Maniya had heard Joginder rant about Radha’s decision, so she knew where this was heading. While she wasn’t sure she agreed with her husband’s opinion that girls were the same as boys and couldn’t help but think that she herself hadn’t needed an education to be a good wife and mother, it was her duty to agree with her husband. She had to prepare her words carefully, though, because Radha was her closest confidante, and she didn’t want to isolate her.
“My husband never even saw a photo of me before we were married. But things are changing now. The villages are almost as modern as the city.”
Radha wasn’t to be thrown off course.
“Maybe so, but do girls wait until they are eighteen to marry there?”
“Probably not. But here in the city, girls even go to college before marriage. Rekha told me, and you see it in films, too.”
Radha was unsmiling: “If it keeps on like this, girls will be the age of a grandmother by the time they become a mother. It makes no sense!”
“Think of it this way—if you had gone to school, you could have gotten a better job when your husband died.”
“That’s different. That’s my fate,” Radha said, in the pitiful tone of voice she reserved for speaking about her widowhood. Maniya refused to take the bait.
“You are still marrying your daughter into a good family despite that. We only hope for the same for ours. Every parent knows it is marriage, not a computer course, that determines a girl’s happiness.”
Rekha, the daughter in question, was crouched over a bucket at the other end of the alley, rinsing out an enormous batik-print bedsheet under the outside tap. Her mother had always decreed her “too tall” for her age—whatever her age—because she’d never been able to wear family hand-me-downs. Now that she was a teenager, Rekha’s relatives would shake their heads sorrowfully when they saw her: It’s much harder to marry off a tall girl, they’d say.
In spite of this physical disability, Rekha’s parents believed she had good dharma. She’d proved it the previous year, when she was having trouble preparing for her exams. Without electricity in the porch-shack, she’d been unable to study once the sun went down. When Rekha told her teacher, he took up her cause. He called Mago-sahib, the man who for twenty-one years had been Joginder’s overseer, and asked whether he couldn’t find a little more space for the family, at least in the weeks before Rekha’s exams. The call apparently shamed the landlord: He told Joginder that he’d allow him to stretch his living space into an interior room of the house.
For the first time in their lives, Joginder and Maniya had legal electric power running through their home and were able to sleep in a separate area from their children. Maniya hung her saris on a hook on one wall, brightening the corner with streaks of yellows and reds. On another wall, she nailed up a calendar, a free offering from the Nizamuddin tailor shop, which had a different Hindu god on each page. When Rekha did well on her exams that term, Joginder took it as evidence that girls should be encouraged at school.
He recited this tale of good fortune at Pushpa’s engagement meeting, but the father of the groom only nodded distractedly.
“Yes, we too believe that school is important. But my wife will need the girl to help in the house. That’s the first duty of a daughter-in-law.”
The groom’s father moved on to more pressing matters, asking his son, Shivshankar, to tell them about his job. The boy explained that mobile-in-charge meant that he managed cell-phone towers for Airtel, India’s biggest wireless provider. After the wedding, the family explained, Pushpa would move in with her in-laws in Delhi and Shivshankar would make the twenty-hour train ride back to Patna, the capital of Bihar, where he lived for most of the year in a company guesthouse. The groom’s parents turned to Radha and began quizzing her about her daughter’s nature and the dishes Radha had taught her to cook. They had a long list of their own Bihari favorites that they wanted to be sure Pushpa could handle.
When Pushpa told me about the meeting, she said she didn’t once lift her eyes from the lap of her red celebratory sari. She was listening intently, though. She knew she’d soon be responsible for using the right amount of mustard seeds for her in-laws’ meals. Only a few weeks from now, she would be forever linked to the stranger who sat only a few feet from her. Pushpa resisted the urge to peek at him, so for all she knew, he could have looked like a crooked character. Or, she said, he might have even looked like Shah Rukh Khan.
Listening to his high-pitched voice, though, she somehow knew he didn’t. It quavered with nervousness, and she imagined his face was tight and pinched. Pushpa gave her pallu a tug to be sure no hair was showing and reminded herself that it was time to grow up. From now on, no one must know how she felt. Beneath her scarf, her carefully oiled hair gleamed, even though no one could see its sheen.
