India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (25 page)

I called Murugan after leaving Selvi’s apartment. I told him what
had happened. I said Selvi sounded confused. She seemed to want to speak with me; at the same time, she said she couldn’t. I said I was confused, too; I wasn’t sure what to do.

Murugan said he’d talk to her, and he called me back about a week later. He said Selvi was “acting very strange.” He said: “It looks like she wants to talk to you, but someone has gotten to her. It’s probably her parents. They’ve given her a gag order or something. She says what’s happened until now is okay, but she can’t go on. She says things like, ‘Everything I am is because of them, they have given me everything, they have made me. Even if they’re wrong, I have to follow what they instruct me to do.’”

He described Selvi’s way of talking as “quaint.” He said: “You know how it is, Akash, they are from the village. They live in the past. A girl can’t do what she wants. That’s how they think.”

A few weeks later, on a visit to Bangalore, I found myself talking
to Veena about Selvi. I told her the story about Sudha’s drowning,
and I told her about my conversation with Selvi. I said I was having a hard time figuring things out. Maybe it was because I was a man; I felt like I was missing part of the picture.

Veena tightened her lips. She brought her hands together, as if in prayer; she looked irritated. She said Selvi’s argument that her parents had brought her up and that she had to listen to them was “bullshit.” There was no “intrinsic power in titles like parents and husband and blah blah blah—people who tell you to do things, who tell you what’s right for you.” Children had no inherent responsibility to agree to the wishes of unreasonable parents.

She told me about her grandmother, who was widowed at the age of thirty-three, but never allowed to remarry. She had to spend the rest of her life eating only vegetarian food. It had been hard for her; Veena heard that before she became a widow, her grandmother would never eat a meal without chicken or fish. It was only because of an oppressive and nonsensical tradition that her grandmother had to spend the next sixty years of her life eating vegetarian food.

“Oppression has been so much the way of life for women in India, and now she’s just succumbing to it,” Veena said, of Selvi. “She’s accepting it.”

“So do you feel bad for her?” I asked.

“No, not at all. How can I feel pity when she’s in a situation that she could clearly work out?”

“What do you feel then?”

“A little bit of anger. Why can’t she just go and tell her parents and friends that this is what she wants to do, that it’s her life and that she thinks it’s good for her? Tell me: if a woman is hit by a man, can’t she hit back? I think women allow this kind of harassment.”

She told me that a friend who worked for a tabloid newspaper
had called her recently and asked if she’d ever suffered sexual harassment at work. “I said, ‘Hell no! If I slept with any of my bosses, I did it because I had the choice.’ I was very clear that it was my choice. I think that all these women who keep on whining about sexual harassment indulge in it and then don’t know how to get out of it. And so that’s their way out: ‘What could I do when I was so innocent?’”

Veena kept shaking her head; she had strong feelings about these issues. “You know, a lot of people are not able to stand up and tell their parents or so-called well-wishers that it’s their life and it’s only their life. I don’t know many people who would say that. But I will choose to live my life the best way that I know. I would be miserable living on anyone else’s terms.”

She started talking about her grandmother again. She said it was very hard for people in her family to stick to a pure vegetarian diet. She said everyone in her ancestral village, no matter what caste, had to eat meat. She said: “I mean, if someone asked me to give up chicken and fish, I would just tell them to fuck off.”

The night after I said good-bye to Selvi, I paid a visit to the
Marina Beach in Chennai. I had never been before, but Chennaites talked about it a lot. They were proud of their beach. They liked to say it was the longest city beach in the world. This was incorrect: San Francisco’s is longer, but it was part of Chennai’s urban mythology, and I rarely contradicted people when they said it.

I went to the beach at around six p.m. It was crowded. Hundreds of kids and parents and lovers and friends were relaxing at
the end of a day, strolling on the yellow sand, chasing each other and holding hands. There were peanut vendors and trinket sellers and, at the front of the beach, closer to the water, merry-go-rounds and puppet shows and cotton candy stands.

I had been thinking about Selvi all day, ever since I left her apartment. I left feeling uneasy. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but something about our conversation had made me uncomfortable.

I sat on the beach and tried to clear my head. The air was cool, the sound of waves soothing. The sand was clean.

When Selvi had first moved to the city, she assured her father that she would never fall in love. Love was for bad girls. Now Sudha, with her tragic affair, had further tarnished love’s name. But what, really, was so wrong with love?

All around me on the beach, there were lovers, walking together, holding hands, touching each other, looking into each other’s eyes. They looked happy enough. They didn’t look like they were ruining their lives.

A middle-aged couple walked by me, sharing a packet of roasted peanuts wrapped in a newspaper. The man said something that made the woman laugh. He put a peanut in her mouth. I thought they looked like each other; they must have been married for a long time.

