Maya and Veer, 2010 to 2014
“Once your lips were rosy, Krishna,
now black as your skin they’re tainted . . .
O God! God! Krishna, go away.”
—Jayadeva, The Gita Govinda
“Janu,” Veer said. “His name will be Janu.”
Janu would be born the year the census was gathered, which would find that the ratio of girls to boys born in the country remained too low. It would find that the number of married people was falling and divorces were rising. And it would tally India’s population at 1.2 billion, so that one in six people in the world were Indian now. Janu would be named after Veer’s grandfather, who had worked hard all his life and sung old Hindi ballads to Veer as he lay dying. He would also be born the year Maya would meet Subal.
The name Janu was derived from the Hindi word jaan, which meant “life.” Veer thought the name sounded strong, like his own; Veer meant “courageous.” It was unlike Maya’s name, which came from Sanskrit and had a complex and double meaning, suggesting both “magic” and “illusion.” The concept of Maya was tied to the Hindu belief that the whole world was an illusion. Like how the ocean looks blue but isn’t—it just looks that way because of how the sea absorbs the sun. The sky looks blue but isn’t either. The concept of Maya suggested that the things to which we attach ourselves are like a mirage in the desert. They are beautiful, enchanting, even magical, at first. But in the end they are an illusion. The person who understands this becomes freer and edges closer to the truth of the universe.
Maya loved the meaning of her name, but Veer wanted a name more like his own for the baby. Like most men, Veer was hoping for a boy but didn’t say so aloud. Based on the scan, which showed broad palms and feet like his own, Veer was certain they were having a son. It was illegal to learn the baby’s gender, because too many girls were still aborted.
The doctors assured Maya her pregnancy would be easier this time around. It had been three years since she married and two since her miscarriage. This time, the tests did not detect ovarian cysts. Still, a few months before the birth, she flew to her parents’ house in Hyderabad, which was considered safer, and was tradition.
Janu’s due date was in January, not long after Veer’s birthday. Veer flew to Hyderabad so that he and Maya could spend the birthday together, as they had years before, when she bought him a ticket with her treasured books and gold bangles. The baby was expected in a couple of weeks. After the celebration, Veer planned to fly to Africa for an important work trip that had been postponed after he’d suffered several epileptic attacks. He had managed his epilepsy since childhood, but it sometimes reappeared in adulthood when he worked too hard. He promised Maya he’d be back in time for the delivery. “You won’t,” she said, getting upset. “Stay. You won’t be here for your son’s birth.”
But at Maya’s checkup that day, the ob-gyn said neither of them was going anywhere. “The baby has a very low heart rate,” the doctor said. “We have to operate right away.”
Instead of the rhythmic, steady dhakdhak dhakdhak dhakdhak, 100-plus beats per minute, the baby’s heart sounded like a slow, uncertain dhak . . . dhak . . . dhak.
“Look, it’s my husband’s birthday,” said Maya. “Can we come back later?” She knew she was being selfish, even reckless, but she couldn’t help herself. I want to have one last quiet day with Veer before the baby is born, she thought. She wanted them to be able to celebrate the birthday. The doctor grudgingly told them to come back for a sonogram that night.
By the time they returned to the hospital, Maya had begun to feel uncomfortable. When she lay down on the hospital bed, she was wheezing. After they did the sonogram, several nurses ran up to Maya, wheeling a stretcher. “Lie down. We need to operate right now.”
“Where is my husband?” asked Maya.
“He is with the doctor. We’re taking you there.”
The heart rate had gone very low. Normal for babies was over 100. The heart rate on the monitor read 25.
Maya remembers what happened next in fragments: A gown. An oxygen mask. A needle as long as her arm. A strange, sudden pain, way deep in her bones. The doctor yelling: “Don’t. Move.” They had to insert the needle four times because she kept moving. “Your baby’s heart rate is falling by the second.” The voice was very far away. The strange pain again and again, followed by a numbness. The first cut of the C-section, and the sensation that she was being unzipped from the inside. “Where is Kancha?” she asked. Veer was let in just as the doctor was about to pull out the baby. He didn’t watch the operation, because he worried it would have set off his epilepsy.
“What do you want—do you want a boy or a girl?” the doctor asked, as she reached down to lift out the baby. She directed the question to Maya. “I want a girl. But it’s a boy,” said Maya.
“It’s a boy.”
The doctor slapped him hard on the behind, and Janu began to cry. He had silky hair just like his father and big, stormy eyes like Maya. He had a good heart rate and a smooth complexion despite the appearance of jaundice. Veer was certain Janu had been born early so that he was there to witness his son’s birth. And so they were born on the same day. He already felt a special connection to his son. He thought Janu looked just like him.
Maya was told to stay in the hospital for five days for observation. “Just don’t leave me,” she begged Veer, though she didn’t think he’d leave his new son.
“No, I won’t,” Veer said, but after a day, or two, or five—they remember this differently—Veer left on his flight, certain that Maya was stable and in good hands at the hospital.
The stability turned out to be fragile for both of them. Maya soon developed postpartum depression. She could feel almost nothing for Janu. She didn’t even want to hold him. She begged to be allowed to leave Hyderabad and fly home to Mumbai. At home, she thought she’d go back to normal.
Back in Mumbai, Veer suffered an epileptic fit, and then another. Maya was sure it was because he was overworking himself and she was not there to call him to come home in the evenings. He also skipped meals when she wasn’t there to cook.
Maya was supposed to stay at her parents’ house for several months, but by March she had returned to Mumbai. After she came home, her depression receded and she found herself wanting to hold Janu all the time. She was certain that she had never loved anyone or anything as deeply as she loved her new son.
Veer’s epilepsy also calmed down. He came home early so that he could help get Janu ready for bed, and he left for work later so that he could play with him in the mornings. One day, Veer joked to Janu, “Who do you love more, Mom or Dad? Raise your right hand for Mom, left hand for Dad.” Janu raised both tiny hands, and Veer and Maya laughed together.
Early on, Janu slept in a crib. But one night he tried to crawl out of it, and Veer woke up and caught Janu’s head in his hand. After that, they stopped using the crib, and Janu slept in the bed instead, nestled between both parents. Many children in the country slept with their parents; it was said this was why Indian men were closer to their mothers than their wives. Veer had slept in bed with his own parents until he was twelve. Some of his happiest memories were of sleeping beside his mother, who had always made him feel safe and calm.
As a child, Veer thought his mother was the most beautiful and perfect woman on Earth. Unlike most parents he knew, she never hired a tutor for him but took his dictations herself every day after school. On top of that, she gave him two hundred rupees’ pocket change every week, which most mothers didn’t do, and which he didn’t think he deserved. He always stowed the rupees in a white box along with coins he’d collected.
She died the night of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, when Veer was just fifteen. It happened after a long battle with cancer and much suffering, but still he could not accept that it was true. Curfew had been imposed on the city, because Rajiv Gandhi—who took office after his mother Indira’s assassination—had been killed by a suicide bomber, and police said it was not safe to go outside. Veer and his family defied curfew and went out to see his mother, who had fallen into a coma, anyway. In the hospital, Veer spoke to his mother as if she were awake. When she was pronounced dead, Veer had an epileptic fit.
