One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

by Scaachi Koul

  Sweetu is the youngest girl of a youngest girl, the last for her mother to marry off. She is the one who moved to England for a few years to get her education, who wanted to leave India for the U.K. or Canada or the U.S., anywhere that would take her. She’s the only one of my cousins—real or otherwise invented—who I can actually see myself in. When I finally got to her, two days of travel and tedious family arguments later, I was reminded of why I’d decided to come to this wedding. “Have you eaten?” she asked me while braiding her little cousin’s hair into two thick French braids. “Do you want chai? Milk chai or keheva? Sugar? Let me ask Bhabhi to bring some ch—BHABHI, CHAI CHA?”

  I told her she was turning into her mother, my Bua, a woman who barely hits five feet and whose fingers and toes have shrunk from arthritis but who can still pleat a sari faster than any woman I know. She used to call me on the phone and scream, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO PIECES SO SMALL, YOU WILL BE A POWDER AND NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.” She attacks you with “ARE YOU HUNGRY COME AND EAT SOMETHING” as soon as you walk into a room. She is exhausting and perfect and has the softest skin and she rubs your face with her little warped hands and it is the most love you will ever feel from another human force.

  “Well,” my cousin replied, “it’s not like you aren’t turning into her too.” I started yelling at her, reaching out to pinch her, until I realized I’d been had.

  Sweetu’s wedding was an arrangement, but in one of the more generous ways that word can be interpreted. Their parents were involved, and I’m not sure they “dated” in any North American sense. I don’t think she and her fiancé spent much time alone before their marriage. But she seemed to like him, and it was clear that she didn’t say yes to the first yahoo who tried to whisk her off to America on his green card. Sweetu was twenty-seven at the time, much older than the “ideal” bridal age, and waited until she graduated and was working before she looked for a husband. She had an Instagram account and posted photos of her guy, standing much closer together than I had seen any other girl in our family stand next to a yet unmarried man.

  I’ve never asked her if arrangement was her choice or her parents’, but the answer is obvious because this is just how things work here, at least, for our family. So many of my cousins who live in Canada or the U.S. did this too—a modern version of arrangement whereby parents present their daughters and sons with dossiers filled with the opposite sex: “nice boys” (they’re always called that, as if being nice is the best thing you can be) with “good jobs” who will take care of their daughters, or elegant, slender-wristed women with wheatish skin who come from “good families” (have you ever heard anything so nebulous?), have money, and will give you attractive, well-behaved, light-skinned babies. Religions have to match. So do class and, inevitably, skin colour.

  A few years before this wedding, another cousin of mine who was raised in Alberta was arranged and had her wedding in India. After she married, I asked her why she got arranged instead of finding someone on her own. “I mean, it’s not like I’d never met him before the wedding,” she said. But even still, her parents monitored and organized the union. Do you trust your parents to make that kind of decision for you? My parents are good at a lot of things—they have made responsible investments with their money, my mom can break an entire lamb down into bite-size pieces on her kitchen island, and my dad scrubs the garage floor biannually, a true testament to his neurosis about garage cleanliness. But I do not want either of them choosing the man I will be stuck with long after their deaths.

  The first family marriage I remember not being an arrangement was that of my eldest cousin, Angie. Fifteen years my senior, she was the first of my brother’s generation to marry, and to a white boy she met in high school, no less. I was eight, and to me, it was just another wedding. To her, and to the rest of the family, it was an act of revolt—something I learned later, when I found my own white boy to bring home. Angie fought for her choice, her husband forced into the position of a patient object who would have to merely wait his turn for approval. They have a son now, a fourteen-year-old who seems unaware of his role in this now long-forgotten mutiny. (I lived with them for a year when he was seven, and one morning he slipped a piece of paper under my bedroom door that said, “To good will only End of Agurment.” If only he knew.)

  Papa would love to arrange me. I know because he’s asked, and got so angry when I refused that his head filled with all the blood he carries around in his body. Mom probably would have liked it too, but she knew better than to suggest it. My brother refused the offer as well, and his wife turned out to be a very nice white lady from the East Coast. Our Kashmiri family used to marry other Kashmiris, an intentional act to keep our kind from dying out since there were so few of us to begin with. But the more we did this, the less possible it became. “I couldn’t marry another Kashmiri if I tried,” Angie told her mother on one of her wedding days. “They’re all our cousins. Our real cousins. Imagine what our kids would look like.”

  Without our active protests—that is, without my brother going ahead and bringing a woman home with a sapphire on her finger—the same roles assumed for Sweetu would have been assumed for us. “I would’ve liked to have chosen for you,” my mom once said to me, after she made her peace with Hamhock’s presence. “What parent doesn’t want to choose for their kids?”

