Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  When Tuesday evening came, Dad was waiting for me in the dining room at eight. It was an ordinary weekday, but everything after this day would be anything but ordinary for him and me. He wore a look of haggard patience. My heart felt too big for my chest and my mouth was dry. ‘Don’t be scared, don’t be scared,’ I repeated to myself. But I was scared. How do you muster the strength to break your parents’ hearts?

  ‘Dad, I’ve been thinking about this arranged marriage thing,’ I began. ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t want to go through with it. I don’t mean I don’t like the guys you’ve been considering. I mean that I don’t actually want an arranged marriage.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t have to get married straight away. We will wait until you are ready.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean. I mean I don’t want an arranged marriage – ever. I want to choose someone myself.’

  ‘That’s all right as well, you just tell us who he is, and we can make the necessary arrangements.’ How peculiar that we were conversing in the same language yet we were so far apart in understanding. Was Dad deliberately facing away from reality?

  ‘I’ve already met the person,’ I said. I couldn’t bear to say the word ‘man’ or ‘boy’ in his presence. Ludicrously, it seemed inappropriate.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked. I thought I heard a note of mild but invariable irritation in his tone. I hesitated momentarily before I spoke.

  ‘His name’s John. He’s English. I’m sorry.’ Even as I said the words I felt cheap. Ashamed that I was not a virgin. Chastity is meant to be an Indian woman’s most priceless possession and the loss of it to anyone other than her husband equates, mythologically speaking, to the eternal damnation of her soul. I looked down at the tablecloth so Dad could not sense my writhing discomfort, and waited for his response. He was silent, and he stayed silent for so long I thought he could hear my own shrill thoughts: ‘Say something. For god’s sake, say something.’

  ‘Is it the same John I met in this house?’ he finally said. I wondered which John he was talking about. I didn’t look him in the eye; I couldn’t bear to. Then I suddenly remembered he was talking about my old friend John. John who had sat smoking in the living room all those years ago. The John whom Dad had met by a mistake, when he was meant to meet Paul the drummer.

  ‘No, not him,’ I said, my shame multiplying exponentially, as if there had been many men in my life. Dad fell silent again and still I could not raise my eyes to look at him. We sat like that for some time, until I couldn’t take it any longer. When I finally looked up, uncertainly, and saw my father’s noble, angular face, he looked tired, so tired and thin. His gaze was fixed on me, not in anger, but with crushing despair in his eyes. He seemed, all of a sudden, so far away. His tears fell onto his light grey trousers, spreading into small dark drops of parental anguish.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry,’ I said, and burst into childish tears.

  Later that evening, when he told Mum, she lashed out and tried to strike me, but Dad held her back until she fell to her knees and broke down. She beat her head with her clenched fists and cried deep, breathy sobs of disappointment and pain.

  From that day on, everything changed. At first Mum cried a lot. Vin and Dinesh, who lived in a neighbouring town, would call over and try to console her day after day, but her tears seemed endless. Through ajar doors I would hear them talking gently to Mum, soothing her frayed nerves, trying to retrieve the cheery, optimistic mother she had once been, celebrating her enthusiasm for life through her unfailing commitment to festive religious ceremonies. If I entered the room, they would all look at me with expressions of disgust and consternation.

  Raja, whose existence till then had been very much at the fringes of home life since he spent so much time with his friends, re-entered the family fold and unleashed his anger at me for the misery I had wrought. ‘Look what you’ve done to Mum and Dad,’ he roared. At the age of fifteen he was a towering figure of mounting testosterone and self-righteous ire.

  I learnt to stay out of people’s way, retreating to my bedroom when there were others in the house. John was my only source of comfort. We met occasionally, but it was mostly on the phone that I kept him abreast of the tumult at home. My parents never asked to meet him. Eventually I arranged for John to visit us for tea one afternoon. He dressed smartly in a suit and tie. Dad and he spoke civilly to each other, mostly discussing John’s studies. Dad asked him a little about his family but Mum stayed very much in the background and barely said a word. John didn’t stay long, perhaps three-quarters of an hour. After he left my parents didn’t make any comments. It was as if he had never been there.

