by Sushi Das
Going to university was my only hope. I could leave home for three years. It would at least delay things. I sent applications to numerous far-flung universities and polytechnics in the British Isles, in the hope I might be accepted somewhere. While I searched for educational institutions far enough from London to warrant leaving home, my parents continued the search for a suitable boy. It was nearly Christmas and, like Colombo, they had a few more leads.
One evening some months later, as the family sat around the dining table for dinner, Mum looked at Dad and said, ‘Shall we talk to Sushila about it, then?’
I froze. It was the way she called me Sushila, my official name, and not Neelum. I wanted to skip the row and go straight to the crying. I wanted to throw open the front door and run down the street screaming. I wanted to be anywhere but my parent’s dining room about to hear their plans for my destiny.
‘Someone in our family has recommended a boy for you,’ she said in Punjabi. ‘We saw him at a party last Saturday. He’s all right, tall and thin and everything, but his hair’s a bit funny. Sort of thinning. His parents want to marry him soon.’ She was trying to sell me a half-rotting pumpkin.
‘He’s practically bald,’ laughed Raja.
‘I suppose he’s got a hairy chest and wears medallions too,’ I sneered. Everyone laughed.
‘His hair isn’t thinning,’ said Dad. ‘It was merely combed back.’ No, of course the pumpkin’s not rotting.
‘Apparently he has a degree from London University,’ said Mum, going in for the hard sell.
‘In what?’
‘Electronics, or something like that.’ So, they couldn’t find a doctor, after all, huh? I had to have something from the next shelf down. ‘He’s quite nice to look at,’ Mum continued. ‘He was wearing a gold chain and he was smartly dressed.’
‘So he was wearing a medallion,’ I cried. Everyone laughed again, except Dad. When they stopped, I noticed they were all looking at me expectantly.
‘Er, you’re not serious about this, are you?’ I said.
‘Yes, of course we are,’ replied Dad.
‘Look, I have no inclination to get married before at least twenty-three or twenty-four.’
‘Hai, hai!’ cried Mum. ‘You’ll be an old woman by then. Nobody wants to marry an old woman.’
‘I will not be an old woman at twenty-three, and it doesn’t matter what people say.’
‘It does matter to a certain extent,’ interrupted Dad. ‘It’s important to stay within the boundaries set by society.’
‘You take society’s conventions as god-given truths! You allow society to dictate the course of action you should take in your life,’ I yelled.
‘No, we just do what is good for us and also keeps us within society’s decent limits.’
‘Don’t get heated up,’ interrupted Mum. I was spoiling her fun. I’d been spoiling her fun since I was born.
‘Look, you know I want to go to university and I don’t want to marry as soon as I get out. I want to get a job.’
‘These are ideals,’ said Dad, affecting patience. ‘They sound nice when you talk about them, but in reality they don’t exist.’ He had expounded the benefits of educational attainment so often, yet now he seemed to be at pains to discourage me from going to university. It was as if, as a man he understood the importance of a university education in securing a good job, but as an Indian father he felt compelled to stop me from leaving home, so I could marry instead.
‘But I’m too young,’ I pleaded, looking from Mum to Dad. Mum breathed out a disappointed sigh and I left the room before anyone could say anything more.
‘I’m sick and tired of this,’ I thought, leaping up the stairs two steps at a time to get to the safety of my bedroom. ‘I’m not marrying a fucking balding half-rotting engineer pumpkin.’
The next day, I had some questions.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do we have arranged marriages?’
‘Because it’s our culture.’
‘But we’re not in India now.’
‘It’s still our culture.’
‘But I can’t marry someone I don’t know anything about and I don’t love.’
‘A husband is not like a commodity in a shop,’ he said. ‘You can’t inspect him and sample him and then pay your price. You can only judge him as he is and if you say yes, then accept him as he is. He will not be perfect, because he is human. You must expect some kind of defect and accept it. Love simply grows from this acceptance.’
‘How can you put your kids through a British education system, expose them to British culture, let them have British friends, and then expect them to abandon all that for an arranged marriage?’
‘You can do anything you like once you are married and gone, but while you are still in my house, you live under my rules.’ By this he meant I was free to abandon the arranged marriage system once I was married, by not imposing it on my own children.
‘So you accept that change will have to come some day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why not let change happen now rather than wait for the next generation? Why don’t you break free from the tradition and let me marry someone I choose?’
‘Because the Indian way is what I know. It is who I am. It is too difficult for me to change.’
Friday 14 October, 1983: ‘It’s not really my father’s strictness and moral rigidness that upsets me, because I can understand that that is all due to his background. He believes that by being a conformist one succeeds in anything. [He believes] rules set out by society may not always be correct, but adhering to them and becoming one of the herd is better than sticking out like a sore thumb and being noticed, because it is that kind of thing that gets one into trouble.
[I think] if one believes that society’s rules are wrong, one must change them by becoming one of the first of the non-conformist group, instead of leaving that job to the next generation.
