Unfinished

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

  At the end of our haldi, we played a game where milk is poured into a large bowl of water, clouding the liquid so you can’t see into it. Then the wedding rings are tossed in and the bride and the groom have to fish around in the bowl with their hands to find them. According to tradition, whoever finds a ring first will be the more dominant one in the marriage. Nick won. He won twice, actually. I wanted a do-over after the first try—I can’t remember the excuse I came up with—but it didn’t matter. My guy fished out the ring both times fair and square.

  The last pre-ceremony before the wedding itself is the baraat, in which the groom makes a grand entrance to the wedding site riding a horse and accompanied by his friends and his family on foot. Nick’s baraat was a colorful and joyous procession. He and his horse were bedecked in finery, and everyone was dancing and playing music and enjoying the excitement leading up to the wedding. While a baraat is primarily a celebration of the groom, it’s also a make-the-bride-and-her-family-wait game. So Nick and his baraat party took their time while my family awaited their arrival. Some say that it’s good luck if the bride catches a glimpse of the groom during his baraat before he sees her at the mandap, so I knew I had to find a secluded place from which I could watch Nick’s grand entrance. I wanted that moment of good luck.

  The room where I was getting ready was quite far from where Nick would be arriving on horseback, but that didn’t stop me from putting my stealth-observation plan into action. In all my paraphernalia—with my elaborate nath hanging on my nose, maang tikka flapping on my forehead, multiple bridal necklaces, and arms full of jingling chudas—I lifted my heavy lehenga and ran up a flight of very steep stairs to a balcony that overlooks the entrance of the palace. My bridesmaids got left behind because they couldn’t run in all their finery, but they didn’t have the motivation that I did. When I arrived at my hidden viewing spot, I saw Nick riding in astride his horse, wearing his gold and white saafa and looking every inch a prince with that wedding turban on his head. Down below, my family welcomed his family in the milni ritual: the uncle meets the uncle, the auntie meets the auntie, the cousin meets the cousin, the brother meets the brother, and so on. His friends danced. The band played. I felt as though all my childhood dreams and fantasies had just come true.

  I returned to my room and sat down for a minute to collect myself before making my own entrance. I was late, of course, because of my crazy run up to the balcony and back. All the same, I took a moment to appreciate the unbelievable good fortune that had brought me to this time, this place. Unlike many Western girls, who dream of getting married in a beautiful white gown, Indian girls dream of getting married in red wedding finery—red for love, prosperity, and fertility. And now here I was in my beautiful red Sabyasachi lehenga and veil, about to marry a man whom I loved with all my heart, and who loved me with all his heart right back. I couldn’t stop smiling.

  An Indian marriage is basically a promise, not a contract, and the couple takes a vow that they’re going to be married for seven lifetimes. A temporary canopy-like structure called a mandap, or “wedding altar,” is constructed, and for much of the ceremony the couple sits under it. In a ritual called a mangal fera, the couple walks around a fire seven times, promising to find each other in every lifetime. When it was time for me to make my entrance, Sid and my cousin-brothers walked me out in a procession to meet Nick. Now it was time for the kanyadaan, the giving away of the bride. Normally this would be a joyous responsibility for the father of the bride. My mother honored her brother, Vimal Mamu, by asking him to step in, and so my uncle—who had helped raise me in the United States, facilitated medical treatment for my father during his illness, and been there for our family always—placed my right hand in Nick’s right hand. We looked into each other’s eyes and vowed to find each other in this lifetime and every other one.

  But again, even around taking a sacramental vow, there is an element of fun built into the ceremony, one that my side of the family wasn’t going to let slip through their fingers. When Nick first approached the mandap, he, like everyone else, had to remove his shoes because it’s a sacred space. While most of our guests were focused on the prayers and rituals of the hours-long ceremony, my female cousins and friends snuck off to steal Nick’s shoes. When the ceremony was over and Nick walked out of the mandap, the girls came out in a mob and demanded payment to get them back. Joota churi is a common game at North Indian Hindu weddings, though I must admit my friends and cousins took it to a new level by stealing not only Nick’s shoes, but a handful of other men’s shoes, too, including his brothers’. Luckily for Nick, I’d prepped him on what he might expect (minus the surprise theft of his friends’ and family’s shoes). He had little diamond rings for all of my cousins and friends, impressing them enough to get his shoes back right away, and everyone else’s, too. Which meant that we could all go dance, celebrating our union and our great good fortune once more.

  * * *

  SHORTLY BEFORE OUR wedding, a friend of mine observed to me that a marriage is different from a wedding. What I understood her to mean was that this one amazing day in our lives was just the beginning of something that we would work on every single day of our lives. It was the formal beginning of supporting each other’s dreams, of understanding each other’s needs in a balanced way, of being able to talk about those things openly and honestly. A wedding is a lot of fun. A marriage is a lot of fun, too, but it’s also work.

  Three days after our shaadi, it was time to embark on the voyage—and the work—of our marriage. That was the day, December 5, 2018, that Bumble India launched. It was a labor of love that had been a year in the making.

