. . . Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all day.Ashok and Parvati, 2009 to 2013
“What can I do for you? I smiled.
A smile is such a detached thing . . .
I want your photo . . .
Sure. Just arrange my limbs and tell
Me when . . .”
—Kamala Das, “The Testing of the Sirens”
Parvati was on the overnight train home when Joseph first spoke to her. She was a shy-seeming student with nerdish glasses, a heart-shaped face, and thick hair that had a habit of becoming unruly. She also didn’t socialize much at her university, so when Joseph approached her, she was surprised.
“Hi,” he said, smiling, as friendly as if they knew each other well. Parvati barely recognized him from college. She appraised his brushy mustache, dark complexion, and glasses that were thicker than hers. She told herself she didn’t find him attractive. She did not know then that he was a Christian; if she had, she might have been even more dismissive. While there were many Christian boys in Kerala—almost more than anywhere else in the country—they were still in the minority, and not meant for Hindu Brahmin girls like her.
She and Joseph talked about their break, and then he retired to his train compartment. But the next morning he was back. “Let’s take an auto together when we get back to college,” he said, his voice earnest, and Parvati found herself nodding yes.
Over her break at home, in Kerala, Parvati did not think of Joseph. Home was a sprawling compound filled with all kinds of trees—jackfruit, plantain, teak, mango, and coconut. Her mother used the coconuts to make curries. Home was shuttlecock and roller-skating with her older sister, who was her closest friend. Home was visits with her father, a devout Hindu Brahmin, to quiet, clean temples surrounded by even more trees.
But after they returned to graduate school in Chennai, a city on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, about five hours by train from her hometown, Parvati agreed to meet Joseph for coffee. Somehow he seemed more decent than the other boys at university. Or maybe it was that closemouthed smile he wore, suggesting he knew something she didn’t. They planned to meet in the university canteen, where the South Indian filter coffee was rich and thick.
Parvati had a difficult time talking to the other students at IIT Chennai, one of nearly two dozen institutes of technology for the best and brightest in the country. It wasn’t because she was unintelligent, or haughty, or shy. It was because of what she lost at the end of college, which she could not forget.
The first loss was her best friend, who was short and bubbly with buckteeth and big, shining eyes—Parvati’s physical opposite. During their senior year, her friend had grown jealous of Parvati’s relationship with a Jacobite Christian boy in college. On the last day of college, she had called Parvati a “cheat” in front of everyone, accusing her of betraying their friendship for a boy. “I know you’re not the kind of girl who would marry a Christian guy,” she said. They hadn’t spoken since.
The second loss involved the boy. When the Jacobite Christian told Parvati he wanted to marry her, Parvati had said no. She had always known she couldn’t marry him. She was a Hindu and a Brahmin, and Hindu Brahmins didn’t marry Christians—at least not Hindu Brahmins from her small and conservative city. Her parents might disown her if she did. Still, she thought they’d remain friends. But after she turned down his marriage proposal, he had also stopped speaking to her.
At coffee now with Joseph in the university canteen, the conversation turned to religion. Parvati’s parents had always told her: “It’s a privilege to be a Brahmin, because it’s top class.” Brahmins were first. Brahmins were pure. Brahmins were the most educated and intelligent. It was said that this idea came from the Vedas, because in the ancient Hindu scriptures the Brahmins were the priestly class. But the Vedas could be twisted all kinds of ways to suit all kinds of purposes. Parvati had repeated that Brahmins were superior, or something like it, and now Joseph challenged her: “It’s not good to have this kind of opinion,” he said. “You should not judge someone based on this, just because he’s not a Brahmin.”
Parvati’s thoughts flashed to her father, who was a devoted Brahmin. Every week he met with other members of the community to chant the Vishnu sahasranamam—all one thousand names of Lord Vishnu—which took a half hour to complete. It was considered one of the most holy and powerful stotras. The ancient warrior Bhishma, from the Mahabharata, the epic story that taught man how to live, had said this chant could transcend sorrow. It was said it could unlock the universe. Though it was a chant available to any Hindu, the temple priests were mostly Brahmins, and some believed this made the caste superior.
But what Joseph said now made sense. It was a flaw, for example, that Brahmins thought so highly of themselves. She remembered how in college an outside professor had once come in to grade papers and failed every student in the class. Parvati’s father, tall and imposing, had marched into the principal’s office to complain. When he came home, he told Parvati the papers were graded unfairly because the professor was “scheduled caste.” Parvati knew what scheduled caste meant—that, according to the constitution, there were officially disadvantaged groups, including the dalits, or “untouchables,” and the adivasis, India’s tribal people. That many government jobs and seats in colleges were reserved for them. She understood in a vague way that these people had been neglected, exploited, or worse. She also knew that many Brahmins disliked the idea of such reservations, because they believed the scheduled castes were stealing their jobs. Her father was no different.
“That’s why he did this, for revenge,” he told Parvati. Parvati held a different point of view. Even if the professor had failed the students as some kind of reprisal, her father had not considered the man’s motivation. She thought that to mistreat lower castes over time, and, when they responded in anger, point fingers, was not the right approach at all.
Parvati realized that she had always found Brahmins lacking. Maybe she even had when it came to boys. She had chosen the Jacobite Christian boy over many Hindu Brahmin suitors, because no one else had seemed as mature or intelligent. She told Joseph she’d think about what he said.
The next time they met for coffee, Parvati told Joseph, “What you said about Brahmins is right.”
Parvati still didn’t know Joseph well, but she saw that he had the power to change her views. He spoke persuasively but was not pushy, always using reason to make his points. And in every conversation, he came across as more perceptive and knowledgeable than the other boys in college. She wanted to spend more time with him. But he was leaving soon for a nine-month research project in Germany to study the applications of inorganic chemistry, which impressed her.
The day before Joseph flew out, they had coffee one last time in the canteen. Parvati told him about her college relationship with the Jacobite Christian boy, who had believed that he could marry her. And Joseph told Parvati about a prior relationship with a Hindu Brahmin girl. He said her parents had initially agreed to a marriage with Joseph but later changed their minds. He said that he still loved her.
***
Ever since coming to Mumbai, Ashok had been thinking about girls. He was twenty-eight and had never kissed a girl, but now he lived in Mumbai, the most permissive of cities. Mumbai, home of Bollywood romance, dance-bar girls, and lovers’ points along the sea. He had never been to a dance bar, but he’d heard of the girls who used to twirl in saris for piles of rupees until dance bars were banned in the city, and many of the girls went into prostitution instead. Still, there was talk of the bars reopening. And sex scenes in films were now getting past the censors—scenes that made it clear what transpired. This would never have happened when he was a boy. He sometimes walked past the lovers’ points along the ocean, where couples sat and French-kissed on the rocks, and didn’t seem to care who saw them. To Ashok, Mumbai seemed like a place where he could be young and loose and free.
Ashok’s background wasn’t his problem with girls. He came from a good middle-class family and had received a good education. He also didn’t think it was about his appearance. He was tall (medium height, depending on who measured), lanky (some would say pencil thin), and had pale skin (theek hai, maybe it was almost wheatish, but pale sounded better). He had big cheeks and soft brown eyes and round glasses that worked their way down his nose. He wore his jet-black hair slicked over to one side and collared shirts that were often wrinkled. People said he looked younger than he was.
And, though he was a Tamil Brahmin, he spoke with an unusual, almost British accent, one that girls seemed to like. It was an accent acquired from his father, who had the same odd way of speaking, and whose own father had been a postmaster in British India. The British had only left India sixty years ago, and evidence of their influence remained everywhere—in the schools and infrastructure, the common law and penal code, their liquor and language. It was fashionable to speak with a bit of a British affectation. The accent had always helped Ashok get jobs. But though it also attracted girls, a conversation was where it always ended.
