Ashok and Parvati, 2013 to 2014
“My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said . . .
Choose a name, a role . . .
Don’t cry embarrassingly loud.”
—Kamala Das, “An Introduction”
Ashok’s father called him at work, unable to wait until his son got home. There was a profile Ashok had to see. Her name was Parvati, and, despite her bad stars, her and his son’s horoscopes were compatible. This was what mattered in life, and in marriage; that same year, a Hindu saint called for the opening of a university in India to study astrology. “The stars are already MATCHED, Ashok,” his father said. Also important was that Parvati was the daughter of a prominent engineer.
“I’ll look later, Appa,” Ashok said.
When Ashok got home after midnight, he unhurriedly opened the profile on his desktop computer. He clicked through her photos one by one. I’m not too interested, he thought. Thick hair, open face, natural look—a typical South Indian girl.
He scrolled farther. Parvati’s bio said she graduated with a master’s degree from IIT Chennai (okay, smart), that she played the violin and could sing and draw (artistic), and that she was working as a teacher (kind). It wasn’t the worst profile he’d seen.
“Okay,” Ashok told his father the next morning, though he wouldn’t allow himself to get hopeful. “Let’s see where it goes.”
At home, Parvati’s mother sat her daughter down and said, “He’s thirty-three, don’t you think he’s a little old for you?”
“No,” Parvati replied, smugly. “You know it’s better not to judge.”
When Parvati picked up the phone a few days later, she was surprised by the warm and friendly voice on the other end. It sounded nothing like the boys her father had introduced her to—boys who kept stammering and letting out uncomfortable peals of laughter. “Hi,” this voice said, casually, as if he had known her for years. “I’m Ashok. In Mumbai.” She could tell that he was smiling on the other end.
He also had an accent unlike any she had heard before. It sounded British but also Indian. It made him sound intelligent. He named the paper he worked for, one everybody knew and read. He made little money there but told her he was working on a novel. Parvati was impressed.
As they talked, Ashok told her about how he was learning the flute, and Parvati spoke of her Carnatic singing, an on-and-off-again hobby since she was young. “So you can sing and I can play the flute,” he said. “Yeah, we’ll see,” said Parvati. She couldn’t decide if his enthusiasm was endearing or too much.
“If on seeing you I don’t like you or vice versa, we should be free to say no.”
“I agree.”
After that, Ashok and Parvati Skyped with both sets of parents. It started off poorly, because Ashok’s father was so excited he kept interrupting his son. “Appa, Appa, it’s not like that, let me talk,” Ashok kept telling him. As the two bickered, Parvati and the rest of her family just stared at the screen.
But then the parents let them talk alone, and Ashok played his bansuri, a North Indian flute with a sound that was strong and low. Though Ashok wasn’t an experienced player, and his notes and playing were uncertain, Parvati found his posture confident, almost sexy.
“It’s good to put a face to your name,” Ashok said when he finished. “Your photo on your profile doesn’t do you justice.” Over Skype, he could see the pretty heart shape of her face, the warm flush in her cheeks, and how her expressions were more in her eyes than her mouth. For the Skype date, she had put on a green salwar kameez, rimmed her eyes with kajal, and even straightened her hair.
“I’m not photogenic,” she said.
“Well,” he said, and, to add a drawback of his own: “I work in the evening at the newspaper.”
“That’s okay,” said Parvati. If she married him, she realized, she could have every evening to herself. She could live far away from her father and his demands. Her father would agree to the marriage—anything to get her away from Joseph—but inside he would regret that she was not marrying another engineer, a man closer to her age, or a man with money.
They kept talking on the phone, and after a couple of calls, Ashok started calling Parvati “dear.” They still had not met in person, and this nickname unnerved her. “Don’t call me that, it’s weird,” she told him. “You use the word dear when you know someone, not with a stranger you’ve called twice.”
“But dear has lost its meaning by now,” said Ashok. From the Oxford Dictionaries: Old English deore, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch dier “beloved,” also to Dutch duurand German teuer “expensive.” Ashok knew theirs would be an expensive wedding, more than his engagement to Nada had cost.
“But you don’t even know me,” Parvati said.
March 2013, Gchat:
Ashok: Do you have a deadline or are you under pressure to say yes?
Parvati: My parents suggest I should be able to decide by talking twice or thrice though that is not my way . . . I thought I’d decide by gut feeling this time
Ashok: What is your gut feeling?
Parvati: Not sure . . .
Ashok: I believed in arranged marriages. The discovery of the other person
Parvati: I believed in love marriages
Ashok: No good-looking handsome seniors?
Parvati: Well . . . no Brahmins
Parvati still hadn’t told Ashok about Joseph. She wasn’t lying when she said there’d been no handsome Brahmin seniors. She worried that Ashok would react like the US boy and tell his family about her past affair.
At the same time, Ashok had only told her a little about his failed engagement with Nada. He worried that if he told her more, Parvati would leave him just like Nada.
“Hey, Ashok?” Parvati asked, as she rode a train back home after a weekend trip to Alleppey, a southern city of backwaters. “How come, Ashok—you’re thirty-three, good-looking, you speak really well—how come you didn’t fall in love?”
Ashok sat in his Mumbai apartment studying the photos she had texted him from her trip. In the first, she had captured a typical Kerala-style home, sun dappling its thatched roof, the grass flooded with light. In the second, she’d photographed a kelly green house with a bright red and blue roof and an apricot-colored kurta hanging on the line. The whole scene was reflected in the backwaters, a perfect mirror image. In the third, she’d taken a photo of sagging Chinese fishing nets suspended over the water. Again, the scene was reflected in the water—a lovely composition of land, backwaters, and sky. He was astonished by how beautiful her photos were. She also sang and drew so well. She did not seem like an engineer.
“Oh, you know, I’m a Tam Brahm,” Ashok said, trying to make his voice sound indifferent. He hoped she would leave it at that. “What about you? Why didn’t you find a guy?”
Parvati paused and looked out the window. The train sped past rivers and clusters of spindly coconut trees. “I’ve got something to confide,” she said. “I have this huge history and . . . I’m trying to get over it.”
She told Ashok all about Joseph, about Chennai and Germany and Sweden and the e-mail Joseph sent to her father. She told him about the US boy and her breakdown and move back home.
