Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  All weddings are complicated, maddening affairs, but nothing beats an Indian wedding for sheer bedlam. Punjabis are especially gifted at organising friendly chaos. Planning and preparations can drag on for months and still there will be shocking pandemonium on the day. In contrast to Western weddings, where things are planned to the minute – where even the bride’s late arrival is factored into the programme – Indian weddings seem deliberately organised to make a mockery of the word ‘schedule’. That said, everything is carefully planned, just randomly thrown together. Details of the ceremony are endlessly discussed yet allowed to unfold as they please on the day. And along the way there will be an awful lot of shouting, a hullabaloo that would be a riot were it not for the celebratory smiles and hearty back-slapping.

  As Punjab is home to Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, Punjabi wedding traditions vary but also have similarities. The Hindu wedding ceremony is elaborate and long, and usually conducted in Sanskrit. The couple encircles a fire to seal their union. A Sikh wedding is considerably shorter, conducted in Punjabi and requires the couple to circumambulate the religious text of Sikhism, rather than a holy fire. Vin had a ceremonial Sikh wedding for pragmatic reasons.

  But before the wedding there were numerous pre-wedding rituals to observe. The Roka ceremony, to formally mark an engagement, is only the start. When the time nears there is the Sagan ceremony, during which parental blessings are given to the engaged couple and gifts are exchanged. Essentially it is a ritual that marks both families’ acceptance of the proposed match, part of which involves the girl being presented with a long red scarf, her dupatta, by her in-laws as a welcoming gesture. Sangeet, or singing sessions, are held in the homes of both families every evening till the day of the wedding. This usually amounts to an awful lot of partying in the run-up to the wedding day.

  Then there is the Mainyan ceremony, in which the bride is bathed in a paste of turmeric and gram flour to give her a fairer glow. This is followed a day or so later by the Mehndi ceremony to decorate her hands and feet with henna (henna is a symbol of an inner glow). Last, there is the Chooda ceremony, in which handfuls of red and ivory bangles, washed in milk and rose petals, are placed on the girl’s wrists. (Ivory has been replaced with white plastic these days.) Now, finally, the girl is ready for her big day, the day her mum and dad have been waiting for since she was born.

  On the morning of her wedding day, Vin wore an ornate red and gold sari. Her bracelets extended almost as far as her elbows, and on her hands, each resplendent with henna patterns, she wore a punja, a gold bracelet attached by five intricate chains to five rings on each digit. Around her neck was a necklace of woven gold threads. Her fingernails and toenails were painted pillar-box red.

  But the zenith of bridal gold jewellery is saved for a girl’s face and head. It is unbelievably elaborate and smoulderingly exotic. A significant part of Vin’s dowry was the jewellery she was given by Mum and Dad. She looked like a Bollywood star wearing it. An intricately woven gold chain starting at the crown of her head flowed down the central parting in her hair and came to rest in a round tikka (disc) at the top of her forehead. From there the chain split, flowing to the right and the left, following her natural hairline to her ears. Just below the tikka, in the centre of her forehead close to her eyebrows, sat a teardrop bindi in blood red.

  All women look beautiful wearing a bindi. It is a unique, surprisingly erotic and captivating symbol: a third eye, a drop of sensuality, the focal point of a woman’s wisdom. Vin’s face was instantly transformed into a countenance of powerful dignity. Above each black eyebrow ran an alluring arc of small alternating red and white dots that curved around on to her cheeks, framing her dark eyes as if with confetti. A large gold nose-stud was connected to her left ear with a loosely hanging chain and her ears dripped with gold bell-shaped earrings. Tiny paisley petals quivered from the rims. Her lips were an exquisite pout of intense red.

  It was barely possible to absorb at once all the colour and radiance from Vin’s bridal costume. Her make-up masked her expression and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Was she happy? Was she frightened? Was she relieved? She was about to marry the man I had turned down.

  Since she’d accepted the match, we hadn’t talked much. She was about to do what I could never bring myself to do. By the end of the day she would have sindoor in the parting of her hair – the mark of a married woman.

