Shahzad and Sabeena, 1999 to 2013
“On no soul doth Allah place a greater burden than it can bear.”
—The Holy Quran, 2:286
It was wintertime in the city, cold and gusty, and Shahzad was thinking of leaving his cold storage business. Though business was good—there were no malls yet or online shopping, only open-air bazaars—he often felt tired and weak at work. Years ago, a customer had told Shahzad that working with freezers would make him sick. Now, what the man predicted seemed to have come true. Every time Shahzad left work he felt dizzy and light-headed, though he was still young, not yet forty. Almost forty, and still without a child. He noticed the weakness intensified every time he headed toward home.
But Shahzad didn’t want to leave the market, or at least didn’t want to leave one person: Diana, a local Catholic woman, and a customer at his shop, who was all fire and intensity. Diana was half-Nigerian and half-Goan and had smooth fat cheeks, siren red lips, and wild, curly hair that framed her face. She wore tight but expensive clothing and worked at a fancy advertising company downtown. Everyone in the market called her “Madhuri,” because when she laughed, she looked just like the actress Madhuri Dixit. Diana often came to buy chicken from Shahzad.
Like many men at the bazaar, Shahzad found her attractive and magnetic. But Diana was also something else for him—more than just a pretty distraction. Shahzad had begun to think of her as his good luck charm. When he was around Diana, the market seemed not as shabby, and his chicken seemed to fly off the shelves. The day never seemed mundane or dull.
Over time, Diana had begun bringing cakes to his shop at holiday times, and he had begun giving her a package of mutton every Bakri Eid. She was fond of mushroom and chile curd, so he started stocking these items alongside the chicken. And he began calling her “Madhuri” to her face, telling her she had the same million-dollar smile. After a while, Diana started calling Shahzad on his work phone just to talk or to confide in him about problems with her husband.
Shahzad knew she was married, but had always assumed she was childless, until one day she brought around a fat teenage boy with ringlets like hers.
Soon, she confided in Shahzad that she also had problems with her son, who was fourteen. He played football well but wasn’t a good student. He would have trouble clearing his SSC exam, which was compulsory to complete secondary school. She said the son’s father was a drunk and couldn’t help. Shahzad thought he understood, because his friends had told him that Christians were like this: they needed to drink to sleep at night. Shahzad had never touched alcohol, which was haram. Because of this, he felt he was clearer of head and saw how he could help her.
In Shahzad’s memory, it went like this: Diana gave money to Shahzad, who used it to pay a teacher to give him tuitions in his weaker subjects. He also approached the friend of an official at her son’s school. After that, her son passed the SSC. And Diana gave Shahzad her million-dollar smile.
But then Diana returned, distressed again. Despite passing the exam, her son had not been admitted to one of Mumbai’s oldest and best colleges. Shahzad soon came up with a plan, which hinged on the “MLA quota.” In some colleges, there were seats reserved for members of the legislative assembly, who could give their seats to anyone. Shahzad thought that at least one member would give his seat to someone who’d pay. After he made a few calls, he found a willing member, and at the last minute Diana’s son received admission. Breathless, she came to see Shahzad at his shop. “Shahzad,” she told him. “You’ve done what my husband could not do.”
Next came the line that Shahzad would remember all his life. “If something happens to you, Shahzad, I will die,” Diana told him. Shahzad had never felt so lucky.
And that same season, as if she was a kind of talisman, an unexpected opportunity arrived in the form of a baby.
A cousin of Shahzad’s who worked with him lost his wife in childbirth. She had gone back to her native village to deliver her baby, and the rural doctors botched her Cesarean section. The mother died, but the baby survived.
Shahzad’s extended family shouted at his cousin after the death, just as they had shouted at Shahzad when his uncle died. “How could you send her home? The doctors are not good there,” they said. A more pressing question was also passed among them: “Who will look after the new baby?”
“I will,” Shahzad said.
He had already begged Sabeena for permission, saying the Quran’s warning did not apply, because the boy was related by blood. Even Shahzad’s father could not complain.
“Bas, bas, let’s take him,” Sabeena said at last, worn down by Shahzad’s persuasions. She was also worried about the future of the baby. After all, it is a newborn child.
Together, Shahzad and Sabeena went down to meet his cousin and see the child. They both thought he looked perfect. As they sat with the baby, the cousin’s father quizzed Shahzad about his business. But Shahzad did not give the right answers. The old man didn’t like how little money Shahzad had in the bank, because Shahzad had spent so much of it on doctors. And he found it troubling that Shahzad planned to leave the cold storage business soon.
For the next forty days and nights, Shahzad and Sabeena did not get an answer about the baby. It was a mourning period, and decisions could not be made. But Shahzad was certain the baby would be theirs. Men whose wives died did not raise children on their own. Soon I will be a father, Shahzad thought, and could barely wrap his mind around the thought.
But then the circumstances changed. The family agreed that the sister of the dead wife could marry Shahzad’s cousin, a common fix in their community when women died early. Together, they would take care of the child. Shahzad and Sabeena were told their help was not needed.
Diana had not been a good luck charm after all.
Despondent, Shahzad addressed Allah as he knelt down on his prayer mat. Everybody has a child. Why not me? he prayed. Give me a child also. Just one. I’ll be very thankful. All of my brothers are having a child. I am the only lonely person.
Please.
In the weeks that followed, Shahzad grew impatient to see Diana, who seemed to never visit his shop anymore. He needed her energy to offset the disappointment of the lost baby. He forced himself to listen to Sabeena, who told him once again that he couldn’t force a child. “Each man’s fate is written,” she told him, with the same fatalism their Hindu neighbours sometimes employed. It said so in the Quran, verse 57, sura 22: “No misfortune can happen on earth or in your souls but is recorded in a decree before We bring it into existence.”
This didn’t make Shahzad feel better. He wanted a world in which circumstances could be changed and tragic events undone. And he knew that in the new Mumbai, men could make their own fates, and families did not have to dictate lives. He kept thinking of how his father, who rarely spoke anymore, continued to rule his fate with his silence.
Shahzad tried to comfort himself by thinking of Dilip Kumar, the actor known for tragic roles who played the prince in Mughal-e-Azam. Kumar never had a child in real life. Shahzad wondered if even the manliest of actors suffered from a low sperm count just like him. No, Shahzad decided, it must have been a choice. The choice of a broken heart, because Kumar had fallen in love with his costar Madhubala, and Madhubala’s father, like the king in Mughal-e-Azam, had forbidden their love affair. Years after the film came out, as her father continued to keep her from Kumar, Madhubala grew very sick. At thirty-six, she died from a hole in her heart. And though Kumar later married, he never had any children.
Shahzad marveled at how life mirrored films and films mirrored life. Except that he and Sabeena did not have an epic love affair. He did not know if they had ever been in love. He didn’t think he even knew what that was. He had stronger feelings for Diana, the kind of feelings he’d seen in the movies. A phrase kept coming into his mind about him and Sabeena: shaadi barbadi. A ruined marriage. Without a child, he didn’t think it could be anything else.
