Читать книгу For Matrimonial Purposes - Kavita Daswani - Страница 7

The normal religious marriage was and still is arranged by the parents of the couple, after much consultation, and the study of omens, horoscopes and auspicious physical characteristics … (w)hile a husband should be at least twenty a girl should be married immediately before puberty.

The Wonder That Was India by A. L. Basham

My grandmother was married off two days shy of her tenth birthday. My mother found a husband when she was twenty. I thus reckoned that if every generation increased by a decade the acceptable age for marriage, I should have become a wife by thirty.

But at thirty-three, I was nowhere close to being married. And it was this that brought much consternation to all, tainting the joy and inciting hitherto suppressed family politics, at the wedding of my twenty-two-year-old cousin, Nina.

I was at a family wedding in Bombay, the city where I was born and had spent most of my life. My parents and two brothers still lived here, in the same house that I knew as a child, a house conveniently located just minutes from major temples and hotels. Which was a good thing considering how much time they spent at such institutions, attending weddings just like this one. It was always, of course, someone else’s wedding and never my own.

Nina had ‘jumped the queue’ as they all liked to say. She was much younger, and marrying before me. But then, as Nina’s mother pointed out, how long could everyone wait?

I forced myself to smile and look happy. It wasn’t that I was unhappy. It was just that, on this steaming May evening, I was hot and flustered, conscious of the damp fog-grey semi-circles formed by droplets of sweat on the underarms of my sari blouse. I had to press my limbs down against my body so they wouldn’t show against the pale fabric. Both the sari and blouse were creamy whipped pink, like the pearly sheen of the inside of a seashell, or of little girls’ bows. Six yards of the fabric were wrapped, nipped and tucked around my body, making me look – in my estimation – like a blushing eggroll. At least that was what I told anyone who complimented me.

I had been fidgeting all evening with the flowers in my hair. They were faux, bought off a wooden stand on a Bombay street-corner, papery and the size of a fingernail, about a dozen of them pinned into my upswept coiffure. Not exactly my idea of understated chic. But the hairdresser had insisted: ‘Your cousin is getting married! You need some decoration!’

Thankfully understated wasn’t the order of the day here at the Jhule Lal Temple. Nina was about to become a wife in the presence of three hundred people, most of whom she had never met. I felt self-conscious standing there on the sidelines, the older, unmarried cousin, aware that people were glancing over at me – yes, to see what I was wearing, but mostly to detect any hint of pain or jealousy on my face as yet another younger cousin married. I closed my eyes for a second, inhaled, found my centre – the way they taught me to do at my Wednesday evening Hatha yoga class. Then, I lifted up my smile, and made it stay.

‘Your turn next,’ said Auntie Mona, my mother’s second cousin, who was standing next to me. She grinned, revealing a space between her two front teeth the size of East Timor. That gap was considered a sign of good luck. Any Indian face-reader worth his chapatti dinner knew that the wider the space, the greater the fortune. ‘Don’t worry, beti, it will be your turn soon,’ Auntie Mona consoled, patting me on the back. ‘God will listen to your prayers. It’s all karma. Tsk Tsk.’

I allowed her to comfort me, as I had learnt to do all these years, and noted how miraculous it was that my self-esteem wasn’t completely annihilated by now. Since arriving in Bombay a week ago, I had been on the receiving end of many things: advice, sympathy, concern. But mostly, it was pity and consolation. Now, coming from Auntie Mona, these sentiments were delivered with the same gravity as a diagnosis of Lyme disease. My relatives never thought to ask about my interesting and independent life in New York, what I did there, who my friends were, or whether I’d scored a ticket to The Producers while Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane were still in it. Instead, it was an incessant: ‘Why aren’t you married yet?’