  Bumble is the dating app where women make the first move, and when I first met the company’s founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, in 2017, I immediately asked her if she’d ever thought about going international.

  “Oh, we’re thinking about that now,” she responded.

  Sparks ignited in my head; I may have actually started to tingle. In a country like my own, where women are finding their voices and pushing back the patriarchy, giving them the tools they need to make the first move would be game-changing. “India would be totally amazing for Bumble,” I told her.

  And so a partnership was born. I invested in Bumble—my first tech investment—and partnered with the company to bring the app to India. And now, just days after my shaadi, all of our work was coming to fruition.

  The atmosphere at the launch was one of great celebration and possibility. I’d worked hard to help make this happen, and the sense of gratification I felt was huge. The jubilation of the evening was amplified by the fact that it was the first time I was appearing in public at a work event with my new husband by my side. All evening long Nick was such a supportive partner, so full of pride for my role in this newer methodology for the empowerment of Indian women. During my speech, during my conversations about how excited I was about Bumble India and the opportunities it offered, I’d look at Nick’s face and what I saw written there was, This is my wife and I’m so proud. And that’s how I felt, too: This is my husband and I’m so proud.

  Just days earlier we’d been in the midst of our fairy-tale wedding celebration, and now, with the mehendi still fresh on my hands and feet, here we were turning that celebration into a marriage, into the reality of a life lived together. And I hope that the joy, and the work, of our shared life will always be something I look forward to every day into the limitless future.

  I am large, I contain multitudes.

  WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

  “THERE?” I POINT, pausing to visualize the option. Then I turn to point across the living room. “Or there?”

  Nick smiles that wry, just-north-of-mischievous smile of his and says, “Wherever you want, babe.”

  I make a face at him; we both know he’s better at these kinds of decisions than I am. I’m just not that good at—or if I’m really honest, not that into�
�picking couches and wall colors and accent pillows. Doesn’t mean I’m not house-proud, though. I am. I love having an uncluttered, beautiful space to live in and welcome friends and family into, so I’m lucky that Nick enjoys the settling-in process, and I trust his aesthetic completely. I don’t know anyone with finer taste than Nick, so it seems kind of pointless for me to get too involved. Just as he did during the final phase of planning our wedding when I was shooting The Sky Is Pink, he took the lead on getting our home ready for us.

  The house we’ve just moved into after a year and a half of marriage is the first home I’ve owned since I moved out of my apartment in Mumbai not long after my father’s death. In the seven years between then and now, all of the places I lived in were rentals or hotels. I seemed to be returning to my old nomadic ways, or maybe I just hadn’t been ready to plant myself in one spot and watch myself establish roots. But here, now, roots seem like a good thing, and so does stability. Who is the person writing this? a part of me asks as I watch those words take form. Roots? Stability? Really? Yes, really, I answer. And now, with this light-filled, airy home where Nick and I and our families and friends can gather and grow, a home where we can celebrate Diwali and Christmas with everyone we love around us, I feel like I have them.

  Our house is planted on a hillside with a view of Los Angeles below. We are solidly on the ground here, and yet with the expansiveness of the outlook, I sometimes feel that I could almost take flight. I love this new vantage point: feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes gazing up to the heavens. It allows me to consider what I have in my life—who and where I come from, what I’ve learned, the work I’ve done and will continue to do—and my dreams for the future. Our house has room for all of those things, both who I am and who I will become. We haven’t moved all the way in yet, so my new home is a work in progress. Like me, it is unfinished.

  As I consider the potential of this house and these rooms that I now inhabit, I feel myself wanting to explore another, less literal set of rooms. Looking forward into the inner landscape of my future, if my life were a home, what kind of rooms would it need?

  I plan to be in the world of entertainment for as long as I can, stretching myself by learning new skills and venturing into new kinds of roles for as long as audiences will have me. So in my inner house there’s a large room for the actor in me, a room big enough to fit all of the writers, directors, co-producers, and co-actors I’ll be collaborating with in the future; big enough to contain the piled-high stacks of scripts that I still love reading in a physical format; big enough for me to stride or tiptoe or pace around in as I find the feet of whatever character I’m preparing to inhabit. It’s a space that inspires creativity and risk-taking, so plenty of bold strokes and touches of edginess belong in this room; as much as I’m enjoying my sense of groundedness right now, I’ve always been one to push boundaries, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. #cantstopwontstop.

  There needs to be a room for business endeavors, too, because in addition to being an actor, I’ve been a film producer for more than five years now, and I see myself doing more of this in the future that I’m envisioning. Shortly after I stepped into my thirties, my mother said, “You know that female actors in Bollywood have a shelf life. As soon as you hit the ripe old age of thirty-five, no one will be interested in you as a love interest anymore, even if the man you’re starring with is in his fifties. Or older. If you’re going to be financially independent”—this was a theme of my mother’s and her mother’s before her, too: financial independence—“you need other options.”

