For Matrimonial Purposes

But Puran obediently put down his glass of mango juice, and stood up, turning to me and expecting me to do likewise. I had no choice but to rise; to refuse would have been hugely embarrassing for my parents, and I would never hear the end of it. I consoled myself with the fact that it was going to be a quick stroll around the interior of the hotel, no big deal, I could do this. Quickly, I reminded myself of all the things I should not say: my mother had fudged my age a bit, so I was really now only thirty. And not a word about the travel that had been integral to my job publicizing fashion designers – boys didn’t want to hear about their prospective brides organizing back-stage interviews for Michael Kors in Paris. Say nothing unless asked, and if forced to speak of it, play it down. Doing otherwise would sabotage this from the outset, and my parents would have another ‘rejection’ on their hands. And my pride wouldn’t allow me to be turned down by someone I would never marry. Ever. Even under the most dire and desperate circumstances.

‘What time do you wake up in the morning?’ he asked as we made our way across the lounge and through the double doors leading to the corridor outside.

‘Excuse me?’

‘What time do you wake up in the morning?’

‘Um, well, here, because I’m on holiday, quite late, perhaps around ten or so, you know how it is when there’s a family wedding and you’re out every night. But in New York, generally, never later than seven. I try and get to the gym before I head off to work and …’

I realized I had revealed too much about my life already, and stopped. I mustn’t sound ambitious or successful, so I just kept visualizing the word my young cousin Namrata had used: marshmallow. I was going to be a marshmallow, just for tonight.

‘Because at home in Accra, everyone gets up early,’ he countered. ‘There is too much to do. So it’s good you are an early riser. Easier for you to adjust.’

Much energy was now being spent on squashing the words inside me that were fighting to be spat out. The poor sod thought it was a done deal. In his mind, I was his wife already.

‘We have three maids at home, and a cook, but they have to be supervised. It’s a job for the woman of the house. All the work starts early in the morning. They still don’t know how to use the vacuum cleaner. Do you know how to use a vacuum cleaner?’

I sighed. This is what my life had become. I was in one of the most beautiful hotels in Bombay, on a sultry evening, dressed in silk, sweet and smiling and basically being a delightfully charming dream-date. And walking next to me was a man who only wanted to marry me because he needed to supplement his domestic task force.

‘My mummy tells me your work in Umrica is to do with fashion,’ he continued. ‘Do you like my trousers?’ He stopped, lifted up one leg like he was a pooch about to pee, and pointed out the little embossed flowers. ‘They are the latest thing,’ he said proudly.

At some point, I phased out of the conversation, I’ll admit.

‘… and then on Sundays I take my mother to the market … we have three maids and a cook, but they have to be supervised, so it’s better we do the vegetable shopping ourselves … you can’t trust the natives, you give them money to buy aubergine, and they buy cigarettes instead and then say the money was stolen. Ridiculous! My mother sometimes doesn’t feel like going to the market, you know, she’s getting a little old now, so of course that will be a job for you. Then, every four Mondays, there’s a picnic with all their friends, and I take them there. Do you like picnics? But sometimes it’s too hot so we have to hold it in somebody’s house. We play bingo. Do you play bingo?’

‘When I’m not at a Tae-bo class, sure,’ I replied. Puran just looked puzzled, and continued nattering on about his life in Accra – how he came home for lunch, but on the days he didn’t, a ‘tiffin’ had to be sent to him at his office. His father was more or less retired now, so he had to run the business by himself, and it could be stressful, so it was time he found a wife. He needed someone he could come home to and who would pour him a whisky soda – although she wasn’t allowed to drink with him, because he thought it was very bad for a woman to consume alcohol.

‘And I like getting massage, do you know how to give massage?’

And on and on he went, not once asking me what I saw for my own life. Even if he had, I still wouldn’t have wanted to marry him, but at least he wouldn’t have come across as so ridiculously archaic. I didn’t expect him to peer into my soul, but a smidgen of polite interest would have been nice. At least I hadn’t deluded myself, as I had done so many times before, into thinking this could be Mr Right. If nothing else, this was just another story to regale the girls with when I finally got home. And they thought they had had bad dates.

