The wedding was a grand affair that lasted two weeks. Musicians were hired and installed in the inner courtyard, where they played throughout the day and evening, stopping only for lunch and afternoon tea. Colorful strings of light blazed down the four floors of the exterior of the house and over the enormous front gates. Lights were wrapped around the trunks and branches of the guava and coconut trees. Beauticians were hired and brought to the privacy of the house in order to wax my full arms and legs, thread my brows, and apply henna to my feet and hands. Each day, silver trays laden with sweetmeats and silk saris arrived from well-wishers and neighbors. My wedding dress, a stunning burgundy silk full-length skirt threaded with gold sequins and brocade, came with a matching cropped top that tied with gold thread just below the breasts, and a six-foot veil that was designed specifically for me and fitted by the best tailors. Around my slim bare midriff, my mother wrapped a stunning silver chain. I was lost in the revelry, almost taken by surprise, at once excited and frightened, as any bride, of getting married, but also deeply afraid of what I was actually getting into. Doubts I never had before suddenly overcame me, and the years of preparation my parents had provided began to seem like nothing more than a gentle and loving indoctrination. I was as American, I realized, as Indian, as free to invent any new custom as I was tethered to continuing these age-old traditions. Yet it wasn't really true. These were just the final rebellious thoughts of a nineteen-year-old. I knew the truth. I wasn't free. I was my father's daughter. Having brought me up in a restrictive and closed environment, he had deemed I was now the right age to get married.
A wedding hall the size of a small mansion was rented for the wedding, along with elephants, horses, and camels to carry the five hundred guests to ride in honor through the palatial gardens. A long line of seven cars led me to the site, which I could spot from a mile away because of the fireworks exploding in the tropical sky. At the front of the cars, a brass band played to announce my slow journey through the streets, then rose to a cacophony when I at last arrived at the wedding hall. As I was exiting the car, two fire-breathers crouched on either side of me and threw their heads back to scorch the night air. A richly sequined veil covered my modestly bowed head down to my knees. When I moved I heard the swishing of silk and the gentle clink of gold. A group of women quickly led me into a separate room where a mullah quietly asked me if I agreed to the marriage. By Islamic law, no woman can be married against her will, and the Muslim priest was here to make sure I wasn't being coerced. I didn't answer him right away. Again, I was plagued by doubts. I didn't know what it meant to be married, outside of my parents' visions, and I had no ideas independent of them. Through the years, without fully being aware, I had adopted their dreams as my own, not from force or manipulation but because what they had described over and over seemed like it was written, something inherited with my brown skin, my thick brows, and my full lips. The mullah repeated his question, and a cry went up around me among the women: The bride hasn't agreed! There are no vows in the ceremony that a groom and bride make to one another before a congregation. A marriage isn't even a covenant according to religious doctrines. Under Islamic law, a marriage is nothing more than a business contract between two people who are meant to provide solace and sustenance to one another. Comfort in partnership, protection, and sexual fulfillment. When a woman marries, she automatically signs what resembles a prenuptial contract in which she can bind her husband to anything she fears might be withdrawn after the wedding: the right to continue her education, the right to work, the right to mobility, even the right to how often she wants sex. None of these went into my prenuptial agreement. It was assumed I had these rights. Nothing was being taken away from me. Unlike most Indian Muslim brides, I wasn't even moving into my in-laws' home; instead, I was bringing my future husband with me back to the United States. The only stipulation in my contract was that if either of us exercised our religious right to divorce, I would receive a specific amount of alimony in one lump sum. Because I wasn't even sure how much to put down, my father set my price.
On the wedding night, I could tell my husband was as nervous as I was. We were locked in a large bedroom in his parents' home with a queen-sized bed draped on all four sides with ropes of marigold, and rose petals were scattered across the velvet blankets. We each took turns using the bathroom, where we each, by turn, locked the door behind us to brush our teeth and then change into our pajamas. When I came out, my arms were full of silks and gold and, not knowing where to place them, I stood before my new husband in some strange stance of spiritual offering. He understood and quickly cleared one of his shelves, then thought better and emptied a drawer. Then we lay side by side under the thick layers of the mosquito net, the breeze from the overhead fan not quite reaching us through the heavy ropes of flowers. The closed room was sweltering. At one point, he got up and opened a window just above the bed. The band was still playing outside, probably just under the bedroom window, judging from its deafening noise. It was four in the morning. He closed the window again and lay back down. He asked if I was hungry, and I said no. He asked if I'd been able to eat anything at the wedding ceremony, and I told him no again. He said he hadn't been able to eat anything either. Then we went to sleep.