Ashok had been exposed to all kinds of girls, thanks to his father’s itinerant lifestyle and career choices, which mostly involved teaching English or selling English-language tapes. The first girl Ashok had a crush on, another Brahmin, was in a Protestant school down south in Tenkasi. Ashok used to stare at her during class until she complained and the principal reprimanded him and several other boys. Then there were the girls in Trivandrum, the highly literate town of coconut trees where his father brought them next. In Trivandrum, some of the girls were bold, sitting alongside the boys in campus protests for local politicians. Others came from small towns and were quiet in class, their only goal stable jobs in the government. But Ashok paid little attention to any of these girls, because this was around the time he discovered books. He would often cut class just to sit and read alone in the university library, which smelled romantically of withered books and damp plaster.
Mostly, Ashok remembered the firangi girls, who came later, also in Trivandrum, and whom his father would recruit off of beach resorts to do voice-overs for documentaries. Afterward, these foreigners—Brits, Jews, and many Americans, a second wave after the initial Peace Corps arrivals—would come to Ashok’s house for authentic Indian food. Ashok’s mother would cook up sambar and rasam, made with sweet-and-sour tamarind, along with cabbage, spinach, beans, and papadums. The firangis loved the papadums best, which were crunchy and smelled pungently of mustard seeds and daniya. After they finished eating, Ashok’s father would play Tamil and classical Carnatic music and expound at length on Indian history, literature, and music. Sometimes, these firangi girls would stay for weeks after they finished their voice-overs, preening for his father. Firangi, depending on which local language you used, could mean either “foreigner” or “a double-edged sword.”
From a young age, Ashok saw that his father was handsome and brilliant and a true polymath. For long hours, he would tutor his sons on a variety of subjects, but most often on English idioms, using flash cards. An Anglophile, like many of his generation, and his own father’s generation (even Gandhi and Nehru, fathers of the nation, had been English-schooled), Ashok’s father told his son that English was the path to success. Though Ashok did not grow up with the British, he could see for himself that this was true. He saw it in the call centres and tech jobs and multinationals popping up across the country, all of which required English. But though Ashok sometimes impressed the firangi girls with his English idioms—A penny for your thoughts? I don’t want to beat around the bush here—he was never able to kiss any of them.
In the big cities there had also been girls, but Ashok had been too absorbed in his work to try courting them. He had been focused on becoming a man with a steady paycheck—a man unlike his father. Ashok secured his first job in Bangalore at a business process outsourcing firm, which were proliferating across India, and then as an English-language journalist and editor. This second gig paid less but lasted longer. Eventually, he moved to a publication in Mumbai, where he found a decent job and a decent apartment in a more-than-decent suburb of the city. On the side, he worked on a novel that he dreamed would be a bestseller one day. Still, he couldn’t get a girlfriend. It should have been easy in Mumbai, where the girls were assertive and provocative and oozed sex appeal. They were nothing like the girls in Kerala. But somehow they didn’t seem interested in Ashok.
Finally, a friend set him up on a date with a small-framed Gujarati girl. To his surprise, it went well, and for the second date he brought her flowers. They were yellow marigolds, because his friend had told him not to buy red, and definitely not red roses. Red was a sign you were in love. When he presented the girl with the flowers, he could tell she was surprised but pleased. But he was also anxious, hoping she wouldn’t expect the date to lead to something more. Like many boys of his age and background, he had no idea what that would be.
On the first date, the Gujarati girl told him about her family—how her brother beat her, and how she didn’t have a father to intervene. On the second date, over coffee by the sea, they talked more and then went back to Ashok’s apartment. There, she asked Ashok if he would dance with her and taught him salsa. It was the first time Ashok ever held a girl. When they stopped dancing, he knew he was supposed to kiss her. But if he kissed her, he reasoned, he might have to marry her—especially if his family found out. And if he married her, he’d have to be with her forever. Ashok sat her down on the couch.
“See, I might not be the right guy for you,” he said. The words came out in a rush. “I am from a traditional family, a Tam Brahm family, and I see myself not settling down in Bombay. I might be in Chennai. I’m not really up for dating now. I’m having second thoughts . . . And I’m new to the whole thing.”
The Gujarati girl began to cry.
After she was gone, Ashok’s mind ran. Who would give a bunch of flowers to a girl, take salsa lessons from her, and then that very same night break up with her?
I’m freaking out.
I should call my father.
***
Not long after Joseph left for Germany, Parvati walked into a hostel on campus and found a cluster of people sitting in strained silence. After a minute, someone spoke. “You know this guy?” Joseph. “His friend passed away.”
Which friend?
It was the Brahmin girl, the girl he had wanted to marry. The girl he still loved.
After the girl’s parents rejected Joseph’s proposal, they started showing her to other boys. She had been keeping Joseph updated about the progress—what boys were coming, and how she felt about the arranged marriage—but then she stopped speaking to Joseph altogether. Joseph assumed she had fallen in love with one of the suitors, and that was why she didn’t call or answer the phone. But she had been in the ICU, sick with a heart disease he never knew she had.
When Parvati called Joseph, he was crying.
“It’s okay, we’re all there to support you,” Parvati said, unsure what else to say.
For a week or two afterward, Parvati didn’t talk to Joseph, thinking she should give him space. But then they spoke again and started e-mailing and Gchatting. As they did, Parvati found her sympathy turned into affection. Soon, they were talking all the time. Later, Parvati worked up the nerve to ask him for a photo of the Brahmin girl and saw that she was not the kind of girl you noticed in a crowd. But she had very long, beautiful hair.
Over the nine months Joseph was in Germany, he and Parvati spoke often. Sometimes, he told Parvati what he learned from living in a Western country. “Don’t stare when people are hugging or kissing. It’s a natural thing,” he told her. “It is not common in India, but in the West people do it.” A common joke: In India it’s okay to piss in public but not to kiss. Or, from a firangi’s Internet list about annoying things in India: #1: Why do you keep staring at me?
Still, Gandhi, father of the nation, founder of the swadeshi movement to boycott foreign goods, might have been unhappy to see how Westernized India had become. The influence wasn’t limited to the British. Now, there were American chains like KFC and McDonald’s, girls pairing Italian jeans with traditional kurtas, and creamy peanut butter and flavored potato chips edging out masala channa on the shelves. The middle class and rich were going West to study and to marry. Bollywood songs had the overlay of hip-hop. Though both Hindi and English were the official languages, it was English that in many ways had taken precedence; most educated, moneyed people in cities were at least bilingual. And, despite the complaints of right-wing parties, couples were celebrating Valentine’s Day. Local politicians warned that couples would soon hug and kiss on the street, just as they did in Joseph’s Germany.
Sometimes, Joseph told Parvati about how well his experiments were progressing abroad, and Parvati would feel dejected. She was not doing well at IIT Chennai, where the engineering classes seemed deliberately complex and confusing and where she was one of the only girls. The campus, a six-hundred-acre forested area filled with banyan trees and crisscrossed by wide promenades, was a lonely place without friends. Though about eight thousand students attended the university, the grounds sometimes seemed more populated by animals, including antelopes, deer, rabbits, and snakes. Some days, Parvati encountered only a wily troop of monkeys on her way to class.
As the semester progressed, Parvati found herself sleeping all the time. She had never taken great care with her appearance or worn makeup; she was pretty and didn’t need to. But she now took even less time and care. She went to class in wrinkled kurtas, often in a dull saffron color. She stopped trying to tame her thick hair and let it go frizzy and didn’t bother to clean the smudged lenses of her glasses. She kept thinking that if she had chosen her master’s degree on her own, she would have never chosen engineering. She would have chosen art.
In college, Parvati had made a number of elaborate line drawings of Hindu gods and goddesses, which the teachers and other students all admired. Once, she had spent seven hours sketching a dancer of Kathakali, a style of dance known for its intricate costumes and exaggerated facial expressions, and people told her it was a masterpiece. But when Parvati’s father had discovered the line drawings, he told his daughter they were a silly hobby and to throw them all away. “Why are you wasting your time?” he asked. Even Parvati’s sister, who usually took Parvati’s side, agreed. “Oh, so this is the big thing you’ve been up to?” she said.
Engineer, doctor, lawyer—these were the acceptable occupations for the wealthy and the middle class. They were stable and paid good salaries. They kept you out of poverty, which about a third of the country was still in. Indian aunties could often be heard muttering to an aspiring young artist in the family: “Arts? Arts lekar kya karoge?” “Whatever will you do with the arts?” Parvati’s father, a prominent engineer, had always expected his daughter would follow his path. But Parvati kept drawing.
