by Ajay Patel
“Oh hush, you’ve only met her for one day! How could you know if you were in love already?” she shook her head, no doubt thinking Vijay was acting silly like all men were apt to do.
“I have all these incredible feelings for her,” he tried to convince Valerie. “I can’t explain it, but she could be the one.”
“I hope you haven’t been this googily with her,” she complained in between bites of her pasta salad.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I hope you weren’t giving off intense signals starting from the moment you first saw her. Please tell me that you haven’t called her already since you’ve come back,” she pleaded.
“Well…” Vijay trailed off, looking away from her, embarrassed to admit he had already done the unthinkable in Valerie’s mind.
“You’ve called her already?” Valerie asked incredulously putting her fork down.
“Kinda. But only four times,” Vijay responded sheepishly.
“You’re going to blow it if you aren’t careful!” she admonished him although her tone suggested that he was already a lost cause. “You know the Rules! You should never call someone right after you’ve met them. Industry standard say’s you’ve got to wait at least two to four days!”
“I don’t believe in any of that nonsense,” Vijay said stubbornly. He had finished his lunch and had put the plate aside.
“I’m telling you, as a woman,” she pointed to him with a scowl, “if you were acting too interested it would scare me off. Or who knows, it might even turn me off.”
“This whole game playing thing and the Rules may work when you’re on a dating circuit, but it doesn’t work for what I’m going through. If I’m meeting someone clear across the country, I feel like I just have to be open about how I feel. There’s no time for these stupid games.”
Valerie let the words sink in as she took another bite of her pasta salad. Upon some reflection, she admitted “Maybe you’re right. This whole process that you’re going through is definitely foreign to me. I guess I just want to make sure that if she’s someone that you see yourself really being happy with, that you don’t mess it up.”
“All right, all right,” Vijay raised his hands in surrender. “I appreciate your concern. And I promise, I won’t wear my attraction for her on my sleeve if I can help it,” Vijay agreed.
After his talk with Valerie, Vijay tried acting a little more nonchalant with Sonia. But try as he might, he was so inexplicably enraptured that he kept doing foolish things. In one instance, Sonia received a phone call on the other line and cut their phone conversation short with an apology to take the other call. During their next telephone conversation, Vijay felt compelled to make arrangements to have Rocky call and interrupt on the other line so that he too would appear equally inaccessible and popular. It continued in this bizarre one-upsmanship way, except that Vijay was the only one playing this game.
A few weeks passed this way and Vijay found himself having lunch with Valerie again. He no longer felt as happy and excited as he had the first time.
“I can tell just looking at you. You’ve got woman problems. Is it that soon-to-be wife of yours, Sonia?” she asked Vijay playfully.
“It’s all just so frustrating!” Vijay released pent up exasperation. “I feel like I’m doing all the work! For every four phone calls, I must be making three of them. It just doesn’t seem like there is an even amount of trying on both sides!”
Valerie listened to him rant and then said, “It just makes me wonder…” she didn’t finish the sentence but chose at that time to occupy herself with her lunch.
“What?” he asked, although he thought he knew.
“I sometimes think that you can tell how interested someone is by how much effort they’re willing to put in. To be honest, things don’t exactly sound great from what you’ve been saying.”
He wasn’t happy to hear the honest analysis from Valerie. This unhappiness was only because it verified in him how he had assessed the situation. If it had been someone else, he would have said the same thing, starting off with a ‘Looking at the situation objectively, here’s how I see it…’. The problem was that he couldn’t be objective. He had so fallen for Sonia that he kept making excuses for her behavior, desperately believing these excuses to be true.
Vijay, despite having received all the signals and having processed them with the help of his friends, was still in denial and held eternal hope that Sonia really had been busy with finals and that all would be fine soon. A week after his lunch with Valerie, he made arrangements to go on another business trip which would allow him to go through Chicago to pay a visit with Sonia again. His spirits rose, as he thought that another face to face would surely rejuvenate, and help to remind her about how great it could be between them. He, of course, needed no such reminders.
“Hello?” Sonia’s voice answered. Vijay had called her number and hung up ten times through the course of the day because he kept getting her answering machine and he didn’t want to chance his message on what he believed to be her capricious answering machine. It had, according to Sonia, already lost two of his messages previously which, she had explained, was the reason she hadn’t called him back.
“Hi. It’s me.” he said.
“Hi. Can we talk later? I’ve got my last final to study for tomorrow and then this awful semester will finally be over!”
“I just have a quick question for you then.” He said in a tone as if he were about to reveal a pleasant surprise.
“Okay,” she responded, unsuspectingly.
“I have to come out to the east coast on another business trip in a week and I was wondering if you’d be interested in meeting again. It would be after your finals are over so I was hoping you might have some free time to do something fun.”
