by Ira Trivedi
From a live-in relationship to an arranged marriage was an extreme reaction. Suketu with his wild hair, listening to jazz music, strumming his guitar, smoking a joint, was this just a modern facade? Did he truly feel like having an arranged marriage? Who really knew. All one could really say was that India was changing at a break-neck pace, and it was quite a ride for someone like Suketu. It was a constant yo-yo between the past and the present, between East and West, between the glittery new ideals on TV and the dusty, outdated ones of earlier generations. I guess it was to be expected that he would be a little, if not, highly, confused.
That night as I lay in bed listening to the rain pounding on my window, I couldn’t get Suketu and Garima out of my mind. On a whim, I decided to call Garima, though we hadn’t spoken since I’d fired her. She told me that she’d moved to Bangalore temporarily to live with her new boyfriend. She was taking a sabbatical from her PhD and had quit her teaching job. Her new boyfriend made a lot of money, and she didn’t have much to worry about. She said she really liked it there, and that she was working on a book, also on love, sex, and marriage. She claimed to have found a publisher. I figured she was doing this because she was angry with me for letting her go.
‘What about your career?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want that?’
Garima had seemed so focused on her career, putting it above everything else in life. It seemed very unlike the Garima that I had known to throw it all away for a man. She had seemed determined that these were the mistakes that her mother had made, and that she must not, in any circumstance, make.
‘Well… You know,’ she replied. ‘The old life is waiting for me. I can go back to all of that whenever I want. This new life though, this is something new and exciting, a new city, a new man, a new project. It’s inspiring. Plus, it’s not like I’m marrying him. He isn’t even properly divorced yet.’
I wondered if Garima and Suketu’s liberation came from a true desire for freedom or was it that they were just rebelling against the strict society they were brought up in. After so many years of repression, had they gone off on an extreme tangent?
OPEN MARRIAGE
When Suganda met Shammi she was a virgin. Not only was she a virgin, she had never kissed a man, or even held a male hand, save her younger brother’s, which her parents began reprimanding her for when he turned fifteen.
Suganda’s parents had found Shammi’s profile in the matrimonial section of The Times of India, and a week after the Sunday ad came out, Suganda was sitting face-to-face with a shy, fresh-faced man of twenty-one. She had turned eighteen just a week ago, and her parents were anxious to get her married. Suganda knew that the things that mattered to her in a man didn’t matter to her parents. When she had presented her father with her criteria he had laughed at her, and had told her gently that she had a lot to learn in life. What mattered to her most was that the man be handsome and tall (she stood at 5’6” herself, well above the average height for an Indian woman). It was also important that he rode a motorcycle, and that he enjoyed Bollywood movies with the same fervour that she did (she hadn’t missed a first day first show of any Salman Khan film for the past five years). To her parents, what mattered most was their reputation in the Jat community that they were part of, and their wealth, which they assessed based on the acreage of their land holdings and the size of their house. Suganda was the older, prettier of two sisters, fair as fresh milk, and her parents had high hopes for her. Shammi, their latest find, seemed to fit the bill. His family had significant land holdings in Haryana, even though they did not have an active family business. Shammi was a recent graduate of the Haryana University and held a BA in Finance. He was hoping to set up a shop selling imported perfumes, CDs, and electronics in Delhi.
Shammi was the first and last boy that Suganda had ‘seen’ for marriage. She only saw him once before their wedding day, in the living room of Shammi’s parents’ home in Rohtak, Haryana. Much to her delight, he was quite handsome, even though he was of wheatish complexion. He had a head of glossy hair settled with heavily scented pomade, nicely shaped eyebrows, a well-shaped nose (this came as a relief to her because Jats were infamous for their hook-noses), and though he wasn’t particularly tall, he more than made up for it by the width of his chest. She couldn’t get as good a look as she would have liked to because she couldn’t stare at him openly in front of his parents. She was expected to be the demure, shy bride, with her eyes cast down—this only helped her get a detailed view of Shammi’s footwear. The only time she got to see Shammi’s face was when she was sent to sit with him in the corner of the same living room, so that they could ‘get to know each other’. This lasted all of ten minutes after which they were summoned back.
Suganda was not the first girl that Shammi had seen for marriage. He had been looking at girls for the past six months now. His family had seen about a dozen girls and had shortlisted six for his approval. He had rejected all six. Only four of them were appropriately fair-skinned for him (and he could tell the difference between make-up fair, powder-fair and real fair) and not all of them were well endowed enough for his liking. There was one woman who had been well endowed, but she had been well endowed all over and he didn’t like fat women. He took his own body seriously, doing his chest and bicep exercises daily. His keen sense of observation informed him that all Indian ladies gained weight after marriage, and if this was her situation at her most nubile time, he only dreaded what would come later. Suganda, though, was adequately fair, slim, and he gleefully observed that she had a generous bosom.
They were married two months later, and Shammi used the dowry money that he got from Suganda’s parents to put down a deposit on an apartment in North Delhi, and much to Suganda’s delight, he bought a Hero Honda motorcycle.