And after she died, Veer never opened the white box again. It still contained the last two hundred rupees she had given him. He never collected coins again either. He promised himself he’d never love another woman, a promise he kept until he met the other Maya, his distant cousin of the same gotra, who had been kind and warm just like his mother. But then she had also left him.
Now that Janu had been born, Veer began again to think about death.
Or rather, money and death, and whether Maya would have enough money to take care of Janu if he dropped dead. This was a new kind of worry—not the frantic, acquisitive mode he knew so well but a gnawing concern he’d never felt before. He was also diagnosed with diabetes, which only compounded his fears. And every moment he spent with Janu increased the anxiety.
Veer saw a lot of himself in Janu. Their hair tufted across their foreheads in the same direction. Janu’s feet had the same raised arches, and Veer sometimes rubbed them in case they hurt like his own. At night, he sang Janu old Hindi lullabies, and in the morning crooned new Bollywood pop songs as he got him ready for the day. The old songs were poetic, heavy; the new ones were simple and light.
Every day that Janu grew bigger, Veer worried more about money.
For Maya, the year after Janu’s birth passed quickly, with no time for such anxieties. Between the baby, the lost sleep, and the housework, she hardly had a free moment to think. And before what seemed like no time it was almost Janu’s first birthday, and Veer’s thirty-sixth, for which she knew she should do something special. For days, she surfed the Internet in search for the perfect gift.
Her idea was to get them matching T-shirts, customized, but she couldn’t find one in Janu’s small size. Finally, she came across a personalized clothing website, still in demo mode, that promised to “design anything, any size, anytime.”
When she called the number on the site, a man answered in a baritone voice that was calm and steady. Maya already felt better. “Whatever you want, I can make it,” he told her. He said his name was Subal. He stayed on the phone with her for a long time, making sure she had what she needed.
Maya called Subal several more times to talk about the order. They also exchanged a few e-mails to ensure the design and product was perfect. Several weeks later, she received the order, just in time for the big day.
At the birthday party, she snapped a photo of Janu and Veer in their new T-shirts and sent it to Subal, so he could see his handiwork. Both grinned goofily in the picture—Veer all teeth and Janu all cheeks, a miniature version of his father.
***
It was around Janu’s first birthday that Maya also proposed to Veer that she go to work. Though she was overwhelmed with the baby, she had an idea, long brewing, to open a preschool, and now felt like the right time to do it. She suggested setting up a franchised school, which would be easier. It would have up-front costs but could make them real money in the long term.
Her school would be nothing like the ones she’d attended in Hyderabad, where the teachers taught in a mechanical fashion, without any nuance or empathy. And where the children often felt unsafe because a teacher or guard tried to touch them. This happened in Hyderabad, and it happened in Mumbai; perhaps it did in every village and city. In her school, she’d make sure no child ever felt that way.
But from where will the money come? Veer thought. Perhaps he could ask his father. He knew that many preschools shut down within just a few years in Mumbai, a crowded market. And yet he also knew most of the schools weren’t any good. He had faith Maya could open something better.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
With the help of a loan from Veer’s father, Veer and Maya bought a two-story villa in a nearby suburb heavily populated by young families. They painted the building in soft colors and hung signs with photos of cherubic children’s faces out front. Maya hired about a dozen teachers, all female, and a male watchman who was not allowed inside the building. They planned for Janu to be one of Maya’s first students and expected to turn a profit within three months.
The preschool was not successful in that time. Not even close. After a year, it was still not profitable, because they had not attracted enough students, and Maya had to ask Veer for more money. But she worked harder to advertise, and, after many months, she got her first full class. After that, the new students kept coming. And coming. Word spread about the new preschool that was different from the others, because it was upscale and clean and did not teach by rote. It combined Indian and international teaching concepts, and the teachers sang both English and Hindi nursery rhymes.
Maya also hired teachers for their level of empathy, so that they could tell her how a child was doing and feeling. She wanted teachers who could guess what was happening at home—such as if a child’s parents were divorcing or a man in the neighbourhood was a sexual predator. As she did paperwork in her office, she loved to listen to the teachers celebrate the children’s little triumphs or find creative ways to assuage their fears. When parents waited anxiously outside the fence at the end of the school day, they were greeted by mostly smiling children. The preschool soon became the most trusted in the area. Before long, Maya and Veer broke even.
As the money came in, Veer felt his worries about death subside. If tomorrow I have to go and say Jai Shri Krishna, good-bye, he thought, I won’t be disturbed. I will be at peace.
Maya was grateful for the money Veer had given her to open the business. But she soon saw his help would end there. She had assumed he would want to talk about the preschool with her. But every time she brought up a problem at the school, he told her, “It’s your work, Maya.” Or “It’s not my thing to be involved in at all.”
Okay, so he’s not interested even in this aspect of mine, she thought. He was only interested in his own work. Even this school he doesn’t want to have a part in.
Maya realized why he’d agreed to let her open the school. It was not to support her idea. It was to get her off his back. It was so she would not nag him at work. But she wasn’t going to let him off that easily.
6 p.m.
“Please come home, Kancha.”
“I have to work.”
“But Janu.”
“I have to work.”
“I feel lost here. Can you come home by at least eight in the night?”
8:45 p.m.
“Where are you? I have been calling.”
“I’m coming,” he said. “Soon.”
“Please come, Kancha. Just come.”
10 p.m.
“Where are you? . . . I need to cook. I need to do all these things. There is a baby.”
“I can’t make it. You have to manage by yourself.”
“But I need you.”
“Find yourself a maid,” he said. “Do what you want to do.”
Veer didn’t understand why Maya couldn’t see he had to work. Sometimes, it felt like she was a flame that needed constant oxygen to keep burning. Once, he had been attracted to her passion, but now he found it suffocating. He wanted to make her happy, but it seemed like no effort was enough.
He had wanted her to work not just for money but so she wasn’t idle. If you are alone, you are a devil’s mind, he thought. You have nothing to do so you make up stories about people in your own family, in other people’s families, and everything is in your head. He had thought that when she went to work, there would be less drama between them.
At home, Maya wondered how, in the City of Dreams, she could sometimes feel so alone. Veer had recently told her he didn’t believe in romance. He’d said he didn’t believe in love. For him, he said, there was one language in Mumbai, and that was the language of money. “Shall I buy a dress with rupees on it to get you to love me?” she replied in a fury.
Sometimes, when Veer did not answer her calls all day, and Maya felt especially alone, she played the song “Dil Hoom Hoom Kare,” or “My Heart Is Gasping,” from the old film Rudaali. The song was sung by Lata Mangeshkar, the most beautiful and haunting of the playback singers, over the sounds of flutes and drums. The film was about a rudaali, a female professional crier, of which there were many in Rajasthan, where Maya and Veer’s families were from. Rudaalis cried at the funerals for the people no one would cry for.
In the film, the rudaali befriends a woman whose life has been nothing but misfortune. The woman has suffered so much hardship that she can’t cry, not even when the rudaali tries to teach her. She doesn’t cry even when she realizes her lover is gone.