Sabeena did not think of their marriage as ruined. But she had learned that she had to live for others, not herself. Shahzad’s mother lived to take care of Shahzad’s father, and Sabeena lived to care for Shahzad and his mother. What is inside a woman dies when she marries, Sabeena thought. We have to sacrifice our wants and our feelings, from morning until night.
And: Sometimes you find happiness, other times not. When she told Shahzad this, he felt ashamed. He would hang his head and say, “My family is like this—what can I do?”
Sabeena remembered back to when she was a child, which felt like many moons ago. She remembered how she would laugh all the time with her father, making masti and telling jokes. Lightheartedness didn’t seem part of her personality anymore. Life went ahead anyway.
She still thought about what her father had said about Kashmir: Madhubala, anywhere you want to go, you can go in a marriage. But that was silly. Trips required money. Kashmir was for the movies. And Shahzad’s family was so conservative that she rarely left the house.
At the beginning, life and marriage had seemed limitless, stretched ahead like the shimmering line of the sea. She and Shahzad went on trips. They spent money as if it would not end. They did lots of favors for each other. It was a very good, very beautiful life, she thought. But now the wave had come crashing down. Her mother-in-law, with her increasing demands, Shahzad so busy and stressed, and then the medical test that had determined their future and possibly made her husband go mad. Since then, they rarely did favors for each other.
But if she drew a line back from every problem in their marriage, she saw that it almost always pointed at Shahzad’s father. Privately, she had begun calling him “the Dictator.” Shahzad’s mother—young and beautiful and full of promise—had been weighed down by the Dictator’s madness, and now she sought to weigh others down. Shahzad had been scarred in childhood by the Dictator’s words, and in adulthood by his silence; now he was mangling their marriage too. The question of adoption, though entangled with their faith, was really made impossible by the Dictator, who lived his life by the old, harder ways. How far could one man’s hurt travel?
Sometimes, Sabeena wished that the Dictator would die.
***
By the next winter, Shahzad had left the cold storage business. His hands were losing circulation. His arms shook just pulling a chicken out of the case. Though he bought a hair dryer to blow hot air on his hands after removing a chicken, especially in the cold, it did not help much. Still, he did not want to leave the market altogether, which would mean leaving Diana.
And so Shahzad began selling live chickens in the market. His father leased him a narrow, enclosed walkway in the middle of the bazaar, which Shahzad quickly realized was the wrong space in which to raise a bird. Perhaps his father had known that. There was almost no ventilation in the passage. The chickens began to die before Shahzad could sell them, collapsing from heat exhaustion and then suffocating from lack of air.
Shahzad decided it was time he made his own contacts in the market. Many Muslim men in the area were builders, and he soon found his way into real estate. Ever since the economy had opened up a decade ago, Mumbai held the promise of limitless jobs. It was one of the largest cities in the world, and getting larger, as more and more people moved in—thousands every day. And so real estate was a booming business. As a real estate broker, Shahzad could also do what he did best: win people over with his honesty and good nature. No one distrusted the earnest broker in the ill-fitting clothes.
But though he and Diana still saw each other around the market, she had recently stopped speaking to him. It started after Shahzad saw Diana’s husband with another woman and had run straight to Diana’s workplace to tell her. He burst into her office and breathlessly delivered the news, even though her secretary was in the room.
Later, Diana admonished him: “Why would you tell me that in my office in front of other people?”
Ever since, Shahzad had been looking for a way to patch things up. He knew Diana lived in a small, one-bedroom kitchen apartment, even though she earned good money and could afford better. He was sure he could find her a nicer flat. And he thought he knew just the place: a far-north neighbourhood with mangroves by the sea. After much persuasion, Diana agreed to take a look.
The day Shahzad showed Diana the flat was one of the happiest of his life. There was a wide creek, tall, marshy grass, and a clear view of the sea. On the suburb’s coastlines, the mangroves’ roots stretched into the water. The flat, though still under construction, promised to be huge, and Diana loved it. They came back downtown very late at night. This day was just like a picnic, Shahzad thought.
But the picnic ended after that. In Shahzad’s memory, Diana gave him money to book the flat, somewhere between one and two lakhs. The following month, work on the building was canceled. Construction was like this in Mumbai: pukka one day and canceled the next, due to a building collapse, the industry’s rampant corruption, or a builder caught skirting the rules. Diana was furious with him. Shahzad tried to reassure her, telling her about another flat by the same builder near the city’s naval dockyard. If she went with the same builder, he promised she wouldn’t lose a rupee. But Diana’s husband did not want to live there; now that he’d seen it, he wanted the original flat, where the mangroves grew. And at the dockyard, the property cost more. This time, Diana would have to take out a loan, which she did, because otherwise she would lose the money she’d put down.
After the paperwork was done, Shahzad called her to check in, as he often did, but Diana did not want to talk with him. “Now you don’t call me,” Diana said. “Kya?” Shahzad asked, certain he must have misheard. “Shahzad, you’re a broker. I’ll give you your 1 percent, but then it’s over.”
Shahzad grew angry. The usual brokerage fee was 2 percent. He had done so much for her, and now she was not only ungrateful but also trying to cheat him. He felt as if he’d been used. “You give me 2 percent, that’s what everyone is giving,” he said, his voice rising.
In the end Diana gave him 1 percent, and after that did not answer his calls.
Instead, on the day of her move, which was just before Christmas, Shahzad watched from afar as she carried her baggage to a taxi; Diana’s old apartment was just across from the market. Distraught, Shahzad could not do any work. A builder friend patted him on the back, saying, “Why are you worried? You’ll get many other girls.”
But Shahzad did not want other girls. He wanted Diana and her million-dollar smile.
Shahzad continued to try to call her after that. Again and again he dialed her number, which he had memorized. Then he started showing up outside her work, at the café she went to for coffee, and in the restaurant where she ate lunch. If Diana saw him, she ignored him, perhaps growing disturbed at how often he was popping up. Shahzad knew he was stalking her but couldn’t help himself. He had seen men chase women like this in the movies. Eventually, the woman always gave in. No really meant yes, or keep trying. After many, many calls, Diana picked up, perhaps afraid of what would happen if she didn’t.
“Whatever is there, let’s forget it and just become friends,” Shahzad said in a rush.
“I don’t know,” she said, and hung up the phone.
After Diana moved, Shahzad felt his world had grown dark. He realized that she had used him to advance her son and to get a nice flat. Even Bakri Eid, the “festival of the sacrifice”—for the cutting of the goat, cow, sheep, buffalo, or camel—one of Shahzad’s favorite holidays, did not cheer him up.
