by Sushi Das
India, we are constantly told, is the largest democracy in the world where everyone is entitled to a vote. But within the traditional Indian family, everyone does not have an equal say. Children are raised with the expectation that their parents will fix their marriages and they grow up learning to accept the authority of those ranked higher than them. This is also true for many Indians who live in other countries.
Members of a traditional joint family depend on each other for support. Family bonds are extremely strong as Indians are generally raised with the knowledge that they are part of a larger extended family, whose needs overshadow those of each individual. When people interact with each other, they pay close attention to hierarchy and this guides them on the level of respect, honour and obligation they need to show towards each other. Etiquette facilitates this: touching someone’s feet connotes great respect, as does addressing them by adding ji to the end of their name, for example, Gandhi-ji.
Within this quite complex hierarchy, the relationship between a new bride and her mother-in-law, or suss, is interesting. Traditionally, a man brings his new wife home to live with him and his parents. If there are several brothers, all the daughters-in-law of a household are likely to become friends, although they would remain mindful of their position within the hierarchy, with the wife of the youngest brother at the bottom of the pile, and likely to be bossed about not only by her mother-in-law but by her older sisters-in-law too.
Whichever way you look at it, the new bride gets the worst deal. Her acceptance in the new household – indeed whether she will thrive or even survive – depends on how quickly she learns to become part of her husband’s family. If she falters in her household duties, or in showing respect, she will be quickly yanked into line by her mother-in-law. If her mother-in-law is cruel towards her or over-burdens her with housework, her husband may not necessarily protect her or fight her corner, as his first loyalty is to his mother, not his wife. Throughout the ages, men have set up a framework that allows women to be controlled, but it is frequently women themselves who police this system.
Given the way things work within old-style Indian joint families and the challenges faced by migrants in Western countries, it’s understandable that my mum thought finding a suitable match from India was better than taking a risk with an Indian boy raised in Britain. The boy from India would have several advantages: he would not have lost his Indian values to Western mores. My parents would be in a strengthened negotiating position vis-à-vis a dowry as they offered not only a bride but a chance for the groom to start a life in an advanced country too. And, crucially, once married he would permanently migrate to Britain, most likely leaving his parents behind in India and thus providing me, the new bride, an opportunity to be married to a man who came without his mother-in-law, or sans suss.
The sans suss issue is important because it gives daughters of Indian migrants an opportunity to embark on married life as the female head honcho in her own home, rather than living under the potential tyranny of a mother-in-law.
‘A boy from India is the best. A doctor, god-willing,’ said Mum. ‘You will have no suss and no sisters-in-law living in your house. It will be only you and your husband and then you will have all the freedom.’ This was my mum’s definition of freedom. For her, it was a matter of persuading me to accept her logic. But in my attempts to persuade her to see things from my point of view, I found myself arguing against a boy from India, rather than against the arranged marriage itself.
In true Indian style, the help of the entire family was enlisted to coax me into accepting a boy from India: my nanna and nanni, and my uncle and aunt. They all ganged up against me. Vin, who witnessed the pressure mounting, could offer little advice. In the privacy of our bedroom I would rant and rave about the injustice of it all and she would sit silently, simply listening. What else could she have done? What wisdom could a younger sister impart? I could hardly expect her to go in and fight for me. No, I was on my own, so I did what I usually did. I turned to my diary.
Sunday 20 March, 1983: ‘I talked to my mother today for a long while – we spoke about the usual thing: arranged marriages. I have protested now for a very long time, that I shall put up every resistance to marrying a man from India. I believe his upbringing would be too different from mine for a happy and true kind of relationship to develop. We will have very different sets of values. Political differences can be borne, but things like ethical differences are very difficult to bear. I cannot even find an equilibrium with my father who has lived here almost 20 years, how will I find a middle life with a husband from a country like India?’
My protestations were pointless. Mum dismissed me as ‘worried for no reason’. She appeared to misunderstand everything I said.