***
As Janu grew, Veer tried to make things better for Maya. He began paying for a full-time maid named Pallavi, a young and able woman from a nearby shanty. Most middle-class families had at least one servant, if not a maid, cook, and driver, and Veer decided they now could afford a maid, who could help cook, and also a driver. In the morning Pallavi made breakfast, cleaned dishes, and washed the clothes. In the afternoons she folded laundry, swept the house, and put out the trash. She had a slender but strong frame, wore flowery but functional saris, and kept her hair tied back in a long braid. She was warm and full of energy and good with Janu. She had a laugh like a bell. After she arrived, the house began to run more smoothly.
Like many maids in Mumbai, Pallavi was married to a husband too lazy to find work. Maya tried to help by giving him a job as a security guard at the preschool, but before long he stopped showing up. Pallavi was not surprised. The two women did not tell each other much about their personal lives, but both knew when the other was troubled. Maya noticed it in the food Pallavi made, which was tasty or badly spiced depending on her mood. Pallavi saw it when Maya and Veer fought in the mornings as she moved quietly about the house. On these days, she sometimes made Maya special green tea or folded her clothes extra neatly. And she always tried to distract Janu from the fighting, by picking him up and singing to him. “Pallavi-ji,” he began calling her, as soon as he learned to talk. Pallavi would laugh at this nickname, a sign of respect for a maid. She spent as much time or more with Janu than with her own children.
One evening, Veer came home with a BlackBerry for Maya, a gift he thought would make her feel less alone.
Maya downloaded BlackBerry Messenger, an app that promised to “keep you connected with friends and family.” There was even a little check mark that showed when the person read your message. Maya thought it would make it easier to reach Veer at work. But it also opened up a new world of conversation, with half friends and acquaintances. Among them was the T-shirt maker, Subal.
On Subal’s birthday, Maya sent him a message. After that, they began talking regularly. With the messenger app, it was easy to continue the conversation.
At first, they chatted about their days and their work. He asked what she liked and didn’t like. Then they began talking about family. As they spoke, Maya found him charming and perceptive and saw that he gave good advice. She began to ask for his guidance on small matters, and then bigger ones, related to her preschool or Janu. After several weeks of messaging, she found herself confiding to Subal how often Veer was away.
Before long Subal also told Maya about his wife, how they’d had a love marriage across religions—he was a Hindu, and she a Catholic—which hadn’t been an issue. But he said there were other problems. On Facebook, Maya found a photo of his family: a rotund little boy, a stout little girl, and a wife who was commandingly tall. Maya thought she was unpleasant-looking, with a shrewd smile and a horse-shaped face, though she did not tell this to Subal.
As the weeks passed, Subal also began to ask Maya more personal questions—probing ones she didn’t want to answer. She wanted to remain somewhat of a cipher to a man she assumed she’d never meet. But she’d already told him some things she hadn’t told her closest female friends or family, whom she couldn’t always count on not to judge her.
One day, months after they’d started exchanging texts, Subal implied in a message that Maya was just a typical Indian housewife: a woman who stayed at home and didn’t know much about the world. As Maya read his message, she was overcome by a fierce, almost irrational fury. That bastard, she thought, and was surprised by her anger at a man she’d never met. I’m going to show him who I am.
For the first time, Maya sent Subal a photo of herself. In it, she wore glamorous sunglasses, a pastel pink blouse, and a short navy blue skirt. She stood barefoot in the surf in Goa, a region of white sand beaches and coconut trees. Veer had taken the photo. She sent it just as Subal took off on a plane home to Mumbai after a business trip. She wanted it to be the first message he saw when he landed.
As Subal climbed into a rickshaw outside the airport in Mumbai, he opened the photo. He looked at it, and looked again. Could this really be the person I’ve been talking to? he thought.
She was petite but shapely, and her hair was thick and unruly. Her skin was nearly as pale as the inside of a dragonfruit. But what struck him were Maya’s eyes, which were bright but sad and lined in dark kajal. She was a strange mix of the simple beauty of the girl next door with the mysterious glamour of a dance-bar girl.
He typed a message: Should we meet?
Maya read the message. She was twenty-eight. Janu was one and a half. The photos on the wall across from her desk showed him at different ages; over time, Janu’s eyes had grown bigger and his hair longer and wavier. There were still henna swirls on the linoleum floor from the Ganesh Chaturthi party. The painting of Krishna and Radha, two lovers on a swing, still hung above the kitchen table.
Maya typed a response, hesitated, and then sent it.
***
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Veer forgot all about it. Or ignored it. Maya had flown from Hyderabad to Mumbai to be home in time to celebrate, but when she arrived, Veer didn’t mention the date. All day, he said nothing, until Maya texted him at work: Happy anniversary then.
Do you want to do something? he wrote back.
They made dinner plans, but Veer didn’t make it home until ten. When he finally walked in the door, Maya felt something snap in her. We can no longer ignore the elephant in the room.
In the weeks that followed, Veer didn’t worry much about their colorless anniversary night. But it was all Maya could think about. At home, her thoughts ran. There’s nothing happening here. That formality thing doesn’t even exist. At times her resignation turned to a savage anger. Fuck this man. I’m not going to bother myself about it anymore.
Maya and Veer began to fight whenever he was at home. Most days, they fought about banal, insignificant problems, like how warm the chai was or why Pallavi hadn’t shown up to work. But there were also bigger stressors: problems related to Maya’s preschool and Veer’s trips to Africa. Fights over how Maya needed more help caring for Janu. The most wounding questions—like why they had not had sex in almost a year, or why Maya made Veer feel like a wayward husband—flowed just under the surface but were not voiced aloud.
Though they fought regularly, they tried not to shout in front of Janu. But Janu, who was almost two, was a precocious child, and it was possible he understood more than they realized. Sometimes, after they had a particularly bad fight, even with lowered voices, Janu would wet or soil his pants.
Finally, Maya confronted Veer over dinner, as he sat eating under the painting of Krishna and Radha ecstatic on the swing. In a quiet, steady voice, she said she wanted a divorce.
“There’s nothing between us, no physical relationship, no mental and emotional relationship,” she said. “Do you want to move on?”
Maya knew that a divorce could cause her to lose her job, her home, and her reputation. She could even lose Janu; under the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, the natural guardian of a child over five was his father. While it was true that Mumbai’s unwritten rules for women were changing, she knew women could run into trouble if they overestimated the progress the city had made. More women were asking for divorce, but they never seemed to get the alimony money they were supposed to, and many were still so stigmatized they could not get or keep work. They lost friends. They lost family. They lost their money and property if they were in their husband’s name. But Maya decided it was worth the risk.
After she spoke, Veer looked at her evenly, as if they were discussing cold chai. And then he said, “Take a year, Maya. Wait it out another year and then see how you feel. If you still feel that way, then you can leave.”
The clock with Hindi script ticked behind them. Veer spoke again. “And you can leave Janu with me.”
Janu.
His name had the desired effect. Maya got up and began clearing the dishes.
The reasons a Hindu man or woman can ask for divorce are enumerated in the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955: religious conversion or entering a religious order; lack of cohabitation or lack of contact for years or death; an unsound mind or other mental illness; rape, sodomy, or bestiality; leprosy; adultery . . . and, as of an amendment in 1976: cruelty and desertion.
Maya saw that none of these applied to them.
