by Tony D'Souza
“I won’t.”
“You must always behave like a firstborn son.”
Before my father ever had a chance to call, my uncle Sam called my mother. He called the following Saturday afternoon, when he knew she’d be there. My father was again at his golf lessons, this time at the Billy Caldwell public links just over the border in the city. His game had improved quite a bit, and despite the costs and distractions of the new baby, he was as determined as he’d ever been that he would one day be invited to join the Ridge Lawn Country Club.
“Denise,” my uncle said into the phone in a quiet voice, “what is Babu on about?”
“Don’t worry about that, Sam. It’s one of his silly things. Lawrence thinks that it’s time you got married.”
“He’s worried that I marry?”
“That’s all it is.”
My uncle looked out the window at his garden. The eggplants were unfurling themselves on the ground, the zucchini were reaching out with their vines. He said, “How are the children?”
“The children are fine. Francisco would like to see you more. Elizabeth does what babies do.”
“And what do you think about it, Denise?”
“About what, Sam?”
“About my getting married.”
My mother was quiet a long time. She sat at her kitchen table and watched through the window as the beautiful clouds scudded across the blue sky. Her mouth felt tight on her face. Then she let that go. She said, “I want you to be happy in this life, Sam. I’ve always understood that you would marry someone.”
My uncle Sam was quiet. A flock of birds, starlings, came into his pear tree. In the glass of the window, he could see his own watery reflection looking back at him as he looked out at the world. “I should see Francisco more,” he said, and my mother said, “Yes,” and my uncle said, “I only wanted to know what Babu wanted.”
Among the Konkans of India, the most important event on the calendar is marriage, any marriage, and the most important of these is the marriage of a firstborn son. Traditionally, three days before the wedding, the bride and groom are isolated from each other, which is not a hard thing to accomplish since marriage among the Konkans is arranged, and if the bride and groom know each other at all beforehand, they are lucky. The boy will certainly have seen the girl a number of times during the dances she is required to do in her father’s compound, to show the boy’s family her knowledge of the ancient things, as well as her body, and even if after the dancing the boy doesn’t care for the look of her, he’ll have to argue with all of his heart for his father to break what the matchmakers and astrological signs have determined should be made one. If the girl doesn’t like the look of the boy, too bad. Her mother will say to her, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Do you think I thought your father was Dharmendra when I married him?”
But three days before the wedding, the bride is sent to the women’s quarters of her father’s house, and there, the women of the family, in their finest saris, begin to decorate the bride like the gift she will be to her husband and his family. All of the women involved in this process have long since been married themselves, and however their own marriages have turned out, they will be jealous and happy for the girl, cooing at her with doe eyes, regaling her with stories about how nervous they had been on their wedding nights, how nervous their poor husbands had been, telling the girl that no matter what happens when she is finally alone with her husband, she must not laugh or avert her eyes or do any of those things that might be her impulse, but she must hold her trembling husband to her as though he were Rama himself. Otherwise, nothing might ever get done. Men trembled like that on their wedding nights. The women tell the girl that she must set all thoughts of herself aside to reassure her scared and shivering husband, who will be her guide and partner through this life.
First, they bathe the bride in the family’s bathtub or bathing yard, each one of their hands taking a turn to scrub the girl’s body, her breasts especially, all of her sacred places. Then she is washed in milk, and then rinsed in spring water to take away the smell of the milk. Her skin is supple then, and the women anoint her with ghee, wash her again, and then rub her whole body with coconut oil. Poor families do this symbolically with dabs of these fine things on the girl’s forehead, but the rich do the whole thing. When the bride’s hair is dry and combed, her grandmother, or the next oldest woman if the grandmother is dead, pulls tightly on her hair and braids it. The bride’s hair glows with the coconut oil, and it won’t be touched again by anyone but her husband. Then the women paint designs on her hands and feet with henna, the same filigreed designs of the flowering of life that the Hindus paint on their brides’ hands, though the Konkans would never admit that this is a Hindu tradition. As the bride sits still on her stool, letting the henna dry and set into her skin, she is dusted all over with herbal scents and sandalwood powder. All of this takes place in her confinement room, usually her mother’s bedroom, the room lit with votive candles set all around her feet. The women burn incense sticks and oils in the corners, offerings to the Virgin Mary. The shutters are closed against any man’s eye, and the room grows thick and heady with these scents. Next, they dress her in her silk undergarments, and begin to drape her with jewelry. The jewelry is borrowed from someone rich in the family, silver anklets with dozens of tiny bells hanging off them like chimes, a silver hip chain with bells on it as well, a filigreed nose stud, delicate earrings of goldlike fans, necklaces and bangles, and finally a gold bindi. Then they wrap the girl in her red satin bridal sari, and sweetmeats are brought and fed to her by her mother’s hand, though not too many, so that her belly won’t burst out of the tightly wrapped sari’s folds. The girl waits two days like this, each and every one of the women telling her how envious they are.
