Maya and Veer, 1999 to 2009
“It was springtime: her limbs delicate as primrose,
Radha roamed the forest, searching high and low for Krishna;
More and more distraught was she in love’s feverish delirium . . .”
—Jayadeva, The Gita Govinda
Maya first saw him at a wedding. Her friend was marrying his brother in the southern city of Hyderabad, on the banks of the Musi River, which separated the old city from the new. It was the year India and Pakistan fought in Kargil up north. They had been fighting since Partition, but still it was a conflict to be remembered. It was January, and cool, the day before Republic Day, which celebrated India’s adoption of its constitution, when the country became truly free. It was held in a hotel alongside a garden. But Maya would not remember most of that. All she would remember of the wedding was that Veer was there.
And that they were both seated on the stage during the saat phere, the seven circles of the sacred fire to the chant of mantras, and the sweet smell of incense. Around and around the happy couple went, holding hands, walking three times with the bride in front, and the last four with the groom leading. Seven times, because a circle’s 360 degrees cannot be divided by seven, and so the marriage was said to be indivisible. Maya, who was sixteen or seventeen and thin and gangly then, could not stop staring at Veer as the priest chanted steadily in Sanskrit, and the bride and groom repeated their vows: I will be Sama, you will be Rig . . . Let me be the Heaven, you be the Earth.
Veer, who was older, had spoken a few words to Maya before the wedding, to ask her the location of a beauty parlor. He said he needed it for his cousin, but she hoped it had been an excuse to approach her.
After the ceremony, as Maya stood in a group of friends across from Veer, she noted that he was handsome, though not in a traditional way. His hair was slicked over to one side, and he had big, full lips set in a smooth, wide face. But it was his eyes—which were large and expressive, and one of which was lazy—that she liked most. He looked intense, poetic, lost in space. He didn’t look like any man she knew. He also seemed to know his way around people, which she found impressive.
Something about him made Maya think of the Hindu god Krishna, who was known to be compassionate and charming. Krishna also had a way with women. In his lifetime, it was said he had taken sixteen thousand wives. As Veer spoke, female wedding guests grouped around him in anxious clusters. Several times he made the entire wedding party laugh. Maya desperately wanted to go over and speak with him.
But she wasn’t adept at conversation. It was a quality that as a teenager she hadn’t developed. And though people said she was pretty, with big, wistful eyes and silky hair that fell far down her back, she was certain that she was ugly. People also told her she had an intense stare and boyish figure. It didn’t help that she was smarter than almost every boy in school, which made her feel self-conscious around them. She didn’t dare speak more than a few words to Veer after the ceremony.
As the wedding ended and the guests departed, several of the boys asked the girls for their e-mails. Maya gave everyone a wrong e-mail except Veer. She handed it to him on a tiny scrap of paper, just as he was preparing to board a train. “Don’t share this with anyone,” she said, letting her voice drop low.
“Thanks,” said Veer, who gave her an easy smile.
Maya decided then, though she knew it was foolish, that Veer would be the man she’d someday marry.
After several months, Maya received a greeting card in the mail, with a picture of a bear sitting at a writing desk on the front, and the caption: “Thank you just doesn’t seem like enough.” Tucked inside was a letter.
“It was a very nice time with you. Thank you so much for tolerating us, especially me. Hope I didn’t bother you too much,” Veer wrote. “I look forward to my next meeting with ‘YOU.’”
The capital letters made Maya’s heart leap. Below it, he had written, “The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.” And a signoff: “With lots of luv and wishes, Veer (Kancha).”
Luv.
Kancha. A nickname.
Maya tried not to get excited. She lived in Hyderabad and he lived in Mumbai, which was a full day’s train ride or expensive flight away. She had also heard he was seeing someone there. But she kept up the correspondence, hoping that if they built a friendship, someday it might grow into something more.
Three years later, the casual letters between them finally turned into a second meeting and a kiss in Mumbai, which was a sprawling, thrilling place to Maya, nothing at all like home. Hyderabad, an old and crumbling city, was filled with monuments to lost dynasties, while in Mumbai, where Maya was visiting family, every day felt fevered and new. She and Veer met in the city’s crowded suburbs for coffee, and then went out to the movies, and finally ended up at a neighbour’s home. There, Veer kissed Maya as she stood at a window, like a hero would in a Hindi film. Veer leaned in first, which Maya would always remember.
Afterward, as they took a walk, Veer told her: “I don’t want to get into a relationship.”
“Okay,” said Maya, who was not dissuaded, “but I think you’re the one for me.”
After Maya flew back home to Hyderabad, she and Veer kept talking, but several seasons passed and they made no plans to meet again. When Veer’s birthday approached, Maya decided it was time to do something bold. She had filled out in the intervening years and had begun to line her eyes with kajal. At twenty, she now attracted attention from men all the time. She could easily hold her own at a party. And so it was without trepidation that she sent Veer a plane ticket to come visit her in Hyderabad for his birthday. Though the flight was only an hour from Mumbai, it cost 17,000 rupees, which was a few hundred US dollars then. Maya, who was still a student, sold a stack of her treasured books and gold bracelets to cover the cost.
After she booked the plane ticket, she also found herself reserving a hotel room. While she had experimented a little with boys in college, she had never had sex. Almost all the girls she knew were virgins, or said they were; the kanyadaan, or giving away of the virgin bride, remained among the most important Hindu wedding rituals. And yet she continued to feel certain that Veer would someday become her husband, and for that reason it would be all right, though she worried that her parents might discover her sneaking out. She knew they’d be shocked if they did. Other girls her age were not so bold.
On Veer’s birthday night, they made love in the hotel room as Maya had hoped. But while it was clear she charmed him, she saw that he did not love her. When she said that she wanted to marry him, Veer was kind but firm as he said no. “There is no future in whatever you’re saying,” he told her. “I’m too much in my past.”
Veer’s past was another woman, coincidentally also named Maya. It was the woman he had dated when he sent Maya the thank-you card. Everyone said Veer had turned into a deewana over the other Maya—had gone mad in love—even though he had met her in person only two or three times.
The other Maya was also Veer’s very distant cousin, and so believed to be of his same gotra, or lineage. In marriage, a gotra was sometimes used to determine whom a person could or could not love. The elders in his family would see marrying this other Maya as taboo, a kind of incest.
When the other Maya broke off their relationship, Veer assumed her family had pressured her into it for this reason. Or because his family’s business had taken on too much debt and crashed around that time, and so their new money was sure to vanish soon. Both realities made him a less-than-attractive prospective groom. He was certain the other Maya would never have left him of her own volition. Because it was a perfect relationship, he thought.
But even if it was clear to the rest of the world that the other Maya could not be his wife, Veer continued to pretend that it was possible. He kept his cell phone wallpaper unchanged: a photo of her, smiling out at him. She was smiling from his wallpaper even as he made love to Maya on his birthday night.
***
When Veer told Maya of his feelings for the other Maya, at first she was distraught. But then she thought of the old Hindu myth of the god Krishna and his lover Radha, and began to feel better. It was a love story she had read since she was small. Out of all the women Krishna met, it was Radha, the gopi, or cow-herding maiden, whom he loved best. But Radha had to suffer for their love. She suffered so much she was known as the personification of Bhakti—of obsessive, devotional, sacrificial love. And yet she also enchanted Krishna like no other woman could. While they never married, Krishna and Radha’s love was considered eternal. Maya thought that she should channel Radha and her sacrifices. If Veer doesn’t love me, Maya thought, then he should be with the one he loves.
Maya called around and found Veer the other Maya’s new contact information, which had changed since they’d dated. “Go ahead and talk to her,” Maya said, and encouraged him to try to win her back.
But though Veer tried, the other Maya did not want a reunion. She said she wasn’t going to hurt her family to be with him. Veer was upset but understood. A common adage went: Family, where life begins and love never ends. And a much-repeated filmi dialogue: The value of family is greater than dreams.