When she finished, Ashok said: “But if you had a thing, if you had a guy, you should have gone with him and not worried what your parents thought of it. After all, it’s your life. You should be the one to decide.”
Parvati was bewildered. This was not what Tam Brahm men said. Tam Brahm men saw past affairs as shameful and believed that parents were the ones to choose.
“It’s too late, and now that guy is unavailable,” she said, a little bitterly. “Where were you last year?”
Ashok laughed at this, but then grew serious. “What’s past is past, and I think we should move on, Parvati. Let’s just think about our future together.”
“Hmm,” Parvati said, her voice wistful. He could tell she liked what he said.
E-mail from Parvati to Ashok, May 2013:
Subject line: ???
Ashok!!! Ashok!!! Ashok!!
Today I poured down my worries to you. My past.
E-mail from Ashok to Parvati, May 2013:
UCA, would you want to visit Mumbai before the wedding?
UCA, meaning “under certain assumptions.” Ashok had come up with it. Assumption: if they met and didn’t like each other, they wouldn’t take the marriage forward.
***
Once, when Parvati’s father invited a boy over to see her, she had made no effort to dress up. Her father was furious. “Why are you dressed so bad?” he shouted. “Is this a way to dress when people come to see you?” He went on: “Your mom looks better than you. She’s looking as if she is the bride, and you are the servant girl wearing a bad salwar. You better change into something nice.” She had gone upstairs and changed.
This time, with Ashok coming with his parents all the way from Mumbai to meet her for the first time, Parvati took care to dress well. She put on a green sari with a red border and golden thread, the kind you might wear to a reception. She put in her contacts and rimmed her eyes with kajal. She even went to the spa to get her hair done. Before he arrived, she found herself looking in the mirror again and again.
When Ashok walked through the door, she could tell her effort had the desired effect. Oh my god, he thought. She was far more beautiful than he had realized on Skype, with her fair olive skin, eyes the color of honey, and thick, dark hair that fell around her face. But she was also cute and nerdish. The combination had an impact.
“We finally meet,” he said, gazing at her.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. She was also surprised. In his pictures and on Skype Ashok had seemed very bookish, with his glasses and slicked-over hair. In person, he was that way, but also very handsome in his pressed white shirt. Mostly, Parvati noticed his face. It seemed like there was a lot of light in it.
A line from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam—a film about two men who loved the same girl—said that if you kept looking at someone a certain way, then you would fall in love. Both Ashok and Parvati had seen the film more than once.
Parvati didn’t speak much during his visit. This is actually a show, she thought, and looked at the ground, as prospective brides on display were supposed to do. She worried that if she spoke, she might say the wrong thing.
But it didn’t matter, because everyone else did a lot of talking. Ashok’s mother chattered to Parvati: “I saw your horoscopes, I gave it to an astrologer, he said you will have a lot of healthy kids.” Parvati mutely nodded.
Meanwhile, Parvati’s father was going over next steps, though Ashok’s father kept interrupting him, speaking loudly as he always did when overeager. He kept praising Parvati’s father to the assembled crowd: “The man is VERY methodical, took his TIME, but made sure to get a HOROSCOPE, THEN a meeting. He got the job DONE.” Though Parvati’s father preferred to speak in Tamil, Ashok’s father kept speaking in English. Parvati could tell her father found Ashok’s father’s behavior absurd. He was still going on: “MARRIAGE is a GOOD thing. TWO PEOPLE getting MARRIED is a BETTER THING. And between a GIRL AND A GUY even BETTER.” He was so agitated he had stopped making sense.
The couple was sent out alone. As Parvati drove them over to the local Café Coffee Day, Ashok talked on and on about Mumbai. She saw that he rambled the same way his father did. “Bombay is a place you’re going to fall in love with. It is very open, welcoming of people from all over,” he said. “Bombay has been very nice to me. People from Bombay are very nice. It’s more cosmopolitan... Also you can make friends easily.”
When is he going to stop talking? thought Parvati.
When is she going to talk? Ashok thought, and babbled on.
As they got out of the car, Parvati realized Ashok must have thought she was a small-town girl, with a small-town mind-set, who had never lived in a city before. She cut in, “Ashok, I was in Bangalore for almost two years. I like to be independent. Any place can be a strange land. If we are a good match, then it will be okay.”
“Okay,” he said, and his phone rang. It was his father. “Is everything going WELL, Ashok?”
“We just got here,” Ashok said. “We haven’t even had a sip of coffee. Don’t put a gun to my head.”
“You’ve known each other for TWO MONTHS. You’ve CHATTED. WHY are you HESITATING?”
Ashok hung up the phone.
His father called back. “WHEN are you GOING to come BACK?”
“APPA. We’ll start home in another ten minutes.”
It seemed unfair that his father was acting like this. After all, his father had married his mother only after they had dated for eight long years. They met when she was just fifteen. Both had been smitten. But her parents had not approved and had promised to disown her if she went through with the marriage. And so Ashok’s parents had dated, and deliberated, and dated some more. When at last they married, his mother’s parents had kept their promise. They did not come to the wedding and never spoke to their daughter again. They even cut her out of their will. But Ashok’s mother and father had had almost a decade to think about it and did not regret their choice. Eight years, Ashok thought. And now he wanted his son to agree to a girl after just thirty minutes.
“We need one more day,” they told the assembled family.
Ashok’s father lost his temper. He began to shout at Ashok, who told him, firmly, “Dad, we’ll tell our position tomorrow.”
“WHY do you need one more DAY, you’ve been TALKING, now you’ve MET her, this is not how you should ACT, not when we’ve come ALL the WAY from Thrissur.”
Everyone stared at Ashok’s father.
Am I saying yes to the wrong guy? thought Parvati. She thought of Joseph, and how much more serious he was than Ashok. She considered how Ashok would behave more like his father as he aged. But then she remembered the line on Ashok’s profile about giving his partner a free hand and expecting the same from her. She decided she had to trust him.
Ashok and Parvati were told to go upstairs and decide right then, not tomorrow.
“This isn’t romantic, not with the way my dad is acting,” Ashok said, as they stood facing each other, each on one side of a doorframe.
“It’s okay,” Parvati said. “That’s how parents are.”
“So we’ve met, and I feel this is going to be a positive thing,” Ashok said, looking Parvati in the eye. Somehow he was certain she’d say yes. “So it’s a yes from our side.”