Eleven years from the day of their marriage, much has changed in the lives of Shammi and Suganda. Shammi never got around to opening his store, though Suganda tells me that he tried many things, imp-ex (import-export), real estate, furniture and upholstery, but nothing ever really worked out. As the years went by, Shammi realized he was passionate about music and had taken various DJ-ing courses. He loved English music, especially pop, and he was now the in-house DJ at a newly opened Gurgaon nightclub.
Though Shammi’s career didn’t turn out the way he had planned, something financially fortuitous did happen to him. The price of the agricultural land that his family owned in Gurgaon increased exponentially every year, as thousands of acres of agricultural land was sold to real estate developers in the hopes of solving the housing crunch that Delhi faced.
Shammi’s family was one of the hundreds of farmer families who benefited from the escalation of prices of agricultural land; they sold their land which was added to a land bank and promptly converted into a gargantuan 500-apartment building township, of which his family were promised five three-bedroom apartments upon completion. Of these five apartments, three were given to Shammi. Today, the substantial rental income that Shammi and Suganda receive from these apartments sustains their lifestyle, paying for all their expenses, allowing them to save enough to feel responsible.
In these eleven years, the world around them had changed. Gurgaon, a sleepy village where once turbaned farmers tilled the land, where water buffaloes wallowed in the shallows of the Damdama Lake, where cows and goats roamed free in the sepia-toned landscape, has expanded into a metropolis of colossal highways, fluorescent SEZs, and gated apartment buildings. The Haryana that they grew up in seems so lost that at times they feel like it may never even have existed. Suganda drives a golden Honda car. She had never imagined that she would be in the driver’s seat, and that too in her own vehicle. The knick-knacks that Shammi strove to smuggle into India, and so much more are available in the hulking malls neighbouring their apartment complex. Their children go to school in a neat, yellow school bus; Shammi and Suganda both remember the bullock cart that took them to school. Life today has a glitter that it never had before.
Fortunes, finances, and land d
eals aside, perhaps the most critical change that has taken place in the lives of Shammi and Suganda, besides the birth of their now six-year-old twin boys, Ram and Shyam, is the change in their selves. Suganda can’t imagine what she had been back then, an inexperienced young girl who made painful love to a man she had only known for a few hours. Shammi can’t believe that he was once a foppish young man who oiled his chest and whose life-long dream was to start a shop selling women’s perfumes.
At first glance, Suganda and Shammi seem like an ordinary young couple, somewhat gilded by the prodigious change of urbanization, but they have a secret that lifts them out of the ordinary—almost a decade after their arranged marriage, they have agreed to live in an open marriage.
In India, where marriage is sacrosanct, an open marriage is an outrageous arrangement, but I have observed from the prolific online advertisements, chat groups and hearsay, that it is happening more and more across all strata of society.
Shammi and Suganda had no option but to get married. For both of them it was a mandatory step into adulthood, and they only began exploring their sexuality after their marriage. Shammi and Suganda married at a young age, burdened by the social definition of marriage, and of what they were expected to be, but the world around them had changed so much that they found it difficult to be living with the antique conventions of their youth. Like Shammi and Suganda, there are millions of people out there who were married young to partners of their parents’ choice, and as they came of age so did the world around them though marriage remained important for the sake for their families.
In India, marriage has important legal and social dimensions, and the married couple continues to be the legally recognized unit for aspects such as property ownership, succession etc. There is also a strong social stigma against children not born into marriage. Though there has been a loosening of norms around relationships other than marriage, there is at the same time a continuing emphasis on marriage.
I meet Suganda at her apartment. She is in the midst of launching her own fashion label and I am overwhelmed by the chaos. The twins are clinging furiously to each other, screaming at the tops of their lungs, and the teenage maid who couldn’t have been a day over thirteen is on the verge of tears. Suganda is the picture of rage as she yells at the tailor who has ruined an outfit. Most aggravating, though, is her Blackberry that goes off on regular intervals, playing the popular Black Eyed Peas song ‘I Gotta Feeling’. And then, just as quickly as it had started, the storm passes (though it returns at regular intervals). The kids are absorbed in the jetsam of my handbag, the tailor has walked out of the apartment, abandoning the blouses, and the battery of the Blackberry has finally (and thankfully) run out of juice. Suganda is now ready to talk.
When Suganda was married, she was fresh out of college with a degree in Mass Communications from Panipat University. She never actually went to college though, she simply showed up for her exams and paid off the admissions officer. She had a flair for design and had been much too busy helping her cousins prepare their wedding trousseaux. On the year-round carousel of weddings, she had no time to attend classes. Today, Suganda has turned her passion for clothes into a busy business. She designs and tailors salwaar-kameez and saris for a clothing store located in one of the neighbouring malls dedicated to weddings. She has now decided to launch her own ‘designer label’ and has named it ‘Suggi’ after her name Suganda. She has converted one of the three bedrooms in her apartment into a manufacturing unit, where two tailors sit at sewing machines, stitching the florid fabric into designs that I observe she pulls off the internet and from fashion magazines.