CHAPTER 11
The Boy Will Do
Ramadan was not a good month for the Fitness Circle. Since Muslims are not supposed to eat between sunrise and sundown during the holy month of fasting, they try to exert as little energy as possible. Banks and some government offices set up napping benches for Muslim employees during lunch hour; some shops just stayed closed. For those gym ladies who were getting up before four o’clock to prepare the family’s morning meal, the rest of the day was pretty much a wash. Membership shrank by half, and Leslie could barely stay afloat.
Azmat still showed up to do jaroo-pocha, but her own exercise regime, such as it was, fizzled out entirely during the holy month. She’d catnap on the mats for a while, then amble over to the treadmill to talk to me.
“Why are you working to stay slim and trim if you already have a husband?” Slim and trim was one of Azmat’s most frequently used English phrases. I’d inject as little enthusiasm as I could into my smile, hoping to discourage further conversation so I could keep up my pace. She rarely got the hint and would continue gamely on.
“I don’t know why you bother. Your husband isn’t even in Delhi now—you might as well relax.” A little while later: “You’re really sweating a lot, deedee.” This remark allowed her to transition to a favored theory: “Foreign ladies sweat more than Indians. Everyone notices it.”
I’d restrain myself from pointing out that if she and the other gym ladies engaged in taxing physical activity, they, too, might perspire.
Eventually, bored by my lackluster responses, Azmat would wander away, eyeing the empty doorway ruefully. When a black burka would block the light at the door and one of the ladies would clomp down the stairs to join her, she’d brighten immediately. They’d sink onto the mats and make what Azmat called “time pass chat” to kill the dull, hungry hours. A common topic was whether they would lose weight this month. Azmat had been disappointed that in past years, she’d actually gained a couple of pounds during Ramadan, because she’d eat so much in the evening to compensate for the day of hunger.
At sunset, the mosque in the Nizamuddin bustee sounded a siren throughout the neighborhood, as loud and jarring as an air-raid warning: the signal that it was time for Muslims to say namaaz prayers and break the fast. One evening, I followed the wail into the bustee, where Azmat shared an apartment with six of her nine siblings. She’d advised me that I’d be unlikely to find the place on my own—if locating an address in Delhi’s middle-class neighborhoods is a challenge, it is virtually impossible amid the tiny lanes of the bustee.
Azmat met me on the bustee outskirts. She was clad in a black, sequined salwar kameez edged with bright orange stitching; a matching dupatta covered her hair. The material was gauzy, but opaque and unrevealing. Still, she looked positively flashy compared to the burka-clad women around us. Azmat had often informed me that her brother, Mehboob, was unusually liberal in not making her and her sisters cover their faces in public. He’d warned her that she’d lose this freedom after marriage.
“He says he probably won’t be able to find a boy for me who won’t make me wear burka. I’ll be tripping all over the place! You can’t see anything in those things, d
eedee. I’ll probably have to give up my job at the Fitness Circle after marriage, too. So I’m just enjoying my freedoms now.”
As she led me through the maze of narrow lanes, I had the sensation of falling down a rabbit hole into a world distinctly different from my own India of chauffeur-driven cars and movie tickets. We were only a few steps away from my orderly neighborhood, but the passageways of packed mud had narrowed, and I fell behind Azmat because we couldn’t fit two abreast. The brick and cement houses were piled haphazardly on top of one another on either side, like teetering castles of cards—cluttered with plastic water tanks, satellite dishes, and laundry lines.
A couple of scraggly goats were tethered to a pole in an alleyway, snapping greedily at a pile of scraps. They looked as if they needed more than another two weeks of fattening; that was all they had left before they’d be slaughtered for the Eid feast at the end of Ramadan. When the siren finally stopped, the sound echoed for a moment in the air, and then the bustee was charged with a new energy. Vendors shuttered their stalls of essential oils, strings of beads, and religious books, and joined the men streaming toward the mosque. Others, too hungry to sit through formal prayers, were cramming into kebab shops.