‘We’d better go back now, no?’ I said to him, as we made our fifteenth circuit around the Taj lobby. He looked happy and satisfied, that perhaps after years of interviewing, he might just have found the right candidate.

‘Oh my God!’ I said to my parents, as soon as we were safely back in our car. ‘What was that? Who was that? What were you thinking?’

‘So that means you didn’t like him, Anju?’ my mother asked, innocently.

‘Like him? Like him? What was there to like?’

‘He didn’t seem that bad,’ said my father. ‘And they’re interested.’

Anil, who was sitting in the front passenger seat grinning, finally spoke.

‘Yeah, they were already talking wedding dates while you guys went off for your romantic stroll,’ he said. ‘They want to do it before they fly back to Accra, so I guess in the next couple of weeks. You’d better start getting your stuff together, didi, you’re going to be married!’ he said.

‘Mum!’ I pleaded. ‘Come on!’

‘If you’re not interested, you’re not interested,’ she said, resignedly. ‘I’ll just tell them when they phone tomorrow. Of course, they’ll tell Maharaj Girdhar that you’re fussy, and then he won’t call us if there are other boys, because he’ll think you’ve become too hoity-toity, but what can we do? You’re saying no, we have to say no.’

‘Yes but, Mum, you know me. Did you honestly think that I’d be into someone like that. Honestly?’

‘But, beti, look at your age! You’re not twenty-two any more. You’re not going to get proposals like Nina and Namrata. There aren’t so many boys still unmarried who are older than you. Maybe he’s not perfect, but at least he’s like you. Elderly-type.’

As we all anticipated, the call came the next day. Maharaj Girdhar phoned to inform us that ‘the boy’s side says yes’. It was a triumphant pronouncement – he had already no doubt decided on how he would spend his finder’s fee. But more than that, he thought himself brilliant and clever for at last having found someone for me, that wayward girl who had left her family in Bombay and gone to live in Umrica, all alone. This would no doubt elevate his status within the religious-social circles in which he slithered.

It fell upon my mother to tell him otherwise. ‘Sorry, Maharaj, but he’s not for us,’ she said quietly.

‘But why?’ the priest retaliated, sounding horrified, as if I had just turned down the hand of George Clooney. ‘The boy is so good, everything is so good. So many girls were interested in him. See, they chose your daughter! How can you say no?’

‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said after she had put the phone down. ‘But you know it would never have worked.’

‘Really Anju,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for.’

Later that afternoon, Aunt Jyoti sent over a jar of cream. Someone at the wedding had pointed out that I ‘had nice features, but was a little on the dark side’. Being fair-skinned was as important a criterion as having all one’s limbs intact. Ordinarily, my complexion could be described as ‘milky chai’. But perhaps I hadn’t been using my sunscreen very faithfully: I had to concede it was now more like a double espresso. Fairness indicated fragility, docility, prettiness. A girl could be cock-eyed, buck-toothed and have had a botched rhinoplasty, but if she were fair, she was considered a beauty in the league of Catherine Zeta-Jones.

So I sat on my bed, holding a jumbo-sized tube of ‘Promise of Fairness’. There were no ingredients listed on the container, but I had read somewhere about how the product was found to contain a high concentration of mercury. I called my aunt to inform her of this, and to tell her that if I used it, I would probably contract some ghastly skin disease like melanoma.

Aunt Jyoti quickly agreed. ‘Yes, better not,’ she said. ‘If something goes wrong with your face, who will marry you?’

A slight depression fell over me as evening descended. It was another scorching night, and I was lying on my bed listening to vintage Toni Braxton on my CD player. I felt an odd mélange of melancholy and confusion. No return date finalized for New York, and not a lot to do here in the aftermath of the chaos of Nina’s wedding. It was just a lot of waiting around, hoping – or at least my mother was – that the phone would ring with another offer.

So I hopped across the street to the neighbourhood internet café – in reality a bunch of computers and a coffee-maker stuck into an old garage. I passed a trio of fifteen-year-old boys downloading porn, and settled in front of an Acer to check my emails. There were thirty-five messages, mostly from my friends in New York who were filling me in on their holiday plans. Sheryl was going down the Amazon. Marion was thinking the Pyramids. Erin was going to stay close, in the Hamptons.

