The Newlyweds E-Book

Mansi Choksi

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 350

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'Staggeringly good... Much like Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, it reads more like a novel than a piece of non-fiction... it does what all great writing should - it puts us into the world of someone else, so completely that days later I find myself missing the couples and wondering how their stories end' Marianne Power, The Times 'A profound book on the politics of love, of couples who brave everything and everyone to be together. Told with warmth, truth and humanity, Mansi Choksi's The Newlyweds is an extraordinary look at what it takes to be together in modern India' Nikesh Shukla 'Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand youth in India today - or for anyone who believes in the galactic powers of love to change history, personal and political' Suketu Mehta What would you risk for love? Twenty-first century India is a culture on fast forward, a society which is changing at breakneck speed, where two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These young men and women grew up with the internet, smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love, the weight of thousands of years of tradition cannot so easily be set aside. An extraordinary work of reportage, The Newlyweds is a portrait of modern India told through the stories of three young couples, who defy their families to pursue love. The lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. The Hindu woman and Muslim man who must escape under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent mob. And the couple from different castes who know the terrible risk they run by marrying. Writing with great insight and humanity, Mansi Choksi examines the true cost of modern love in an ancient culture. It is a book that will change the way readers think about love, freedom and hope.

Leseprobe

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For Suhail and Kabir

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Cast of Characters

NEETU AND DAWINDER

Neetu Rani, the daughter of a landlord from the village of Kakheri in the northern Indian state of Haryana. She is twenty-one, trim and stylish, with the ability to talk about the lives of Bollywood actors as if they are next of kin. She is a Hindu of the Panchal caste, a rank of goldsmiths, stonemasons, and carpenters, and is expected to stay home until she can be transferred to a husband through an arranged marriage.

Dawinder Singh, a twenty-four-year-old neighbor of Neetu Rani and the son of a retired truck driver. He is a Sikh of the Mehra caste of palanquin bearers and boatsmen that is considered marginally lower in the complex web of caste structure. He has a soft, cheerful face, a headful of curls, and a nervous laugh.

Gulzar Singh, also known as Kala, Neetu’s father. He is the short-tempered owner of a firewood shop and a landlord. With two successful businesses, a two-bedroom house, and a son in the Indian Navy, he is considered an influential man in the village.

Sudesh Rani, Neetu’s mother and Kala’s wife. She quietly protects her daughters from her husband’s temper in a place where women are expected to fade into the background in the presence of men.

Gurmej Singh, Dawinder’s father, a sickly man who drove trucks for a living until his eyesight grew weak. He dreams of growing old in his ancestral fields in the village of his birth.

Sukhwinder Kaur, Dawinder’s mother, a god-fearing woman and devoted wife.x

Kulwant Kaur, Dawinder’s aunt, who lives in a neighboring province. She is a wealthy veterinarian’s wife with jet-black hair and loose wrinkled skin who prides herself on taming feral daughters-in-law.

Sanjoy Sachdev, chairman of the Love Commandos, a vigilante group that protects couples marked for honor killings by their families. He likes to be addressed as Baba (Grandfather), even though he is “only eighteen with thirty-eight years of experience.”

Manoj and Babli, young lovers from a village near Kakheri, who are murdered for bringing dishonor to their families by defying the caste system and marrying each other.

MONIKA AND ARIF

Monika Ingle, the youngest daughter of a Hindu trader of double cotton mattresses in the western city of Nagpur. She is eighteen, small, and delicate, with luminous skin and a glossy side braid.

Mohammad Arif Dosani, called Arif, the son of a Muslim shopkeeper in the village of Basmath who dreams of becoming a policeman. He is twenty-three, with pockmarked cheeks, a circular nod, and a heart he keeps ice cold while flirting with city girls.

Bhagyashri Ingle, called Bhaga, Monika’s older sister. She is bold and outspoken. She meets Arif at a training for police constable recruits, and they become fast friends.

Shridhar Ingle, Monika and Bhagyashri’s father. He is a trader of mattresses and the head of the Ingle household.

Ranjana Ingle, Monika and Bhagyashri’s mother. She is a mild-mannered housewife.

Bashir Dosani, Arif’s father. He is a small-boned man with a poetic bent who owns a children’s clothes shop near a mosque in the village of Basmath.

