The moon is on my back. The auto races into the night. I shed this miserable city like a second skin. I have got away, at last.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF THE INTERNET
IRA TRIVEDI
When I moved back to India in the ninth grade, a boy asked me to be his friend. Even before this I’d had a feeling that it may not be a normal sort of friendship. He had crank-called me for two weeks, had written me anonymous notes and then one day, when I stood lost in the hallways of my new school, he came up and introduced himself.
‘My name is Kunal. I am Jawahar House prefect. Will you be my friend?’
I thought this introduction a bit odd, but he was cute, he was in the twelfth grade, and being the new girl in school was awfully lonely. Our friendship was short-lived: I soon realised that this friendship wasn’t ordinary; it was a ‘special’ friendship where he would write me love letters, ask me to meet him in empty classrooms and place toffees in my desk. Once he even tried to hold my hand.
Over the next few years at high school, in the town of Indore in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, I realised that a ‘proposal for friendship’ was a mime for dating – boys officially ‘befriended’ girls by presenting them with a card and a rose, nervously clearing their throats. Over the years to come I got many proposals of friendship, and I made (somewhat) wiser decisions.
All this seemed a dreamscape, an antiquated world, when I moved away to the U.S. for college, where mating and dating were uttered in the same breath. For me, a girl who had only ever been ‘friends’ with boys, this was utterly frightening. Nervous about the prospect of what ‘American’ dating entailed, I stuck to hanging out with girlfriends and only eventually found a boyfriend – a nice boy from India who, while he didn’t ‘propose’ friendship, took me out for many lovely meals and seemed to be a suitable prospect for a long-term relationship leading to marriage. I dived right in.
But alas, my college sweetheart did not become my husband and I moved to New York after I graduated. Here speed dating was all the rage. I did not realise how much my high school days had affected my perceptions of dating.
‘Did he pay?’ my roommates would ask after I returned from a night out on the town with a new gentleman friend.
‘Yes,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘I offered though,’ I hastily added.
‘What did you guys do?’ they curiously asked.
‘A play and dinner,’ I said.
‘That’s a date!’
‘No,’ I argued, ‘but we are just friends!’
‘In America,’ they joked, ‘that would be considered a pretty hot date.’
While I was going out for what were obvious dates, I was in denial for no good reason at all. In my mind, ‘dating’ was what you did when you really liked someone, when you wanted to have a serious relationship, which would eventually lead to marriage.
Fast-forward six years, and I have moved to New Delhi, single and ready to mingle and hopefully, for my parents’ sake more than mine, settle my personal life.
Here all my friends bitterly complain: we want to date, we want to meet new people, but there is no scope. New Delhi isn’t like New York, where you see a hot guy at a bar, walk up and say hello. Here everything seems to happen with hooded eyes, with tense smiles across crowded rooms, or running around trees like in Bollywood movies of yore. The only real way to meet people is through friends, or friends of friends – and, eventually realising how limited this is, most young people grudgingly allow their parents to get involved, though that has its obvious pitfalls: involving parents means getting serious, which in this case means marriage.
My friends aren’t the only ones who are frustrated. As I wrote my book India in Love, interviewing hundreds of young people across the country, I realised that the frustration seemed to be on a national scale. Educated young men and women, who grew up watching Friends and new-age Bollywood films where dating was in vogue, seemed desperate to have romantic relationships outside of parental pressures and marriage, but since there was really no concept of dating, or no way for them to meet people other than those in their immediate ambit, they came up with creative solutions, as young lovers always seem to do.
Many young Indians began using the numerous matrimonial websites to ‘date’, with little or no intention to marry. This created problems for the websites as parents complained of the ‘seriousness’ of the candidates their sons and daughters had met online. Several of the larger websites created an ‘offline’ marriage bureau, hoping to build customer trust.
But even brick-and-mortar marriage bureaus and flesh-and-blood marriage brokers were becoming frustrated as young people chose to date instead of getting married.
‘Ira-ji! These people never make up their minds! They keep on meeting and meeting and meeting. What is all this? Why don’t they just say yes?’ asked the marriage broker I was spending time with, in the line of my research. He refused to say the word ‘date’, which was a bad word, just as ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ had been back in high school, where we cloaked the words with ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’.
According to another, more savvy, marriage broker, who matched people on chemistry and compatibility instead of the older tropes of caste and class, ‘These people, they come to me for marriage but they have no intention of marrying. They meet, they sleep with each other, holiday with each other, and then they move on saying that they aren’t compatible.’
Enter 2016.
Across India, young people, straight and gay, are downloading and swiping right. Unlike in the West, the concept of ‘dating’ has never really existed in India, but now the Western concept of dating has captured the imaginations of India’s young, quite literally at cyber speed. While dating is largely an urban, middle-class phenomenon, in cities big and small India’s young are choosing their own partners across caste and community lines.
At the offices of Truly Madly, a dating app, young Indians lounge around in hoodies and skinny jeans, working on their MacBooks and sipping on lattes. Inside the sleekly designed Facebook-style offices, with beanbags and exposed brick walls, one could be anywhere – San Francisco or Stockholm – but outside we see a hip, up-and-coming India.
