For Matrimonial Purposes

‘Some guy from Spain who seemed interesting turned out to be a flake because he thought I was too independent. Me! I can’t even find a man without my parents helping me. How independent is that?’

‘Look,’ said Sheryl. ‘He probably just wants some submissive twelve-year-old. It’s his prerogative, you know. It’s like he went into Henri Bendel, saw a nice sweater, but it’s been there for a while, marked down, on sale. So maybe he takes a look at it, puts it down, moves on to something else. Something in the new arrivals section. It’s nothing personal. He just doesn’t want that particular sweater.’

I could always trust Sheryl to reduce everything to a shopping expedition.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘you think you’ve got problems. I had a blind date last night, a fellow called Jerome my cousin set me up with. The date was fine, but when he dropped me home, he wanted to come up and use the toilet. After he left, I went in there and he had peed all over the place, on the floor, splashed around the toilet bowl. What do you think is the likelihood of me wanting to go out with someone who can’t even pee straight?’

‘I don’t know, Sheryl,’ I said. ‘But I still think my dilemma is far worse than yours. I was rejected by a man before he even met me. Beat that.’

Chapter Three

The scriptures forbid the sacrifice of female animals, but in the case of human beings, sacrificing females gives the greatest satisfaction.

Chaturanga by Rabindranath Tagore

‘I’m not understanding it,’ my father said, putting down his newspaper and turning to look at my mother. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Anju. She’s a pleasant enough girl, quite attractive. I’m not understanding how she’s so unable to find a good boy.’

My mother turned her attention away from the Hindi comedy show – a rip-off of The Brady Bunch – that she was watching on Zee TV.

‘It’s God’s way. We have done our best, and all now is in God’s hand.’

I was in my bedroom, half reading an old Wodehouse book I had found lying around, in a failed bid to distract myself. All day long, I had only been able to think of my life in New York. The free concerts in Central Park would be starting soon, and the men’s shows for fashion week would be under way in a few weeks. I had called Marion this morning and asked for an indefinite leave of absence. Professionally, it was the most illogical thing to do. But I really did feel as if I had little choice if I was going to see this thing through.

‘I need to show my parents that I’m making an effort,’ I had told my boss. Yes, I was tearful, anxious, bored, desperate – a lethal combination sure to drive all the boys away. And yes, I wanted to return to my little apartment on the Upper West Side, to my girlie dinners alfresco, to finding clever ways to describe a new handbag collection in a press release, to my Sex and the City existence – minus the sex.

I loved my life there.

But I loved my parents more.

‘Look, Marion, I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I think I need to give it a fair shot. I had no idea when I left New York to come here for my cousin’s wedding that I’d end up staying longer than two weeks, but that’s what’s happened, so I have to deal with it.’

‘Are you sure you’re OK with what you’re doing?’ Marion asked, a concerned tone in her voice. Fortunately for me, my boss was a sympathetic sort, and the complete antithesis of a fashion doyenne. She was a former rebirther turned PR guru who spent most of her time counselling the six neurotic female publicists and one hyper-neurotic gay male one she employed. She served us camomile tea and vegan cookies when we were having a bad day, hair-related or otherwise.

‘Marion, I really appreciate you being this understanding. Not a lot of bosses would let their staff have some time off to find a husband.’

She laughed. ‘Honey, I’m not that altruistic. I’m just dying to come to an Indian wedding. So hurry up and get on with it. And by the way, I’m not that great a boss. I’m giving you leave, all right, but it’s unpaid – we’re not exactly Fortune Five Hundred.’

In August, I was turning thirty-four. As far as my community was concerned, I was already a write-off. As far as everyone else saw it, I was always going to be there, still single. There were some girls that all the boys wanted to marry, but I, sadly, wasn’t one of them. Marion told me once that it was better to be divorced at thirty-five than never married at all. At least that one failed marriage proved some capacity for entering the union, if not actually the ability to sustain it.

‘What do you mean?’ I had responded to Sheryl, my first real friend in New York, during our first real lunch together. Sheryl had asked what ‘defined’ me. We were both twenty-seven.

‘I mean just that. What defines you? What makes you you? What’s your contribution to the world? How do you see yourself?’

These were very Sheryl questions. She was a kick-boxing devotee who, in her time away from her financial analyst job, studied the Kabbalah and took opera-singing and rock-climbing lessons. She saw life as one giant lab experiment that could explode at any time, but felt that was half the fun of it.