For several days around the holiday Shahzad felt sick, weighed down by work and daily life. He didn’t take any meetings or show his clients flats. When Shahzad’s brother asked him to go visit their grandfather’s native place to arrange some paperwork for the family property, Shahzad begrudgingly agreed. The village was a forty-minute boat ride away or a rocky three-hour drive in heavy traffic. He couldn’t stand the thought of getting on a boat feeling as he did, and so he took the three-hour taxi. As they drove past the winding ghats near hilly Panvel, he felt even worse than before. At first, he assumed it was just nausea from the car ride or his depression over Diana. But, passing Panvel, Shahzad had a sudden sinking feeling that something was not right. It was a feeling he couldn’t shake even after he arrived at the village. He completed the paperwork and returned home anxiously to bed.
Several weeks later, Shahzad was at the train station when his cell phone rang. The call was from an old childhood friend, who used to go on the Sunday drives to Chowpatty. “See the headlines,” his friend said.
Shahzad ran outside the station to buy a paper. There, on the front page, was the headline: a karate champion in Mumbai was dead.
Atif.
Shahzad came home crying. His best friend. His strong friend. His braver and better-than-he friend. His only true friend, if he was being honest with himself. The clients and builders and shopkeepers and Diana—they were all friends because they wanted something. Atif had never asked anything of Shahzad. He had only given, never taken.
“It’s God’s will, O,” Sabeena told him. She wanted to comfort Shahzad but did not understand how it was already Atif’s time. Atif was still young, not yet forty.
The next day, Shahzad went to see Atif’s parents. In Shahzad’s memory, this was the story they told him: Atif had a niece, a Muslim like him, who fell in love with a Hindu boy. The girl and boy ran away. Atif, the strongman of the family, was asked to find a way to stop the marriage and went to the police station to ask for help. Several officers followed him in jeeps to track down the girl. But when they reached the boy’s house, the girl already had a red tika on her forehead, which was worn by married Hindu women. Atif called his wife and said, “She’s married. It’s too late.”
Shahzad found it strange that Atif would have agreed to help prevent an interfaith marriage, which were only becoming more common in the city. After all, Atif himself had run away with a Jain. But his family told Shahzad that the boy was uneducated and the girl was underage. Under those circumstances, Atif must have found it his duty.
It’s too late. Those were Atif’s last words. After that, the police put the boy in the passenger seat of one of their jeeps to take him to the station, while Atif sat in the back with the constable. The girl was placed in a second jeep. Atif’s family’s hypothesis was that the boy was afraid, because the girl was underage, and he could be put away in jail for many years. As they drove past a tree, the boy reached across the driver and grabbed the wheel, turning it toward the tree. Perhaps his plan was to make a break for it. But the jeep spun out of control, tumbling down a hill, into a ghat outside Panvel. The boy emerged with only a fracture. Atif and the constable were dead.
Atif’s family told Shahzad they believed there had been a conspiracy. Why was the boy sitting in front? Who puts a criminal in the front and the constable in the back? It didn’t make any sense.
Atif’s death appeared in the paper late, because of Bakri Eid. During the festival, a time of celebration, the family held the news. But Shahzad realized now, looking back at the date of the accident, that it was the very day he’d passed the Panvel ghats with a sinking feeling. He thought he must have somehow sensed that his best friend was dying nearby.
The family told Shahzad that as Atif tumbled into the ghat, he’d been doing namaaz
Shahzad cried harder at this. Of course he was praying. Atif had always been a better man than he.
***
After this, when problems arose at home or with Sabeena’s family, Shahzad sought to prove himself as worthy a man as Atif. He wanted to be known as a man who could be called upon in times of crisis to fix problems.
Shahzad found his moment after Sabeena’s brother, who was known to be hot-tempered, married a girl who kept a lover, and there was an incident on their first night of sex. It was not clear whether Sabeena’s brother had been rough with her, or if she had refused sex because of her lover, or whether something else happened altogether. But the rumors flew. People gossiped that Sabeena’s brother was gay, which was a black mark in their community. They whispered that because of this he could not perform.
Shahzad went to Sabeena’s brother. “Didn’t you break the seal?” he asked. He said he had. Shahzad told others in the community that Shahzad’s brother had performed, and wasn’t gay, but the rumors persisted. Shahzad had the idea to take him to a fertility clinic. The doctor measured Sabeena’s brother’s sperm count, which was very high. Shahzad couldn’t help but feel jealous. Wow, he thought. God has shown me this report I wanted to see for myself for so long.
“Now no one can talk badly against you,” Shahzad told him. He called Sabeena to tell her the good news. “He can be strong now,” he said, and he was right. The community accepted the report as evidence her brother was straight, and Sabeena felt proud of her husband.
But within a week, the girl asked for a divorce. The decision was up to Sabeena’s brother and the community, because Muslims had their own laws that governed marriage and divorce—laws that had been in place even before Partition. Efforts to create a uniform civil code in the country had been unsuccessful; each time, the government was accused of violating religious freedom. And so it was Sabeena’s brother and the community that granted the divorce, claiming extreme circumstances had warranted it. Even the Prophet had said divorce was an occasionally necessary evil. The girl was blamed, while Sabeena’s brother was considered an innocent divorcé.
After the divorce went through, Sabeena’s brother quickly found a new wife. His position in the community was secure. Shahzad was proud of his role in safeguarding it. But he also couldn’t help thinking back to the doctor’s report. It is no wonder he could marry again so quickly, he thought. With a sperm count that high, a man was capable of anything.
A few weeks after his marriage, Sabeena’s brother and his docile new wife came to Shahzad and Sabeena’s house for a meal. Sabeena bustled around the kitchen. She rarely had the opportunity to serve her extended family at home. But before long Shahzad’s father appeared.
“Why did you all come here?” he shouted from a corner of the room. “Who called you?”
As Shahzad’s father stood and glared at them, Sabeena’s brother and new wife stayed silent.
“Go away,” Shahzad told him, finding a voice he did not know he had. “You are mad,” Shahzad continued, his shaky voice growing stronger. “You don’t know anything about how relations are. You go inside.”
Surprised, Shahzad’s father retreated. But the meal was already ruined. “I’m very sorry,” Shahzad told Sabeena’s brother. “No, don’t worry,” he said, as they stood up to go. “I know your father, Sabeena told me.”
After this incident, Sabeena was dejected for days, and Shahzad made it a point to get her out of the house more often. He was sorry he hadn’t done so more in the intervening years. They began going to Chowpatty Beach again, though not by scooter, because in all those years Shahzad’s driving had not improved. Instead they went by taxi, with the windows down, so they could feel the fresh air.
At Chowpatty the water was dirty with the debris of past festivals and neglect. Garbage collected at the place where the Arabian Sea met the sand, and the water was unsuitable for swimming. And yet many couples went parking at Chowpatty, because the breeze was always cool after a scorching Mumbai day. The view of the city was also magnificent as the darkness set in. By this hour, the lights of Marine Drive began to gleam like pearls, a sort of mirage that gave the road its nickname, the “Queen’s Necklace.”
One night, as Shahzad and Sabeena sat at the beach’s edge, looking out at fellow beachgoers, they considered their life together. It had been a hard stretch of years, but Shahzad thought maybe things were getting better. It is so nice to do timepass like this, he thought.
