The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Read online

  February 2014, Gchat:

  Parvati: Do you feel any comm gap between us . . . I feel u don’t want to listen or u r getting bored . . . I feel I am bothering you

  Ashok: I want to listen to you . . . Seriously . . . I was writing and you were unloading

  Parvati: So I have to keep some time off to tell u about what bothers me

  Ashok: I have the fear that if I don’t continue writing I might not reach anywhere

  Parvati: Chttn I don’t think I have ever disturbed you while u r at work writing

  Ashok’s novel about the dysfunctional couple was not being written. Parvati’s emotions were taking up most of his writing time. In the mornings before work, when he used to write, he often found her crying. He would sit down and they’d talk, and a whole morning was lost, and then another. At night, after work, when the house was quiet, he was mostly too tired to write.

  February 2014, Gchat:

  Ashok: [If I see you cry] I will also break down . . . That is a sight I can’t take

  Parvati: Sounds like I am always going to be alone when I cry

  Weeks into her break, Parvati began to draw again. This time, she didn’t sketch Hindu gods and goddesses or dancers of Kathakali but instead drew celebrities from American movies she and Ashok watched together. She drew Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, and the cast of Friends. She watched YouTube tutorials that instructed her on how to draw lips, mouths, and eyes, instructing her to “break up the major planes into minor planes,” “look at the landscape surface,” and “make sure to observe all the angles.” She began to think that drawing was a bit like engineering.

  She also started riding the train with Ashok to work downtown so she could visit the galleries in Kala Ghoda, an art district shaped like a crescent moon. In Kala Ghoda, time seemed to move slower than the rest of the city. The architecture was colonial, Indo-Saracenic, and neoclassical. The cafés had high windows and were expensive and airy. The streets were wide, but little traffic entered, and a person could walk for long minutes uninterrupted. Today, Kala Ghoda looked like how people described the old, colonial Mumbai, when the city hadn’t yet become overpopulated, and when you could still pluck mangos from the trees.

  Parvati’s favorite gallery in Kala Ghoda was the Jehangir Art Gallery, which invited visitors to come in and talk to the artists. The gallery’s art included soft watercolors of rural areas, bronze sculptures of Hindu gods, and neon acrylics of proud village women. After Parvati visited, she often went home and drew for hours. As she did, she began to feel more like herself.

  Soon, Parvati focused her efforts on drawing portraits, and specifically on eyes. She had heard that the eyes were the most difficult part of the body to capture, because they expressed the most feeling. Kamala Das said eyes were like a “white, white sun burning.” An Indian yogi had said the heart smiled through the eyes. The beloved Sufi poet Rumi had said the same. Rumi had also said, “Rub your eyes, and look again at love, with love.”

  As she drew, Parvati began to give Ashok more space, and as she did, she noticed how he came back to her.

  February 2014, Gchat:

  Ashok: I was thinking about how I rolled on top of you and you rocked me clasped between your legs

  Parvati: That’s what you’re thinking about?

  Ashok: Yes chikki that’s true

  Chikki, an Indian sweet, made of groundnuts and jaggery. Chikki, the color of honey, and of Parvati’s eyes. Parvati had cut her hair during the break, shorter than she’d ever worn it. Ashok told her it looked “naughty and impish,” because few Indian girls wore their hair short. When they had sex now, they tried new positions, even put their mouths on each other.

  Parvati got better, Parvati got worse. Whenever she had a bad meltdown, Ashok called it a “crying jag.” One day, he heard Parvati crying so loudly he knew it was going to be the worst jag she’d had yet.

  From the Oxford Dictionaries: Jag—a sharp projection . . . Origin—Late Middle English (in the sense “stab, pierce”): perhaps symbolic of sudden movement or unevenness.

  The jag started after Parvati got off the phone with Ashok’s family members. As she spoke to them, she realized how foreign they still felt. She hadn’t chosen them, not really. She hardly knew them. And she didn’t feel connected to them at all. The more she thought about it, the more upset she got. After hanging up, she went inside her room and began to sob.