Veer called Maya and thanked her for her help but told her he would not keep trying. He said he had too much respect for the other Maya’s devotion to family and would honor that by giving up what they had. We met perfectly. We left perfectly, Veer told himself so that it would not hurt so much. So it is still a perfect relationship.
Veer continued to call and text Maya often, though he said that they were just friends. Soon, they began talking every day. “I don’t think we should be talking,” he’d say, but then they would talk for two, four, six hours, until the morning light arrived. When India’s telephone companies got the capability for picture messaging, they began sending photos back and forth every day. In each successive photo, they could see the tiny, almost imperceptible changes in the person from the day before. Before long, Veer began calling her “Mayu,” and she used his family nickname “Kancha.”
And then Maya came back to Mumbai several times with her mother, and each time, she snuck out and rendezvoused with Veer in hotel rooms. Each time, they had sex. When apart, they began having phone sex, and Veer knew she was no longer a friend. I miss you, he found himself texting her. I need you.
Soon, Maya allowed herself to believe he had forgotten all about the other Maya. She thought that maybe he could even become a deewana over her instead. After many months, Veer said the words Maya had longed to hear for so long. “Let’s get married,” he told her over the phone, “and see how and where it goes.”
Maya tried not to think the words sounded noncommittal.
***
She didn’t want her father to find out about the engagement. Not so soon, and not like this. But her brother—who had once drawn a literal dividing line in their bedroom between what was his and hers, playing at the border of India and Pakistan—spilled her secret before she had a chance to.
“Have you gone mad?” her father said, his voice thundering through their big, open home, which was so close to the airport they could hear the planes come in. Her father, a gentle man with professorial glasses, was unexpectedly forceful as he forbade the marriage. He told her to forget all about Veer. “Marry him, and yours will be a life of sorrow,” he said.
Maya’s father knew Veer’s father, because the two men had done business together. They were also both from the same ethnic group: Marwaris, traders, migratory but originally from Rajasthan, and stereotyped for valuing money above all things. He thought Veer’s father inhabited the stereotype to the greatest degree. He had heard whisperings about the other Maya, about how Veer could not give her up. In their community, news traveled fast. Maya’s father did not trust Veer or his parents. He had heard that women who married into Veer’s family were harassed by their in-laws. He swore to prevent the marriage any way he could.
As weeks passed, Maya began to panic. She was convinced that she and Veer would never marry. Not only did her father remain opposed to the union, but Veer made no steps to plan a wedding. She thought that he regretted having asked her. She decided he had not meant it at all. Love marriages were still rare in the city; romance was mostly reserved for the gods and the movies. She had been foolish to believe that Veer was different from other men. But she had believed, and that made it worse.
In a moment of rashness, Maya found a bottle of sleeping pills in the house and swallowed thirty of them, one after the other after the other. Her father came home to find her stumbling down the hall.
At the hospital, they put a thick tube down Maya’s throat and pumped her stomach. The tube caused searing pain but saved her life.
Maya took the pills to send a message: I cannot live without Veer. She wanted her father to see it, and Veer to see it. And it was true; if she couldn’t have him, then she wanted to die. She had begun to feel that life was a constant struggle: with her father, with boys, and with how girls in India were permitted to live. She hadn’t been allowed to study what she wanted to, earning a master’s degree in analytic chemistry only because it was a field her father found respectable. If she had chosen, she would have studied psychology or journalism. And now her father would also choose her husband. She hoped that swallowing the pills would show him how misguided that effort was.
But after she recovered, Maya was shocked to find her father’s stance had not changed. If anything, it had hardened. She should have remembered this about him. When he made up his mind about a subject, it was like he’d completed a Marwari business deal. It was finished, bought and sold. Over. Neither melodrama nor violence could change that.
And Veer still made no steps to plan a wedding. He and Maya continued to talk, but he avoided the subject of marriage. And so, a season later, when Maya’s father suggested she at least meet another man, she unhappily agreed to it. There was, in fact, a line of men waiting for her: a fair, well-proportioned Hindu girl, and a supposed virgin, who smiled in photos with her mouth closed. Demureness was always valued in a woman.
Her parents set her up with Anil, a small-time Bollywood filmmaker and aspiring poet with a feminine voice, and a desperate comb-over. They impressed upon Maya that he lived on Mumbai’s tony Altamount Road and came from a wealthy family. Equally important was the fact that he was from the same Brahmin subcaste.
Soon a trip was suggested—with Anil, Maya, and both sets of parents—for everyone to get to know one another better. Maya agreed, thinking this might be just the leverage she needed to win over Veer. But when Maya told Veer, he only said, “Go and let’s see what happens.” Maya thought he sounded upset but couldn’t tell for sure.
Anil and Maya set off with their parents for Mysore, a South Indian city of palaces at the base of the lush Chamundi Hills. In spite of the bucolic landscape, Maya found it anything but romantic. She was not at all interested in Anil, with his turtle face and family wealth. Anil found Maya beautiful, but also didn’t want to be pressured.
After the trip, Anil and Maya met without their parents at a Café Coffee Day, a Western-style coffee chain frequented by young couples, on a prearranged date to talk next steps. As they sat down, Anil said, “I think this is all bullshit.”
“I agree,” said Maya.
“I don’t believe in arranged marriages.”
“Neither do I.”
Nor did many young people in Mumbai, and so arranging marriages took a special finesse. Both sets of parents tried to convince Maya and Anil that the other person had come around and asked when they might also give in. As summer neared its end, and Maya’s parents kept asking, Maya called Veer to impress upon him that he was about to lose her.
“There is no way they are not going to get me engaged to this guy,” she told Veer, with a touch of drama. “The whole society knows. You have to decide what you want to do.”
The next day, Veer asked Maya to marry him. This time, she could tell the proposal was different. Something had changed in his voice and demeanor. “Until the eighth of August I wasn’t definitely interested in a marriage,” Veer said later. “But on the ninth of August I thought: it’s okay.”
Something had changed because when Veer saw he might lose her, he thought of all of Maya’s best qualities. He thought about how she was always supportive. She always told him what she felt. I have also shown her my life like an open deck of cards, he thought, and she’d embraced it, not getting hung up on the success or failure of his family business. This seemed like what a man needed in a wife: someone who supported and understood you and always gave you a frank opinion. Veer had also come around after he mentioned the idea of marrying Maya to his father and his father supported it.
But when he asked Maya to marry him, he also told her the other Maya would remain in his life. He said the photo of her might stay on his wallpaper forever.
I should walk out right now, Maya thought. But she didn’t, because she was certain he was the one.
And before they married, Maya decided she would visit Choodi Bazaar. There, in the centre of a teeming marketplace in Hyderabad, a woman could find bangles in any color and style. There were big shops with glass cases of fancy bangles and little outdoor shops with tarpaulin roofs that sold simpler ones. The shopkeepers always beckoned with cries of “Choora, choora!” which could be worn for any occasion but primarily for weddings.
Some were made from the ivory of an elephant tusk or rhino horn and slid on with the help of perfumed oil. Others were twenty-four-karat gold, inlaid with jewels in a glittering red and clasped at the edges with a satisfying click. Most came in red and white, for luck and purity.
Bangles were symbols of a marriage promise, of finality and commitment. If Maya were like her mother—and like most Hindu women—she would wear her red wedding bangles until she died.
***
It was when her parents went away on a short trip that Maya took her chance. She and Veer planned to meet at the airport in New Delhi, and then go on to Jaipur, city of pink palaces, to wed. But as Maya waited for Veer’s plane, she worried that he wouldn’t be on it. She called her best friend, who would be a witness at the wedding, and asked, her voice tight and fearful: “What if he doesn’t come?”
“Then go back home,” her friend said, “and no one will ever know.”
But Veer did come, and seemed excited, even euphoric, about the wedding. They met up with Maya’s friend and her boyfriend and another couple, friends of Veer. These four would be the witnesses at the wedding, in lieu of parents.