I turned towards Nina, who really was the sweetest thing, looking a dream in her wedding sari. This was pink too, but a celebratory pink: deeper, richer, embellished with thick gold, a bridal bonus. The top of her gleaming black hair, parted down the centre, was covered with the same fabric, her smooth white forehead dotted with tiny flecks of red paint in an arched design spliced in the middle by a gold-and-diamond bindi. Her hands, lavishly hennaed, reached up to push back a wisp of hair that had fallen into her half-closed eyes. Nina was praying, and blushing, swooning from the heat. She and her groom were sitting in front of a small bright orange fire, both sets of parents by their side, deep in their own thoughts as our family priest, Maharaj Girdhar, uttered thousands of Sanskrit words that no one but him understood.

The ceremony was about done, and now came my favourite part – when the groom slipped his finger into a pot of sindoor – and traced it down his new wife’s hair-parting. The gesture seemed to say, ‘You’re mine now. We belong to each other.’ He looked at her with something that appeared to be pride mixed with awe. While it might not yet be love, the happiness seemed real, born of gratitude. He also seemed relieved. He had done it; he’d found the perfect bride and the fun could start. Later, they would spend their first night together, and kiss for the first time.

The groom had won Nina’s heart without really trying. She’d fallen for his looks, his height (five feet eleven), his casual, easy-going demeanour. It was an arranged match. They had met twice, and then got engaged. That had been five weeks ago.

The couple stood, poised to garland one another and exchange rings. Nina bowed her head before her new husband, who looked upon her excitedly, like an archaeologist who had just stumbled across some rare artefact and couldn’t wait to examine it. Within seconds, they were surrounded by waves of well-wishers who hugged, kissed, shook hands and leaned in to see up close just how big the necklace was that Nina’s parents had given her. Everybody wanted to know the precise carat weight of the marquise diamond her groom had placed on the slender ring finger of her left hand.

It was time for me to make my way through the pack of people towards the couple. En masse, they smelt of sweat, turmeric, paan leaves and Pantene hair oil. I could detect here and there a whiff of Charlie perfume that I knew had been sitting in someone’s metal Godrej cupboard for fifteen years. I winced for a second, but when I reached them, summoned up all my warmth and goodwill and embraced them.

‘You look gorgeous, honey, I’m so happy for you. God bless,’ I said, kissing Nina’s smooth, warm cheek.

‘Didi Anju,’ she whispered, taking my hand. I loved how she always referred to me as didi – big sister. ‘I said a prayer for you while I was walking around the fire taking my vows. You’ll be next. I asked God, and God always listens to the prayers of brides.’

The pure sweetness of the gesture made me want to cry, but tears here would be misconstrued as a sign of longing and sadness, so I pinched them back. I turned to the groom, and looked up at him. ‘Congratulations, sweetie,’ I said, reaching up to hug him. ‘You look after her.’

I became, as the word didi implied, the generous, solid, single, big sister.

That duty done, I turned and wove my way through the clusters of chattering people who were shuffling out of the hall to a large dining room below. I found my parents in one corner and padded, still barefoot, over to them. Next would come the horror of trying to find my shoes in the pile outside. Bombay weddings were notorious for shoe theft, and I began wondering – belatedly – how good an idea it had been to wear my Dolce & Gabbana mules today.

‘OK, come, let’s go downstairs and eat,’ said my mother, as she automatically adjusted the part of my sari that was coming undone.

My father was mopping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

‘Too damn hot,’ he said. ‘Let’s go downstairs. Maybe it’s cooler there.’

The large air-conditioners rumbled away, blowing frosty air on the long lines of people forming at the buffet table. My father put away his handkerchief, and picked up a plate.

‘OK,’ said my mother, turning to me. ‘Have you seen anyone here you like? Any nice boys?’

‘Mum, I haven’t really been paying attention,’ I replied. ‘I wanted to watch the wedding ceremony properly.’

Again, my mother sighed, and looked around. People carrying plates piled with spicy aubergine and vegetable biryani were starting to fill up the rows of plastic chairs that had been set out.

That’s when she spotted him.

‘Who’s he?’ my mother asked, a finger pointing at a stranger in black across the room. ‘The boy talking to Maharaj Girdhar.’