  “What’s up, Chiboo?” Ashok said, coming into their bedroom.

  Recently, someone had told him that the name of their suburb meant “drama” or “hysterics” in the Gujarati language. My life since moving here has been all drama and hysterics, he thought.

  Parvati looked up at him now. Who is this person? He was just a blank space. A space barely filled in over the last year. He was a stranger, one she had traded for her father.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “It’s about my past,” Parvati said, weeping now, though inwardly she reproached herself to stop.

  Ashok sat beside her, not knowing what else to do.

  “Ashok,” she said finally, “if I go into one of my phases, don’t ask me what is the reason for my crying.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I cry even when you aren’t here.”

  “That’s really something to worry about,” he said, and left to go get his phone to tell his editor he needed the day off.

  Ashok sat hugging her as she cried. After that, they went to sleep, even though it was the afternoon. When they woke up, the apartment felt hot and stale, and it had grown dark outside. A car would have been a welcome distraction, but of course they did not have one. They decided to take a walk, meandering through the suburb’s downtown, past the D-Mart grocery store and the new Starbucks. When they got back to the apartment, Ashok turned on a Malayalam movie, which he thought Parvati would like. Soon, she began to talk over it.

  “I should not have wept so bad. It must have scared you, Ashok,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “You had to. But your weeping made me very worried.” Sometimes, Ashok felt afraid of his new wife.

  “I won’t cry from here on out,” she said, her voice solemn, as if she were making a promise. “I’ll deal with it in a way which is more mature. We’ll talk about it.”

  “Okay,” said Ashok, though he wasn’t sure the promise could be trusted.

  * * *

  In April, Ashok bought a car.

  He’d worried about not having one for months. He knew Parvati’s desire for a car was linked to her desire for him. In all the films—Bollywood, Tamil, Malayalam, even American and British—men took women out on long drives in their cars or on their motorcycles. It was how they fell in love. “You are that kind of girl who wants to . . . take long romantic drives,” he teased Parvati once, and she had said, without hesitation, “Yes, I am that kind of girl.” Ashok had overheard her on the phone with her relatives, telling them how much she missed driving.

  So Ashok bought the car. He had to empty his savings account and take out a loan to do it, but voilà, he thought, now they had one. The Tata Nano had turned out to be too cheap—so cheap it did not work. The car they bought was squat and boxy like a golf cart, and one of the most economical vehicles on the market, at 3.3 lakhs. But it worked, and it was theirs. Ashok referred to it as “the poor man’s Merc.”

  When they first got married, Ashok told Parvati he was an “amazing driver,” but once they got the car, she saw this wasn’t true. He was anxious and uncertain in all his movements and had no idea how to follow road signs. Sometimes, he’d freeze in the middle of the road in heavy traffic as rickshaws darted around him. Motorcycles would nearly clip the car, and giant, brightly painted carrier trucks would barrel past, their “Horn OK please” signs disappearing in the distance. A cacophony of horns would sound, until at last Ashok unfroze and crossed the intersection.

  “I saw how amazing you are,” Parvati told him after one such incident, laughing.

  “Thi
s doesn’t happen all the time, just today,” Ashok protested.

  “You stop saying that you are amazing, that day I’ll believe you,” said Parvati, and Ashok laughed with her.

  * * *

  Ashok had a new goal: to not just finish the novel but also find a publisher. He could see the way the novel had changed with each woman he was with—from Nada, when his writing was lighter, to their breakup, when the book turned dark, to his breakup with Mallika, when his writing became despairing. Now, with Parvati, his writing had changed again. Since marriage, he wrote more authentically about relationships—about the complex power struggles, unspoken hurts, and small moments of grace between husband and wife. He also sometimes pilfered little pieces of Parvati’s life that she shared with him, such as how, in her college days, she had tried to build a boat that could fly, but it never took off from the ground.

