For Matrimonial Purposes

‘I’d love some tea, Mummy,’ I said as I dumped the flimsy shopping bags in my bedroom. I suddenly craved a steaming hot cup of the rich, cardamom-laden milky chai that Starbucks tries to do authentically.

‘Chotu, chai laikhe ao,’ my mother called out to the family cook, who was busy preparing dhal and pulao and pakodas.

My father was sitting on the burgundy silk settee, reading The Times of India, his legs stretched out over a mirrored coffee table.

‘Heat-wave in New York, it says here,’ he announced, looking up. ‘Why are you leaving so soon? I’m sure the airline can change your booking for tomorrow, maybe postpone it a few days,’ he said.

‘Dad, I need to get back to work, I only took two weeks off. The wedding is over, it was nice, time to go. Plus I’d rather suffer heat stroke in New York than hang around here. You know what I mean?’

I didn’t want to hurt my parents. This was, after all, their home – as it once was mine. I didn’t want to seem dismissive – as if I was now better than all this, as if I had left them behind for what I perceived to be a more worthwhile life. But as much as I wanted to please my parents, I couldn’t stay here a day more than I had to.

I joined my father on the couch and turned to look outside the window. There was never anything other than complete pandemonium on the streets of Bombay. The cars seven floors below honked furiously, futilely, for no reason other than to hear the sound of their horns. Pedestrians darted in and out between vehicles and motorcycles – called ‘scooters’ in these parts – with complete disregard for their lives. They had a fatalism about them: get run over, lose a limb, all meant to be, whatever. Huge billboards painted with the faces of the hot stars of today, Hrithik Roshan and Karisma Kapoor, stood atop rickety buildings. In India, everything looked as if it were on the verge of collapse. I spotted another billboard across the street, advertising a new health club. ‘Open from 5 in the morning until 11 in the night!’ it trumpeted. ‘Come on, get FIT and look COOL!’ The visuals featured what appeared to be a couple of amputated pecs and a hacked-off torso. Fine art in the world of advertising was not a forte of my homeland. But still, this was the new Bombay, one in which women’s magazines advertised condoms, sultry Bollywood love scenes were filmed, barely clothed MTV starlet-veejays and Baywatch bodies ruled the small screen and everyone was having affairs.

And marriages were still arranged.

A navy Mercedes pulled up on the street just outside the building, depositing three well-dressed, polished-looking women – Indian, but obviously not living in Bombay – on the pavement. They made their way into Benzer, a chic store across the way. They scowled at the broken paving stones, littered with cow dung and refuse. Bombay had evidently been their home once too, and now, like me, every time they came back, it became more and more a home they no longer recognized nor resonated with.

While lunch was being prepared, and I was enjoying my chai, my mother was on the phone with her sister Jyoti, Nina’s mother. The newlyweds had gone off honeymooning in southeast Asia, and then they would fly off to London, where they’d be living.

‘Ay, Leela, I miss Nina,’ Jyoti wailed. ‘She’s left the house, she’s no longer my daughter, she belongs to someone else.’

‘Ay, Jyoti,’ my mother consoled her, as if someone had just died. ‘It has to happen for all of us. The girls must get married and leave. Be grateful, your daughter has found a good boy, she’ll be happy, don’t worry. See, I’m still waiting for my Anju to find someone. No other boys came from overseas for the wedding?’

‘What about the Accra fellow?’ Jyoti asked. ‘Maharaj Girdhar called today. He says the boy is very interested. I think you should pursue it.’

‘Hah. Let us see. We’ll talk about it over lunch.’

Chotu, our cook of twenty years, appeared from the kitchen carrying a large stainless steel tray bearing steaming, richly spiced dishes of food. A good Bombay meal was one of my favourite things about coming home. Hot, soft pulao embedded with mung dahl. Spinach smeared around chunks of paneer, soaked in a dozen freshly ground spices. Bite-sized pakodas dipped in mint chutney and eaten with thick white bread. Ulrika, the goddess of New York fitness trainers, would positively pulverize me if she could see me now.

‘Beti,’ my mother said as she ladled out some food onto a plate for my father. ‘The Accra boy is still here. Why don’t you meet him?’

