The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Read online

  To them, the name Coorg sounded magical. Coorg was also called Kodagu, but the Anglicized version had stuck ever since British officials treated it as their getaway. The Brits had also dubbed Coorg “the Scotland of India” for its rolling mists and hills. Ashok marveled at how just two days ago they’d gotten married in front of three thousand people, and now they were on a sprawling coffee plantation, almost entirely alone.

  The next day, Parvati woke up to her period. She had bad cramps and worried that it would ruin the trip. If she were at home, she’d be untouchable. But Ashok told her that was silly; no one believed that anymore. He suggested they spend the entire day in bed. They ordered all the food they could off the room service menu: vegetarian soup, fried rice, palak paneer, chapati breads, ice cream, and cake. Ashok told the server, “Chalo, bring them all.” Their plates came heaped up high like a mountain.

  The next night, Parvati felt better, and they went out to the private pool beside their cottage. Parvati wore just her panties and a bra, her wedding henna still dark on her hands. Ashok stripped down to his boxers. As they swam, they kissed, but Ashok didn’t try to initiate having sex. He would wait for Mumbai. Instead, he taught Parvati how to float, and they stayed in the pool gliding on the surface for a long time, even though the water was cold. The next day, Ashok took a photo of Parvati on a swing near the cottage wearing blue jeans, a blue dupatta, and a seductive eye-smile for the camera.

  When they returned to Mumbai, it was the last day of the festival of Ganpati. The streets from the airport were crowded with processions. Massive elephant-headed idols were carried in the air, on horseback, and on floats through swelling crowds. People sang and danced and drummed for Lord Ganesh, god of new beginnings, remover of obstacles. It was as if the entire city were celebrating their union, and their ability to make love, at last.

  * * *

  Sex between them wasn’t clumsy at first, not the way Ashok thought it might be. But it did become smoother over time. You don’t hit the ground running, he told himself, remembering one of his father’s flash card idioms, as they had sex the first time in the bedroom of their new apartment, just after their honeymoon. You walk, you limp a bit, then you jog, you hit a stride. Soon, they were having sex two or three times a week, and Ashok was amazed at how comfortable it felt. They didn’t care if the lights were on or off. They didn’t worry about how their bodies looked. And they always fell back to talking right after sex, about what took place at his office or her lab at school that day. Or sex segued right into banter, with her making fun of how excitable he got around groups of people, like he had at their wedding, or him jabbing her for how spoiled she acted because of her wealthy upbringing. He secretly found this behavior sexy.

  But Parvati didn’t think they were hitting a stride. To her, it seemed that their sex didn’t have passion, at least not like she had seen in the movies. She didn’t like that they transitioned from making love to talking of trivial matters. And she thought the way they had sex felt almost mechanical. With Joseph, she was sure it would have been different, electric. But she was married to Ashok now.

  And she was in Mumbai, not Germany, in a north-central suburb that looked a little like Trivandrum. It was greener and less smoggy than the rest of the city and built along an artificial lake. Crocodiles sometimes basked in the sun there, and bird-watchers came to find jacanas, kingfishers, and cormorants. The lake’s water, though long ago declared unfit to drink, was a deep, even blue.

  Because it was a kind of oasis of calm in the city, their suburb was filled with firangis and wealthy Indians. Many of them lived in one apartment complex, a set of ornate, neoclassical high-rises that towered over the suburb’s downtown. The high-rises had romantic names like Florentine and Eva. But Ashok and Parvati could not afford to live in the towers, and so they’d moved into an anonymous-looking cooperative complex up on a hill instead. Ashok got them into the complex by telling the society board they were newlyweds. Their apartment, on a high floor, seemed to them spacious and airy.