In front of me a young man in a black shirt and a girl in a blue
salwar kameez
were sitting on a cloth laid over the sand. He pulled her toward him, and she leaned into him, cautiously, her head and neck moving toward his shoulder but her body pointing resolutely away, toward the ocean where I could just see the outlines of fishing boats bringing in the day’s catch.

Behind me, another woman had her head in her lover’s lap.
They were less shy. He was leaning over her, one hand on her shoulder. He cracked the fingers on his other hand, and then he brought it down, onto her hips.

A couple young men came over, one of them holding a parrot. They stopped at the shy lovers in front of me and started taunting them. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see that they were being unpleasant, harassing the girl. The boyfriend kept his face down, looking at the sand. He was meek; he didn’t rise to the occasion.

The men finally left them alone, but the girl had moved away now, and she sat upright, her face looking straight ahead, her hands clutching a bag. The boy kept putting his arm on her shoulder, trying to pull her toward him, but she was unyielding. He had a hungry look on his face, and I thought his moment had passed. But then, suddenly, she loosened her grip on her bag, put an arm around his shoulder, slid it down to his waist, and leaned into him, melting her body into his.

A group of schoolkids ran by, laughing in their blue uniforms. Their teachers followed, trying to control the kids, slow them down, but they were also laughing. The teachers gave up and the whole group—about seventy kids and ten teachers—went running and laughing down to the water, toward the merry-go-rounds.

I thought of what Veena had said about Selvi. Veena was a tough woman; she had come through some difficult times. I thought maybe she was being a bit hard on Selvi. Still, I understood her point. I, too, felt a little exasperated by Selvi’s ambivalence. I shared Veena’s frustration at living in a country where a girl couldn’t talk to a man if she wanted, where gossiping neighbors could make a woman retreat into herself and away from the
city, give up her independence, and where a roommate’s failed love affair could doom a future marriage.

I knew what it was about my conversation with Selvi that was disturbing me. For all India’s modernity, the weight of tradition was still formidable. For all the enthusiasm of my homecoming, there was still so much in my home I couldn’t relate to.

Once, I would have felt estranged, like an outsider to my country. Now I just felt angry. I found myself questioning the new India. What good was all the money, all the big houses and cars, the fancy jobs, if men like Hari still had to deny who they were, if women like Selvi just went running back to their villages when their families ordered them to? What good was all this development if all it did was allow people to buy more? That wasn’t real freedom; that didn’t strike me as progress.

I had been in India for almost five years. The sheen was coming off the country’s new prosperity. I had started to see things differently. My vision had broadened, and in the process grown darker.

The thin light of evening was giving way to the thick light of night. The darkness was like a sheet, pulled over the ocean by the waves. There was a hazy, almost milky, quality to the advancing night. I knew it was the pollution of the city, but still, I thought it was beautiful.

A trio of floodlights turned on behind me. The beach was lit up. The light was harsh. I decided it was time to leave.

On my way out, I came across a soothsayer woman, dressed in a red sari and wearing heavy red lipstick. She was holding what looked like a flute. She was calling out, offering her services to anyone who wanted to know their future. A sad-looking middle-aged
man walked up to her and they sat in the sand and she waved the flute around and she told him that she could see that something good was going to happen this month.

“Does it involve love? Does it involve marriage?” the man asked, and he told her there was someone he knew who needed to find a wife.

The soothsayer grew impatient; the man had interrupted her speech. She said that yes, she could see a marriage, but when the man asked who, she said that she couldn’t say. He pressed her a little and she stood up abruptly and asked the man for her payment. They haggled over the price, like a whore and a client, and then the man walked away, without his answer, toward the lovers on the beach.

Part II

There was so much I loved about living in rural India. I loved the
clean air, loved the starry nights, the open fields, and the sense of space. I loved the stillness. Sometimes, in the evenings, after the village temples had turned off their music, I would sit on my terrace and hear nothing—nothing at all—but the rustle of leaves in the wind.

I would go for walks in the forest behind my house. I would go at the end of the day, when the afternoon heat had lifted, along a path that led between acacia and palmyra trees to a small earth dam. I sat on the dam. I stared at the muddy water. I knew there were snakes in that water. I knew the forest was full of scorpions and centipedes. But I felt very safe in Auroville. I was far away from the chaos—the noise, the frenzied pace, the cultural dislocations and moral dilemmas—of a nation in the midst of tumultuous change.

My life in Auroville was peaceful, and for that I was grateful.
There were times, though, when the smallness of my world could grow oppressive. I lived three hours from the nearest airport, in Chennai. Sometimes I felt cut off. I didn’t have much of a social life. I found myself longing for simple pleasures—going to a bar, making eye contact with a girl I didn’t know, just hanging out at a party in a room full of strangers—that I had taken for granted when I lived in New York.