‘But you, sweetie, are having the most unique experience of all!’ Sheryl wrote. ‘A literal, far-reaching, no-stones-unturned quest for a husband! So brave! So Indiana Jones!’

At home an hour later, the phone rang. It was Rita Mehta, a professional matchmaker whom my mother had called a few days earlier. I listened as my ‘details’ were divulged: age – ‘twenty-nine’, a further reduction; height (five feet four), build (average), complexion (medium). So far, I hardly sounded scintillating or vibrant. No talk was made of preferences, hobbies, interests. Just how old, how tall, how slim, how fair.

‘Is she very Umrican-type?’ the matchmaker asked, when my mother reluctantly let on that I had been ‘working in New York, temporarily, in an office’. ‘I mean to say, can she adjust?’ Rita clarified.

‘She’s a very good girl,’ my mother said. ‘Smart, but homely-type.’ By that, my mother was wanting to drive home the point that I was a stay-at-home kind of girl, the gentle and subservient sort who would subjugate her own needs for the sake of a peaceful household. My mother wasn’t far wrong, either. I was fairly sure my club-hopping, plane-changing days would stop the day I found a groom.

‘She’s living for a short while in Umrica now, but she’s Indian at heart,’ she continued, aware that my ‘living in Umrica’ thing was not just a fall from grace, it was a huge, almighty thud. Men who came to India to find wives generally didn’t want women who had carved out independent lives for themselves away from their families. Mr Accra had chosen to ignore all that because it didn’t seem too important, in the scheme of things. What he had wanted was someone who would marry him, move to his country, and above all spend the rest of her days memorizing the vacuum cleaner manual.

‘We’re looking for a good boy,’ my mother continued. ‘No bad habits.’ That was an oblique reference to cigarettes, over-indulgence in alcohol, extravagant spending and womanizing – a proviso that basically eliminated everyone in my New York circle of friends.

She started scribbling some notes down again, in a small red notebook that had ‘Boys’ marked on the front. Sitting next to her, I saw her write ‘Dubai, 36, own clothing shops, well educated’, Lalit-something-or-another. A father’s name, a mother’s name.

Rita said: ‘He’s a very good boy, I’ve checked everything thoroughly. The boy is not in Bombay now, but if there is someone interesting, he’ll fly down.’

This time, my mother didn’t even consult me. Within an hour, she was on the phone with a friend who had lived in Dubai.

‘Can you make some inquiries, find out if the boy is good? It’s for matrimonial purposes,’ she asserted.

Poor fellow, I thought. He’s probably out having a perfectly nice day, doing whatever they do for fun in the United Arab Emirates. Little did he know that before the end of the day, my family would know enough about him to do a Kitty Kelley.

As it turned out, Lalit had spent six months in jail for forging cheques. My father curtly said, ‘Drop it. We don’t want a criminal son-in-law.’ But my mother thought he was acting too rashly.

‘So? It’s not like he murdered anyone. Plus, after marriage, he’ll change.’

Another week passed. Sunday morning, and I joined my parents in leafing through The Times of India matrimonial pages. My father circled a couple of interesting prospects: ‘Overseas Indian (Sindhi) male in mid-thirties seeking overseas Indian female of same caste. Must be at least 5′3″, slim, medium complexion, good nature.’

My mother called the number on the bottom of the ad. ‘Er, yes, hello, I’m calling about the boy in today’s paper.’

A fleeting pang of guilt struck me. Going on thirty-four, I couldn’t even find a mate on my own, and my mother was spending her Sunday mornings in the twilight of her life on the phone with the families of strange men.

‘Yes, the girl is now here … We’re local people, but she’s living temporarily in New York, working in an office there … Yes, she’s the right height … How old is the boy? … Hah, thirty-five, very good. And where does the boy live?’ And so continued a barrage of questions to the woman on the other end, the sister of the boy in question.

‘Hah, OK, yes,’ she said, starting to scribble. Suddenly, she stopped writing, and quickly said: ‘Hah, OK, OK, thank you, I’ll talk to my daughter and phone you back,’ before hanging up.

‘So?’ my father asked, looking up from the paper.

‘He lives in Indonesia,’ my mother said. ‘He owns a small videotape copying shop, you know, people bring in their tapes and he has a lot of VCRs and he copies them.’ She looked over at me. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested.’

