For Matrimonial Purposes

For Matrimonial Purposes

KAVITA DASWANI

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperFiction

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Kavita Daswani 2003

Kavita Daswani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007160587

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007387908

Version: 2016-10-03

Dedication

To Mummy and Papa,

for teaching me humor and humility.

To Sunita, Ranju, Sanam, Mansha and Sohana,

a family that I am profoundly proud to be a part of.

And especially to my exceptional husband Nissim,

who made me believe that my words have worth, and

our gorgeous son Jahan, who moved me to write as

he lay in my belly. As long as I have you both,

my life is blessed.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Three

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgment

Keep Reading

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

Chapter One

The normal religious marriage was and still is arranged by the parents of the couple, after much consultation, and the study of omens, horoscopes and auspicious physical characteristics … (w)hile a husband should be at least twenty a girl should be married immediately before puberty.

The Wonder That Was India by A. L. Basham

My grandmother was married off two days shy of her tenth birthday. My mother found a husband when she was twenty. I thus reckoned that if every generation increased by a decade the acceptable age for marriage, I should have become a wife by thirty.

But at thirty-three, I was nowhere close to being married. And it was this that brought much consternation to all, tainting the joy and inciting hitherto suppressed family politics, at the wedding of my twenty-two-year-old cousin, Nina.

I was at a family wedding in Bombay, the city where I was born and had spent most of my life. My parents and two brothers still lived here, in the same house that I knew as a child, a house conveniently located just minutes from major temples and hotels. Which was a good thing considering how much time they spent at such institutions, attending weddings just like this one. It was always, of course, someone else’s wedding and never my own.

Nina had ‘jumped the queue’ as they all liked to say. She was much younger, and marrying before me. But then, as Nina’s mother pointed out, how long could everyone wait?

I forced myself to smile and look happy. It wasn’t that I was unhappy. It was just that, on this steaming May evening, I was hot and flustered, conscious of the damp fog-grey semi-circles formed by droplets of sweat on the underarms of my sari blouse. I had to press my limbs down against my body so they wouldn’t show against the pale fabric. Both the sari and blouse were creamy whipped pink, like the pearly sheen of the inside of a seashell, or of little girls’ bows. Six yards of the fabric were wrapped, nipped and tucked around my body, making me look – in my estimation – like a blushing eggroll. At least that was what I told anyone who complimented me.

I had been fidgeting all evening with the flowers in my hair. They were faux, bought off a wooden stand on a Bombay street-corner, papery and the size of a fingernail, about a dozen of them pinned into my upswept coiffure. Not exactly my idea of understated chic. But the hairdresser had insisted: ‘Your cousin is getting married! You need some decoration!’

Thankfully understated wasn’t the order of the day here at the Jhule Lal Temple. Nina was about to become a wife in the presence of three hundred people, most of whom she had never met. I felt self-conscious standing there on the sidelines, the older, unmarried cousin, aware that people were glancing over at me – yes, to see what I was wearing, but mostly to detect any hint of pain or jealousy on my face as yet another younger cousin married. I closed my eyes for a second, inhaled, found my centre – the way they taught me to do at my Wednesday evening Hatha yoga class. Then, I lifted up my smile, and made it stay.

‘Your turn next,’ said Auntie Mona, my mother’s second cousin, who was standing next to me. She grinned, revealing a space between her two front teeth the size of East Timor. That gap was considered a sign of good luck. Any Indian face-reader worth his chapatti dinner knew that the wider the space, the greater the fortune. ‘Don’t worry, beti, it will be your turn soon,’ Auntie Mona consoled, patting me on the back. ‘God will listen to your prayers. It’s all karma. Tsk Tsk.’

I allowed her to comfort me, as I had learnt to do all these years, and noted how miraculous it was that my self-esteem wasn’t completely annihilated by now. Since arriving in Bombay a week ago, I had been on the receiving end of many things: advice, sympathy, concern. But mostly, it was pity and consolation. Now, coming from Auntie Mona, these sentiments were delivered with the same gravity as a diagnosis of Lyme disease. My relatives never thought to ask about my interesting and independent life in New York, what I did there, who my friends were, or whether I’d scored a ticket to The Producers while Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane were still in it. Instead, it was an incessant: ‘Why aren’t you married yet?’