  Should I have been standing in her shoes that day? There is such a small space between the words yes and no. It could have been me wearing red and gold that day. It could have been me preparing to leave my father’s house. I tried to picture myself in Vin’s bridal outfit. But I couldn’t muster the mental image. There had been such a small space between me and Vin as little girls, only just making us two people. But now, in her bridal outfit, she stood as a distinctly separate person.

  I hadn’t asked her how she felt about Dinesh; she probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. Once she had accepted him, she was effectively honour-bound to treat him with the utmost respect, and no doubt that would have included not discussing her private thoughts about him with me. I was confident that the family would have chosen well, that Dinesh would be a good husband and she a good wife. I was confident that she would always stand by her man. What I could not be confident about was whether she would be happy. I felt my emotions being tossed around like corks in the sea. I was delighted she was moving into the next stage of her life – perhaps she would have romance and love would grow. But I would see less of her, and, even though we had moved apart, she remained my most treasured friend. It was going to be a joyful wedding day, but I couldn’t help feeling the sting of self-hate. Why? Because I was relieved. Relieved that it was not I who was preparing to marry. And something about that relief made me dislike myself.

  Outside, I heard the sound of men’s voices. I looked out of the window to see the arrival of the barat – the collective term for the groom’s male family members and other accompanying men. Dinesh was wearing a grey Western suit. My dad greeted him at the front door with warmth and respect. By now our English neighbours were aware that something was up and were looking through their windows as wedding guests snapped up every available parking spot down our road.

  Traditionally, each side of the front door is anointed with a drop of oil before the groom is received. So there was Mum, the proudest Indian mother in all of England, standing on the doorstep of the porch, a plastic one-litre bottle of vegetable oil from the kitchen cupboard in her hand, waiting to greet the man into whose care she was going entrust her youngest daughter.

  The barat eventually left for the local Anglican church hall where the Sikh wedding was to take place, and Vin followed shortly afterwards. As the bride’s sister, it was my job to stay near her, help her adjust her sari, give her tissues when required, dispose of the scrunched-up old ones, bring her a glass of water, tell her if there was anything untoward visible in either nostril, and other such things. But once we arrived at the hall, I couldn’t get within a two-metre radius of her because of the throng of guests aching to see the bride. Dumpy middle-aged Indian women, with their polyester cardigans and fat elbows, formed the front rank of the phalanx bearing down on her.

  Vin married before three hundred guests, and like any other Indian wedding I’ve ever attended, few of them paid attention to the words uttered by the holy man. They organised themselves so that men sat on one side of the hall and women and children on the other. The women instinctively pulled their long, colourful dupattas or saris over their heads as a gesture of respect while the men, who all appeared to have come equipped with clean white handkerchiefs, proceeded to knot them over their heads as a gesture of respect. Most people had removed their shoes before entering the hall, so the entrance foyer looked like the bargain basement section of a second-hand shoe shop.

  While the priest went about his business chanting holy words, small children ran up and down the sides of the hall wailing for their lost mums. Others sat eating crisps a
nd tittering. Teenagers slouched about while women gossipped. Occasionally a seated man would grab a child running around in circles and send him over to his mother on the other side of the hall, whereupon she would pull him over to her seat, give him a sharp clip around the ear and thrust a bag of salt and vinegar crisps in his lap. There appeared to be, on the face of it, a serious paucity of decorum, but then that’s nothing new at an Indian wedding.

  On the stage where the ceremony took place, I sat cross-legged near Vin, but I couldn’t tell whether the ceremony had started or whether the priest was saying pre-wedding chants. Then a mutter went through those assembled on the stage that the coconut had been left behind at the house. Not a coconut, but the coconut. Mum, looking anxious, bounded off the stage, so I followed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked over the din.

  ‘We’ve left the coconut at home,’ said Mum. ‘We need it. It has a red ribbon round it. It’s on the kitchen bench.’