In the confinement room of his father’s house, the groom is attended in much the same manner by the married men of his family, though not his father, who sits in his preferred chair like a throne in the living room, receiving bowed visitors and their gifts of folded cash and liquor bottles, which pile up at his feet. The groom’s fingernails and toenails are trimmed, any calluses he might have on his hands or the soles of his feet pared away and sanded smooth, something especially important for the Konkans, who regard themselves first and foremost as merchants, who don’t have calluses as do the Hindu laborers who work for them, until he is as smooth for his bride as a god. His hair and mustache are clipped, and though he bathes himself alone, he is then anointed with coconut oil. The men dress him in his best white satin suit in the casual Hindu style, white satin sandals slipped over his feet like ballet slippers. Then he is carried on his chair out to the wedding courtyard, usually the courtyard of his father’s house, where lights of many colors have been strung up to form a ceiling, or if the family is poor, candles are placed on the courtyard’s walls.
All during this time, the married men of his family have been telling him about sex, about how he must approach his bride with care, handle her as he would a flower, but how he must also be like a bee and enter that flower, and how to take the bloodied marital sheets from the bed once he has, and present them to his father. His father will then hang them on a nail beside the door to the house so that everyone can see that the marriage cannot now be revoked. And if the groom has earned himself a reputation for philandering among the servant girls of his father’s house in his youth as some of them have, the men of his family remind him not to mount the poor girl like a buffalo, but to give her a chance to let her heartbeat slow, and meet her in that place women call love. Because if he is rough with her that first time, the girl will know everything he has done, and then she will nag him about it for the rest of his life, which, all the men agree, is a hell of a thing to put up with.
The Konkan wedding is more for the groom’s family than anyone else, the dowry the most important part of it. Weddings were known among the Konkans at the time my parents were married as the “three keys,” because the best matches earned for the young man
three keys from his bride’s father: the key to a house, the key to a shop, and the key to a car or motorcycle. The wedding itself was a festival: nonstop drinking and singing, gluttonous eating of dukrajemas pork curry, lamb-and-pea-stuffed samosas, and the men of the groom’s family would form lines and sing “E puri kon achi,” kicking their legs with such violence that an observer couldn’t be sure if this was a celebration or the protest of a travesty. So many were unhappy in their marriages that a case for the latter could be made. Weddings were like that in India.
After the conclusion of the Catholic ceremony at the church, all of the Konkans of the area would toss flowers onto the ground for the bride and groom to walk on as they left, toss rice on the couple’s heads, and follow the newlyweds in a raucous procession all the way to the young man’s father’s house. A meal would be eaten, and then the couple would retreat to the marital bed prepared for them, until the groom would emerge with the bloodied sheets to the ululations of the women of his family. Sometimes this took less than an hour, but sometimes it took days. The most nervous of husbands knew how to scratch the insides of their nostrils to make their noses bleed. The best marital sheets had two or three drops of blood on them, nothing more. The ones that set off knowing glances among the married women were the ones that were heavily stained. Once the sheets were hung, the two fathers would embrace publicly in the groom’s father’s living room, exchange outrageous gifts of money and liquor to seal the new covenant between their families, which didn’t really cost them anything as the gifts were at once symbolic and exactly the same. Everyone would touch the stained sheets hanging beside the door for luck: newly married women for the fertility held within them, young men in their hopes of good matches, old women for added wisdom, and old men for one last moment of virility.
And while everyone loved every instant of the drawn-out Konkan weddings, the best part for the younger brothers of the groom was the rouse, the ceremony that happened before any of the others, the ritual that opened the three wedding days. On the first day of the wedding weekend, the groom, in his best Western suit, would leave what would soon be his confinement room and sit on a chair in the courtyard, where the lights were only just beginning to be strung up. His younger brothers would come with their own chairs in their best clothes, and sit beside him. Cousins of marital age were invited into this ceremony as well. It was something like the gathering of Rama’s supporters before they wheeled out on their chariots to battle the rakshasas and reclaim his wife, Sita. Everyone would congratulate the groom, and they’d pass around a bottle of cashew fenny, the liquor of the Konkans. As soon as everyone was drunk and giggling, the married men of the family, and especially the women, would come out from the house with eggs and flour, and then they’d pelt the young men in the chairs with the eggs, dump flour over their heads, until the youths were white with it. The rouse was an informal and ridiculous event. For as much as they loved the ceremony, none of the Konkans knew any longer what it could possibly mean. And neither does history.
My father had a rouse at his father’s house in Chikmagalur three days before his wedding, and my uncle Sam sat beside him on one side, and my uncle Les sat on the other. Instead of being in seclusion in her mother’s house while her groom and his brothers were being doused in eggs and flour in their finest clothes, my mother was sitting anxiously in a chair across from the country director’s desk at the Peace Corps headquarters in Bombay. The director was a balding functionary from Washington, and with his fingers folded, he was giving my mother a lecture. Did she understand the economic impulse of people in matters like this? My mother looked down at her hands and said that she did. Was she sure it was really about love? My mother bit her lip and said, “Yes.”
“Why don’t you at least wait until your service is over, Denise? You might feel differently when you see everyone from your training group going home.”