I turned towards Nina, who really was the sweetest thing, looking a dream in her wedding sari. This was pink too, but a celebratory pink: deeper, richer, embellished with thick gold, a bridal bonus. The top of her gleaming black hair, parted down the centre, was covered with the same fabric, her smooth white forehead dotted with tiny flecks of red paint in an arched design spliced in the middle by a gold-and-diamond bindi. Her hands, lavishly hennaed, reached up to push back a wisp of hair that had fallen into her half-closed eyes. Nina was praying, and blushing, swooning from the heat. She and her groom were sitting in front of a small bright orange fire, both sets of parents by their side, deep in their own thoughts as our family priest, Maharaj Girdhar, uttered thousands of Sanskrit words that no one but him understood.

The ceremony was about done, and now came my favourite part – when the groom slipped his finger into a pot of sindoor – and traced it down his new wife’s hair-parting. The gesture seemed to say, ‘You’re mine now. We belong to each other.’ He looked at her with something that appeared to be pride mixed with awe. While it might not yet be love, the happiness seemed real, born of gratitude. He also seemed relieved. He had done it; he’d found the perfect bride and the fun could start. Later, they would spend their first night together, and kiss for the first time.

The groom had won Nina’s heart without really trying. She’d fallen for his looks, his height (five feet eleven), his casual, easy-going demeanour. It was an arranged match. They had met twice, and then got engaged. That had been five weeks ago.

The couple stood, poised to garland one another and exchange rings. Nina bowed her head before her new husband, who looked upon her excitedly, like an archaeologist who had just stumbled across some rare artefact and couldn’t wait to examine it. Within seconds, they were surrounded by waves of well-wishers who hugged, kissed, shook hands and leaned in to see up close just how big the necklace was that Nina’s parents had given her. Everybody wanted to know the precise carat weight of the marquise diamond her groom had placed on the slender ring finger of her left hand.

It was time for me to make my way through the pack of people towards the couple. En masse, they smelt of sweat, turmeric, paan leaves and Pantene hair oil. I could detect here and there a whiff of Charlie perfume that I knew had been sitting in someone’s metal Godrej cupboard for fifteen years. I winced for a second, but when I reached them, summoned up all my warmth and goodwill and embraced them.

‘You look gorgeous, honey, I’m so happy for you. God bless,’ I said, kissing Nina’s smooth, warm cheek.

‘Didi Anju,’ she whispered, taking my hand. I loved how she always referred to me as didi – big sister. ‘I said a prayer for you while I was walking around the fire taking my vows. You’ll be next. I asked God, and God always listens to the prayers of brides.’

The pure sweetness of the gesture made me want to cry, but tears here would be misconstrued as a sign of longing and sadness, so I pinched them back. I turned to the groom, and looked up at him. ‘Congratulations, sweetie,’ I said, reaching up to hug him. ‘You look after her.’

I became, as the word didi implied, the generous, solid, single, big sister.

That duty done, I turned and wove my way through the clusters of chattering people who were shuffling out of the hall to a large dining room below. I found my parents in one corner and padded, still barefoot, over to them. Next would come the horror of trying to find my shoes in the pile outside. Bombay weddings were notorious for shoe theft, and I began wondering – belatedly – how good an idea it had been to wear my Dolce & Gabbana mules today.

‘OK, come, let’s go downstairs and eat,’ said my mother, as she automatically adjusted the part of my sari that was coming undone.

My father was mopping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

‘Too damn hot,’ he said. ‘Let’s go downstairs. Maybe it’s cooler there.’

The large air-conditioners rumbled away, blowing frosty air on the long lines of people forming at the buffet table. My father put away his handkerchief, and picked up a plate.

‘OK,’ said my mother, turning to me. ‘Have you seen anyone here you like? Any nice boys?’

‘Mum, I haven’t really been paying attention,’ I replied. ‘I wanted to watch the wedding ceremony properly.’

Again, my mother sighed, and looked around. People carrying plates piled with spicy aubergine and vegetable biryani were starting to fill up the rows of plastic chairs that had been set out.

That’s when she spotted him.

‘Who’s he?’ my mother asked, a finger pointing at a stranger in black across the room. ‘The boy talking to Maharaj Girdhar.’

‘Mum, stop pointing! And how am I supposed to know?’ I was getting testy. This was inevitable, this scouting around for available men at a family wedding. But I was hot and tired, my sari felt like it was coming unwrapped, and, a day away from getting my period, I just wasn’t in the mood. My psychic, had he been there, would have said that I was experiencing a mild form of resentment at Nina’s new matrimonial state, that it had brought up my worst fears about my own future. Because he had been right about such reactions in the past, I decided on the spot that from now on, I’d save the money I’d spent on him for shoes.

But the Great Official Husband-Hunt, as I had come to call it, was well under way. I had been here for several days, and there had been some talk of this boy and that. Tonight, my mother had spotted a real-life prospect.