Tabssum Dosani, Arif’s mother, a bossy woman who likes to deliver her xiinsults in a voice dripping with honey and who appoints herself in charge of the household and the business.

Akida Khemani, Arif’s aunt, who also lives in Nagpur, with her own family. She loves Arif as much as her own children.

Vishal Punj, also known as Bajrangi Paji Saheb, the chief convener of the Bajrang Dal’s Nagpur Metropolitan chapter, a belligerent Hindu nationalist youth group.

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–73), a zoology professor from a village near Nagpur, who took over the reins of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Far Right quasi-militant group devoted to the creation of a Hindu nation.

RESHMA AND PREETHI

Reshma Mokenwar, a twenty-eight-year-old sales assistant from a Mumbai suburb. She has a heart-shaped face stained yellow from a lifetime of turmeric fairness treatments and a tongue sharpened through the knife grinder of a bad marriage.

Preethi Sarikela, an eighteen-year-old daughter of Reshma’s father’s cousin sister from the village of Bazarhathnoor in the southern state of Telangana.

Babu Mokenwar, Reshma’s father, who works as a driver in the city of Mumbai.

Rekha Mokenwar, Reshma’s mother, who earns a living by scrubbing dirty dishes.

Kishen Mokenwar, the younger of Reshma’s two brothers, who is named after the Hindu god of love and dreams of becoming a local politician.

Narsa Sarikela, Preethi’s mother and Reshma’s aunt, a farmhand whose small frame is hunched over from a lifetime of picking cotton in the fields of Bazarhathnoor.

Ushanna Sarikela, Preethi’s father, a worker in the village’s irrigation department.

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The Newlyweds

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1

Introduction

For most of my mother’s life, she has lived in the house she was born in. It is a roomy apartment on the second floor of a building with curving, dark stairs in an old part of Mumbai. Every afternoon, the sunlight presses through the stained glass windows of the corridor. Its big bedroom windows open into the canopies of trees. There is a powder-blue wall populated with old photographs of the city, and the drawers still sometimes reveal the belongings of people who spent part of their lives in this house, then moved on to go somewhere else. They include my great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, my sister, and me.

When my mother was eighteen, she fell in love with a man and married him against her family’s wishes. After her eleven-year-long marriage crumbled, she returned to the house with two daughters. Even though she has lived in the same place for forty-eight years since, she carries an air of displacement everywhere she goes. She is 2always in a hurry. In a hurry to get somewhere. In a hurry to return. In a hurry to leave again. But to go where?

When I met the young couples whose stories make up this book, they were consumed with that same hurry. I met Neetu and Dawinder days after they had run away from their village and landed in the grip of a journalist-activist who promised to protect them. Weeks later, I met Monika and Arif when they were on the run from right-wing vigilantes. Finally, when I met Reshma and Preethi, a lesbian couple struggling to start their lives together in a town where they knew no one, I came to realize that the pursuit of love and its aftermath was ultimately a kind of displacement.

Two in every three Indians is under the age of thirty-five. No other country has more young people. Yet we are torn about whether it is acceptable to be young and do the things young people do. If a survey asked us who we were or where we were going, we were expected to say that we are different from our parents because we look to the future and not to the past. Recently, such a survey was conducted, and it revealed that half our young people consider caste and religion to be the defining aspects of our identity. One-third of us believe that intercaste marriages will destroy Indian society. Half of us are completely opposed to interreligious marriage. Only one in seven of us approves of dating before marriage. Four in five of us married with permission from our parents, and less than 6 percent of us chose our own partners. Most of us think like our parents and conduct our lives based on the fear of disappointing them.

Marriage has a special place in Indian society. In many ways, it is the only intended outcome of growing up. It is an arrangement 3between two families belonging to the same warp and weft in the tapestry of religion, caste, class, clan, region, and language. The goal of marriage is to cement those boundaries to ensure the survival of power hierarchies because we are a society that places greater emphasis on collectivism than individualism. We derive our identities from the groups we belong to; our daily lives and our politics are arranged around them. When young people choose their own partners, we threaten order with chaos.

I wanted to know if love can endure with dignity if it becomes tainted with shame. I learned there is a great power in longing for love, but once we attain that love at the cost of moral injury, that space can become filled with a longing for acceptance.