Now, Parvati told Joseph how much she wanted to quit IIT Chennai and study art instead. It didn’t help that her sister had just gotten married. Her sister, who had always been her best friend, but would now have her own family. “Just hang on,” Joseph told her. He was coming back to Chennai soon.
When Joseph returned from Germany, he looked different from how Parvati remembered him. He had shaved off his mustache. His clothes were more Western. And he possessed a new, firangi style of confidence. Many of his views had changed. He also returned laden with gifts for the other students in his hostel. For Parvati, he brought a Japanese fan with a Michelangelo painting printed on it. Michelangelo, who had been both an artist and an engineer.
***
Ever since he could remember, Ashok had assumed he’d have an arranged marriage. It remained the most common form of marriage in the country. Studies varied widely but found between 60 and 90 percent of unions in India were arranged. Ashok told himself that even the British did it for centuries. An arranged marriage offered a set path and security. There might be more love marriages now, but people said these were behind the rise in divorces. To him, a love marriage seemed inherently uncertain and bound to come with expectations he’d never meet. His father had other ideas.
“I thought YOU might find a girl on your OWN,” his father told him, in his oddly punctuated English, where the emphasis was always on the wrong word. “And spare ME the trouble.” Ashok’s father and mother’s marriage had been a love marriage. They’d married despite the disapproval of her family. They reasoned that if they had had a love marriage back then, surely Ashok could find a girl in today’s Mumbai.
But as the years passed and Ashok approached thirty, he still hadn’t found a girl. He had gone on few dates since the disastrous date with the Gujarati girl, the yellow marigolds left behind wilting in his apartment. And so his father and mother intervened. They put up a profile for Ashok on BharatMatrimony.com, which boasted of having “millions of brides.” They hawked him under the section on the site for Tamil Brahmins, called “Iyer grooms.” Iyer came from a word meaning “respectable” or “noble.” Better. Being labeled a Tam Brahm and Iyer implied that you were educated and conservative. It meant that you were pious and pure. In marriage, Ashok’s father reminded him, it was essential to claim the privileged caste.
This was the way it had always been, or had always seemed to be. Brahmins first, others below, and dalits so low as not to be included in the hierarchy. Caste divisions were said to have originated in ancient India’s four main specialized professions, with priests at the top, then warriors, traders, and lowly labourers below. These divisions were only further encouraged and solidified under colonial rule, with the British urging Brahmins like Ashok’s family to see themselves as superior.
Ashok found the assumptions associated with Brahmins misleading. He was not that conservative; he had eaten meat and drunk alcohol before. At times, he felt like a pseudo-intellectual, talking with confidence about subjects he did not understand. This was what many Indian journalists did, that and adding their own masala to stories. None of that went into the profile.
Instead, Ashok’s parents checked the box for “upper middle class,” though “middle class” would have better described them, with all the money Ashok’s father had lost over the years. “Lower class” wasn’t an option. They did not provide a number for Ashok’s salary, which was nowhere near that of a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, and would hurt his chances. And then they screened girls using their own parameters: she should be Tam Brahm, at least three years younger, beautiful, vegetarian, a nondrinker and nonsmoker. They preferred that she be educated yet conservative, a tricky balance to strike. And, of course, her horoscope must match his own.
“She’s YOUNG, she’s not bad-looking, she has a JOB, but making slightly less than what my SON is making,” said Ashok’s father, scrolling down a girl’s profile on the matrimony site. “THAT will mean Ashok has the upper HAND.”
For a man who had lived abroad, had many foreign friends, and spoke like a Brit, Ashok’s father still went about the arranged marriage business with the gusto of any desperate Indian father. It was as if he had forgotten he wanted Ashok to find a girl on his own.
After a year had passed and they still hadn’t found a match, Ashok’s father began to worry. “Ashok,” he said, “let’s find a girl who is maybe NOT from a small town, who won’t MIND marrying someone older.”
What he meant was it was time to widen the search.
But Ashok was surprised to find that he was picky. At first, a lot of girls reached out to his profile, and he said no for the slightest of reasons. If a girl weighed more than him—which was easy, since he had not even the hint of muscle—he said no. Or if she was wearing glasses, no, even though he also wore specs. Big nose: no, no, no. He knew he was being shallow. They’d reach out, and he would reply: “You know, I’m focusing on my work of fiction, I might not be ready for marriage right now.”
“Ashok, just say YES to the girl we throw up in FRONT of you,” his father said, accusing him of setting a bad example for his unmarried cousins. But Ashok couldn’t just say yes to any girl.
In Mumbai, Ashok tried hard to find a wife on his own. After the Gujarati girl, he went to a speed-dating event hosted by the Bombay Expats club and bought an expensive blue collared shirt for the occasion. The girls were foreign, fascinating, and beautiful—everything the girls on BharatMatrimony.com weren’t. But he found himself telling them all the same boring spiel: “I want to be a writer. I work as a journalist. I stay in Bandra.” Next.
None of the foreign girls followed up with him.
On the matrimony site, Ashok began to try harder. He found a few girls he liked, Indian girls who seemed worldly and cosmopolitan. He blamed that preference on his father, who had always made it seem like India was too small for them. As a child, Ashok had watched Remington Steele, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes on television. At his father’s urging, he had read Shakespeare and Shaw, and then moved on to the Americans: Roth, Hemingway, and Bellow. Bellow, who once wrote: “All a man has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.” When he was younger, getting a beautiful wife had looked easy.
One girl Ashok liked on the site was a Tam Brahm professor in South Africa. He liked that she spoke and wrote well, and in English. But it turned out she wasn’t interested in Ashok and didn’t care that he was writing a novel. Over e-mail, she wrote that men raised in India were domineering and did not want women to work. She said they placed demands on their wives to be home with their children or relatives. While Indian men wanted Westernized girlfriends, in the end they wanted traditional Indian wives. Ashok tried to tell her he wasn’t that kind of man. He wanted a girl who worked and spoke her mind. But she soon stopped responding, and he saw she’d only talked to him to please her parents.
Ashok also realized he wanted the other trappings of the characters on American TV shows, such as girls who wore lipstick or high heels. Indian girls did not often wear lipstick or heels. He felt duped by the mismatch of what he had expected and what was possible.
New profiles were put up on Bharat Matrimony all the time.
“My daughter is a confident, independent girl . . .” “My sister is very talented she is so sweet also . . .” “Am a jovial, helpful and humourous person with traditional views in life . . .”
For each profile, there was a pile of data to review. Each applicant had answered more than a dozen questions, which might have been insulting if every Indian boy and girl hadn’t been asked the same questions since birth. Willing to marry from other communities or only the Brahmin Iyer community? Body type slim or heavy? Complexion very fair, fair, wheatish, wheatish brown, or dark? Physical status normal or physically challenged? Monthly income? Veg or non-veg? Joint or nuclear family? Star and moon sign? Have Dosham? And it went on.
Ashok was glad he didn’t have to check the box for “Have Dosham.” A person with mangal dosha had a bad astrological combination, with the planet Mars in an inauspicious spot. A person with mangal dosha was such bad luck it was believed they could cause the early death of a spouse. And if Ashok had mangal dosha, it would be almost impossible to find him a spouse.
At the end of every profile, there was also a section to “express yourself,” in which people talked about how “well-settled” their siblings were, how “homely” their daughter was, or how “humble” they’d be as a bride. “Origin of ‘humble,’” his father might say, quizzing him and his brothers on note cards, from the Oxford Dictionary of English: Middle English: from Old French, from Latin humilis “low, lowly,” from humus “ground.”
Ashok felt turned off by the whole exercise.
“I need a break, Appa. For at least a month.”
Ashok had quit his job at the magazine without having a new one, which he hadn’t told his father. He couldn’t; his father would be apoplectic. Ashok had left to work on his novel, which he never had enough time to focus on, and because the effort of constantly looking at girls was rattling him.
“Can we stop this for a year?” Ashok asked.