Parvati looked back at him. Earlier that day, they had hugged, and she had noticed that Ashok did not smell at all like Joseph. In that moment, she knew she would never love like she had loved Joseph again. Life with Ashok would be wholly different. But this was the life she’d been offered. And maybe, someday, she could also love him.
“It’s a yes for me too,” she said, keeping her voice even. “I like you. And I feel like we’ll be happy together.”
They walked down the stairs together and Ashok told the assembled family, “We’ve made a decision. It’s a yes from both of us.”
They sat down to a proper South Indian meal: rice and dal and sambar, to celebrate the union of two Tamil Brahmin families. Someone asked them to stand next to each other, and all the relatives nodded and clicked their mouths in approval: “Haa, yeah, he’s a little bit taller.”
***
UCA, would you want to visit Mumbai before the wedding?
In May, Parvati visited Mumbai for an interview at an engineering institute in Mumbai, where she could get a PhD. The city was not like Ashok described it. Not outside the airport anyway, where a sea of taxi drivers stood chewing paan and speaking in rough Hindi. They reminded Parvati of every villain she’d seen in the Bollywood films.
But then she spotted Ashok in the crowd, grinning as he held his long bansuri over his shoulder. He looked happy here, so maybe she could be too.
On the first day of the trip, which Parvati had made with her father, she noticed how skinny Ashok was. Perhaps it was that everything was bigger here: the new residential skyscrapers that towered over the city, the huge, multilane freeways and expressways that cut across town, and the colossal cable-stayed bridge that linked the suburbs to the downtown—its cables the shape of an upside-down V in the sky. The bridge’s wires could span the circumference of the Earth; this was exactly how vast the city felt. He is looking so puny, and I so heavy, she thought. Should I reduce or ask him to fill up?
To Ashok, Parvati hadn’t seemed heavy down south, where all the Tamil girls had a belly. She was not at all large, just of average build. But in Mumbai she somehow seemed plump compared to the thin, modish city girls—girls who wore lipstick and heels, straightened their hair, and went out to clubs in tiny tops and tight jeans. He worried that they would not look good in photos together and told himself he should start lifting weights.
On the second day, when the sun was high in the sky, Parvati took Ashok’s hand as they were crossing the road, just to see what it felt like. Parvati’s father was walking ahead of them, and Ashok was surprised. But when her father turned back to them, they hurriedly detached.
On the third day, Parvati had her interview at the institute. She and her father were staying at a guesthouse on the campus. It was her father’s plan for her to get a PhD in engineering there. PhDs were cheaper in India than abroad, and it would be the perfect way to anchor her in Mumbai. Parvati had not had a say. Parvati’s father had come around to the value of women working, but on his terms. If she got in, she would begin attending in the fall, just after she and Ashok were married. Now, as they waited for her interview, Parvati, her father, and Ashok sat talking over coffee on the institute’s campus, which looked a lot like IIT Chennai, with the same banyan trees, wide promenades, and scatter of school buildings.
“Hey, Ashok, why don’t you have a car?” Parvati asked. It was a casual question, perhaps just to make conversation, but Ashok felt ashamed. There was no reason he shouldn’t have one; the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, had come out in India that year. And he knew Parvati had grown up with a car at home, plus two scooters. He wished Parvati’s father wasn’t sitting there, waiting for his answer. “You don’t really need a car in Mumbai,” Ashok began. “There are trains, buses, rickshaws—”
“But why can’t you drive?” she pressed. This is a real weakness in me, Ashok thought. He knew what a car meant: status, privilege, freedom. He didn’t make enough money to afford one. But he promised himself he’d buy her one someday.
The engagement came soon after, in a big hall in Trivandrum, where Ashok and Parvati sat on the floor with a mountain of sticky-sweet laddoos between them. They were surrounded by piles of fruits, some of them expensive and out of season: apples, grapes, even tender plums. Parvati wore a nine-yard blue sari, and Ashok had on an expensive blue dress shirt. They both wore garlands of white carnations around their necks. As Ashok grinned and talked with ease to the party guests, Parvati watched him, not knowing how to feel. At the end of the ceremony she sang a Carnatic song about Lord Vishnu, protector and preserver. Ashok had already performed in his confident but unpracticed way the “Raag Desh,” a romantic nighttime song. He had wanted to accompany Parvati with his flute, but it had been too hard to pull off. Parvati thought the songs had come out better separately.
That night, after the ceremony, Ashok tried to take Parvati’s hand as they walked out from the engagement hall. “This is Trivandrum. This is not Bombay,” Parvati said, and shook him off. “If you hold my hand at this time of night, people will come and bash you for taking advantage of a girl.” “But what is wrong? We’re engaged,” said Ashok. “Not here, Ashok,” she said. She had lived in Kerala long enough to know. “And if they see me smiling, then it means I’m a different kind of girl.” Frustrated at her prudishness, Ashok dropped her hand.
What if this doesn’t go well? What if we decide to call it off because of some fight? thought Ashok. There was still time before the wedding. Time for everything to go wrong.
In the months between the engagement and marriage, Ashok’s thoughts ran. He thought of the last engagement, and of Nada’s last-minute call. Parvati could phone anytime now and say she was still in love with Joseph. She could say that if she and Ashok got married they might end up fighting and get divorced. Or she might not get into the institute, and then she’d have no good reason to come. She would call off the wedding, his father’s name would be beyond repair, and he would never marry.
But Parvati was accepted to the institute and moved in July to the city, where she planned to stay in a campus hostel until their wedding day. She arrived with her parents and her baggage at Kurla, one of Mumbai’s most chaotic train stations. Ashok had booked them a taxi from the station, hoping to impress her father. As her parents unloaded her bags, Parvati took note of the scene before her. The station was filled with trash, stray dogs, and limbless beggars. The signs had dried paan spit on them. When a train arrived, men and women hurled their bodies onto it—pushing, shoving, and shouting obscenities at one another. In the rush to get on, many people were left behind on the crowded platform. Some who made it on hung off the side of the train compartments or sat on top, risking electrocution.
A nearby overpass was also under construction, adding to the chaos and noise. But Parvati was thrilled. She could not wait to leave her sleepy Southern city behind. As she got down from the train, she placed her hand into Ashok’s, who squeezed it as a welcome to the city.