Often when love is gained, it can start to feel unheroic. The process of reconciliation with our choices can be both beautiful and terrible. There is an expectation in Indian society that even if married life turns out to be hell, women will stay in the marriage and pray for the same partner for the next seven lifetimes. Our bodies are repositories of family honor, battlefields for political wars, and instruments for reproduction.

While reporting on the lives of these three couples, I often thought about why Indian society does not implode from the pressures of so many young people—especially young women—pushing against what we want and what we are expected to want. It also made me think about whether curiosity was really a trait that could be gained and then given up.

Neetu and Dawinder, Arif and Monika, and Reshma and Preethi grew up in villages and towns in different corners of the country, 4each of them internalizing a narrow spectrum of morality and an overwhelming sense of duty. They are exactly the kind of young Indians who are raised to resist the urge to surpass the boundaries of traditional Indian society. So, after they risk everything for the sake of love, they suddenly cannot recognize themselves. Each of them is tormented by one central question: Was it worth it?

Late one evening, when I went back to my mother’s home after spending the day reporting, I asked her if her decision to marry the man she fell in love with all those years earlier had been worth it. “I don’t know,” she answered.

We took our dinner plates to the television and sat down to watch a Hindi soap opera about another doomed romance.

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PART ONE

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Chapter 1

Kakheri

On the night of November 27, 2016, Dawinder Singh dropped off a bottle of sleeping pills outside his neighbor’s door. Everyone in Kakheri, his village in the northern Indian state of Haryana, believed him to be gone, perhaps abroad. But here he was, a handkerchief tied over his mouth like a bandit, fleeing toward the bus stand. He was twenty-four, with a soft, cheerful face, a headful of curls, and a tendency to laugh at the wrong times. Inside the neighbor’s house, Neetu Rani, the birdlike beauty he grew up adoring, was more composed. She was twenty-one, trim and stylish, with the ability to talk about the lives of Bollywood actors as though they were next of kin. She waited for her parents to finish their Hindi soap opera, and as soon as they went to bed, she went outside to pick up the pills.

Two nights later, Dawinder returned in a car with two cousins who had been persuaded to join his mission when they were already 8weak from watching romantic movies. One would drive the getaway car, and the other would provide moral support. The cousins watched music videos on their cell phones while they waited on the abandoned road that took freight trucks to marble factories nearby. Dawinder muttered prayers—the only way he knew to cope with uncertainties such as exam results, visa applications, and the outcome of eloping with a neighbor.

Inside, Neetu watched her parents finish bowls of rice and beans laced with the sleeping pills. After midnight, Dawinder’s phone finally rang. Neetu was scolding Dawinder in whispers: What kind of sleeping pills were these? Her parents had finished their dinner, but they were still shuffling around. Her father kept waking to go to the bathroom. Dawinder asked her to be patient and began praying aloud.

An hour later, she called again, reporting that she had shaken her mother, pretending to be scared of the dark, but there was no response. Dawinder got out of the car and hurried to her house to help her haul out four suitcases containing twenty-three tunics, salwar suits, jeans and tops, old family albums, friendship bands, birthday cards, stuffed animals, and a life-size poster of herself that she’d had taken in a professional photo studio. She knew he would come barefoot, despite her having told him not to, so she had cleared away the fallen branches and razor-rimmed leaves from the babul tree. After the last suitcase, she scaled the wall herself, and they ran out laughing through the narrow dirt lane where they had first seen each other. A sharp right, and past the cowshed where she would hide to take his phone calls. Another right, and past their school. On the corner, her father’s firewood shop. Finally, into the car. 9

The vehicle was moving, but it was hard to see where it was going in the thick blanket of smog that descended across northern India in the winter. In the back seat, Dawinder slipped a set of twenty-one bangles around Neetu’s wrists: reds and golds stacked between whites and silvers. This was her choora, the marker of a new bride. If she wore it for a year, Dawinder would be guaranteed a long life. He tied a mangalsutra, a thread of small black beads that looked like a sprinkling of black mustard seeds, around her neck and painted the part in her hair with vermilion powder that he carried in the fold of an old newspaper sheet. Neetu was now his wife, he announced. She thought that their love story was just like in the movies, only without nice costumes.

As the car sped onto the highway, Neetu felt herself floating. Outside the window, rice fields flew past. Suddenly she felt her stomach churning, and she realized she needed to vomit. The car screeched to a halt, and she climbed out to throw up. A few miles ahead, she needed to stop again. And then again.