  It had been six months since Parvati’s break began. Ashok was now able to write more often in the mornings, though there were still many days wasted. If he were to find a publisher, he’d need uninterrupted time to write. But when Ashok asked Parvati what her plans were, she told him she was still confused. She said she wasn’t sure whether to go back to school. As Ashok listened to her waver, he grew irritated with her in a way she had not seen before.

  At the newspaper, a colleague had recently quoted a Marathi saying about marriage: Love is like a scorpion’s sting. At first it’s painful pleasure. But as the poison begins to seep in you feel the pain more.

  “This is not the way things should be,” he told Parvati, his voice severe. “You cannot indefinitely be depressed. You have to consider that there are others living with you.”

  Parvati was quiet. She knew he was right.

  That week, she called her oldest friend from childhood, whom she had not spoken to in years. Pacing across their living room floor—from their altar with their gods by the door to her wedding photo and back—Parvati told her friend about all that had happened since they last talked. She began with Joseph and ended with Ashok and the loneliness of her long break in Mumbai, a city of eighteen million or more. A city where it seemed anyone could disappear.

  Her friend listened, and at the end said, “Do you think there is any future with this guy?”

  With Joseph.

  “I’m married to Ashok,” said Parvati. In that simple statement, she knew she had her answer.

  She would give up on Joseph. She would go back to school. And she would try to love Ashok as best she should.

  It was time to pick a role, pick a life.

  After Parvati hung up, she felt a kind of calm she hadn’t felt in a long time. And she did not cry after this, fulfilling the promise she’d made to Ashok—not until what happened with the baby.

  In Time

  Maya and Veer, 2014 to 2015

  “The bite wounds on your lower lip

  So distress my heart

  That it seems we are still one

  Though we’ve been so long apart?”

  —Jayadeva, The Gita Govinda

  Veer made plans to take Maya out to dinner, which he never did, at a restaurant in Juhu by the sea. But it rained so hard that day, and the night before, that the roads were flooding, and they saw Juhu would take hours to reach. The morning paper reported that the runway to Juhu’s airport had turned into a lake. It warned that because of all the rain, a crocodile had walked on land and dragged a woman washing clothes into the water. And it noted that in the west-central part of the country, because of the monsoon, it “rained happiness” but “poured worry” too.

  Maya and Veer decided to go to the mall for dinner instead, a common refuge when the city got too hot or rainy. On the road, motorcyclists held umbrellas, riding one-handed, or drove with plastic bags over their faces. Rickshaw drivers unfurled their rain flaps, though they never kept out all the rain. As they sat in traffic growing hungry, Veer brought up a recent visit with his aunt. “Janu told her he wanted to drink alcohol,” he told Maya, dropping his voice low. “He said he wants to drink it since ‘it’s not a big deal, and Maya and Veer and Subal always do it.’” Maya made a face. “Now she has some masala,” Veer said. Maya nodded; he was right. Gossip like this could lead to trouble. Janu is too smart, she thought, turning to look at him in the back seat. They’d have to start disguising their drinks at restaurants.

  But all gossip was forgotten when they got inside the mall, which was huge and new and gleaming. Banners hung in the mall’s atrium boasting of an upscale Chinese restaurant and Italian ristorante. As rain dripped from the ceiling, a sinewy man crouched with a bucket and rag and wiped up every drop. Maya and Veer wandered from floor to floor, Janu running with delight in front of them. He was four now, and excitable and curious about everything.

  They chose an all-you-can-eat Indian restaurant, which Veer preferred, with gaudy colored pendants hanging from the ceiling. As they ate pani puri and other chaat, a DJ put on a sixties-era British love song for a couple’s anniversary, and Janu begged them to dance. “Not yet,” said Maya, who was busy checking and rechecking her phone, as Veer went up to the buffet for more food.

  After dinner was over and Janu was allowed to get up, he ran over to a tarot card reader. The reader, who was fat and had a lazy eye, told Veer, who asked for a reading, that he should start preparing for a worsening future. Veer only laughed at this. Afterward, the DJ switched to Punjabi music, and Veer and Janu began to dance. Maya, who had gotten a text from Subal after a long silence, began to film them on her phone.