In a year’s time, an amendment would be proposed to the Hindu Marriage Act allowing for divorce on the grounds of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage.” But it would not pass, because the populist politicians and the religious men would rail against it. They would warn of the breakdown of the Indian marriage, asserting that love marriages led to divorce. They would say that the world had entered the Kali Yuga, the age of vice predicted in the ancient Sanskrit texts. In the Kali Yuga, people sinned and lusted and left religion, lost their Dharma, and broke their vows without care. They would point to how homosexuality had already been decriminalized, saying that India was being “disrobed” piece by piece by Western culture.
There was no Hindi or Sanskrit word for divorce, because it was said even those who predicted the Kali Yuga had not conceived of such a practice.
Veer did not want a divorce, at least not now. But he thought that the big disappointment of marriage was that a husband and wife did not stay friends. He and Maya had had an uncomplicated friendship before marriage. They spoke openly and laughed with ease. They shared their tensions with each other instead of creating new ones.
When he considered their relationship now, he saw it in two lights: the “frank picture” and the “rosy picture.” The frank picture was that on the way home from the office, he often had to think about how he could avoid a fight. The frank picture was that their marriage took up so much time that could be spent working, and they laughed far less than they had before.
But there was also the rosy picture: Maya was not like most Indian women. She did not misjudge people based on her own biases. She was not like the women who sat on folding chairs in hallways, gossiping the day away. Instead, she saw straight to the heart of people and their motivations, with an uncanny perceptiveness. She never gave a sugarcoated view. And she was supportive of Veer, even when he didn’t deserve it.
Veer also knew that if he were not married, he might go out drinking with his cousin on weeknights and sleep out. He might drive himself into the ground with work, eat poorly, and his epilepsy could get worse. Maya was a reason to come home at the end of the day. Janu was very much a reason to come home at the end of the day. And on many nights, they still made each other laugh. The idea of divorce was unfathomable to him, at least when Maya still depended on him for money. He could not shirk that duty.
But when Veer imagined life in the seaside shack, with a shop on the first floor to keep him busy, he didn’t always imagine Maya in it. He didn’t even imagine Janu there, who would be almost grown up by then. Instead he imagined waking up alone to the sound of waves. He told himself he didn’t want to force Maya into his dream.
***
After Veer asked Maya for another year, she thought that maybe she had been mistaken, and that he did care for her after all. But then she found the messages on his phone. Maya remembers that Veer was in the shower, and she was in bed with a fever when she picked up his work cell phone to call a doctor.
A text from the other Maya was on the screen. Disbelieving, Maya began to scroll through Veer’s messages. She found many messages from the other Maya, though they seemed to be forwards from Veer’s second phone, so they didn’t include the original messages he’d sent her. In her messages to him the other Maya called him “jaanu.”
Jaanu. “Darling.” Like the English word: “baby.”
Such as: Jaanu, I’m out of balance, I’ll call you in a little while.
“What is this?” Maya asked when Veer came out of the shower. She showed him the texts on the phone.
“There’s nothing,” he said.
“She’s calling you ‘baby’ in the conversation,” said Maya. “That’s a little unbelievable.”
He was quiet.
“You call her right here in front of me.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Call her.”
This wasn’t the first time. The year after they’d married, Maya had seen call logs that showed Veer was talking to her from the time he left work until the time he got home. Then, Maya had said, “Go ahead and talk to her, but don’t hide it from me.”
“I’m not talking to her,” he’d said, and she let it go.
Now, Maya saw that she’d been foolish. They hadn’t been talking as friends, or even as two people who once loved each other. They talked as if they were still intimate. Veer took his phone back, but later Maya sent the other Maya, who she knew was engaged to be married, a message from her own phone. Maya told her that what she was doing was not right.
The message she received back was impudent; the other Maya said she’d never understand what they had.
Maya, furious, replied: Let’s do one thing. I’ll forward these messages to your fiancé that you sent to my husband. If he understands then I’ll understand.
The other Maya did not reply.
Maya showed Veer the message she had gotten from the other Maya, the one that said she’d never understand. “As long as I’m your wife I need to understand what’s going on here,” said Maya, trying not to panic.
“I think you’re overreacting,” he said.
To Veer, this was not cheating. He maintained he had only met the other Maya twice in his life. He had never seen her again after she’d ended things, which was many years ago. Yes, they texted now and again. Yes, he still loved her. He still thought of his relationship with her as the most perfect it could have been. But that also meant it was in the past. Their relationship was forever caught in amber. And he was married now.
Eventually, Maya dropped the argument. She did not know what else to do. And she did not text the other Maya’s fiancé. Let at least one marriage be intact, she thought. But her thoughts about Veer ran like a tape. Did I force him to marry me? Is he ever going to get out of loving this girl?
She saw now that the other Maya was the love of his life. And she thought she understood why. Veer valued family above all else, and the other Maya had sacrificed their relationship for her family. The other Maya was the virtuous one, while she, Maya—who had risked her relationship with her father to marry Veer—was immoral. She was like the girl who eloped in the film Omkara, who also defied her father. In the film, another character asks: “How can anyone trust a girl who betrays her own father?”
Veer had never trusted her. Never loved her. Never would.
And, if that were the case, then Maya thought she might as well give up thoda compromise altogether. She would no longer compromise her ideals, and that meant no longer following the old religious rules, such as not eating meat, not cooking with garlic or onion, or being unclean during her period. She no longer owed him anything.
***
A month after Maya asked Veer for a divorce, she had to go for a three-day training course to Powai, where Subal, the T-shirt maker, had his office. After he had asked to meet, Maya put him off for many months. But they kept messaging, moving from talk of their daily lives to deeper, more personal subjects. When Maya mentioned she would be in Powai, Subal offered to pick her up and drop her back home. She hesitated but told herself there was no harm meeting once.
It was Maya who saw Subal first. From the side of the car, at an angle where he could not see her, she saw his brushy mustache and shock of sandy gray hair. What am I doing here? she thought. She noticed his thick stomach. Why can’t people just take care of themselves? She considered turning around. But he was searching the sidewalk for her, and she noticed a brightness in his eyes. Her phone rang.
“Where are you?” he asked.
In Subal’s memory, it was raining that day, and Maya was holding an umbrella as she spoke to a friend across the street. She wore a gray T-shirt and jeans. She looked beautiful and young—too young for him. Could this really be her? he thought. Maya doesn’t remember any rain, or an umbrella, only that she had been talking with her friend. When she climbed in Subal’s front seat, she folded her legs underneath her and sat back, trying to act relaxed.
On the ride home to her suburb, which was more than an hour in traffic, Maya and Subal didn’t talk much. The conversation wasn’t stilted, but it didn’t have the easy rhythm of their messages. Subal kept noticing how warm she was in real life. She smelled good, strange; she wore men’s cologne.
“This is on your way home, right?” Maya asked.
It wasn’t. Subal lived in Thane, which meant he’d have to drive an hour north to drop her off, farther north around the city’s sprawling national park, then south to Thane. He’d make a giant loop, covering almost all of northern Mumbai.
When they arrived at her apartment complex, driving coolly past the nosy guard at the gate, Maya said, “Do you want to come upstairs and take a coffee?”
He said he’d just like to come use the bathroom.
