At a social networking website, Anita meets another interesting guy Sanjeev. Both of them start dating soon. Anita likes him for his charming personality and friendly behaviour. She is relieved to find him so articulate and well informed. Slowly they start developing a liking for each other. Anita thinks that her parents will be thrilled when she breaks the news to them that she is getting married to Sanjeev. They explore the city and enjoy each other’s company. One day Sanjeev asks her to accompany him to Rishikesh, a town on the Ganges and Anita agrees to his plan.
"How is the match?” I ask.
Germany has won and will move on to the semifinals. Sanjeev tells me he thinks it was fixed and the Argentinian coach has been bought off. “He took his best players off the field. And since the World Cup is being held in Berlin, it would be upsetting for Germans if their team didn’t advance to the semifinals.”
I think Sanjeev’s assessment is entirely plausible and go back to sleep, amused at his skeptical, “out of the box” thinking.
The next day, Sanjeev drives me around the campus of his and my father’s alma mater. Like most Indian universities, little concession has been made to elegant architecture. He points out the fields where he used to play soccer and cricket, the different buildings he lived in, the architecture department where he studied. The only thing that distinguishes this building from those housing the engineering or mathematics departments is the massive modernist iron sculpture sitting next to it.
As we drive around, I recall some of my father’s stories about his Roorkee days, like his “drinking water”. Since engineering students in India weren’t big partiers back in the sixties, my father made a bet with his circle of friends that he could drink the most water of anybody. And he did. He guzzled five gallons right on the spot and then collected his earnings. (I guess I’m a chip off the old block.) Being at my father’s university four decades later also makes me think of the hopes that imbued his spirit back then - that a good education would secure a good life in India. He would have to leave the country to fulfill those hopes.
Outside the campus, the city of Roorkee boasts the same tumult of blaring horns, motorcycles swerving around cows, dilapidated storefronts, and busy signage that define most north Indian cities. But Sanjeev is proud to show off his former college town. He takes me to the place that serves the town’s best milkshakes. I have a coffee milkshake and he has one made with mango. We try each other’s milkshakes. This weekend is perfect, yet, yet . . .
I have bought Sanjeev, the quintessential bookworm, the American cult classic A Confederacy of Dunces, and he spends the whole weekend devouring it – not me. As Sanjeev reads, I leave our cottage and walk down the hill outside to sit on the banks of the Ganges. An hour later, at dusk, he emerges from the room, wearing a long red cotton kurta and white pyjamas, and finds me. The first thing he does is build a fire. I watch him gather nearby driftwood and twigs and leaves, setting them on fire with a lighter. I have never watched a man build a fire before, having dated men who’ve grownup in cities and suburbs, and I’m suitably impressed. Wearing his cotton kurta and stoking a fire, he presents a picture of Spartan Thoreauvian elegance. Sanjeev sits down on a large rock facing the one I’m sitting on and begins telling me the story of his life, his migration from Gorakhpur to Roorkee to Lucknow to Bangalore, and eventually to Delhi. He started out as an architect but found his aesthetic vision too compromised in India. He eventually moved into the booming IT sector. I watch him speak as the light from the fire flickers across his face. My heart aches. Sanjeev is interesting, well-spoken, kind, capable. I don’t know why it’s not working. I take his hand, kiss his palm, and bring it to my cheek.
On our last day, we drive past Rishikesh further up into the mountains, to a place called Devprayag, a tiny town perched in the hills where the Ganges begins. Two separate rivers, the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, meet here to form the country’s holiest piece of topography, the Ganges. We walk to the platform set up at the intersection of the two individual rivers. It is the place they flow together to create something much larger than either is alone. A pandit comes forward to extort us. We allow ourselves to be blessed. He asks if we are married.
“Haan,” Sanjeev says.
I know Sanjeev is saying it to deflect unnecessary questioning. Unmarried couples in Indua usually do not travel together. But it feels heartening nonetheless. The pandit asks us to recite various Sanskrit incantations. He drips water from the Ganges into our palms and then places marigolds in them. He adorns both of our foreheads with a red tika. I look out at the two rivers flowing together, creating something much larger than either is alone. It is the closest I’ve ever been to being married.
We drive back and spend the night in the same hotel in Roorkee. In the room, we call room service and order paneer tikka and dal makhni. Sanjeev is also vegetarian, which is actually rarer than you would think in India today. He’s the first man I’ve dated here who is, and somehow I like the idea that we eat the same thing. Food is bonding, after all.
Now, after a shared two days together on this journey, we’ve achieved a comfort level. We talk easily, swapping stories about our best friends and college days. It is the best day of our trip.
Sanjeev and I meet for another month or so before he has to leave for a three-month work stint in the US, his first trip to America. We’ve been picking at each other as his departure nears. Something is not quite right. Certainly we don’t share a great deal of chemistry, and because of his stated preference for women from India’s northeast, I feel particularly self-conscious.
Rather uncalled for one day, he describes me as too flamboyant as well as a “loud American.”
“Sanjeev, I’ve long held reserve to be an entirely overrated virtue,” I reply.
I take far more umbrage, though, at his second comment, saying, “Why can’t I be a loud Indian? Plenty of Indians are loud too.”
“The women aren’t,” he answers.
What we’re really doing is circling around something else – a mismatch in our exposure to the world, something that unnerves us both, to our mutual surprise. Sanjeev spends some time on my roof terrace, with the lights of Humayun’s Tomb blinking in the background. Though he lived in Nigeria for a few years during his childhood, his only forays out of India as an adult have been to neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal. He certainly couldn’t afford to travel to Europe or the US without being sent there for work. When I offhandedly mention that I prefer my winter wardrobe to my summer one because I purchased my winter clothing in Paris the previous fall when I met a friend there and my summer attire is from a local chain, it sounds pretentious as soon as it comes out of my mouth. Sanjeev responds to the comment with his strange smile.
