Weddings were Amisha’s least favourite thing, having been dragged to several, none of which stood out in her mind, except as a long blur of boring adult talk and greasy food and then the bride crying as they carted her off. It was all so terribly dull, not a thing for her to do, since none of her own cousins was anywhere near her own age, and still at a stage where scampering around the rented metal chairs was the most thrilling entertainment ever discovered. She was, on the other hand, in that interesting place between being one of the grownups, and yet, still being served dinner in the first round.
She found she quite liked the mehendi ceremony, more than she had in the past, especially sitting around in the fickle December sun, with the older young women, friends of her cousin–aunt’s, who made much more fascinating conversation than the knot of aunties where her mother was sitting. One spoke blushingly about a boy to whom her parents had introduced her, the others all hooted and whistled, and they made much of Amisha, adopting her into their fold, almost like a little sister. She had her own little sister, a six-year-old brat called Tulika, but luckily, Tulika was too young and too engrossed in Sunday morning cartoons to have been invited to something as adult as a mehendi ceremony.
There was nothing really remarkable about this wedding, except perhaps the sunrise ceremony, which got many people whining about having to wake up so early, but they all shut up really quickly when the first rays of the sun hit the Taj Mahal, making it glow golden in the background, as the couple exchanged garlands on the roof of a hotel. Amisha remembered being bundled up, a thick blue cardigan over her best salwar kameez, and her sister still grumpy, asking loudly, ‘But why can’t I sleep?’
‘Because you’ll remember this moment when you’re old,’ said their mother, but didn’t force Tulika into her best salwar kameez, letting her stay in track pants and woollen socks instead.
The sight of it, that monument of love, as the priest called it in his perfect, Sanskritized Hindi, waving an arm towards the Taj and the view, like he had personally invented it, coupled with the young love in front of it, yes, that was a moment Amisha would remember. Enough to wonder whether she and Derek should consider being married there, on a cold December morning, holding clay glasses of tea. She dismissed the idea as impractical. Agra had changed in the many years since Aarti was married there, and even if they did consider Agra, there would be everyone to put up, more complaints, and in her mind she had always imagined a low-key beach wedding. As low key as you could get with three hundred guests, of course.
‘Three hundred guests?’ Derek had asked, when they got engaged and she had called her parents excitedly to tell them, and her mother had instantly launched into wedding planning.
‘Well, yeah,’ she said. She was surprised he was surprised. He wasn’t some brand new expat, he’d been to his fair share of Indian weddings and surely, by now, he knew how this worked. She had taken pride in telling her friends that Derek wasn’t like all the goras they encountered around Bombay, no, he was totally acclimatized, unfazed by anything, open to all that his adopted new culture threw at him.
Three hundred really wasn’t that many if you considered that her extended family alone was about a hundred people. Then there were the people who had asked her and her family to weddings, plus some of their family, if they were close, then friends, and significant others of friends, and this was also allowing for his guest list, which wouldn’t be fewer than fifty people, she assumed.
‘Fifty? No way, babe. More like about ten,’ he said, when she told him her calculations.
‘Ten?’ Did he have no friends? No family?
‘Okay, maybe fifteen, at most. Not many people are going to come all the way to India for a wedding. We don’t do that.’
‘Oh.’ She tried not to feel hurt by this, but she couldn’t help feeling like this was a big deal only for her and her family. It was like they had much more to lose, and as much as she tried not to read too much into it, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was a sign about their entire relationship. She, in her own country, with her own wedding, he with the freedom to opt in or out as he chose, always with the lure of ‘home’, his own country’s passport lying, taunting her, in the bottom drawer.
Bombay girlfriends. She had seen enough of them to know what that meant. An expat posted abroad, taking to local culture in the best way possible—by dating a native. Most stuck to girls like her, educated girls, girls shaped by the Western concept of ‘dating’, who would know not to put too much pressure on them, who were okay having sex with them with ‘no strings attached’ and who, in turn, enjoyed the benefits of a global relationship. It didn’t just have to be Bombay, it could also be Delhi or Bangkok or wherever. But, at the end of the day, these foreign men had the choice of going back where they came from, being with someone from their own country, and dismissing whatever they had shared, even if it was for three years, with ‘Oh, when I lived in Bombay and dated this Indian girl’. A good cocktail-party anecdote. Better anecdotes were those who went all in, dating someone from a really conservative family, so they could talk about ‘marriage pressure’ and having to hide things from the girl’s parents and all that. And the girls left behind? Well, they could live with the fact that they were essentially accessories, or a future story, and most found it hard to find an Indian man to be with after that. To be fair, there was a certain number of foreign women who dated Indian men as well, but the men had the upper hand. And she knew so many more mixed-race marriages, where the man was Indian and the woman white. It wasn’t fair, but that was the way it was. She didn’t think she was Derek’s ‘Bombay girlfriend’, but you never knew.
