Chapter 12: Shaadi — 1986

I married Elina D'Souza on a Saturday in March, in a registered ceremony at the Pune District Court, witnessed by Prakash, two of Elina's college friends, and the particular bureaucratic indifference of a government institution that processed marriages the way it processed land transfers: with stamps, signatures, and a complete absence of sentiment.

We did not have a traditional wedding. Not a Sikh ceremony — I had, by 1986, placed my faith in a drawer along with my turban, the two inseparable, the practice abandoned when the symbol was abandoned. Not a Catholic ceremony — Elina's relationship with the Church was architectural rather than spiritual; she loved the buildings but not the beliefs, the stained glass but not the doctrine. Not a Hindu ceremony — neither of us was Hindu, and the suggestion, made by a well-meaning colleague of Advocate D'Souza's, that we could "just do a Hindu ceremony since it covers everyone" had produced in Elina a response so sharp that the colleague had physically retreated.

The court ceremony took fourteen minutes. The judge — a tired woman in a cotton sari who had performed, by her own weary admission, "more marriages than a temple priest" — read the relevant sections of the Special Marriage Act, asked if we consented, confirmed that we did, stamped the certificate, and wished us "a long and happy life together" with the particular conviction of a person who had seen enough marriages to know that length and happiness were not always correlated.

Elina wore a white sari — not a wedding sari, not the red-and-gold of a traditional bride, but a white cotton sari with a blue border that she had bought from the Tulsi Baug market for three hundred rupees and that she wore with the particular elegance of a woman who understood that beauty was not about the garment but about the confidence with which it was worn.

I wore a kurta. Clean. Pressed. The best kurta I owned, which was not, objectively, a very good kurta, but it was mine and it was clean and Elina had said, with the practical romance that was her defining characteristic: "I don't care what you wear. I care that you show up."

I showed up. Fourteen minutes later, I was married.

The families' responses formed a spectrum that ranged from grudging acceptance to active hostility, with several interesting stops in between.

Bauji: silence. The particular silence of a man who had been informed, rather than consulted, and who had processed the information by not processing it. He did not attend the ceremony. He did not send a message. He existed, for the six months following my marriage, in a state of communicative suspension — present in the house, absent from my life, the particular Bauji-response of withdrawing his attention as punishment, which was, for a man whose attention was already minimal, a feat of reduction that approached the mathematical.

Amma: tears, followed by chai, followed by a letter that arrived three weeks after the wedding and that contained, in her neat Gurmukhi handwriting, the following: "I wanted to dance at your wedding. You took that from me. But I want you to be happy. These two things are both true. I am your mother. I can hold both." The letter was — is — the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me about love. I keep it in the tin box with Esha's letters. The two sets of correspondence: one from the woman I didn't marry, one from the woman who raised me. Both essential. Both painful. Both kept.

Advocate D'Souza: disapproval expressed through legal metaphor. He called Elina the day after the wedding and said: "Marriage is a contract. All contracts require due diligence. You have entered into this contract without adequate due diligence regarding the other party's financial prospects, career trajectory, or family background. I would have advised against this transaction." Elina said: "I didn't ask for advice, Daddy. I asked for your blessing." He said: "Those are different requests and you have received neither." He sent a cheque for twenty thousand rupees the following week, because Advocate D'Souza expressed emotion exclusively through financial instruments.

Conceicao: a phone call in which she wept, then laughed, then wept again, then asked if Elina was pregnant ("No, Mummy, I married him because I love him, not because of biology"), then asked what she should tell the neighbours ("Tell them the truth — your daughter married a Punjabi painter, it's not a crime"), then asked if we needed bedsheets ("We need everything, Mummy, we have nothing"), then sent bedsheets, towels, a set of steel plates, and a crucifix, the last of which Elina hung on the wall not from faith but from the particular affection of a daughter who understood that her mother expressed love through objects and that refusing the object meant refusing the love.

Shobha: pragmatic acceptance. "At least she's educated. Could be worse. Could be Madan's choices." This was, in Shobha's vocabulary, effusive endorsement.

Madan: appeared at our flat three weeks after the wedding, drunk, bearing a gift — a painting. A terrible painting. A painting of two people standing under a tree that might have been a banyan or might have been a mushroom, the figures identifiable as human only through generous interpretation. "Wedding gift," he said. "I painted it myself." I hung it in the kitchen, where it remained for nine years, through the birth of our daughter and the death of our marriage, the one object that both Elina and I agreed was too terrible to fight over in the divorce.