“No,” his father said. He could have a break, but a short one. “After a little while, we are back AGAIN on the HUNT.”
On the hunt, a metaphor for a man’s quest for a woman, his father might say as he flipped over the card.
Ashok hung up the phone.
***
It was the beginning of the third year of her four-year master’s programme at IIT Chennai, and Parvati planned to drop out. She told this to Joseph as they sat at the university’s Café Coffee Day, drinking the expensive, bitter coffee that wasn’t as good as the canteen’s.
“I’m glad your work is coming to an end. You’ve done all your experiments,” said Parvati. “But I am hopeless. I am at the same place I was. I might just quit.”
Joseph listened to her and then said, in his careful way, “No, I see us graduating together.” It was a simple statement, and Parvati laughed when he said it. But after he did, Parvati knew they would.
And after this, Joseph began helping Parvati with her lab work. He went through her presentations with her point by point. Classes soon began to seem easier. Parvati started sleeping less and wearing better kurtas. She even looked forward to the lab, because Joseph was always there. They would work separately, and then he’d ping her online, saying, “Wanna come for coffee?” “Wanna come for tea?” They’d do this throughout the day: lab, coffee, lab, tea. And then they’d study together in the lab until late. Sometimes, Parvati’s parents would call at night and ask where she was, and she’d lie and say she was in her hostel getting ready for bed. She had never really lied to her parents before.
Soon, Parvati and Joseph also began taking long walks across campus, meandering under the banyan trees with their aerial roots and wide leaves glossy from rain. On their walks, they talked about books, and Joseph urged her to read more widely. At first, they both read the same biographies of historical figures, but after a little while, Parvati moved on to fiction. She picked up Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which was said to be banned at home in Kerala, because it featured an affair between an upper-class Christian woman and a caste-less “untouchable” man. In it, Roy wrote of the unspoken “love laws” that dictated “who should be loved, and how.” Laws that demanded that differences in caste, class, or religion keep two lovers apart. After reading it, Parvati began to wonder why Indian society banned people from loving who they chose because of how they were born.
Parvati also found Kamala Das, a fierce confessional writer who wrote plainly and without guilt. Kamala Das was a Hindu turned Muslim, a rarity in the country, and she was from Kerala, Parvati’s home state. Parvati started with her autobiography, which chronicled the tumult of Das’s inner life, the trials of her marriage, and her sexual and literary awakening. Das wrote fearlessly about taboo subjects and Hindu gods. In one poem, she recounted the famous story of the time Lord Krishna lay down on the riverbank with his lover, the milkmaid Radha. In Kamala Das’s telling, Radha “felt dead,” and when Krishna asked if she minded his kisses, Radha thought, “No, not at all . . . What is / It to the corpse if the maggots nip?”
It seemed Kamala Das was not afraid to write anything. She didn’t care what her parents or husband thought, or that her writing was called “histrionics.”
Reading her, Parvati felt for the first time that she could think as she liked about men, family, love, sex, and religion. If famous women—even Kamala Das, even Radha—had thought that way, why couldn’t she?
You don’t have to just live the way your parents have told you, Parvati thought, and was surprised at her own defiance.
Parvati had rebelled some as a teenager. Her grandmother, a staunch Hindu Brahmin who led her life governed by strict parameters, had always maintained that women on their periods were untouchable. The old Hindu rule was rooted in science, supposedly—a woman’s foul smell, the toxins in her blood, the simple fact that blood turned from red to black. Women on their periods could not enter the kitchen or go near the pooja stand. In Parvati’s house, they also couldn’t sit on the cloth seats in their living room; Parvati’s grandmother always made this very clear. In the old suppression of women, women sometimes led the suppressing. But when Parvati and her sister had their periods, they sometimes wouldn’t tell their grandmother and sit brazenly in all those places anyway. Or they would tell her, and wait for her fury to come, and then run away, giggling.
This, though—this was not the same. This had bigger consequences. Now, Parvati and Joseph were taking walks so often that other students at their university began to talk. One girl told Parvati, “People think that you are seeing each other.”
Unsettled, Parvati said to Joseph, “I don’t want this. I don’t want people to think this.”
“Is this a reason to not hang out anymore?” he said, and she could tell he was upset. “Are you really going to care?”
As always, he was right, and Parvati began ignoring the comments and whispers.
Several weeks later, Joseph suggested they venture off campus. They took a rickshaw with a group of friends to a showroom to go shopping. Parvati and Joseph both ended up near the cash counter. She looked at Joseph, and he looked back at her, and they held each other’s gaze for a long time. Parvati was wearing a maroon-colored kurta and a white dupatta—details she would always remember, as if it were a still from a film. It seemed like Joseph wanted to tell her something. But then he lowered his eyes and they all piled in a rickshaw and headed back to college.
They did not talk much about religion, because they didn’t want to fight. But one day, on the pretense of running an errand, Joseph got Parvati on the bus, only to tell her he was taking her to San Thome Basilica. She knew he expected her to get off or say she needed her parents’ or sister’s permission. San Thome Basilica was not close. But she surprised him. “Let’s go,” she said, and felt a little thrill in her chest.
When they arrived, morning mass had just ended. Parvati stared up at the walls and paintings in wonder. She had never been in a church before. “This is one of the most important churches, because Saint Thomas is buried here,” Joseph told her. “There are only three churches in the world where a church is built over a saint. For Christians, this is a very huge thing.”
He did not mention that San Thome Basilica was also built over the place where Hindus said a temple to Shiva once stood. Portuguese Catholics had apparently demolished it. But many holy places had changed hands like this, from Christians to Hindus, or Hindus to Muslims, and back again. And there had never been the same animosity between Christians and Hindus as Hindus and Muslims had.
After that day at St. Tom’s, they ventured beyond campus all over the city. Joseph had always been up for adventures, and now Parvati was too. Chennai was a sprawling city, known for its long stretches of white sandy beaches, packed Carnatic music halls, and ancient temples with fantastic backstories. At one Chennai temple, a man’s vision was healed miraculously. Another temple brought a man’s daughter back from the dead, or so it was said. At a third, it was common knowledge that Lord Shiva had once appeared. Soon, Joseph and Parvati were taking day trips outside the city, including to Kanchipuram, famous for its silk saris and old Hindu temples. On these trips, Joseph sometimes talked of how much he admired Hindu chants or Carnatic music, especially songs that featured the mridangam, a double-headed drum. But they did not talk more seriously about Hinduism or Parvati’s beliefs. She was certain they’d stop talking if they did.
Sometimes, though, they discussed with admiration the marriages they’d heard about between Hindus and Christians, or Hindus and Muslims, which were taking place more often in the city, despite the consequences. After one such engagement in Mumbai, the parents held a mock funeral for their daughter. The girl married the boy anyway. These people often had simple ceremonies, as if making the point that they did not need the pageantry and only wanted to make their love official. Their weddings were not at all like the lavish, many-thousand-guest weddings common among Hindu couples, which seemed designed to conceal any problems between the boy and girl with pomp and circumstance.
On the one-year anniversary of the Brahmin girl’s death, Joseph told Parvati, “I don’t want to be alone tonight.” And so they stayed up late in the lab, until everyone else had gone home. In the lab, Joseph began to cry, and Parvati hugged him. He smelled powerfully of his Axe cologne, a smell Parvati would always remember. She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek; she would not kiss him on the mouth. A kiss just for comfort, she thought. The first kiss I am saving for my husband.
After that, they began to text more regularly, starting as soon as they woke up and ending just before bed. Joseph had always gotten up early, and Parvati got up late, but soon they began waking up at the same time. The texts themselves were often just a simple Good morning, or Good night, but it was how they measured their days. One night, Parvati forgot to text Joseph and fell asleep. The next morning, Joseph was furious, a side of him Parvati had not seen before.
“You have to promise to text me every night before you go to bed,” he said.
Parvati promised, though part of her wanted to refuse. It felt as if he were trying to control her. But Parvati also thought she understood. They had not named their relationship, and so they were becoming very anxious with each other.
Soon, though, they began texting about how they felt, putting voice to what those long walks and e-mails and conversations over coffee and in the lab added up to.
