The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai by Elizabeth Flock
In the back alleys of the market, there were illicit wares for sale, including exotic songbirds, trafficked illegally from across the continent. It was said that the birds traveled hundreds of miles stuffed inside water bottles, their beautiful feathers crushed, with tiny holes poked through for air. After their long journey, they were released, wings spreading, into a wire-frame cage. Shahzad was a sensitive boy and hated knowing that was how they came to the market. But he loved walking past the birds on his way home from school, and would often stop to listen to their calls. He also loved to watch the monkeys that hung off the arriving mango trucks.
It wasn’t that Shahzad’s father didn’t have the money to give his wife for Crawford Market. He came from great wealth; he simply didn’t want to share it. At least not with his family, who lived as though they were barely middle class, though he would give a few rupees to any beggar, street boy, or madman he saw on the road. His wealth was the reason Shahzad’s mother had married him. She was a poor girl from a village who had won this moneyed man with her beauty.
But it was not long into marriage before Shahzad’s mother understood her mistake. She understood when her husband began getting nosebleeds and then fell over, shaking, and went unconscious. They would wake him by putting leather near his face—an old belief held that “shoe smell” revived epileptics. It was then that Shahzad’s mother began to see her husband for what he was: brain-damaged.
Later, when Shahzad’s father became obsessed with foreign cars (buying a boxy Hillman and Austin and a sleek Opel) and started talking to them, when he took to wearing pyjama pants with a winter coat to go to work, and when he viciously mocked his youngest son, Shahzad—in these moments she knew there was something very wrong with her husband. Maybe his unkindness was not born out of cruelty but of a failure of the synapses in his brain to fire as they should.
Life improved for the family when Shahzad’s father was asked to run part of Byculla Market. His domain, a three-thousand-square-foot plot of land, was crowded with vendors, and his job was to collect rent and keep it clean. Every day, he collected a single rupee from every cross-legged fisherwoman, blood-spattered butcher, tomato-wallah, and hawker of chiles and channa. Next, he swept the entire area, a Sisyphean but necessary task—the rough dirt of the market mixing with rotten food, fish bones, urine, and spit. He also cleaned up after the market’s many animals: fat cats on the hunt for unattended fish, goats grazing freely before slaughter, rats nosing for scraps, a chicken running headless through the passageways. Byculla Market wasn’t as big as Crawford Market, but still it was daunting to clean, and sometimes just as noisy. The market was loudest when the butchers brought in the chickens for slaughter, holding them five at a time, heads toward the earth. The birds would squawk, bodies writhing, as they were carried to their death. Blood would run through the dirt, crows would circle, and Shahzad’s father would furiously sweep.
“Chee,” Shahzad’s mother would say when his father came home just before midnight. “So much smell is there. And dirt. Keep your clothes outside.”
“Nobody is there to do this but me,” Shahzad’s father would tell her mournfully, because at night he did not have the energy to shout. “I am alone.”
Most nights, he did not even speak to his wife and children. He just disappeared to talk to his cars.
Shahzad didn’t enjoy being at home as a child, nor did his brother or sister. He didn’t enjoy school much either, where he was often singled out as the only Muslim in class. The other students would beat him, taunting him in the singsong way of bratty schoolchildren: “You’re a Muslim, you’re a Pakistani.” Shahzad could have been Pakistani, if his family had chosen to immigrate to Pakistan after Partition. When the British, bowing to demands for freedom, had hastily divided India into two countries in 1947, they had created in Pakistan a new Muslim nation-state. They had also, in abruptly withdrawing from India after three hundred years of rule, left terrifying sectarian violence in their wake. Even now, schoolchildren learned that Partition had been a kind of apocalypse. Babies were carved out of bellies. Neighbors stabbed one another in the night. Hundreds of thousands died, and countless women were raped. Millions of uprooted people also fled the rioting: Muslims moving one way to start new lives in Pakistan, while Hindus walked another—the biggest mass migration in history. The violence made it seem impossible that any Muslims would choose to stay. But Shahzad’s family had stayed, because his grandfather had businesses and property in Mumbai, which was then called Bombay. And so, instead of dealing with the problems facing the brand-new nation of Pakistan, Shahzad and his family had to face living as Muslims in Hindu-majority India. After Shahzad complained to the teacher, the beatings had stopped, but he did not make many friends.
Instead, as he grew up, he spent time with his birds, pigeons he bought from Crawford Market. He kept the birds on his verandah and grew to love them as if they were family. He tossed them so much seed that they soon became fat, until he got in trouble for making the verandah dirty, and wasn’t allowed to keep pigeons anymore.
Shahzad made one friend in those years: an Arab girl, the youngest of four sisters, who had the sweetest face he’d ever seen. After school and his tuitions in the Quran, they would play carrom together, using their strikers to push their carrom men toward the pockets, and giggling whenever one of them succeeded.
