Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  Five years after arriving in Australia, John moved to Sydney to take up a senior lecturing post at Sydney University and I carried on working as a journalist in Melbourne. But we stayed in touch, crying down the phone, trying to work out where it all went wrong. And even after we had exhausted ourselves looking for the answers, we stayed in touch, primarily to make sure the other person was managing on their own.

  I was in my thirties and childless when we separated – an appalling time for a woman, in particular, to start life again. We hadn’t tried to start a family, always thinking we would do that soon, but not yet. Now I had a car, a job and I eventually bought a flat. Well, actually I had a reliable car, an enviable job and a comfortable flat. I tumbled out of my marriage straight onto the heap of thirty-something single professional women with all the scaffolding required to hold up the appearance of a liberated and independent life, but none of the scatter cushions of inner comfort.

  Reminders of John jumped out from the most unlikely places and the memories were welcome as often as they were unwelcome: suede boots on shoe-shop shelves, U2 playing on the radio, Sanj Bhaskar on the TV. Although I never again came across a leatherjacket that smelt of roast beef. These small reminders were enough to undo me, but on the whole I thought I was managing fine, until a senior colleague on the newspaper took me aside one day and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Something’s not right,’ he said. ‘I can tell by the look on your face.’

  I reluctantly told him I was dealing with the breakdown of my marriage and he shared with me his own similar experience some years earlier. I felt relieved to have spoken about my angst with him, and though I knew ‘talking’ helped to alleviate burdens, I nonetheless could not bring myself to tell other colleagues or many of my friends. Most of all, I could not bring myself to tell my parents.

  A year after John and I separated, I still couldn’t find the courage to tell them what had happened. I had once shattered their hopes and dreams with my refusal to have an arranged marriage. I had insisted on marrying the man of my choice. I, their firstborn, had inauspiciously brought shame upon their heads, hurt their izzat and damaged their standing in the Indian community. Surely they had suffered enough. One day I would have to tell them. But I was tarrying because I didn’t have the strength. They would almost certainly see it as a vindication of their warning years earlier: ‘These English boys, these Angrez boys, they go when they finish with the girl.’

  Had I had an arranged marriage, perhaps love would have grown and my marriage to whomever my parents had chosen would still be going strong. Who knows. Certainly my sister’s marriage was proving to be successful – she even had a child now. My marriage would inevitably be compared to hers and I would be the loser. The facts would speak for themselves. I had had a love marriage to an English boy and it had gone wrong, just as they’d said it would. What a disaster.

  One night I was sitting at home alone when the phone rang.

  ‘Hello Sushila, how are you?’

  ‘Hi Dad, I’m fine.’

  ‘How’s John? Is his job going well?’

  ‘Yes, he’s fine too. His job’s going really well.’

  ‘Are you both keeping good health?’

  ‘Yes, we’re both doing really well.’

  There were many phone calls like that. Sometimes Mum would ask to speak to John, and I’d tell her he was working late or had gone shopping or was visiting a friend. After all these years, my parents had reconciled to John. Mum even asked if we were contemplating starting a family soon, to which I responded by telling her if there was any news to report, she would be the first to know.

  At the end of every phone call I would be simultaneously overcome by relief that I had managed to lie my way through it, and shame that I had been too spineless to tell them that John and I had separated, that he lived in Sydney now, and that I was lonely and adrift. But I simply didn’t know how to tell them, and how I would handle what might come afterwards. The feeling was not unlike the anguish I’d felt when I was trying to work out how to tell them I didn’t want an arranged marriage, except this time the agony was laced with fear of humiliation.

  I spent weeks and months in a madness of my own making and shared my thoughts with no one. I looked at photos of Vin’s cherubic child and wondered whether I would have had a similar-looking baby had I married Dinesh. In the background, biological clocks were ticking everywhere: in women’s conversations, in cultural studies books, in newspaper articles and in the bedrooms of commitment-phobic men. I lurched from week to week hoping that something would happen to make that inevitable phone call to my parents slightly easier.

  By the end of that year, joyless madness had taken over and I was focusing on my work ever harder, spending long hours at my desk, for there was nothing to go home for. I decided to work through the Christmas period that year – taking leave felt pointless. I drove to the office along empty roads on Christmas morning. The sunshine bounced off the top of cars parked along the leafy streets bordering the Botanic Gardens. Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance stood bold and strong. The summer air, still morning-fresh, would be suffocatingly hot by the afternoon. The streets were empty. This was a Melbourne Christmas – sunny and glaring, all hairdryer hot. This was not the Christmas I grew up with.

  I hankered for a winter chill in the air and brussel sprouts with a pinch of Mum’s garam masala. I wanted to scrape the ice off my car windscreen with my credit card, like I used to. I wanted the weatherman to warn of more cold fronts and hazardous driving conditions, not of northerly desert winds. So hard to adapt. At least being in the office took my mind off things. Later that day, taking the same route home, I remembered I hadn’t been shopping and there was barely anything to eat in my flat, just the usual fridge stalwarts: half a bottle of wine and a tub of olives.