  ‘What do you need it for?’ Realising she would need to explain five thousand years of Hindu custom, I didn’t let her begin. ‘Never mind. Get Dad or Raja to go home and get it.’

  So off went someone, I have no idea who, to get the coconut. None of the guests had any idea what was going on, so it didn’t matter that everything was behind schedule. How much behind schedule was anybody’s guess. The coconut, Mum explained later, was a gift sent by Vin’s parents-in-law as a symbol to ward off evil. When it had been fetched, it was passed gingerly through the crowd as if it was the Kohinoor finally retrieved from the crown jewels. Once it was in Mum’s grasp she instantly relaxed.

  The wedding ceremony took place around the holy text. As is customary, Vin sat cross-legged to the left of Dinesh. Over one shoulder he had draped a pink sash and when the time came, my Dad performed his fatherly duty by tying a knot between one end of Dinesh’s sash and a corner of Vin’s sari pallu – the loose end that is draped over the shoulder. Apart from the obvious symbolism involved in literally tying the knot, the gesture also symbolises a girl being passed by her father from his care to that of her husband’s. Connected like this, Dinesh led Vin around the scriptures four times in a clockwise direction. During their circumambulations, the holy man spoke words seeking god’s blessing, emphasising the couple’s loyalty to each and reminding them of their family and religious duties. After the fourth round Vin and Dinesh were formally husband and wife.

  There was much feasting, singing and dancing for the rest of the day, until, somewhat exhausted, we returned to my parents’ house for the final post-wedding ritual, the dholi ceremony. This was the last time Vin would set foot in Dad’s house still a daughter of the household. Once gone, she would return only as a member of her husband’s household.

  Many of the wedding guests came to the house to witness this final, heartbreakingly sad moment when Vin tearfully bade farewell to everyone. Mum could not stop the flow of her tears and nor did she try. The cacophony of the wedding celebration had evaporated and there was a hush in the front garden as the afternoon turned to evening. The car was waiting as Dinesh said his last goodbyes to guests waiting to shake his hand. Vin walked towards the car and then turned to Mum, Dad, me and Raja, embracing us all as if she no longer belonged to our family. And indeed, technically speaking, she did not.

  John and I continued our illicit relationship, which became more difficult as the days passed. He spent most of his time in the British Library and was difficult to contact as these were pre-mobile-phone days. Dating took careful planning and involved John driving from Camden in his beat-up Mini across town to Twickenham. It was a tedious, sometimes two-hour-long journey through congested traffic that ate away at valuable time. Sometimes we met for no more than an hour during my lunchbreak. (I still worked at the car showroom.) Other times, I would lie to my parents, fabricating some story about going to the movies with girlfriends to get an evening out with him. It was absurd and deeply frustrating that at the age of twenty-two I was scurrying around, ducking and weaving through life to hide my relationship with John from Mum and Dad. Soon John and I began to realise that the secrecy was unsustainable. We talked loosely about marriage, but both of us remained hesitant to charge into the unknown and bring down upon ourselves all the attendant consequences.

  On one occasion I learnt that Mum and Dad would be away one evening, probably until late. Seeing an opportunity, I rang John and we arranged to meet. He would drive to Twickenham and park his car halfway up the road (so it wasn’t too near my parents’ house) and I would join him around six o’clock once my parents had left. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite to plan – they never do. As my parents were getting ready, my nanni arrived. Had they arranged for her to effectively ‘babysit’ while they were out? So I couldn’t go out as planned because nanni was there to guard the front door. Around six, while she was watching TV, I told her I was popping out to post a letter. I found John sitting in the Mini halfway up the road as planned. I explained why I couldn’t leave the house.

  ‘I don’t know how long nanni is going to stay,’ I said, standing on the pavement leaning down to the driver’s window. ‘She might leave in a short while or she might stay the whole evening till my parents get back. I can’t leave while she’s here.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait,’ said John. I returned to the house. An hour later, nanni was still watching TV. I crept out of the house and sprinted up the road to John’s car again.

  ‘She’s still here. I’m sorry. You’d better go back to Hertford,’ I said.