But over time the games grew less frequent and the Arab girl became distant. Shahzad realized she had fallen for his bigger, stronger cousin instead. She had a direct view of his cousin’s room from her apartment, across a courtyard, and Shahzad was certain this was how they fell in love. He had seen it happen in the movies. He thought he’d like to court a woman this way someday. But he also worried that girls might always prefer bigger, stronger men than him—a boy given the name of a prince but who had grown up to be gangly and uncertain.
* * *
Not far away, in Bhendi Bazaar, Sabeena, the second child of four sisters, and the liveliest and most beautiful among them, was given a nickname. Her father christened her Madhubala, after the actress who played the court dancer in Mughal-e-Azam—the woman whose dancing sent father and son to war. Like Madhubala, Sabeena had apple cheeks, strong, straight nose, and Cupid’s bow lips. She had the same eyes that danced below dramatic brows. She even had the same raspy voice and effervescent personality, in a house that desperately needed it. Sabeena lived with her grandfather, who was a tyrant, her mother and other sisters, whom she found dull, her brother, who had anger issues, and her father, whom she loved but who was strict with her. Outside of the movies, the actress Madhubala was barely seen out on the town. She never went to the big Bollywood parties or award shows, because her father did not allow it. It was the same for Sabeena, whose father rarely let her and her sisters out of their small apartment.
But Sabeena knew her father loved her and wanted to protect her. She knew that many Muslim girls were kept inside. He told her as much, warning that if fathers gave their daughters freedom, they could take a wrong step. And if they didn’t take a wrong step, a boy would for them. Sabeena mostly didn’t mind. She and her father would make masti at home, telling their own private jokes that the rest of the family members—who Sabeena and her father agreed were all “half-nut” or brainless as cows—would never get.
Still, sometimes Sabeena longed to go outside. Her grandfather, who could not walk, would go to the bathroom in his bed without warning and shout: “You all are not looking after me.” She did not find much joy in talking to her mother or sisters either. And her father was often away at work, especially in the evenings. Without him their cramped apartment seemed a sad and shabby place.
But through the windows of the apartment, which was in the heart of Bhendi Bazaar downtown, Sabeena could see all the activity and life of the outdoors. She could see the rows of shops selling gold jewelry, dusty old antiques, and colorful rows of cotton kurtas and fancier salwar kameez. Bhendi Bazaar sprawled over sixteen acres and was populated mostly by other Musl
All through her primary and secondary education, before she reached a marriageable age, Sabeena went directly home after school. She obediently completed her homework and Quran tuitions, wore her head covering, and did her five-times-a-day namaaz. And she spoke to few people outside of family. Her father, who was a doctor of skin diseases, often entertained his daughter by sharing his medical knowledge, telling her about the body and heart and brain. He was an intelligent man with bright eyes and big, owlish glasses, and he spoke with the confidence of a professor. Sabeena did not know then that he was a sexologist, or that when he came home late it was because he worked in the nearby red-light area, which was called Kamathipura. In Kamathipura, he gave injections and tablets to protect the men who had sex with prostitutes from getting gupt rog, which meant the “secret illness”—STDs. Sabeena’s father could not tell these things to a young girl.
About sex, he told his daughter that childbirth was painful. He warned her that when a woman got married, she freed herself of her family, but when she had a child, she became like a slave again. “Because through you he has had a child,” he said. He had seen this happen with couples in his practice. Sabeena knew her father wanted to prepare her for marriage, but she could not help feeling anxious. She knew she’d be married off eventually, matched with someone from her community. She found most of her immediate community bakwaas, rubbish: full of Muslim butchers who spent the whole day in the shop, leaving work with blood on their hands, and fighting with their wives in the night. But she told herself that her father would find her a better man.
Sabeena’s beauty was known throughout Bhendi Bazaar, and in the surrounding Sunni Muslim communities, and so she received dozens of marriage proposals. The first came when she was just ten, from a man in Pune, and later from all over Mumbai, for the girl who looked like the actress Madhubala. Child marriage had been outlawed in the country some forty years ago, but Islamic personal law—which had its basis in the Quran, decisions of the Prophet, and prior legal precedent—sometimes allowed for child marriage with the consent of a parent. Still, Sabeena’s father would wait until she was older. Whenever he told her about a proposal, Sabeena would laugh her long, throaty laugh, and her eyes would crinkle at the edges. With marriage a prospect for the faraway future, the proposals only delighted her.
But when at age twenty her father sat her down in their apartment to show her a photo of Shahzad, she knew this time it was different. Though she had not been sent to college, her education was now considered complete. This boy, Shahzad, was a Sunni Muslim like they were, and from another Muslim market area downtown, just a kilometer or so south. His family also went to dargahs and followed the same practices in prayers and fasting. They took seriously the edicts issued from Saudi Arabia but weren’t hard-liners either. And, like her family, his family followed the Hanafi school of law, meaning, among other things, they read the hadith to know how to live a good life. Though Sunnis and Shias mostly lived in harmony in the city, the same branch of Islam was preferred in marriage.
But there was one major difference: Shahzad came from a wealthy family. Sabeena looked at the photo again. She noticed Shahzad’s fat mustache, which he had worked hard to grow, but otherwise found little to remark on. Not that it mattered. Her father had trained her to like what she saw. After she looked at the photo and realized this man could become her husband, she began to cry. She wasn’t ready to leave her father or childhood home behind.