  I pulled over by a 7Eleven, that overly illuminated beacon of convenience, and went inside. The woman behind the counter had a remarkably heavy brow and five o’clock shadow. I guessed she was Lebanese, maybe Greek. Perhaps even Turkish. You can be anything in Melbourne. I asked for a hot meatpie, which she placed in a paper bag for me. ‘Merry Charissmas, love,’ she said, handing me the change. I ate the lukewarm pie in the car on the way home. It didn’t feel like Christmas, it really didn’t feel like Christmas.

  When I got home I thought about calling London, but the time difference wasn’t good and they’d probably still be asleep. ‘I’ll ring them tomorrow,’ I thought. ‘Maybe I’ll tell them about me and John too. Nah, probably not the best day. Maybe some other time.’ I studied my last bank statement. I had enough money in my account for a trip home. I would have paid double the price to be able to go home for a while, but I knew I was stuck here. How would I explain John’s absence? They would ask me why he had not come with me. They would ask me if everything was all right.

  I can’t remember when I finally told my parents, or what motivated me to call them on that particular day, but I remember the conversation.

  ‘Dad, things have not been going very well with me and John. We’ve tried our best but we’re not happy. We’ve talked about it a lot and we’ve decided to separate. I just wanted to let you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve decided to finish things. We’re separating.’

  ‘This is all very sudden. You must take time to consider these things. What is the problem?’

  ‘Nothing – I don’t really want to talk about those kinds of things. We’re separating because things are not working out. I’m sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Is there somebody else?’

  ‘No. Neither of us has found anyone else. It’s a decision we’ve made together.’ There was silence as Dad absorbed the news. After a long pause, he finally said, ‘There is no need to rush. There is plenty of time for reconciliation. You must try to reconcile your differences.’

  ‘Dad, there is no chance of reconciliation. It’s over.’

  ‘It
’s all right,’ he said kindly. ‘Everything will be all right.’

  There were many more conversations like that with Dad and Mum. They encouraged me to try to keep my marriage together, to work out what was wrong and put it right. If only it was that easy to rewind the passage of time and undo the knots of a relationship. The idea of relationship breakdown simply did not register on my parents’ radar. They could never visualise their own marriage falling apart. There was no such thing for them. Their philosophy was quite different: people hit hard times, but they get through it. Everyone’s life has some struggle and pain, that’s no reason to pack your suitcase and leave. A wife should forgive and forget – it’s her duty. A marriage is not good or bad, it just is.

  Please, they begged, couldn’t John and I work it out? Here they were pleading with me to stay with the Englishman that they had not wanted me to marry in the first place almost thirteen years before. But now, for them, divorce was the least desirable outcome. Theoretically speaking, within the traditional Indian social structure, a divorced woman belongs neither to her father nor her husband. In India, there is a strong religious, cultural and social stigma attached to divorce and this still informs the thinking of diaspora Indians. Widows are often shunned in India, but a divorced woman does not even have the dignity of a widow. A divorced woman is damaged goods.

  I waited for my parents to tell me I had ruined my life, that if I had only listened to them and allowed them to choose a husband for me, I would still be a respectably married woman. But there was no reproach. They never reprimanded me for refusing an arranged marriage, nor taunted me for the breakdown of my love marriage. They didn’t say ‘we told you so’ or claim any type of victory. They didn’t need to.

  But did I feel I had made a mistake? Should I have had an arranged marriage? Would I have been happier? Did I regret my decision to have a love marriage? Well, of course I wondered what life with Dinesh, or any other man my parents might have chosen, would have been like. Of course I wondered whether an Indian husband would have taken me gently by the shoulders as I rose from touching his feet during the Kurwa Chauth ceremony. And, yes, I regretted that relations with my parents had been damaged because I hadn’t followed Indian tradition.

  Regret is surely the worst of all emotions. By its very nature it can never go away. It must linger forever. It’s quite unlike anger, for example, which can be eliminated from one’s system through the pressure cooker vent of verbal or physical expression; or grief, which necessarily loses its agonising edge with time. Regret is an altogether very different animal. Quite simply, regret would not be regret if one didn’t rue forever.

  So is that how I felt? Did I regret refusing to have an arranged marriage? No, absolutely not. It all comes down to choice and control. Like so many women before me, I wanted a say in my future, even if others thought they knew better or did know better. Every individual must be free to make her or his own mistakes. That’s the nature of freedom.

  Months later my mum was on the phone again, as she had been nearly every week.

  ‘Are you sure you and John can’t be together anymore?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Then come back home. Come back to England. Why live in Australia anymore, with no family, no husband? Iss no good for you.’

  ‘I know I need to rebuild my life.’ But I had rebuilt my life after marrying John, then I had rebuilt my life again in Australia and now my mum was asking me to rebuild my life in London. How many times can a person rebuild their life?

  ‘If you come back home, me and Dad can look for someone for you, if you want,’ said Mum.

  ‘What do you mean “look for someone”?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, maybe we find Indian boy for you.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t think so,’ I said, bemused that she thought I might entertain the idea of an arranged marriage at this stage of my life. That really would have been the cherry on the cake for my parents: I marry an Englishman in a love marriage that falls apart. Then Mum and Dad marry me off to an Indian guy of their choosing and it’s a rip-roaring success. No way.