Sabeena also felt content. She had always loved Chowpatty, and now, with the breeze on her skin and the wind pulling at her dupatta, she felt at peace. They didn’t need to speak. It was enough to sit in silence, gazing out at the churning sea.
The beachgoers that night were mostly teenage couples, looking carefree as they stood on the sand eating falooda, kulfi, and butterscotch ice-gola, the liquid streaming down their arms. But dozens of kids also ran along the beach, circling the balloon sellers and other toy hawkers and digging deep holes in the sand. They screamed with excitement as they rode the miniature Ferris wheel. And they begged their parents for ice-gola or to go swimming in the murky water.
As Shahzad watched the children, he felt a rising anxiety, more than usual. He could not bear to look at them and hear them laugh and scream.
“Let’s get out of here,” Shahzad told Sabeena. “Please.”
After that, they did not make the trip to Chowpatty Beach again for a long time.
***
Shahzad began visiting doctors again. They all gave him the same report as before—low sperm count, no other problems—with the exception of a female doctor, who had a different take. “Your body is perfect,” she said. “Maybe it’s your brain.”
The female doctor recommended seeing a psychiatrist, which was becoming less taboo in the city, though suicide remained a crime and confidentiality was poorly regulated. The government had begun warning that many millions of Indians needed counseling and weren’t getting help. Shahzad decided to see the psychiatrist but not tell anyone outside of his family. The doctor was a handsome, thin man with a beard, a fellow Muslim, who gently asked Shahzad what was on his mind.
“How can I forget her?” Shahzad blurted out.
Diana. He had not meant to say her name. But then he told the doctor everything, ending with how their friendship fell apart.
He also told the doctor about being childless. He talked about the shame he felt around his neighbours and the burden of not being able to give a child to Sabeena, which sometimes felt too much to bear. And he went back further, to his uncle’s death, their fight, and how everyone had blamed Shahzad. “If you think about it this way, it will come again and again in your mind. The fact is we will all go inside someday,” to heaven, the doctor said.
Shahzad told the doctor about the hand washing too, how he did it compulsively, often before or after eating. He told him how he still felt the dirt from his uncle’s grave beneath his nails. Sabeena had begun to complain because Shahzad asked her to scrub the house even when it was clean. After Shahzad finished talking, the doctor prescribed him a multipurpose drug for depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. “It will calm your mind,” the doctor said. “Just for now. Come back again, and next time I will reduce it.”
A few months after Shahzad started the medicine, Sabeena noticed a change in him. He seemed less anxious. He began sleeping better. And he washed his hands less frequently. He even told goofy jokes more often, such as: Husband: Do you know the meaning of wife? It means “without information fighting every time!” Wife: No, darling, it means “with idiot forever!” After telling a joke, he’d laugh his infectious laugh until Sabeena joined in. She suspected he was also growing more confident, because, after years of trying, his real estate business was thriving.
Shahzad mostly showed flats to local Muslim families. But being downtown also put him in contact with dozens of firangis—from England, France, the United States, and all over the world. As India’s economy expanded, expats had begun flooding in. Shahzad made friends with many of them, winning them over with his off-color jokes, florid style of dress, and oddly accented English. “He is an Englishman now,” Sabeena joked to the family, as he spent more and more time with firangis. But Shahzad had been fascinated by foreigners since his school days, when he’d studied French and first learned English. Sabeena’s English had never come as easily.
As a real estate broker, Shahzad was not always good at his job. He arrived late to show houses, and keys often went missing. He showed people flats that didn’t fit their specifications. But he saved himself, as he always had, by being more honest than the other men in the business.
Shahzad felt that showing flats showed him the whole world. He found flats for rich women and poor men, for Hindus, Muslims, and Catholics. One day, he found a house for a man who had transitioned to become a woman. Shahzad was familiar with hijras, which he also knew as eunuchs, a common sight on the streets of Mumbai. As far as he knew, these men were not really men and liked to parody women. They also cursed you if you did not pay for their blessing. But the woman he found the flat for was different. She lived like any other Muslim and was married to a man. And she had very specific needs for Shahzad: a dark house with plenty of privacy. She told Shahzad she had been teased as a child in Mumbai, gone to America to transition, and was now back to care for her mother. She worked as a makeup artist in Bollywood, where being transgender was more accepted, but otherwise did not go out in public much. She did not want neighbours watching her. Shahzad took her request to heart and found her the most private house he could.
Before long, Shahzad expanded his brokerage business into a tourist business, offering all-India package tours or Mumbai darshans. He asked the firangis to meet him in his dingy office, which was on the second floor of a convenience shop in the Colaba tourist district downtown. He often started his darshans with a slum tour of Dharavi, once Asia’s largest slum and still India’s biggest, and where his family had property. There, the foreigners could feel a mix of pity and awe at all the poor, resourceful people and take photos of young, wiry men at sewing machines or bent old men treating leather in a tannery. They were always amazed that these goods would find their way West. Afterward, Shahzad took them to the dhobi ghats, where they marveled at the endless rows of laundry and at how even the poor wore well-pressed clothes. Next, to lighten their mood, Shahzad brought them to the Bollywood studios, which he visited with the help of the transgender makeup artist. At the studios, the foreigners laughed at the dance numbers, calling them “cheesy,” and compared them to old Hollywood movies before they evolved beyond song and dance. To finish, Shahzad took them on a night tour of Marine Drive and Chowpatty, where the lights of the Queen’s Necklace gleamed. Often, they spent the whole day getting in and out of an air-conditioned car, which blocked out the heat and stench and poverty but cost a whopping four thousand rupees to rent for the day. Shahzad was amazed by how foreigners lived.
But then, in 2008, the terror attacks on Mumbai happened, and the foreigners stopped coming. On Shahzad’s TV, a newscaster said that men were on the ground with guns in Mumbai, in multiple locations.
Leopold Cafe, where all the tourists went for beer, was among the first targeted. Eight people in the café were killed. Two bombs also went off in taxis in the suburbs; downtown, young men wielding AK-47s opened fire in Mumbai’s famed Victoria Terminus, not far from Shahzad and Sabeena’s home. As they sprayed bullets across the open hall, commuters screamed and ran and fell. At a Jewish centre, the gunmen took hostages. They tried to enter a women and children’s hospital, but the nurses had turned off the lights and locked the doors to confuse them. The gunmen also stormed the Taj Mahal Hotel.
The Taj sat, proud and opulent, across from the Gateway of India, on the shore of the Arabian Sea. People described it as a wedding cake, with seven tiers of Gothic windows and hanging bays in tan and cream. The hotel employed some 1,600 staff and boasted 565 bedrooms and 11 restaurants. It was where dignitaries and rich firangis stayed, but it also had a grand lobby where anyone could sit, which Shahzad sometimes liked to do.