After Parvati’s parents left to go back home, before the wedding, it began to rain in Mumbai. The monsoons always arrived in the city in July, but this year the rains were heavier, harder. Meteorologists blamed it on El Niño or a subtropical westerly jet. Parvati had seen enough Bollywood films to know that the monsoon in Mumbai led to romance: shared umbrellas, wet saris, the dreamy way the trees and seashore glistened in the rain. When Ashok came to see her at her hostel, he found her bags packed for an overnight stay.
“Oh,” he said, looking up at her, surprised. “I wanted to ask you, but I was not sure if you would want to come.”
“You’re the only reason I came to Bombay,” she said. “So I just want to be with you, and get to know you.”
When they left the hostel it was still pouring, the kind of rain that covered everything in mud. The kind that splattered kurtas and ruined chappals and exasperated the city’s maids, who clucked at all the work they had to do. The rain soaked through Parvati’s jeans to her skin, but she did not mind.
Ashok’s apartment, in a busy eastern suburb, was neat and clean and compact. Parvati liked him better for it. She imagined them living together in just a bare single room and found herself charmed by the thought. She decided she wanted to try kissing him inside the cozy apartment as the rain beat hard against the window. But then she remembered when he’d surprised her with a kiss in Trivandrum, and how his breath had been awful. She’d told him, prudishly, “You have to brush your teeth twice.” “Do you think couples sharing a toothbrush is romantic?” he had joked back, trying to save the moment. “No,” she’d said, unsmiling. “It’s unhygienic.”
Now, inside his apartment, Parvati said, “I’ll kiss you only if you brush your teeth.” He did, and they kissed, and it was better. Afterward she used his toothbrush without shame, and even felt that he was right: it was romantic to share.
“Hey, Ashok,” Parvati said. “Let’s take a shower together.” Her jeans were soaked, and it was chilly being wet, but that was just an excuse.
What will this be like? Ashok worried, as he had with the Gujarati girl as they danced in his living room.
The shower was very small, and the two of them filled up the space. As the water ran, they hugged each other. Parvati was ready to go further. Forget the kanyadaan at the wedding; plenty of women were given away not as virgins. But Ashok seemed uncomfortable. He had not expected a girl from a conventional background to be so forward. He worried she was only acting this way for him. I don’t want to take advantage of her, he thought. And he didn’t want to do anything that could ruin their chances of making it to the marriage hall.
His unsureness endeared him to Parvati. “You go,” she said, after he had finished washing. “I’ll take some more time.” Ashok kept Pears brand soap in the shower, the blue kind that smelled of mint extract. When Parvati smelled it afterward, she would always think of that night.
After they got out, Ashok started making his bed on the floor, still thinking that he should not presume.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Parvati, who got down on the floor to sleep beside him, and it was settled. They lay awake for a long time, talking and hugging, as the rain pounded down outside.
For the next few weeks, Parvati came to stay with Ashok on the weekends. In August, just before their wedding day, Parvati bought Ashok a small red wooden car for his thirty-third birthday, shaped like a Rolls-Royce from the 1930s. She hoped it would show him that she didn’t mind that he didn’t have a car. Forget status and privilege. She also drew a homemade card. When she got to his apartment, she handed him the model car and card and said, “We’re not going to get a car, so let’s have this.” Afterward, she gave him a big hug. But Ashok didn’t say anything, not even thank you.
I thought he would think it was romantic, Parvati thought, but it was clear he didn’t. She felt stupid about the gift, the card, all of it. She realized Ashok was not the kind of guy who would quote her scenes from movies like Up, the way Joseph had. He was not the kind of husband who would be romantic.
***
On the day of the wedding, Parvati woke up annoyed. The beautician began her work at 3 a.m. sharp, because the first ceremony was to begin at 5:30 a.m.—the early time chosen by an astrologer. Parvati fidgeted as she was caked with makeup, draped in gold jewelry, and wrapped in a nine-yard red and gold sari her mother had chosen. She hated wearing the color gold, which felt ostentatious and gaudy. I feel like a clown, she thought.
When the ceremony began, Parvati was kept to the back at first, while Ashok looked out at the crowd. Parvati came from a prominent family, so some three thousand people had shown up. Ashok did not know most of them. Her family came out in droves, he thought, and was upset that he did not have more guests there.
The wedding officially began with a pooja, followed by the custom of the bachelor pretending to leave for Varanasi, saying he did not want to get married and instead would become a wandering ascetic. Ashok, bare-chested except for his yajnopavita, or sacred thread, and wearing a dhoti, acted the part, holding his stick, begging bowl, and copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a book that discussed the self, nature, and God. “I don’t want to get married,” Ashok said, though his voice was halfhearted. Parvati’s father, also bare-chested, his sacred thread also crossing his chest, replied with more vigor: “No, there’s a girl waiting for you. Don’t give up everything. Just take a look at my girl, and you’ll change your mind.”
Ashok did, and told the crowd that he had decided to get married after all. He and Parvati exchanged garlands of roses, marigolds, and jasmine. Parvati’s face shone as she smiled, and Ashok saw how beautiful she was when she was happy. There were white carnations in her hair. She was weighed down with bloodred bangles and gold jewelry. As Ashok smiled back at her, he decided he didn’t care that she had more guests there. He was proud that his extended family—who had witnessed his failed engagement to Nada—was here to see him make it to the marriage hall. Now that they had exchanged garlands, he and Parvati were said to be two souls in one body.
The wedding lasted six hours and was filled with tradition and ceremony. They performed one ritual in which Ashok bent down to touch Parvati’s feet in respect, which was the tradition Parvati liked best. They also did the kanyadaan, in which Parvati’s father symbolically gave away his virgin daughter. At last came the most auspicious time, when they were required to physically tie the knot—three knots, in fact—on a gold necklace with three threads, for which Ashok’s mother had bought a big jewel. As Parvati sat on her father’s lap for the tying, he smiled out at the crowd, looking confident and happy. His hands rested on Parvati’s shoulders. Just for a moment, Parvati looked back and gave him a knowing sidelong glance—a look that was captured by the photographer. It was an expression that said that although he had won, she had won too, because, like many women now, she was marrying a man he didn’t quite approve of.
Then Parvati looked forward again and lowered her head as was expected. Soon, a priest began chanting mantras in Sanskrit. A nadaswaram played, its sound as celebratory and loud as a trumpet but reedier. It was an instrument of good fortune, and together with the mantras it built the emotion in the room. As the music swelled, Parvati closed her eyes. As Ashok tied the knot, she could feel him standing close beside her. For once, I’m not going to be lonely anymore, she thought, and hoped this would be true. It’s going to be the two of us, through thick and thin.