  Parvati worked hard to make the apartment feel like home. She started in the living room, where she hung their marriage photo, which showed her enveloped in deep folds of red and gold, and Ashok, bare-chested, grinning beside her. In the kitchen, she stuck Post-it notes with recipes dictated by her mother to the wall so she could cook the kind of elaborate meals Ashok’s mother had at home; this was the measure of a wife. In little corners of the house, she placed sentimental trinkets: the model car she’d bought for Ashok, a lucky lotus flower made of glass, a statue of a little boy and girl holding hands. On their wooden altar, she placed Ram and Sita, the stars of the epic Ramayana, who had fallen in love at first sight.

  In the beginning, Parvati would also stay up late, until Ashok got home from his night shift at the newspaper, so they could watch TV and gorge on ice cream together. Every day she brought home a different flavor from the Naturals ice cream shop down the road: tender coconut, anjeer, mango, or papaya pineapple.

  She felt like she was playing house, and it was working. She thought it’d keep working as long as she didn’t think of the past too much. It was like in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, a Bollywood film that came out just before she and Ashok married, when one character warned that memories were like a box of sweets. If the box was opened, you couldn’t eat just one piece.

  But sometimes, Parvati needed to be alone and think, and went up to the terrace of their apartment building to do what she called “skywatching.” She had done this as a child in Trivandrum, gazing up at the sky as her father told her and her sister all about the stars and solar system and helped them identify Venus and Mars. Now, as she lay on her back on their cool marble roof, she tried to see stars or spot a comet. But she could not see anything because of the heavy pollution in Mumbai.

  Mumbai was light polluted from its traffic, signboards, and brightly lit offices and residences. It was air polluted from the number of vehicles, road construction, and open burning of fuel and waste. It was so polluted that living in Mumbai was said to be equivalent to smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. It was said to cause respiratory symptoms, heart and lung disease, and premature mortality. Parvati sometimes dreamed of another life—of moving out to the country, even—where she could see clear skies.

  There were other moments that broke the spell of being newly married, when Parvati realized she did not really know Ashok. After a visit to his family in Trivandrum, where he told each of his relatives how wonderful they were, he disparaged them in private to Parvati. “But—what are you doing?” she asked, surprised at his duplicity.

  “I was talking to my grandma. She is eighty-seven years old,” said Ashok. “There is no point in telling her something bad.”

  At first, Parvati couldn’t get past this. But as she thought about it, she realized this was something that wouldn’t change. She knew she couldn’t keep listening to this false praise for the rest of her life. From then on, she left the room when the praising began.

  * * *

  The week before her first exams at IIT Bombay, and just a few months into their marriage, Parvati told Ashok she needed a break.

  “Sure, Chiboo,” said Ashok, using Parvati’s childhood nickname, which she’d always hoped her husband would use someday.

  And so they took off for Matheran, a hill station east of Mumbai with sweeping vistas of the plains and valleys. They took a train partway up the hill and rode horses the rest of the way up. It was peak season, and the whole of Matheran was packed with tourists. Their hotel, which looked seedy, was full of nervous couples and rickety furniture. It was difficult to get a moment alone.

  The next day, they decided to get up at sunrise, 5 a.m. But when they got to the top of the mountain, it was still dark, and a lone chai-wallah told them that in December the sun didn’t rise until six. And so they sat quietly and drank tea in the dark, watching as the local people woke and swept and walked to their baths. It reminded them both of the south, and Ashok began to speak of his chil
dhood in Tenkasi.

  In Tenkasi Ashok had gone to a Protestant school just before the new millennium, and the pastors had read to the children from the book of Revelations, warning of the water and the deluge. In Tenkasi Ashok dove into a pond that was twenty feet deep, although he couldn’t swim. His friend had dared him, and for long seconds he sank under and under, his mind going blank, until his friend had pulled him out, laughing as he choked up water. In Tenkasi his father had quizzed him and his brother from the flash cards: “What does it mean when you say you have HATCHED a SCHEME?” “Okay, tell me the meaning of through THICK and THIN.” Ashok would always try to answer first.