‘Mum, stop pointing! And how am I supposed to know?’ I was getting testy. This was inevitable, this scouting around for available men at a family wedding. But I was hot and tired, my sari felt like it was coming unwrapped, and, a day away from getting my period, I just wasn’t in the mood. My psychic, had he been there, would have said that I was experiencing a mild form of resentment at Nina’s new matrimonial state, that it had brought up my worst fears about my own future. Because he had been right about such reactions in the past, I decided on the spot that from now on, I’d save the money I’d spent on him for shoes.

But the Great Official Husband-Hunt, as I had come to call it, was well under way. I had been here for several days, and there had been some talk of this boy and that. Tonight, my mother had spotted a real-life prospect.

I turned to look at the man, and I was struck by the extreme shininess of his hair, as if he had emptied an entire bottle of Vitalis oil on to it. He also had one eyebrow. Well, not strictly one eyebrow, but two that merged in the middle. I fought the urge to run home and find my Tweezerman. He wore a black shirt with little shiny translucent stripes running through it, a white short-sleeved undershirt and black trousers. And white socks. There was also a big gold pendant hanging from a chain around his neck, a shiny bracelet and diamond-studded watch. Looking at him, I felt like I was having an eighties moment.

‘Wait a minute,’ my mother instructed, and moved off to consult with Nina’s new mother-in-law. I knew she figured that if the man she saw was not from our side of the family, then he must surely be from the other.

At that precise second, the guy with one eyebrow turned to look at me. My stomach sinking, I saw him lean over and say something to Maharaj Girdhar, who quickly moved to intercept my mother. The two talked quietly for a few minutes, while I stood alone, in my shimmering pinkness, looking around awkwardly. I knew I should be off celebrating and chatting inanely with random family members, but just couldn’t summon up the initiative.

I saw my two younger brothers, surrounded by a gaggle of girlies who were brilliant and shiny in their embroidered saris, dangling earrings and colourful bangles. My brothers were the undisputed Princes William and Harry of this community, albeit somewhat older than the British royals. Anil was twenty-nine and Anand two years younger, and they were the hottest and most eligible boys around. In their Indian silk outfits, both clean-shaven, hair combed neatly back, their smiles revealing perfect teeth and an attitude often described in these parts as ‘happy-go-lucky, easy-coming-easy-going’, they looked as if they’d just stepped off the set of a Listermint commercial. Other, younger, girls on the Great Husband-Hunt were mesmerized by them – as were their pushy mothers. Of course, the fact that the boys stood, one day, to inherit a substantial jewellery and antiques business didn’t hurt their combined appeal. I figured I would go and join them and let the young girls be fawningly nice to me. Always a plus to having an eligible brother or two.

But first I saw my father stepping outside alone, so I followed him.

He was looking over the metal gates surrounding the temple, and out on to the sea. He seemed wistful, perhaps remembering all the family weddings he had attended here, in this very temple – three in the past year alone – and how at each one he had prayed that the next time he came it would be to give his own daughter away.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw me walking towards him, negotiating my way on ridiculously high-heeled shoes that he knew I had spent way too much money on.

‘Fresh air,’ he said, enjoying a rare moment of calm in what had been a wedding-crazed week. ‘All is well. God is great,’ he sighed, pensive and calm.

I paused, then said, ‘It stinks out here. Daddy, this is so not fresh air. You’d have a better chance of finding it standing on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-Seventh. I can see your lungs blackening! Come on, let’s go back in,’ I said, hoping to interrupt his regretful thoughts about me, if that was indeed what preoccupied him.

Back in the temple hall, my mother, beaming, rejoined us.

‘Anju, beti, he’s asked for you. That boy. Maharaj Girdhar said he likes you and wants to meet you. What do you think?’

Part of me, I had to concede, was flattered. It was not every day that a man would look at me across a crowded, overheated room, and decide right off that he wanted to marry me. The last time it happened, I’d been with my girlfriends in a seedy salsa club on Eighth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. There, a man in a polyester pinstriped suit and a handlebar moustache told me he wanted to marry me, right before he threw up in a potted plant. That, pitifully, had been my last proposal.