After this Sabeena’s father went to visit Shahzad at his shop, which was a cold storage business for chicken. Shahzad had set up the shop inside Byculla Market while still in college. He had not wanted to be in such close proximity to his father, who passed through his shop three or four times an hour, asking anxiously, “How are things going on?” But the market was close to a church and a mosque, and with both Catholic and Muslim customers, who shared some of the same meat-eating habits, Shahzad’s business soon began thriving.
Sabeena’s father asked Shahzad what he had studied at university (English-language school, BComm), and ensured Shahzad wasn’t a butcher or involved in the mutton business (No, no). Did he chew paan and roam around? (Nothing like that.) What marks, then, did Shahzad get in his secondary education? (Good enough.) Sabeena’s father nodded. All satisfactory answers. Most important, he was the son of a landlord of Byculla Market.
* * *
Weeks later, Shahzad stood in Sabeena’s lane beside his mother, sister, and, begrudgingly, his father, to meet the girl his mother had chosen. His mother had first noticed Sabeena’s movie-star looks at a wedding, learned she was the daughter of a doctor, and set up a meeting.
Shahzad saw Bhendi Bazaar with different eyes than Sabeena. To him, it seemed filled with cheap jewelry sellers, broken antiques, and cut-rate women’s clothing shops. His shoes were getting dirty. The walls of her building were stained with paan. Inside, laundry was hung at random. These people are not poor, but they do not have much money either, thought Shahzad. To him, it did not seem a suitable place to meet a bride.
When they reached Sabeena’s apartment, Shahzad was ushered into a small side room, so he would not see the rest of the flat. A window was open, and Shahzad felt cold. Why would they leave the window open in December? he thought, and wished he were at home. For more than an hour, Sabeena’s father peppered Shahzad with many of the same questions he had already asked at the shop. “What are you doing now?” “Where have you studied?” “Which college did you go to?” “How is cold storage?” As he spoke, Shahzad felt the room grow colder. He tried not to shiver.
And then the door opened and Sabeena walked in, eyes cast down, in a deep purple dress, and on her head a cloud-colored dupatta. She was accompanied by several women from her family. She did not look at Shahzad, but he could see her well enough. He observed with pleasure her resemblance to Madhubala: her look-at-me nose, inviting mouth, and round cheeks. The women accompanying Sabeena pulled back her head covering. Still, she did not look up. I have no choice, Sabeena thought to herself, so why should I look? But Shahzad saw what he thought was the trace of a smile. So she’s got energy, he thought. He is from a rich family, Sabeena told herself, as she tried to hide her expression. So even if I have to leave my family, my future is secure. If she kept thinking this, maybe she would not cry.
Shahzad wanted to say yes. He thought of the Arab girl who had chosen a stronger man over him. He thought of the boys who teased him at school, holding him down until he couldn’t breathe. And he thought of his father, who made him think he didn’t know anything, and that he’d never find a woman. Now, he faced a lovely woman who was willing to be his. He knew he should give her an answer. But he needed time to think.
At home, Shahzad’s mother and sister worked on Shahzad. “What are you thinking?” they asked. “Tell us.”
“Stop,” Shahzad said. “I’ll let you know.”
But they wouldn’t let up. “Other girls are not so educated.” “Look at how badly other girls live.” “Other girls have a habit of eating tobacco to enjoy.” “She is looking better than them.” “Her father is an important doctor.” “She is the best you’ll find.”
Two days later, Sabeena’s family called for an answer.
“Yes,” he said. “Okay.”
“Pakaa?” Sabeena??
Shahzad nodded into the phone. He was twenty-three, and Sabeena just a little younger, twenty-one. When his mother put sweets in his mouth to celebrate, he dutifully swallowed them all.
There were also sweets at the engagement ceremony, along with gold bangles, dresses, and saris for Sabeena, and dress slacks, shirts, and wristwatches for Shahzad. After gifts, the couple exchanged rings. Throughout the ceremony, they did not speak to or look at each other. Sabeena wore a shy, almost sad expression. Shyness is the ornament of a girl, a common expression went. A garland was placed around Shahzad’s neck, and rose petals were scattered over Sabeena’s hair. Sharbat, a cold drink made with flower petals and fruits, was served. People neither Shahzad nor Sabeena knew signed the engagement book, wishing them health and happiness. To Sabeena, the day felt like a dream.
It was very cool in the city. Later that year, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, would be assassinated by her own bodyguards. She flexed her power in too many ways: cracking down on civil liberties, imprisoning opponents, even allowing her son to carry out a program of forced sterilizations to help control overpopulation. And so people would say that she had gotten her due.
After her assassination, there would be riots and mass killings up north. But that was months off, and the unrest would take place primarily in a state far away, against a community not their own. The political machinations of the country were of little importance compared to finding the right match for a son or daughter. Or so many parents in the country believed. In this engagement hall, with the right boy and girl brought together, all was right with the world.