  ‘It’s okay. I’ll just carry on waiting.’

  ‘You can’t sit in your car waiting for me – you could be here all night.’

  ‘I’ll wait. I’ll wait for as long as it takes,’ he said softly.

  The evening light was already fading. His blue eyes were steadfast, looking at me with ageless wanting. I felt like crying. I wanted to stay with John forever. Instead, I kissed him and left him sitting in the car. I don’t know how long he sat there waiting in the dark, but I felt that I could spend my life with him and I didn’t care about anything else in the world.

  So, a month or two after Vin’s wedding, John and I decided we had to come clean and tell my parents we were having a relationship. They most certainly would not approve. They might even try to separate us. But we couldn’t continue with our illicit rendezvous; it was too difficult. In fact, the whole relationship was becoming untenable and that enraged me. We were adults, having a relationship that would have been acceptable in anybody’s eyes but my parents’. We could not move in together, as leaving my parents’ house an unmarried woman would have hurt the family’s izzat, and possibly been more catastrophic than actually marrying. There was only one way forward: to stay together in a legitimate relationship, we had to stop pussyfooting and get married. I’m not sure either of us really wanted to get married immediately, but we felt we had no choice. Escaping an arranged marriage meant forcing ourselves to have a love marriage.

  Now that Vin was safely married to a respectable Indian doctor, the time had come for me to drop what I had once referred to as my bombshell. I wondered whether I should write a letter and leave it for Mum and Dad, or tell them face to face. I decided to tell Dad that I wanted to marry an Englishman and let him break the news to Mum himself. For weeks I sought the right moment, but there were always distractions. The phone would ring, or the doorbell, or Mum would call Dad to help her in the kitchen. So one Saturday night in September 1987, I made an appointment with my dad.

  ‘Dad, I’d like to speak to you on Tuesday, at about eight o’clock. Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He didn’t ask me what I wanted to talk about. He didn’t even express surprise that I was making an appointment to talk to him. Perhaps he assumed it would be bad news. Perhaps he had willed all those earlier distractions in the hope of avoiding the confrontation we had been heading towards for years.

  In the ensuing days I tried to steel myself. I imagined there would be a huge argument accompa
nied by terrible shouting and tears. Dad was a calm man, not given to wild displays of emotion, but I feared he might lose control, unleash anger he had restrained for years and perhaps even hit me. Or perhaps he and Mum would turn me out of the house, telling me they didn’t recognise me as their daughter anymore. I would spend the night at John’s if that happened.

  Strange as it may seem, I still had my small brown runaway’s suitcase. I had taken it with me when I left home for three years to study, and I’d brought it back when I returned. I was twenty-two years old and I’d never unpacked it. Inside were still all the things I’d stowed in it many years before: a toothbrush, a few clothes, sanitary pads, a pen and the stolen photos. I opened it, looked at the photos and put them back. The letters inside the lid stared up at me: SIOUX. I took out the old clothes and replaced them with new ones, clicked the case shut and slipped it under the bed. I might still need it.

  Despite being a fully grown adult, I didn’t think things through with agonising pedantry as, say, a forty-year-old might: weighing up the pros and cons, balancing the financial cost against the benefit or considering and reconsidering the emotional, moral and ethical fallout of my actions. I thought I’d thought it through, and my youthful enthusiasm would certainly see the project through, but I hadn’t really thought it through properly – with wisdom. I knew this meeting with Dad would be the confrontation to beat all confrontations, but I didn’t know what was going to happen or how I would handle the fallout.

  I understood what it meant to have a love marriage. I understood I would be the first in my family to break the tradition of arranged marriages. I understood that I was putting my interests before those of my parents and my extended family. I was defying my parents’ culture. I understood that if my marriage failed, I alone would be responsible; and that my actions would hurt my parents because they would be the ones who would suffer condemnation from the Indian community. I knew I would have to forgo the warmth of family to pursue my own dreams and I knew that to free myself from my parents’ stranglehold, I also had to throw off their embrace.