She knew a girl, engaged to be married to an American, who had broken up with her a month before the wedding, citing ‘cultural differences’ as the reason. Everyone knew that girl. She had pretty much dropped off the radar after that, but you saw her at parties once in a while. No one brought it up. The American had gotten married, she heard, to another American, and they now lived in New York City. What if that was she and Derek? What if he came up on her Facebook page in five years, with his blonde toddler and his toothy blonde wife? But her grandmother had always told her that comparing her fortunes to other people’s misfortunes was bad luck, so instead, she took a deep breath, and focused on their upcoming wedding.
She hated too, that everything she knew about Derek, she had come to know from him. There was no context she could apply to him, no seeing him hanging out with old, old friends, or knowing about the school he went to. Even his last name didn’t tell her anything, while hers said so much, about her family’s history, what their ancestors did, even where they’d probably be living and which language they spoke at home.
‘Are these cold feet?’ she wondered. ‘Am I meant to be questioning everything about my relationship?’ What a funny term for marriage anxiety—‘cold feet’. When she thought of cold feet, she thought of her own feet, which were always cold. She loved to sneak them between Derek’s thighs to warm them. He was nice about it, never complained, instead drew her in closer, even in his sleep, so she was tucked under his chin and his arms were wrapped around her. Cold feet made her feel safe, because she had an excuse to be close to him. It was rare, because Bombay was usually warm, but the odd nights when the monsoon was incessant outside, and the fan was on low, and she forgot to pull out her only cotton quilt, she liked to snuggle. Face to face, well, face to chest anyway. Cement feet, then. Feet that were heavy. Why was she doubting this when she was so close to getting everything she wanted?
It was funny, but in the two years they had gone from ‘casually dating’ to ‘engaged’ she had never had a chance to meet his family. In India, this would be unheard of. As soon as she was serious enough about someone that marriage might enter the picture, she had introduced them to her family. Her family was slightly more lax about these things than others; elsewhere, if you introduced someone to your parents, you had to marry them. No two ways about it. But even though Derek had gone home to Aust
ralia a couple of times since they had been together, the timing had just never been right for her to join him. And he hadn’t gone since they got engaged, so the first time she would meet his parents, his three older brothers, their various offspring and spouses and girlfriends and whoever, would be at their wedding. That didn’t feel right. Even though her mother had said they should have an ‘intimate’ dinner before, just for that purpose, it still felt weird. If Derek were Indian, her mother and his mother would be planning this together. Derek’s parents had kindly offered to pay for the entire thing, weddings could cost a lot of money, and with the current exchange rate, they had a lot more cash. They had suggested it to Derek, who had passed it on to Amisha, who passed it on to her own parents, who were indignant.
‘As if we can’t pay for a wedding,’ sniffed her mother.
‘It’s going to cost loads, Mummy,’ said Amisha, patiently, but her mother wouldn’t have it. In the end, they had compromised on going halves, and all this through Amisha and Derek, the two sets of parents not even so much as calling each other beforehand.
It bothered Amisha. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
At least Derek had met her family, she thought, sighing. With her parents, the meeting had been slightly more formal, but twenty-three-year-old Tulika and Derek had got on like a house on fire. She was glad about that. Tulika and she weren’t particularly close, but she was her sister, and it was nice seeing Derek around her. Tulika had visited Bombay several times, talked about getting a job there, and Derek had, unprompted, told Amisha their new house had to have a separate bedroom, just for Tulika.
That was nice.
Also, when she was new to her relationship, Tulika had visited, and had happened to get very drunk with some old school friends that same night. Amisha had been sitting up waiting for her to get home, and Derek had not only come over to keep her company, but stayed after Tulika staggered in, reeking of vodka. He had held back her hair while she vomited, and then helped Amisha put her to bed. The next morning, Tulika had emerged, sheepish and sullen, and following Derek’s cue, Amisha hadn’t said a word to her about the previous night. Derek offered her fried eggs for her hangover, Amisha gave her a glass of water and a Disprin, and the whole matter was forgotten, she thought, until Tulika was ready to leave. Then she threw her arms around Amisha and said, ‘Thanks for being so cool about the other night.’ It was rare for Tulika to be affectionate and even rarer for her to say things like that, so Amisha treasured it, and chalked that down to another wonderful thing Derek had brought to her life—an actual, proper relationship with her sister.
She knew, from him, that he was close to his own siblings. ‘Four boys!’ he had told her, the first time she’d asked. ‘Can you imagine life for my poor mother? And we’re all stairstep children too, that’s one born a year after the other. At one point, she had to deal with four kids under six!’ And he worshipped his mother. ‘We all do,’ he said. ‘She’s so small, and she was the only girl in the house. She often borrowed my cousin, Janie, to come and stay with us, because she wanted another girl in there.’ Four boys, two dogs (Alexander and Hannibal), and a small house in Sydney. It sounded awful to Amisha, but Derek was proud of his family, that his father had started out as a bank clerk and made his way up to manager; that his mother was always home for the boys; that his brothers were all talented in various fields (Nigel was a dentist, and played the drums very well; Neil was a paediatrician, and had won surfing competitions; John was a pilot, and that was cool enough so he didn’t need a second hobby, but he also collected art. And Derek, who called himself the talentless one, but who, she knew, dreamed about being a writer, even in his finance job.)