There was an awkward silence. She then said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s such a great idea.” She sighed and then another period of silence followed. “I probably should have said something earlier, but I just never know what to say in these kinds of situations and just keep trying to avoid things.” More silence. Vijay just gripped the telephone listening. “I know, I probably just made things worse because of that. The truth is, I don’t feel like this is working. I don’t know…I’m sorry,” she repeated, fumbling, not certain how to get the words out, certain only that the words had to come out.
Vijay was reeling. He sat down, and put one of his hands on his forehead. She no longer even had excuses or reasons for him not to come over other than the one he dreaded, that she didn’t feel for him like he did for her. “But I feel like we’re so perfect for each other. Are you sure?” he asked desperately.
She sighed again, more in control. “Do you remember what you told me after we had left the museum and were at the El train station? We were talking about who our perfect persons were?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I had said the perfect person for me would be someone who I just felt so comfortable and attracted to, like no other person could ever make me feel. Like two ends of a train track, perfectly aligned. And I think you had said that was only one-half of the answer. That there always are two tracks, and it was perfection only when both of the tracks were aligned. That in order for the person to be perfect, they had to feel the same way about you too.
“Perfection on both ends,” Vijay remembered what he had said that day underneath the El tracks. He then realized why she had brought back that concept. “I see. I guess I may have been focusing only on my end of the tracks.”
“Well…” she trailed the word off with no others to follow. It was as if she was trying very hard not to have to agree to his conclusion out loud, but rather only allude to it. “I’m sorry, Vijay,” she said quietly.
Vijay let out a sigh. “I’d better go.”
“Good bye.”
And like that, another chapter in Vijay’s life came to an end. Vijay hung up the phone, put on his running shoes, and went on a long run.
&nbs
p; He tried to rationalize everything now. He had said “no” to lots of women during this process. It was only fair that he be on the receiving end finally.
But as much as he tried to make it all make sense, he couldn’t escape the feeling of being cursed. It was a case of bad luck, similar to when as a child he played hide and seek with his friends. There were certain days when for some reason or other, he would always end up being “it” no matter what he did. That same feeling overcame him again, making him run even harder, hoping the pain in his body would dull the other pain. The one that hurt even more.
He thought viciously as he ran into the sunset on the wet packed sand near the surf. This was all supposed to be like corporate dating. No one was supposed to get hurt. Just friendly inquiries, encounters and evaluations. And it had been like that. Well, mostly. But in the past, he hadn’t been the one that had fallen for someone. Now he was. And the hurt was unbearable. A hurt no less painful than it had been with Jennifer when they had broken up. This puzzled Vijay. Because Vijay hadn’t known Sonia for long, having met her only once. Why, he wondered, did this cause him such pain? After an hour of running away, he realized why it had hurt so much. Even though he had known Sonia for such little time, it had felt so right so right away, just like it had with Rina. It had been special. It was almost as if Sonia was this wonderful meteor that had come blazing into his life. But now, after coming so close, leaving a tail of shooting stars and fireworks, she was leaving him, gone forever.
The next time when his parents called and asked if any progress was being made, he would have to once again say “No”. And as so often was the case lately, Vijay stopped running, took a deep breath, and realized he was still alone.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Re: Destiny / Fate Revisited
Mona,
Sorry I haven’t responded to your last e-mail to me for a while. It’s just that I’ve been so busy because I am officially on the marriage track. My parents are trying to set me up with Indian women around the country in the hopes that I’ll find someone to marry.
It kind of feels hopeless sometimes though. I’m looking for this one perfect person and it just seems that finding her and having her feel the same way about me is impossible. The perfect person. Is there such a thing?
Let me know what you think. Vijay
To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Re: Re: Destiny / Fate Revisited
Vijay,
Personally, I think there is a perfect person for all of us and that we’ll find them given time. I feel that each person has more than one perfect person so its not as impossible as it sometimes seems. I also believe that destiny and fate will guide us, no matter what we do. Paths will cross—in unex
pected ways. Be patient. But I have a question for you—why are you limiting yourself to just Indian women? What about that woman I met with you when you visited—Valerie? To make it easier to find that perfect person, shouldn’t you be casting the widest net possible?
Mona
To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Re: Casting the net.
Mona,
Valerie’s just a good friend I work with. We’re the only single ones left at the firm so we give each other support in our dating adventures. And while I have gone out with women who weren’t Indian in the past, for some reason, now that I’m older, finding someone Indian is something very important to me—important enough that for a woman to be perfect for me, she’d have to be Indian.
I guess the result of that is my search will continue—as painful, difficult, and lengthy as that search may be.
Vijay
13
Look Before You Leap
“Hi Vijay. Can you talk?” a tired voice asked over the telephone
at midnight.
“Megha? What’s wrong?” Vijay answered the phone with concern. She and Vijay had been talking more often lately, re-establishing connections naturally now that the unnatural parental scrutiny and pressure of marriage had been taken away. But this call was unusually late even for her to be making.