  Sweetu’s mother closed in on her, petting my cheek briefly (“My beauty,” she said to me) before chirping at her daughter in rapid Kashmiri. Sweetu was being called in for one of what was surely a thousand small indignities, requirements, unspoken agreements that the traditional Indian wedding demands. She took in a deep breath, raised her eyebrows at me, and lifted herself off the bed to perform her soon-to-be-wifely duties. What can she say? She’s a brown bride. She knew what she was getting into.

  —

  The wedding had seven different events, each of which required its own outfit—I didn’t pack enough, and the ones I brought were, according to my mother, too formal, or not formal enough, or a colour that made me look “sickly, like a—” and here, she pantomimed vomiting. There were ten or twelve outfits stored in my old closet at my parents’ house: emerald-green lehengas—two-piece outfits comprising a crop top and a long skirt, embellished with stones and jewels and itchy mesh; salwar kameezes—pants with a long tunic, more silken; and a sari or two—usually reserved for women older than me or, at least, married, because they presumably have the poise to figure out how to piss while precariously hiking up fifteen yards of fabric. (No safety pins means you’ve levelled up.) Most of the outfits were from my brother’s wedding, nearly a decade before. My chest, my hips, my butt, and my thighs had all expanded tremendously since then. Even my neck was thicker. I didn’t know that, though, until I tried them all on. Teenage girls of all creeds and colours so often think their bodies are too big, or too small, or too misshapen to be acceptable—we are conditioned to hate ourselves and the ways we’re built. So it’s surprising when you try to wedge your pancake breasts into a decade-old chiffon top, your arms unable to bend back down, your soft biceps straining the tensile strength of a factory stitching, only to learn that your teenage body was, in fact, fine, it was just fine. (For all you know, despite your current physical hang-ups, it might still be.)

  Outfits are cheaper in India, so my mother wanted to buy another five or six that I would end up wearing only once. I did not want to do this. The preamble to the trip had been an exhausting routine of my mother asking me for my measurements so she could buy me outfits for the wedding, only for her to disagree with me when those measurements were provided.

  She called me after I sent my arm circumference and bust size, as requested months before the trip. “No,” she said.

  “What no?”

  “This is not right.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “These measurements are not physically possible.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I’ve had two chi
ldren and I’m three times your age. How is it possible that your bust is bigger than mine?”

  There are a thousand rational ways to protest this, one of which being that my mother and I are separate human beings who do not share the same body and might therefore be different sizes. Alternatively, I could have argued that because my body has these measurements, it was therefore empirically impossible for them to be impossible. Instead, I felt uncomfortable for weeks before the trip, knowing that this would come up again. My bust: the medical anomaly.

  Indian women are naturally curvy, supposedly. This is what people tell me when they look at me sympathetically. Girls I knew in high school said it to me when they’d see me change for gym class and notice I was all hips and thighs, or when we’d get our swimsuits out for that one misery-making week of swimming that the school forced us to take. (“You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?”)

  In reality, the bulk of the women I saw there were rail thin, and Indian ideals of beauty continue to be similar to Western ones: fair skin; small, curved waist; doll tits; long, smooth hair; thin nose. Of these qualities, I have the fair skin and naturally straight hair. Jammu is the only place I’ve ever felt white, and resolutely privileged, and yet my body still feels misplaced. It has never been small enough for any region. It never has the right proportions. My wide shoulders get stuck in shirts, my hips get caught in zippers, my nose juts out of glasses too wide for my small face. My body feels too big for this place. I am too tall, too wide, too much. The girls here, even the ones with a similar shape to mine, barely hit five feet tall. (One afternoon, I put on a form-fitting maxi-dress. My mother told me to think about changing. “It’s not that I care,” she said. “But you know everyone will talk.” She ran her hand along my bloated stomach, filled with chai and fried goods.) I thought my body would make more sense here, that I’d find people with my hips, my arms, my thighs, my ever-expanding neck. My body was being wedged into this country at odd angles, shoved in where it might have never belonged in the first place.

  All of this didn’t necessarily make me feel bad about myself until we actually started the torturous process of shopping for clothes in a country where English was not a first language and the sales associates were all thirty-five-year-old men who do not accept that your size is what you say it is. I was suddenly a teenager again, embarrassed by and uncomfortable with my body. I had been dropped into a country that screamed at me even louder than the place I was born does: You are not the size we want you to be. The process was, predictably, demoralizing. In Canada, I could be an 8 or a 10 or a 14, but in India, I am nothing smaller than an XXL. I tried to not get too wrapped up in the process—what is, physically or morally, wrong with being of a certain size? Where do I get off feeling sorry for myself based on an arbitrary metric that I already know to be bullshit?—but when a shopkeeper looks at your frame and shakes his head solemnly, it’s hard not to take it personally.