Two years later, we still hadn't consummated the marriage. By then, we were living in America. Within months of our moving to Minneapolis, however, he had quickly left for Chicago in order to pursue a master's degree while I stayed on in my parents' home and went to the local university, as was my husband's wish. During my occasional visits to his apartment, we sat on the couch and watched a Hindi movie. He made no advances toward me, and if I attempted a gesture, he quickly distanced himself. What had seemed to me at first to be an undiscussed mutual agreement to slowly get to know one another, possibly even to fall in love before we became intimate, eventually became apparent as his exclusive determination to keep away from me. It wasn't just that we weren't having sex; he was also emotionally distant. He refused to answer innocent questions about how he passed his days, to share anything of his history in India, to even include me in his phone conversations with his parents, which he conducted in Gujarati, a language I didn't understand. When I went to my parents for help, they advised me to be patient. They continued to believe, as I once had, that my husband and I were getting to know one another. They had never known any couple to not end up falling in love, as they did themselves, and held firmly to their dream for me. After all, love comes after marriage in this culture, not before. The commonalities of language, faith, customs, education, and economic status are all in place to help cajole these tender feelings. In the same way I had felt gently trapped into getting married, now I felt trapped to remain in it. Divorcing would mean losing my family and everything I had grown to know. Still, at twenty-two, when I peered honestly into my future, I saw year after year of devastating isolation. The truth was, despite all the superficial connections I shared with my husband, we didn't share a basic human bond. We remained the strangers we had been on the wedding night. By then, I was finishing my college degree and possessed more confidence than when I got married, more self-assurance and independence. This time, I did what I didn't have the strength to do before and went against my parents' wishes. I filed for divorce. Ironically, my actions freed my husband to tell me what he had been hiding all this time: He was gay. Because he came from a good Muslim family, he knew there was no way for him to express it. He had married me believing he could repress or even change his homosexuality.
The next time I married for love. I met my husband in graduate school in Oregon, where he was studying poetry and I was studying fiction. Though he claims we met on the first day of orientation, I didn't notice him until the end of the first year, when a group of us rented a beach house for the weekend and spent the days hiking along the jagged cliffs and sunbathing on the pebbly beach. We bought fresh oysters for dinner and barbecued them on the wide balcony overlooking the ocean. It had been three years since my divorce, but I rem
ained stunned by my first husband's revelation. Somehow I was deeply embarrassed, as though it had been my fault that he couldn't overcome his sexual preference. In looking back, it's easy to see why I took responsibility. Our divorce scandalized the provincial Indian Muslim community in which I had been raised in Minneapolis, and though I was exercising the rights Islam granted me to fully and safely divorce, the followers of this very faith attempted to snatch away those rights in order to keep me in my place as a woman. I underwent a psychic stoning. While the families dismissed my husband's confession as a moment of confusion, they criticized me for ruining a perfectly good Muslim man's reputation. Although my parents had always encouraged me to have patience, the community claimed that no woman possessed the kind of patience needed to endure two years of a sexless marriage. I was accused of lying, of covering up the supposedly real reason I was leaving my first husband: I had an American lover secretly stashed someplace. One of my father's close friends even suggested I was a “whore.” This is what I left behind when I went to Oregon and, not yet knowing how to understand this betrayal and suffering, I kept from telling my classmates what I had been through. Like those days in the Wisconsin Dells, I once more hid my body's secret experience.
That night in the beach house, however, when all our friends turned in for the night, leaving the balcony one by one, only Tim and I remained on the balcony under the bright night sky. He told me about his travels through India, his botched affair with a woman he had met there, his revelations so honest and intimate and vulnerable that I was inspired to confess my own failed marriage. We spoke through the night, naturally sharing in the way I had tried to force with my first husband, then crawled into our separate beds when the sun appeared red along the horizon. Two days later, he drove me back to my apartment in Eugene and we continued the conversation in the car. It was a relief to have a companion to share with, someone to hold my secrets, to help carry my burdens, to laugh. In this way, I guess we had the traditional American courtship. We went on dates to restaurants and concerts and slowly got to know one another. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, with a poet father and an artist mother, had already gotten his master's degree from Berkeley in English literature, and was expanding with a second one in poetry writing. He had traveled to most every corner of the world, to places I had never even heard of, and spoke three languages fluently. Like me, he possessed both an insider's and outsider's view of America. We were already falling in love when the school year ended, and I returned to Minneapolis for the summer and he to San Francisco. For three months, he wrote me long letters filled with his poetry, his visions of our future together, and I, afraid of my father, checked the mail early each morning and smuggled in these treasures under my shirt. When it was time to return to Oregon, he flew out to get me and we drove my car back west. For two weeks, we traveled through barren canyons and deserts and lush forests where I heard owls hooting in the middle of the night and the scurrying sound of jackrabbits. He read me his poetry while I drove, and I talked to him about my novel. By the time we arrived in Oregon, we knew we were going to remain on the journey together, and a year later, when we made our feelings official, all our friends said it was fated.