A terrorist attack of this scale and ambition had never really happened in India before. The gunmen had entered the city on a rubber dinghy at a fisherman’s village, not far from the Taj, as if attacking the city was easy, like a joke. And they targeted the places foreigners liked to go. The attack also took place over Thanksgiving in the United States, and so for three days Americans watched their TVs in horror as Mumbai was under siege. The terrorists took out men, women, children, rich, and poor. When the shooting and explosions ceased and the police had caught or killed the gunmen, the newscasters announced that 164 people were dead. The majority were Indian, but among them were some two dozen foreign nationals, six of them American.
After the attacks, the foreigners stayed away. No one wanted to visit Mumbai, city of horrors. No one wanted to tour the slums or even play bit parts in Bollywood for a day. Shahzad’s brokerage and tour guide businesses suffered. But he was hopeful the tourists would return. And he held on to the firangi customers who stayed in Mumbai, though some of them talked about leaving. They said that a coordinated attack like this would be the first of others.
India held Pakistan responsible for the attacks, but Pakistan denied it had played a role. Rumors flew that sweets had been distributed in Pakistan to celebrate the siege. But that same year Pakistan had forty terrorist incidents, and Shahzad knew there was plenty of blame to go around. Mumbai’s attacks, which began on November 26, became known as 26/11—like 9/11, which took place in America seven years before. And extremists were still trying to plot attacks on American soil. To Shahzad, it seemed that attacks could now happen anywhere, in rich and poor countries alike. This idea scared him—that violence was possible even in the places you would not expect.
***
It was after this that the Dictator got sick. First, he stopped wanting to eat. Then, he was unable to clean the market. At his hospital downtown, the doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Shahzad’s family went to another hospital, and a third, until they were told it was cancer.
For more than twelve months, the Dictator was confined to his bed. This was a difficult year, not as much for Shahzad, who often came home late from work, but for Sabeena, who took on the role of her father-in-law’s maid and live-in nurse. Her days were already overscheduled, with endless laundry to clean, meals to make, and prayers to perform. Now, on top of all her duties, she also had to tend to the Dictator’s health and whims. When his appetite returned, he demanded food from Sabeena at odd hours, calling out in the middle of the night: “Cut me an apple!” and “Make me fish!”
Sabeena always did what he asked. But she worried about Shahzad’s mother. It was a fine line to walk—tending to her father-in-law’s needs while not making his wife jealous. She worried Shahzad’s mother would grow upset.
One day, as Sabeena sat next to Shahzad’s father to keep him company—though his company was very poor—Shahzad’s mother became suspicious. She looked at Sabeena beadily and shouted: “You are making like you are a sweet dish at my husband, a gulgule.”
Sabeena controlled herself and did not reply. If she did, she knew there would be a fight. Later, she and Shahzad laughed about it, whispering in their bedroom in the dark. Gulgule! Like a sweet dish. Her mother-in-law was a genius.
Before long it was Bakri Eid again, and Sabeena had to help Shahzad’s mother with the preparations. After the cutting of the goats, and after the women cooked the meat, the men went out to distribute the leftovers to friends and family and the poor. A few hours after Shahzad had gone out, Sabeena got a call from the police.
“Your husband has been in an accident,” an officer said. “It is a bad accident. Come to the hospital right away.”
Sabeena, always the picture of calm, began screaming. It felt like the moment she had learned of her father’s death.
Together, Sabeena and Shahzad’s mother ran to the government hospital where Shahzad had been taken. When they arrived, Shahzad was unconscious, with stitches zigzagging across his head.
They were told Shahzad had been on his scooter coming back from the local market when he collided with a Parsi man’s car. It was unclear who was at fault. But it was lucky it had been a Parsi, because Parsis, a tiny community of Persian origin, were known to be wealthy and conscientious. True to type, the Parsi man paid a visit to the hospital with his mother and father and even offered Shahzad’s family a watch or money as compensation. Though they were likely trying to avoid a police case, Shahzad’s family found it extraordinary they showed up at all.
Meanwhile, Shahzad was not waking up. The whole night, Sabeena and Shahzad’s mother lay on the floor beside him, crying and praying for his recovery. They both slept in their salwar kameez, the folds of their dresses serving as blankets, and their dupattas too-thin pillows.
In the morning, Shahzad opened his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Shahzad asked his neighbour, who had come to the hospital after hearing the news, and now stood over his bed. Shahzad turned to Sabeena. “What happened to me?” he asked.
“You’re in a hospital,” Sabeena said. “You had an accident.”
“You’ve just fallen from the bike and gotten a little hurt,” Shahzad’s mother said, gruff again now that it seemed her son would get well.
And then Shahzad remembered. He had been out distributing meat on his scooter when he had seen Diana. Diana, whom he once distributed meat to every Bakri Eid, before she cut him out of her life. She had been sitting in a taxi. Through the window, he could see her fat cheeks, red lips, and cascading dark curls. He had blinked and then her taxi was gone. He’d been rattled but drove on to the market to give his lawyer a package of meat. After that, he’d headed toward home. And then he had seen Metro Cinema looming before him—he was close to home now—when the Parsi man’s car appeared. That was when everything went black.
Diana, his good luck charm. And now look where he was. It was not Diana but Sabeena who had come to see him. It was Sabeena who slept in her clothes on the floor. Later, when Shahzad got home from the hospital, his father shouted at him: “I told you not to go on the motorcycle. Why were you driving?”
Even Shahzad began to wish his father would die.
It was a searing hot day, six months after, when they got the call. The Dictator wouldn’t make it until morning. At the same time, the world’s seven billionth baby, Nargis, was born, an Indian baby chosen symbolically to represent the country’s swelling population. Every minute, fifty-one babies in India were born. Every minute, ten people in the country died. The doctors said the Dictator had stopped swallowing food, even after they had put a hole in his throat.
But before this, Shahzad’s father had done something unexpected. He had told his wife he was sorry. He’d begun crying and said, “I made a mistake. I never looked after my children.” He even showed his hands, as if in a sign of apology. “I treated you all bad, I did not treat you all good.”
He did not say this to Shahzad, but his mother told him afterward, which was enough.
The apology reminded Shahzad of a moment in Mughal-e-Azam, when the Emperor Akbar seeks his son’s forgiveness. Akbar tells his son he is not an “enemy of love” but “a slave of my own principles.” Perhaps Shahzad’s father had been a slave to his illness or his cruelty.
Now, Shahzad and the family crowded around the bed, where his father lay, unmoving. After a little while, Shahzad thought he saw a small movement beneath the sheets. “See, his stomach is still there. He’s breathing,” Shahzad said. “No, it’s the ventilator,” another family member told him. “He is already gone.”
When he heard this, Shahzad began to cry. He didn’t know what he felt. He couldn’t say that he was happy or sad. It was a strange mix of emotions he did not recognize.
People offered words of comfort: “He was in bad pain,” “His soul will be blessed,” and “He will be at peace.” These platitudes helped a little.
For forty days after that, the family sat in mourning. Shahzad did not go to work, and no one went out except for the necessary shopping. There was a big marriage in the extended family, but they did not attend.