Their honeymoon, in Coorg, was to be a trip of firsts: first time to the land of coffee plantations, first vacation together, and—they both hoped—first time they’d have sex.
It was the year Ashok turned thirty-three and Parvati twenty-six. It was the year India launched its first mission to Mars, whose position in either of their star charts could have made them unmarriageable. And it was the year astrologers predicted vulgarity and Western influence would spread like a virus, infecting Indian youth, and a leading politician proclaimed that women who drank liquor and wore jeans were bad for Indian culture. Parvati packed her favorite blue jeans for the trip, and on their first night in Coorg drank wine for the first time ever. As they ate a meal in a treehouse restaurant, she grew tipsy, and then they kissed as if they were not in India but some Western country far away.
To them, the name Coorg sounded magical. Coorg was also called Kodagu, but the Anglicized version had stuck ever since British officials treated it as their getaway. The Brits had also dubbed Coorg “the Scotland of India” for its rolling mists and hills. Ashok marveled at how just two days ago they’d gotten married in front of three thousand people, and now they were on a sprawling coffee plantation, almost entirely alone.
The next day, Parvati woke up to her period. She had bad cramps and worried that it would ruin the trip. If she were at home, she’d be untouchable. But Ashok told her that was silly; no one believed that anymore. He suggested they spend the entire day in bed. They ordered all the food they could off the room service menu: vegetarian soup, fried rice, palak paneer, chapati breads, ice cream, and cake. Ashok told the server, “Chalo, bring them all.” Their plates came heaped up high like a mountain.
The next night, Parvati felt better, and they went out to the private pool beside their cottage. Parvati wore just her panties and a bra, her wedding henna still dark on her hands. Ashok stripped down to his boxers. As they swam, they kissed, but Ashok didn’t try to initiate having sex. He would wait for Mumbai. Instead, he taught Parvati how to float, and they stayed in the pool gliding on the surface for a long time, even though the water was cold. The next day, Ashok took a photo of Parvati on a swing near the cottage wearing blue jeans, a blue dupatta, and a seductive eye-smile for the camera.
When they returned to Mumbai, it was the last day of the festival of Ganpati. The streets from the airport were crowded with processions. Massive elephant-headed idols were carried in the air, on horseback, and on floats through swelling crowds. People sang and danced and drummed for Lord Ganesh, god of new beginnings, remover of obstacles. It was as if the entire city were celebrating their union, and their ability to make love, at last.
***
Sex between them wasn’t clumsy at first, not the way Ashok thought it might be. But it did become smoother over time. You don’t hit the ground running, he told himself, remembering one of his father’s flash card idioms, as they had sex the first time in the bedroom of their new apartment, just after their honeymoon. You walk, you limp a bit, then you jog, you hit a stride. Soon, they were having sex two or three times a week, and Ashok was amazed at how comfortable it felt. They didn’t care if the lights were on or off. They didn’t worry about how their bodies looked. And they always fell back to talking right after sex, about what took place at his office or her lab at university that day. Or sex segued right into banter, with her making fun of how excitable he got around groups of people, like he had at their wedding, or him jabbing her for how spoiled she acted because of her wealthy upbringing. He secretly found this behavior sexy.
But Parvati didn’t think they were hitting a stride. To her, it seemed that their sex didn’t have passion, at least not like she had seen in the movies. She didn’t like that they transitioned from making love to talking of trivial matters. And she thought the way they had sex felt almost mechanical. With Joseph, she was sure it would have been different, electric. But she was married to Ashok now.
And she was in Mumbai, not Germany, in a north-central suburb that looked a little like home. It was greener and less smoggy than the rest of the city and built along an artificial lake. Crocodiles sometimes basked in the sun there, and bird-watchers came to find jacanas, kingfishers, and cormorants. The lake’s water, though long ago declared unfit to drink, was a deep, even blue.
Because it was a kind of oasis of calm in the city, their suburb was filled with firangis and wealthy Indians. Many of them lived in one apartment complex, a set of ornate, neoclassical high-rises that towered over the suburb’s downtown. The high-rises had romantic names like Florentine and Eva. But Ashok and Parvati could not afford to live in the towers, and so they’d moved into an anonymous-looking cooperative complex up on a hill instead. Ashok got them into the complex by telling the society board they were newlyweds. Their apartment, on a high floor, seemed to them spacious and airy.
Parvati worked hard to make the apartment feel like home. She started in the living room, where she hung their marriage photo, which showed her enveloped in deep folds of red and gold, and Ashok, bare-chested, grinning beside her. In the kitchen, she stuck Post-it notes with recipes dictated by her mother to the wall so she could cook the kind of elaborate meals Ashok’s mother had at home; this was the measure of a wife. In little corners of the house, she placed sentimental trinkets: the model car she’d bought for Ashok, a lucky lotus flower made of glass, a statue of a little boy and girl holding hands. On their wooden altar, she placed Ram and Sita, the stars of the epic Ramayana, who had fallen in love at first sight.
In the beginning, Parvati would also stay up late, until Ashok got home from his night shift at the newspaper, so they could watch TV and gorge on ice cream together. Every day she brought home a different flavor from the Naturals ice cream shop down the road: tender coconut, anjeer, mango, or papaya pineapple.
She felt like she was playing house, and it was working. She thought it’d keep working as long as she didn’t think of the past too much. It was like in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, a Bollywood film that came out just before she and Ashok married, when one character warned that memories were like a box of sweets. If the box was opened, you couldn’t eat just one piece.
But sometimes, Parvati needed to be alone and think, and went up to the terrace of their apartment building to do what she called “skywatching.” She had done this as a child in Kerala, gazing up at the sky as her father told her and her sister all about the stars and solar system and helped them identify Venus and Mars. Now, as she lay on her back on their cool marble roof, she tried to see stars or spot a comet. But she could not see anything because of the heavy pollution in Mumbai.
Mumbai was light polluted from its traffic, signboards, and brightly lit offices and residences. It was air polluted from the number of vehicles, road construction, and open burning of fuel and waste. It was so polluted that living in Mumbai was said to be equivalent to smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. It was said to cause respiratory symptoms, heart and lung disease, and premature mortality. Parvati sometimes dreamed of another life—of moving out to the country, even—where she could see clear skies.