Did you think that you would have ever fallen in love with me? Parvati texted Joseph, half joking, half hoping to provoke a real answer.
If your parents did not have any problem with this, he wrote back cautiously, I would have seriously considered you as my partner.
Parvati called him. She wanted him to say the three words, though she knew she shouldn’t. She longed to hear them, savor them.
In the Hindi film Dil To Pagal Hai, which came out when Parvati was a child, when she first started watching Bollywood films, a line of dialogue went: “Have you ever . . . even for a day . . . even for a moment . . . loved me?”
“Yes, I think I love you,” Joseph said, finally, into the phone. In the movies, lovers often overcame the objections of their parents. Parvati knew real life wasn’t the same way.
“I love you too,” said Parvati, though she knew this was the path to trouble.
***
Ashok got a new job and a promotion. He was relieved but mourned the long expanse of days he’d had to concentrate on his novel, which followed a dysfunctional married couple, who—the husband too ambitious, the wife too shallow—face a string of bad luck. It had a complex narrative, with interlocking story lines; he did not know where all the ideas in it had come from. Now, he could only work on it on weekends and at night.
Sometimes, people in the newsroom made good fodder for the book. He based a female character on a buxom journalist he knew. She was a lot like the American girls he saw on TV, but he was also certain he could not have pulled off her sex appeal without the real woman in mind.
The job and the promotion also meant it was time for marriage, which he knew, though he tried to push away the thought. He had a job and a steady income. There was no excuse left. I’m ready for it. I’m game, he told himself, like a mantra, as if saying it would make it true.
Ashok’s father responded to his son’s renewed interest with excitement, inundating him with girls’ profiles, all of them Hindu, Tamil Brahmin, and Iyer. As his father explained again, distinctions of caste and religion were essential in marriage. Ashok might like to think this was changing in the country, but his father told him he was wrong.
Sometimes, Ashok wondered why he was so shy with girls. He wondered why, when others chose to go out, he stayed at home with his books. Perhaps it was in his nature. He had been shy and bookish from the start. But he also wondered if it had a little to do with the episodes that came before.
The first time was in Chennai, when he was about eight or nine years old. His dad had run a company that produced English-language tapes and employed many local men. A chai-wallah there used to dote on Ashok, taking him out of the office to buy him little treats. On one of these excursions, he tried to touch Ashok in places he shouldn’t. He took Ashok out a second time, and again he did it. After the second time, Ashok told his father. His father shouted at the man, who was never seen in the company building again.
It happened again in Trivandrum, when Ashok was almost eighteen. He had gone alone to see an American movie called Boys Don’t Cry at a seedy movie theater. It occurred to Ashok that he shouldn’t have gone to see that kind of movie there. A man sat down beside him and after a little while slipped his hand between Ashok’s legs. Ashok waited, not moving, praying it wouldn’t go further, and then took the five-minute intermission as an opportunity to run. The man shadowed Ashok as he ran into the bathroom and tried to follow him once he left it. After he lost the man in the crowd, Ashok took a new seat in the darkened theater. That night, feeling his sense of order and calm shaken, he buried himself in a book.
Ashok had not yet learned about sex. But he knew men were not supposed to touch him that way. When he grew up, a government study would find that one in two Indian children—boys and girls both—had been sexually abused. But this was much later, and Ashok had mostly forgotten about the incidents by then. And yet still he could not talk to girls. He just wanted to be at home with his books and his writing. Any day, he’d prefer to be with Martin Amis, who wrote that fiction was “the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.” Fiction made him feel safe.
***
Ashok decided to give up on the marriage search. He remembered when he was younger, watching scenes in Tamil and Bollywood movies, which had made marriage seem simple and light. The Tamil hero would touch the girl’s arm, and the girl would say, in a hokey sound effect, “haaa-aaan,” and the studio audience would laugh. Or the Bollywood hero would dance and sing to her in exotic locales, like Fiji, Switzerland, or Morocco. Now, it was obvious marriage was nothing like that—that it was instead a complicated and heavy affair. Though Ashok was no longer picky, it seemed harder than ever to find a match.
But then, a profile had come along: a girl named Nada who lived in Bangalore, who was Tam Brahm and worked for a British company. In her photos she was good-looking, with an easy smile, prominent nose, and fair skin, almost like a firangi. She and Ashok connected over the website and later talked on the phone. A visit to Bangalore was scheduled. A visit to meet her parents was scheduled. When there was a match, the process moved forward quickly.
Before he flew to Bangalore, Nada told Ashok, without a hint of embarrassment: “When you come down to see me, I might have pimples.”
“That’s okay,” Ashok said. No superficiality was going to stop him now.
But when he came down to see her, her skin was clear, and she told him she had paid for a miracle treatment, along with other information Ashok found too private to share with a stranger. As they sat at the local Café Coffee Day, she told Ashok how much she liked to steal. “I mean stealing small stuff, like when you check in and out of a hotel. From the lobby, things that would escape notice,” she said. She told him she did it for fun. When they went out to eat, she grabbed a toffee from the host stand of a restaurant and whispered to Ashok that she’d stolen it. “You can’t really steal things if they are free,” Ashok said dryly. He tried to focus on how Nada had appeared when he first saw her, driving up on her scooter in a Western-style top and capri pants.
Later, they went to Cubbon Park, which was so green in contrast to Bangalore’s pollution that it was called the “lungs of the city.” Sitting under the thickets of trees, Ashok tried to ask her about books, but she did not read. They had little to say to each other, and Nada played with her phone. Ashok’s eyes were drawn to the cheap, clunky jewelry on her arms. His thoughts about her weren’t very charitable, but he was determined to press on.
Ashok and Nada got engaged on a rainy day in August, in a big hall attached to a three-story house, which seemed to Ashok like a mansion. His parents had rented it from a landlord they knew. Before the big day, Ashok had met Nada’s father, with whom he found he got along better than his daughter. The two talked of Tamil poetry. It’s going so well between the two of us, Ashok thought, and wished Nada was as intelligent or well-read. After this, Ashok had kissed Nada in his apartment in Mumbai, and it was a decent kiss, not sloppy or clumsy. But then she had begun talking again.
As the engagement date approached, both of them tried to pretend they felt something, sending sappy notes over Gchat.
Nada: Just 4 more days . . . Are you tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind all day.
Ashok: can never be tired of you. But yeah, generally, I am.
Nada: love you soooooooooooooo much
Ashok: Love u 2 bits
Nada: 2 bits?????????
Ashok: It’s an expression.
Even the sappy notes didn’t work.
A day or two before the engagement, Nada sent Ashok an e-mail, and he was surprised to find she was as reluctant to get married. “I see no great chemistry between us,” she wrote. “Do you want to take it forward?”
Ashok wrote a long e-mail in reply, insisting they could make it work. He worried this was his last chance to get married, and if this didn’t work out, he’d die alone. It didn’t matter if their connection was a stretch. He couldn’t afford to let her go.
“I have a feeling that everything will be alright,” he wrote. “Our crazy frequencies match. Our involvement in our families . . . The occasional trespass (eating non-veg or getting a tattoo), all these are what I think will make us a rare couple in an otherwise humdrum Brahmanical clan . . . As you rightfully said that not everything is going to be perfect in a relationship.”
Some one hundred people came for the engagement party, including most of Ashok’s close relatives and family friends. There was a three-course meal, with puri and bhaji and subzi, and afterward, chai, coffee, and sweets. There was no meat or alcohol, since the purity of the Vedas had to be maintained, along with the reputation of a Tam Brahm’s piety. Ashok’s family brought Nada expensive silverware and fine clothes. The priest spoke, Carnatic music played, and a date was fixed for the wedding. Through all of it, Ashok felt in a daze. In total, his father had spent a mind-numbing forty thousand rupees on the ceremony.
When it was all over, Ashok panicked. Oh my god, he thought. This is not the girl. And my dad has just spent a lot of money.
As the wedding date grew closer—only a few months away—he was of two minds: marry her and save his father’s name, or call the wedding off and pretend it never happened. Ashok decided to honor his father. He would marry her. He had to.
