The Story of a Long-Distance Marriage Read online

  Two hours later, while I am having lunch and falling head over heels in love with Amy Poehler as I watch Parks and Recreation on my laptop, Yusuf messages me on WhatsApp.

  ‘Has the wife left?’

  ‘Yea. All alone now.’ I keep it short, not wanting to sound overly dramatic.

  Yusuf was just an acquaintance from journalism school before he agreed to take me in as his roommate on Ira’s request when I first moved to Delhi. He and Ira were good friends, and continue to be—only that he and I too are close now; he was my ‘best man’ at our court wedding. Last year he moved to a high-paying job with Reuters in Bangalore, where he stays with his girlfriend Mira. At thirty he does not look a day older than seventeen, is the kindest, wisest person I know and is full of cheer at all hours of the day. Which is how I can get away with saying things like ‘All alone now’ to him without him getting unduly worried for me.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he replies. ‘What will you do for sex now?’

  I smile. It’s just the sort of thing he would say to lighten the mood.

  ‘Good question. And thanks for asking. Everyone is making this all about Ira. Where she will live, how she will get by, New York is so expensive, etcetera. No one stops to ask what I will do when I get horny.’ Then I add, ‘On second thoughts, maybe that’s a good thing.’

  ‘Ha! So what will you do when you get horny? And remember, I owe allegiance to you and Ira both, so whatever you say to me will be passed on to her. Though I’d say the time is ripe for a sordid office affair. Didn’t you tell me about a cute girl?’

  ‘Alisha? Yards out of my league.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m sure I can hook you up with someone real nice.’

  ‘Do. Do. But I don’t know how you’ll sell me. I doubt if they’ll even do it for money.’

  ‘Hey! You’re a catch. I’ll be sending.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ I reply.

  The conversation ends there, and I realize that I’m taking myself less seriously now than I did yesterday, thanks to the faux locker-room talk. I know Yusuf looks out for me and Ira, and worries about what the distance will do to our marriage as much as our parents do, but he prefers to keep the tone light. And I’m grateful to him for that.

  By the time I leave for work at four, Ira’s flight has taken off from London. On the first floor I ring Sunil’s doorbell; he is particular about getting his rent on the thirtieth of the month. His son Varun opens the door.

  ‘Rent,’ I announce. He goes in and sends his mother to the door. She takes the money from me and counts the notes carefully.

  Just when I am about to leave, she asks, ‘Why was Ira crying last night?’

  ‘It wasn’t her, it was me.’

  Anju looks amused. ‘Your wife makes you cry?’ She sounds as though she and Ira could form a group, and I feel my heart go out to Sunil.

  ‘She left for America last night. She is going to study there for two years.’

  Her face also expresses the same disapproval that Shobha’s did. ‘Your dog barks too much,’ she says. I mumble something about running late for office and rush downstairs.

  *

  At work, there is such an overwhelming amount of concern being expressed to my face and whispered behind my back that I start to feel obligated to be in mourning. It’s not just my colleagues on the front-page desk who know about Ira’s move to New York. Everyone in city, nation and world knows too. And everyone in design. And they all make it a point to ask me how I am doing. I get the impression that perhaps some of them believe Ira and I have separated and are simply refusing to admit it to the world. Those who seem to think our marriage is still on, especially the women, make sombre faces and hold my hand in solidarity.

  ‘Let me tell you in all honesty, Rohan,’ says a reporter, ‘how lucky I think your wife is. I wish my husband had let me study in the US. I could have been working for the New York Times today.’ I want to tell her Ira is not lucky but talented. If anything, she should praise her for the full tuition fee waiver she got.

  A senior male editor says, ‘You are a good man, Rohan, for allowing your wife to go away and do what she wants.’ I want to tell him how patriarchal that sounds but think better of it.

  An old hand in design says, ‘Why didn’t you go to New York? What great career are you building here?’