The wedding he and I planned was very private. We decided to hold the ceremony in the back garden of his parents' house and invited thirty-five of our closest friends and relatives, though my father, who was against my decision to marry outside my faith and culture, didn't attend. We held the humble affair in the afternoon, and that morning, I rose early to get to the local spa, where I had my hair pinned, my makeup professionally applied, and my hands and feet manicured and pedicured. On the second floor of his parents' house, I wrapped myself in a gold sari my mother had brought for me to wear, not especially designed for me, just something she thought was pretty. The only flowers were those I carried in a bouquet. I didn't wear a veil, and no women surrounded me; no brass band announced my arrival. There weren't any fireworks. At the scheduled hour, the sitar player we had hired played a traditional raga and I walked down the aisle, so to speak, out the back garden doors, down the patio, and through the garden to where Tim stood. My older brother gave me away. My best friend from Oregon was my maid of honor. Tim's parents were part of the local literary circles, and the man who married us was a prominent writer who didn't possess a license, which meant Tim and I later went to court to register. Another prominent writer videotaped the ceremony. Yet another photographed it. In front of our loved ones, he and I shared vows to love and cherish one another, through sickness and in health, after which Tim read a love poem by Rumi and I cried. A local Indian restaurant catered the celebration and, because I wanted to hang on to it, I didn't throw my bouquet. We rented a grand hotel room for the wedding night, with a hot tub on its private terrace, where we whispered and kissed into the warm silent night.
I wish I could say that our bond of love has grown stronger through the years and that we are still together, each day finding creative ways to bridge our cultural and religious divides as we so beautifully did on our wedding day. But our marriage ended after seven years. By any standards, they were the severest and most trying years anyone could face: In that period, we buried both his parents, one who died slowly of advanced lung cancer, another suddenly of a heart attack; I suffered significant health setbacks after a very complicated delivery of our son; and Tim was diagnosed with a rare, inoperable, and incurable brain lesion. It was our deep love for one another that kept us striving through the earlier misfortune, an optimism that inspired hope that we could make it through. But the catastrophes piled one on top of the other, and soon our different approaches slowly divided us. Other than our love, we didn't have anything in common, and this is what became apparent. I turned to my faith to imbue me with courage, while he grew uncomfortable with what he thought was my naive belief in some greater force, like a child still clinging to visions of Santa Claus. During the worst period, when I considered taking a quick trip to Hyderabad to visit relatives in order to regain my strength, it only reminded him that both his parents had passed away, and he was unmoored. He left his poetry while I dived into my fiction. Soon, we began differing on how we would raise our son. The journey we had undertaken together split into two separate paths, and we found ourselves strangers not only to one another but also to our own former selves who had fallen in love.
When I think about my perfect wedding now, I don't think about the day itself, the glamour and hoopla, the fireworks exploding overhead or the gentle sitar music in the background. My mind automatically wanders to those many days and months and years that come after the ceremony, when two people are traveling side by side, agreeing from moment to moment on how mutually to confront disappointment and disaster or celebrate the milestones of their children. Whereas my first marriage may have been conducted solely with intelligence and thought and the second entirely with the heart, I have come to see that if and when I get married again, the two—mind and emotions— must join. That is the perfect marriage for me, because a union within one will bring about the union with the other. There is a practicality that weighs down my floating feeling of love that, at an earlier age, I would have condemned as unromantic but which I have come to see as realistic. Now that I am in my mid-thirties, when I honestly peer into my future, I see myself reaching my peak, then hitting middle age, and eventually slowing down. The man by my side will witness the gentle unraveling of my glory, as I witness his, both of us an audience to the other's impressive twirling and high jumps as well as the private vulnerabilities and embarrassments. The bond that will take us to the end can only be that of love, but a steady and mature love toughened by defeat, compromises, and worthy celebrations.
going bridal
farah l. miller
It was three a.m. on a twenty-nine-degree January night in New York City, and I was climbing out the window of my fifth-floor apartment in an oversized T-shirt and cotton pajama pants to cry my heart out on the fire escape. I'd been crying for three hours insi
de, and when my fiancé, Scott, told me to calm down and try to sleep, I decided it was time to get some air.
“What are you so upset about?” he asked. He knew I'd found out earlier that day that my best friend Jamie's stepsister wanted to buy the wedding dress I had my eye on. I told him about my phone call with Jamie, how I called her sister names. He knew that Jamie wasn't returning my phone messages now. Still, as I look back, I'm the first one to admit that none of it added up to middle-of-the-night theatrics.
I wouldn't come back in. I folded my knees into my chest and rocked back and forth, mimicking Demi Moore's depressed Jules pose from the end of St. Elmo's Fire.
“Farah, please…what the hell are you doing?” Scott asked.
“I don't”—gulp, sniffle—“want to have a”—sniffle— “WEDDING!” I said.
Why was I acting like a toddler? How did I get to this point? It couldn't have been about the dress. I never even thought I'd wear a wedding dress. Four years earlier, I'd gone with my friend Julie to a Vera Wang bridal collection sample sale, held in a huge ballroom at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. It was insane. First, we waited on a queue of five hundred nervous brides. Then, we watched them rip $6,000 gowns from the racks and strip down to their sports bras to try them on. When Julie found the one she wanted, she ordered me to “Hold on tight and don't let anyone else touch it!” I hugged the bodice like a new puppy and used the skirt to whip unsuspecting shoppers if they so much as asked if they could try on Julie's dress.
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