Sabeena felt lighter the moment Shahzad’s father stopped breathing. At long last, they were free of the Dictator.
***
The change in Shahzad was just as dramatic. After his motorbike accident, his balance had worsened and his gait became more uneven. But after his father’s death, his posture corrected itself. He grew his mustache into a manicured goatee, like some Westerners did, and even went to the salon to maintain it. His hair was now always hennaed, and he wore better-fitting and more expensive clothes. All of this made him look younger, and even the women in the family commented that he had grown more handsome.
After his father died, Shahzad had realized the obvious. At long last, he could adopt a child. A child would no longer be considered an outsider.
When Shahzad approached his mother after the mourning period, she insisted he still adopt within the family, a baby that could take his name. But Sabeena now said she wasn’t sure she wanted a child at all. She felt old—they were both past forty now—and it seemed to her too late. Shahzad dismissed this, saying he was as full of energy as the day they met.
Shahzad’s mother presented another idea. They had distant relatives who lived in a hut on a hill in Kalyan, a faraway suburb at the end of the Central Railway line. A woman had given birth to a baby boy, but she was sick and did not have the money to care for him. “She’s got TB and must be dying, so you can go adopt that child,” Shahzad’s mother said.
And so Shahzad took the long train ride to Kalyan. When he entered the hut, it was obvious the baby boy was also sick. He seemed to have a fever. Perhaps he had already caught his mother’s TB. But Shahzad still thought the baby was good-looking. He could even sense a trace of mischief in him. He prayed with the baby as the boy fell into a twitchy sleep on the floor.
The woman was very thin, and the bones on her face were sharp. There was no food in the hut, and she said she couldn’t afford a doctor. Kalyan, a popular resting place for new migrants to the city, had few doctors anyway. The woman and her husband and father had come from a fort city several hours east, but now the husband was gone.
Shahzad felt uneasy. His manicured, hennaed beard, shaded glasses, and city clothes stood out amid the harsh poverty. No one else in the area spoke English. The woman was making him tea, even though she was ill, and had no idea why he’d come.
The woman’s cell phone rang. It was Shahzad’s mother, calling to do the telling for him. After the woman hung up, she faced Shahzad. “I understand what you want,” she said. “But first you have to ask my father.”
Shahzad knew just a little about the woman’s father—that he owned a mutton shop but never seemed to have any money. Later, he learned that the man was a gambler, which was illegal but common, and that the man lost his money playing cards.
When the old man appeared inside the hut, the woman told him about Shahzad’s plan to take her baby. “No,” the old man said, without hesitation. “I have only one grandson, and he is the last. I cannot live without him.”
Shahzad nodded and turned to go. He wasn’t going to fight an old man. But the woman’s father stopped him, motioning to his lower body. He lifted up a pant leg and showed Shahzad that his skin was raw and peeling. Whatever the affliction was, it looked as if it had never been treated. The man also pulled out a broken cell phone. He said the phone was more important than his leg. He did not mention his daughter’s illness. Shahzad took the man to the repair shop and pushed two hundred rupees into his hands. “Give me one hundred rupees more, I need it,” the man said, and Shahzad did. He could not wait to get on the train back home.
“We don’t want it,” Shahzad’s mother said, after he told her what happened. “He’s a gambler, he will always be out for money.” Shahzad knew she was right. Even if the old man gave them the boy, he was certain to appear regularly—on the boy’s birthday or during Ramadan or Eid, along with the other poor people—to ask for money for every ailment and problem. He might even demand the boy back when he was grown.
But maybe he wouldn’t. For a brief moment, Shahzad considered stealing the baby. He could take him to a doctor. The boy could have a better future. And the chances of repercussions were small. Poor people almost never went to the police or to court against the rich, because the outcome rarely worked in their favor.
No, Shahzad thought. This is not the way to become a father.
With regret, he gave up the idea, and on future Ramadans and Eids, when the boy came to their house with the other poor children to ask for money, Shahzad noted with relief that he had survived, but also that he hadn’t grown up to be good-looking.
***
The Dictator’s death set other events in motion: most important, the inheritance of an enormous tract of family property in Dharavi, a half-hour train ride north of home. It was the slum land where Shahzad used to bring the firangis—some twenty thousand square feet of it—and he inherited it along with more than a dozen other family members. Dharavi had one million inhabitants per square mile and a churning economy all its own. It was part dumping ground, part living space, and part swamp. It had countless satellite dishes and cell phones but few toilets. Shahzad’s cousins took a survey of the land and immediately declared it a headache.
For one, the property was not in good shape. At the entrance there was a dirt-filled field, which doubled as a rough cricket maidan where young boys liked to play. Beyond that sat hundreds of makeshift dwellings. A narrow lane, which ran between the dwellings, was filled with hanging laundry, running children, squatting womenwashing clothes and utensils, and men hanging out in dhotis. These slum dwellers had not paid rent in years, and it would be difficult for Shahzad’s family to collect it now. Surrounding the living spaces were heaps of rotting trash, dirty water running from pipes, squawking chickens, tied goats, three-legged dogs, and tiny kittens pawing at the remains of food. Big-beaked crows sat on dumpsters eating pilfered meat. And at the very end of the property sat the remains of a burnt-out tannery.
The second, and much bigger, problem, was that when Shahzad’s cousins went to visit the land again, they found a goon had moved to take control of the property. The goon was associated with a local but powerful right-wing political party that had previously led attacks against the city’s migrants. Shahzad’s family worried that he would hurt anyone who tried to reclaim the land.
But Shahzad was not afraid. Instead, he saw an opportunity. This was his chance to prove himself a hero. And if he could keep the land and then sell or rent it to a builder, they’d all be rich. Though in bad shape, the property was valuable—as the goon and his party recognized—because Dharavi occupied five hundred acres at the centre of Mumbai, and Mumbai was running out of space. If Shahzad got rich from the builder, he could also afford to adopt a child. He’d be so rich no one would dare stop him.
Through his brokerage business, Shahzad met with several builders and found one willing to pay twenty-eight crores—an incredible 280 million—rupees to build on the land. The builder said he would do all the construction legally, through the city’s major project to clear and redevelop slum land. The project promised slum dwellers free apartments in exchange for their shanties so that luxury towers could be built in their place.
It was possible that when it came time to build, some of the slum dwellers would be obstinate about moving. Shahzad had heard stories of slum people who were ungrateful for their brand-new apartments, objecting to the isolation, lack of community, and Western toilets in the new flats. Some slum dwellers even begged to go back home—to homes that no longer existed. The builder promised Shahzad he knew how to handle this. But first Shahzad would have to get rid of the goon.
As Shahzad plotted his next steps, his perspective of himself began to change. He began to see himself as a big shot in Dharavi, a would-be slumlord with lots of land. He concocted wild plans for a show of force against the goon. In the meantime, he visited the property and put up a giant sign with his name on it, warning: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” He told himself he wasn’t afraid.