The following month, Ashok and Nada broke up over the phone. Nada initiated it, saying she had feelings for an ex-boyfriend, a boy who was not a Tam Brahm and whom she had met on her own. But first she had gotten philosophical with him. “Hey, Ashok,” she said. “You touch your heart, ask yourself this question if you want to get married to me, and tell me how you feel about it . . . I feel we are not connected. And if we get married despite this we might end up fighting a lot and getting divorced within a year.”
The word divorce hit Ashok. I don’t want to get divorced. I don’t want to fight, he thought. A marriage was supposed to last seven lifetimes, and divorce was to be avoided at all costs. Once he heard the word divorce, he knew their engagement was over.
When Nada told her father, the man fell off the cot he slept on, broke his arm, and dislocated his shoulder.
Ashok dreaded telling his father. But Ashok’s father already knew, because Nada’s father had written him a terse e-mail that said the marriage was called off, with “mutual incompatibility . . . the reason for the cancellation.”
Once, after another failed match on Bharat Matrimony, Ashok’s father had shouted at him: “Ashok, you’re just a WASTED guy, you can’t FIND a girl.”
This time, his father did not shout. Instead, he flew to Mumbai to comfort his son, fearful of the effect the broken engagement might have on him. He knew boys did pagal things over failed engagements: they castrated themselves, jumped in front of moving trains, and hanged themselves from trees. And so the entire time Ashok’s father was in Mumbai, he kept spouting encouragement: “You DON’T have to feel bad for yourself. Things will work OUT for you.” And: “Don’t worry, Ashok. You will find a GIRL. It’s just a GIRL you’re looking for, not the Holy GRAIL. The right GIRL will come along.” And, the one that discouraged Ashok most of all: “You’re NOT doing badly enough yourself. You have a JOB and a studio a-PART-ment.”
What a joke. Ashok thought he might die alone in his apartment with his stacks of books and unfinished novel.
But after Nada, he began to write. He had written before, but not like this. Before, his sentences had been funny, optimistic, even blithe. His novel had hung together through its show-offy quality, verbal loops and hoops, and mimicry of great writers he’d read. Now he wrote to get through the fog. Soon, the families in his novel became more dysfunctional, the language more honest, and themes existential. Ashok felt an urgency to write in a way that he hadn’t before. There was a mismatch in the tone of the novel from beginning to end, but Ashok did not care. Life was just as uneven.
***
Parvati didn’t know how it was possible, but she had almost reached the end of the master’s degree. The last year had been far different from the other three, because it had been filled with Joseph. They worked together, drank cups and cups of milky chai and South Indian filter coffee, and, after that first kiss on the anniversary of his ex-girlfriend’s death, surreptitiously made out in the lab after the other students went home. They never went further than kissing, though sometimes Parvati wanted to. This was why she never let their day trips turn into overnights. On campus, where boys and girls weren’t allowed in each other’s dorm rooms, it was impossible for things to get out of hand. And so Parvati and Joseph took long, leisurely walks across campus, often pausing under the college’s ancient banyan tree. It was a tree so old that no one could identify the original roots, which had long ago disappeared into the ground.
And they went into the city, where they ate crispy sada dosa and went shopping, and Parvati spent money on herself for the first time. She even bought a designer handbag, a lavish purchase her father would never permit. Like many fathers, he railed against the increasing consumerism in the country—how young people did not save and spent more than they earned on new gadgets, cheap clothing, and afternoons at the mall, like the young people in the West did.
When Parvati and Joseph took day trips, they often rode buses to faraway places, such as Pondicherry, the French-settled city by the sea. Around this time, they also watched the movie Up together. When the montage played of Carl and Ellie’s relationship—first marriage, then a house, then dreams of babies and travel, and, best of all, growing old together—Joseph said this was how their life would be.
Before college ended, they wanted to have one last excursion: to watch the sun rise over a Chennai beach. It wasn’t something Parvati could experience in her hometown, or Joseph in his, because both cities were on the western side of the country.
They stayed up all night in the lab, and very early in the morning, Parvati, Joseph, and another friend took a rickshaw to the beach. Joseph wore his Western jeans rolled up at the bottom, while Parvati wore a golden kurti the color of the morning sun. As the sun rose, they marveled at the array of hues in the sky and sea. As the light spread, it was infectious. They took goofy pictures: of Parvati pretending to hold the sun in her hand, their friend trying to swallow it, and Joseph jokingly pushing Parvati into the ocean. They played barefoot in the surf until the sun rose all the way. And they shared chai and idlis, and Parvati wrote her name in big, looping letters in the sand, then photographed it to remember.
After college ended, Parvati was offered a job with an international auto company in Bangalore, which was just an hour plane ride west of Chennai but felt nothing like the wooded campus at university. Many international auto companies were opening up plants and offices in Bangalore, the country’s tech and business hub. Meanwhile, Joseph planned, as he always had, to go back to Germany, where he would earn his PhD in a small university town. They talked of Parvati moving there to join him later, maybe after a year or two. They talked of all the things they would do in Germany together, though Parvati didn’t know if they were being serious or playing pretend. Whenever Joseph brought up marriage, Parvati told him she wasn’t sure. She knew her parents would never agree. Perhaps they would even disown her. Some parents went so far as to kill their daughters for marrying the wrong boy, though Parvati knew her parents were not capable of that. Perhaps she could convince them—her sister first, then her mother, and finally her father, who had always distrusted other religions—that a Hindu Brahmin–Catholic union could be decent and good. But this, she knew, was wishful thinking.
At times, Joseph grew angry that Parvati seemed unwilling to fight her parents to get married. But in the end they always let the conversation move on.
On the last day they had together in Chennai, they visited a Hindu temple in the oldest part of the city, and then Joseph took Parvati to the station. As she climbed inside the train, he stowed her luggage by her seat. “Good-bye,” he said. They were surrounded by hundreds of other travelers and knew they could not kiss or hug. Instead they shook hands, like strangers.
There were a lot of famous train farewells in the Bollywood films Parvati had grown up on. In Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, by far the most famous of these, both the boy and girl end up getting on the train.
Joseph promised to come visit her in Bangalore before leaving, but this felt to Parvati like the end.
“Good-bye,” Parvati said, and as the train pulled away without him, she steeled herself not to cry.
***
On day one in Bangalore, Parvati felt overwhelmed. She had moved into paying guest accommodations with nine other working women, all of whom seemed unfriendly. Her rent was expensive, and she had no Internet or phone connection; her SIM card from Chennai did not work. It was easy to remedy these problems in the city, but she had never lived on her own.
But then Joseph had come to visit before he left for Germany, and together they bought spices and utensils for the apartment. She started work at the auto company, where she liked her colleagues and the work. And she became close with one of the girls in the house, a girl who was sassy and silly and reminded her of Rachel from the American TV show Friends, whose reruns everyone her age seemed to watch. After a few months, Bangalore began to feel like home.
Joseph had decided to spend three months teaching down south in Kottayam before he left for Germany, and during that time he often called Parvati. Too often, Parvati began to think, because any time she went out in Bangalore he’d ask where she was going. At night, when she was trying to sleep, he said he needed to talk. And when she had lunch with colleagues or friends he now grew suspicious, saying, “You just had coffee, why are you having lunch now?”
Her parents already called every day to ask what she was doing. She did not need Joseph to do the same thing. It’s like since I moved to Bangalore I have no breathing room, she thought, and was surprised at how frustrated she felt.
Joseph came to visit her a second time before leaving the country, and this time he tried to show his affection in public, the way couples in Germany did. Though they were in India, he argued that Bangalore was a progressive city—India’s Silicon Valley—and that few people knew them there. He would take her hand, sit very close beside her, or put his arm around her in a rickshaw—gestures Parvati began to hate. It’s like he’s trying to control me, she thought, just as at IIT Chennai, when he made her promise to text him every night before bed.
Now, if she made a new friend, Joseph objected, saying she shouldn’t see the same person more than once. Parvati told him she wouldn’t but felt confused. Joseph had always been right about everything, but now she had the feeling he was wrong.