Both couples had tried to prevent the marriage at first, saying they didn’t think it would work out. Not with how big a deewana Veer had been over the other Maya, or how fanaa—how destroyed in love—Maya seemed. And not with how controlling Veer’s parents were, or how displeased Maya’s father was with the union. There was also the glaring problem that Maya and Veer’s stars did not match. Marriage is made in the heavens, the old adage went. Most Hindus consulted their birth charts before marrying, even the nonbelievers. Maya’s and Veer’s stars forecast that their marriage would bring them only trouble.
But then the couples had come around, after seeing that Maya would not yield, and that Veer now called her “Mayu” with affection. They came around after they learned that even Veer’s father supported the marriage. In the end, both couples helped organize the entire affair. They planned the wedding for Jaipur, city of epic forts and fanciful palaces, because Veer had been born there and would know how to get around. It was where even Maya’s and Veer’s parents might have chosen for a wedding, because of their shared Rajasthani roots.
It was August, and excruciatingly hot in the city, as they ran from one temple for the ceremony to another for the pooja, fearing at any moment that they’d be found out. Maya wore a hot pink sari, a deep red–colored shawl, and cheap plastic red bangles, which Veer’s friend had gifted her. She had not bought the bangles at Choodi Bazaar, because there had not been time. Veer wore a majestic white, gold, and red sherwani and a tall turban that didn’t fit quite right. They both wore garlands of pink and white carnations. They married in the style of Arya Samaj, the equivalent of a court wedding, for couples that married across caste or religion, or without parental approval. Arya Samaj ceremonies were simple and inexpensive but still included all the essential Vedic marriage rituals and blessings.
There were some minor mishaps during the ceremony, which worried both sets of friends. Marriages were supposed to take place before sunset, but by the time Veer and Maya married, the sun had already gone down. It also began to rain very hard, as if to signal bad luck. When Maya and Veer walked around the sacred fire, they accidentally did it eight times instead of seven. The pandit said not to worry, that the last time was “just to finish.” What is this? thought Veer’s friend. No one does eight times instead of seven.
But in a photo from the day, Maya and Veer do not seem worried. Maya smiles in her hot pink sari, her hands and feet dyed deep red with henna, and she leans comfortably into Veer. Veer, who is still in his tall turban, stands with his arm draped around his new wife.
As they left the temple, Veer received a call from his older brother. Maya’s father had called Veer’s family and told them he was searching for the couple.
“We’ve already done it,” Veer told his brother, his voice calm. “Let’s not talk much now,” he continued. “Just give it two days. After two days you can call me, and if you feel at ease then it’s good. If you say anything right now, you will be shouting and regret it later.” Though Veer’s family had initially approved of the marriage, he knew Maya’s father’s anger could stir up trouble.
Veer hung up and switched off his phone, as did Maya. They spent several more days in Jaipur, switching hotels every night. Maya worried her father might show up at any moment, though she did not know what he would do if he came. At the minimum, he would take her back home to Hyderabad and never allow her to see Veer again. To be extra safe, they stayed one night at the house of a Jaipur mafia don, the father of one of Veer’s old school friends. No one is going to catch us here, Veer thought.
For Maya, their week on the run was the most terrifying and romantic of her life. She found herself even more besotted than before. Veer felt only at peace. He thought he had made the right decision. I am marrying a good friend, he thought. In the end, he hoped the marriage would bring two respected, middle-class Marwari families together. Marriage was, as it had always been, a kind of transaction. But their families would only come together if Maya’s father forgave her.
When Maya and Veer flew to Mumbai, Veer’s father and stepmother were waiting at the airport to receive them. They were thrilled for the new couple. Their son was thirty, so it was past time he settled down with a young, supposed virgin, only twenty-three, and from his same background.
Soon after, they hosted a grand wedding reception in a banquet hall, inviting some five hundred people, including Maya’s parents. It was unusual for the groom to bear all the costs of a reception, but Maya’s family wasn’t going to do it. Maya’s mother attended the party, along with Maya’s brother, uncle, and other family members. But her father did not show up. “These people will mistreat you,” he warned his daughter over the phone. His view had not changed.
And it didn’t change even after Veer’s father took Maya home to Hyderabad after the reception, to try to mend what was broken. In their living room, Maya found her father crying, with her grandfather seated beside him.
Maya’s grandfather had always been intimidating, both in height and demeanor. He was a government man, and he’d worked for the railroads. His posture was ramrod straight. He was also a man of strict principles, which could be good or bad for his grandchildren, depending on whose side he was on. This time he stood by Maya. He thought that if she had found a good man she loved, she should be allowed to marry him. He was only upset that it had been done in a way that could end her relationship with her father.
“You should have told me,” her grandfather said, sadly. “I would have gotten you married.”
Maya began to cry along with her father. “But this is what I’ve done,” she said, looking from one man to the other. “Now I’m responsible for my life. You have to trust me.”
Her father said he couldn’t, because he knew what lay ahead.
Veer’s father sat watching the scene coolly, and, when everyone was finished crying, took Maya back home to Mumbai.
***
As was customary for a new bride, home was now Veer’s parents’ house, which was in a crowded suburb on the northern outskirts of the city.
Maya had always pictured Mumbai as the city of love. Mumbai, which until not long ago was called Bombay, and before that Bom Bahia, Boa-Vida, Mambe, Mumbadevi, Heptanesia, and many other names that captured the city’s glamour. A city ruled by the Portuguese, and then given to the British as part of a marriage treaty, before it wrested itself independent with the rest of the country. A city renamed Mumbai, because a political party wanted to rid the city of its British history, though many locals still used the sexier Bombay. Even Mumbai’s nicknames were seductive: the City of Seven Islands, City of Dreams, and City of Gold. It was the home of Bollywood and all the most filmi love stories. It was the gateway to all of India. If there was anywhere to be in love, it was in Mumbai.
Veer, who had lived in Mumbai all his adult life, saw it differently. To him, Mumbai was first and foremost a trading city, a city of transaction. A big and bursting city of eighteen million, it was India’s financial hub and the source of much of the country’s wealth. Bollywood didn’t mean big romance; it meant big money. Mumbai was every good Marwari businessman’s dream. It was called “the Gateway to India” because so much trade flowed through the city’s port. And Mumbai was just one big island now, with the centre of the city at its tip.
There was also a monument called the Gateway of India at the southernmost end of the city. It was a basalt arch structure, and it stood proudly between the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and the shore of the Arabian Sea. The arch had been built to commemorate the visit of the British royal couple King George V and Queen Mary, who were not supposed to marry but fell in love and did. Just before the monsoons started, kite birds always circled the Gateway of India monument, filling the space between the water and arch with the beating of wings. They often landed at the arch’s base, where the muddy water met the land. Or they perched on the trash gathered there in ugly clumps or on the residue of those who used the sea as their toilet.
All of downtown Mumbai was like this: dazzling from one view, horrifying from another. Downtown, the city fell easily along the curve of the shifting sea. In the daytime, the melting heat created a foggy haze that gave the illusion of a dreamscape.
At night, along Marine Drive, which followed the shape of the coastline, the road’s streetlamps lined up to look just like a string of pearls. Farther inland, the Victorian and Indo-Saracenic buildings maintained a crumbling dignity and beauty. They sat beside open green cricket maidans and blocks filled with Irani cafés, tourist stalls, corner shops, and beer bars. Between it all were the hawkers of the city’s favored street foods: deep-fried vada pav, buttery pav bhaji, and spicy-sweet pani puri, with mango lassis and masala Cokes to wash it down.