  I continued living and working in Melbourne and in many ways it was all downhill from there. I was binge-drinking, binge-smoking and binge-dating. If it wasn’t for the memory loss that accompanies depression, those years would be easier to recall. All I know is that the seasons came and went because the leaves on the trees outside my flat changed from green to red to yellow and then fell to the ground several times over.

  Life was empty and soulless. I seemed to be forever sitting on a barstool on my own, booking weekends out of town on my own, eating dinner on my own. Sometimes whole weekends would go by without me leaving my flat, getting out of my pyjamas and barely eating. I couldn’t shake the melancholy; I could sometimes scarcely recall what I had done the day before.

  I do, however, have an alarmingly vivid memory of having to complete an official form that required me to name my next of kin who should be contacted in the event of an emergency. It didn’t make sense to name anyone in my family – they were all in England or America. Even John – Professor John Hobson by now – had moved back to England. I couldn’t think of a single person whom I would not be imposing on should I be run over by a bus. I locked myself in one of the cubicles in the ladies’ loos at work and stayed there for a long time.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked a young reporter when I finally emerged.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. ‘Just a bit tired of life.’

  ‘Yeah, I know how you feel,’ she said. ‘This job gets to you after a while, doesn’t it?’ At work I carried on as best I could. I interviewed pillars of society, networked, made snap judgments and met deadlines. I told none of my colleagues that sometimes I sat at home staring at the wall for hours; that I spent weekends on my own lost in the fog of depression; that sometimes I just didn’t feel like living anymore.

  I rang my sister, who was now building a house in New Jersey, as well as my brother in London, in a hopeless attempt to feel connected to my family, but both sounded busy with their own lives. However, Raja must have heard a note of desperation down the phone, because something persuaded him to visit me.

  He arrived at the peak of summer that year. By day I drove him around Melbourne showing him the sights, but in the evening and into the night we talked – and that’s all I wanted to do.

  He was no longer the boy he’d been when I had left England almost a decade earlier. He was now a tall man with broad shoulders, still able to talk the hind leg off a pony, but more restrained, perhaps even cautious. As a boy of about eight or nine, he’d had neat black hair, clear honey skin and a passion for football. He still had all those things, except his hair was now long and he sported a carefully crafted unshaven face. His leatherjacket completed his rock ’n’ roll look. He was still a sound engineer working in one of London’s few remaining small recording studios, and he spent a lot of time with rockstars.

  I showed him newspaper clippings of articles I had written and he showed me his name on the back of the latest Robert Plant CD. ‘I did backing vocals on that one,’ he said with thinly veiled pride.

  ‘Which other famous people have you met?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that many, really. Had a fag with Brian Ferry once – does that count?’

  Raja had been outside my life for a long time and I had been outside his. My most vivid memory of him was his angry face shouting, ‘Look what you’ve done to Mum and Dad,’ after I’d broken the news that I would not have an arranged marriage.

  It was all different now. He had an English girlfriend and he didn’t have to hide her from our parents – he was living with her! I could never have lived with a boyfriend in my twenties – that would have been unconscionable. Clearly my parents were changing – or was it that Raja, being a son, was receiving special treatment?

  My experience of traditional Indian families is that, metaphorically speaking, boys are given the cream, while girls get the milk. (In my mum’s day, boys literally
got the cream, while girls were given thinner milk.) The men of the family are fed first, women eat later. A 2010 American study of child gender and parental investment in India found boys received on average 10 per cent more parental time than girls. They were also more likely to be breastfed for longer, and given vaccinations and vitamin supplements.

  Vin and I received as much or as little of everything as Raja ever did. But certainly in terms of our parents’ moral strictness towards us, their grip on Raja was much looser. Was he allowed to do whatever he wanted? No. But he had greater freedom to associate with friends, including girls, outside the home. Didn’t Mum and Dad want him to have an arranged marriage? ‘Yeah, Mum gives me the telephone numbers of Indian girls,’ Raja told me. ‘I met one once. She worked in a bank. She was nice and all that, but not my type.’

  I asked him if he was prepared to have an arranged marriage.

  ‘Yeah, well, I suppose if Mum and Dad found someone and she was all right, I suppose I would, but I’d have to get to know her and all that. But that won’t stop me finding someone myself,’ he said. A picture of him in his leatherjacket leading a demure Indian girl around the holy fire popped into my head. I couldn’t imagine him doing things the traditional way and nor could I see him marrying a girl with whom a relationship had not naturally evolved. What he wanted was what is these days known as a semi-arranged marriage, where parents allow their sons and daughters to find their own match. If the match is deemed suitable then the couple is free to ‘date’ until marriage.

  As far as I am concerned a semi-arranged marriage is merely an arranged marriage with the word ‘semi’ attached for the purposes of appearing modern. A girl, at some stage, is still required to marry someone her parents have vetted, whether she’s picked him herself or not. And what if she chooses her own husband, secures her parents’ approval, dates him and then dumps him because he isn’t Mr Right? Would that be acceptable? I don’t think so.