She paused, waiting for my response. I didn’t provide one, so she asked again.

‘So, what do you say?’

The guy hadn’t even crossed my mind since the night of the wedding, I thought guiltily. I was poised to get on a plane the next day, to fly back to New York, my home for the past seven years, and to my job as a fashion publicist. Though I loved my job, and loved living in the city, it wasn’t getting any easier for me there. So many men, but none of them quite what my parents had in mind for me. And because of some weird cultural osmosis that I had unwittingly succumbed to, I felt they weren’t right for me either. I was on the party circuit, hung out at hip restaurants in the city, and because of my job, even went on the occasional junket to Europe. But most of the men I had met were gay, or white, and usually both.

My parents, perversely, thought gay was fine. When I was thirty, my mother had introduced me to a nice Indian boy from a nice Indian family. I had known right away; the red Versace leather trousers gave him away, as did his endearing – but ultimately condemning – interest in my Manolo Blahnik collection. After gay suitor and his mother had left, I voiced my reservations to my mother, who dismissed them with a simple: ‘Once they marry, they change.’

‘I doubt it, Mum,’ I had said. ‘Elton John: case in point.’

Pretty much once a year, every year since I had moved to New York, I’d been hauled back to Bombay for a look-see. All my cousins had done it that way, usually meeting their spouses at a family wedding. It was almost a domino-effect, although I thought it interesting that I was the only female cousin still left standing, with the exception of Namrata, and another, who was only eleven. Even she would probably find a husband before me at the rate all this was going. I had also been told that, at Nina’s wedding, at least five girls had expressed their interest in ‘either one’ of my brothers. Such was the grab-bag nature of the game.

That I had received one expression of interest was in itself of tremendous significance. Bombay, after all, was a matrimonial melting-pot. All a single person need do is show up, make a few calls, pray, seek the advice of astrologers, family priests and professional matchmakers. And then pray some more that these people had some idea what they were doing. And most importantly, as my mother never failed to remind me, it was all about compromise.

From my family’s perspective, this proposal was a big deal. Someone had literally ‘asked for’ me, and it was an honour, any way they looked at it. I had always told them I really wanted to get married. Truly I did. I wanted to slip back into the system. Yet I had been away so long now that often it was like I’d been forgotten by the society I was born into. I realized that when an attractive, eligible man appeared on the scene, I wouldn’t be the first choice because I was living alone in New York, far removed from the matrimonial-minded masses.

I was oddly drawn to the age-old system of arranged marriage – it seemed exotic somehow, noble, and fragile. Observing the tradition would elevate me to the highest ranking on the scale of social conduct; when a girl marries a man her family members select for her it is the ultimate act of piety, and, according to tradition, would bring many, many blessings.

On each of my trips back to Bombay, I secretly hoped that this would be the special, destined journey in which I would find ‘the one’. That here, in the midst of the wedding parties and politics and desperate mothers seeking boys and girls for their offspring, I, too, could find my intended.

On this trip, now, there was a proposal.

But, for God’s sake, he lived in Accra.

‘Beti, it’s not the place, it’s the person,’ my mother said, reading my mind in that most inconvenient way that mothers do. ‘If he’s a good boy, then you’ll be happy anywhere you go.’

Nice thought. But I still wasn’t buying it.

‘What do you think?’ my mother asked my father.

After thirty-five years of marriage, my mother still never addressed her husband by his first name. She had told me when I was very young that wives should refer to their husbands only with a very grand ‘he’. Anything else would be defamatory. ‘Your husband will be your lord, and you must treat him with dignity and respect,’ she had said. I must have been five.

But now, my father was stumped for an answer. He was no longer as involved with my matrimonial affairs as he had been, say, fifteen years ago. In fact, he would commonly say that he had ‘given up’, which hardly inspired hope and confidence in my beleaguered and perpetually single thirty-three-year-old heart.

At last, my father spoke. ‘We should definitely consider it,’ he said, wrapping a floppy brown piece of chapatti around a chunk of paneer. ‘You’re here, so you may as well get the job done. That way, at least your airfare won’t be wasted.’

After lunch, my mother telephoned Maharaj Girdhar.