  The ripe old age of thirty-five is no longer an assured expiration date for leading-lady roles, thanks to the growing number of women of all generations who are working hard to push the envelope—although there’s plenty of room for continued improvement. That was not the case when my forward-thinking mother set up Purple Pebble Pictures in 2015. When I asked my mother how she came up with the name, she responded, “Purple stands for royalty, and you’re a queen.” Then, laughing at her own joke, she added, “And you’re moving all the time, like a rolling stone, but you’re not big enough to be a stone yet. You’re still a little pebble.” And so the name stuck.

  My thought was that I would not star in the films that Purple Pebble Pictures produced, at least not at the start. I wanted to be able to take myself out of the equation so that the business could stand on its own feet. While I handled the creative aspects of the films, from poster design to postproduction, my mom handled the business side of things. Mom has a natural business sense and is savvy with money; she always made the investments and financial decisions in our family—whatever salary my father received he put directly into her hands—and so she was eminently qualified to handle the finances of our production company. Any business acumen that I have, I’ve learned from her.

  We decided that rather than producing Hindi films, we would start with regional ones. There are twenty-eight states and eight union territories in India, and many of them have their own language and their own film industries, though they are smaller relative to the Hindi film industry. My father was from Punjab, my mom grew up in Bihar, and her mother was raised in Kerala, at the southern tip of India next to Tamil Nadu. Having myself grown up in so many different places, I’m an accumulation of many different parts of India, but I didn’t see a lot of stories that were reflective of all of those places being brought to a mainstream audience. My nani used to tell us about her school days in Kerala, where she lived on a rice paddy farm in a hut on a river, and how in order to go to school, she and her siblings had to travel by boat. I was fascinated by that world and eventually I visited her old home with her, but not before I’d fully imagined the landscape and made up my own stories about all the details of her young life.

  I believe that good stories are universal, and that they come from everywhere. The idea of our production company was to shine a light on storytellers who didn’t get the platform that Bollywood movies provide. I’m a big believer in creating opportunity where I don’t see much happening, and so I wanted to put my might behind those filmmakers. Now a lot of Hindi movie producers are going regional, too, which is good news, but when I started doing it I was one of only a handful. We also back a lot of first-time filmmakers. Someone’s got to take a chance on newcomers, after all. When I started working, it was extremely hard being a newcomer in an industry where success can depend on personal connections and whose favor you find yourself in at any given moment, or not in, as the case may be. I want to create opportunities based on merit in my company. I want to give back to artists what the arts have given to me: a livelihood and a purpose.

  We’ve done nine regional films so far, in five languages: four in Marathi, two in Bhojpuri, one in Assamese, one in Sikkimese/Nepali, and one in Punjabi. Within our first few years in business, two of our films won a total of four national awards—Ventilator received three and Paani received one—which was both gratifying and mind-blowing in equal parts. We co-produced our first Hindi-language film—our tenth movie—the 2019 release The Sky Is Pink, because the based-on-real-life story was too moving to pass up. Once I decided to start originating more of my own projects, it made sense to slowly spread the wings of the company and bring it to the U.S., and so Purple Pebble Pictures is involved with Netflix’s The White Tiger and my joint venture with Mindy Kaling at Universal Pictures, as well. I’m also developing multiple projects for Amazon in my first-look deal with them, focusing on creating global content in multiple languages for me to produce or star in, and actively exploring collaborations with other partners in both India and the U.S.

  The taste of business I’d gotten with Purple Pebble Pictures whetted my appetite for more. I knew I wanted to invest in tech. Bumble India’s success since its launch at the end of 2018 consolidated that desire and I see myself doing a lot more tech investing in the coming years. I don’t know where my future will take me, but I know being an entrepreneur will be a par
t of it.

  This room for my business endeavors needs to reflect all of the different influences in my life, and so I envision it as a mix of East and West, old and new, traditional and modern. There will be books galore, in scads of languages, bursting with stories that want and need to be told, and there will be a monitor on a neatly organized desk for all my video calls. A wide-screen TV with comfy chairs and couches nearby will allow us to watch the fruits of our labors when they air. And of course there will be a purple accent or two in the room—or maybe just a royal reference.

  The next room in my inner house will be the most enticing of all. Anyone looking in or passing by should feel an immediate desire to step inside and learn more. Or better yet, to be inspired to action. This room is one that’s especially close to my heart.

  One day in 2006, a few years into my career, I finished shooting early and went home unexpectedly in the middle of the day. Actually, I stopped by my parents’ apartment, which was on the same floor as mine. I’d just grabbed a snack from their refrigerator—my own kitchen being a storage facility for all my suitcases—and had plopped down on their couch to watch television when I noticed my parents’ housekeeper’s ten-year-old daughter sitting quietly on a chair and reading.

  “Hey, what’s up, choti?” I asked. I didn’t think it was a school holiday, but sometimes I lost track of things like that. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I don’t go to school anymore.”

  I blinked. “Why not?”

  “Because my brothers have to.” It was offered as a simple fact.