Three hours and five episodes of retching later, the cousins dropped Neetu and Dawinder at a bus stop in Rajpura, a town forty miles from home. When the bus came, they found seats by the window. Neetu rested her head on Dawinder’s shoulder and described the agony of waiting for her parents to drift off to sleep. “Who knows when they will be able to eat or rest again,” she said.

The sun was rising when the bus rolled through a traffic jam outside New Delhi. Dawinder saw a big, heaving city packed with crowds that could swallow them up and provide the anonymity they needed to survive. Neetu’s eyes watered from the pollution. 10Dawinder called his aunt Kulwant Kaur, who he suspected would be his only relative able to receive the news of his elopement without collapsing. She asked to speak to his new bride. “Don’t betray him now,” Kulwant said. Neetu promised that she would not.

They hailed a rickshaw, which bobbed in and out of potholes and squirmed through waves of pedestrians. Neetu saw a storefront that displayed red, blue, and yellow bras. In her village, she had been able to buy them only in white. They rode past cheap hotels that offered rooms by the hour, places where married men took their mistresses. Dawinder clutched her hand and told her to trust him.

The rickshaw stopped outside a rusted gate. They looked up at a crumbling building covered in lime plaster, scaffolding, and saris hung to dry. Outside, men were smoking and staring. Dawinder had seen videos of this place online, but in person it looked nothing like he had expected. It was too late to turn back now—they had saved up ten thousand rupees (about $150) to reserve a space. He took out his cell phone.

“Hello, Love Commandos,” the voice on the line said.

“We have come,” Dawinder said.

“We have been waiting for you.”

In Kakheri, the news of Neetu’s and Dawinder’s disappearance broke with sunrise. Neetu’s father, Gulzar Singh, a landlord known as Kala, walked around the bazaar looking crazed. With his wrestler’s physique and a pencil-thin mustache, Kala resembled the villain from a 1980s television adaptation of the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic in which each character is meant to embody a trait that is supremely good or evil. 11

Neetu’s mother, Sudesh Rani, sat in her kitchen sobbing as neighbors gathered to commiserate, for a runaway daughter was as good as dead. Women in rural Haryana are required to cover their heads, fade into the background in the presence of men, and make informed guesses about what their husbands would like to eat for dinner. Young girls are expected to stay home until they can be transferred to a husband through an arranged marriage. Neetu had disgraced her family not only by eloping but also by doing so with the short, slow-witted son of a neighbor.

According to rural custom, men and women of the same village are considered to be siblings, which put Neetu and Dawinder’s relationship under the umbrella of incest. Worse, Dawinder was a Sikh, from the Mehra caste of palanquin bearers and boatsmen. His father, Gurmej Singh, who had driven a truck for a pittance for most of his life, turned to farming when his eyesight grew weak. Neetu was a Hindu of the Panchal caste, a rank of goldsmiths, stonemasons, and carpenters. Her father, with his own firewood shop and a son in the navy, was a respectable man in the community.

In rural Haryana, when romantic relationships become ensnared by taboos, the consequences were often fatal. In 2007 the bodies of Manoj and Babli Banwala, lovers from the same village, were found in gunnysacks that had been dumped in a canal not far from Kakheri. After kidnapping the couple, Babli’s family forced her to drink pesticide and strangled Manoj to death in front of her. With support from leaders in their village, Babli’s relatives saw the murders as the only punishment commensurate with their humiliation.

Neetu and Dawinder’s match should have been unthinkable. When they met in 2005, her family had just moved up the street. She was nine, 12and he was twelve. After school, Dawinder would play video games with Neetu’s brother, Deepak, and Neetu and her sister, Ruksana, would play house with Dawinder’s sister, Jasbir. The families got along well for a few years, until one afternoon in 2009, when Deepak grabbed Dawinder’s neck during an argument. Neetu’s father, Kala, who was known to have a short fuse, broke them up and slapped Dawinder across the face. After the incident, the families stopped talking. Besides, the children were entering their teens, and it was not proper for young girls and boys to be seen together.

The village practiced a separation of the sexes. Neetu’s parents, for instance, observed a version of sannyasa, the Hindu philosophy of renunciation, which in retirement forbids physical contact with the opposite sex. If Neetu’s father sat down on the rope cot, her mother would jump up as though something had bitten her.