Mumbai was dazzling despite the clear signs of the city’s rapid deterioration, the unrelenting honk of taxicabs, and the smell of human waste. Even with the sting of polluted air and the memories of the violence that came before. There was no privacy, and no space. But the lack of space offered reassurance that everyone was in this city together: majority Hindu and minority Muslim, wealthy and famished, native and migrant, hopeful young men and bent old women, all brushing up against one another. Touching was a way to speak when more than a hundred languages were spoken. Or it could be a way to hurt children, women, or neighbours. Nothing was simply good in this city. Beauty and brutality were intertwined. But it was a city that was Maya and Veer’s now, together.
The suburb where Veer’s parents lived was crowded and noisy, and almost twenty stops north on the Western Railway line from the centre of the city. It was nowhere near Mumbai’s Marine Drive, where lovers went to walk hand in hand. And it looked nothing like the downtown with its wide and airy streets. Instead, like most of the city, its roads were clogged with cars, motorbikes, and rickshaws that darted across the street like cockroaches at dusk.
Farther into the suburb, past the shops selling fabric by the yard, liquor by the peg, and flowers by the garland, it was mostly new construction. These buildings were low and painted in unimaginative hues of brown and tan and gray. They were often covered in paan, the favored betel leaf and tobacco combination that when spit looked just like blood. The tallest structures in the suburb were the glittering new malls, plastered with advertisements in garish colors and signs that promised objects few could afford. The shorter structures were the chawls, or tenements. Even smaller were the shanties, made of bamboo, tarps, and corrugated metal, which lined many of the suburb’s lanes. Downtown Mumbai was overpopulated, but the suburbs seemed on the verge of collapse.
But Maya didn’t see any of this, not at first. She saw only that she had made it to Mumbai, City of Dreams, with the man she married.
***
Veer’s parents’ home was a joint family arrangement. Though Maya had finished college and earned a master’s degree, it was assumed that she would not work, except to help cook for the household of seven. She often started preparing food at sunrise along with the other women, kneading the roti and adding spices to that morning’s meal.
She was also expected to wear saris, a change from her school-going Western dress. She didn’t know how to tie one, which was always difficult for girls the first and even tenth times. She didn’t own many clothes, traditional or Western, but she was always careful with her appearance. On a visit with Veer to see his grandmother, she chose a plain but smart-looking sari and thought the visit went well. That night, Maya remembers his parents bursting noisily into the house after work. They would not speak to her, and after a little while the other members of the family began treating her coldly.
What is happening? Maya thought. In her childhood home, people talked about issues and moved on. Here, it seemed that problems festered.
The next day, Maya overheard Veer’s parents say that his grandmother scolded them about the sari she had worn. They agreed that Maya went out “wearing clothing not fit for a new bride.” They said that it “spoiled our name” for Veer’s new wife to dress in plain clothing. Panicked, Maya went into her bedroom and dialed Veer at work.
“I’m new to their ways. If there’s a problem, have them talk to me about it,” she said. “I’m willing to compromise.”
“Mayu, it’s a family. These things keep happening,” he said, which Maya didn’t find helpful at all.
“Talk to them. Please.”
But when Veer came home he didn’t.
Veer didn’t like to confront his father, an imposing man with a thick belly, dense mustache, and lazy eye just like his son’s; some said he resembled a traditional Bollywood villain. Veer and his father had always been close, and they had become closer still after the death of Veer’s mother from cancer a decade and a half ago. The stepmother who replaced her was a tall, cruel woman with a hard face and quick tongue. Veer and his brothers seemed only to tolerate her. Some said she had turned Veer’s father into a harsher man. Still, Veer always listened to his father.
Maya bought better-quality saris after that and worked harder on her cooking. When Veer was at work, she tried not to call him, even if his parents shouted at her, as they had increasingly begun to do. It helped that Veer sent her loving messages when he was away.
Hi jaana, he’d write. My life.
I think I am already missing you a lot & so lil out of place as well.
Mayu . . . I miss you yaar . . . yu dint send me even one mms.
When Veer finally came home from work at the end of the day, Maya tried not to complain. She could tell how exhausted he was. She noticed his fraying dress pants, sweat-stained shirt, and belt that often missed a loop. And when he smiled and crawled into bed beside her, Maya felt their joint family home was not as bad as it seemed.
But she sometimes grew restless in the afternoons, when Veer and his father and brothers were at work, and the other women in the house took their daily naps. In these hours, Maya would flop down on her stomach in her bedroom and open the laptop Veer had given her to use. She would have liked to surf the Internet—maybe even look at porn, which more women in the country were watching. But the laptop was primitive, and it took forever to boot up or load a page, so videos were mostly out of the question. When she was able to get into her e-mail, she sometimes sent messages to school friends or waited for a message from her father, who had not spoken to her since her marriage.
But her father didn’t e-mail or call. She received one unexpected note, from a college boyfriend, who wrote: “I sent a gold watch to your friend’s address for you. I am still waiting.” For a moment, she wondered where that relationship would have gone. No, she thought. He is nothing like Veer.
It was not long after Maya began using the laptop that her father-in-law called her into his bedroom. Grim-faced, he stood flanked by Veer and his older son.
“Put your laptop and your phone on the bed,” he said, and Maya obeyed. “Now what?” she asked.
“In our house,” Veer’s father said, “we don’t bring up daughters-in-law to use gadgets or to be technologically advanced.”
Veer’s father had heard rumors that Maya was miserable in the joint family home. He had heard she wanted to leave and take Veer with her. And so now he thought he would have to cut off her ability to communicate with the outside world.
“Is that what you called me here for?” said Maya, growing petulant with her in-laws for the first time. It was true she had told a friend, one of the witnesses at their wedding, that she was unhappy with her living situation. But she had never said she was going to leave the house or break up the family.
“See, is this how your wife talks?” said Veer’s father, turning to Veer, who didn’t know what to say.
“You’re just standing there,” Maya said to her husband, accusingly, “while they’re treating me like dirt.”
Veer looked at her but didn’t say anything. He had always felt that it was better not to speak up during conflict. It is better to keep a horse’s view, he thought. If he was doing the right thing, and not speaking ill of anyone, that was all that mattered.
He also knew that everyone would have their own spin on it. “If we re-create it after five years,” he would later say, “everyone will be putting their own masala on it. What is the pull or push on these people? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be involved.” But Veer was involved. After Maya handed over the phone and laptop, life in the joint family home only grew worse. In January, a month in which many Mumbaikars take vacation, Maya told Veer she needed to get away. She said she would go mad if she didn’t.
Veer’s father tried to prevent them from going. He said that Maya was sick and couldn’t travel. For once, Veer stood up to him. He argued that the trip would be their honeymoon, which every new couple deserved.
That month they flew to Mussoorie, a hill station at the foothills of the Himalayas, once used by the British as a getaway. In Mussoorie, the temperatures were cool and the clouds sat low over the mountains. Maya and Veer visited temples and shrines. Their days were filled with happy wandering. Before they left, they had their picture taken beneath a waterfall. The water was so white and the exposure so bright that it looked like a backdrop of snow. They both wore small, hopeful smiles.
But after they returned to Mumbai, Maya saw that nothing had changed. She realized that Veer would continue to be away for long hours at work, and that while he was gone his parents would verbally abuse her. Like many women in the country, she saw that she would never be allowed to work. She made plans to visit her father and make amends, but Veer’s parents told her she could not go. Considering a future she could not bear, Maya picked up the inhaler she was prescribed for her asthma and swallowed all the medication inside.
This time, Maya intended more than a message. She was hospitalized for three days, during which time Veer hardly left her side.
On the third day, Maya woke up in the hospital room to find her mother and father standing over her. “Who has been taking care of you?” her father asked.
“Veer,” she said. He had been good to her.
After she felt well enough, Maya’s father brought her home to Veer’s parents’ house. He laid her on her bed and went out in the hall to talk to Veer’s father, who told him he believed his daughter’s hospitalization had been a stunt.
“No,” Maya’s father said. “Maya is very sick. She needs to be taken care of. She has lost seven kilograms. I will take care of her, and then send her back to you.”