  As the days passed, communication between me and the rest of the family simply ceased to exist in any meaningful form. It was the beginning of our Ice Age. If I met Mum in the hallway, she would walk past me without looking at me or saying anything. If our eyes ever met, she would look away quickly. Her lips seemed permanently pursed. Her once open features were now a closed knot.

  Communication between Dad and I became perfunctory, and Raja barely spoke to me. I was in a hitherto unknown zone: I was living in the same house as my brother and my parents, yet I was alone and shunned. I had tried to brace myself for frightful shouting and possible expulsion from the house, but what I now confronted was a crushing silence. I had not expected to be cold-shouldered within the warm confines of family. They had sent me to Coventry and I didn’t know how to get back.

  A week or so later Dad took me by surprise: ‘Your mother and I have no say anymore. So, go. Go and marry whoever you want. There’s nothing we can do about it.’ He spat the words out bitterly and I was unsure what he expected me to say or do.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want to get married without your blessing.’

  ‘Marry who you want,’ he snapped. ‘But you don’t have my blessing.’

  ‘Well then, I will carry on living under your roof until I do.’

  He looked at me sharply and left the room.

  Three months went by and still Mum didn’t speak a single word to me. It was crippling. She had sent out Lady Capulet’s directive: ‘Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee.’ If she wanted to communicate with me, she passed messages via my dad, as if he were her official spokesman. Every night she made dinner and set the table for Dad, Raja and herself but not me. I stayed in my bedroom until I smelt the aroma of her cooking and heard the others going into the dining room to eat, and then I would skulk down the stairs and lay my own place at the table.

  Dinner was always in total silence, not like the old days when Vin and I would indulge in uncontrollable giggling fits and Dad would glare at us and make threats about how we wouldn’t be laughing so much in our husband’s houses. Obviously, Mum didn’t want me to join them for dinner each night, but I silently insisted on having my presence noticed, if not acknowledged. Itwas a truly unbearable existence – familial persecution, day after day. I wondered how long we could continue this charade.

  Autumn had come and gone. Winter had already settled, and though red robins perched on the garden fence, they never sat long. It was dark by about four in the afternoon and the evenings dragged interminably. A week or so before Christmas, Dad addressed me in Punjabi: ‘Your mother and I are going to pay a visit to a Hindu temple. We would like you to come with us.’ I immediately agreed. Who cared for what purpose, he had spoken to me.

  That weekend Mum, Dad and I drove to a suburb on the outskirts of London to a gaily coloured temple decorated in tinsel. Shoeless, people were milling around as a holy man chanted mantras on a raised platform in the central part of the temple. The repetitive, baritone chants, like the heady incense, were mesmerising. We didn’t spend long there. Mum made an offering at what I presumed was a shrine, where two colourful statues of Hindu deities stood. I had been inside a suburban temple before, but Mum and Dad were not overtly religious in that th
ey made regular visits. In our house a temple was only visited in times of crisis or thanks.

  After Mum and Dad had said their prayers, we drove to someone’s house. Dad briefed me on what we were doing: ‘We’re going to visit a priest to talk to him. He is an old man; some say he was a pilot in his youth.’

  ‘A pilot?’ I said, wrinkling my nose. ‘What kind of pilot?’

  ‘We don’t know. But he is an old man and he might speak to you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  When we entered the house, an old woman greeted us at the door and offered us tea. The living room had been converted into a mini temple of sorts. There was no furniture, save for a couple of armchairs that had been pushed against a wall to create space. A white sheet was spread on the carpet and a small group of middle-aged Indian women sat on the floor listening to a holy man who was sitting cross-legged in the lotus position before them. He was bare-chested apart from a saffron-coloured cloth wrapped around his lower half with the loose end thrown over one shoulder. He had long dark hair that fell to his shoulders and a dark, brushed beard. His skin was as fair as a Caucasian’s but his dark eyes were unmistakably Indian. He certainly didn’t look like an old man. Aged thirty-five, tops, I guessed. I imagined him piloting a jumbo jet in his saffron garb.