In the summer of 2010, a year after the families cut ties, Dawinder noticed Neetu looking at him on the walk home from school. When he got to his house, he made himself a cup of tea and climbed onto a stool in his parents’ room, curious whether he could see his neighbor from the window. She was out on her terrace, still watching him from a distance. Seeing that no one else was around, he raised his glass to her. Neetu responded by bursting into laughter. She was fourteen, and he was seventeen.

Dawinder was sure that this girl was trying to get him into trouble. But every day after that, Neetu would dawdle on the way home so that the two of them could talk. If they were alone at home, they would run into each other’s houses and whisper sweet nothings: “That shirt looks good on you,” she would say; “You look pretty with your hair loose,” he would reply. 13

Neetu could not bear to think of herself as “that type of girl,” which was the type of girl with a boyfriend, so she gave up meat for sixteen Mondays to convince Lord Shiva, a supreme Hindu deity, to turn Dawinder into her husband. On Karwa Chauth, the Hindu festival in which married women fast until moonrise for the safety of their husbands, Neetu secretly went hungry all day. When the wives of the village gathered on their roofs in shimmering bridal saris to break their fasts, Neetu watched them wistfully from her window. As the women glimpsed the moon and their husbands through the net of kitchen sieves, Neetu held up a tea strainer in the direction of Dawinder’s window. “All I pray is that Lord Shiva accepts my fast and makes us husband and wife,” she said to a thumb-sized photo of Dawinder.

Within two years, in March 2012, their relationship was discovered. One night after dinner, assuming her parents were asleep, Neetu snuck into Dawinder’s house. The two had hardly a moment together before her mother started banging at the main door. Neetu panicked and slid under his bed but her mother pulled her out and started beating her, slapping her face and shoulders.

“Why did you come here?” Sudesh Rani hit her daughter until a cut opened above her lip. “Did he touch you anywhere?”

“We were just talking,” Neetu cried.

“You jumped into his bed to talk?” she scoffed. “Should I wake your father and tell him where I found you in the middle of the night?”

Sudesh Rani dragged Neetu out by her hair. At the door, she warned Dawinder that if he wanted to live, he should disappear before she felt compelled to tell her husband. 14

For most of her life, Neetu had felt her mother’s love drain all her worries, like a scalp massage after a long day out in the sun. When she was three, and a mysterious illness turned her legs into jelly, her mother walked barefoot from temple to temple, offering up her gold earrings and bangles to various gods and goddesses and giving up one favorite food after another to persuade them to cure her daughter. After the miracle really happened the year Neetu turned four, Sudesh Rani vowed to protect her daughter from her husband’s temper. She promised to buy her a roti machine so that Neetu would not have to risk blistering her precious hands feeding kindling into a clay oven to make bread after marriage. But the day after Sudesh Rani found Neetu hiding under Dawinder’s bed, she sent the girl away to her own mother’s house in the nearby town of Jind as a final gesture of her affection. Weeks later, Neetu was sent to a strict all-girls boarding school, where, in order to scrub out temptations of youth, young women were forbidden from using phones, applying makeup, or wearing jeans.

In the house across the street, Dawinder’s parents prepared to sell a chunk of their ancestral land. After hearing about Sudesh Rani’s threat against their son, they decided that now was as good a time as any to send Dawinder to England to study business management, in the hope of eventually immigrating.

Even though their family had lived honorably in Kakheri for three generations since Dawinder’s grandfather bought up tracts of barren land during the partition of Punjab in 1947 into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan and tilled them until they turned green, they were prepared to sell everything to send their son to safety. 15

“Mummyji, what color is this shirt?” Dawinder pulled out a red shirt from the trunk as he gathered his clothes.

“Betaji, it is tomato red,” his mother answered absentmindedly.

“No,” he said. “It is blood red.”

Sukhwinder Kaur burst into tears. Her son’s habit of loading mundanities with deep meaning ever since he had become involved with the neighbor’s girl suddenly filled her with contempt for his choices.

Late one night, three months after Dawinder left for London, Neetu had a nightmare about him. They were running up the stairs of a dilapidated building, away from an angry mob wielding swords and axes, until they made it to a roof that was falling off in slabs. There was a pot of gold coins within their reach, but instead of grabbing it, they declared that they wished to get married. Suddenly the floor beneath their feet crashed, and, as Neetu saw herself fall, a quickening in her stomach woke her up. For weeks after that, she worried that something bad had happened to Dawinder. She kept trying to get in touch with him, but after a while the calls stopped going through.