Janu was upstairs with Pallavi. When Subal came in, Janu tottered over to him. Maya watched, amazed. Janu was not very friendly with men. Like many Indian mothers, she had taught him not to be. And yet he had welcomed Subal without fear. She went into the kitchen to rummage for something for Subal to take home and brought out chocolates for his children. She noticed how tall he was, almost a foot taller, and how when he spoke it filled the room.
That night, Maya told Veer that a man had driven her from Powai to home, then back to Thane. “Is that guy okay?” said Veer. “And are you?”
When Maya went to Powai for her second day of training, Subal asked if they could meet again so he could show her something. “Okay,” Maya said, but thought: What am I doing? A married woman did not fraternize with married men, much less allow them to take her places. Subal wanted to show her Chhota Kashmir in Goregaon, a secluded area spread over four thousand acres, with lakes and gardens and paddleboats for two. Chhota Kashmir meant “Little Kashmir,” and it did look a little like that beautiful valley region whose beauty was overshadowed by politics and conflict. Maya felt nervous as they walked around. What does he want from me?
Finally, she ventured aloud, “Why have you brought me here? Do you want to kiss me?”
“What if I say yes?” Subal said.
Maya felt drawn to him—his low voice, easy smile, and eyes that gleamed when he spoke. But she didn’t like this setup: two married people in a clichéd landscape of seclusion, having the kind of cheap conversation that appeared in romance novels. “It will ruin everything,” she said, her voice flat.
“But I like you more than a friend,” he persisted.
“But I am not comfortable,” Maya said, and she knew it was time to go home.
The next day, Janu fell sick, and Maya used the excuse not to go to the third day of training in Powai.
***
At night, from the inside of Maya and Veer’s apartment, the bass of car stereos could sometimes be heard from the street, pumping out old Hindi ballads and new Bollywood songs. Lately, all the drivers had been playing the soundtrack of Ishqiya, and especially the song “Dil Toh Baccha HaiJi,” which meant “My Heart Is a Child,” and whose instrumentation sounded foreign and hypnotic. Bollywood was always making metaphors about the heart: My heart is a child. The heart is a madman. This heart is a thug. The heart is like the sea.
The distant clatter of aging trucks could also be heard from the apartment, because they often ferried goods after the traffic had died down. And there was the unsettling howl of stray dogs that couldn’t find enough scraps to eat that day.
Veer could fall asleep to the discordant sounds with Janu curled up in his arms. But Maya often sat awake in the living room, looking out at the city.
From her perch on the couch, she could make out a cluster of palm trees, encircled by the dozen buildings in their apartment colony. Beyond these lay hundreds of intersecting roads, zigzagging cars, and a ridge of hills off in the distance. But the nearby apartment buildings were most interesting, because each one contained some twenty windows in a grid. At night, many of the windows lit up, each window like a tiny play. A full scene was never visible, but Maya could catch glimpses.
People went out, watched TV, and had dinner. Husbands sat at the dinner table with their wives and children. In the windows, the husbands always seemed to come home on time. Maya was reminded of an old adage: The family that eats together stays together.
In one window, a child was up late, and her mother seemed to be shushing her, then dragging her across the room to bed. In another, a man sat in his undershirt on the couch, his tubby stomach lit by the glow of a TV screen. In a third, plates were being cleared, though the clatter could not be heard from across the way. Maya could see big TVs in some of the apartments and small ones in others, AC units or open windows, the outline of a washing machine or upturned bucket—each an indicator of a family’s wealth.
After an hour or so, the lights would shut off, and the sounds of the city’s millions would die down. Sleep was necessary if work was to be done and two-bedroom apartments in the suburbs paid for. A light in one room would dim, and then in the next. Families mostly went to sleep together.
But outside the gates of the apartment colony, Maya knew one woman might still be awake. If she was, she’d be standing in the middle of the rubble-filled lane, dressed in a raggedy red sari. It was the same sari she wore every day. The madwoman in the lane hardly slept.
On some days, the woman picked petals off a flower and scattered them in the road. On others, she sat listlessly on a big rock. Her hair was always wild and unbrushed, and her cheekbones were sharp. Lately, her hair was cut short, like she had had some kind of infection. Her sari was often dirty and crumpled at the edges. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days. It was said that she once had two big flats and a family nearby but went mad after her husband left her for another woman.
Maya wanted to stay awake longer watching the last of the window plays, but she was tired. After another light shut off, Maya got up to go to bed. A few pigeons landed on the tin-roof porch, making a gentle “whoo, whoo” sound at her. She looked back at them for a moment and then shut off the lights to go join Veer and Janu in bed.
***
It was Subal who suggested the seaside hotel to Maya. He had been there for conferences and meetings before. Maya had been to the hotel once, for a birthday. Now, she and Subal met there for breakfast, in December, when the air in the city was cool.
The hotel was more magical than Maya remembered: the whitewashed building standing tall against the clear, blue water of the hotel pool, the palm tree fronds dangling in the soft breeze. Subal listening intently to what she had to say, though he was not pushy. She found herself tracing lines in his hands—life line, head line, heart line—and it did not seem like a cheap romance novel at all.
Afterward, they walked back to the parking lot. In the car, Subal leaned over without warning and tried to give Maya a kiss. Maya moved away, and his lips fell on her neck instead. For a moment, they stayed there, his mustache brushing against her skin.
This is bad, she thought, and if it were an old Hindi film, this would be when the playback singer would start to warble, her voice thin and shrill. I want to go home. But also it feels so good, Maya thought. It has been so long.
If it were an old Hindi film, there also would be no kiss; it would never make it past the censors. And there was no kiss now.
After a minute, she pulled away, and they drove out of the gates past the twisting banyan trees, back toward Maya’s home.
The following month, when Janu turned two and Veer thirty-seven, Maya did not get them anything special. It didn’t feel necessary, because Veer had been spoiling Janu with plenty of gifts from abroad: dress shirts from J.Crew, pants from the Gap, sneakers by Nike. He brought them back from work trips to China and Qatar, along with branded clothes for Maya. “Top of the line,” he’d say. “Best quality.” He enjoyed buying items that would last a long time, especially international brands, which everyone in India wanted. Soon, there were so many new outfits Maya had to pile them in Janu’s crib, which had barely been used. The apartment was cluttered with everything Janu.
On the walls were pasted marker drawings he had done in preschool and posters of Chhota Bheem, the kid-aged, Indian version of Superman. In the corners were stuffed animals, toy cars, and rolls of Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh stickers. On the TV stand, beside the photo of Maya and Veer in Mussoorie, sat framed photos of Janu at three months, six months, and a year old, with his hair falling into his eyes.
Janu had grown into a bright but naughty child who liked to discard his clothes and run around naked or dress in odd costumes he cobbled together from his closet. He loved disobeying Maya especially when it was time for a bath. He listened more often to his father, who was sterner with him. He had a smooth face and shiny hair just like Veer and big, wistful eyes like Maya. The effect was so charming that people stopped her on the street to ask if he was a child model.
Though Maya hung the letters J-A-N-U on the wall for Janu’s birthday, she and Veer more often referred to him by his nicknames. They called him “beta,” which meant “son,” or “bana,” a Rajasthani word for “little prince.” Veer’s favorite nickname was laddoo, which was a delicious sweet.