‘Yes, I’m calling about the Accra boy,’ she said, as if responding to an ad in the Village Voice about a second-hand Volkswagen. She grabbed a piece of paper and pen, and started scribbling.

‘Yes … of course … good … oh, almost thirty-nine? … Very good … Educated … Well-to-do and all … Good … Yes, I’ll talk to my husband and call you … No, Anju is supposed to be leaving tomorrow, but of course if something works out, she’ll stay. Her job in New York is not so important, hah? She must see the boy first, no?’ she said in a conciliatory tone, wanting to please the priest as he, evidently, held the key to my future happiness.

She hung up, and turned back to us.

‘OK, so here are the details. He’s almost thirty-nine, which is a good age. Five foot eight, which is quite a good height, OK not so tall, but then you’re not that tall and you’ll maybe have to stop wearing such high high heels,’ she said. Scanning her notes, she went on. ‘Only son, one sister married, they have their own business, some shops, even a factory. Rich. Parents are nice. He also went to school in America. He travels here and there, I’m sure he’ll take you along.’

She paused, having felt she’d done a sufficiently convincing sales pitch. ‘He seems to have everything. What else do you want?’ she asked, reasonably.

‘Well, it’s just that I have a nice life in New York,’ I began. ‘And I’m sure he’s a decent enough fellow, but I don’t think Accra is the place for me.’

‘Beti, do you want to stay unmarried for ever?’ my mother countered. ‘Just imagine, if you met someone, and you married him, and he lived in a place you don’t mind living in, such as New York or London or Singapore, and then something happened and he had to move to not such a nice place, like maybe even Accra. Are you saying that you wouldn’t go with him? That is what marriage is, sacrifice and compromise.’

‘Yes, I understand, Mummy, but I’m not married to him so the sacrifice thing doesn’t come up. I have the choice right now. You know what I’m saying?’

I looked at my mother’s slowly greying hair, elegantly swept off her smooth and unlined face, the prize feature of which was her regal, haughty nose. She was wearing a polyester kaftan, similar to one of those 1970s-style Gucci djellabas from a few seasons ago, but this one had been made by the family tailor. It was my mother’s preferred choice of stay-at-home clothing.

‘Anju, you can’t have everything in life. You can’t be too hoity-toity. Didn’t Maharaj tell you so many years ago that you have to learn to compromise? Where will you find everything you want in one boy? It’s not possible, beti. You’re already almost thirty-four. Soon, no one will ask for you any more. You must think carefully.’

I was thinking carefully. About waking up to Matt Lauer every morning, about the paraffin manicures and oxygen facials at Bliss, and Saturday afternoons shopping in Nolita. And the parties and fund-raisers. And waiting to see if Paris Hilton and Aerin Lauder would turn up, and what the fabulous ex-Miller girls would wear. And trying every different flavour of Martini, every new designer shoe, and giggling with my girlfriends as I listened to the stories of the boys in their lives. It had taken me some years, but now it was a life I had grown intimately familiar with and happily accustomed to. And, like so many women in my situation, I wanted a man to fit in neatly with it. I wanted him to live the same life, enjoy the same things, look the part. And, simultaneously, I wanted him to be chosen by my parents, sanctioned by the rest of the family. It wasn’t much to ask for, was it?

But I also knew that in the view of my society, a woman was never much of anything until the day she got married. She was always a guest in her parents’ home, they were her temporary caretakers. When the right man came, regardless of where or how he lived, this young, single woman would wrap her life around his. It was not about what she wanted, it was about what he wanted for both of them. Given that view, I remembered how my mother was baffled one time, watching an American TV movie, where a woman left her perfectly nice husband because she said she wanted to ‘find herself’.

‘Such nonsense,’ Mummy had said. ‘He’s not beating her, he’s not doing anything wrong. She wants to leave, for what? Stupid woman.’

My mother just didn’t get it, but there was no reason she should. Her life had been all about sacrifice and compromise, the same virtues she plugged to me every day. My parents met once, and were engaged within five hours, married after two weeks. Together, they created a life that they had helped ease one another into. But they were both twenty when they met, and the word ‘option’ didn’t exist for them. As my mother never failed to remind me, by the time she was my current age, she had been married thirteen years and had had all three of her children.