There were other moments that broke the spell of being newly married, when Parvati realized she did not really know Ashok. After a visit to his family in Trivandrum, where he told each of his relatives how wonderful they were, he disparaged them in private to Parvati. “But—what are you doing?” she asked, surprised at his duplicity.
“I was talking to my grandma. She is eighty-seven years old,” said Ashok. “There is no point in telling her something bad.”
At first, Parvati couldn’t get past this. But as she thought about it, she realized this was something that wouldn’t change. She knew she couldn’t keep listening to this false praise for the rest of her life. From then on, she left the room when the praising began.
***
The week before her first exams at the institute, and just a few months into their marriage, Parvati told Ashok she needed a break.
“Sure, Chiboo,” said Ashok, using Parvati’s childhood nickname, which she’d always hoped her husband would use someday.
And so they took off for Matheran, a hill station east of Mumbai with sweeping vistas of the plains and valleys. They took a train partway up the hill and rode horses the rest of the way up. It was peak season, and the whole of Matheran was packed with tourists. Their hotel, which looked seedy, was full of nervous couples and rickety furniture. It was difficult to get a moment alone.
The next day, they decided to get up at sunrise, 5 a.m. But when they got to the top of the mountain, it was still dark, and a lone chai-wallah told them that in December the sun didn’t rise until six. And so they sat quietly and drank tea in the dark, watching as the local people woke and swept and walked to their baths. It reminded them both of the south, and Ashok began to speak of his childhood in Tenkasi.
In Tenkasi Ashok had gone to a Protestant school just before the new millennium, and the pastors had read to the children from the book of Revelations, warning of the water and the deluge. In Tenkasi Ashok dove into a pond that was twenty feet deep, although he couldn’t swim. His friend had dared him, and for long seconds he sank under and under, his mind going blank, until his friend had pulled him out, laughing as he choked up water. In Tenkasi his father had quizzed him and his brother from the flash cards: “What does it mean when you say you have HATCHED a SCHEME?” “Okay, tell me the meaning of through THICK and THIN.” Ashok would always try to answer first.
Ashok also told her about his years in Chennai and Trivandrum, though he omitted the part about the chai-wallah and the man in the movie theater. Instead he told her about how his father moved from business to business, and when the business flopped and the family had almost no money, they were forced to move again. As he spoke, Parvati regretted having talked so much about growing up wealthy—about the car and scooters, having chai brought to her in bed, and a fancy case for her violin. She began to see Ashok differently.
Ashok asked Parvati why she had needed a trip away.
“Chetan,” she said, using the Malayalam term of respect she had taken to calling him, a kind of distancing nickname he didn’t quite like. “My past is coming back to me and giving me a lot of trouble. So I am not able to focus at university.”
Ashok nodded, but Parvati knew he didn’t understand. He couldn’t, because she wasn’t telling him everything. She didn’t tell him that nothing felt right—not engineering college, not Mumbai, not him. I was not supposed to get married to this guy, she thought, as the orb of the sun crept over the mountains.
Some days, Parvati felt a strong aversion to this new life they had constructed in Mumbai. On those days she missed Joseph and wanted nothing to do with Ashok. She hated playing house.
“I want to take a break from college,” she said now. “Take leave for a little while.”
“Okay, Chiboo, you go ahead,” said Ashok. “Take a break.”
But on other days, she knew she was the problem. On these days, Parvati felt grateful to Ashok and almost loved him for allowing her the room to be confused. He had not even hesitated in supporting her decision to take time off from college.
They filled the rest of their trip to Matheran with activities. They rode horses, climbed a mountain, and went rafting along with other nervous, newly married couples. In each photo from the trip, Parvati attempts a smile. After they returned to Mumbai, they sent the photos to their parents, and Ashok’s father wrote a glowing e-mail to Parvati: “Both you and Ashok look so happy, so young . . . I am very happy for you. DAD.”
Shortly afterward, Ashok’s aunt and uncle came to stay. Like Ashok’s father, they could talk for hours. But unlike him, they mostly spoke about themselves. The last day they were in town, Parvati went to the mall after college to find a book to read at a coffee shop—anything to not go home to them. She picked up Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, which was about the colonial opium trade and the people it hurt, and she read and read, until she stopped on a page that ended: “It was useless, she knew, to be seized by regret now, on the very night when her fate had been wedded to his . . .”
That night, as Ashok’s aunt and uncle talked endlessly about themselves, Parvati had nothing to say. I am listening to them and falling sick, she thought. The next morning, she woke up with a bad cold and fell back to sleep. The aunt and uncle woke expecting breakfast. They pestered Ashok, saying, “We are here, we want our breakfast and then we need to go. How can she be sleeping?”
Ashok tried to shake Parvati awake. “They want some breakfast. Do you want to make it?” he asked.
“No,” Parvati said with a groan, and rolled over. Since the wedding she had gone back to sleeping almost ten hours a night, like she had at IIT Chennai when Joseph was away.
Ashok made coffee but soon ran out of milk. He offered to make dosas, but his aunt said she’d make them herself. They left indignant that Ashok’s new bride was so uncultured she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed.
When Parvati woke up at around 9 a.m., she sleepily shuffled into the kitchen. “Is there any milk at home?” she asked.
“No, you have green tea,” Ashok said, his voice tight. Later, he confronted her. “You could have at least got up and said hi or something. What’s the harm in at least making tea? They were just going to be here for a day or two. You could pretend to like them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, surprised to see Ashok angry. “I wasn’t feeling well, and I needed to sleep for longer.”
Ashok’s expression softened. “If that’s the case, then fine,” he said, and in his easy way let the incident go. Neither he nor Parvati brought it up again, but after that, Parvati was certain his family had branded her as unfit to be a household girl. She told herself she didn’t want to be one anyway.
***
On New Year’s Eve, Parvati woke up feeling hopeful. Exams were over, her classes were finished for the semester, and she’d applied for a break from college after that. Maybe she wouldn’t go back at all. The promise of freedom thrilled her. Outside their cooperative complex, puppies had been born. New high-rises were going up. New Western chains were opening across Powai. New, new, new. That day, Parvati cleaned the apartment, even the places that were hard to reach. She bought a small chocolate cake and made a handmade poster that said “Happy New Year.”