Unfortunately, my father refuses to become one of the first Indian non-conformists of his generation. He believes that the job of changing Indian society in England can only be handled by people like Vin and myself; but that is where he is wrong. It is he who must change radically. One of two things may then result. Either he will be ejected from Indian society, or Indian society will begin to change too, as one domino will have started a chain reaction.’
Saturday 15 October: ‘Musing over what I wrote yesterday – it is more likely that a radical change from someone like my father would cause the whole [Indian] community to reject him rather than follow his example. This, my father believes, is an extremely unstable position, as he is then neither a part of the ‘English’ nor the ‘Indians’. Instability leads to breakdown. Furthermore, my father has been brought up an Indian. Why should he change in any way? Why should he forsake everything? It’s people like Vin and I who wish for change. We ask our father to help us and increase the rate of that change. He refuses, and he has every right to.’
Within a few weeks, the arranged marriage circus was back in town with a new act. ‘There’s a doctor,’ said Mum bluntly in Punjabi. I looked at her and sighed. ‘We haven’t seen him, but we’ve heard he’s tall and slim. They say he’s sharp.’
‘Oh god,’ I muttered under my breath.
‘He lives in India,’ Mum added quickly.
‘I’ve told you, no boys from India,’ I yelled. ‘It won’t work, I know it won’t.’
‘A friend of the family has been to visit him,’ she said. Negotiations had been taking place without my knowledge and were clearly quite advanced.
‘We’ve received a letter telling us he’s a pleasant and modern man. Apparently his ideas are like yours. His name is Dinesh.’
‘What do you mean his ideas are like mine?’
‘Well, you know – he’s your kind of person.’
As far as I could tell, my parents had thus far understood my ideas to be abnormal, extreme, rebellious, English and wild. Now, all o
f a sudden, Mum was claiming a suitable boy had been identified with similar ‘ideas’. A suitable boy for an unsuitable girl.
‘Mum, I’m a feminist,’ I blurted childishly. ‘And I want to be a journalist. Those are my kind of ideas.’
‘Yes, I know. These fads will pass.’
I was livid. She still wasn’t listening to me. She was my mother and she hardly knew who I was. My head felt like a pressure cooker and I could barely speak for the fury.
Then, one night, Vin, Raja and I were playing Monopoly when there was a knock at the front door. It was the family friend who had been to India to check out Dr Dinesh. We continued our game of Monopoly as the friend talked about his trip to India. He had a small, neat round face like a cartoon character, and he sat with his legs together as if he was trying to take up as little room as possible on the sofa. Reaching into his jacket pocket he pulled out a reel of photographic film. ‘Neelum, go make some tea,’ said Mum. Her tone was urgent, indicating I was being ordered to leave the room rather than actually being asked to make tea. I left immediately.
Some minutes later I returned with a tray of mugs and a pot of tea, but stood outside the living room door listening to the conversation. ‘I’m sorry the film got spoilt,’ I heard the cartoon say. ‘That’s why I only have the transparencies.’ I thought I felt a moth in my rib cage.
I entered the room and set the tea things on the table, on which a box of transparencies had been opened. Vin and Mum had taken a handful each and were holding them up to the overhead light. I took a few too and joined the rest of the family, squinting at the tiny photos.
All I could see were Indian people I didn’t recognise standing in a ‘we’re-having-our-photo-taken’ pose, with a yellowy Indian sun glinting off their oiled black hair. I flicked through them quickly and chanced upon one of a man in a white shirt and grey suit. His arms hung loosely with both hands in his trouser pockets. His face, although hard to see clearly, looked as if he wanted the photographer to hurry up. ‘That’s him,’ I thought, and quickly pushed the slide back into the rest of the pack. Mum complained that the images were too small for her to see properly, so Dad set up his projector and screen and somebody turned off the lights as the device whirred into action. Mum sat on the edge of her chair, and there was an air of excitement in the darkened room, as if we were about to see the opening scene of a new blockbuster movie.
Dad clicked methodically through the slides. The images, which moments ago had been minute when illuminated through the tungsten light, now appeared in gigantic form on the screen in front of us. He stopped clicking when he reached the man with his hands in his pockets. ‘Oh, isn’t that him?’ cried Mum, almost catapulting herself out of the chair. Everyone leant forward to study the photo of Dr Dinesh, as if their being a few centimetres closer might reveal the kind of husband he would be.
It’s not uncommon for families involved in arranged marriage negotiations to exchange photos. Mum and Dad would have supplied Dinesh’s parents with a photo of me, but I didn’t know which one they had picked. Vin looked at me, her eyebrows raised, inviting me to react. I remained silent.
Mum was beaming. She could have leapt into the air and given Dad a high five and it would not have seemed out of place under the circumstances. ‘He look nice,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Neshy look nice.’ She already had a nickname for him! I felt faint.
All around me there was excited chatter as the family conducted a forensic examination of the photo of Dinesh. I zoned out, withdrawing into my thoughts, ruminating over the pros and cons, as I had done many times already.