Azmat’s apartment smelled like stewing meat and onions. We all sat cross-legged on the plastic sheets that she and her sisters had laid out on the floor, with the food in the middle, like an indoor picnic. Azmat’s brother said a quick prayer, and they passed out dates to break the fast. They presented Rhemet’s special chicken biryani rice dish with great fanfare; this was the dish that Azmat believed would guarantee her older sister a swift match. There was also a dish of ground lamb and wheat called haleem, plates of cut fruit sprinkled with salt and pepper masala, and rose-flavored vermicelli in syrupy milk. The family ate efficiently, breaking their concentration only to heap more food onto my plate.
In the digestive silence that followed, one of Azmat’s brothers returned to the topic of Rhemet’s biryani. “The whole neighborhood knows when Rhemet is cooking. The aroma is so fragrant that it makes people long to taste it.”
“Any boy who does will surely want to marry her!” chimed another brother.
Rhemet looked down with forced modesty, and everyone chuckled, as at a joke that has been told many times before. I noticed that none of the three sisters, not even outgoing Azmat, spoke much around their brothers. They addressed them not by their first names but more respectfully, by the Hindi words for “older brother” or “younger brother.”
When the brothers headed out to visit a relative, Azmat’s familiar, chatty self reemerged. She moved to the daybed and patted the space beside her for me to sit down.
“You know we still haven’t found a match for Rhemet or me yet, Mirindaah. That com-pooh-ter way didn’t work.”
I nodded, and she pointed toward a huge blowup of a couple in wedding regalia. It was the only decoration in the room.
“That’s our brother in Mumbai. He was the first in the family to marry—and he chose a girl he went to school with. Not arranged.” She looked at me significantly as she said these last words in English, anticipating that I’d be impressed. That did not mean, however, that she’d want the same for herself, she was quick to inform me: “It’s not good for a girl. The family should pick her match—that’s the right way in my community.”
Azmat wanted a straightforward alliance, but spending time at the Fitness Circle had made her consider making some changes. Now that she’d befriended women who worked outside the home even after marriage, she’d decided that she’d like to find a husband who would allow her to do the same—or, at the very least, who would permit her to take a tailoring course so she could work from home. Mehboob told her that was probably too much to ask; he was not optimistic that they’d find a boy who’d be willing to invest in a sewing machine.
When I asked her to tell me what else she’d like in her husband, she smiled coyly. Apparently, Azmat often whiled away the unsociable hours at the Fitness Circle imagining her dream spouse. Her ideas sounded far from dreamy to me, though.
“The most important thing is that the boy come from a good family, where everyone lives together under one roof and shares their income. He also shouldn’t have any bad habits: no smoking, no drinking, and no paan. I don’t want him to take a second wife, no matter what the Koran says.”
Rhemet joined us in the living room. I was pretty sure she’d been listening in from the kitchen as she washed the dishes. Although she was the shier of the two and usually allowed Azmat to speak for the both of them, she sounded like a reproachful older sister now.
“You know you aren’t likely to find all those things in one boy.”
Rhemet realized that if Azmat held out for the perfect husband, her own marriage could be further delayed, since Mehboob had decided to combine the two events. As a result, her own wish list was even more modest than her sister’s.
“I’m looking forward to socializing a little after marriage. It isn’t appropriate for single girls to mingle outside the family. And I guess I’d like to improve my appearance, too. Maybe my husband would take me to get the mole on my face removed.” She laughed as though she was embarrassed about this self-indulgent aspiration and added, “It doesn’t matter, though. We’ll both be content with any boy our brother chooses for us. Now that our parents are gone, he knows best.”
Azmat wasn’t so easily quieted.
“Well, our brother thinks it is okay to have more modern ideas, Rhemet. He says it is acceptable to talk to the boy or even meet him for a date before the engagement.”
She used the English word date proudly, a cherished signifier of upward mobility.
“He does say that,” Rhemet concurred. “But I don’t think I could—I’d be too nervous.”
Azmat reminded her that Mehboob’s own wife, Hena, had been reluctant, too.