And that was basically what this was. As loose an expression of interest as it seemed, this was a proposal, no doubt about it.

There was, however, the whole issue of first impressions. The last man I’d dated wore Prada. No gold, no gum. He’d been cool. And he had neat eyebrows. But there certainly had been no proposal forthcoming.

But, here and now, my mother didn’t want to hear about bad dress sense. That was an unacceptable reason to say no.

‘What shall I tell Maharaj?’ she asked me again.

‘Mum,’ I whispered, ‘he looks like he should be on some America’s Most Wanted list.’

‘Anju, be serious!’

‘OK, OK. Where’s he from?’

‘Accra.’

‘As in Accra, Ghana, West Africa?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the hell am I going to do in Accra?’

‘Don’t say hell here, beti. People will hear you. They’ll think you have no manners.’

Mr Monobrow was a vague distant relative of the groom, here to find a wife. He was from a well-to-do family that had made its money in grocery stores, my mother told me.

‘Beti, Maharaj says he’s a very good boy. Very good family. Plenty of money. At least meet him, no?’

‘I’m sure he’s perfectly nice, Mum, but really, I can’t imagine living in Accra. I mean, aren’t there military coups there every five minutes? And he just seems, you know, a bit kind of uninteresting. I can’t see that we’d have anything in common.’

My mother gave me that familiar look: the super-sized frustration-annoyance combo, with a side order of impatience thrown in.

‘Anju, really, sometimes I think you have been in Umrica too long.’ She sighed, and returned to the priest, who was waiting for an answer. She went to tell him they would think about it. In Indian-parent parlance, that meant she needed a day or two to convince me.

Mr Monobrow, in the meantime, had sidled off to the buffet table, with a short, plump woman who was probably his mother. I went off and found Namrata, Nina’s eighteen-year-old sister, who had been given gift-holding duty.

‘Hey, sweetie, what’s up?’ I asked.

‘Nothing, didi. Just so tired. My feet are really paining me,’ Namrata replied. She was toting a Singapore Duty Free Stores plastic bag filled with pretty envelopes, little silk purses and the odd velvet box, all containing cash, gold coins and jewellery.

‘How are you, didi? Having a good time?’ she asked.

Namrata was, like her sister, wholesome and good-natured. She reminded me of Britney Spears in her pre-sex siren days, all perky and popular, but minus the cropped tops and mini-skirts. Like her newly married sister, Namrata too could sing – from Hindi film songs to religious bhajans. She had learnt how to pickle lemons and fry papads perfectly. And with her soft, fair, plump complexion, she was every Indian male’s dream-wife. She looked a vision tonight, in a floaty lilac embroidered gagara-choli. She was being primed; her mother was already on the lookout for son-in-law number two. But Namrata was also bright and funny, not a cream-puff like so many of the other girls in this room, so I ran the Monobrow-dilemma by her.

‘You see that guy over there?’ I motioned to him. ‘He told Maharaj Girdhar, who told Mummy, that he’s interested in me. But he’s from Accra. What am I going to do in Accra?’

Namrata glanced over at him, and a knowing smile spread across her pretty face.

‘You know what it is, right, didi? In your baby-pink sari, you look like a marshmallow. All soft and sweet and fluffy and nothing inside but air. That’s what he would want in a wife, don’t you think?’

Two days later, I spent the morning with my mother at Bhuleshwar market. If there were such a thing as an urban purgatory, this would be it. Strings of small shops lined a road that wasn’t quite a road. Cars were stalled every two feet by a dead cow, a sleeping homeless person or hawkers selling food. They heaved around worn wooden carts filled with plastic buckets and stainless steel forks, weaving their way in and out of the hundreds of people crammed throughout this smelly, fly-infested labyrinth.