  On the way home, they let Janu sit in the front of the car and put the seat all the way back. Veer sang made-up lullabies to help him sleep. “Bana,” he sang, “soja bana.” Janu’s eyes began to close. It had stopped raining, and a light fog hung all around them. “Laddoo,” Veer sang. “Pyaar.”

  Janu, who was old enough to sleep in his own bed now but didn’t, slept that night pressed against the curve of Veer’s back, clutching a piece of Maya’s hair in his hand.

  * * *

  The road to Pune was covered with a misty fog, the kind that suggested ghosts and apparitions. Maya chattered as they drove, her anticipation of the trip ahead loosening up her tongue. She had seen very little of Subal that month. His visits had become even more erratic after he quit his new job, which never paid him. To see Maya, he had to drive more than an hour in traffic. But now they’d have an entire two days together.

  “I’m driving, Maya,” Subal said, annoyed by her constant chatter, and reached over to slap her thigh.

  The road began to wind through the mountains, from which were suspended ads for the phone company Tata Docomo and the Indian whiskey brand Royal Stag. The fog made it appear as if the letters were hanging in the sky. T-A-T-A, and then air. The fog thickened as they drove, and soon all Subal could see was white. Maya, who craned her neck forward, spied a mountain peak through the haze. “Look at that,” she said. “Let’s go up there. To the top.”

  Subal nodded but didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, he pulled over at a rest stop known for its stale idlis and watery sambar. As she went inside, he didn’t follow her and instead took deep drags of a cigarette.

  When they reached Pune, a city polluted by scooters and motorbikes, Subal let Maya out of the car. He had a business meeting and didn’t want to be late. After he’d quit his job, his usual bluster had disappeared, along with his proclivity for jokes, and his baritone voice had become strained. But he had an idea for a new business venture, and the meeting was to raise money for it. He tried not to think about how much depended on it going well.

  When they met up in a café later, Subal told Maya the man had promised him a five crore investment, a sum so sizeable it gave him pause. Instead of excitement, he felt only worry, a pit in his stomach like the stone of a mango. And Maya was so congratulatory it made him feel worse. She also had a business meeting that afternoon, with an engineer to troubleshoot an app she’d bought for her preschool. As she pulled out her phone to confirm the time, Subal
stared at her.

  “Why can’t you get the problem fixed over the phone, Maya?” he asked, his voice edged with suspicion. “I don’t understand.”

  Maya explained that she had tried that already, and it hadn’t worked. Subal was not convinced.

  “Do you like someone there?” he said, his voice getting louder as they walked out to the car. “Is that why you’re going?”

  “What? No. No.” Maya dropped her phone into her purse as if it was hot.

  As Subal got in the front seat, he told Maya that she would have to hail a rickshaw to her meeting. “Good-bye,” he said, and shut the door, leaving her standing in the middle of the road, motorcycles and scooters whizzing past her. Maya steeled herself not to cry.

  When she messaged Subal later, he told her he would sleep at a cousin’s house and she would have to find her own accommodation. What did I do wrong? she thought. I haven’t done anything.

  Last-minute bookings for hotels in Pune turned out to be pricey, or the hotel had no vacancy, or it was in a dangerous part of town. As Maya kept searching, she began to feel anxious. It wasn’t safe for women to roam alone after dark. She ended up asking for help finding a hotel from the engineer, whose name was Mohan. Mohan was several years younger than Maya and drove a Royal Enfield motorcycle. He wore a soul patch and an earring and had an open, boyish face. Maya wouldn’t allow herself to think he was good-looking.

  For several hours that night, Mohan drove Maya from hotel to hotel to check prices and vacancy. He kept apologizing that he couldn’t let her stay at his home, which would not be appropriate for a woman traveling alone. At last, they found a reasonable hotel in the shopping district. Maya thanked him profusely for his help. In his formal, polite way, Mohan told her it was nothing and waited outside until she got up to her room.