I have joined the board of this company started by three men, all successful entrepreneurs.
Sachin Bhatia, previously the co-founder of makemytrip.com, one of India’s first and most successful travel websites, founded the website when he saw the widening gap in the market and because he was seeing Indian women taking matrimonial decisions into their own hands.
‘I saw my neighbour’s daughter, a highly qualified doctor, get matched to someone with fake credentials on one of the matrimonial sites. I was hearing of more and more such cases where online profiles were fake or there was little or no compatibility between the man and the woman, yet matches were being forced down people’s throats. I realised that the solution was to give girls options early on. An Indian girl should have the option to suss out a bunch of guys before she decides who is right for her, just like she has the option of going into a store and trying out a few pairs of jeans and deciding which one is the right one for her.’
But starting a dating app in India is no easy task, especially when ‘dating’ remains taboo. So much so that many of the young men and women who work at Truly Madly have not been able to tell their families the true nature of their jobs.
‘If I tell my mum I work at a dating app, she’ll freak out,’ says a twenty-something employee – a recent graduate of one of India’s top engineering colleges.
‘What do you tell her, then?’ I ask.
‘I just say that I am working with a start-up,’ she says with a grin.
Another employee says that she tells her parents that she works at a matrimony website.
A third says that he told his parents, but they aren’t too happy about it, preferring he get a government job instead.
But these young people are excited and passionate about what they do – the company has r
aised millions of dollars from venture capitalists, they have over a million users across the country, and they are now the biggest player in the Indian online dating space.
Most exciting are the stories of users that are constantly pouring in.
Take the story of Shilpa, a young woman who worked at IBM. Her parents found her a match on the matrimonial website shaadi.com, and she got engaged. But her fiancé’s family wanted a dowry, and they would not relent. Eventually Shilpa put her foot down and decided to call the wedding off. Jaded, she downloaded the app while having a drink with her friends at a bar, and within minutes she swiped right and met the man she would marry six months later.
Another is the story of a Muslim couple, Salem and Alia, who met on the app but are from different communities. He is Shia, and she is Sunni. Initially their parents were dead-set against this inter-caste marriage but, after a year, the young couple finally persuaded their parents, and were wedded a few months later.
Then there is Mira, a PR consultant who found her boyfriend on the app. It turned out that he worked in the same office building as her, just three floors above, but they had never met till they both downloaded the app.
I am not the only one who has harboured warped notions of dating, and one of the first things Truly Madly does is run a campaign to educate people on dating.
#Itsadateif goes viral and, within hours of launching the Twitter campaign, it is trending not just in India, but also in the U.S.
Responses pour in.
Some innocent:
#Itsadateif you both dance like no one’s watching, even with your two left feet.
Others not so much:
#Itsadateif she wears a thong, someone writes.
Then, a few days later, Truly Madly launches #Itsnotadateif and this too goes viral.
If she keeps on checking out her Twitter, you’re clearly not the top trending topic on her mind! Sorry, bro. #EpicFail
#Itsnotadateif she brings all her friends along.
Offline, Truly Madly hosts block parties in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai: young men and women pour in, shimmying to electronic dance music, drinking beer and looking for people to date.
Perhaps the most well received approach is a TV ad called ‘Boy Browsing’, which involves young girls choosing boys. Now, while this may sound ordinary – after all, dating applications around the world have more boys than girls – to me, this is utterly refreshing. I spent weeks at marriage bureaus across the country researching my book, and discovered that the power of refusal almost always lies in the hands of the boys. Marriage brokers are flooded with profiles of girls whose parents are desperate to marry them off and are hot in pursuit of marriageable boys. On the dating apps, the balance of power has shifted.
I go into the Truly Madly office one afternoon to speak to the employees, fresh-faced and young. There are more girls than boys – a rare statistic in most Indian offices. I tell them about a depressing piece I have just written about honour killings, in which I recounted the story of a young couple’s murder, master-minded by her family because the couple had married out of caste. These atrocities are commonplace in India, and this particular incident took place less than 300 kilometres away from the offices of Truly Madly. I tell these employees that what they are doing is no light-hearted thing, even if their parents or families think otherwise. What they are doing is breaking India’s archaic caste laws which marriage has bound for centuries on end.
For India’s women, the journey towards personal freedom is a long and arduous one. Yet change is happening – perhaps not at cyber speed, but slowly, one swipe at a time.
S/HE GENERIS: SHAPE-SHIFTING OUR WAY ACROSS THE RIVER OF DESIRE
MARGARET MASCARENHAS
‘Identities, identifications and desires cannot be untangled from one another. We become ourselves through others, and the self is a porous thing, not a sealed container.’
– Siri Hustvedt, ‘My Father Myself’
Aeroplanes and lace
In the photograph on the dressing table, the man’s expression suggests that he is even more excited about opening the Christmas presents than she is, although he is thirty-five, and she is only three. He is slimly debonair in a Noël Coward kind of way, though a shade darker. The blur to the left is her mother, who has not had time to take position in the frame before the camera, set to automatic, clicks.