But when Ashok came home, he looked at the cake and poster and said, “Oh, wow, Happy New Year,” and then, “Let’s go to sleep.” It was not yet midnight, but he was exhausted from work. He also didn’t like New Year’s. One more year of resolutions you’ll never keep, he thought. Ashok felt that one part of him was still a child, while the other was as cynical as an old man.
The next day, Parvati started a diary for her time off from college, writing in a small green and maroon floral notebook: “January 1, 2014. First New Year after marriage. Nothing much but cut a cake and then went to sleep.”
January 2014, Gchat:
Ashok: Let’s decide not to continue with the PhD
Parvati: Not ready for PhD. Chttn I feel so stupid
Ashok: Chill maadi
Parvati: Chttn ur my sunshine . . . one of the rare ppl who has told me not to keep lot of options except to opt to be myself.
Ashok: U are making me blush:
Parvati: When i told yes to you at my place in tvm when u came to see me i said yes to everything about you . . . Good or bad . . . I might murmur stuff i don’t like because it’s new to me . . . Once I get used . . . My yes will take its full form literally.
Ashok: OUOUOUOYIU.
Parvati and Ashok sometimes were more affectionate online than in real life. Online, they could try out what they wanted to say without the in-person rejection. Online, they could test out the kind of couple they wanted to be.
In the official paperwork requesting Parvati’s leave, Ashok wrote that his wife was having a difficult time adjusting to their arranged marriage. He did not need to provide details because this was a problem even the stodgiest university bureaucrat could understand. After some deliberation, the leave was approved.
Parvati spent the first month of her break rearranging the furniture in the house, cooking her mother’s recipes without much success, and sleeping long hours in her baggy pajamas. She tried Gchatting Ashok, but he was often busy with work. And so instead she loaded Joseph’s Facebook page and clicked through photos of him and his Catholic wife.
First was a photo of him and her in a pristine green field, her arms wrapped around his stomach. Next was a photo of them with her family, all dressed in fancy saris and kurtas. After that they were pictured on a campus in Germany wearing winter jackets and on the ground a light dusting of snow.
On a few occasions, Parvati talked to Joseph over Skype. They spoke tentatively at first—so much time had passed—but then the conversation became more natural. When Joseph asked Parvati about her marriage, she told him everything was good. She could not bring herself to ask about his wife. On one call, Joseph told her that he’d heard the ancient banyan tree at IIT Chennai, the one whose roots went deep into the ground, was going to be cut down. He said the students were agitating against it. After Parvati hung up from these calls, she often felt depressed.
When Ashok came home from work one night, she was crying. “I have no way to figure this out,” she said.
“You have to,” he told her. “You can.”
Parvati just kept crying.
“What’s happened in the past, let’s put it behind us,” Ashok said. “Let’s bury it and move on. To live a life together you have to focus on the future.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.” But along with the weather of Mumbai and her hometown, she kept the weather of Berlin on her phone.
She called her sister many times during her break, even though her sister was busy with work, her husband, and a new baby. Sometimes, Parvati cried and ranted; other times she hinted at suicide. “There is no point in living anymore,” she said. She blamed her sister for not supporting her relationship with Joseph. She blamed her father for keeping her from marrying Joseph and pushing her to go to the IITs, when so many other women were choosing their work and husbands. “Don’t be like this,” her sister said. “It is you who have tortured you the most.” She reminded Parvati that she had chosen Ashok and her university programme. And then Parvati blamed herself. By the time Ashok got home from work, Parvati had cried herself to sleep.
February 2014, Gchat:
Parvati: Do you feel any comm gap between us . . . I feel u don’t want to listen or u r getting bored . . . I feel I am bothering you
Ashok: I want to listen to you . . . Seriously . . . I was writing and you were unloading
Parvati: So I have to keep some time off to tell u about what bothers me
Ashok: I have the fear that if I don’t continue writing I might not reach anywhere
Parvati: Chttn I don’t think I have ever disturbed you while u r at work writing
Ashok’s novel about the dysfunctional couple was not being written. Parvati’s emotions were taking up most of his writing time. In the mornings before work, when he used to write, he often found her crying. He would sit down and they’d talk, and a whole morning was lost, and then another. At night, after work, when the house was quiet, he was mostly too tired to write.
February 2014, Gchat:
Ashok: [If I see you cry] I will also break down . . . That is a sight I can’t take
Parvati: Sounds like I am always going to be alone when I cry
Weeks into her break, Parvati began to draw again. This time, she didn’t sketch Hindu gods and goddesses or dancers of Kathakali but instead drew celebrities from American movies she and Ashok watched together. She drew Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, and the cast of Friends. She watched YouTube tutorials that instructed her on how to draw lips, mouths, and eyes, instructing her to “break up the major planes into minor planes,” “look at the landscape surface,” and “make sure to observe all the angles.” She began to think that drawing was a bit like engineering.
She also started riding the train with Ashok to work downtown so she could visit the galleries in Kala Ghoda, an art district shaped like a crescent moon. In Kala Ghoda, time seemed to move slower than the rest of the city. The architecture was colonial, Indo-Saracenic, and neoclassical. The cafés had high windows and were expensive and airy. The streets were wide, but little traffic entered, and a person could walk for long minutes uninterrupted. Today, Kala Ghoda looked like how people described the old, colonial Mumbai, when the city hadn’t yet become overpopulated, and when you could still pluck mangos from the trees.
Parvati’s favorite gallery in Kala Ghoda was the Jehangir Art Gallery, which invited visitors to come in and talk to the artists. The gallery’s art included soft watercolors of rural areas, bronze sculptures of Hindu gods, and neon acrylics of proud village women. After Parvati visited, she often went home and drew for hours. As she did, she began to feel more like herself.
Soon, Parvati focused her efforts on drawing portraits, and specifically on eyes. She had heard that the eyes were the most difficult part of the body to capture, because they expressed the most feeling. Kamala Das said eyes were like a “white, white sun burning.” An Indian yogi had said the heart smiled through the eyes. The beloved Sufi poet Rumi had said the same. Rumi had also said, “Rub your eyes, and look again at love, with love.”
As she drew, Parvati began to give Ashok more space, and as she did, she noticed how he came back to her.
February 2014, Gchat:
Ashok: I was thinking about how I rolled on top of you and you rocked me clasped between your legs
Parvati: That’s what you’re thinking about?
