Don't ask or tell

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The rules of adultery keep on changing and yet somehow remain the same.

Does adultery elicit the same reaction of disapproval and censure as it did 20 years ago? In ‘don’t ask don’t tell Mumbai’ I was recently amazed to see that it did. Except the reproach was subtler than it had been earlier.

I was at a party in south Mumbai where the walls were as distressed as the women present and the furniture as wrought as the men. Just kidding. It was your tony, fashionable set, well-heeled, well-traveled, well-shod and successful, chattering away about cabbages and kings (Brussels sprout and politicians, actually) until a young buccaneer, an icon of sorts for the air-kissing set, who had recently walked out of a high profile marriage, made a late entry with his new partner, many years his junior. You could have sliced the coagulated atmosphere with a knife. Not only did a collective bristle quiver through the women present, but also the couple itself seemed almost resigned to the response that met its presence.

That night I wondered if the reproof was a moral judgment or something more akin to expediency. Most of the guests who had stonewalled the adulterous couple were women, and many of them with colorful back stories of their own, a few in fact who had been undeterred from pursuing relationships with married men. Could these women afford to occupy the high moral ground or was their censure self-survival dressed up as principal?

The more I thought about it the more I was inclined to believe the latter. Amongst the people present that evening most were middle aged, many with broken marriages behind them, a few onto their second and third attempts, and of course all were grown up enough to know that happily ever after was a Mills and Boon construct.

The hostility that adultery evokes is not because people believe that marriage is a rock solid institution, in fact it is because of the very opposite: by middle age one realises just how fragile a convention it really is. And therefore any assault on it, and challenge or threat evokes an even more rigid response.

The women bristled because they sensed how tenuous was their own situations, how easily replaceable they were in the revolving door of modern couplings. This year’s celebrated couple of the year can become next year’s minor scandal before the ink had dried on the wedding thank you notes.

Their response was akin to those of Turkeys approaching Christmas.

Do I exaggerate? Is the institution of marriage in as much of a threat as I make it out to be? Is adultery as common as it seems? No and yes. There is a restaurant in Mumbai that I half jokingly tell people possess an ‘ adulterer’s table’ : a special seating area where canoodling couples are placed. On two separate occasions I have observed two separate sets of adulterous couples pursuing an evening of fine wine and nouvelle cuisine.

Mind you the table is not tucked away in some dark corner of the restaurant and neither is it dimly lit. The couples have sat right at the center of the eatery, in full view of the other diners, many of them who are friends of their partners. In “don’t ask don’t tell” Mumbai, everyone knows not to carry tales and all’s fair in love and war as long as the veneer of respectability and ground rules are maintained.

Ground Rule One is the show must go on. Pretense and piousness are to be defended at all costs. And every one has a stake in keeping the status quo. Ground Rule Two, however, is opposite. Once status quo is breached and an individual is seen to be getting away with it — put up a subtle but firm resistance. Show your disapproval. In congenial “hail fellow well met” Mumbai, a slight lagging behind in a greeting, a muted hello, or a delicate turn of head away is as loud as a gunshot.

No sir, adultery is as egregious as it’s always been in post-reform double-digit-growing urban India. It’s just that the responses to it are more incremental.