away from Joseph—but inside he would regret that she was not marrying another engineer, a man closer to her age, or a man with money.

  They kept talking on the phone, and after a couple calls, Ashok started calling Parvati “dear.” They still had not met in person, and this nickname unnerved her. “Don’t call me that, it’s weird,” she told him. “You use the word dear when you know someone, not with a stranger you’ve called twice.”

  “But dear has lost its meaning by now,” said Ashok. From the Oxford Dictionaries: Old English dēore, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch dier “beloved,” also to Dutch duurand German teuer “expensive.” Ashok knew theirs would be an expensive wedding, more than his engagement to Nada had cost.

  “But you don’t even know me,” Parvati said.

  March 2013, Gchat:

  Ashok: Do you have a deadline or are you under pressure to say yes?

  Parvati: My parents suggest I should be able to decide by talking twice or thrice though that is not my way . . . I thought I’d decide by gut feeling this time

  Ashok: What is your gut feeling?

  Parvati: Not sure . . .

  Ashok: I believed in arranged marriages. The discovery of the other person

  Parvati: I believed in love marriages

  Ashok: No good-looking handsome seniors?

  Parvati: Well . . . no Brahmins

  Parvati still hadn’t told Ashok about Joseph. She wasn’t lying when she said there’d been no handsome Brahmin seniors. She worried that Ashok would react like the US boy and tell his family about her past affair.

  At the same time, Ashok had only told her a little about his failed engagement with Nada. He worried that if he told her more, Parvati would leave him just like Nada.

  “Hey, Ashok?” Parvati asked, as she rode a train back home to Trivandrum after a weekend trip to Alleppey, a southern city of backwaters. “How come, Ashok—you’re thirty-three, good-looking, you speak really well—how come you didn’t fall in love?”

  Ashok sat in his Mumbai apartment studying the photos she had texted him from her trip. In the first, she had captured a typical Kerala-style home, sun dappling its thatched roof, the grass flooded with light. In the second, she’d photographed a kelly green house with a bright red and blue roof and an apricot-colored kurta hanging on the line. The whole scene was reflected in the backwaters, a perfect mirror image. In the third, she’d taken a photo of sagging Chinese fishing nets suspended over the water. Again, the scene was reflected in the water—a lovely composition of land, backwaters, and sky. He was astonished by how beautiful her photos were. She also sang and drew so well. She did not seem like an engineer.

  “Oh, you know, I’m a Tam Brahm,” Ashok said, trying to make his voice sound indifferent. He hoped she would leave it at that. “What about you? Why didn’t you find a guy?”

  Parvati paused and looked out the window. The train sped past rivers and clusters of spindly coconut trees. “I’ve got something to confide,” she said. “I have this huge history and . . . I’m trying to get over it.”

  She told Ashok all about Joseph, about Chennai and Germany and Sweden and the e-mail Joseph sent to her father. She told him about the US boy and her breakdown and move back home.

  When she finished, Ashok said: “But if you had a thing, if you had a guy, you should have gone with him and not worried what your parents thought of it. After all, it’s your life. You should be the one to decide.”

  Parvati was bewildered. This was not what Tam Brahm men said. Tam Brahm men saw past affairs as shameful and believed that parents were the ones to choose.

  “It’s too late, and now that guy is unavailable,” she said, a little bitterly. “Where were you last year?”

  Ashok laughed at this, but then grew serious. “What’s past is past, and I think we should move on, Parvati. Let’s just think about our future together.”

  “Hmm,” Parvati said, her voice wistful. He could tell she liked what he said.

  E-mail from Parvati to Ashok, May 2013:

  Subject line: ♥♥♥

  Ashok!!! Ashok!!! Ashok!!

  Today I poured down my worries to you. My past.

  E-mail from Ashok to Parvati, May 2013:

  UCA, would you want to visit Mumbai before the wedding?

  UCA, meaning “under certain assumptions.” Ashok had come up with it. Assumption: if they met and didn’t like each other, they wouldn’t take the marriage forward.

  * * *

  Once, when Parvati’s father invited a boy over to see her, she had made no effort to dress up. Her father was furious. “Why are you dressed so bad?” he shouted. “Is this a way to dress when people come to see you?” He went on: “Your mom looks better than you. She’s looking as if she is the bride, and you are the servant girl wearing a bad salwar. You better change into something nice.” She had gone upstairs and changed.

  This time, with Ashok coming with his parents all the way from Mumbai to Trivandrum to meet her for the first time, Parvati took care to dress well. She put on a green sari with a red border and golden thread, the kind you might wear to a reception. She put in her contacts and rimmed her eyes with kajal. She even went to the spa to get her hair done. Before he arrived, she found herself looking in the mirror again and again.

  When Ashok walked through the door, she could tell her effort had the desired effect. Oh my god, he thought. She was far more beautiful than he had realized on Skype, with her fair olive skin, eyes the color of honey, and thick, dark hair that fell around her face. But she was also cute and nerdish. The combination had an impact.

  “We finally meet,” he said, gazing at her.

  “Yes,” she said, and smiled. She was also
surprised. In his pictures and on Skype Ashok had seemed very bookish, with his glasses and slicked-over hair. In person, he was that way, but also very handsome in his pressed white shirt. Mostly, Parvati noticed his face. It seemed like there was a lot of light in it.

  A line from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam—a film about two men who loved the same girl—said that if you kept looking at someone a certain way, then you would fall in love. Both Ashok and Parvati had seen the film more than once.

  Parvati didn’t speak much during his visit. This is actually a show, she thought, and looked at the ground, as prospective brides on display were supposed to do. She worried that if she spoke, she might say the wrong thing.

  But it didn’t matter, because everyone else did a lot of talking. Ashok’s mother chattered to Parvati: “I saw your horoscopes, I gave it to an astrologer, he said you will have a lot of healthy kids.” Parvati mutely nodded.

  Meanwhile, Parvati’s father was going over next steps, though Ashok’s father kept interrupting him, speaking loudly as he always did when overeager. He kept praising Parvati’s father to the assembled crowd: “The man is VERY methodical, took his TIME, but made sure to get a HOROSCOPE, THEN a meeting. He got the job DONE.” Though Parvati’s father preferred to speak in Tamil, Ashok’s father kept speaking in English. Parvati could tell her father found Ashok’s father’s behavior absurd. He was still going on: “MARRIAGE is a GOOD thing. TWO PEOPLE getting MARRIED is a BETTER THING. And between a GIRL AND A GUY even BETTER.” He was so agitated he had stopped making sense.

  The couple was sent out alone. As Parvati drove them over to the local Café Coffee Day, Ashok talked on and on about Mumbai. She saw that he rambled the same way his father did. “Bombay is a place you’re going to fall in love with. It is very open, welcoming of people from all over,” he said. “Bombay has been very nice to me. People from Bombay are very nice. It’s more cosmopolitan than Trivandrum. Also you can make friends easily.”