Ashok: Yes chikki that’s true
Chikki, an Indian sweet, made of groundnuts and jaggery. Chikki, the color of honey, and of Parvati’s eyes. Parvati had cut her hair during the break, shorter than she’d ever worn it. Ashok told her it looked “naughty and impish,” because few Indian girls wore their hair short. When they had sex now, they tried new positions, even put their mouths on each other.
Parvati got better, Parvati got worse. Whenever she had a bad meltdown, Ashok called it a “crying jag.” One day, he heard Parvati crying so loudly he knew it was going to be the worst jag she’d had yet.
From the Oxford Dictionaries: Jag—a sharp projection . . . Origin—Late Middle English (in the sense “stab, pierce”): perhaps symbolic of sudden movement or unevenness.
The jag started after Parvati got off the phone with Ashok’s family members. As she spoke to them, she realized how foreign they still felt. She hadn’t chosen them, not really. She hardly knew them. And she didn’t feel connected to them at all. The more she thought about it, the more upset she got. After hanging up, she went inside her room and began to sob.
“What’s up, Chiboo?” Ashok said, coming into their bedroom.
Recently, someone had told him that the name of their suburb meant “drama” or “hysterics” in the Gujarati language. My life since moving here has been all drama and hysterics, he thought.
Parvati looked up at him now. Who is this person? He was just a blank space. A space barely filled in over the last year. He was a stranger, one she had traded for her father.
“Why are you crying?”
“It’s about my past,” Parvati said, weeping now, though inwardly she reproached herself to stop.
Ashok sat beside her, not knowing what else to do.
“Ashok,” she said finally, “if I go into one of my phases, don’t ask me what is the reason for my crying.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I cry even when you aren’t here.”
“That’s really something to worry about,” he said, and left to go get his phone to tell his editor he needed the day off.
Ashok sat hugging her as she cried. After that, they went to sleep, even though it was the afternoon. When they woke up, the apartment felt hot and stale, and it had grown dark outside. A car would have been a welcome distraction, but of course they did not have one. They decided to take a walk, meandering through the suburb’s downtown, past the D-Mart grocery store and the new Starbucks. When they got back to the apartment, Ashok turned on a Malayalam movie, which he thought Parvati would like. Soon, she began to talk over it.
“I should not have wept so bad. It must have scared you, Ashok,” she said.
“It’s fine,” he said. “You had to. But your weeping made me very worried.” Sometimes, Ashok felt afraid of his new wife.
“I won’t cry from here on out,” she said, her voice solemn, as if she were making a promise. “I’ll deal with it in a way which is more mature. We’ll talk about it.”
“Okay,” said Ashok, though he wasn’t sure the promise could be trusted.
***
In April, Ashok bought a car.
He’d worried about not having one for months. He knew Parvati’s desire for a car was linked to her desire for him. In all the films—Bollywood, Tamil, Malayalam, even American and British—men took women out on long drives in their cars or on their motorcycles. It was how they fell in love. “You are that kind of girl who wants to . . . take long romantic drives,” he teased Parvati once, and she had said, without hesitation, “Yes, I am that kind of girl.” Ashok had overheard her on the phone with her relatives, telling them how much she missed driving.
So Ashok bought the car. He had to empty his savings account and take out a loan to do it, but voilà, he thought, now they had one. The Tata Nano had turned out to be too cheap—so cheap it did not work. The car they bought was squat and boxy like a golf cart, and one of the most economical vehicles on the market, at 3.3 lakhs. But it worked, and it was theirs. Ashok referred to it as “the poor man’s Merc.”
When they first got married, Ashok told Parvati he was an “amazing driver,” but once they got the car, she saw this wasn’t true. He was anxious and uncertain in all his movements and had no idea how to follow road signs. Sometimes, he’d freeze in the middle of the road in heavy traffic as rickshaws darted around him. Motorcycles would nearly clip the car, and giant, brightly painted carrier trucks would barrel past, their “Horn OK please” signs disappearing in the distance. A cacophony of horns would sound, until at last Ashok unfroze and crossed the intersection.
“I saw how amazing you are,” Parvati told him after one such incident, laughing.
“This doesn’t happen all the time, just today,” Ashok protested.
“You stop saying that you are amazing, that day I’ll believe you,” said Parvati, and Ashok laughed with her.
***
Ashok had a new goal: to not just finish the novel but also find a publisher. He could see the way the novel had changed with each woman he was with—from Nada, when his writing was lighter, to their breakup, when the book turned dark, to his breakup with Mallika, when his writing became despairing. Now, with Parvati, his writing had changed again. Since marriage, he wrote more authentically about relationships—about the complex power struggles, unspoken hurts, and small moments of grace between husband and wife. He also sometimes pilfered little pieces of Parvati’s life that she shared with him, such as how, in her college days, she had tried to build a boat that could fly, but it never took off from the ground.
It had been six months since Parvati’s break began. Ashok was now able to write more often in the mornings, though there were still many days wasted. If he were to find a publisher, he’d need uninterrupted time to write. But when Ashok asked Parvati what her plans were, she told him she was still confused. She said she wasn’t sure whether to go back to school. As Ashok listened to her waver, he grew irritated with her in a way she had not seen before.
At the newspaper, a colleague had recently quoted a Marathi saying about marriage: Love is like a scorpion’s sting. At first it’s painful pleasure. But as the poison begins to seep in you feel the pain more.
“This is not the way things should be,” he told Parvati, his voice severe. “You cannot indefinitely be depressed. You have to consider that there are others living with you.”
Parvati was quiet. She knew he was right.
That week, she called her oldest friend from childhood, whom she had not spoken to in years. Pacing across their living room floor—from their altar with their gods by the door to her wedding photo and back—Parvati told her friend about all that had happened since they last talked. She began with Joseph and ended with Ashok and the loneliness of her long break in Mumbai, a city of eighteen million or more. A city where it seemed anyone could disappear.
Her friend listened, and at the end said, “Do you think there is any future with this guy?”
With Joseph.
“I’m married to Ashok,” said Parvati. In that simple statement, she knew she had her answer.
She would give up on Joseph. She would go back to university. And she would try to love Ashok as best she should.
It was time to pick a role, pick a life.
After Parvati hung up, she felt a kind of calm she hadn’t felt in a long time. And she did not cry after this, fulfilling the promise she’d made to Ashok—not until what happened with the baby.