But then came something far more promising. A prospect from Spain. Madrid actually. Mmm, I thought. Romantic and cosmopolitan. The home of Loewe, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and a stately King and Queen, and tapas and sangria. And at least a place where an electricity generator was not a mandatory household appliance.

He was a banker, thirty-seven, educated, good-natured, tall, according to the ad. ‘In Bombay from June 2 to 15.’

‘That’s now,’ my mother announced, enthusiastically. She got on the phone again, this time reaching a very pleasant-sounding woman, who was apparently the prospect’s mother. He went to Yale, and was head-hunted for a position starting up a new American bank in Spain. He had a sister at university in California, so apparently they were fairly liberal people. He had taken a few weeks off from work to be in Bombay, like myself, for matrimonial purposes. It was decided that, before it went any further, photographs should be exchanged. ‘Quickly, go find one, something that doesn’t make you look so old,’ my mother instructed.

I may as well have been hunched over, clasping a cane, shuffling off into the next room. For an Indian woman, I was not just spinsterly; I was positively old-maidish. Knowing this made me laugh – but only because I’d cried enough about it in the past.

Marrying me off now, at this appallingly late stage, would require a miracle.

And some savvy marketing.

And a flattering photograph.

A couple of hours later, a driver appeared to deliver an envelope containing a photograph of the banker from Spain, and to pick up mine. I tentatively pulled out the colour print. It was a picture of him taken in an outdoor café: ‘Barcelona, July 2000’ was inked across the back. He was wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt tucked into blue denim jeans. He was smiling, one finger resting lightly on the edge of an espresso cup, the sun shining down onto his black hair, a light shadow falling over part of his face. A good face it was, too. Open, kind, intelligent. He seemed nice, somehow, not like the sort of narrow-minded chumps who were on the prowl for another maid, another mother.

‘You like him, no?’ my mother asked when she saw a satisfied smile appear on my face.

‘Well, he looks like a nice guy, Mum.’

It had suddenly become a situation full of possibilities. The possibility that my father would finally stop moaning about how I kept ‘wasting airfare’, that my mother’s friends would stop ‘tut-tutting’ their way through their card-playing sessions about poor, perennially unmarried me. And, most importantly, the possibility that I could find someone for me, even if I wasn’t the ideal Indian woman – someone with the talents of Martha Stewart and the body of Claudia Schiffer, a vegetarian teetotaller who never stopped smiling, praying, pleasing and nodding. That despite all this, maybe, just maybe, there was someone who wanted me anyway. As my more supportive relatives would always say: ‘Beti, the boy destined for you is already born. He is somewhere in the world. We just have to find him.’

The sun set, and a light breeze came in through the open windows. My father was asleep in his armchair, my mother went off to nap in the bedroom, and the boys were out somewhere. I was eating dokhlas – spongy semolina snacks served with a cool mint chutney, and watching rehashed coverage of the Tommy Hilfiger fashion show on CNN. I remembered being there, standing way at the back as all publicists do, ensuring that the Vogues and Elles and In-Styles were all happily seated. All the front row divas looked bored and constipated, as if they were doing the world a huge honour by simply showing up. All praying that they would be the ones seated next to the celebrity-of-choice at this particular catwalk show, maybe bold and brassy Samuel Jackson, or skinny, pretty, sad-looking Gwyneth Paltrow.

That had been my life – catwalks and cocktail parties and being able to say that I had been in the same room as Angelina Jolie. It was fun and frivolous, but that was it. The other day, I had read some of the pages in my journal from last year: ‘Yes! Got the last Kate Spade bag in the Barneys sale!’ or ‘Why did I spend $1,500 at Patagonia when I hate hiking?’ or ‘Exhausted from power yoga, and not helped by the three Raspberry Stolis I had afterwards.’

There were no words about being moved in deeper ways, except for those occasions when I might have attended a meditation class and returned home vowing to change my life, become connected with the greater universe, find inner peace. But then The West Wing came on, and all was forgotten. Mine had become a life lived on the outside. And if I tried to probe to see what was beneath it, there would only be concealed neuroses and petty jealousies and more dysfunction than I could deal with. So instead, I’d have a Cosmopolitan, buy a pair of shoes, whatever. It was, essentially, a biodegradable life, one that, if I let it slip from my grip, would merge with the dirt and disappear, leaving nothing behind.