Yes, I deeply wanted to get married. I associated it with love and commitment and security – plus all the parties and new saris and a trousseau full of pretty dresses. But a family wedding in Bombay was one thing; a lifetime in Accra something else entirely.

‘Mummy, I decided a long time ago that it was going to be G Eight only. You know, developed nations or nothing. Plus, there is the issue of compatibility here. We don’t look compatible.’

My father interjected.

‘What? Is he too short for you?

‘No!’ I said emphatically. ‘Look, there’s got to be a vibe that happens between two people; you know, kind of a connection. You just get it – either it’s there, or it’s not.’

‘Aarey, I don’t know what you’re saying,’ my mother replied.

‘I just want to be happy, Mummy.’

‘Beti,’ she replied, ‘I don’t want you to be happy. I want you to be married.’

Chapter Two

It is considered highly improper for a young man or woman to take the initiative for his or her marriage. With the spread of education nowadays the boy and the girl are given a chance to see each other unlike the old days when the newlyweds saw each other after the marriage.

Hinduism: an Introduction by Dharam Vir Singh

There seemed to be nothing more for it but to call Delta Airlines and change my flight. My mother had implored me to stay in Bombay just a few more days, convincing me that since the wedding had only just finished, calls would be made and somehow between all my family members we could find out if there were any interesting, suitable boys floating around. Of course, my mother then had to casually suggest it: ‘Beti, while you are still here, why don’t you meet the boy from Accra? You can’t just look at how he was dressed, a wife can always change her husband’s clothes,’ she had reasoned. ‘And so? What’s wrong with white socks?’

Maharaj Girdhar worked quickly and set up a meeting for the following evening at the Sea Lounge in the Taj Mahal Hotel. He wasn’t going to waste any time. If this thing went through, he would collect twenty-five thousand rupees as a matchmaker’s fee – about the price of a small Louis Vuitton handbag – certainly more than enough for him to live on for the next six months. He had organized Nina’s match, so he felt he was on a roll as far as my family was concerned. Unlike with dating agencies, there was no payoff for him until the deed was done; he wouldn’t collect a paisa for simply setting up a meeting. This was an interesting metaphor for the Indian-style matrimonial game. The jackpot is a wedding, and there are no consolation prizes. It’s all or nothing.

The Accra boy project had begun to acquire a momentum all its own, and it had swept me away. No matter how hard I looked, there simply was no good enough reason to say no – the whole ‘I don’t like the way he looks’ excuse just didn’t fly any more. On the instruction of my parents, I had emailed my boss, Marion, and told her I had caught a touch of dysentery, and the doctor thought I shouldn’t travel. Marion emailed back, and said fine, absolutely, we’ve got everything under control. Evidently she was aware I was fibbing too, because she added a PS: ‘Have you found a husband yet?’

At six the following evening, my parents and Anil – the older of my two brothers – walked ahead of me as we all trod up the wide, red-carpeted staircase leading from the lobby of the Taj to the Sea Lounge. This was one of my favourite haunts in Bombay: a couple of times in the past week, while the rest of the family had been busy with wedding preparations, I had escaped here with a copy of the latest Vanity Fair, and sat and sipped fresh young coconut water while occasionally looking through the open windows on to the Gateway of India and the sea beyond. Neutral ground, light and breezy: it was not surprising that the place was a popular venue for fix-ups of this nature.

Aunt Jyoti had wanted me to go ethnic, in just a simple salwar kameez. ‘It’s better, Anju, you’ll look more Indian, more domesticated.’

But I had said that I would feel much more comfortable, and therefore exude a more relaxed air, if I slipped into a silky BCBG dress. It was sufficiently modest not to offend any sensibilities, yet feminine enough so that, when I was fully dressed, my mother had glowed at me in delight. She wanted me to wear some nice jewellery – enough to show the Accra family that we were people of means, yet not so much that the man in question would think that I was some high-maintenance diva-de-luxe. It was a delicate balance.

They were already there, seated at a corner table, with Maharaj Girdhar. The spacious, comfortable lounge – all cosy aqua-green chairs and natural lighting – was filled with the genial buzz of conversation.