We embarked from the quiet and cool sanity of our white Ambassador car and joined the approximately seventeen million other pedestrians. The only way to really ‘do’ Bhuleshwar was to walk it. The stench of cow dung in the heat was overwhelming; sweaty people pressed against me. Scrawny men with paan-stained teeth heckled and cat-called as we stopped intermittently at a stall here and there to shop. My mother chastised me for wearing embroidered capri pants and a slightly cropped white Martin Margiela T-shirt. ‘You should have put on a cotton salwar kameez, beti. Now they all know you are a foreigner.’

The purchases, however, were worth the horrors. I bought thick copper bangles, packets of bindis and little painted clay dishes that Indian families use to hold devotional flames. I’d give those to my best friend Sheryl for her Tribeca loft where they would look great as trinket boxes. We selected a bale of woollen shawls, and countless yards of coloured silks that Marion, Erin, Kris and the other girls from work would fashion into cool cushion covers or summery sarong skirts. I found mirrored slippers that sold at Scoop for two hundred dollars (’What nonsense!’ my mother screeched when I mentioned this), and which sold here for the equivalent of four dollars. See, there was much to return to Bombay for!

We were home in time for lunch, before the sun became too hatefully hot.

I grew up in this apartment on Warden Road, a nice residential part of the city not far from the sea. The cool of the marble in our entry corridor felt delicious against my bare feet. The apartment took up the whole of the top floor in a seven-storey building. It had once been two three-bedroomed suites but now had been combined into one rather oddly laid-out but grand six-bedroomed home. My grandfather had had the foresight to buy both units when he fled with his young family from Pakistan to Bombay around the time of the partition in 1947. He’d been able to sell his land in our family’s original homeland of Hyderabad Sind, and came across the border on trains piled with other refugees, his pockets filled with old gold coins collected over the decades. With the help of relatives, he’d bought property, set up a jewellery business and raised his family safely away from the chaos over the border.

As we entered my mother reached out to touch the feet of a big stone statue of Lord Ganesh by the entrance, something she did each time she went out and returned home. I always resolved to emulate her, but mostly I forgot.

‘I’d love some tea, Mummy,’ I said as I dumped the flimsy shopping bags in my bedroom. I suddenly craved a steaming hot cup of the rich, cardamom-laden milky chai that Starbucks tries to do authentically.

‘Chotu, chai laikhe ao,’ my mother called out to the family cook, who was busy preparing dhal and pulao and pakodas.

My father was sitting on the burgundy silk settee, reading The Times of India, his legs stretched out over a mirrored coffee table.

‘Heat-wave in New York, it says here,’ he announced, looking up. ‘Why are you leaving so soon? I’m sure the airline can change your booking for tomorrow, maybe postpone it a few days,’ he said.

‘Dad, I need to get back to work, I only took two weeks off. The wedding is over, it was nice, time to go. Plus I’d rather suffer heat stroke in New York than hang around here. You know what I mean?’

I didn’t want to hurt my parents. This was, after all, their home – as it once was mine. I didn’t want to seem dismissive – as if I was now better than all this, as if I had left them behind for what I perceived to be a more worthwhile life. But as much as I wanted to please my parents, I couldn’t stay here a day more than I had to.

I joined my father on the couch and turned to look outside the window. There was never anything other than complete pandemonium on the streets of Bombay. The cars seven floors below honked furiously, futilely, for no reason other than to hear the sound of their horns. Pedestrians darted in and out between vehicles and motorcycles – called ‘scooters’ in these parts – with complete disregard for their lives. They had a fatalism about them: get run over, lose a limb, all meant to be, whatever. Huge billboards painted with the faces of the hot stars of today, Hrithik Roshan and Karisma Kapoor, stood atop rickety buildings. In India, everything looked as if it were on the verge of collapse. I spotted another billboard across the street, advertising a new health club. ‘Open from 5 in the morning until 11 in the night!’ it trumpeted. ‘Come on, get FIT and look COOL!’ The visuals featured what appeared to be a couple of amputated pecs and a hacked-off torso. Fine art in the world of advertising was not a forte of my homeland. But still, this was the new Bombay, one in which women’s magazines advertised condoms, sultry Bollywood love scenes were filmed, barely clothed MTV starlet-veejays and Baywatch bodies ruled the small screen and everyone was having affairs.