I needed a change. And perhaps that change could begin with marriage.

I said a silent prayer that the nice-looking man from Madrid would call. I hadn’t even heard his voice, nor did I know anything about him beyond the basics. But he seemed closer to ‘the one’ than anyone I had come across in a long time. Like the struggling ingénue who has already written an Oscar-acceptance speech, I had yet to meet this man, but I had already named the children.

My parents finally stirred awake from their afternoon nap. ‘Did they call?’ my mother asked me. I shook my head. They all knew that for every hour that passed, it would be less and less likely that the phone would ring. I then realized that although I had liked the look of him, perhaps he didn’t like the look of me. Could that be? I had sent along my most appealing photograph, taken in Central Park on a sunny afternoon, me in a summery pink top and white pants, subtly conveying some of that fluffy-marshmallow element, just in case. In the picture, my black hair, lightly tinted, looked shiny and lush under the sun, my smiling face a vision of relaxed happiness. And I didn’t look too dark-skinned either. How could anyone not like the look of me in that photograph?

I attempted to busy myself with various things, but every time the phone jingled, I stopped what I was doing and I prayed that this would be the call.

It never came.

Late the next afternoon, Aunt Jyoti stopped by for tea, and settled onto the sofa in preparation for a no-holds-barred gossip session that would last at least three hours.

‘I hear the parents of that Madrid boy have been making inquiries about you,’ she said to me, with the air of someone who had obtained classified information from the Pentagon.

‘Oh, yes, we spoke to them yesterday,’ my mother interjected, surprised. She had wanted to keep this quiet until something ‘worked out’, so ashamed had she become of the litany of failed alliances that trailed behind me. But Bombay was a small town when it came to things of a matrimonial nature, and it never took more than about four minutes for news of pitches and proposals to spread. I began to feel like one of those screenplays that get touted around Hollywood agents and studios and producers; everyone takes a quick look and passes, yet they continue knocking about ad infinitum.

‘We exchanged pictures,’ my mother said, figuring she may as well tell her sister all. ‘We liked his. We didn’t hear back. Maybe they didn’t like how Anju looked. Oh well, can’t be helped – these things happen.’ For my sake, my mother forced a couldn’t-care-less attitude, although I knew she was deeply disappointed. At last, she had come across someone her daughter seemed interested in, and this time they weren’t interested. Karma, she thought. That’s what everything comes down to.

‘It’s not her looks,’ Aunt Jyoti said. ‘The family made inquiries and heard that she has been living alone in New York for some time, that she was independent-type. The boy says girls like that can’t be moulded. He wanted someone a bit more traditional-type. What can you do? You have to live with it.’ My mother and aunt looked over at me with pity and tendernesss, as if I were a quadriplegic.

‘That is so not on!’ I cried out. ‘I mean, this guy went away to university in the States, right? His sister is there, right? So what’s the hypocrisy all about?’

‘Anju, beti,’ Aunt Jyoti started. ‘It’s not that. Boys feel it’s OK for them, maybe even their sisters, but in the end, they don’t want to marry a girl like that. He just doesn’t like it that you have been living alone there, without your parents, for so many years. He feels that by now you will surely have become too much independent. I told you years back when you were going that this would happen. Now see? That’s why I would never let my daughters go off like that,’ she said, casting a look of disapproval at both my mother and myself, and recalling proudly how one daughter was snapped up at twenty-two, and surely the younger one would not be far behind.

My mother, surprisingly, stood up for me.

‘Jyoti, boys should be more open-minded these days, more forward-thinking. If he doesn’t want my daughter, that’s his loss. We’ll find someone better. He can just go marry some dumbo who can’t even open her mouth without asking for permission.’

‘You go, Mum,’ I chimed in, smiling. I felt better now, knowing that my mother didn’t chastise me – not in public, at least. At that moment, the phone rang. It was Sheryl, calling from New York.

‘How’s it all going over there? Married yet? Should I be booking airline tickets, buying the dress? Will you seat me next to someone cute?’ she asked. She always spoke this way, always sounding breathless, rushed and enthused.