  He stood up when my parents entered the room and led them to another room while I waited in what I assumed was the temple part of the house. The women on the floor gave me a welcoming smile and I joined them. Mum and Dad were gone for no more than about ten minutes. When they re-emerged, Dad called me over and ushered me into the room with the pilot guru. Dad closed the door behind him as he left me with him. There was brown and cream chequered lino on the floor. The guru was sitting at a formica table with four chairs around it. He gestured for me to sit down.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked in English.

  ‘Sushila.’

  ‘Your parents are troubled.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said nervously. I had no idea what was going on. I wondered if he was going to give me a religious telling-off.

  ‘I have spoken to them and told them all will be well in February. What must be, must be. They have nothing to fear. You too have nothing to fear.’ He opened a carved wooden box on the table beside him and took out a small brown bead and a silvery ring. ‘This ring is for you to wear.’ He handed it to me and I placed it on my little finger ‘Take this bead, also. It has a small hole. Your mission is to thread it. Be patient as you try.’

  I took the bead and examined it. It was about half the size of a pea and had a tiny, barely visible hole in it. ‘It is time for you to go now,’ he said, leading me out of the room to where Mum and Dad were waiting.

  We drove home in silence, bewildered silence on my part. I rolled the bead around in my hand all the way, wondering about the significance of February; wondering what we had achieved. For a week I tried to thread the bead. A thin chain I had was far too thick. Even the finest needle in the house was too thick. Cotton thread lacked the stiffness it needed to get through the hole. Fishing line might have done the trick, but I didn’t have any. After several exasperating attempts, I opened my bedroom window and flung it out as far as I could.

  It’s hard to know what my parents were thinking, but many times I found my mum sitting alone, staring out of the window at the park opposite the house, elbow on the table, chin resting on her palm. My parents had sought guidance at the temple because they were lost. Things had been certain once, but now all was filled with doubt. Mum and Dad felt the tectonic plates of their lives shifting, but they didn’t yet know what the new landscape would look like, or their role within it, and it frightened them.

  One day, Dad came home with a bundle of papers. They were application forms for civil service jobs. Jobs within the tax office, specifically. Jobs like the one he had. Of course, I still dreamt about being a journalist, but I had no idea how to realise that dream. There were three million unemployed people in Britain, so the chances were that there would be hundreds of people ahead of me in the queue. Dad suggested I apply for a job at the tax office.

  ‘I don’t want to work in the tax office,’ I protested.

  ‘Why are you so confident they will offer you a job? Why don’t you fill in the application form and see what happens? You need a steady income.’

  ‘But I can’t work in the same office as you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be in the same office as me. I work in income tax. This is an application for the inheritance tax department.’

  ‘The death tax?’

  ‘Fill in the form. You have nothing to lose.’

  So I sent off the application and they called me for an interview.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to work in tax.’

  ‘Why don’t you attend the interview? You have nothing to lose. They may not even offer you the job.’

  So I went to the interview and they offered me the job.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to be an inheritance tax officer, taking money from the dead.’

  ‘You have no other job offers. Why not take the job till something better comes along. At least you will have a decent income. You need a decent income.’

  So I took the job. I went from helping car salesmen lie to hounding the relatives of the dead for money. But my home life didn’t change. Mum continued to ignore me. We still passed each other in the house, eyes downcast. We ate at the same table without a word. We folded each other’s dry laundry and left it in neat piles. I tried to talk to her but she simply turned away from me.

  In total, Mum didn’t speak to me for five months. It doesn’t matter how old you are, the withdrawal of parental love is always agony. I couldn’t undo what I had done. Words, once uttered, cannot be retrieved. I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted. Then, in the first week of February, while winter stubbornly hung all around, Dad came and sat with me at the dining table where I was reading the newspaper. He and I were the only ones in the house.