I turned to look at the man, and I was struck by the extreme shininess of his hair, as if he had emptied an entire bottle of Vitalis oil on to it. He also had one eyebrow. Well, not strictly one eyebrow, but two that merged in the middle. I fought the urge to run home and find my Tweezerman. He wore a black shirt with little shiny translucent stripes running through it, a white short-sleeved undershirt and black trousers. And white socks. There was also a big gold pendant hanging from a chain around his neck, a shiny bracelet and diamond-studded watch. Looking at him, I felt like I was having an eighties moment.

‘Wait a minute,’ my mother instructed, and moved off to consult with Nina’s new mother-in-law. I knew she figured that if the man she saw was not from our side of the family, then he must surely be from the other.

At that precise second, the guy with one eyebrow turned to look at me. My stomach sinking, I saw him lean over and say something to Maharaj Girdhar, who quickly moved to intercept my mother. The two talked quietly for a few minutes, while I stood alone, in my shimmering pinkness, looking around awkwardly. I knew I should be off celebrating and chatting inanely with random family members, but just couldn’t summon up the initiative.

I saw my two younger brothers, surrounded by a gaggle of girlies who were brilliant and shiny in their embroidered saris, dangling earrings and colourful bangles. My brothers were the undisputed Princes William and Harry of this community, albeit somewhat older than the British royals. Anil was twenty-nine and Anand two years younger, and they were the hottest and most eligible boys around. In their Indian silk outfits, both clean-shaven, hair combed neatly back, their smiles revealing perfect teeth and an attitude often described in these parts as ‘happy-go-lucky, easy-coming-easy-going’, they looked as if they’d just stepped off the set of a Listermint commercial. Other, younger, girls on the Great Husband-Hunt were mesmerized by them – as were their pushy mothers. Of course, the fact that the boys stood, one day, to inherit a substantial jewellery and antiques business didn’t hurt their combined appeal. I figured I would go and join them and let the young girls be fawningly nice to me. Always a plus to having an eligible brother or two.

But first I saw my father stepping outside alone, so I followed him.

He was looking over the metal gates surrounding the temple, and out on to the sea. He seemed wistful, perhaps remembering all the family weddings he had attended here, in this very temple – three in the past year alone – and how at each one he had prayed that the next time he came it would be to give his own daughter away.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw me walking towards him, negotiating my way on ridiculously high-heeled shoes that he knew I had spent way too much money on.

‘Fresh air,’ he said, enjoying a rare moment of calm in what had been a wedding-crazed week. ‘All is well. God is great,’ he sighed, pensive and calm.

I paused, then said, ‘It stinks out here. Daddy, this is so not fresh air. You’d have a better chance of finding it standing on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-Seventh. I can see your lungs blackening! Come on, let’s go back in,’ I said, hoping to interrupt his regretful thoughts about me, if that was indeed what preoccupied him.

Back in the temple hall, my mother, beaming, rejoined us.

‘Anju, beti, he’s asked for you. That boy. Maharaj Girdhar said he likes you and wants to meet you. What do you think?’

Part of me, I had to concede, was flattered. It was not every day that a man would look at me across a crowded, overheated room, and decide right off that he wanted to marry me. The last time it happened, I’d been with my girlfriends in a seedy salsa club on Eighth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. There, a man in a polyester pinstriped suit and a handlebar moustache told me he wanted to marry me, right before he threw up in a potted plant. That, pitifully, had been my last proposal.

And that was basically what this was. As loose an expression of interest as it seemed, this was a proposal, no doubt about it.

There was, however, the whole issue of first impressions. The last man I’d dated wore Prada. No gold, no gum. He’d been cool. And he had neat eyebrows. But there certainly had been no proposal forthcoming.

But, here and now, my mother didn’t want to hear about bad dress sense. That was an unacceptable reason to say no.

‘What shall I tell Maharaj?’ she asked me again.

‘Mum,’ I whispered, ‘he looks like he should be on some America’s Most Wanted list.’

‘Anju, be serious!’

‘OK, OK. Where’s he from?’

‘Accra.’

‘As in Accra, Ghana, West Africa?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the hell am I going to do in Accra?’

‘Don’t say hell here, beti. People will hear you. They’ll think you have no manners.’

Mr Monobrow was a vague distant relative of the groom, here to find a wife. He was from a well-to-do family that had made its money in grocery stores, my mother told me.

‘Beti, Maharaj says he’s a very good boy. Very good family. Plenty of money. At least meet him, no?’

‘I’m sure he’s perfectly nice, Mum, but really, I can’t imagine living in Accra. I mean, aren’t there military coups there every five minutes? And he just seems, you know, a bit kind of uninteresting. I can’t see that we’d have anything in common.’