In London, Dawinder had discovered that the university he was to study at was a sham that existed only on paper. The Indian owners had closed up shop and run away with his family’s life savings. He went hungry for days until he was taken in by a Sikh family who allowed him to work as a stock boy at their supermarket without valid papers. They gave him warm clothes, food, and a place to sleep.

Dawinder and Neetu, who was still at boarding school, managed to get back in touch. She begged her classmates to let her receive his 16calls on cell phones they kept hidden behind toilet tanks. The two would discuss who ate what for lunch, gossip about her brother’s love affairs, and assess the profound obstacles facing their relationship. He would tease her about how her eyes grew wide and her face turned into her father’s when she became angry. She would respond by sending goofy selfies.

Dawinder’s boss would ask him, “Betaji, why don’t you get married to a nice British girl and settle down here?” “No, Uncleji,” he would answer. “Someone is waiting for me in my village.”

Two years later, in 2014, when Dawinder was arrested for transporting unlicensed liquor and deported back to India for working without valid papers, he was partly relieved. He was miserable without Neetu, as if an organ had been ripped out of his body.

Since it was too dangerous for Dawinder to return to Kakheri, the young man shuttled between the homes of two aunts and an uncle that were scattered across the northern Indian countryside. Everywhere he went, he was unable to sleep, stirred awake easily by the washing of pots and pans, locks and latches turning, and the distant mewls of stray cats.

Late one night, after being woken by the TV outside his room, Dawinder tried to put himself back to bed by imagining what Neetu looked like asleep, but the thoughts made his heart ache even more. When he wandered into his cousin Shanty’s room, rubbing and shielding his eyes from the glow of the TV, he saw his cousin hypnotized by the movie actor Aamir Khan.

“There is no force over love; it is the triumphant fire, Ghalib. It cannot be stamped out, nor can it burn once doused,” the actor’s voice 17boomed as he recited an Urdu couplet by the nineteenth-century poet Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan on his popular television talk show, Satyamev Jayate. This episode of the program, which exposed grim social realities such as corruption, hunger, and unemployment in the hope of shaming millions of viewers out of their thick-skinned apathy, focused on the crisis of love marriages.

Dawinder’s cousin was in a trance watching the famous actor weep as he told real stories of young lovers who were hunted by their own families for defying taboos regarding caste and religion. “We have young people whose hearts are burning with that fire of love, and we have parents of young people who are trying to douse that fire,” Khan said. As he introduced a vigilante group that provided protection to young couples who wanted to marry for love, Dawinder let himself drop onto the sofa next to his cousin.

“Be strong, young lovers,” Sanjoy Sachdev, the chairman of the Love Commandos, said to a thumping and whistling studio audience. Sachdev, an older man with an infant’s face and large, green eyes, described his mission to help young lovers marry. His organization assisted them in navigating the red tape of getting weddings registered legally, offered free housing and food, and even risked its members’ own lives to protect them. “There’s an old song that always rings in my ears: ‘We will love each other shamelessly, we will not fear the world,’” Sachdev told the audience. Dawinder stood up to clap in front of the television, his eyes brimming and his nostrils trembling with reverence.

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Chapter 2

The Love Commandos

A little after nine, Neetu Rani and Dawinder Singh climbed up the dark, curving stairs of a crumbling four-story building across the street from a row of cheap hotels behind the New Delhi railway station, which may have been brothels. On the first landing, a dog named Romeo sniffed them for guns and explosives, and a rotating cast of young men led them into a three-bedroom apartment. Past a metal grille, a mini fridge, and a wall shrine of assorted Hindu deities, in a room cluttered with newspapers, ashtrays, and biscuits, an older man dressed in a matching tracksuit sat in a plastic lawn chair, conducting three different phone conversations at once.

“Why is the administration and police machinery criminally silent on implementing the standing directions of the honorable Supreme Court?” he said into one phone.

“Son, in fifteen minutes, the situation will settle down, and the police will release her,” he muttered into another. 20

And into a third phone: “Yadavji, do me a favor and let this love couple pass your jurisdiction safely.” He turned around to nod at Neetu and Dawinder and gestured at them to sit down on the edge of a tattered bed.