And marriages were still arranged.

A navy Mercedes pulled up on the street just outside the building, depositing three well-dressed, polished-looking women – Indian, but obviously not living in Bombay – on the pavement. They made their way into Benzer, a chic store across the way. They scowled at the broken paving stones, littered with cow dung and refuse. Bombay had evidently been their home once too, and now, like me, every time they came back, it became more and more a home they no longer recognized nor resonated with.

While lunch was being prepared, and I was enjoying my chai, my mother was on the phone with her sister Jyoti, Nina’s mother. The newlyweds had gone off honeymooning in southeast Asia, and then they would fly off to London, where they’d be living.

‘Ay, Leela, I miss Nina,’ Jyoti wailed. ‘She’s left the house, she’s no longer my daughter, she belongs to someone else.’

‘Ay, Jyoti,’ my mother consoled her, as if someone had just died. ‘It has to happen for all of us. The girls must get married and leave. Be grateful, your daughter has found a good boy, she’ll be happy, don’t worry. See, I’m still waiting for my Anju to find someone. No other boys came from overseas for the wedding?’

‘What about the Accra fellow?’ Jyoti asked. ‘Maharaj Girdhar called today. He says the boy is very interested. I think you should pursue it.’

‘Hah. Let us see. We’ll talk about it over lunch.’

Chotu, our cook of twenty years, appeared from the kitchen carrying a large stainless steel tray bearing steaming, richly spiced dishes of food. A good Bombay meal was one of my favourite things about coming home. Hot, soft pulao embedded with mung dahl. Spinach smeared around chunks of paneer, soaked in a dozen freshly ground spices. Bite-sized pakodas dipped in mint chutney and eaten with thick white bread. Ulrika, the goddess of New York fitness trainers, would positively pulverize me if she could see me now.

‘Beti,’ my mother said as she ladled out some food onto a plate for my father. ‘The Accra boy is still here. Why don’t you meet him?’

She paused, waiting for my response. I didn’t provide one, so she asked again.

‘So, what do you say?’

The guy hadn’t even crossed my mind since the night of the wedding, I thought guiltily. I was poised to get on a plane the next day, to fly back to New York, my home for the past seven years, and to my job as a fashion publicist. Though I loved my job, and loved living in the city, it wasn’t getting any easier for me there. So many men, but none of them quite what my parents had in mind for me. And because of some weird cultural osmosis that I had unwittingly succumbed to, I felt they weren’t right for me either. I was on the party circuit, hung out at hip restaurants in the city, and because of my job, even went on the occasional junket to Europe. But most of the men I had met were gay, or white, and usually both.

My parents, perversely, thought gay was fine. When I was thirty, my mother had introduced me to a nice Indian boy from a nice Indian family. I had known right away; the red Versace leather trousers gave him away, as did his endearing – but ultimately condemning – interest in my Manolo Blahnik collection. After gay suitor and his mother had left, I voiced my reservations to my mother, who dismissed them with a simple: ‘Once they marry, they change.’

‘I doubt it, Mum,’ I had said. ‘Elton John: case in point.’

Pretty much once a year, every year since I had moved to New York, I’d been hauled back to Bombay for a look-see. All my cousins had done it that way, usually meeting their spouses at a family wedding. It was almost a domino-effect, although I thought it interesting that I was the only female cousin still left standing, with the exception of Namrata, and another, who was only eleven. Even she would probably find a husband before me at the rate all this was going. I had also been told that, at Nina’s wedding, at least five girls had expressed their interest in ‘either one’ of my brothers. Such was the grab-bag nature of the game.