  Ashok also told her about his years in Chennai and Trivandrum, though he omitted the part about the chai-wallah and the man in the movie theater. Instead he told her about how his father moved from business to business, and when the business flopped and the family had almost no money, they were forced to move again. As he spoke, Parvati regretted having talked so much about growing up wealthy in Trivandrum—about the car and scooters, having chai brought to her in bed, and a fancy case for her violin. She began to see Ashok differently.

  Ashok asked Parvati why she had needed a trip away.

  “Chetan,” she said, using the Malayalam term of respect she had taken to calling him, a kind of distancing nickname he didn’t quite like. “My past is coming back to me and giving me a lot of trouble. So I am not able to focus at school.”

  Ashok nodded, but Parvati knew he didn’t understand. He couldn’t, because she wasn’t telling him everything. She didn’t tell him that nothing felt right—not engineering school, not Mumbai, not him. I was not supposed to get married to this guy, she thought, as the orb of the sun crept over the mountains.

  Some days, Parvati felt a strong aversion to this new life they had constructed in Mumbai. On those days she missed Joseph and wanted nothing to do with Ashok. She hated playing house.

  “I want to take a break from school,” she said now. “Take leave for a little while.”

  “Okay, Chiboo, you go ahead,” said Ashok. “Take a break.”

  But on other days, she knew she was the problem. On these days, Parvati felt grateful to Ashok and almost loved him for allowing her the room to be confused. He had not even hesitated in supporting her decision to take time off from school.

  They filled the rest of their trip to Matheran with activities. They rode horses, climbed a mountain, and went rafting along with other nervous, newly married couples. In each photo from the trip, Parvati attempts a smile. After they returned to Mumbai, they sent the photos to their parents, and Ashok’s father wrote a glowing e-mail to Parvati: “Both you and Ashok look so happy, so young . . . I am very happy for you. DAD.”

  Shortly afterward, Ashok’s aunt and uncle came to stay. Like Ashok’s father, they could talk for hours. But unlike him, they mostly spoke about themselves. The last day they were in town, Parvati went to the mall after school to find a book to read at a coffee shop—anything to not go home to them. She picked up Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, which was about the colonial opium trade and the people it hurt, and she read and read, until she stopped on a page that ended: “It was useless, she knew, to be seized by regret now, on the very night when her fate had been wedded to his . . .”

  That night, as Ashok’s aunt and uncle talked endlessly about themselves, Parvati had nothing to say. I am listening to them and falling sick, she thought. The next morning, she woke up with a bad cold and fell back to sleep. The aunt and uncle woke expecting breakfast. They pestered Ashok, saying, “We are here, we want our breakfast and then we need to go. How can she be sleeping?”

  Ashok tried to shake Parvati awake. “They want some breakfast. Do you want to make it?” he asked.

  “No,” Parvati said with a groan, and rolled over. Since the wedding she had gone back to sleeping almost ten hours a night, like she had at IIT Chennai when Joseph was away.

  Ashok made coffee but soon ran out of milk. He offered to make dosas, but his aunt said she’d make them herself. They left indignant that Ashok’s new bride was so uncultured she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.

  When Parvati woke up at around 9 a.m., she sleepily shuffled into the kitchen. “Is there any milk at home?” she asked.

  “No, you have green tea,” Ashok said, his voice tight. Later, he confronted her. “You could have at least got up and said hi or something. What’s the harm in at least making tea? They were just going to be here for a day or two. You could pretend to like them.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, surprised to see Ashok angry. “I wasn’t feeling well, and I needed to sleep for longer.”

  Ashok’s expression softened. “If that’s the case, then fine,” he said, and in his easy way let the incident go. Neither he nor Parvati brought it up again, but after that, Parvati was certain his family had branded her as unfit to be a household girl. She told herself she didn’t want to be one anyway.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, Parvati woke up feeling hopeful. Exams were over, IIT Bombay was finished for the semester, and she’d applied for a break from school after that. Maybe she wouldn’t go back at all. The promise of freedom thrilled her. Outside their cooperative complex, puppies had been born. New high-rises were going up. New Western chains were opening across Powai. New, new, new. That day, Parvati cleaned the apartment, even the places that were hard to reach. She bought a small chocolate cake and made a handmade poster that said “Happy New Year.”