“Two months isn’t a long time. I’ve already begun to wrap up my major projects.”
“You know better than anyone that they’ll expect different things out of you as a wife.”
“I’m marrying a Konkan. He’s not the kind of Indian you’re thinking about.”
“Everyone in the world has their own idea of marriage. I hope you haven’t lost sight of who you are in your time in India.”
“I know who I am.”
“I know that you do, Denise.”
“So you’ve decided not to pull me out?”
“I won’t do that to you. Congratulations. Funny thing, this Peace Corps. So many things are coming out of it that weren’t in the original plan. I’ve signed off on six marriages this year alone. Weddings may be its only real purpose.”
While my father was laughing and washing the eggs and flour off with buckets of water with his brothers in my grandfather’s courtyard, my mother was on the night bus to Goa. Above her on the rack was a box with a hat and veil that she’d bought while in Bombay, and underneath the bus in the carriage was her suitcase with her wedding dress in it. Twenty other Peace Corps volunteers from her training group were on the bus with her, and it was certainly among the rare times in Indian history that a local bus traveling through the countryside was carrying mostly whites. The volunteers had brought rum with them, and as they drank and sang to the Hindi music that the driver played all through the night, my mother rested her head against the window and looked out at the darkness. There wasn’t even a single light to see in the night along the highway. Even though she knew the road was lined with villages, she could see nothing but fleeting glimpses of men sitting by lanterns and smoking cigarettes as the bus passed.
India was her life now. Lawrence would be her life. And she was happy about it. Lawrence treated her with a respect she’d never known in an American man. True, she hadn’t known many American men. But once in a while. To pay her way through high school when she’d lived with her great-aunt, she’d worked at the Baby Ruth candy-bar factory in Chicago. Men from there had come out with her group of conveyor-line friends to bowl at the local alley. Every one of them had told her she was beautiful. Then when they were drunk, they would say it to all the other girls, too. And always there was that man in her room. These Indian men with their false bluster, their real innocence, were not like the men at home. She had learned that she could trust these men. She trusted one of them so much, in two days she would marry him.
All around her on the bus, the Americans were drinking and telling stories of what they had seen in India. Wasn’t it good that one of them was going to marry someone here? they asked each other. It was good beyond belief. Maybe they all should marry here? They all certainly should. Too bad they weren’t as brave as Denise. If they were, then maybe they really would change the world. And then once, and softly, someone behind my mother had said, “But isn’t it mad? Isn’t it also a lunatic thing?”
“Come on, Denise. Why so glum? Have a drink and participate,” Lenore had said, and leaned over the back of her seat. My mother looked out the window and said, “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m supposed to be like this, Lenore. I’m getting married.”
In Chikmagalur that night, my grandfather sat in his chair in his suit with none of the gifts at his feet that would have been expected of the family of a firstborn’s Konkan bride, because my mother was not a Konkan bride. The mood was somber in the house. The visitors did not know how to act, everyone glanced at each other in the absence of gifts. Was this truly worth it? What could this strange sort of wedding mean? My grandfather sat through that night the way he’d sat through all of it. Not a single instant of it touched him. So what if the floor around his feet was bare on the eve of his firstborn’s marriage? To hell with the absence of gifts. His son Babu was marrying a white woman. And though the servants whispered about it in the kitchen, even this did not disturb my grandfather. My mother would take my father to America. The three keys he’d given up for his son would soon turn into a hundred keys in that rich place.
Everyone from Chikmagalur set out
for Goa in the morning. Once in the heartland of the Konkans, the women of my father’s family went to my mother’s hotel room, and as my grandmother looked on from her chair in the corner, they decorated my mother’s hands and feet with henna, braided her hair. The Peace Corps people came in and out to watch and take pictures. There was no washing of my mother in milk or any of that. Not one of the women of my father’s family even imagined talking to my mother about sex.
At the church, my father’s best man was a white man he’d never met. After the first nuptial night, no bloodied sheets were hung anywhere. While my parents spent their honeymoon eating shrimp curry on the beach at Goa, my grandfather walked about Chikmagalur with his cane. Even though his son hadn’t received a key to anything yet, my grandfather knew what his son had accomplished. So did everyone else in that town. The Konkans had married a white woman.
When my parents came back from Goa to live in his house, my grandfather told my grandmother to make my mother’s life so miserable that she would want to leave. After a year of cooking on a stool in the kitchen, of pounding my father’s clothes on the washing stones of the stream so that even the Muslims snickered as they watched, my mother finally did.
Whatever my father thought he was getting in marrying an American girl, in America my father realized that he’d gotten my mother. She nagged him, she had her own ideas about how their life should be. And then she sponsored over his brothers.
The night that he’d invited my uncle over to tell him that he had to marry, my father dressed up in a suit. He told my mother to get dressed up as well, and because all the arguing they’d done that week had worn her out, she did.
“So you’re going to get your wish, Lawrence,” my mother said as she put in her earrings. “What is the next thing going to be?”
My father said back, “The next thing that is going to be is that all of us are going to be happy.”