Having been single for long periods of my adulthood, I have become accustomed to a life of trying out new restaurants; it is the life I have lived. Here in India, however, the price of going out for dinner or drinks is so completely out of proportion to monthly salaries that only the city’s moneyed elite – the Delhi businessmen’s sons who I find boorish – can afford such a lifestyle. Sanjeev might end up paying a tenth of his salary for dinner out at a restaurant, and it makes him squirm when I pay.
Sanjeev is extremely bright-as bright as they come, really-and has liberal values, and yet we both can’t seem to overlook the difference in exposure. Perhaps it intimidates him that I’m more wordly than he is, and it makes me question whether a life together is feasible. Neither of us had though that was something that could come between two people otherwise of the same intellect, and yet it sits between us like the elephant in the room.
He goes off to Baltimore, and I return to the US to visit my parents in California. The separation is the perfect deus ex machine for the breakdown of our relationship. We have difficult telephone conversations about whether we should meet somewhere in the U.S. We both know it’s not working – we are too different – but I’m loath to call it off. After all, my parents have been asking about him every day. I’m back in the roiling pot of hot water that parental pressure to get married has become for me, and the disconnect between us is a bit too intangible for me to make a considered decision. Not to mention, it’s always painful to split with somebody, and after a few months of dating, I’ve developed feelings for Sanjeev.
So instead I strike out at him for his lack of high-octane enthusiasm for the relationship. Finally, when the arguments escalate, Sanjeev calls it off.
I can’t escape the feeling that I pushed him to do it.
I’ve been in Delhi for a year, the time I’d given myself o find a husband. I am alone. I wonder if my escapades were much different from those in New York. Many of them weren’t, as the variegated cultures of the world increasingly collapse into one-urban, homogenous, fast paced, self-interested.
But in this year, amid all the raciness and jadedness I find among Delhi’s youth, I know that I also see glimpses of a starling innocence and beauty that are harder to come by in benumbed cities like New York and London. The oddly nude yet chaste night I spent with Vikram in his cot in Gurgaon, with him reciting Urdu couplets into my ear. The day at Tughlakabad Fort with Shekhar as we dangled out feet off a parapet and smoked a spliff. Naveen, the “vernac” guy from Pegs and Pints, taking me on the moonlit motorcycle ride. My nightly rambles with Mustafa as we both lay in bed, he in Kashmir, me in Delhi. My earnest chats with Nair on my terrace about his background and his aspirations. Gurpeet’s exquisitely planned evening that kicked off with the fortune tellers. The encrypted message from Manoj, which asked nothing of me but to be delighted. My dates with Sanjeev in a moving car, and our two strangely affecting days on the hillside.
What I don’t know, though, is how much longer that innocence will last.
Epilogue
Farhad was right, you know. Remember the friend who used to tell me to take comfort in cold, hard numbers when I would lament that I would grow old alone? It’s true, what he said; few people do end up alone.
It’s been a year since Sanjeev and I split up, and I think back to all the men I’ve spent time with, both in my first year in India and before – the men I flirted with, dated, almost married.
There was, of course, my filmmaker uncle, Arjun. Toward the end of my first year in Delhi, he had managed to track me down through my relatives in Ghaziabad. And one day, while sitting in an auto rickshaw, I received a call from an unfamiliar number and picked up to hear a voice I had not heard for nearly fifteen years, since that summer I had left his flat near Connaught Place, dust kicking up in my wake.
“Anita, you’ve been in India for a year, and you haven’t called me,” Arjun said in Hindi.
“Hi, Arjun. Yes, I haven’t called you. What happened between us was many, many years ago. I didn’t feel the need,” I said in the formal language of English, shouting to make myself heard above Delhi’s traffic commotion.
“I would like to see you,” he said in Hindi.
I agreed to meet him, since I too was curious about who this man who had been so instrumental to my introduction to India, or a particular type of India, really was. We made plans to meet for lunch the next day at a restaurant in Asian Games Village.
He came attired in what appeared to be a black tuxedo without the bow tie and shiny, patent-leather shoes. I arrived in a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and flip-flops. Interestingly, Arjun hadn’t aged badly, largely because he had already looked so old when we’d spent those long-ago summers together. He looked more or less the same, his straight hair dyed blue-black.
He studied me. “You’ve grown thin, Anita. You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said in Hindi. To say someone is thin in his India isn’t a compliment. It means you look haggard and peaked.
“Well, it’s been a long time. I’m thirty-three years old now,” I replied in English, struggling to keep things neutral.
I quickly added, to dispense with any chance of his wanting to resume things, “So, are you married?’
“Haan, shaadi hogayi hai. Yes, I married,” he said. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t call me.”
“That’s wonderful that you’re married. How long has it been? Any children?” I said.
“It’s been a few years, no children,” he said, waving away the question before saying. “I was so hurt when you ran out the way you did.”
Arjun and I went on like this, picking over our Indian buffet lunch, for the next hour, him trying to rehash events from fifteen years ago in Hindi, and me trying to rein us back into safe territory, as well as the present, in English.
Mercifully, after the lunch was over, he didn’t call again.
Then there’s Rahul, my first love, the one who I would spot around campus with the tweed blazer and the Harry Potter glasses – though it’s an anachronistic comparison to say so, since Harry Potter didn’t exist back then.
To be continued..