Suganda speaks to me candidly about her open marriage. Both she and her husband have affairs but remain committed to each other. They are both open-minded individuals in creative fields and an open relationship allows them to explore connections with other people that they never had a chance to experience when young.
It all started three years ago when Suganda found incriminating text messages on Shammi’s phone. At the same time she had found herself insanely attracted to one of their tenants, a 6’2” young American whose hair was as golden as the mustard that grew on her parents’ farm, and whose eyes were as blue as the cloudless summer sky. When she found the SMSs on her husband’s phone, she didn’t feel anger or sadness as she thought she would. Instead she felt interminable relief that she was not the only one who was having wayward thoughts.
She wasn’t sure how Shammi would respond to her adultery; after all, he was an Indian man. But she also knew that he was more open-minded than their fathers. Perhaps Shammi would be able to accept it, especially if she accepted his misdemeanours.
‘One day I confronted him about the messages and he told me that he liked a girl in his nightclub, but only sexually. I told him that I had romantic feelings towards John. I was scared at first, you never know with men. But he just simply shook his head and told me that he understood. I am not sure exactly when we came to our open understanding. It’s not like we ever sat down and talked about it. He saw me hanging out with John, I saw him with the women from the club. And basically we just sort of got with it,’ says Suganda.
I meet Shammi at the nightclub. It is 6 p.m. in the evening, and he too has just arrived. The air has a sickly-sweet odour of stale alcohol, and the floors are so sticky that each step of mine sounds like a thunderous rip. I immediately like Shammi. He is a soft-spoken man with kind, smiling eyes. He has a hard body that speaks of many hours spent at the gym. He is wearing a faded black tank top with a pair of fatigues and sports an untrimmed beard. A large eagle tattoo is embossed on a sinewy bicep. He speaks mostly in English and Punjabi and chain smokes a pack of Indonesian clove cigarettes Gudang Garams.
‘Suganda and I were young when we got hitched, yaar,’ he began. ‘We did it for our parents, not for ourselves. We really love each other, but life is all about experiences, and we don’t want to deny that to each other. Life is short, and we both want to live it.’
‘Would you ever consider ending the marriage?’ I ask.
‘No chance!’ he retorts. ‘I love Suggi. She is my best friend. We have grown up together, and I can’t imagine being married to anyone else. Also, I would never break up my family, I love them all too much for that. My affairs are different—they are for masti, for mazaa, not for love.’
I ask him if their friends know about their arrangement. He shrugs, the smile disappearing from his face.
‘Some do. Many found out, you know how gossip travels. Most people are shocked. I don’t care though, our relationship is honest and happy. That is a lot more than most of our friends can say about their marriages. Most people just live through their unhappy marriages lying to each other. The husbands cheat on their wives with cheap women. The wives have no freedom and have affairs with the servants and drivers,’ he says grimacing in disgust.
‘The truth is that ours is a case of modern love,’ he says smiling his infectious smile.
What Shammi tells me is not far from the truth. A survey conducted in 2011 amongst people living in urban India shed some light on extramarital relationships. A whopping 23 per cent men confessed to having an affair as against 8 per cent women. Of these a surprising 37 per cent female respondents said that their spouse knew about their affairs.254 These figures were bolstered by a similar survey by Outlook magazine in which 25.4 per cent people confessed that they have had sex with someone outside of their marriage. (Of these 48.4 per cent of respondents have slept with their friends/batchmates, 14.3 per cent with their colleagues, 11.7 per cent with their neighbours, 9.1 per cent with their spouse’s friends and 5.5 per cent with relatives.)255
I recall my conversation with psychotherapist Dr Vijay Nagaswami, who told me that extramarital affairs were more rampant today than ever before. Extramarital affairs are not a new phenomenon in this country. There are several references, even in the Mahabharata–in the story of Svetaketu, the son of the great sage Uddalaka, whose mother is taken away by a guest for
sexual intercourse. We also find Krishna willing to give his wife and sons to his friends and Karna declaring that he will give his wives and children to the man who can show him where Arjuna can be found. In the Niruttara Tantra as also in other Tantras, it is said that a worshipper will not gain virtues or merit unless he sexually unites with a married woman.256
As society got more rigid, strict monogamy became the norm, especially for women. Today, it appears extramarital affairs happen not with religious sanction, but with moral sanction, sometimes even with the permission of the spouse. In Shammi and Suganda’s relationship there seemed to be a sort of equality, there weren’t glaring double standards that one usually saw in Indian marriages.
To me it seemed that Shammi and Suganda had skipped the normal trajectory of Western-style romance that involves dating, premarital sex and break-ups. They have followed the traditional track of arranged marriage and suddenly veered off-road to enter into a brazen, undefined open marriage. Neither of them seemed to be resentful, but were rather like overgrown teenagers enjoying the youth that they never had the chance to live, their adulthood a zone of adolescent desperation.