From the bedroom, Maya heard Veer’s father start shouting. After marriage, a girl belonged to her husband’s parents, not her own. Unless she was pregnant, it would not be acceptable for her to go back to her childhood home in Hyderabad. But as Veer’s father became more and more worked up, he said that he wanted Maya out of his house. “Take your daughter,” he shouted, as Maya remembers. “You have not given her any values. She does not respect anyone. Take her wherever you want to take her.”
Maya’s father dropped to the ground at this show of fury and began kissing the man’s feet. He begged to be able to take his daughter back home with his permission, not his anger. Maya, who was still groggy from medication, dragged herself out of her bed. She could not reconcile the father she knew with this fawning display.
“Don’t kiss his feet for me,” she told him as she came into the living room. “Get up. You don’t deserve that.”
To Veer’s father, she said, as coldly as she could: “What you give to me, I’ll give back to you.”
Maya’s father left the joint family home, perhaps knowing he could only do more harm by staying. The next day, he called Maya to tell her that he and her mother had decided to go back to Hyderabad and leave her with Veer’s parents. “We don’t want to break your house,” he said, his voice weary. “But can I see you and Veer before we go?”
Veer felt caught in the middle. On one side were his parents and on the other were Maya and her parents, he thought, and everyone has their own cycle and mood. He knew people didn’t change, especially Indian elders; instead, they only kept pushing. Though he saw that his parents were torturing his wife, he also believed that drama toward daughters-in-law was part of the Indian lifestyle. Even these days, when Indian women were becoming more assertive, many of the TV soaps were still of the saas-bahu genre, in which the controlling and cruel mother-in-law treated the daughter-in-law like dirt. This dynamic existed even in the old songs and the folktales. Most girls just dealt with it. But Maya, when pinched, blows up, he thought. When handed drama, she became insolent and angry. Veer knew his parents would hold on to these first impressions of his wife for a lifetime. And now Maya was forcing him to get involved, which he did not want to do.
“Are you coming?” Maya asked.
“I’ll ask my father and come down,” Veer said, but several minutes passed before he appeared. When he did, he took her hand and said, “Mayu, let’s go back home.”
“No,” she said, her voice firm. “I have to meet my father.”
“Don’t do this,” he said. “You will create a scene.”
“I need to meet my father,” she repeated.
Veer’s cell phone rang, and she could hear his father shouting as he picked it up. “You can’t control your woman,” his father said, his voice like a threat. At the same time, Veer’s stepmother came out and ordered them back inside.
“Who are you to stop me?” said Maya.
In Maya’s memory, Veer’s father came out next, and the four of them began pushing and shoving on the street. Maya wrenched her arm free to put a hand up for a passing rickshaw, which screeched to a halt before them. As she and Veer climbed in, his father tried to get in with them. Maya turned to her father-in-law and addressed him icily. “There is a policeman there,” she said, pointing to a uniformed man down the road. “And if you don’t get out, I will file a complaint against you.”
“So this is the culture you were brought up in,” Veer’s father said, and let the rickshaw go.
In the rickshaw, Veer turned to Maya and asked, “What have you done? You’ve blown everything.”
Maya began to cry. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if we can be together anymore,” Veer said.
“Why are you saying this?” Maya was sobbing now. But she knew. To Veer, like many Indian men, family was everything.
Inside the house, Veer’s father called Maya’s grandfather in Hyderabad. Over the phone, he rained abuses on her grandfather for how she was raised. And while Maya and Veer’s rickshaw steered through the trafficked streets to meet her father, whom they found crying inside a café, her grandfather’s blood pressure shot up and he had a stroke while still clinging to the receiver.
***
The week after the incident, Veer sent his wife an e-mail from work that began: “Dear Maya.” He almost never addressed her as Maya, not since he had started calling her “Mayu.” In the e-mail, he wrote that his parents were “broken from the inside,” and that an episode like this could not happen again. He said they must think in the present and plan for the future. He ended the e-mail with “love always,” but his sign-off didn’t seem convincing.
The drama in the household was not over, because every morning, Maya woke up thinking of the long years ahead. Years of his parents berating and belittling her, and Veer keeping silent. One day, she walked out of the joint family apartment and took a bus to Pune, a three-hour ride from Mumbai, and Veer had to come and take her back home. In the middle of the night, she woke up screaming, and was put on antipsychotics and antidepressants. She went to the doctor, feeling unable to breathe, and Veer’s father followed her inside the office to prove she was making it up. The doctor, a sweet, white-haired man with a large nose and wide smile, told Veer’s father, “Leave now, you’re only making it worse.”
In the end, Maya and Veer moved out of the joint family home. At first, they moved to a temporary apartment, and then another, and finally to the new apartment they’d call home. More couples in the city were choosing to live apart from their parents and in-laws, despite how the conservative politicians and older generations railed against it, blaming the creeping influence of the West. But couples often did not move far away. Maya and Veer moved only a suburb over from Veer’s parents. When at last they moved out, Veer’s father and stepmother seemed glad to see Maya go.
Maya’s mother came to visit soon after the move and sat her daughter down for a talk. With her square cheeks and thinning hair and rolls of fat, she was what many dutiful Indian mothers grew into—and what Maya didn’t want to become.
“You have to take things in stride, and don’t get so mad,” her mother told her. “Thoda compromise karo.”
Maya had heard the phrase many times before. She knew that Indian women were conditioned to compromise. But she didn’t think there was such thing as “a little compromise.” Even small compromises chipped away at what a person held dear, until much had been taken from her.
In moving to the new apartment, though, Maya had gotten what she wanted. Veer saw that his parents and Maya could not live under the same roof, even as he was haunted by something his father had said years before, just after his mother died of cancer. “We men must stay together,” Veer’s father had told his three sons. “But watch out, because there will be people who will try to break us up.” And yet, in the first few months, in the time of settling and nesting, their new home felt as auspicious as if they had followed vastu shastra in its design. The two-bedroom, two-bath apartment was roomy and airy in a city without space. It came with an AC unit that was a decade or two old but made them feel removed from the city’s blur of heat. They bought an LG TV and TV unit, tall Godrej dressers, and two low beds. They inherited deep leather couches and wooden tables from Veer’s family home. And they made plans to buy a washing machine, and someday hire a maid, which would decrease Maya’s daily workload. Water came on for just an hour in the morning and evening, but it was their water. Best of all, there were two tin-roof porches that overlooked the city and wavy hills beyond. The apartment signaled their arrival to Mumbai’s middle class, which had been growing steadily, along with India’s economy. Foreign investors were flocking in. India is on fire, India is the next superpower, India will overtake China—this was what all the papers were saying. Veer thought there was no better time to be a Marwari.
Maya decorated the apartment to make it feel like theirs. Over the dining room table she hung a painting of Krishna and Radha, showing the lovers seated side by side on a swing. Lord Krishna, blue-skinned and handsome, was painted in a turban and golden harem pants, while the milkmaid Radha wore a long braid and flowers in her hair. The swing itself was garlanded, and the lovers were positioned facing each other, their knees touching and foreheads close. Krishna gazed in rapture at Radha as she looked out into the distance. To Maya, it portrayed companionship and comfort—what she thought it must be like when you were with someone for a long time. When he moved, you moved with him.
On the living room shelf, Maya placed a framed photo from their honeymoon in Mussoorie. By the front door she hung a sign that read “happy star”—a name for their new home.
Over time, Maya also placed teddy bears she’d kept from ex-boyfriends in different corners of the house. Button-nosed and glassy-eyed, the bears were reminders of bad endings and of men less perfect than Veer. Veer didn’t buy Maya stuffed animals because he said he didn’t see any life in them. Once, before Maya had learned this, she bought him a teddy bear that was pink and fluffy. Now it was kept in the apartment’s second bedroom, which they hoped would someday be the bedroom of their first child.