Over the course of his visits to Dharavi, Shahzad grew close with the people who lived there. He got to know them and their stories—the girl who spoke English and worked in marketing but lived in a decrepit hut to save money for more schooling; the fat, lazy men in undershirts who roasted chicken tikka and hung out on plastic chairs all day; and a hunched-over man named Pinya, who was once a big man in Dharavi before he got hooked on moonshine and drank all his money away. Out of all of the slum dwellers, Shahzad liked Pinya best. He often gave him money to do small tasks, such as fetch chai or share information he’d learned about the goon, though he knew how Pinya would spend the money. Every so often, slum moonshine was made wrong and killed dozens of people. But Pinya was hooked and drank it anyway.
Shahzad also got to know a security guard the goon had hired, a boy so young he couldn’t grow a mustache. The boy had come to Mumbai from up north after suffering a bad breakup. If this was the goon’s security guard, Shahzad thought he didn’t need to be afraid. Emboldened, Shahzad set up shop in an old office in the centre of the property and taped a picture to the door of him standing with members of another local political party. He hoped it would scare away the goon and any other interlopers.
After several months, Shahzad and his family met the goon in person. They gathered twice in fancy flats—the goon’s choice—to negotiate over the family land. Both times, Shahzad and his family rejected the unfair terms the goon offered, though they worried that violence would follow.
The more often Shahzad visited Dharavi, the more the slum dwellers grew to like and admire him. Even Binky, the floppy-eared slum dog, perked up when he came around. Shahzad took the time to ask after their families, gave them small amounts of money, and never collected rent. They greeted him in obsequious tones, commenting on how bindaas his Western-style blue jeans and fake Gucci belt were or inviting him into their shanties for dinner. As Shahzad waved at them, he sometimes imagined that he was royalty, a real shahzad, and that this was his fiefdom. Which, in a way, it was. Here was a property that bore his name. A property worth twenty-eight crores. And here were people that owed him something and whose futures were in his hands.
With his new swagger, Shahzad began to respond differently to strangers when they asked if he had children. He no longer hung his head and said “Nahi, nahi,” in a small voice. Instead, he began to play pretend.
This did not work with his neighbours or the people in the local market, or Crawford Market, or Bhendi Bazaar. These people all knew better. But if he and Sabeena went to a wedding or birthday party with guests they did not know, there Shahzad could lie. Sabeena had been the one to suggest this. “Who’s going to question you?” she said.
Shahzad lied with confidence and gusto. “How many children do you have?” a wedding guest would ask. “Two children, one boy, one girl,” Shahzad often replied, “and they’re very good-looking.” The wedding guest would nod in approval or say, “Allah ki marzi.” “It’s God’s will.” This always made Shahzad feel good.
Sometimes, Shahzad got confused. At the last wedding he attended, he told a guest his daughter was six years old after first saying she was seven. “Oh? I thought you said seven?” the keen-eared guest asked. Shahzad saved himself by telling the biography of his niece Mahala and nephew Taheem as if they were his own children. He told the guest in detail about their hobbies, friends, and high-quality Catholic primary school.
“Ah, good school, a convent school,” the wedding guest said appraisingly, and Shahzad smiled with relief, and let the conversation move on.
Mahala and Taheem had still been small when the Dictator died. In the years since, they had grown up to be bright-eyed, bucktoothed, and full of energy. They were so close in age people thought they were twins, a ball of energy split into two humming parts. They made the joint family home younger, louder, less predictable and staid. After they started school, they’d become even livelier.
In the evenings, the kids would run from one room to another, finding Sabeena to ask what she was cooking for dinner or tracking down Shahzad to tell him what they learned in school that day. Mahala was the more talkative and mature of the two, while Taheem often got scolded for his mischief. They had reedy voices and expansive laughs, and they were almost always playing.
Shahzad had gone to see Taheem when he was born, which was at Ramadan time. He had looked thin and small and perfect in the hospital bed. Shahzad had also visited the hospital after the birth of Mahala, whose skin had been very black, like a poor labourer’s child, but he had still found her beautiful. At last I’ll have some company, he thought when they were born. But it was only now that they were older—old enough to hold conversation—that Shahzad realized how much they’d changed in him.
They called Shahzad “badi baba”—big father—and Sabeena “badi ma.” Though Taheem was often naughty with his father, he would mostly listen to Shahzad. If Taheem told Shahzad he got into a disagreement with a Hindu boy at school, Shahzad would admonish him: “Chup! Pagal hai tu. Hindu-Muslim differences are very bad for children.” On weekdays, after finishing his homework, Taheem would come into the living room in the morning and call out, “Badi baba, put on the TV.” Every night, they’d watch Maharana Pratap together, a show about a Hindu Rajput king who fought against the conquests of the Muslim Mughal emperors, including Emperor Akbar of Mughal-e-Azam, who had been a real-life king. After watching their epic battles, Taheem would sleepily shuffle off to bed.
On the weekends, while Taheem’s father worked and his mother cooked, he and Shahzad watched cricket and made bets against each other. “Thirty rupees,” Shahzad would call out, as India played New Zealand, Sri Lanka, or, most important, Pakistan. If he lost, he’d joke with his nephew, “I won’t leave you, I’ll get you in the night.” Taheem would always run away giggling. Or they played cricket outside, and Shahzad would bowl for his lanky nephew. He threw the ball over and over until Taheem connected, hitting it all the way into the lanes of Crawford Market.
Mahala and Taheem’s parents had had a love marriage. Farhan, who was nearly forty, had been teaching classes in the trendy suburb of Bandra when he met Nadine, his much-younger student. Nadine had a tiny frame, a baby face, and deep dimples. He was immediately smitten. Farhan told his family, “I will marry this girl only, or I won’t marry anyone.” Though Nadine was much younger, she and Farhan were from the same community, and so her father had given in. At first, even after marriage, Nadine had been enamored with Farhan, who was a learned and well-spoken man. He had read the entire Quran and many of the Islamic scholars and poets. He could even quote Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet, offhand. But as time went on, Nadine saw that Farhan was not making much money. He stopped teaching and took up a job as a mobile phone technician. It was an unglamorous and low-paid position. They rarely went on vacation or out to eat in hotels.
Sometimes, Nadine complained to Sabeena, telling her older and wiser in-law that what she had expected and what she got were not the same. But Sabeena had heard all of this before; she had also gone through some of it herself, in her own way. Once, Nadine complained to her sister that Farhan did not buy her jewels, but Nadine’s sister had not been sympathetic. “It was your choice only, according to your choice you have done,” her sister said, and Sabeena privately agreed. She felt that Nadine was behaving foolishly.
But Sabeena also knew that when a woman chose a spouse on her own, she was often young and didn’t know her own mind. And then she became upset later, because her husband did not meet her expectations. Love marriages seemed to be built on expectations. Even Sabeena had come to marriage with expectations, but she had also known she would have to adjust. It was something Nadine didn’t understand. Because of this, Nadine had bhadaas, or what Sabeena called “fire in the heart”—which could only be quenched by acting out, shouting, gossiping, or crying. Nadine got out the fire by talking about her marriage with Sabeena. Shahzad, who maybe also had bhadaas, got it out by taking action at Dharavi.