“Now Hena says she’s glad she met him before they got married, because she knew what to expect in the marriage. Most girls are terrified on their wedding, because they don’t know whether the boy is nice or not. But she didn’t have to be worried, she said.”
Hena was the first girl in her family to go on a premarriage date. Even though the event was chaperoned by Hena’s sister and her husband, who sat at a separate table within eyesight, it was a radical move for a conservative Muslim girl. Mehboob chose the venue—Yo! China, a Chinese fast-food chain restaurant whose ridiculous name apparently appeals to middle-class teens. Although the place was far from romantic, the loud piped music and non-Indian cuisine made an important statement about Mehboob’s aspirations. The appeal of the globalized lifestyle worked their charms on the girl.
“Hena told me that our brother asked about all kinds of unheard-of things. He even asked whether she liked the idea of marrying him. Can you imagine? She didn’t know what to say! He told her he didn’t want to marry her unless she wanted to. Eventually, she became bold enough to tell him yes.”
Recalling the story of her brother’s match, Rhemet seemed to recover from her irritability. She pulled a pink-covered album from the sole bookshelf in the room.
“Our brother’s wedding photos. We never get tired of looking at them.”
Rhemet flipped the album open to an image of Mehboob, exuberant in a cream-colored sherwani, the formal brocade coat typically worn by Indian grooms. I couldn’t see Hena’s face in any of the images because her gaze was always lowered, but Azmat informed me that she’d worn blue contact lenses that day, to make her look “even more beautiful.”
Rhemet flipped through quickly. The best part was toward the back: the honeymoon pictures. The section opened with a shot of an ornate canopied bridal bed that the family had decorated with mounds of rose petals. This intimate picture led into dozens of even more private photos of the newlyweds. Apparently, the honeymoon, just as much as the wedding, is family property in India.
Both Hena and Mehboob were clad in revealing Bollywood clothes in the shots of their week together in Goa, a strip of India
famous for its beaches. Gone was the loose salwar kameez Hena usually wore; she’d transformed herself into a saucy Mallika-style starlet for her honeymoon. To judge from Azmat and Rhemet’s reaction to the album, it is just par for the course to do so. In one picture, she modeled painted-on-tight jeans and a 1980s-style cropped jean jacket that exposed her midriff. Mehboob strutted beside her in a bomber jacket and knockoff designer jeans. They looked like stills from a romantic Bollywood film: The couple posing stiffly in front of their palm-tree-lined hotel; standing, not touching, in their flashy outfits beside a waterfall; and strolling barefoot in the surf. I mentioned how different Hena looked, and Azmat laughed.
“That’s why they took so many snaps. She’ll never wear any of those clothes again. It was purely for the honeymoon.”
I paused at one of the last photos of Hena on the beach. She was pointing at the words “Mehboob loves Hena” scratched into the sand.
“It was an arranged match, right? They had just had one date?”
“Yes, but they’d already been alone in Goa for a few days. Of course they felt love by now!”
Azmat’s chuckle was startlingly bawdy.
Geeta’s father didn’t hear from Ashok’s family, and she took out her frustration on Shaadi, refusing to sign on to her account for more than two weeks. When she finally went back online, an instant message box popped up.
“Hi Geeta—It was very nice to meet you in Delhi. I am sorry my family wasn’t in touch.” It was Ashok. She was trying to decide whether to respond when another line pinged through. “Actually my situation is a little complicated. I have a girlfriend who I am trying to get married with. Our families are giving us trouble.” Silence for a moment. Then he wrote, “Anyway, bye!”
Geeta closed the message box, feeling more vindicated than angry. It was just as she’d thought. Energized by the knowledge that Ashok might have worked out had his situation not been “complicated,” she resolved to take fate into her own hands. She’d have to do as Radha’s and Usha’s parents had: compromise on the match. In the online matrimonial world, this meant expanding the criteria on her Shaadi profile to include non-Punjabi boys. She wasn’t willing to go so far as to include those from another caste or religion, but even so, she decided not to tell her parents what she was doing. As eager as they were to get her married, they would hate to imagine her raising children who didn’t speak their mother tongue.
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