They didn’t have a timeline for when Maya might get pregnant, but they prepared for a baby anyway. Maya wanted a baby in part because of how often Veer was away. He worked harder than ever now at the family business, and they both agreed Maya would go to work only after they started a family. Veer wanted a baby because that’s what came next. He had suffered from epilepsy since childhood and had some attacks as an adult, which worried him, so he thought it would be better to have a baby sooner than to wait. He also thought that having a baby would make Maya feel less alone.
In the second bedroom, they placed a tall dresser for clothes, a wooden cabinet that could be used for children’s books or toys, and a low single bed with two mattresses for comfort. But they did not buy toys or blankets in pink or blue, because it was bad luck to prepare for a baby before the child was born. Even in big cities with good hospitals, many children did not survive.
A few months later, over Diwali, festival of lights, Maya found out she was pregnant after she missed her period. She was twenty-four now, which was considered old for a first pregnancy; the average age for first-time mothers in the country was nineteen. But women in cities were waiting longer to have children, and Maya was glad she did not live in a village. When she called Veer at work to tell him, she said she was worried because she’d recently taken antibiotics. “What if it harmed the baby?” she said.
“Calm down, Maya,” he said. “We’ll go to the doctor.”
The doctors told Maya the pregnancy would be a difficult one. Not because of the antibiotics, but because Maya had ovarian cysts and other gynecological problems. They ordered her on strict bed rest until the baby was born: no going out, no exercise, and no strain. Maya was scared, but Veer kept saying there was nothing to worry about, that she was “perfect” and nothing would go wrong.
A month or so into pregnancy, Maya began to bleed. She and Veer had just gotten home from a wedding ceremony, and she called the doctor in a panic. “What color is the blood?” the doctor asked. “Bright red or dark red?” “Bright red,” said Maya. “Nothing to worry about,” the doctor told her. “Some people just bleed throughout their pregnancies.”
The next day, she began to bleed again, and this time a local doctor gave her a painful injection, after which Veer brought her home to rest. “I’m going to the office,” he said, turning his attention back to a problem at work. “You call me if you need anything.”
Half an hour later, Maya began to hemorrhage again. Maya’s doctor told her to go to a hospital downtown, at the very tip of the city, because all the beds in the nearby hospital were full. It was an hour-and-a-half drive south from their apartment in traffic. On the way Veer insisted they stop at his parents’ house to pick up his stepmother, so another woman would be with them. Maya remembers his stepmother dawdling as she bled in the car.
In the days that followed, the doctors did sonogram after sonogram to try to identify the problem. On the third night, they told Maya they would do a CT scan in the morning and told her to go to sleep.
But Maya couldn’t sleep, and when she got up to use the bathroom that night, she felt something drop out of her. It was small, fleshy, and reddish purple in color, a tangled mass that she caught in her hand. She tried not to think about what it was. She kept it, and later the doctor came and swiftly took the mass away.
In the morning, she prepared for her CT scan. Veer came in and held her hand. “Am I going to do the CT now?” she asked, looking up at him.
“No, we’re going for a D and C. Not a CT,” he said, his voice quiet.
A D and C. Maya knew what that meant. A dilation and curettage was a procedure that would dilate her cervix and scrape her uterus of tissue.
“You already miscarried, Mayu.”
“I won’t do the D and C,” Maya said, and began to cry. “I’m not going to let go of whatever is left inside me.”
“You have to. It’ll be toxic.”
To do the procedure, the doctors had to hold Maya down while she screamed and cried. After it was over, Veer told her there was nothing to worry about. “You’re very young, we can try again,” he said.
Veer was upset but told himself not to go overboard with his emotions. Emotions don’t help us much, he thought. He remembered back to something he had once read, that if a child was not competent to survive in the world, it wouldn’t join it. This was better than the child being born unable to cope. Veer held on to this thought as comfort.
***
Outside the gates of Maya and Veer’s apartment colony, past the security guard who often dozed, there was a long, potholed lane that led to the main road, filled with people on foot and bicycles, in rickshaws and cars. It was bordered by a dozen shops and chawls.
Maya frequented the shops for necessities. There was a ladies’ tailor, a chai-wallah, milkman, eggman, and shoe cobbler who sold glittery Kolhapuri sandals. The corner stores stocked sugary biscuits, cheap water bottles, and plastic bags of salty channa to cater to the nearby chawls.
The chawls were several-story structures that charged little in rent, and the walls between neighbours were often thin and temporary. Inside, the kitchen sometimes served as the dining room or bedroom or all three, which led to ongoing mini-dramas. Out front, there were clothes on the line, children playing naked in the dirt, and men passed out from cheap liquor early in the day. The women who lived there came to Maya’s apartment to ask for money, because she was kind, and their husbands had drunk it all away.
And there were dogs in the lane, dozens of them, which Veer had to navigate around carefully on his way home from work. Many had been struck by cars or rickshaws. They had been hit as puppies, before they knew better, or when they were older and didn’t have time to run. Some had three legs, or walked with a limp, or dragged a lame limb behind.
Mostly, the dogs did not want for food. The people who lived in the chawls and the shopkeepers all threw their trash into the lane. When not foraging, the dogs spent their days playing atop parked cars, lazing in the street in the sun, or rolling in the dust to keep cool.
From the time they moved in, Maya was afraid of the bigger dogs, which she feared would attack her. She had seen wild dog attacks in Hyderabad as a child. But she liked the puppies, which kept being born in the squalid lane every season. She sometimes saw one learning to stand on uneven legs or yelping as it figured out how to play.
One day, Maya was walking to catch a rickshaw when she saw a dead puppy in the lane. It had been raining for weeks in Mumbai—cold, heavy rains—and its body was swollen and bloated from the wet. Maya wanted to bury the puppy, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. She called several city offices and many animal NGOs, but no one called her back. Day after day, she passed the small, distended body, which the shoppers in the lane seemed not to notice.
Finally, she begged the manager of the housing society to get someone to bury it. He agreed and asked a trash collector to take it away. The next time Maya walked down the lane, the dead puppy was gone, and there was nothing in the space where it had been.
***
Since losing the baby, it had been mostly peaceful between Maya and Veer. At night, they tried to eat dinner together or watch a movie or talk on the tin-roof porch before bed. But as Ganesh Chaturthi, the Hindu festival for the god Ganesh, approached, they found themselves fighting. They planned to bring home Ganesh in the form of a statue, hire a local priest, and invite their extended family over. After Maya had organized the party for weeks, however, Veer’s father said he was taking over the arrangements. Veer told Maya it was easier to give in. She and his parents had developed an uneasy but polite rapport since they’d moved out, and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. Maya disagreed, and spent the night on the couch to make her point. In the morning, her eyes had dark circles under them as if she’d slept in her kajal.
On the morning of the party, Veer checked his text messages, which were holiday-themed greetings (Wishing you happiness as big as Ganeshji’s appetite, and life as long as his trunk!), while Maya went from room to room in agitation. She didn’t have to worry about food, which her father-in-law had ordered, including Veer’s favorite chole bhature. Do you know how much indigestion that gives you? she thought. But she had won control of the house, and wanted the day to be flawless. She purchased small idols of Ganesh to give as party favors to the guests. She painted the linoleum floor in henna with curlicue designs. And she hung garlands of fresh marigolds over the door. The statue of Lord Ganesh, with his long trunk and healthy stomach, presided over the dining room from inside a golden throne.
Maya loved the story of Ganesh’s origins: how his mother, the goddess Parvati, asked him to stand guard while she took a shower, but then Parvati’s consort Shiva, god of destruction, came for a visit and chopped off Ganesh’s head. To remedy his mistake, Shiva replaced Ganesh’s head with the head of an elephant. She and Veer also loved what Ganesh stood for: remover of obstacles, god of new ventures and beginnings. And they thought of Ganesh not so much as a god but as a famous, real-life man who later inspired many myths—Beautiful stories to keep man close to religion, Veer thought. Hinduism, after all, was not really a religion but a way of life, driven by the idea of Dharma. Of one’s duty to the universe. Duty to yourself, your ancestors, and your children. Duty to your fellow human beings and animals. And duty to society, to living a life of morals and faith. Fulfilling your Dharma was more important than the worship of any god. Still, sometimes Maya and Veer asked Ganesh for help, just in case.