“I’ve been up all night talking to a friend of mine who’s kinda down about all this arranged marriage stuff. After talking to her trying to bring her up, I kinda started to feel down myself. I just felt like I needed someone to talk to and I thought of you,” she said earnestly.
“Tell me what happened,” Vijay said quietly.
“My friend Sheila was introduced to this guy named Sumeet a few months ago at a wedding. Things looked good pretty quickly so much so that, when his parents were in town last week, Sumeet actually introduced her to them.”
“Is the problem that they don’t like her?” Vijay asked.
“No, it’s not that,” she sighed. “Sheila is perfect, and Sumeet’s parents thought so too. The problem is that Sumeet’s parents wanted to meet her parents while they were in town since things were going so well.”
“Did that not go well?” he tried to predict again where the conversation was going. “You could say that. About two years ago, Sheila’s father had a stroke and is partially paralyzed. Sheila’s mother stays home to take
care of him. So when Sumeet’s parents went to Sheila’s house to meet them…
Vijay understood where the conflict existed, interrupting, “Let me guess, Sumeet’s parents were less than thrilled about the situation for their son.”
“Yeah,” Megha said sadly. “His parents told him that if he married Sheila, he was going to end up having to take care of the whole family. They wanted him to break it off with Sheila and he did just that today. Sometimes Indians can be just so…so, insensitive and stupid!” she finished, frustrated because she couldn’t think of more appropriate and bitter words to described Sumeet and his parents.
“I don’t know if it’s an Indian thing,” Vijay said after further reflection. “I think anybody, whether Indian or not, would have had the same reaction in that kind of situation.”
“That’s not true!” Megha answered back vehemently. “I have this friend who isn’t Indian, and she met someone the normal way, not the messed up way we do. They started going out and fell in love and are married now. Things happened to them and their families before they got married. But they loved each other and dealt with it together. They didn’t quit! Why can’t our Indian thinking be like that? If you’re in love, you should be able to deal with things and be supportive!”
“But there’s a huge difference,” Vijay protested after thinking about Megha’s example, “It’s like you said. Your friends met through the normal way and they fell in love.”
“So? Can’t Indians be normal and fall in love?”
“They can,” Vijay responded. “But everything about this arranged marriage process is designed to learn about a person up front before you’ve even had a chance to really fall in love.”
“And?” Megha continued stubbornly, still unable to see any difference.
“And,” Vijay continued, “because of that, there’s a whole different order of things for us. Your friends fell in love and learned about things along the way. Their love for each other was strong enough then to deal with the issues. But for Sheila and Sumeet, and for us and everyone else that goes through this process, you learn about everything before anyone’s really had a chance to truly fall in love. And well, if things aren’t exactly how you’d like them, there’s no strong love there yet to make it work.”
“It just seems so mechanical though. It’s almost like you have to look at the financial statements before you can even make any kind of emotional connection with a person,” Megha said tiredly. “And because of that, you might miss out on something that actually works. Whatever happened to the romantic leap of faith we were all supposed to take where you fall in love with the person, not their entire set of circumstances?”
“We kinda lose out on that,” Vijay said sadly. “Most people usually fall in love before they take their leap of faith. For us, though, because how this is all set up, we’re forced
to look before we can even fall in love. Because of that we may not be making those leaps of faith that we really ought to be.”
14
Parental Conventions Regarding Matrimonial Conventions
“So what’s up? Any new potential wives on the marriage radar screen?” Rocky asked Vijay. They had just entered Carl’s House of Billiards, a true gritty neighborhood pool hall. The place was not one of the yuppie hangouts where people went to “play pool” but rather a place where people went to “shoot stick.” As a result, the pool tables were available for less than ten dollars an hour and the waitresses were unattractive. Rocky had already sunk two balls in the first game before any conversation between them had even started.
“No, the coast unfortunately seems pretty clear,” Vijay said glumly as he applied chalk to the end of his pool cue. He never knew the reason for doing so other than that people who seemed to know how to play pool always did. “Believe me, my parents are pulling out all the stops, but no one’s panned out yet.”
Rocky missed, sinking the cue ball into the corner pocket. Vijay pulled it out and lined it up for an easy shot. “Are you planning to go to the convention?” Rocky asked as Vijay struck a ball that rolled into a corner pocket.
Vijay stood up to look at Rocky forgetting, for a moment, his next shot, and asked puzzled, “Convention? What’re you talking about?”
“Didn’t you know? Every year during Thanksgiving weekend there’s a Gujarati convention. A couple of thousand people usually go to it. A lot of people our age. Lots of new faces,” Rocky described. He now was applying chalk to the end of his pool cue, no doubt not knowing the
purposes of it any more than Vijay did.
“Is it any fun?”
“Definitely! And the parents love it because they feel like it gives us all a chance to meet other single people and, who knows, maybe find someone. It’s set up to be a matrimonial convention, but it’s really just a big party. I’ve actually gone to the last couple of them and they weren’t too bad. We should totally go!”
