The Heart Is a Shifting Sea Page 32

  “What? Are you okay?” asked Parvati.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It was like ghadda-ghadda-ghadda.” He switched to Tamil. “It was like a bomb blast. I went into our room and . . .”

  Ashok was grateful Parvati hadn’t been at home when the blast happened. She would have gotten upset. She would have wanted to call people or make him stay home from work. Or maybe he would have made her stay home from school. They were similar that way, both cautious, careful people.

  Later, Ashok would learn the blast was caused by a short circuit in the car’s wiring. The current had followed the wrong path. Short circuits could happen anywhere—in Mumbai, Trivandrum, or even Germany, where Ashok knew Joseph still lived. Joseph, who did not have the same gods or beliefs as Parvati. They would have struggled with that, Ashok thought.

  But this kind of blast probably happened more often on the streets of Mumbai, a city of spontaneous combustion. The city where he and Parvati chose to live and where they’d soon have a child. The list of potential hazards for a child was long: bad water, bad food, air pollution, light pollution, car accidents, train accidents, shoddy construction, shoddy roads, religious violence, political violence, street mobs, fires, floods, Eve teasers, rapists, and pedophiles. And the bursting of a car into flames.

  * * *

  In December, after their one-year anniversary, they had sex to try for a baby for the first time.

  Parvati had always heard that trying for a baby was romantic. But instead it seemed like work. She tried to make it passionate, like she had in the early days of their marriage, yet somehow they couldn’t summon the emotion. It didn’t help that they had to plan sex: for after Ashok came home at night, exhausted from the office, or midday, when she rushed home from school for lunch, or in the morning, when she was trying to get out the door. For all of December, they kept trying.

  Later that month, they decided to go away to Pune for the day. In the city, once a stronghold of an old Hindu empire, they visited Pataleshwar, an ancient Hindu cave-temple devoted to Lord Shiva, with a lingam, Shiva’s phallic symbol, at the center. Shiva was known to be an ardent lover—so much that his lovemaking shook the cosmos. This was not one of Parvati’s favorite stories.

  As they left Pataleshwar, Parvati spotted a three-striped Indian palm squirrel outside the temple and thought of the story of Lord Ram, who built a bridge to rescue his wife Sita from a demon with the aid of birds and a particularly helpful squirrel. Afterward, Ram stroked the squirrel on the back with three fingers in gratitude, leaving the trademark stripes behind. Parvati preferred this story, though not its ending, when Ram wrongly accused Sita of sleeping with the demon and made her walk over coals to prove her purity. In the old myths, women were punished in many different ways.

  The last stop they made was Parvati Hill. Parvati’s namesake was said to help with fertility and birthing, because though the goddess had been cursed as barren, she ultimately gave birth to a child. On the hill there was a colorful Parvati temple, painted in bright reds and yellows. It reminded Parvati of the flamboyant domed churches in Saint Petersburg and Moscow Joseph had told her about. After visiting the temple, Ashok and Parvati stood at the top of the hill, quietly looking down at the city. The sun was just beginning to set. It was the golden hour, and the air felt very cool. Parvati took photo after photo of the city bathed in yellow light. Ashok asked her to take a photo of him and she did, laughing.

  As they rode the bus home to Mumbai in their cramped but cozy seats, rain pouring down outside, it almost felt romantic. Parvati hoped that the next time they made love it would be more like the movies in the West, where a baby was conceived with passion, maybe even over a bottle of wine.

  After the New Year—a holiday that passed without fanfare, though Parvati expected this now—they tried again. At the same time, Parvati’s parents kept doing poojas for her to get pregnant and to the snake gods. In early February, when Parvati peed on a stick at home, she saw that there was a line.

  She didn’t believe it and took a second test with the same result. She called Ashok into the room. “Let’s not get too excited,” she said, though her voice said otherwise. “Let’s not get too excited,” Ashok said back, and kissed her on the forehead. He was already thinking of baby names. “And let’s not tell this to anyone yet,” she added, because she knew how much could go wrong in a pregnancy. Ashok promised her he wouldn’t.