When Maya began letting Subal visit her apartment, Janu was almost always home. Janu accepted this new man in his life without question and got excited when Maya said he was coming over. From the beginning, Subal—who had two school-aged children of his own—helped Maya change Janu’s diapers and heat up his steamed milk. As Janu grew older, he played game after game with him and answered his many curious questions.
To her family and friends, Maya began referring to Subal as her “best friend.” She introduced him to the teachers at her school. She pinned a picture of her and Subal to her office wall. And she informed Veer when she went out with him. She also encouraged the two men to spend time together, and sometimes they did, even without her.
Veer didn’t question Subal’s role in his wife’s life. If Maya needs a friend, so be it, he thought. Perhaps it would take some of the pressure off him. I should give her space, he thought, and then didn’t think about it anymore.
At first, Maya was surprised Veer didn’t question this new relationship. But then she decided it was more proof he did not care about her. She was certain Veer stayed married to her out of duty. Duty to her. Duty to Janu. Duty to some antiquated notion of family. Duty, perhaps, to pursuing the goals of any good Hindu’s life—dharma, artha, kama, moksha. Duty, means, pleasure, freedom. Through marriage, you fulfilled a moral duty, acquired means, and enjoyed pleasure. And in the end, you died and became free.
She considered no longer seeing Subal. She could stop now, before it turned into something. Before she let the attempted kiss slide into other territory. But if she did, she’d be alone again. And Veer would not come back to her. Over the years, she might go wild with loneliness, like the madwoman in the lane.
No. She’d keep her sanity and spend time with Subal when she pleased. Subal, who was open-minded and charming, with his baritone voice and witty comments and his willingness to discuss philosophy, politics, and religion. Subal, who treated her like a companion in the way Veer had forgotten how to do. She would keep seeing Subal even though he’d begun calling her “baby” in English, which was maybe as intimate as the Hindi word jaanu, or “darling.”
And she decided she would expand the preschool as another way of keeping sane. Before long, she recruited a vice principal, Ashni, to help her do it. Ashni was smart and clever and spoke frankly. She had an open face, thick hair she wore pulled back, and a motherly but exotic beauty. She was about Maya’s age and had a son the same age as Janu. Maya saw in Ashni a future friend.
The two soon became close, and Maya entrusted most of the preschool’s daily tasks to her. In addition, Ashni helped Maya retain teachers, which was often a problem at India’s schools. Female teachers often left the job after they got married, facing pressure from a new husband or in-laws. Many of these girls were the first in their family ever to go to work. Economists and sociologists debated why more Indian women weren’t entering the workforce or were dropping out, but Maya thought she understood. Despite better jobs for women and more women wanting to work, the opinions of husbands and in-laws had not changed. A woman was needed to run the home, care for her children, and cook for her husband’s family. She was still expected to live up to the ideal of pativratya—of total devotion to her husband.
Though she knew they wouldn’t last long, Maya hired these girls anyway. She wanted to give them a chance to see what the working world was like. When they told her they were quitting, she and Ashni would try to coax them to stay. Sometimes, this would work, but mostly it wouldn’t. Even if they left, Maya was proud she had given them several months of employment and freedom.
Veer had far fewer female employees than Maya. There was just a handful at his factory. The rest were all married men. But these men’s marriages presented their own problems; his factory manager, for one, was always taking leave to go collect his wife from her parents’ house, where she went whenever they had a fight. The lower-level employees at Veer’s factory, almost all of whom were local men, had their own marital problems. But Veer was proud of how far he’d come with them. He had set up his factory in a tribal area at a time when no one else in Mumbai would. People warned that the adivasis, or tribals, were violent. But Veer had not feared them, and instead had come at Diwali time, given them gifts, and offered jobs. Now, more than a decade later, the tribals had acquired skills and were paid well. Still, there was much for Veer to worry about at the factory. Often, he worried how much rain would come. The amount of rain determined the number of people who’d get sick, which in turn determined how much medicine people would buy, and the amount of aluminum foil needed to package it. When there was a high demand for foil, Veer sometimes didn’t come back from the factory for over a week or more, not telling Maya where he’d gone. At home alone, Maya often grew anxious, and then upset or angry.
***
Ever since she was a child, Maya had visited International Society of Krishna Consciousness temples. Hare Krishna temples, which preached an ecstatic love for Krishna, existed all over the world. In Mumbai, the temple was in Juhu, a tree-lined suburb along the sea. Maya wasn’t a Hare Krishna follower, but Krishna remained her favorite god, and she always felt a presence when she visited the temple, which she described as a kind of strong vibration. She often gave offerings and prayed for her preschool to continue to do well.
Soon, Subal began visiting the temple with her. They made it a habit to go together every Friday. Subal wasn’t a follower either—he professed himself an atheist—but Maya liked that he was willing to come along.
And soon, Subal changed jobs, joining a financial company in the suburbs, so Maya’s house was now on his way to work. A crass saying in Mumbai went: People fuck based on location, because the traffic in the city is so bad. She and Subal were not having sex. They hadn’t discussed it. But still.
Subal began stopping by Maya’s apartment almost daily. He would come up for a cup of coffee or just to talk. Or Maya cooked him her specialty, rajma chawal, its rich ginger-garlic smell filling the apartment. Often, he sat on the ground in the kitchen playing with Janu, giving him a playful knuckle on the ear. Maya never worried that Veer would come home while Subal was there, because Veer rarely showed up until after dinner. Or he was away for many days at the factory or weeks in Africa.
When Veer was away, Maya often sent Subal meals packed in tiffins. It started after he told her that his wife cooked one meal a day and other than that expected him and the children to eat leftovers. Maya was aghast. She knew how much Subal valued food. Just look at his stomach, she thought. Maya also considered good food essential for a happy life. Why do we earn? she thought. For food, for shelter.
Subal and his wife had been married almost two decades, but he told Maya he hadn’t been happy for a long time. Once, he implied to Maya that his wife had a man on the side, someone from college, but didn’t say more. Even his family knew his marriage was in trouble; they had for a long time. He said he didn’t care if it ended or who knew.
One afternoon when Subal stopped by Maya’s apartment, Maya had just gotten a call that Janu was sick at school. It was a call she received regularly. Like his father, and like many children in Mumbai, Janu had an array of health problems caused by the pollution.
Subal was sitting on the living room couch next to the porch, where the honeybee hive had come and gone. Maya sat on the couch opposite his. After she hung up, Subal said that they should have sex. Maya looked at him steadily.
“Boss, I need to pick him up soon,” she said.
“As much time as I have, I don’t care,” Subal said.
The Bhagavad Gita was clear on the subject of adultery. A wife who slept with another man destroyed the family. The Vishnu Purana, another ancient text, said an adulterer was reborn as “a creeping insect” and “when dead he falls into hell.” Manu, an ancient Hindu lawmaker, saved special disdain for the female adulteress: “Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal toward their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this [world].” The consequences were also worse for a female adulteress: a woman who strayed was to be “censured among men,” and in her next life “born in the womb of a jackal” and “tormented by diseases.” In the old texts, men sometimes kept multiple partners, but a woman who cheated was past reproach.
It had been so long since Maya had had sex.