The brothers had a regular email chain going, which they kept adding to; Derek had pictures up of his two nephews and his niece, whom he adored—all this just made her feel even odder about not meeting them. They were so familiar to her, mostly because of her probing questions, Derek didn’t really volunteer much information, and she had talked to Neil on video chat, once or twice, when he came online to speak to Derek and she happened to be in the same room. But Derek could answer questions about his siblings down to the last detail, like what their drink was or how they liked their coffee, if they liked it at all, and she barely knew these things about Tulika, and yet, he had met Tulika and she hadn’t met his people, and it was unreasonable, because they were in a whole different country, but they could have made the effort and flown down to Bombay, especially if they were as close as Derek claimed.
11
Daddy’s Girl
Yusuf was forty-four, and exactly twenty years older than me. When I say ‘exactly’, I’m not even rounding off. He was born on the same day I was, twenty years earlier. His twentieth birthday was the day I was born. He celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday in Kanyakumari, having spent the previous two months travelling around south India, while I was excitedly blowing out the candles on a cake shaped like a princess. And so on. His age stretched, like the years between us, mocking me with all the life he had lived while I was still coming to terms with being alive. He had been married for fifteen years, while I was in school, and around the time I was in college, he got divorced. He had an eight-year-old son, whom he shared custody of with his ex-wife, who spent her time between Delhi and Bombay, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. When I met him, his son was living with her. I liked the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the salt-and-pepper of his hair, even the gentle middle-aged slump around his waistline. It wasn’t terrible, but it spoke of the life he had had before me.
He treated me well. I hadn’t actually been accustomed to that kind of treatment before. When he called me, often when I was on my way back home from some debauchery or another, he’d sound worried until I was home and in bed. I liked the way his forehead furrowed when he was trying to make sense of something, and the way he looked wearing his reading glasses. I liked the way he stroked my hair after we made love, I liked the way he placed his palm firmly and securely on the small of my back when we were out, announcing to the whole world that I was spoken for and taken care of.
I am normally a prickly person, I shrug away from too obvious public embraces, I don’t like it when someone tries to boss me around. I am all about being independent, but with Yusuf, it was less like he was trying to change who I was, and more about just the way he was. He wasn’t jealous, I’d sit around in shorts in front of my male friends, and he’d be okay with that. He trusted me, and he wanted to take care of me. I found that combination irresistible. My previous boyfriends were, despite first impressions, always so quick to feel insecure. I like guys, I’m not going to deny it, have never been very good with girls, and I’m in my element when I’m in a group of all men. I find they bring out a side of me that is truly me. ‘One of the boys’ is how I describe myself, and my other boyfriends couldn’t handle that after a while, even though that was the very reason they had liked me in the first place.
I grew up with a brother, in a large joint family, my father and his two brothers shared the house, which was three storeys. We got the ground floor, because my dad’s the eldest, and each brother had two kids, both boys. I was the only girl, and that meant I grew up a little spoilt, I guess, but also, that I’ve always been able to hold my own with the dudes. Then there’s my daddy complex, we were very, very close, my father and I, well, as close as a thirteen-year-old can be to her father, and then he died, really suddenly, really randomly, of a heart attack. He was a smoker, and he was a large man. This is before exercise got trendy and, being the giant Punjabi joint family that we were, there was always food. Like constantly. Someone or the other was always eating, even if lunch had just got over. My uncles watched their diet pretty quickly after that, and they both tried to step in to help us out, but it wasn’t the same. Especially when we all grew up, and then my second aunt wanted the ground floor for herself, because her older son had just got married and there was a lot of drama. My mother now lives on the top flo
or. I’m actually surprised they didn’t just move her into the barsaati and be done with it, considering how they were, but my mother’s okay. She’s chilled out and doesn’t need that much space.
When and if my brother ever gets married, then there might be a struggle, but we were brought up, after my father’s death, to ask for nothing from our extended family. My mother even made us come inside when she thought we were taking up too much of our uncles’ affections, because she didn’t want their kids to be resentful. My brother has a good job and hopes to buy some property that doesn’t come with a built-in family tree, and relocate the three of us there. I want my mother to sell her share of my father’s property, but she doesn’t want to get into the inevitable court case it’s going to turn into, like in many Delhi joint families, so she’s just staying put. Plus, over the years, she’s grown fond of my aunts, she was the first daughter-in-law, and helped ease the way for the other two. They respect her, but not as much as they respect having a larger home for their kids. It makes me sick.
So, right, daddy issues. It’s the first thing I told Yusuf about me when he asked me out. He was a friend of my producer’s, and I had just come off camera, and he looked at me and smiled, and his eyes crinkled up. He has a lovely smile. Even if I hadn’t liked him, I would’ve liked his smile. I didn’t like him then, I didn’t even know him, but something about those crow’s feet—so sexy!—made me want to get to know him a little better. I didn’t think I actually would, it was a random thought, along with ‘Maybe I should pick up some biscuits for tea on my way home.’
Cold Feet Page 9