This was Sanjoy Sachdev, the cofounder and chairman of Love Commandos. He looked unwashed and reeked of cigarettes, but everything he uttered sounded like poetry to Neetu and Dawinder. He ordered tea and spiced rice flakes for breakfast, then told them that even the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati married each other against caste tradition.

“The world’s first intercaste marriage was between Lord Shiva and Mother Parvati,” he said. “None of their families were happy. They did not accept it. So what did they do? They exchanged garlands in the mountains and became husband and wife. No one was ready to go along with them, so they arranged a wedding procession of ghosts. The enemies of love screaming in the name of religion today don’t understand that what they are opposing is a path set out by Lord Shiva himself.”

Dawinder nodded solemnly. Neetu looked over his shoulder to observe two women in the kitchen. They heaped spiced rice flakes onto small plates and poured tea into a tray of mismatched cups. She thought it was too bold for maids to laugh and let cups and saucers clink in full view of guests.

The Love Commandos operated like a family, Sachdev continued, so couples were required to call him Baba, meaning Grandfather, even though he was “only sweet eighteen with thirty-eight years of experience.” He oversaw the couples’ marriage registration process so that they could not be legally separated. The three other middle-aged Commandos, who lived in the neighboring building, 21were to be addressed as Papa. Each had an area of expertise. Harsh Malhotra, a former interior decorator and local politician, coordinated rescue operations of couples in distress. Sonu Rangi, a former worker for the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena Party, organized weddings of runaway couples. Govinda Chand, a part-time graduate student, took care of groceries and bills.

“I am sure you want to know why us old mad men risk our lives for young people like you,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. Once, a small boy asked an old man why he was planting a mango tree. ‘Dada, by the time this tree bears fruit, you will probably be dead. Even if you are still alive, you won’t have any teeth left to eat the fruit. So then why are you wasting your time?’ The old man smiled at the boy and said, ‘Son, I am not planting this mango tree for me. I’m planting it for your children. By the time this tree grows, you will have children just about as big as you, and it is them who will savor the sweet fruits of my efforts.’

“I am planting a mango tree called Love Commandos,” Sachdev continued. “I am risking my life for you today so that your children can inherit a country where love is not a crime. It is my small effort for a new and bright India.”

Before he showed Neetu and Dawinder their room, Sachdev explained the rules of the shelter: no sex, no afternoon naps, and no contact with the outside world. Everything was free, including shelter, food, and legal aid, but since they were a volunteer organization and they had already sold their cars, flats, and gold to protect runaway lovers, each couple was expected to pay for their own wedding. Neetu and Dawinder were so grateful that, without being asked, they handed over Dawinder’s debit card and gave Baba the PIN. 22

Their room was at the end of a dark corridor. With its low ceiling, blue-green walls, and gloomy views of a concrete roof, it felt as if the air had been deliberately sucked out. A thin fluorescent tube light flickered all day above a small television that streamed back-to-back episodes of a Hindi soap opera about a dutiful housewife who was really a mythical, shape-shifting cobra.

Neetu surveyed the room morosely as three other couples they were to share it with introduced themselves, including the two women she had seen in the kitchen and mistaken for domestic help. Sanjay, a rickshaw driver from the city of Ahmedabad in western India, was with Bhavika, a landowner’s daughter from a higher caste. Prashant and Sheetal, college friends from the northern Indian town of Amroha, were on the run because they belonged to the same clan, and even though they were not directly related, their relationship was considered incest. Afsana, a Muslim housekeeper from East Delhi, was with Malkit, the Sikh heir to a readymade clothes shop in West Delhi. As the couples started to exchange notes about the varying amounts they had paid to reserve a place at the shelter, they heard a knock on the door.

“Children?” Sanjoy Sachdev’s voice rang out. “Your wedding is in ten minutes.”

As Neetu dabbed the pink of her lipstick on her cheeks, she wished she had brought a brocade salwar suit and gotten a chance to get her hair done at a beauty salon. Dawinder threw on a clean shirt and styled his hair into a disarray.

Sonu Rangi, who sported a handlebar mustache and an explosion of canned laughter for his mobile ring tone, led them past shops 23selling spare motorcycle parts, stalls stacked with pens and notebooks, and carts displaying plastic flip phones. Dawinder hurried to keep up with Rangi, while Neetu got left behind in a knot of people milling at the shopping stands. When she turned a corner at a row of lawyers in flapping black coats perched on plastic stools to solicit clients, she was on the verge of tears.