  ‘Who will give me a job there, dada?’ I reply, because he likes it when people sound weary and defeated like him. ‘And without that, how will we pay off the loan?’

  The only one to act as though nothing remarkable has happened is Tanuj. He works at the terminal next to mine and is the only one in editorial my age. By default that means I’m closest to him in office. He looks up as I sit down in my chair and says, ‘Hey.’ He acknowledges what is going on in my mind with the offer of a sympathetic fist bump and leaves it at that.

  ‘There’s been a triple murder in Gurgaon,’ he informs me. ‘Man kills wife, son and self because of financial problems. Front-page flier.’ And with that I get down to business.

  In the deadline-driven rush at the national headquarters of The Fourth Estate, I lose track of time. It helps. But I also almost ignore the message on WhatsApp at midnight from an unknown number. Then I remember Ira and look closely. ‘Landed an hour back. Message me when you’re done with work. This is my new number.’

  We just have minutes before the front-page needs to be in press. But I first assign the Diagon Alley photo to the new number so I don’t ever ignore it again. And only then do I get back to work.

  3

  Change

  Ira slips into her new and exciting life as easily as though she had been preparing for it the whole time. I had expected her to take at least a week to overcome the jet lag and orient herself to a new culture before moving out of her friend’s place in New Jersey and begin looking for a flat. But within the first four days, she has shifted to a house on Christie Street in the Lower East Side.

  An artist she knew from the time she worked at an art gallery in Delhi recommended her to a seventy-year-old artist friend, Laura, who lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment. She offered Ira her spare room for six hundred dollars. It does not take me much time to calculate that that translates into almost a full month’s salary for me. But Ira assures me that she could not have found a place so close to her school for anything less than two thousand dollars.

  Ira sends me photos of the house and also takes me on a virtual tour of it on a video call. The place looks extremely cluttered to me but Ira tells me the clutter is part of the character of the apartment.

  ‘There are things here that lost their function forty years ago,’ she says, not disapprovingly. ‘Laura’s husband, Hanz, who was also an artist, died of lung cancer some years ago. They suspect it had something to do with the toxic air following the WTC crashes on 9/11. Laura says his two-year battle was difficult but he was cheerful throughout—because he had survived the Second World War in Germany and after that found no experience in life unbearable. He escaped to New York a few months before the war ended. The things you see around the house are things he collected then onwards. He never threw them away because, Laura says, they reminded him of a place that is safe.’

  Laura also has a tabby cat called Estelle. Ira tells me that she too has had a difficult childhood. She grew up in an animal shelter where she had to compete with twenty full-grown cats for food. Which meant she had to gobble it fast. And though she now lives in a house where three meals a day are guaranteed, she continues to eat so quickly that she often throws up and needs to be fed in tiny quantities. The first few days, she was scared of Ira and kept her distance, but has since warmed up to her. The only problem with that is that Ira’s room is not actually a room. It has been created by partitioning off a part of the house with paper walls. Estelle likes to visit by walking straight through the walls and does not believe in using the same opening twice. Other than that, she is well behaved and does not create a needless ruckus like our stud back home.

  A few da
ys later Ira shows me how she has done up her room. It does look more homely now. She has decorated it with photos and artworks that she found lying around the house. They are stunning pieces of work, especially this one photograph of a young boy sitting in his father’s lap and looking straight at the camera. His mother is seated on a couch in the background and is looking at the camera too. You can sense they are poor but there is something defiant about them.

  ‘Rohan,’ Ira says into the phone that night—her night, my day. ‘We will not raise our children like other people do. They will sit in my lap whenever they feel like and have adult food. They will grow up with cats and dogs and any other animal they want. They can choose to not study maths or English if they don’t feel like it. They will walk naked if they want to and will not tie their hair if they don’t want to.’ So the decency rules apply only to me, is it, I want to ask her, but I don’t because I like the sound of her voice and the things she is saying. ‘There will be no bare walls in our house. They will be filled with curiosities from around the world. Each morning, my children and I should be able to lose ourselves studying a different part of the wall. There need to be enough parts to keep us occupied for years.’