And Radha was a cheater. This part was played down in the Krishna-Radha stories, and Maya had not considered it before, but it was true. Radha was a married woman when she had met Krishna, and she was still married when he undressed her on the Yamuna River banks. Of course, Krishna was also a philanderer. He snatched away the clothes of all the milkmaids, which was the source of Radha’s anguish. But Krishna was a deity and could do what he pleased. Radha was just an ordinary woman, and her infidelity could not be denied. Or perhaps it did not matter when your lover was a god.
According to the myths, Radha was married to a dark, dull-witted man named Abhimanyu. He was apparently no match for Radha’s beauty and intelligence, and he did not recognize her great gifts.
The poet Jayadeva wrote of the moment before Radha and Krishna’s lovemaking: “The darkness of night deepens, and with it Krishna’s passion . . . There’s no point in waiting any longer, innocent girl—now is the moment for the tryst.”
His language suggested something had been sullied: Radha’s “breast had been scratched, streaked scarlet by his nails,” and “her eyes were bloodshot from sleeplessness.” Her lipstick “was smudged”; flowers had “fallen from her disheveled hair.” Even her skirt “had slipped loose from its golden girding cords.”
Centuries later, Krishna and Radha’s affair had been reduced to metaphor. Now, the pious people said their passion was an allegory of man’s desire to connect with his god. They said that Abhimanyu had never existed.
Maybe. Or maybe Radha was a cheater.
***
Veer noticed that Maya now saw or mentioned Subal every day. Pallavi also noticed it, but Pallavi was a loyal maid, and Maya knew she would not stir up trouble. Many maids in Mumbai kept secrets. And Veer did not tell Maya to stop meeting him. One thing’s simple, he told himself, with the twisted logic he sometimes employed to make things right between them. If she wants to have her life her own way, then that’s the way. It’s her choice, why not.
Since Maya asked him for a divorce, Veer had adopted a harsher view of marriage. He questioned whether it was a viable institution for the modern age. Perhaps the four goals of life could be achieved without marriage, because marriage only complicated life and friendship. But if you did get married, and stayed married, he thought a husband and wife should try to keep the friendship intact. They shouldn’t bring up the past too much. They should try to allow each other to be independent and live their life in the present day. And so he didn’t say anything about Subal.
On the subject of cheating, he felt different ways on different days. Or at least he expressed it differently. Sometimes, he said that it was more relevant that a husband and wife be happy. If he didn’t know about an affair, then he didn’t mind. “It is just normal human nature to want to explore greener pastures,” he said. If someone had an affair, that was a subject that should be raised at an appropriate time, when both people felt comfortable addressing it. Some of the old books sanctioned extramarital affairs, including the Mahabharata, which taught that life was complicated. The Mahabharata also said your Dharma wasn’t always easy to find, and that sometimes rules should be bent or broken.
But there was also the Ramayana, an epic that taught the opposite, and said that you should always follow the rules and do your Dharma. In the Ramayana, decisions were far more black-and-white. If a spouse wanted to sleep with someone else, perhaps it was better they divorce first. Not like I’m safe here and playing there, Veer thought. It should not be at the cost of the family.
Sometimes he grew more philosophical on the subject. “Time should only change our selection of things,” he’d say, his voice growing sad and tired. “Not the people around us.”
***
May 8 was a date Maya and Subal would not forget—the day of the Big Bang. May in Mumbai was known for the intensity of its heat, and the day was sweltering. They were back at the seaside hotel. The place was quiet except for the crash of the ocean waves.
The Big Bang, as in: after so much built-up tension, an explosion of feelings between them. Everything out in the open at last. Out in the open for them but not for others to see.
Afterward, Maya left to pick up Janu from school. She brought him back to the hotel, to a small park beside the hotel pool. For a long time, Maya watched Janu play on the merry-go-round. She looked out at the sea, and then over at Subal, who stood at a distance looking at her. He held her gaze for a long time. While he felt happy, he was also a little unsettled, because he thought he didn’t deserve her. And it seemed impossible this could end well. But Maya felt only at peace. She wanted to hold on to the moment and the calm it gave her for as long as she could.
Like Veer, Subal traveled a lot—often to Jaipur and Indore up north and to Bangalore and Goa down south. After the Big Bang, Maya began sending him flowers everywhere he went.
She had always gone overboard in her affections, for all of her friends, male and female. She loved the Bhakti poems and the old stories about devotion. And with Subal, she felt compelled—as she once had with Veer—toward a showy, demonstrative kind of love.
Maya went through local vendors to make sure she found the freshest flowers in every city. Later, she also began sending desserts. In Goa, it was chocolate bebinka, with its layers of butter and sugar. In Pushkar, it was kaju barfi, the native cashew sweet. In each place, she made arrangements so the bouquet would be waiting for him in his hotel room. And in each place, Subal sent her a photo of himself smiling with the gifts.
Sometimes, Maya also sent gifts to his workplace. His team of accountants began to expect them. They would be sitting in a board meeting and a local delivery boy would bring in a dazzling bouquet. At their annual meeting in Jaipur, which more than one hundred people attended, Maya sent a three-tier, sixteen-kilogram cake, which cost her a staggering fourteen thousand rupees. When these deliveries arrived, Subal felt not like a middle manager but a CEO. But as time passed, even her extravagances began to feel routine, and he didn’t always send her a photo in return.
Subal sometimes sent Maya flowers—on her birthday, or if there was a positive development at the preschool, which kept attracting more and more children; even Janu had enrolled. Or Subal sent her books, in English, Hindi, or regional languages, several of which Maya knew. Maya gave Subal a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, one of her favorite books, and on an inside page, she wrote: “To Subal . . . This book has all of life in it.” Gibran said that a friend was all of a person’s needs answered, “your board and your fireside.” He said that in friends you found peace.
Around this time, Maya changed her last name on Facebook from Veer’s name to her family name. People asked her about the change. She said it was because she liked her old name better. Veer said nothing about it.
Soon, Subal and Maya began going away together. Subal was not religious, but he knew it was important to Maya, and she convinced him to accompany her on a visit to a holy city, where there was a temple that shone as the sun rose. The temple held special meaning for Maya, who believed that in some past life she had visited there.
On this visit with Subal, the temple brought up old memories for Maya of having been molested as a child. Maya knew this happened to many Indian children, and so she thought it best to banish the memories. This had mostly worked; she hadn’t thought about them in years. But now she worried that there could be a connection between the incidents and her relationship with men. Perhaps these memories explained why she grew too attached or acted so needy. Perhaps this was why she wanted sex more than the average Indian woman. Maybe this was at the root of her unhappiness with Veer. And maybe it explained why, when men came on to her in a sleazy way and she didn’t like it, she sometimes flirted back.
For her, the connection had to do with the concept of hisaab, the settling of accounts. Everyone had a hisaab to fulfill. Her attitude toward men could be evidence of a debt she had to repay. Maybe spending time with Subal was also about a debt. All accounts would be settled, now or later. As she looked at her reflection in the water beside the temple, she thought she should feel some kind of dread. But with Subal standing behind her, all she could feel was light.
A few months later, Subal changed jobs again, and Maya was no longer on his route to work. After starting his new job, Subal learned there were financial issues in the company. Months went by, and he wasn’t paid. He worried about how to pay his bills. He discussed his problems with Maya, who began lending him money and even sold off some of her gold jewelry to do it.