To her surprise, she began to count down the days until he left for Germany, when he’d have to sign on to Skype to ask her where she was or where she’d been.
From Germany, Joseph pestered her to tell her parents about him and ask their permission to marry. Sometimes, Parvati thought she should. She missed him. Over the phone, he would talk of all the places they had gone together in Chennai. He would tell her of all the places they could go to in Europe. He’d send her pictures from Germany—of a shop bursting with color, or of Germans eating giant wheels of cheese. Parvati knew that young people with means often went abroad to work or study, and she thought maybe she should too.
But when Parvati applied for a position in Germany and didn’t hear back, she felt not disappointment but relief. The balance of power had shifted since IIT Chennai. The farther away Joseph was, the more he clung to her. And she didn’t like how it felt.
Still, the next time she went home, Parvati decided to tell her mother about him. She couldn’t keep the secret anymore. Her mother didn’t even know Joseph existed, though her sister did. Sometimes, Parvati’s sister supported the affair, and other times she told Parvati she was foolish. At home, as Parvati waited for the right moment, Joseph texted her: Did you tell?
Finally, as she packed her bags to go back to Bangalore, Parvati began, her voice tentative, “Amma, I’m in love with this guy.” She told her mother he was a Christian, and that she didn’t know what to do. “What do you think?”
Her mother’s fury was immediate and fierce. This was the moment when all the years of careful rearing fell apart. “If you don’t want to marry this guy, why did you even bother to tell me this story?” she said. “You could just have finished it yourself.”
Stunned, Parvati began to cry.
“Never talk about this again. Don’t tell Dad. Let’s just close this topic. And forget him,” her mother said.
With that, the conversation was over.
The next day, at the airport, Parvati’s mother looked at her daughter and smiled. Perhaps it was a kind smile, but more likely it was coercive, meant to ensure her daughter did as she was told. “Just remember what I said. Close the chapter,” she said.
Parvati relayed her mother’s response to Joseph, who told her she hadn’t approached it the right way. He said he was going to e-mail her dad and ask for her hand in marriage.
Parvati knew her father would say no. Like many Hindu Brahmin fathers, he believed a girl should marry not only within her religion but also her caste and gotra. And she knew that Joseph asking for her hand by e-mail would infuriate him. Her father was a man who valued propriety, and this was not the way it was done.
Back at work in Bangalore, Parvati couldn’t focus. She sat at her desk at the auto company and grew fidgety, and then listless, waiting for her father’s call to come.
But it was her mother who telephoned, and told Parvati that her father was not angry but heartbroken. She said he was so upset to receive the e-mail that he could not speak. She said she was worried about how sad he was and how many feelings were in his mind. This was not what Parvati had expected.
Parvati’s sister called next, and said that their father had also called her. “It’s better not to tell you what he said,” she told Parvati. “Horrible stuff. Anti-Christian.”
Parvati didn’t want to know.
Later, her father would tell her that he’d responded to Joseph, that he had written a clear, unequivocal: “No.”
But Joseph said he never got a reply and wasn’t giving up.
Parvati would never know who was telling the truth.
After the e-mail from Joseph, Parvati’s father vowed to marry her off without delay, and her parents set up a BharatMatrimony.com profile. Though Parvati was Malayali—born, proudly, in the state of Kerala—her family’s roots were in Tamil Nadu, and so her profile was placed in the section for Tamil Brahmins. Her father quickly identified a suitable Tam Brahm boy. He was in the United States, working for a big tech corporation, and, luckily or unluckily for Parvati—whom the astrologer warned had terrible stars—the US boy’s horoscope matched her own.
Not long after, Parvati’s bosses in Bangalore told her they were sending her to Sweden for work. When Parvati told her father, he jumped at the opportunity. He said the Tam Brahm boy from the United States could meet her in Sweden, and that he would come along. Parvati called Joseph to tell him about the impending meeting, and Joseph said he’d also meet her there; it was just a short flight from Germany.
It’s like a bad movie, Parvati thought, but she didn’t find it funny. She ran through terrifying scenarios of what might happen when she, her father, the US boy, and Joseph all converged in the same city.
As the date of the Sweden trip approached, Parvati felt a loosening on her hold with reality. She began to cry while she walked to work, talk to herself, and write long diary entries and burn them. If one of the girls at the guesthouse spoke to her, Parvati would say darkly, “There is no point in this life.” But when a colleague spoke to her at work, she tried to give a calm response. She tried to smile. She thought she should try to hold it together at work, at least.
In these months, Parvati also remembered old South Indian movies she had watched as a child—how the men were always in charge, and any woman who raised her voice was a villain. Watching these, she had believed men should do the thinking for her.
Now she pleaded with her father: “Please don’t do this to me. Give me some more time.” But Parvati’s father told her that time had run out.
She did not go to Sweden. Instead, she told the auto company she’d quit if they sent her there. She told herself she’d have a breakdown. She told her father the trip had been canceled. And she asked her sister’s husband to call Joseph and tell him to leave her alone. She stopped answering his calls, texts, chats, and e-mails. At night, she began to see snakes in her dreams. When she was a child, Parvati had been terrified of snakes. When she dreamed of them now, she also felt afraid.
The astrologer had said there was a problem with her stars, and with one star in particular, a star associated with snakes. Now, her parents were doing poojas to the snake gods to offset it. They said the poojas would help ward off sin, which was in danger of attaching to Parvati. If it did, the astrologer said she might never marry or have children. And she was supposed to marry the US boy.
But Parvati hated talking to him. She found him naive and overly nice, in a way that suggested he was being fake. In spite of his job at a big tech corporation abroad, which many girls would admire, she didn’t find him at all impressive. When they Skyped with her sister and brother-in-law beside her, she spent the entire call making funny faces he couldn’t see. Parvati’s parents assured her that marriage came first and affection would follow. But Parvati didn’t think she could ever love the US boy. When she thought of Joseph, she missed his smell the most.
“I don’t want to proceed,” she told her sister, who told her father, who shouted into the phone. Parvati was twenty-five now and should already be married. Her father and the US boy’s parents fixed a date in late November for their engagement.
On one call, Parvati told the US boy about Joseph. In telling him, she thought it might dissuade him from marriage, since it was shameful for a bride to have had a past affair. And if it did not dissuade him and she was forced to marry him, at least the truth would be out in the open. But she made him promise not to tell his parents, because she knew how it would be received. He swore to her he wouldn’t.
Soon after that, Parvati’s parents went to visit the boy’s family, who lived in the same city, to plan the engagement. When they arrived, his family presented a long laundry list of demands for the ceremony. They insisted that Parvati’s parents go to a specific store in Bangalore to get her saris stitched. They maintained that they be the ones to place the garlands during the ceremony, which was tradition anyway. They asked that Parvati’s parents book rooms for all their family members at the pricey Taj Mahal Hotel. And at the end of the conversation they said, “You should understand we’re doing a favor for your daughter.”
Joseph. Their son had told them. They knew.
When Parvati’s mother relayed this to Parvati afterward, she also told her that her father had acquiesced to everything.
Later, the US boy called Parvati, and Parvati confronted him. “Did you tell about my past to your parents?”
“No, I didn’t say.”
“Why are you lying to me?”
He grew angry and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
Parvati despised the US boy then. “I’m getting a headache just talking to you,” she said, and hung up.
The next day, the US boy defriended Parvati on Facebook, and his relatives did the same. Parvati’s father called her and told her, sadly, “I think we are just calling this off.”
Parvati was quiet on the phone. But afterward she rounded up her friends and colleagues to celebrate. And that night, she slept more deeply than she had in months. For the first time, no one would be calling her from Germany or the United States or home. In Hindu philosophy, there were three forms of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and deep, dreamless sleep. After deep, dreamless sleep came turiya, pure consciousness, which was for the liberated. That night, for the first time, she felt free.
***
Ashok found Mallika on the site himself. She was about his age, lived in Mumbai, was a big deal in Bollywood—or so her profile implied—and was into art and books and movies. She seemed street-smart and sure of herself, qualities Ashok thought he lacked. She seemed nothing like Nada, with her cheap bangles and stolen toffees, except that of course she was also Hindu and a Tamil Brahmin.