As the guests arrived, Maya greeted them warmly. She glided around the room in her bejeweled sari, gold jewelry, and thickest kajal, making sure everyone felt at home. She made small talk and laughed gaily at the festival jokes. She poured tea for the men, who gathered in the living room to talk business. A few of them snuck outside to smoke a cigarette, where they made lewd comments about Maya’s good looks. She shepherded the children into the second bedroom, where she gave them sweets to eat. Maya avoided only the female guests, who gathered in her bedroom to gossip about her, inspecting her belongings and looking for dust or dirt.
Late in the afternoon came the pooja, and all the guests gathered to watch Maya and Veer recite a prayer before the local priest. The priest, who was dressed in a dhoti and kept a long sikha—the rest of his hair shorn close—had a pinkie finger that dangled as he spoke. People whispered that it made him more holy. As the priest led the prayer, Maya and Veer offered Ganesh laddoos, incense, and coconuts to appease him, and Maya looked at Veer with lowered eyes. Whenever she caught sight of the pinkie, she tried not to laugh.
Later, after the last guests had left clutching their small Ganesh idols, Maya sat down in her bedroom and sighed, and Veer went out on the porch to smoke.
Changing into a T-shirt and jeans, Maya began to take down the decorations. She used nail polish remover to remove the henna from the floor, though most of it wouldn’t come off. She threw the remaining chole bhature in the trash.
But Ganesh would stay on his throne for another ten days. After that, Maya and Veer would join the many in the city who took their idols to the water to immerse them.
Every year, thousands in Mumbai flocked to the Arabian Sea for the Ganesh immersions. The lines to see the largest Ganesh idols sometimes stretched kilometers long. Idols sat on floats, trucks, and thrones made with wheels. Some idols stood fifty feet tall, towering over the crowds. Others were as small as a child’s hand. In each iteration, Lord Ganesh looked regal and strong, with the ample stomach of a well-fed man and the crowned head of a mighty elephant. In five of his six hands he held a trident, ax, conch shell, laddoo, and lotus blossom; his sixth hand was upraised in beneficence. Garlands hung around his neck, and his trunk was covered in jewels. As people walked the Ganesh, or Ganpati, idols to the water, they sang loudly, voices straining, “Ganpati bappa morya!” along to the steady beat of drums. When they reached the sea, men waded, shirtless, into the murky, waste-filled water, carrying the life-size statues above their heads. Women trailed behind them, letting their saris get wet, and the children ran into the water splashing. As Ganesh crashed into the ocean, the crowd let out a guttural yell.
The Arabian Sea was full of Ganesh idols from years past. For days after the festival, the statues would bob above the surface, until at last they sank into the muck. Over weeks, months, even years, the idols disintegrated slowly in the water.
Before Maya and Veer immersed him, they both privately asked Ganesh, remover of obstacles, for the same thing. They asked him for another child.
***
In the weeks after Ganesh Chaturthi, Veer got up early, as always, to read the papers, and Maya to make him tea. If she was slow to get up, he would call out to her in a singsong voice, both inhabiting and lampooning the role of a traditional Indian husband, until he heard the crackle of the gas stove turning on. Veer always read the Times of India first, which contained exciting headlines about local rapes (the numbers increasing yearly, though perhaps more women were reporting), the latest controversy with Pakistan (over land, over water, and over cricket), and India’s exponential growth (inching up on China, soon to surpass it, or so the papers said). He ended on page 3, which covered Bollywood celebrities and glitterati, who lived a world apart from middle-class families like theirs and from the poor. Unlike them, Bollywood celebrities could do what they wanted: actresses could wear skimpy skirts and have affairs, and a famous actor got away with a drunk driving hit-and-run. Veer liked to stay informed about both politics and entertainment, which he thought helped a man get ahead.
After the holiday, he also reread Osho, the spiritual teacher and mystic whose controversial writings he had always appreciated. Though deceased, Osho had followers all over the world, people who liked that he challenged politicians and organized religion, that he embraced free sex and living and thinking, and that his beliefs had evolved over time. Veer loved Osho’s writings on how to live.
Osho argued that the route to happiness was to worry about oneself, which aligned with Veer’s sense of the world. Osho also said people felt good or bad based on their unconscious. He said no one was responsible for anger or joy but you. And he said that if you did not realize this, you would live your life like a slave.
Veer also liked that Osho had been a wealthy man. Osho collected a hundred Rolls-Royces in his lifetime and never apologized for owning them. He was rumored to never wear the same clothes twice. Every man deserves to find wealth, Veer thought. And every man deserves to be at peace.
Veer saw himself as a bit of a philosopher, though nowhere near Osho’s level of understanding. He liked to wax poetic while having a cigarette on their tin-roof porch, where Maya often joined him. It was a nightly tradition he called “dam,” which was Urdu for “life breath” or “moment.” He smoked fake Marlboros imported from Pakistan, which were said to be mixed with cow dung. He joked that it made the cigarettes more holy.
On the porch, smoking, the city at his feet, Veer came up with new names for Mumbai. To him, the City of Dreams moniker wasn’t quite right. Mumbai was more like a slap or a punch in the gut. It overwhelmed people, shoved them down—or at least knocked them off their balance. Dreams were squashed in the city, rebuilt, and squashed again. Mumbai was the Maximum City, like one author had written, but Veer also found the name too positive. “The city of everything,” he said. Yes, that was better, and Maya agreed. A great maw of a place that could swallow you up but that could also make you into a star. A city in the aggregate: of both good and bad and everything in between. Satisfied, he tossed his cigarette butt off the porch and went inside, the ash scattering in the night breeze.
Veer also liked to find metaphors to describe their relationship. When he and Maya reminisced about their early days, when they had constantly messaged between Hyderabad and Mumbai, running up phone bills they couldn’t afford, he said: “That was when things were biryani.”
Like biryani rice. Wild, with a lot of spices. A dish you only have once in a while. Maya nodded, and joked back, “And now, now it is all white rice.”
“It’s still biryani,” he countered. “But only sometimes.”
“And who wants to eat biryani every day? No one,” she said.
As Veer’s family business grew, and he began to travel more, he tried out his philosophizing in other countries. He bragged to Maya that in Africa he kept a client up talking until six in the morning, a client who told Veer he was like a “great prophet.”
In China, Veer said, he persuaded a woman selling handbags on the black market to sell him an imitation Louis Vuitton for one-hundredth of her quoted price. He told Maya he convinced her using a philosophical explanation of the market.
Maya found these stories amusing, as well as the way her husband carried himself in their apartment building. Instead of saying “namaste,” he greeted neighbours in the lobby with “Allah Hafiz,” which made people think that he was Muslim.
“What are you even saying?” Maya, laughing, would ask Veer after the elevator doors closed, leaving a perplexed neighbour behind. Veer would only grin at this.
Sometimes, while Veer was at work, Maya took little trips into the city by train, so that she wouldn’t get bored at home. When she did, she tried to arrive early to the station so that she could board the women’s compartment, where men could not go. If she arrived late, she’d have to get on the general train compartment, which wasn’t considered safe for women. It was said that a disabled girl had recently been gang-raped on a Mumbai train, while the other men in the car sat doing nothing.
That kind of assault might be rare in the city, but Maya knew harassment was not. Some men grabbed between a woman’s legs on a crowded train compartment so that it wasn’t clear to whom the hands belonged. Others groped or grazed a woman’s chest and then disappeared into the crowd. And still other men—many of them—liked to make a “chh chh” sound of appraisal at a woman’s backside and, when the woman turned around, greet her with a leering face.