We moved into a flat in Deccan Gymkhana — a two-room flat on the third floor of a building that had been constructed with the particular optimism of 1960s Indian architecture: the walls were thin, the plumbing was ambitious, and the balcony — the one feature that had sold us on the flat, the balcony where we could set up our easels and paint the Pune rooftops — faced west, which meant it received the particular punishment of the afternoon sun and was usable only in the mornings and evenings, which was, we decided, when the light was best anyway.

The first year was — I will use the word that Elina would have used — "correct." Not perfect. Correct. The marriage functioned the way a well-designed machine functions: the parts moved, the output was produced, the system operated within its parameters. We painted in the mornings. I taught English at a coaching institute during the day — a job that paid enough to cover rent and food and the particular expenses of a life that was being built from nothing. Elina taught at a school in Kothrud — art and English, a combination that the school valued because it reduced the number of teachers they needed to hire and that Elina resented because it reduced her from a person into a resource.

We cooked together. Elina's Goan food — the fish curry, the vindaloo, the xacuti that required seventeen spices and three hours and produced a gravy so complex that eating it was not a meal but an education. My Punjabi food — the rajma, the chole, the particular saag that I made from scratch because Amma had taught me and because the act of making saag — the washing of the greens, the boiling, the mashing, the tempering with garlic and butter — was a meditation that connected me to a kitchen in Amritsar and a mother whose letter I kept in a tin box.

The food was good. The painting was good. The marriage was — correct.

The incorrectness began slowly. Not with a fight — Elina and I did not fight, which was itself the problem. Fighting requires engagement, and engagement requires the particular investment of energy that two people must make when they disagree: the energy to argue, to defend, to attack, to repair. We did not invest this energy. We disagreed in silence. The silence accumulated like dust on furniture — invisible at first, then noticeable, then suffocating.

The first silence was about children. Elina wanted them. I did not — or rather, I did not want them yet, which Elina heard as "I do not want them ever," because "yet" is a word that means different things depending on which side of the wanting you stand on. For the person who wants: "yet" is a delay, a postponement, a frustration. For the person who doesn't want yet: "yet" is a protection, a boundary, a reasonable request for time.

The second silence was about Amritsar. I wanted to go home. Not permanently — I was Pune now, the city had absorbed me — but regularly, frequently, with the particular need of a person who had been displaced by violence and who needed to touch the original place the way a compass needs to touch north: to recalibrate, to confirm that the direction was still there.

Elina did not want to go to Amritsar. She had been once — in 1984, the worst possible time, the city stunned and grieving — and the visit had imprinted on her the particular association of Amritsar with crisis. For Elina, Amritsar was not my home. It was the place where my turban had come off. The place where the iron rods had been real and the escape had been necessary. She did not say this — silence, again — but I knew it, the way you know the things that the person you live with cannot say: through the tension in the body, the slight withdrawal when the subject is raised, the particular quality of silence that is not peaceful but loaded.

The third silence was about Esha.

Esha wrote to me. Still. After the marriage. Not frequently — the letters had thinned from weekly to monthly to the particular rhythm of a correspondence that had found its sustainable frequency: four or five letters a year, arriving at the coaching institute rather than at home, because I had given Esha the institute's address rather than the flat's, which was — I understood, even as I did it — a continuation of the lie of omission, upgraded now from omission to active concealment.

Elina did not know. Or Elina knew and chose not to know, which was a different thing — the particular knowledge that exists in a marriage like a locked room: you know the room is there, you know something is in it, but you agree, by unspoken contract, not to open the door because opening the door would require you to deal with what's inside, and dealing with what's inside might be more than the marriage can survive.

The letters from Esha were not love letters. They were — what? Reports from a life that was continuing without me. Esha had become a lecturer at Khalsa College — her father's college, the irony of which she acknowledged with the particular bitterness of a woman who had wanted to leave and had stayed and was making the best of the staying. She taught English Literature. She was good at it — brilliant, probably, because Esha did everything with the particular intensity that made mediocrity impossible. She was not married. She did not explain why. The absence of explanation was its own explanation.

I kept the letters. In the tin box. With Amma's letter. The box was in my studio — the small room off the balcony that I had claimed as painting space and that Elina did not enter, the room that was mine the way the locked room of her knowledge was hers: a space where things were kept that the marriage could not accommodate.

The incorrectness grew. The silences multiplied. And the correct marriage began its slow, inevitable transition from correct to something else — something that did not have a name because we refused to name it, because naming it would make it real, and reality was the one thing that our marriage, built on omissions and silences and the particular fiction that two people could love each other without telling each other the truth, could not survive.