‘Mum, I’m not worried because I’m scared of getting married. I’m just saying I don’t want a boy from India.’
‘You don’t need to trouble yourself with these things. Your father and I will look very carefully and find the right boy to suit you. You are our daughter. Of course we will find the right boy,’ she said in Punjabi.
‘There would be no boy in the whole of India who would be acceptable to me because I don’t want to marry anyone from India.’
‘Now that’s just being silly and unreasonable. There are many, many boys – it doesn’t make sense to say there would not be a single one in the whole country who would not be right for you.’
‘For god’s sake, Mum, are you doing this deliberately? Are you not understanding me on purpose? You’re not listening to what I’m saying.’
‘I’ve been listening to you for a long time. I’ve heard it all,’ she said, abandoning a kindly tone and adopting a harsher pitch. ‘We are not forcing you to do anything. How could you even dare to suggest that your own parents would take any action that would bring you harm? You are the eldest, don’t forget that. It is your actions that can harm us – your parents, your family. You have a responsibility to your sister and your brother to do what is right for you and for them. It’s not as simple as marrying whoever you want. This is not how it works. We will all do this together. The whole family will look for the right person, and we will find him. And, trust me, trust your mother, you will be happy. Just wait till you are married. You will see things differently then.’
I did not yet fully understand the complexities of Indian family life. I did not understand my position in the hierarchy, my duty or the expectations placed upon me. Had I grown up in India with a large extended family around me, with my peers facing similar futures, it might have been different. But I was a British Indian. Neither British nor Indian, yet both, and I was seeking individuality in the world of the collective.
Indians love functions: organising them, going to them, talking about them, arguing over them. Naturally, the greatest function of them all is a wedding. And if Indians are not celebrating at a wedding, they will be found celebrating at a pre-wedding ritual. Once, Mum took Vin and me to a pre-wedding ritual of a family friend. Following the Roka ceremony to mark a couple’s formal engagement, there are a number of other pre-wedding rituals that allow for the prospective bride and groom to be blessed. One of the last ceremonies before the big day is the mehndi (henna) ceremony, and this is the one that Mum took us to.
The groom’s family sends the mehndi, which is applied in intricate patterns to the girl’s hands and feet by friends and family or a professional mehndi artist. The mehndi, which is not washed off until the following day, stains the hands and feet in detailed red patterns that last about six weeks. It is part of a girl’s wedding decoration and the occasion provides the opportunity for women to engage in merriment, singing and feasting.
Vin and I did not know the girl who was soon to be married, but we knew she had come from India to marry a British-born Indian boy. Maybe his parents thought a girl from India would not be corrupted by Western ways. She was shy and spoke softly with her head lowered as the mehndi was applied to her hands. Women and girls gathered around, everyone s
miling and happy.
Saturday 14 May, 1983: ‘They sang songs that I could not understand and chanted rhymes that were meaningless to the language and the kind of living I knew. Perhaps I felt a little uncomfortable or an outsider. I thought about my own marriage. They would paint my hands and feet with henna. They would rub the yellow flour and ghee into my skin too. They would sing songs that I wouldn’t understand. Rites would be performed and prayers said in a language I could not really comprehend and then I would be married. Then they’d let me wear the red colour in the parting of my hair and a red dot on my forehead, to show I was married. Why do these things have to be done? I don’t know, maybe they don’t either. When customs and traditions have been passed down through the ages, people forget to question their origins and examine their relevance.’
I wanted to grab the girl and shake her by the shoulders. I wanted to shout at her, ‘No, don’t do it. Don’t place yourself permanently in the custody of men. You belong to your father right now. But soon you will belong to your husband and then, when you are old, you will belong to your sons. You will never belong to yourself. Break free. Break free before it’s too late!’
I was a misanthrope among the party revellers. Women sang and ate samosas around me as I stood watching the mehndi being applied.