All of it was lumped together as “Eve teasing,” a term many women in the city didn’t like. Its very name suggested that women were temptresses and that the harassment was the woman’s fault. The right-wing politicians said women wouldn’t have a problem if they didn’t go out on their own. But Maya knew she’d go mad if she didn’t.
***
For years, Veer had worked in the family aluminum foil business with his father and brothers. But now he also became business partners with his cousin, a hard-drinking, hardworking mountain of a man with a proclivity for wild business schemes. He was the kind of new Mumbai man who believed Karma was dead and that you made your own destiny.
Together, they decided to open a pharmaceutical business in Africa, which had lost trust in Chinese drugs because they were so often fake. Africa wanted better-regulated pills now. They thought they could easily sell antimalarials, blood tonics, and anti-acidity drugs to African buyers, which the family business could help package.
His cousin’s other business was sex toys, which Veer was not actively involved in, though it operated out of the same office. Within India, his cousin sold toys with the label massager to avoid attracting government notice. The sale of sex toys was suspect, if not illegal; the Indian Penal Code barred the sale of any object that was “lascivious” or that “appeals to the prurient interest.” Dildos, lotions, and gels were sold in open-air markets and online anyway. The most popular product Veer’s cousin sold was a gel that delayed ejaculation. This was not surprising to them, because it was found that half of all the men in the country struggled with premature ejaculation due to anxiety or inexperience. Veer’s cousin saw the demand and produced more.
Since the launch of the new businesses, Veer was home less and less. He worked six days a week, and then he began working seven. When Maya called him now, she often got no answer. He spent long hours at his family office, a cramped two-room space that he, his father, and two brothers rented inside a residential building not far from home. The office was nothing extravagant: two dusty rooms, a few desktop computers, and documents stacked to the ceiling. When the business had crashed years ago, they’d learned the importance of being frugal. In the corner of the office was the only decoration: a sepia-toned photo of Veer’s mother, taken when she was very young.
Veer was also often out of the city, on visits to his aluminum foil factories, which were scattered across rural Maharashtra. He most regularly visited a factory several hours north of Mumbai that smelled like daaru, or bad moonshine, combined with gum and wet tar. It had big boilers that stank as they burned. The malarial mosquitoes that swarmed outside were as big as a child’s hand. But the tribal men who worked there were used to them and did not mind.
Outside the factory, warthogs ran through the grass. Flamboyant pink and blue butterflies gathered and fluorescent bugs glittered in the night. Veer didn’t notice any of this. When he was at the factory, he worked nonstop. Sometimes, he stayed for ten days straight, sleeping on the dirt-stained floor. During his long absences, Maya grew anxious and upset.
And over time, as the pharmaceutical business grew, Veer also spent more time at his cousin’s office, which seemed to smell of new money with its recessed lighting and blasting AC. Their business in Africa was already booming thanks to the antimalarials, which were intended to cure, not prevent (three doses of shots plus a pill). Antimalarials were desperately needed in African countries where nearly the entire population was at risk. Soon, Veer and his cousin began traveling to the continent for weeks at a time. On these trips they met local businessmen in hotel bars and drank too much as they closed deal after deal. The trips invigorated Veer and made him want to work harder.
If Veer ever felt lazy, he thought of his grandfather. For the last seven months of his grandfather’s life, when he had been very sick, Veer was his primary caretaker. In long afternoons at the hospital, his grandfather had sung Hindi ballads to Veer, which he never did with anyone else. Veer had sung him back the old songs he knew.
In the last weeks of his life, Veer’s grandfather also stressed to Veer the importance of hard work. Historically, the business of their family’s subcaste was moneylending to kings, but his grandfather had diversified into pharmaceuticals and become rich. It allowed him to pay for the weddings of all five sons, plus nearly a dozen other people. Veer felt ashamed that few remembered his generosity now. This much is true, if you do something good, no one will remember, he thought.
After his grandfather died, Veer vowed to honor him by making just as much money and giving as much away. To do this, he knew he would have to work night and day.
But Veer often promised Maya he’d be home in time for dinner. For hours, she’d cook his favorite dishes and then sit alone at the kitchen table, watching them grow cold. She’d call him a dozen times to ask where he was and, caught up in something at work, Veer wouldn’t answer the phone. When, exhausted and stressed, he finally arrived, he would eat the cold meal and pass out within minutes, not even asking about her day.
And though Veer watched his cousin sell sex toys with beguiling names, he also told Maya he was no longer much interested in sex. Maya would joke, a little bitterly, that it was illegal in India not to have sex with your spouse; the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 mentioned the “conjugal rights” of a spouse several times. She wondered what happened to the man with whom she had steamy phone sex from Hyderabad to Mumbai.
In the mornings, Maya began to make Veer’s tea and put out his work clothes in silence. As she handed him his tiffin for lunch, he would nod at her, talking into multiple cell phones at once, like many businessmen in the city did. He talked in loud, exaggerated tones of Hinglish. And then, tiffin in hand, he’d walk out the door.
At home alone all day, Maya read books she’d bought by authors she liked, including V. S. Naipaul and Chimamanda Adichie. On her laptop, she listened to ghazals, Indian classical music and old Hindi film songs. She read the newspaper and cleaned the house. After she exhausted all these activities, she cooked dinner and tried to show her love for Veer in other ways, some of them traditional. On Karwa Chauth, the holiday on the fourth day after the full moon, when a wife was supposed to fast for her husband to live a long life, Maya fasted from sunrise to moonrise. She wasn’t very religious or superstitious, but she liked the idea of practicing sacrifice. During her period, she followed the old rules that said she was unclean, because she knew the women in Veer’s family followed them. She also slept in a different bed, did not cook or enter the kitchen, and did not touch Veer at all.
But Maya’s attempts were lost on him. He barely noticed her efforts, or commented on them. There wasn’t time to devote to both a wife and work. He chose work over Maya every time.
It was after nearly three years of marriage that Maya remembered what her father had warned her about marrying another Marwari. Marwaris were money-driven. Marwaris cared about nothing but their work. A joke: What happens if you give a Marwari a corner in soccer? Oh, he’ll set up a shop in it. Especially a Marwari in Mumbai, where shops were sometimes constructed wholesale overnight. She and her father had slowly repaired their relationship, and they talked more often now, but she didn’t want to admit that he’d been right. She didn’t want to tell him that Veer was as absent a husband as he’d predicted or that she had begun to question her marriage.
It was true that Veer cared mostly about money and work, but he always said it was for a larger purpose. He insisted that making money was their best chance for a life of azadi, or freedom. Making money meant that he could relax one day not far off. He imagined retiring at fifty-five and moving to a seaside town, where he would live in a small shack. He would sell beer, whiskey, and coconut water on the first floor to keep busy and live on the floor above. And he’d take royalties from his pharmaceutical sales in Africa to supplement retirement.
Veer’s businesses, though booming, had not yet turned much of a profit. He assured Maya that soon his businesses would become more lucrative, and then he’d spend more time at home. Maya did not believe him.
One night that winter, to test him, she walked out of their house, as she had once left his parents’ home, and Veer had to drive around the city to find her. When he picked her up in the central suburb of Bandra, he pretended as if nothing had happened.
“Thoda compromise karo,” Maya’s mother had told her just after their move. Make a little compromise. Be patient. This was necessary in a marriage, she said. Maya did not believe her either.
Soon after Maya walked out, a honeybee hive formed on their tin-roof porch. Veer told Maya it was a sign of good luck. He said bees foretold one of two events: a visitor or a big windfall of money. He insisted not a single bee be harmed.
Left unchecked, the bees formed a giant, amorphous nest, from which a dull hum could be heard through the window. Dozens of bees circled the nest. Some died and fell in clumps on the porch. Others clung tight to the hive. While Veer waited for a big windfall of money, Maya desperately hoped for a visitor. She thought a visitor—in the form of a baby—might help solve the problems between them. A baby would mean she was no longer alone.