  But it was hard to keep the news a secret. A Malayalam proverb went: You can keep one betel nut in your pocket, but will it be possible to keep a betel nut tree? Although Ashok told only his father and brother, they both told other members of the family, who told still others, until many people knew. Ashok’s parents were so excited they immediately planned a trip to Mumbai.

  Outside Ashok and Parvati’s bedroom window, a pigeon began building a nest. Parvati saw it and thought she should remove it. It was on their air-conditioner unit, and the eggs might crack. She also didn’t want the birds coming in the house. A common superstition said that a bird inside was an omen of a death to come.

  Parvati tossed the sticks and twigs to the ground every time she noticed them. But the pigeon was persistent, and soon a nest was built and two eggs were laid on top of the AC. Parvati told Ashok, who agreed they should be removed, but not by them, because it could be bad luck. Ashok asked the maid to take care of it.

  After that, Parvati came home from school one day to find the AC unit spotless. She hoped the maid had been careful with the eggs and also worried a little about whether the pigeon would be able to find her babies down below.

  * * *

  At her previous appointment, the doctor had warned Parvati that miscarriages were common at this stage, especially for Indian women; about a third experienced a spontaneous miscarriage the first time. “This happens all the time,” the doctor said, in a voice that sounded aggressive and loud to Parvati. “See, it’s just four weeks, so you’re not emotionally attached to it yet.”

  Who are you to say that? Parvati thought. I know my body, and I became attached right away.

  In the month since Parvati found out, she had begun waking up nauseous in the mornings. Afterward, she felt ravenous, as if she were already hungry for two. She felt an immediate connection to the baby. There is something alive in my body, she thought.

  Since Ashok’s parents arrived in Mumbai, they had talked about nothing but the baby. Ashok’s father spent most of his time online, looking up data on early stages of pregnancy. He relayed all his findings to them: At four weeks, a baby is the size of a poppy seed. At five weeks, the beginnings of the spine, brain, and backbone begin to form. At six weeks, the average heart rate of a fetus is 120 to 160 beats per minute.

  When Parvati went to the doctor’s office for her next checkup, the doctor did a scan. Afterward, Ashok and Parvati sat in the room together, waiting like Carl and Ellie in the movie Up. When the doctor came back, she announced without fanfare: “There is no heartbeat.”

  Zero beats per minute.

  Her voice still seemed loud.

  At home, Ashok’s father opened the door, his head hanging low. Ashok had called him from the car. Parvati saw that she had to be strong for Ashok’s father, who clearly could not be strong for her. “It’s okay,” she told him. “Next time we’ll have a baby. Next time there will be a heartbeat.”

  “But are you sad?” Ashok’s father asked.

  How is this a question? Parvati thought.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice felt far away. “But there is nothing we can do.”

  Ashok’s mother, who could always be relied on to be warm and kind, came over to her. “You’re like my own daughter,” she said, and though she had said this before, this time Parvati knew she meant it.

  Parvati called her parents in Trivandrum, who demanded she send them her medical reports so they could consult local doctors they trusted. Meanwhile, Ashok disappeared into the computer room to search for information on miscarriages. He was heartened to find that eve
n women who had four miscarriages or more could still carry a healthy baby to term.

  He came back into the living room and told Parvati, “Chiboo, we’ll be okay.”

  But the fetus was still inside Parvati. The doctor had given her a pill; if not for the scan, she said, she would have had a natural miscarriage in four months. On the official paperwork, it was called an abortion.

  That night, after Parvati swallowed the pill, she began to throw up violently. “Call your mom,” she told Ashok. It was always a woman who helped in these situations, when women were considered unclean.

  “No,” he said, firmly. “I’ll help you.”

  All through the night, as Parvati threw up, Ashok stayed awake and wiped her face with tissues. She threw up over and over again and began to bleed.

  “I flushed my baby,” she said, and she was crying now, for the first time since she had promised Ashok she wouldn’t. “I flushed my baby.”