They met first at a restaurant along the sea, and later at her apartment. In her flat, Ashok was startled to find a three-level cabinet packed with liquor: foreign whiskey, Smirnoff vodka, and Kingfisher beer. He knew most of the country did not drink, and especially not Tam Brahms; the Vedas said intoxicants destroyed the intellect. Mallika offered Ashok milk tea and invited him back a second time to drink flavored vodka. The process rolled forward, and he went to New Delhi to meet Mallika’s mother. Over tea at the rotary club, her mother told him, “You’re the kind of guy my daughter has been wanting to marry. She has seen a lot of guys who are silly and immature. But you seem all sorted.” She seemed not to care that he was past thirty.
As Ashok got to know Mallika, he thought that perhaps the guys she had dated had been more than just immature or silly. She was sure-footed and street-smart, this was true. But she also seemed distrusting, as if there had been an incident in her past, and now every man could be a potential offender. When Mallika came to visit Ashok at his apartment, he offered her a mango, but she said she didn’t like mangos, and so he offered her an apple, which she accepted only after watching him take a bite. When he kissed her and tried to go further, she recoiled, as if he were going to hit her. But then she had surprised Ashok and invited him to live with her—just for two weeks—as a kind of experiment before marriage. Ashok couldn’t help telling his father.
“As long as it’s in Bom-BAY, where we don’t have any FAMILY members, go accumulate as many experiences as you WANT to,” his father said. “But DON’T breathe a word about it to ANY-one.” Emboldened, Ashok bought a packet of condoms and packed them along with his book, Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, and his flute, which he had taken up to play classical Tamil music. Mallika was a Bombay girl, and Ashok assumed Bombay girls were up for sex before marriage.
But when he arrived, Mallika told him, “Okay, Ashok, although I’ve agreed to live with you, there will be no sex.” After this pronouncement, she went into her room and closed the door, leaving Ashok to sleep on a mattress in the hall.
For two weeks, Ashok lived at Mallika’s, during which time they hardly spoke to each other. When he tried to initiate conversation, she ignored him or spoke in short sentences. Soon, he didn’t care to keep trying. Instead he practiced his flute and read Joseph Anton, which chronicled Rushdie’s life under fatwa and the dissolution of not one but three of his four marriages.
“I’m not feeling quite right about this,” Ashok said on the last day, after entering Mallika’s room. “Do you think this is what we should be doing?”
“Ashok,” she said. “When you see me, do you feel like talking to me?”
Oh, thought Ashok, and he steeled himself to talk about the trauma in her past, to listen and unburden her, though he didn’t want to. He wanted to go home.
“You have this face about you that is very busy,” he said, finally, “not encouraging people to say nice things to you. It’s like you have ‘fuck off’ on your forehead.”
“Yeah,” she said, and seemed unsurprised. “I guess I have that.”
After Ashok moved back to his studio apartment, they spoke just once more on the phone, and that was it. As Ashok finished Joseph Anton, Rushdie told him, unhelpfully: “It was always women who did the choosing, and men’s place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones.”
After Mallika, Ashok’s parents began to send his profile to divorcées.
***
Joseph was engaged to be married. After Parvati heard the news, she quit her job at the car company in Bangalore and got a job teaching engineering in her hometown, where she’d live with her parents.
Before he got engaged, Joseph had sent her a final e-mail, saying he was “waiting for a positive sign” from her, but Parvati hadn’t written back. Now she wished she had. He had also sent her a photo of the girl, who stood in a gazebo in the picture, looking sweet and small and innocent. After Parvati saw the photo, she went into her company’s conference room and cried. The girl he was marrying was a Christian.
Now, Parvati had a month off before starting her new job, and she tried her best to distract herself. She spent time with a girl in her Bangalore guesthouse who was loud and funny and loved to gossip. One night, they went out to a movie, and afterward Parvati saw Joseph had called. Later, he called her again.
“The date of my marriage is fixed,” he told her. Fixed. In that moment, Parvati realized that she had not believed he would go through with it. She had expected the wedding to be called off, and for him to come to Bangalore and take her away as his bride.
“But I’ve called off my engagement,” she said, the words tumbling out. “Is there a way we can be back together?”
He paused, and said, in his cautious way, “I don’t think so. I have said yes to this girl and she is a very nice girl.” Parvati was silent. He went on: “She was supposed to get engaged to another guy, who turned out to be a drug addict. So her parents are scared, but they’ve found me okay, and I’ve given my word. I don’t want to break her heart.”
If Joseph had given his word, Parvati knew he wouldn’t break it. Quietly, she hung up the phone.
Joseph got married in January, after Parvati had moved back home and begun teaching. On the day of his wedding, she went to the charity house with her parents and distributed clothes to the poor. She knew Joseph would have liked that.
Not long after, Parvati picked up the novel Balyakalasakhi, or My Childhood Friend, which was about two kids who fall in love but whose parents won’t let them marry. As the story progresses, the girl gets married off to someone else, but the boy never finds a bride. They live separate lives, grow old, and die.
It was a beautiful book, written in plain and colloquial language by the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. As Parvati read it, she felt that the novel became her real life, and that her life became the fiction. After she finished and emerged from the spell of Basheer’s writing, she felt a little better about Joseph. Just because you fall in love with someone doesn’t mean you have to marry him, she thought. It is not the end of your life.
It was said that after Basheer wed, he was institutionalized twice for mental illness, for paranoia.
Or perhaps, she thought, it was better not to marry at all.
***
The following month, when her sister and brother-in-law sent her the profile, Parvati thought little of it. Her family had been inundating her with online profiles, and she said no to every single one. Girls were being inundated across India, because as the matrimonial ad section in the paper had gotten thinner, the old aunties who did the arranging had learned to navigate the Web. The online marriage market was expected to triple in the next few years. Bharat Matrimony, the site Parvati was on, had recently run an ad in which a girl came home to be told by her mother that a boy was waiting in her bedroom—scandal—only to reveal that a boy’s online profile was open on the computer screen. But though Parvati was lonely, the loneliest she had ever been, she wasn’t interested in any of the profiles. None of them compared to Joseph.
No, no, no, she thought now, as she sat in her room at home, looking at the profile open on her laptop screen. It belonged to another Tamil Brahmin, who, though he had grown up partly in Trivandrum, now lived up in Mumbai. He had a boyish face and a natural look. He looked like an average Tam Brahm—like, in fact, her father. He is not looking good, she thought. I’m never going to say yes to this guy.
The next day, her father brought her several engineers’ profiles, boring men, men who’d ensure her life would be tedious and small. Parvati saw he was going to force a marriage to one of these men soon, and she’d be powerless to stop him. That night, she revisited the profile her sister and brother-in-law had sent.
The boy still looked like her father. She moved on to his stats. From her parents’ perspective, a weak prospect. This made her look more closely. Weak point 1: master’s in English. (Not an engineer, lawyer, or doctor.) Weak point 2: height, five feet ten. (In Parvati’s family, short. She was almost as tall.) Weak point 3: age, thirty-three. (Too old; Parvati was just twenty-six.)
She saw this was the kind of boy who might upset her parents, and felt a flush of excitement at the prospect.
As she scrolled farther down the page, she noticed extra text at the bottom, a personal note he had written for the girl, not her family: “I would give a free hand to my partner, and expect the same from her.” She paused. She liked the sound of this. He didn’t seem like the kind of boy who would keep tabs on her every movement.
The next day, trying to keep her voice casual, Parvati told her sister and brother-in-law: “This seems to be an okay profile.” It was one of the first signs of interest she’d shown. And so the wheels of marriage were set quickly into motion: her brother-in-law informed her father, who, despite Ashok’s age and height and occupation, took their horoscopes to an astrologer. Parvati accepted this news passively. She didn’t expect the match to move forward. Out of the dozens of boys her parents and sister put before her, there had been few matches, because of her bad stars. And, despite her recurring dreams about snakes, she did not believe any amount of poojas to the snake gods would fix that.
Improbably, Parvati and Ashok’s stars matched.