Soon, Subal began to visit less. His calls and texts became erratic. Maya noticed that he never messaged her on Sunday, which he said was a “family day.” She began picking fights with him about his wife and accusing him of messaging other girls. Subal insisted he wasn’t and begged her to hang on. He said he needed to get his life in order, and then things could go back to how they’d been. He told her to remember the Big Bang.
After one of these fights with Subal, Maya went on a whim to the nearby mall, where there was a tattoo parlor. She asked for a treble clef, saying that she loved music. Subal called her as the first ink was seeping in.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m just shopping for my birthday,” she said, and told him the store number. When he arrived, the outline of the backward S was already imprinted on her arm.
“What are you doing?” he asked, and looked closer. “Oh god, you are mad,” he said, and Maya knew he meant it as a compliment.
She was mad, pagal. She didn’t care.
Around this time, Subal also introduced Maya to his father. Afterward, he thought: You’ve finally met your match in madness.
The tattoo hadn’t hurt as much as Maya thought it would.
***
Soon after, it was the tenth wedding anniversary party of Maya’s cousin Adit and his wife, Naisha, whose marriage had been arranged. Adit and Naisha were new money, so it would be an extravagant affair.
Maya, who was still in her petticoat, glanced up at the clock. Veer was late, as usual. She wrapped herself in an embroidered sari of turquoise and orange and chose gold jhumkas that dangled from her ears. She added a deep red bindi to her forehead. She took a photo of herself looking glamorous and sent it to Subal. As she set out a tiny black suit and white collared shirt for Janu, Veer finally arrived. He swept in the door singing, throwing out his hands in grand sweeping gestures—trying to make Maya laugh.
“You’re late,” Maya said, and rolled her eyes, pulling Janu’s tiny T-shirt over his head. “Hurry.”
Veer disappeared into his room and reemerged in a white dress suit and black collared shirt, the inverse of Janu’s. He had his hair gelled the same way.
“How do we look?” Veer asked her, as they struck a pose together: Veer imitating Janu, and Janu imitating what he had seen in the movies.
“We look too good only,” said Janu, who did a little hip sashay, and Maya laughed and snapped a close-up.
“Let’s go, you two.”
They were among the last guests to arrive at the party. At the entrance, a larger-than-life-size photo of Adit and Naisha greeted them. The real Adit and Naisha, somewhat smaller and dressed in Indian finery, stood beside it. The room was draped in purple and gold, and a stage was set up for speeches and dancing. Seated women in heavy saris commented on “how much bhabhi has changed” and “how beautiful she looks in her expensive clothing.” Naisha smiled demurely as she greeted her guests, a massive Rolex on her wrist.
After a few minutes, the lights in the hall went down and a slide show began. First came photos of Adit and Naisha in different poses and on different vacations, standing beside their rotund, red-cheeked son. Then came slides with messages typed in fancy cursive, a series of clichés in English: “You are better than precious diamonds to me,” a slide from Adit read. And from Naisha: “They say the first year is the hardest for a wife, but you made it a piece of cake.”
As the lights came up, Adit stepped onstage. In a shiny sherwani suit, he looked out at the audience and began his speech: “When my parents told me to meet her, I told her: ‘I might stay in Bombay or go. So I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘What do you think?’ And she said, ‘Let’s take it step by step. Let’s take that approach.’” Adit gazed over at Naisha, who sat, hands folded, beside the stage. “These were words of wisdom. I wish I could be like her,” he said, and paused to take a deep breath. “This was an arranged marriage. But it is a love marriage now.”
The room burst into applause, and Maya and Veer politely joined in. Adit grinned and held out a hand for Naisha to join him onstage.
Maya used to be skeptical of arranged marriages like Adit and Naisha’s. She saw the practice much as the Western world did: antiquated and lacking romance, unfathomable for her own life. She had always thought that love, wild and untethered, should come first. But now she’d begun to think she was wrong. Perhaps it was all a matter of compatibility, and a marriage arranged by the people who knew you best had just as much chance of working. It seemed to Maya that any marriage was a kind of arrangement, or became one. And in this room, after ten years together, Adit and Naisha seemed to be in love.
Maya and Veer’s tenth wedding anniversary was only a couple of years away. She doubted that they would celebrate. Not like this. She didn’t know what Subal and his wife did for anniversaries. She didn’t like to ask.
***
A few days later, Maya stood in front of the mirror, fidgeting. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. She tried on a dress and complained that it made her look fat. She settled on another one: gray, Western-style, and conservative. She slid her feet into plastic turquoise shoes, in case it rained.
They arrived at the restaurant before Subal. He now worked more than an hour away.
“Can you call him and make sure he isn’t lost?” Maya asked Veer, and excused herself to the bathroom. “Okay,” Veer said, curtly.
When Subal arrived he greeted Maya and Veer with a toothy smile. He adjusted his belt over his ample stomach and sat down as the DJ put on an Indian remix of a European techno song. He pinched Janu’s cheek, who ignored him; lately when Subal visited he had been impatient with Janu, which Janu didn’t like. Janu made a show of playing with the table settings, taking olives from a platter and dropping them into his water glass. A TV behind them played the World Cup, which India had not qualified for.
After exchanging pleasantries, Veer filled the table in on a recent business meeting. “I’m going to kill the bhenchod who is trying to screw me,” he told Subal.
“Now or later?” Subal asked, as if calling his bluff. Veer didn’t answer.
When the waiter came, Maya and Subal ordered chicken; Veer ordered palak paneer. Drinks were poured: Old Monk rum for Maya and Subal and Johnnie Walker for Veer. Janu mixed himself a mocktail of water, peanuts, and mint leaves, unconcerned with anyone at the table. Maya worried that Janu would ask for chicken in front of his father, but Janu knew better.
“The food is good,” said Veer, looking up at Subal, who was chewing on a gristly piece of chicken. Subal nodded, and said, “But Maya’s rajma chawal is better.” Maya giggled and gulped at her cocktail. Veer looked down at his plate.
After the meal was finished, the adults went out for a smoke. Janu had fallen asleep at the table. It was blazing hot that month in the city, and they were all sweating. Veer offered a cigarette to Maya. Her eyes were getting glassy, and her words were running together. They began to talk about marriage, other people’s marriages, and Maya said, her voice loud: “What do you all think? Is marriage shit?”
Veer took a long drag of his cigarette, while Subal exhaled. “Partly, yes,” Subal said. “But I think later in life you could make a better decision about this, because of the growth and experience of the person.”
“But your emotions always stay the same,” said Maya, and turned to Veer. Veer sucked hard on his cigarette and glanced toward the window. Janu was curled up on his chair. It seemed that they were on the edge of something dangerous, but talk turned quickly to the World Cup.
Inside, Subal paid the bill, and Veer bent to pick up Janu. Outside, the night air was heavy. Maya began walking ahead, toward Subal’s car instead of her husband’s. “I’ll meet you at home,” she told Veer over her shoulder.
Subal and Maya made it home first, and she waited in his passenger seat. After Veer parked, he came up to the car, and rapped his hand on the window. Time to come in. Janu was draped over his shoulder. Veer waited as Maya said good-bye to Subal, slowly lifting her purse off the car floor. It was quiet in their apartment complex at that hour, and the sound of the car door closing seemed loud. Without a word, Maya followed her husband and son into the dark.