‘How can she marry someone she hardly knows?’ I whispered to Mum.
‘Love grows,’ she said. ‘Love grows after you get married. You’ll see.’
I watched the mehndi artist make deft swirling patterns on the girl’s palms. Pausing with the nozzle of her applicator poised over her hand, she asked the girl for the groom’s name so she could write it in tiny letters somewhere within the mehndi patterns. Later, when the wedding was over and they were alone at last, he would hold his new bride’s hand and search for his name hidden in her palm. Maybe she would take the opportunity to look at his face, perhaps properly for the first time, and feel something that could be love. Maybe that feeling would grow and never go away and they would live happily ever after forever and ever and ever. Maybe Mum was right.
But then again, maybe not. I knew things had become preposterous when the introductions started. The first boy arrived at our house with two carloads of his family. His parents had probably forced him to wear that concrete-grey suit. A suitable boy in a suit. It had a sheen that I found instantly unattractive. He had athick head of black hair and eyes like a squirrel: small, intelligent and furtive.
They all spilt out of the cars – short dumpy women with jingle-jangle gold bangles and long crepe scarves about their necks and sure-footed men in suits and with serious faces. There were children too – ten-year-old cousins in their Sunday best smirking on the inside of their mouths. They didn’t all fit into Mum and Dad’s living room, so the women and children were led into the dining room. Even if they could all have been comfortably accommodated in one room, the women and children would still have been separated from the men. The suitable boy with the shiny suit sat with the serious faces.
I had been ordered by Mum to wear ‘something Indian’. I didn’t always do as I was told but on this occasion I did. I didn’t want to embarrass her and besides, what choice did I have? I can’t remember the colour of the sari I wore, but I’m certain it matched my bindi and restrained my stride. ‘Tie your hair back,’ said Mum, fussing around me in my bedroom.
‘Why?’
‘So you look Indian.’
‘But I am Indian. I’ve got a brown face. He’s hardly going to think I’m English.’
She knew that, but she was operating on a subterranean level. Overt signals as well as nuances implying I had become Westernised had to be concealed. After all, we didn’t want him to think I had been corrupted. Nobody likes a girl corrupted by the West.
In the kitchen I prepared the tea things and adjusted my sari for modesty, pulling it across my body to provide maximum breast coverage and minimum midriff exposure. It’s astonishing how six yards of silk, with a slight tug here and there, can be transformed from a garment dripping with sexual allure to one that projects pure, incorruptible piety. When I entered the dining room and set the tea things on the table, the women from his side watched me with eager eyes. I pretended not to notice, keeping my eyes lowered so I didn’t appear bold.
From my side of the family there were my mum, my aunt and Vin. I sat on the chair that Mum pointed to with a dart of her eyes, and the women continued to talk among themselves until the door opened and the suitable boy was ushered into the room. He was tall and I thought I saw the beginnings of a stoop. He looked uncomfortable, as men often do when they’re outnumbered by women. With an artificial confidence born of attempted bravado, he immediately approached Vin and introduced himself. She didn’t need to be ordered to wear Indian clothes. She was an obedient girl and knew what was expected of her.
Mum, noticing that he was talking to the wrong daughter, quickly interrupted their smiling banter and guided him to a dining chair she had placed directly in front of me, about a metre away.
‘Hi,’ he said, sitting down, looking at me for the first time.
‘Hi.’
His chair was too close to mine but I couldn’t push mine further back as I was up against a wall. My back was always up against a wall. Our knees were pointing at each other, like machine guns facing off.
‘Nice weather,’ he said smiling thinly. This is going to be hard, I thought, unless someone takes the reins. The women and children were seated around the walls like patients in a doctor’s waiting room. I was aware of them in the corners of my eyes. Lipsticked mouths chatted. Cups and saucers clinked. Saris rustled. Samosas crunched.
‘Have you got a degree?’ I blurted.
‘Yes,’ he replied, snapping to attention.