  The only respite I got for my body in Jammu was from my hands. When aunties and uncles asked me whose child I am and I told them my mother’s name, their faces lit up because, of course, I look like her, they could see it all over me. Then they’d see my hands—my short fingers, my long nails painted red, the gold rings on two fingers—and would hold them for a long time in wonder.

  Maybe it was foolhardy to think that I’d find my brethren here. Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or the children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you’re in.

  Every store we went to during this futile endeavour was complete with at least one outfit that did not go over my head, another one that made it over my head but not my shoulders, and a third that went over my head and down my shoulders but cut off circulation around my breasts, making me look quadra-boobed. I would wear this third one out of the dressing room to show my mother, her disappointment registering so strongly that I think I should bottle it and sell it to people who miss their immigrant mothers and want a lady with great thick grey hair looking at them with deep sadness.

  We found three outfits for me over the course of the day. I hated every single one of them.

  —

  Attending an Indian wedding means being struck, constantly, violently, by how truly unequal the standards are for men and women, here or abroad. My father and brother weren’t required to wear traditional outfits at any point during the wedding. Instead they stuck mostly to sports jackets and polos and cotton tees. They ate and drank freely, they didn’t participate in the prayers we chanted around Sweetu’s head, and their bodies were rarely up for discussion—a fact I was incensed about mostly because of how alien mine felt to me.

  During the Sangeet there was some singing and dancing, provided first by a modern DJ who blasted Indian pop and hip hop—one song bleated “SEX IN THE MORNING” as the hook, making my mother look at me and grimace, and making me want to turn into salt—then later with traditional Kashmiri ghazals sung by live talent.

  While the women were downstairs watching everyone dance, and while I was trying to suck my body in so I could fit into this first of many uncomfortable outfits that seemed to creak like old floors every time I took a breath, the men were upstairs getting loaded on cheap whisky and eating fried fish and chicken. I was mostly angry that there were not delicious little pieces of protein circulating for the women, but also that the men were allowed to drink and eat meat on a day reserved for religious activity when both were strictly verboten.

  I approached my father on the terrace and he offered me some chicken on the DL.

  “Why do you guys get to drink,” I asked him, “while the rest of us have to wear dumb outfits and watch crap downstairs and drink Thums Up and Fanta?”

  “Because that’s the way it always goes.”

  “That’s some patriarchal bullshit,” I said between mouthfuls, flecks of fried batter shooting out. “That’s hypocritical and I hate it on a feminist level.”

  “As you should.”

  “But you’re participating in it.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, drinking the rest of his boozy syrup. “What’re y’gonna do.”

  Arguing over traditions that have been in place forever is so consuming that neither of us even began to try. But this version of my father, a man who was lazily dropping fried fillets into his mouth, was hard to square with the same man who demanded I get an education, pay my own bills, and take care of myself before considering even communicating with a human man. Even though he was born in the 1950s, I think he was doing his best and most convincing impression of a passive feminist. And yet, it’s likely easier for men in India to not get too tied up with these little inequities. I hate the narrative that Indian people are backwards, that they are more barbarian, more animalistic. That’s not what it is, but some of them do have priorities that do not include who gets to eat at the fish-fry.

  I don’t know how long customs like this—outdated ones, because, again, I want fried chicken—can be sustained. The younger girls who were dancing downstairs with the bride, all younger than thirty, were constantly on their phones and their English was flawless and they all wanted to move to America. I can’t imagine any of them being happy with the men in their families getting loaded on another floor while they’re resigned to flat soda in paper cups.

  My cousin Rohan, the bride’s brother, patted me on the shoulder and muttered, “Do you want me to see if I can bring you a drink?” Rohan was halfway between my age and my parents’ age, obedient to his family, but very aware of how dumb I found all this.

  “Always, and forever, as long as I am alive,” I said.

  “Give me a few minutes.” Maybe some people are trying, albeit quietly, to change things.

  When I returned downstairs, Sweetu had endured yet another out
fit change, and the mehndi that was painstakingly applied to her arms and legs and feet and hands had dried and was flaking off. The man singing to her and the rest of the family was a young, classically handsome Kashmiri, with tanned skin, brilliant teeth, and thick, curly dark hair that had been shaped into an Elvis mullet. I liked him. His face was charming and funny and sweet. He was wearing a dress and had churia around his wrists, thick anklets that jingled, and little bells strapped around his legs from the knees down. Slowly, the men oozed their way back downstairs, gabbing loudly, largely ignoring the performance. Our man in the dress hopped around the venue singing to different family members, calling out the bride’s uncles (my father and Chacha joined him near the stage to dance awkwardly with him) and then her parents. He pulled my mother up onstage with him, singing to her and getting her to dance. When the dancer asked her, in singsong Kashmiri, “Who is your hero?” my father marched over to collect her in mock rage and said, “Me, goddamn it,” pointing aggressively at his chest with one hand and dragging my laughing mother away with the other.