  ‘We have all suffered,’ he said in Punjabi. I looked at him, unsure of what to expect next. ‘Your mother and I are not young anymore. We cannot be happy unless you are happy. And you will not be happy until you are married to John.’ It was the first time he had spoken John’s name. He stood up, looked down at me and then placed one hand on my head with the softest touch. I felt the warmth of his palm. ‘You are my child. I want you to be happy. Marry John. You have my blessing, now and forever. Live long.’

  ‘Thank you, Dad.’

  He left the house, maybe to get some fresh air, I don’t know. I went upstairs to my room, buried my head in my pillow and cried.

  What was it that Mickey Rooney said? ‘Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t wasted the whole day.’

  Had there not been a legal minimum period of twenty-one days to give ‘notice of intention to marry’, John and I might have simply walked into the local registry office and married the morning after Dad gave his blessing. My parents didn’t think I was wasting the whole day. They thought I was wasting my whole life. They didn’t actually say so, but I could tell by the way their faces refused to smile.

  So John and I were forced to take twenty-one days to plan our wedding. He was busy buying a house in London for us to live in and I had nuptial arrangements to make. By choosing my own husband I had, under the Indian system, forgone my right to a grand ceremony organised by parents, so it fell to me to make preparations for the big day – or perhaps I should say the small day.

  I bought a packet of pre-printed wedding invitations from the local newsagent and sent them to our friends. I had an old pair of white shoes. So I replaced the laces with satin ribbons and bought a knee-length wedding dress in my lunch hour. Done.

  Well, overdone actually. The biggest mistake was the wedding dress. It was what could be described as a modern 1980s wedding dress: knee-length, ivory silk, hexagonal neckline, leg-o’-mutton sleeves, fitted bodice, dropped waist, puff-ball skirt. I wasn’t just a fashion vi
ctim, I was a fashion casualty. Unlike other Western brides, I was not surrounded by a clucking clutch of hens advising me on something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. I assumed that because I was not an Indian bride I must be an English bride in white. There were simply no cross-cultural signposts for me to read.

  I hired John a dark morning suit that he wore with a wing-collar shirt. He looked like a cross between a stage actor from a 1920s movie and Count Dracula. I don’t like to dwell too long on how we appeared standing next to each other.

  Naturally, there was no dowry for me, but kindly Dad had booked lunch at The Winning Post – a local hotel up the road from our house. I didn’t deserve, and nor did I expect, any gold jewellery from my parents. But some traditions are almost impossible to relinquish. As a gesture, they did give me a gold chain and John a gigantic gold ring that any gangster would have worn proudly. And so that John and I had rings to exchange on the day, he sold his much-loved fretless bass guitar and bought me a diamond-cluster ring.

  I wish I could say that 26 Februray 1988 was the happiest day of my life. But the temperature never rose above five degrees Celsius, which is about as warm as my parents’ hearts could get that day. Mum wore one of her oldest saris: a turquoise and orange checkered one that she had told me countless times she disliked, and Dad wore a dark suit with a red tie. Raja didn’t turn up because he said he had to sit a test at school. Dinesh looked suitably smart. Vin, who wore a lilac silk sari, was the only one who had a remotely celebratory tone to her attire, and even that was subdued by Indian standards.

  John’s parents looked exceptionally smart and were courteous and friendly. They were outside their normal comfort zone and they did their best. They were happy for their son and that was the most important thing. Altogether, John’s family, my family and a handful of close friends formed a group of about twenty-five people at the registry office, which happened to be on Paradise Road. We were hardly on our way to Eden. Still, life has a funny way of throwing in a dose of poignancy when you least need it. On arrival, everyone was keenly aware of the cross-cultural sensitivities and the stated approval hiding the barely concealed disapproval, and no one knew quite what the etiquette at a mixed marriage was supposed to be. This is what happens when customs are broken: no one knows how to behave anymore. No one knows how to celebrate. No one knows what to say to whom.