My mother gave me that familiar look: the super-sized frustration-annoyance combo, with a side order of impatience thrown in.

‘Anju, really, sometimes I think you have been in Umrica too long.’ She sighed, and returned to the priest, who was waiting for an answer. She went to tell him they would think about it. In Indian-parent parlance, that meant she needed a day or two to convince me.

Mr Monobrow, in the meantime, had sidled off to the buffet table, with a short, plump woman who was probably his mother. I went off and found Namrata, Nina’s eighteen-year-old sister, who had been given gift-holding duty.

‘Hey, sweetie, what’s up?’ I asked.

‘Nothing, didi. Just so tired. My feet are really paining me,’ Namrata replied. She was toting a Singapore Duty Free Stores plastic bag filled with pretty envelopes, little silk purses and the odd velvet box, all containing cash, gold coins and jewellery.

‘How are you, didi? Having a good time?’ she asked.

Namrata was, like her sister, wholesome and good-natured. She reminded me of Britney Spears in her pre-sex siren days, all perky and popular, but minus the cropped tops and mini-skirts. Like her newly married sister, Namrata too could sing – from Hindi film songs to religious bhajans. She had learnt how to pickle lemons and fry papads perfectly. And with her soft, fair, plump complexion, she was every Indian male’s dream-wife. She looked a vision tonight, in a floaty lilac embroidered gagara-choli. She was being primed; her mother was already on the lookout for son-in-law number two. But Namrata was also bright and funny, not a cream-puff like so many of the other girls in this room, so I ran the Monobrow-dilemma by her.

‘You see that guy over there?’ I motioned to him. ‘He told Maharaj Girdhar, who told Mummy, that he’s interested in me. But he’s from Accra. What am I going to do in Accra?’

Namrata glanced over at him, and a knowing smile spread across her pretty face.

‘You know what it is, right, didi? In your baby-pink sari, you look like a marshmallow. All soft and sweet and fluffy and nothing inside but air. That’s what he would want in a wife, don’t you think?’

Two days later, I spent the morning with my mother at Bhuleshwar market. If there were such a thing as an urban purgatory, this would be it. Strings of small shops lined a road that wasn’t quite a road. Cars were stalled every two feet by a dead cow, a sleeping homeless person or hawkers selling food. They heaved around worn wooden carts filled with plastic buckets and stainless steel forks, weaving their way in and out of the hundreds of people crammed throughout this smelly, fly-infested labyrinth.

We embarked from the quiet and cool sanity of our white Ambassador car and joined the approximately seventeen million other pedestrians. The only way to really ‘do’ Bhuleshwar was to walk it. The stench of cow dung in the heat was overwhelming; sweaty people pressed against me. Scrawny men with paan-stained teeth heckled and cat-called as we stopped intermittently at a stall here and there to shop. My mother chastised me for wearing embroidered capri pants and a slightly cropped white Martin Margiela T-shirt. ‘You should have put on a cotton salwar kameez, beti. Now they all know you are a foreigner.’

The purchases, however, were worth the horrors. I bought thick copper bangles, packets of bindis and little painted clay dishes that Indian families use to hold devotional flames. I’d give those to my best friend Sheryl for her Tribeca loft where they would look great as trinket boxes. We selected a bale of woollen shawls, and countless yards of coloured silks that Marion, Erin, Kris and the other girls from work would fashion into cool cushion covers or summery sarong skirts. I found mirrored slippers that sold at Scoop for two hundred dollars (’What nonsense!’ my mother screeched when I mentioned this), and which sold here for the equivalent of four dollars. See, there was much to return to Bombay for!

We were home in time for lunch, before the sun became too hatefully hot.

I grew up in this apartment on Warden Road, a nice residential part of the city not far from the sea. The cool of the marble in our entry corridor felt delicious against my bare feet. The apartment took up the whole of the top floor in a seven-storey building. It had once been two three-bedroomed suites but now had been combined into one rather oddly laid-out but grand six-bedroomed home. My grandfather had had the foresight to buy both units when he fled with his young family from Pakistan to Bombay around the time of the partition in 1947. He’d been able to sell his land in our family’s original homeland of Hyderabad Sind, and came across the border on trains piled with other refugees, his pockets filled with old gold coins collected over the decades. With the help of relatives, he’d bought property, set up a jewellery business and raised his family safely away from the chaos over the border.

As we entered my mother reached out to touch the feet of a big stone statue of Lord Ganesh by the entrance, something she did each time she went out and returned home. I always resolved to emulate her, but mostly I forgot.