‘Nothing defines me, Sheryl. I’m a very ordinary Indian girl. The only way I managed to get to this country was because my father thought it would be a good way for me to meet boys. So maybe that’s what defines me. That was what it was always about, what it’s still about. Getting married. You know, from the time I was seven or so, my aunt Jyoti insisted that my mother slap a homemade concoction on my face, chickpea flour mixed with lemon juice. It makes you white, you know.’

Sheryl narrowed her eyes.

‘So, what went wrong?’ she asked, taking in my brown complexion.

‘Oh, I stopped using it. It just got to be a drag, a bit smelly and it stung. My aunt blames that for my lack of proposals. She says nobody wants a dark wife.

‘You know how little girls dream of what they want to be when they grow up – an air-hostess, a movie star, a queen?’ I continued. ‘I used to tell my mother what my dreams were. I wanted to be a social worker, or a manicurist, I couldn’t decide. I saw them both as helping people. But my mother only said, “First get married, then do what you want.” I think I was twelve.

‘It wasn’t just me though. There was a big bunch of us girls, cousins and friends and neighbours’ children, all the same age, and we went to birthday parties and ate jam sandwiches and we used to only talk about the kind of men we would marry. My best friend from school, Indu, she even had a name for her dream husband. Suresh. She liked that name. She said he would have his hair parted down the middle, and that he would be taller than her, and that she would get lots of diamonds on her wedding day, and also a big house and a fancy car. That’s how she saw her life.’

‘Did she get that?’

‘Yup. At seventeen. A proposal that came through her aunt. They got engaged after talking for an hour in the lobby of the President Hotel, surrounded by both sets of parents. He was everything Indu said she would find, except his name was Sanjay. They have twin boys, and she rides around Bombay in the back of an air-conditioned Mercedes.’

‘So, happily ever after?’ Sheryl asked.

‘Not really. I think he ignores her most of the time.’

I toyed with the slim gold bracelets around my wrist, and went quiet for a minute as I remembered my old friend Indu, and thought how our lives were so different now. Even she, I knew, disapproved of me.

‘As soon as Indu was married, everyone started looking for a husband for me. She and I were the same age. My mother had taught me everything I needed to be a good wife, and really, I had to compensate for being so dark. So I learnt how to make perfect Indian tea, with just the right amount of condensed milk and elaichi. Blindfolded, I could tell the difference between the dozens of bottles of spices on our kitchen shelves. I could make samosas, no problem. And all the Indian bhajis, even the complicated ones, were a breeze. They used to take me to visit people, and say, “See our daughter, all grown up now, she can do everything, cooking and all, and she’s such a sensible and clever girl.” In that sense, I suppose they are pretty proud of me.’

‘And now, here you are. Away from all that,’ Sheryl observed. ‘Who would have thought it?’

Given where I had come from, and the circumstances that had brought me here, who indeed?

PART TWO

Chapter Four

The father who does not give away his daughter in marriage at the proper time is censurable.

Sources of Indian Tradition, Volume 1, edited by W. M. Theodore de Bary

In my early twenties, I had never had any intention of leaving home before becoming someone’s wife. Heading off, solo and independent, was unthinkable and irrevocably scandalous, and would effectively seal the coffin on my parents’ endeavours to find me a husband.

Long before I started thinking otherwise, my mother had started us down on the more traditional path. Two days after my twenty-first birthday, she called Udhay, the most noted astrologer in Bombay. His tiny cubby-hole on the streets of Colaba – flanked by a seller of dog-eared Mills & Boon books and a hawker peddling flea-smattered limp leaf vegetables – was a regular stop-off point for Bombayites and their visiting relatives. They called on him for advice about whether to invest in a new stock, move house, when to undergo the angioplasty, should the marriage proposal be accepted.

‘He’s verrrry good,’ Aunt Jyoti had said to my mother a week earlier. ‘Remember when we were having all those problems with our flat in Mysore, trying to evict the tenants? He told us on what day we should appoint the lawyer and start the legal proceedings. Believe me, Leela, within just a few weeks the problem was solved. I’ve been hearing verrry good things about him from my friends also. Bas, definitely you should show Anju’s chhati. You still have her birth chart somewhere, no? Really, Leela, she’s completed twenty-one now, she’s graduated, but still no boys are coming for her. He’ll definitely tell you when it will happen. Put your mind at ease, no?’

Fortunately, Udhay said that for a higher fee, he would make a house call, as my mother expressed her anxiety about being seen lingering outside his painted blue cubicle. Doubtless, someone would see her, and within precisely forty-five seconds, it would be all over Bombay society that there was, surely, something wrong in our family.