  “No, no,” Ashok said, and his voice was calming. He cleaned her face again and massaged her back and feet. His touch felt so unbearably kind to Parvati that she only cried harder. A line from the movie Up went: “I have just met you, and I love you.” As he kept kneading her feet and back, Parvati felt she had not really seen Ashok until now.

  * * *

  After the miscarriage and Ashok’s parents’ departure, Parvati began to dream again of snakes. Her parents were still doing their poojas to the snake gods. A belief: the snake deity Naga could make a woman fertile or he could turn malevolent, depending on how he was pleased. In the nearby lake, one of the crocodiles that usually sunned himself turned up dead.

  Parvati dreamed of other things, including the Jacobite boy from college. On Facebook she saw that his wife was pregnant with a second child, and in her dream, he had four children surrounding him. She messaged him to tell him about her dream, and he wrote back, “At this rate, you’re right.”

  Parvati and Ashok visited doctor after doctor together. At each visit, Parvati asked what she’d done wrong. Ashok and the doctors told her that was silly. “Don’t blame yourself,” the doctors said. “The miscarriage was not in your control.”

  Then Parvati’s sister got pregnant a second time, along with several of Parvati’s cousins. It seemed like the whole country was getting pregnant. “Everyone’s getting two babies and I’m not even getting one,” Parvati told Ashok. “You just go sit there and watch some TV if you’re going to think like that,” he said, and then added, “Wait, do you mean to be funny? Or are you making a joke of being sad?”

  Both, Parvati thought.

  “What will happen if we don’t have children?” Ashok asked the following month as they sat in their bedroom with the shades drawn.

  “Well,” Parvati said, and tried to envision it. “If we do not have a kid, you will withdraw into a shell. You’ll spend most of the time in front of the computer writing. And over time, you’ll grow indifferent to me.”

  “Ah,” said Ashok. This sounded right. He also tried to imagine it. “Chiboo, you’re tempestuous and you’d become more tempestuous,” he said. “You will rage and rant a lot. And when my parents would come to stay with me, you will treat them badly and not be nice to them at all.”

  They both laughed at this.

  “So we better have a kid,” said Parvati.

  “Right,” said Ashok. “But . . . couples find ways to stay together without kids,” he said. “We’d still be together. Because fundamentally there is a lot of connection, Chiboo.”

  There was a saying Ashok had grown up hearing the elders of the family say, which had variations across India: The family name—the kutumpa peyar—should continue. The family line should not end. The family line must not be broken.

  Also, in Hinduism, there were four life stages. Student, householder, retiree, renunciation. The second stage, householder, meant getting married and having children. The Mahabharata said the householder should take a spouse and then establish “a fire of his own.” You couldn’t move on to the third stage without the second.

  Also, in Hinduism, only a male child can light his father’s funeral pyre.

  In the fall they decided to try again. Parvati’s father told her to visit the campus temple to Laxmi, goddess of prosperity, to pray for a successful pregnancy. The temple was rose pink and overlooked the artificial lake and stood against a backdrop of trees. Once a week before class, Parvati dutifully visited the shrine. It couldn’t hurt.

  At night, she practiced her Carnatic singing, which helped keep her focus elsewhere. It also made her think of home. She thought that if she got pregnant again, the baby would hear her and feel calm.

  “Go for it like it’s the first time,” the doctors kept telling them, but it didn’t feel like the first time at all. The calendar method only increased the pressure, because there was only a small window in which to conceive. We can’t just wait for passion to arrive, thought Parvati. Especially when it didn’t seem like passion was going to come.

  There were many ancient beliefs in Hinduism about what happened if you conceived without passion. Mostly it was said this would be reflected in the mental state of the child.

  There were also beliefs about the best time to conceive, which was supposed to be between midnight and 3 p.m. Diti, the earth goddess, had conceived two sons out of lust and out of jealousy of her sister, at dusk, an improper time. As a result, her sons had been born wicked and immoral.

  There were also beliefs about how to have a son. A husband and wife should have sex midway through the menstrual cycle and perform a special ritual.