***
Shahzad was spending more and more time at the family property. With each day that passed, he felt closer to securing it and becoming the family hero he’d always wanted to be.
There had been some complications. The old owners of the burnt-out tannery on the land had started a legal battle with Shahzad’s family. They were being helped by the local goon and, improbably, by members of Shahzad’s own extended family. The goon was now going around offering checks to Shahzad’s cousins and aunts to buy out their shares, for far lower than what the property was worth. Shahzad had to keep calling his relatives and warning them not to accept the scam money. He assured them that they would make not lakhs but whole crores of money from a builder in a legal deal, if they could just wait a little while.
Shahzad was now fighting the tannery owner in the Mumbai Court of Small Causes. Long ago, it had been the court where Gandhi and Jinnah, the founding fathers of India and Pakistan, famously started their practice in law. Now, it was where sticky matters of tax and property were adjudicated. In the courthouse, a great, old colonial-era building, the cases moved lackadaisically, as if in an earlier time. In some rooms, documents were stacked to the ceiling. Court peons pasted decisions on paper using toothbrushes and sticky glue. It was no surprise to anyone that the general backlog of court cases in Mumbai numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But Shahzad was confident he would win the suit, because of how the tannery owner had let the land go. Today, the property was a thick jungle of grass, a crumbling stone wall, and a buzzing of fat, malarial mosquitoes. Downy ducks paddled in a small pond. Nature had long ago won the battle.
That said, Shahzad worried about the goon’s continued involvement in the property. He hadn’t forgotten the violence the party sometimes employed. The attacks against North Indian migrants in the city were still fresh—shop windows smashed, taxi drivers beaten till they bled. Shahzad had nightmares he’d be killed by the goon in the night. Even Sabeena, though she did not know all the details, began to fear for Shahzad’s safety. Whenever he was at Dharavi, she would call his cell phone and ask: “O, how long until you come home?”
With his focus on Dharavi, Shahzad’s belief that Sabeena could still raise a child at last had begun to subside. His days were filled with court appearances, slum visits, and builder meetings rather than medical appointments. Yet his feelings of inadequacy were directed elsewhere—to his manhood—because as he had gotten older, he had not been able to make love to Sabeena the way he had before.
When the performance problems started, Shahzad talked about them with his friends, the men he knew from Crawford Market and Bhendi Bazaar. They laughed and told crude jokes, which he did not mind. It made the problem seem less serious. Soon, they even came up with a code word for Shahzad’s manhood.
“How is babubhai?” they’d say, jabbing each other, laughing at the idea of using bhai, a term of respect, for a sexual organ. “Babubhai is working or not?”
“No, baba,” he’d say, shaking his head sadly. “It’s not working at all.”
The men also had developed a code word for porn, which was strictly forbidden in Islam, haram. Of course they all watched porn, or “blue films” anyway; these videos were now available and shareable on their mobile phones. When they talked about the videos they’d call them “BP,” for “blue pictures.” Later, the code word evolved from “BP” into “Bashir Patel,” who was a member of Mumbai’s legislature. “Bashir Patel bhejna mera mobile pe,” one man would slyly request of another, and soon, a video message popped up on his phone.
Shahzad thought these films were having a negative effect on Indian society. He read that India had some of the highest porn traffic in the world, and that at the same time sexual assault numbers were rising. He worried that the kind of uneducated man who stared at women in trains, or groped or “Eve teased” them on the street, was growing more aggressive from seeing these videos. It is because of all the naked women always playing in their minds, he thought.
But Shahzad also watched porn, and felt little shame about it, though he did not tell Sabeena. Once, she found a gel he had been using to watch porn and asked him: “Yah kya hai?” “It is babubhai’s tonic,” he told her, laughing, sure she wouldn’t understand. But she did, because the Haj Committee had warned pilgrims that year not to bring such gels or pills to Mecca. She only shook her head. Still, Shahzad did not tell her about the photos of big-breasted girls he kept on his phone, in a secret subfolder called DIA, after Diana.
One day, a nephew of Shahzad’s, who was just out of university, found out about the porn and the code. “Have you met Bashir Patel recently?” he teased his uncle. Shahzad, growing red, feigned innocence. “Kya?” he asked. “What do you mean?” Shahzad thought that boys must be growing up faster now because of the Internet. Taheem, who was in the room, and just eight years old, asked, “Who is Bashir Patel?”
“Just a person going to stand election,” Shahzad said, and left the room. From his bedroom, he could hear his older nephew laughing.
After that, Shahzad did not talk to his friends about his performance problems anymore. Instead, he began to visit doctors again, who told him that after forty, any man could have trouble performing. His low sperm count didn’t help, nor did his anxiety. But they said that half of all middle-aged men in India suffered from the same problem. This didn’t ease Shahzad’s mind. If he couldn’t be a father, at least he should be able to perform.
Sabeena didn’t care how Shahzad was in bed. She would have told him this if he asked her. She had grown older now and felt it in her body. She didn’t want to be made love to like a teenager anymore. There may have been times she wanted to have sex and Shahzad couldn’t. But the Quran was clear on this point: a woman had to love, honor, and obey her husband, no matter what came. The Quran also said that Allah never placed a burden on a person greater than they could bear. And in her community, it was the men who ended marriages, pronouncing talaq—“I divorce you”—three times, as Muslim personal law prescribed, though some women were challenging this practice now.
But Sabeena didn’t want to be like the women in the West, who in the morning were married and in the evening divorced, or who took a lover on the side. She didn’t want to be like the women who drank to keep themselves from being sad or to fall asleep, who wore short clothes or showed cleavage to attract men, or who didn’t look after their parents or in-laws as they grew old. And who did not know how to find strength in the best place of all: in God. She also didn’t want to be like the sex-addled women she’d heard about, who loved their husbands for what happened in the bedroom.
Still, Shahzad was becoming obsessed with this new problem, and Sabeena knew it was her job to stop him. She knew where this road led. She asserted herself, telling her husband in a firm, raised voice that he was acting pagal. But this only further upset Shahzad. He became convinced that Sabeena was becoming more assertive because of his problem in the bedroom—because she thought he’d become weak. She already controlled the house, and he worried soon she would control him. Many women in Mumbai controlled their husbands now. And so Shahzad continued to make appointments with every doctor he could, but none of them seemed able to help him.
After Shahzad came home from another upsetting appointment, where the doctor told him nothing could be done, he carried on an inner monologue with himself: I am not gay. I have good hair. They say, “You are a perfect man.” They say, “Everything is normal.” Except this.
Except everything down there. It had been the problem from the start.
Would it have been different with Diana? he wondered. No. Diana had not loved him. He had wasted so much time being focused on the wrong things. The wrong woman. If only he and Sabeena could find a way to begin again, to go back to that cold and drafty room where he’d first seen her and Sabeena had not yet raised her eyes to his.