‘Hah, hah, no problem, I’ll come,’ said Udhay, when my mother called him one evening. ‘But vill you send me your car and driver?’

He looked educated enough. No dhoti around his thin brown legs or tilok on his forehead. Indeed, he could have been a middle-rung civil servant, in his polyester shirt and trousers, with his sun-chapped feet in tatty chappals, and toting a brown leather satchel that looked as if it had barely survived World War Two.

‘So, vot is the problem?’ he asked, once seated, a cup of chai on the table next to him.

‘My daughter,’ said my mother, pointing to me, appropriately dressed for the occasion as I was in an unadorned cotton salwar kameez. ‘She has just completed twenty-one, and my husband and I are most worried, as no boys are approaching us. Maybe there is some grechari?’ she asked. This is a black cosmic cloud that is said to hang over the heads of the unfortunate, woebegone souls who are about to go bankrupt, lose a limb, or remain single for another year.

‘Ha, ha, don’t vurry, ve vill see vot is the problem,’ Udhay replied, reaching into his fatigued satchel to pull out the Hindu almanac, a pad of paper and pencil and a calculator.

‘Do you have her chart here?’ he asked.

My mother handed over a laminated sheet covered with elaborate drawings and interspersed with the names of planets in Hindi. Udhay consulted his almanac, jotting down numbers and punching in figures on his Casio hand-held calculator, muttering under his breath.

I sat on my sweaty hands, my mother next to me, both of us quiet but anxious, the only sound in the room from the sleepy whirring of the air-conditioner behind us.

All of my friends had already been forced to have their charts read – or their mothers had done so surreptitiously – so I knew I had no choice but to sit through it. Since graduating with a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Jai Hind College in nearby Churchgate, I had been having a rather grand time – or at least as grand a time as could be managed by a young girl in Bombay with a curfew and somewhat neurotic parents. But I needed to get serious about marriage, and this was the first step. So I adjusted the soft chiffon dupatta that was slipping off my shoulders and looked at Udhay’s face for any hint of what was to come. I knew, having heard about my friends’ experiences, that whatever he said in the next half-hour would set the tone for the rest of the day, indeed, the next several weeks. If the news was good – that I could and would be married within the year, to a good boy, good family, and all that, then my mother would be in such a fine and sparkling mood that my brothers would be allowed to hang out with their friends after school for at least an hour longer than usual.

I had observed, these past few months, how my mother’s innate joie de vivre seemed slowly to diminish under the weight of her anxiety about me. She had nothing to feel sad about, surely: my father’s business was thriving, allowing her to visit India Emporium to shop for Banarasi silk and French chiffon saris whenever it pleased her. Or to spend three afternoons a week playing rummy and eating pakodas with her friends. Or to go along to all those religious gatherings, baby-naming ceremonies, kitty parties, where she could show off a new, shiny piece of jewellery made by my father, or talk about how well her sons were doing in school.

But invariably, she would return home from each one of these social gatherings with her elegant head slightly drooping from her graceful, South-Sea-pearl-draped neck, telling me or whoever was around that she had just heard that Shanta’s son was engaged, or Mira’s niece or Renu’s grandson. My mother watched as all the women she grew up with, and all the distant relatives she had acquired after her marriage, were jubilant in their news of another engagement, another marriage, even another grandchild on its way. Sitting there, with her plate of pakodas and her share of playing cards, contriving a smile and uttering congratulations, she always wondered why – when it came to her daughter’s matrimonials – she had been dealt a bad hand.

‘More tea?’ I asked of Udhay, standing up to make for the kitchen, falsely believing that if I made a good impression, it might affect the outcome of things.

‘Nahin, bas, enough,’ the astrologer replied. Looking up, he said, ‘I think I have understood vot is happening here.’

I caught my mother’s short, whisper-quiet intake of breath, priming herself for the best news, or the worst. There were two words she would die if she heard: anura yoga – that the possibility of marriage does not exist.

‘Your daughter has rahu in her seventh house,’ he said, pausing. ‘The timing is not good for her now for marriage. She must vait.’

‘How long?’ my mother asked, biting her bottom lip, her face slowly turning white, as if she were being sentenced to Alcatraz.

‘Some years still,’ said Udhay sorrowfully. He hated being the bearer of bad news. It often meant that the envelope containing his cash payment when he left this session would be lighter than if he had delivered happier tidings.

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