  But when Ashok came home, he looked at the cake and poster and said, “Oh, wow, Happy New Year,” and then, “Let’s go to sleep.” It was not yet midnight, but he was exhausted from work. He also didn’t like New Year’s. One more year of resolutions you’ll never keep, he thought. Ashok felt that one part of him was still a child, while the other was as cynical as an old man.

  The next day, Parvati started a diary for her time off from school, writing in a small green and maroon floral notebook: “January 1, 2014. First New Year after marriage. Nothing much but cut a cake and then went to sleep.”

  January 2014, Gchat:

  Ashok: Let’s decide not to continue with the PhD

  Parvati: Not ready for PhD. Chttn I feel so stupid

  Ashok: Chill maadi

  Parvati: Chttn ur my sunshine . . . one of the rare ppl who has told me not to keep lot of options except to opt to be myself.

  Ashok: U are making me blush ☺

  Parvati: When i told yes to you at my place in tvm when u came to see me i said yes to everything about you . . . Good or bad . . . I might murmur stuff i don’t like because it’s new to me . . . Once I get used . . . My yes will take its full form literally.

  Ashok: OUOUOUOYIU.

  Parvati and Ashok sometimes were more affectionate online than in real life. Online, they could try out what they wanted to say without the in-person rejection. Online, they could test out the kind of couple they wanted to be.

  In the official paperwork requesting Parvati’s leave, Ashok wrote that his wife was having a difficult time adjusting to their arranged marriage. He did not need to provide details because this was a problem even the stodgiest university bureaucrat could understand. After some deliberation, the leave was approved.

  Parvati spent the first month of her break rearranging the furniture in the house, cooking her mother’s recipes without much success, and sleeping long hours in her baggy pajamas. She tried Gchatting Ashok, but he was often busy with work. And so instead she loaded Joseph’s Facebook page and clicked through photos of him and his Catholic wife.

  First was a photo of him and her in a pristine green field, her arms wrapped around his stomach. Next was a photo of them with her family, all dressed in fancy saris and kurtas. After that they were pictured on a campus in Germany wearing winter jackets and on the ground a light dusting of snow.

  On a few occasions, Parvati talked to Joseph over Skype. They spoke tentatively at first—so much time had passed—but then the conversation be
came more natural. When Joseph asked Parvati about her marriage, she told him everything was good. She could not bring herself to ask about his wife. On one call, Joseph told her that he’d heard the ancient banyan tree at IIT Chennai, the one whose roots went deep into the ground, was going to be cut down. He said the students were agitating against it. After Parvati hung up from these calls, she often felt depressed.

  When Ashok came home from work one night, she was crying. “I have no way to figure this out,” she said.

  “You have to,” he told her. “You can.”

  Parvati just kept crying.

  “What’s happened in the past, let’s put it behind us,” Ashok said. “Let’s bury it and move on. To live a life together you have to focus on the future.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” But along with the weather of Mumbai and Trivandrum, she kept the weather of Berlin on her phone.

  She called her sister many times during her break, even though her sister was busy with work, her husband, and a new baby. Sometimes, Parvati cried and ranted; other times she hinted at suicide. “There is no point in living anymore,” she said. She blamed her sister for not supporting her relationship with Joseph. She blamed her father for keeping her from marrying Joseph and pushing her to go to the IITs, when so many other women were choosing their work and husbands. “Don’t be like this,” her sister said. “It is you who have tortured you the most.” She reminded Parvati that she had chosen Ashok and her school program. And then Parvati blamed herself. By the time Ashok got home from work, Parvati had cried herself to sleep.