Strange, really – love marriages and arranged marriages begin so differently, yet the goal for both is that two people should stay together forever. So which one achieves its goal most often? Let’s deconstruct for a minute. In Western marriages, love can die. People can pack their bags and walk out. In the postmodern age we manage these relationship breakdowns in many different ways. There is long-term separation, on-again-off-again, bitter recriminations with children in between, and, of course, marriage’s fatal bullet – divorce. It’s not ideal. And the numbers never seem to drop – in fact, year on year divorce rates keep rising.
Now let’s take a ride around the mystical East. Arranged marriages mean parents know best, so why not let them choose? No waiting for the phone to ring; no wondering whether the relationship’s serious now. Parents make it practical. There are no pretensions about love: it ‘grows’ after you marry. But isn’t that just a euphemism for familiarity? If you stay together for long enough, don’t you simply get used to each other?
How many times have we heard that arranged marriages are more successful than love marriages? Disillusioned Westerners love that line, as do Easterners who want to assert the supremacy of their ways. But there are no reliable figures. Put this ‘growing’ love within a community that frowns on divorce and what have you got? True love or bondage? If your husband is a drunk who beats you every night and divorce is unacceptable in your extended family-cum-community, where do you go to build a new life? If your husband is a cheat or neglects you, who can you turn to? What structures has Indian society or the worldwide community of expatriate Indians created to cater for these women? When divorce is taboo and the gauge of a successful marriage is a low divorce rate, then of course arranged marriages appear to be successful. A better measure might be one that gauges happiness. But no one has invented a happy arranged marriage index yet, so the divorce rate is the only measure we have to work with.
But it’s not all that bad. Look at the bright side – at least you’ll never be alone in an arranged marriage. They consolidate wealth and community; they provide a massive network, like a club; they preserve and continue the ancestral lineage. They’ve got a lot going for them, haven’t they? Remember, it’s not an individual contract, it’s a company merger. Your future is with the firm. The firm’s success is your success.
Suddenly I heard Vin yelling my name.
‘Sushila, Sushila! Are you listening?’
‘What?’ I said, snapping out of my thoughts.
‘I said, what do you think of Dinesh?’ Vin was leaning into me, her face contorted with impatience. Raja was packing up the Monopoly board and the cartoon character had left the room. I looked at her like a patient in a hospital ward unable to understand what the nurse was asking, before opening my mouth and letting the words fall out.
‘Look, he’s okay,’ I said. ‘But fucking hell, Vin, what’s going on here? Mum called him Neshy, like we’re already married or something. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but it’s the idea, the idea of letting them choose. I mean, I wouldn’t let them choose a dress for me, so why would I let them choose a husband?’
‘It might be okay in the end,’ she offered.
‘In the end? What about the sodding beginning?’
My dad never left me in any doubt about what he expected of me. When I came home with a grade A in geography once, happily skipping into the house in the knowledge that I was about to make my parents proud of me, Dad studied my report card and said, ‘Good. Now make sure you get an A next year as well.’ There was no time for whoop-whooping, no moment to luxuriate in pride, just an immediate mental leap to next year so I had as much time as possible to fret about how to stay on top of the mountain I had climbed.
Dad never let up on his demand for high academic standards, but he had made it clear many times that there was a point in a woman’s life where study stopped and marriage began. It was as if the purpose of study, other than to ‘improve oneself’ on a personal level, was to be able to present the best academic credentials on paper in order to command a high price in the marriage market. An educated girl can secure an educated husband and therefore she has greater potential for wealth and comfort in the future for her and her children. With an education, a girl is no longer a simpleton from a village whose parents can only secure for her a poor, ignorant weakling. (I am certain Dad would have had no problem
if I had studied to become a nuclear physicist or brain surgeon, as long as it didn’t obstruct his marriage plans for me.)
The remarkable irony of viewing a girl’s education in this way is its failure to realise that while an education may improve a girl’s chances of snaring a better husband, it is also the doorway to her free thinking. An educated mind has the potential to scrutinise tradition, question it, even destroy it. Perhaps Dad never thought this far ahead. He saw no contradiction in encouraging me to excel academically, but then drop my studies for marriage. What would have been unacceptable to him was studying for the purposes of delaying marriage. Parental expectations can be so exacting.
When Dad told me he was planning a trip to India for the whole family to meet Dinesh the doctor, it was obvious there would be expectations. ‘You’re not going to be unreasonable when we get there, are you?’ he asked. I sensed I didn’t have what people like to call ‘wriggle room’.
‘No, I won’t be unreasonable,’ I said. What else could I say?
Fortunately, the trip never eventuated. In June 1984 the Indian government imposed a curfew in Punjab shortly before troops stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where Sikh militants had amassed heavy weapons in protest at what they believed to be discrimination against them by the Hindu majority. More than a thousand people were killed in the battle and it ultimately led to the then prime minister, Indira Ghandi, being assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, in October that year. Dad was shaken up by what was happening in his home state. Unwilling to take his family into a danger zone, he abandoned his travel plans.