  And there were beliefs about what a pregnant woman shouldn’t do. Dhanvantari, avatar of Vishnu, and god of Ayurveda, supposedly said if a pregnant woman drew kajal on her eyes, the baby would be born blind. He said that if a woman cried while pregnant, the baby would have bad eyesight. If she got an oil massage, then the child would have leprosy. If the woman laughed too much, then the baby’s lips would be black.

  Ashok and Parvati did not place much stock in the old Hindu tales. But Parvati worried about the belief about passion. It seemed only logical that a child should be conceived that way. One day Parvati suggested a solution to their problem: she and Ashok should watch porn.

  Parvati didn’t know much about pornography. Conservative families down south mostly didn’t talk about it. The only time porn was openly discussed was when it was in the news, such as when three politicians were caught watching porn on their cell phones in the legislature. Or when actress Sunny Leone crossed over from porn films—Goddess: Sunny’s First Anal Scene—to big-budget Bollywood thrillers. After Leone’s third Bollywood appearance, a woman in Mumbai filed a police report against her for “destroying Indian culture and society.” India now had among the most women watching porn of any country.

  From what little Parvati knew about porn, she thought it might help them. She had watched some soft-core videos on her own on the website Dailymotion, and she knew Ashok sometimes watched more graphic films on sites like YouPorn and RedTube. Like many Indian men, he searched keywords like “boyfriend girlfriend” and “husband wife,” because he liked watching couples together. Or because he didn’t know there were more explicit videos out there.

  Ashok was unnerved by her suggestion. He’d much rather watch porn alone. He thought that they should solve their passion problem in other ways, such as by going out with friends, which seemed to act as an aphrodisiac.

  But Ashok need not have worried, because when he finally agreed, the website wouldn’t load. They tried another site. Nothing. Another. It wouldn’t load either. The sites all displayed the message that they were “blocked as per the instruction of Competent Authority.” Later, they read in the newspaper that the central government had enacted some kind of ban on pornography, which was allegedly just for child porn but had also extended to adult sites. Some 850 adult websites in total had been found in violation of “decency or morality,” which were enshrined in the constitution.

  Despite the ban,
she and Ashok were determined to make their sex better. One week, they had sex five times in six days, and Parvati hoped that it was with enough passion to make a baby.

  * * *

  Ashok was also determined to get his manuscript out to literary agents. After four years, it was finally complete. The novel was very long now and filled with complex story lines. But Ashok saw it as the simple story of a man’s botched efforts in marriage, work, and life—though he had tacked on a happy ending. One day, after Parvati left for school, he hunkered down to write a synopsis so he could send it off.

  For nearly an hour, he tried to write on his laptop out in the living room but kept getting distracted. Across from him was the pooja shelf with the ceramic baby Krishna, still in its wrapping. He moved into the computer room, empty of sentimentality—just a bed, desktop computer, and books, with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot on top. Next to the desktop was a medical slip from Parvati’s last visit to the doctor. On it were a few scrawled notes: “miscarriage March 2015,” “planning for a baby,” and “anxious about any precautions or care to be taken.”

  Ashok decided to send off the book the next day.

  It was around this time—after a long period of forgetting—that Ashok thought of the incidents with the chai-wallah and the man in the theater. He decided they were not significant events and that he did not need to tell Parvati about them. He knew that many young boys in Mumbai had dealt with worse. Many young boys had not just been touched but had also been forced to have sex. A line from The Marriage Plot about sadness said it was like a bruise you had to try not to touch. The key was not to think about it.

  * * *

  Parvati felt both hungry and nauseous, and her period was late. She wondered if she could be pregnant again. She allowed herself to get a little excited at the prospect.

  The following night, she and Ashok went bowling at the mall, passing a romantic fountain with colored lights at the entrance and a lingerie store promising “lace all over . . . so, so sensual.” The city’s malls were so different from the street bazaars of old—far more sterile and orderly. They passed a kids’ arcade filled with well-dressed children and a giant Hamleys toy shop from London. As they walked, Eric Clapton’s “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” played from the loudspeakers.