“I’m here.” Dawinder took her hand. “I’m right here.” So much was changing so fast that it was hard to understand if she was crying because she had suddenly lost him or because she suddenly felt lost.

In an apartment on the top floor of a tin-roofed building that had been converted into a temple, Neetu and Dawinder sat cross-legged in front of a holy fire as a priest with sandalwood paste on his forehead chanted Vedic scriptures. Sonu Rangi sat in a corner, talking into his cell phone and gesturing for the rituals to continue.

The couple circled the holy fire seven times and vowed to be together for seven births, the entirety of time it is believed for a soul to break free from the cycle of births and deaths, according to Hindu philosophy. They signed a religious marriage certificate and posed for a photograph as evidence. Then the couple waited at the door with a box of sweets in their hands and listened to curses drift out of the stairwell as Rangi and the priest negotiated the payment.

When they arrived back at the shelter, jasmine and rose garlands still around their necks, the other couples stood in the doorway to receive them. “Mr. and Mrs. Dawinder Singh,” Sachdev announced from his bed. “Where are my sweets?” The last step to legally formalize their wedding was to submit the religious certificate to the government marriage registrar. Sachdev would take care of that.

24Before starting the Love Commandos, Sachdev had tried to open a poultry farm, a sweetened-milk company, and a factory for car parts. All three businesses tanked. He worked briefly as a consultant to Indian Railways, entered and lost a local election, and finally became a journalist. But he sensed that he was meant for a larger purpose. One Valentine’s Day in the early 2000s, a colleague in the newsroom told him about the Hindu nationalist groups that roamed parks and college campuses to protest the Western corruption of Indian values. They beat up couples, cut their hair, sprayed them with chili powder, and pronounced them brother and sister. Hearing of the victims suffering for their love, Sachdev thought, Who are these people to poke their dirty nose in between?

In 2010, when honor killings started to dominate television news debates, he got the idea to create Love Commandos. Sachdev didn’t like the word runaways, so he referred to his clients as “people leaving parental homes for the unification of the love family.” He wanted them to relish their freedom. “This country is sitting on a volcano,” he said. “This is a country of six hundred and fifty million young people. Each young person has a heart that is burning with a flame called love.”

Through local newspaper reporting, the Love Commandos were made aware of at least four bounties that were issued by khap panchayats for protecting runaway couples. Khap panchayats, unelected councils of upper-caste elders in the countryside, routinely issued diktats for disturbing the delicate balance of the caste system. They did not have any government-sanctioned authority, but they wielded extraordinary influence over their communities. Once, while the daughter of a local politician was taking shelter with the group, a mob burst in and took turns beating and kicking the Commandos. But within a week, they 25were back on their feet, helping a new runaway couple get married.

As it turned out, Sachdev had never been in love himself—it was only his work. “I didn’t have time to fall in love,” he said, “because I was busy solving other people’s problems.” At twenty-eight, he entered an arranged marriage. His wife lived in his hometown, thirty miles from New Delhi, and took care of his aging father. Sometimes Sachdev would go to see her, but months might pass between visits, since planning trips depended on his mood. They had four children, now grown, who had given him what he described as “an eternal feeling of love.”

As Neetu and Dawinder clicked photographs on the shelter’s balcony soon after their wedding in New Delhi, Dawinder’s father, Gurmej Singh, took his brother-in-law to a hospital in Ladwa, a town a hundred miles away. While there, Gurmej silenced three calls. Two were from his younger brother, and one was from the village chief. When his phone rang a fourth time, he started to worry. His wife, Sukhwinder Kaur, was away on a pilgrimage in a distant village, and Dawinder was supposed to have started work at a relative’s shop in a neighboring province. “Only God can save us,” Gurmej’s younger brother sobbed on the phone and asked him to meet outside the hospital gate. “Only God can save us now.”

When Gurmej reached the hospital gate, the side door of a van slid open. Neetu’s uncle and cousins pulled Gurmej inside and wedged him into the middle seat. His younger brother, who was in the back seat, stared back in guilty silence.

“What happened?” Gurmej said in a heavy voice as the van jerked to a start. “What are you doing?” 26

“Where did he take her?” Neetu’s father, Kala, turned in the front seat to look Gurmej in the eye.