The name of the intended was Puran. Next to him was his mother, the woman I had seen him with at the buffet table at Nina’s wedding. With them was also a sad-looking man – the father, I figured. Puran was still chewing gum, and I fervently hoped it wasn’t the same stick from the other night. I tried not to stare at his one eyebrow, bushy and unkempt, reminding me of two baby ferrets lying nose-to-nose. But there was something else … he was wearing the same semi-transparent black shirt and the same black trousers that he had worn at the wedding. As I walked closer, I noticed that his trousers had little flowers embossed up and down the leg. Someone, I thought, should get this man a stylist.

They stood as we approached, and awkward handshakes and introductions were exchanged all round while I smiled nervously, wanting to be pleasant and affable and enter into the spirit of this thing, yet utterly convinced in my soul that this was never going to happen.

‘Anju, why don’t you sit there,’ my mother entreated, pointing to an empty seat on the other side of the prospective groom. Good thing I was wearing my slides, as Puran appeared shorter than I remembered him. Drinks were ordered, small-talk made (‘So hot here these days, Bombay is getting worse and worse,’ announced Puran’s father), and both mothers complimented one another on their saris. I said nothing. I had been through so many of these that by now I knew the drill intimately. It went something like this:

1. Wait until the boy speaks first.

2. Smile.

3. Reveal as little as possible. (In the words of my mother’s guru from years ago: ‘Don’t show you have any opinions or intelligence. Boys don’t like it. You can say what you want after you’re married, but until then, be quiet.’ It was straight out of The Rules. And it hadn’t worked thus far.)

‘So, you like Bombay?’ Puran’s mother asked me.

I smiled and nodded

‘You must be liking New York also?’ the father asked. ‘What is your work there?’

‘I, um, just work in an office, they do like, um, an advertising type of business,’ I replied, knowing I should dumb-down my life. Puran still hadn’t uttered a word to me or to anyone else at the table, immersed as he was in the task of stirring his mango juice with a plastic straw. I had opted for a lassi, but, at that moment, would have sacrificed a Fendi bag for a Cosmopolitan. I smirked at the thought of how ordering a vodka-heavy drink would look to my potential in-laws.

‘So, Puran,’ my father began, taking on the tone of a paternal job interviewer. ‘I understand you have some shops in Accra?’

Puran finally spoke, in a voice that sounded a bit more helium-enriched than I had imagined. ‘Yes. Groceries, general provisions, like that,’ he said, with no further elaboration.

‘And how’s business these days?’

‘Up and down. There were some riots last year, and our stores were looted.’

I was not encouraged. Talk of anarchy on one’s home front did not make for good first-date conversation. I glanced over at my brother for a show of support; Anil winked and smiled. ‘Just pretend it’s a game,’ he seemed to be saying to me. An uncomfortable silence descended upon the table, as Puran’s mother eyed me up and down, ascertaining if I was a daughter-in-law in the making.

No doubt, if this had been thirty years ago, my appearance would have been different. My mother went to meet my father for the first time wrapped in a blue silk sari, with jasmine flowers laced through her long, braided hair. She never looked up once. And the words ‘New York’ certainly never featured in the conversation. My father says he wanted to marry her as soon as he saw her enter the room. It was, actually, deeply romantic.

Most mothers of supposedly eligible Indian men want their sons to marry unspoiled and domesticated girls from wealthy families. That way, dowries are munificent yet the girl herself is acquiescent and non-demanding. It is the ideal. Puran’s mother was no exception. She was clearly disapproving of the living-in-America factor, but was willing to overlook it when she thought of the kind of parties my family would throw to celebrate finally off-loading me. And the images of suitcases containing silver and silks, of the red velvet boxes carrying jewellery and gold coins that would be sent over to her in the run-up to the wedding … well, what was a little independent streak in a daughter-in-law – one that could surely be quelled with marriage – in comparison to that?

‘Puran, why don’t you take Anju for a walk?’ his mother suggested, smoothly segueing into the next step in the proceedings. Please say no, I silently beseeched. That would signal that he wasn’t interested, that he had decided that I didn’t suit him, and I could go home with my family, then fly back to New York, and never have to think of Accra again.