‘In what?’
‘IT.’
‘What did you get?’
‘A third.’
I made a note on my mental clipboard: Not a medical doctor, susceptible to hen-pecking, degree only third class, possible hunchback in old age. He’d stumbled out of the corral.
We continued the interrogation, covering all the basics: education, age, place of abode, ages and marital status of siblings. It would have been quicker to exchange CVs. We were both friendly, courteous, accommodating – all the attributes we knew were expected of us, but I was bored.
‘Do you have any hobbies?’ I asked. It was a pointless question, but we were running out of things to talk about and we’d only been conversing for a few minutes. He shrugged.
‘Not really.’
‘Do you live with your parents?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s you star sign?’ asked Vin barging into the conversation.
‘Pisces,’ he replied foolishly.
Things were beginning to disintegrate. So I looked at Mum, who put down her teacup and rose from her chair, smiling in the way she always did when visitors came to our house, the way I always wished she’d carry on smiling after they’d left. She started engaging the suitable boy in irrelevant chitchat as I turned to Vin and swallowed hard.
After the visitors left, Mum was excessively and unnaturally ebullient. ‘Well, what you think him?’ she asked eagerly, in a friendly attempt to be my equal, rather than my mother.
‘No.’ I replied.
‘No? Why?’
‘You know why. Because I want to get a degree and a job first. I want to be journalist.’ I had a much longer list of reasons why I didn’t want to marry anyone, let alone her suitable boy, but I didn’t tell her. I wasn’t in the mood for a row. Suddenly, she wasn’t smiling anymore. She was sick of me. Her shoulders took on a familiar slouch as she padded out of the room.
A few days later we received news. ‘The boy, he say yes,’ said Mum, her eyes glinting with hope.
‘I’m sure he’s a very nice boy,’ I said. ‘But my answer is still no. Please stop looking for boys, Mum. There’s no point.’
‘But he is tall like you. And he study the computer degree.’
‘Please. My answer is no.’
Mum and Dad would have to let his family know that I had turned him down. There was potential for embarrassment and humiliation for all parties concerned if the matter was not handled sensitively. But I didn’t care, because when you’re eighteen you don’t care about anything. So that was the end of that. I never saw him again and he was never mentioned in our house again – it was as if the whole thing had never happened.
Within a few months I turned nineteen. My parents were permanently angry with me, probably because I disobeyed them most of the time. I went out when they told me to stay in; I argued with them over nearly everything; I never wore Indian clothes when they told me to and my exam results were rubbish. All I ever did was listen to music, brood and sulk. I was Holden Caulfield.
As winter drew in that year, so did my fears. It seemed as if Mum and Dad had contacted half the Asian population of Britain in a frenzied attempt to find a husband for me before I became completely derailed. Every time the phone rang I was sure it was one of my parents’ scouts calling with a suggestion for a match. Mum once showed me a passport-sized photo of a fat Indian man with curly hair and a double chin. ‘What you think him?’ she asked, looking at me earnestly though her spectacles. ‘He live in Germany.’ I think I said no before she’d even finished the sentence. She and my aunt muttered in corners, and made phone calls to India.
By now, my uncle and aunt had had three kids of their own – two daughters, Surekha and Praveen, and a son, Ashwani. Of course, that’s not what we called them because in any Indian family at least one child must have an absurd pet name. In our family, my cousins were known as Twinkle, Peen and Ash (my distant relatives also include a Happy and a Bubbly). They were old enough to know that my marriage was in the process of being arranged. My permanently knotted brow was an external indicator of the weight of responsibility I felt. As the eldest child, I was expected to set an example for Vin, Raja, Twinkle, Peen and Ash. Any unconventional action by me was likely to ripple into their lives. Friends would tell me to ‘lighten up’. A workman on a building site once yelled, ‘Cheer up, love! Can’t be that bad!’ Other girls got wolf-whistles from builders. I got counselling.