  I don’t reply. I had no idea she had such specific thoughts on the topic. ‘Even when I was nine I was thinking about how I will raise my children,’ she says. ‘I don’t know whether I ever want to have children. But I definitely don’t want to have them and raise them in a house whose walls are filled with shadows.’

  I had asked her the question several times before but never got a proper answer: what did her interest in art stem from? I wonder now if this is what led her to study art, if it’s the same thing that made an artist out of Hanz. Only such a person would want to create something who has seen so much around him destroyed. Only she would look for beauty who has shadows to fill.

  *

  It’s hard for me to keep track of Ira’s classmates. They become a jumble of names and nationalities. I know there is a Gloria, a Liz, a Stuart, a Marion, a Malcolm and a Xavier. I know there is a Brazilian, a Lebanese, an Ecuadorian, an American and a French. But if I were to match the two columns, I’d fail, considering I just recounted one nationality less than the names.

  I use pegs to remember her professors. There is the dean who gave her the full tuition fee waiver and whose expectations she is now desperately trying to live up to. Then there is a professor from Australia who, she thinks, looks a lot like me. A third, a woman, is extremely fond of Ira and always has positive things to say about every assignment she turns in. I do not doubt Ira’s talent, but I like to tease her by suggesting that her professor’s appreciation stems from the correctness of being nice to a third-world citizen.

  For me it’s strange to not be able to construct her new life in my head. When she was in Delhi, I knew her colleagues well. I had met them several times and was familiar with their voices and habits. I knew Ira’s routine after she left from office in the evening. I knew she would walk from Lajpat Nagar out to the Ring Road and look for an auto. After reaching Shahpur Jat, she would buy vegetables from the vendor right under our balcony, groceries from the store in the back lane and milk from the Mother Dairy outlet across the road. I knew she would come home, have a shower, heat the morning’s food in the microwave, feed Momo and then have dinner while watching Bob’s Burgers on her laptop. Then she would go to sleep and stir briefly when I reached home at midnight. But I’m at a loss now. I know she takes the subway to and back from school, that she picks up something cheap to eat at the Lebanese cart near her place and does her assignments after reaching her room. But never having seen any of it myself, I’m not able to recreate her world.

  New York grows on Ira rather quickly. She tells me that everything costs a million dollars and there are an insane number of homeless people in the city, all of whom are necessarily black. ‘But even though it’s a crowded city, people actually greet each other,’ she says. ‘I mean strangers greet each other. Today alone I had one cop, one garbage collector, one passenger in the train and two kids greet me. And you know those super annoying people in their cars on the streets of Delhi who don’t let you cross in peace even on a zebra crossing during a red light? They should all be sent here. Cars here go at ten miles per hour and they wait for every single human being to cross before starting the engine.’

  She feels safe in New York in a way she never did in Delhi or even in Bombay. The subway runs all night and I don’t worry when she returns from pubs after a night out with her friends at one or two. What she likes most about the city is that everyone walks a lot. And they eat and drink as they walk. It’s a city full of really busy people from all over the world and they let you be.

  ‘They let you be,’ she emphasizes. ‘It’s a city that does not judge you, a place where all the deviants in the world can assemble without making heads turn. You can be a cultural, a racial or a sexual minority and no one will look at you weirdly. You can be a single woman or a single parent and the landlord won’t threaten to call up your parents if you are a thirty-year-old guy getting a girl home.’ Then she says something that leaves me feeling melancholic but I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way: ‘It’s where one can come just to be left alone.’