At this stage, she is still an only child. Her father is from Goa, a former Portuguese colony in India. There is no hard evidence that he would have preferred she be a boy, even though boys are better appreciated in traditional Goan families. But this is not a traditional Goan family, and they are in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. Her father met her mother – of French, Dutch and Native American stock – at a Thanksgiving dinner held annually for foreign students at the University of Michigan and decided to stay. He is a part of the Goan diaspora.
The first Christmas present the child opens is from her father – a toy helicopter. She is fascinated by its metallic sheen, its twirling blade. Her father excitedly commandeers the helicopter while she squeals with delight. She reaches greedily for its seductive silver, but her father is not prepared to relinquish control of the toy, saying, ‘Wait. Here, let Daddy show you.’
The next present is from her American grandparents, Bess and John. A composite gift wrapped in gigantic boxes containing a child-size kitchen set, replete with pretend stove, pretend refrigerator and assorted pretend Betty Crockerish cooking implements.
The toy refrigerator, which is about three feet high, stored in her attic playroom, is where she hides her father’s socks. After stowing the socks – brown, black and grey fruit that will only be discovered by her bewildered mother a month later – she strips off her clothes and dons her white and pink lace Easter hat. Digging into her mother’s closet, she finds a pair of lemon satin heels and puts them on, staggering down the stairs, clinging to the railing, but determined. She sits at the foot of the stairs, facing the front door of the small house on Henry Street, waiting for her father to walk through it. This is her routine on most days. Her father is not bothered by the fact that a three-year-old refuses to wear clothes in the house and will strip at the first opportunity, but he doesn’t care for little girls in pants.
It is her father, not her mother, who decides on her clothes – pastel fairy-ballerina dresses, patent leather shoes, socks of lace, made by nuns, that tie just above her chubby knees. Her mother thinks children, irrespective of gender, should have pets, climb trees and wear comfortable, sturdy play clothes. No, says her father, she should wear only dresses. In winter, tights and leggings are allowed. (What would a full-grown female helicopter pilot, raised in this manner, wear? she wonders now. Would there be some hidden remnant of childhood? Lace lingerie?)
She is five when she starts kindergarten, with her father’s dress rule still in force. It remains in force even when, in first grade, she becomes the fastest runner in her class and all the boys want her on their teams at recess. Through first grade, second, third, even though she has to hold down her dress when she runs, she remains the fastest.
When Christmas rolls around, her father gets her an aeroplane.
She has a crush on her first grade teacher, Mrs Callaway. She has an even bigger crush on Robert Kennedy, whom she watches on the news with her parents. She cries inconsolably when he is killed. Robert Kennedy defines the kind of fine-featured boys she will like when she is in her teens, and the boyish-looking men she will date when she is in her twenties. Hardly unusual, given that her father is Peter Pan. Having Peter Pan as a father is not only is fun but also teaches a girl total self-reliance.
Her twenties’ boy crushes will be followed by a penchant for ‘manly’ men, ten years her senior. At no time will she have the desire to procreate with them, however. As for marriage, she is against it on principle. Only in her forties will she discover that she can also be attracted to women – well, one woman – while simultaneously maintaining a sexual relationship wit
h a man.
Age has a way of androgenising; when she regards her father as an old man, parchment skin stretched across fine facial bone, he almost looks like a woman.
I was raised by storytelling lit-witches
I am mildly dyslexic and also ambidextrous. I’ve been known to take up to ten minutes to figure out the difference between words such as ‘tree’ and ‘moon’. Without looking at the yellow diamond ring on my left hand (an inheritance from my Indian grandfather and the only piece of real jewellery I ever wear), I can’t tell right from left. It does not surprise me that I might be predisposed to the scrambling of gender eggs. Though I am biologically female and identify as such, I continue to question what it means to be female.
The role of my parents in my development becomes hazy in my memory beyond secondary school; they are, for the most part, cameos. My thinking on sexuality and gender roles evolved predominantly through reading pioneering, and often gender-bending, literary witches. Alcott, Woolf, the Brontës, Plath, Elliot, Sand, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Hurston, Le Guin, Atwood, de Beauvoir, and so on. In my case, reading literature appears to have trumped my environment, long before intellectual knowledge was transformed by experience and feeling, long before I read any comprehensive gender studies that made it clear that while sexuality was only one aspect of gender fluidity, gender was an endlessly evolving and complex subject.
Beginning with my time as a student of comparative literature at Berkeley, several of Alice Walker’s novels and essays had a most profound effect on me, compelling me to question what it means to be a woman, as well as the political rigidity and militancy of the word ‘feminist’ and its appropriation by privileged white women. The militant aspect of 1980s feminism was first brought home to me in junior college, when anyone wearing heels and lipstick was made to feel unwelcome at the campus Women’s Lounge by the white lesbians in hiking boots who had staked a claim. I responded by staging a coup with daily sit-ins, with women who dressed as they pleased and slept with boys and men.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 16