  For me, it’s difficult to break out of the habit of having her around and be left alone, but it’s not like I regret not being in New York. I like the life I have built for myself in Delhi. I like my routine of waking up at eight to Momo, going to office in the afternoon and returning home at night with the satisfaction of having sent an edition to press. I like driving my Alto on roads I have grown familiar with. A few years ago I may have but now I don’t feel sorry for myself that I didn’t get a chance to study in Manhattan, that I can’t even hope to get a job in New York. I do not feel like I’m missing out on the vastness of Central Park or the redness of maple trees in autumn. More than not being drawn to New York, I think the thing that keeps me in Delhi is that I’m really attached to this place. For me, Delhi is my city of love.

  4

  Delhi

  Yes, come to think of it, that’s how I’ll put it. I don’t know if it’s true for others also, if they too have a certain place they associate completely with the security and happiness of love. But, for me, there is such a place, and that is Delhi. To be correct, Delhi was not where Ira and I first met or where we first started dating. That was Bombay. But then we broke up and got back together only after she had moved here to study at JNU, both of us realizing too late that we were more attached to each other than we knew.

  Just at the onset of winter that year, I told Amma and Appa that there was an office conference I had to attend in Delhi, and flew down to spend a few days with Ira. It was a beautiful time—thin wisps of fog curling around trees in the wide, quiet roads of the city under a sun that was tender even at noon. Ira hadn’t yet got her hostel room at the time. She shared a third-floor barsati in Munirka with a classmate who, Ira told me, had cleared out for the weekend after telling her to ‘make good use of it’. But by the time we got to her place after lunch, I was so tired from having woken up early for the flight that I fell asleep on the mattress on the floor without meaning to. I woke up at some point to the sound of her making tea. She didn’t realize I was up, so I watched her. The sun was setting in the window in front of her. She shimmered. And when she turned around, she was surprised to find me looking at her.

  In the evening, she took me to JNU for a walk. She was so happy there that I was fond of it already. I rubbed my hands as we entered through the gate and dug them deep into the pockets of my sweatshirt. We walked down the main road of the campus as she pointed out the hostels named after rivers; the health centre where treatment was practically free; Ganga dhaba, where she had lemon tea in paper cups morning and night; the shopping centre, where a Tibetan joint had cheap but good food and where I had momos for the first time in my life.

  The next day Ira wanted to show me Delhi. The reason I had come prepared to like the city wa
s that she liked it already. But I also fell in love with its tree-lined roads and the metro, which, to me, stood for something other than itself. The crowded lanes of Chandni Chowk felt like home. At Jama Masjid we took selfies, though the word wasn’t coined yet, with my clunky point-and-shoot camera. We didn’t pose or make faces at the camera, only brought our heads together in an arch and smiled. When I look back at the photos today, we look happy. Whether we knew it or not back then I don’t know, but we weren’t simply dating. We were in love.

  For dinner she took me to Hauz Khas Village. There were barely three restaurants there at the time and we went to the rooftop of one. Ira told me there was a huge park with a small pond just behind the village. Of course, in the dark I could make out neither, but knowing they were there made me feel like I had come somewhere far from the city. We ate quickly and left as the place became deserted at nine. Also, since it was my last night in Delhi, I was cold with eagerness to get back.

  But it’s not simply because I went through a rite of passage in Delhi that I call it my city of love. It’s because when I think of Delhi, I think of two- and three-storied structures built very close to each other, of rooftops overlooking unseen parks and ponds, of noisy lanes leading up to the tranquillity of a masjid, of roads smelling of new-born amaltas at the start of winter and of bodies colliding in a fever in the dead of quiet night. And all of it is tinged with the mellow, yellow tones of love.

  *

  I moved to Delhi the next year. It was a jerky start to a new phase in life. The houses around the North Campus of DU, where I had enrolled for a master’s, were tiny and expensive. For a month, I moved around from the house of one acquaintance to another, until their patience ran out. But I had no luck finding a good place. Then one day Ira told me a room in a two-bedroom house in upmarket Vasant Enclave where Yusuf was staying had fallen vacant and I could move in with him. The only problem was it would be twenty-odd kilometres from North Campus. But I decided to take it anyway. I was tired of the house hunt and the place was close to JNU, where Ira now had a hostel room.