That I had received one expression of interest was in itself of tremendous significance. Bombay, after all, was a matrimonial melting-pot. All a single person need do is show up, make a few calls, pray, seek the advice of astrologers, family priests and professional matchmakers. And then pray some more that these people had some idea what they were doing. And most importantly, as my mother never failed to remind me, it was all about compromise.

From my family’s perspective, this proposal was a big deal. Someone had literally ‘asked for’ me, and it was an honour, any way they looked at it. I had always told them I really wanted to get married. Truly I did. I wanted to slip back into the system. Yet I had been away so long now that often it was like I’d been forgotten by the society I was born into. I realized that when an attractive, eligible man appeared on the scene, I wouldn’t be the first choice because I was living alone in New York, far removed from the matrimonial-minded masses.

I was oddly drawn to the age-old system of arranged marriage – it seemed exotic somehow, noble, and fragile. Observing the tradition would elevate me to the highest ranking on the scale of social conduct; when a girl marries a man her family members select for her it is the ultimate act of piety, and, according to tradition, would bring many, many blessings.

On each of my trips back to Bombay, I secretly hoped that this would be the special, destined journey in which I would find ‘the one’. That here, in the midst of the wedding parties and politics and desperate mothers seeking boys and girls for their offspring, I, too, could find my intended.

On this trip, now, there was a proposal.

But, for God’s sake, he lived in Accra.

‘Beti, it’s not the place, it’s the person,’ my mother said, reading my mind in that most inconvenient way that mothers do. ‘If he’s a good boy, then you’ll be happy anywhere you go.’

Nice thought. But I still wasn’t buying it.

‘What do you think?’ my mother asked my father.

After thirty-five years of marriage, my mother still never addressed her husband by his first name. She had told me when I was very young that wives should refer to their husbands only with a very grand ‘he’. Anything else would be defamatory. ‘Your husband will be your lord, and you must treat him with dignity and respect,’ she had said. I must have been five.

But now, my father was stumped for an answer. He was no longer as involved with my matrimonial affairs as he had been, say, fifteen years ago. In fact, he would commonly say that he had ‘given up’, which hardly inspired hope and confidence in my beleaguered and perpetually single thirty-three-year-old heart.

At last, my father spoke. ‘We should definitely consider it,’ he said, wrapping a floppy brown piece of chapatti around a chunk of paneer. ‘You’re here, so you may as well get the job done. That way, at least your airfare won’t be wasted.’

After lunch, my mother telephoned Maharaj Girdhar.

‘Yes, I’m calling about the Accra boy,’ she said, as if responding to an ad in the Village Voice about a second-hand Volkswagen. She grabbed a piece of paper and pen, and started scribbling.

‘Yes … of course … good … oh, almost thirty-nine? … Very good … Educated … Well-to-do and all … Good … Yes, I’ll talk to my husband and call you … No, Anju is supposed to be leaving tomorrow, but of course if something works out, she’ll stay. Her job in New York is not so important, hah? She must see the boy first, no?’ she said in a conciliatory tone, wanting to please the priest as he, evidently, held the key to my future happiness.

She hung up, and turned back to us.

‘OK, so here are the details. He’s almost thirty-nine, which is a good age. Five foot eight, which is quite a good height, OK not so tall, but then you’re not that tall and you’ll maybe have to stop wearing such high high heels,’ she said. Scanning her notes, she went on. ‘Only son, one sister married, they have their own business, some shops, even a factory. Rich. Parents are nice. He also went to school in America. He travels here and there, I’m sure he’ll take you along.’

She paused, having felt she’d done a sufficiently convincing sales pitch. ‘He seems to have everything. What else do you want?’ she asked, reasonably.

‘Well, it’s just that I have a nice life in New York,’ I began. ‘And I’m sure he’s a decent enough fellow, but I don’t think Accra is the place for me.’

‘Beti, do you want to stay unmarried for ever?’ my mother countered. ‘Just imagine, if you met someone, and you married him, and he lived in a place you don’t mind living in, such as New York or London or Singapore, and then something happened and he had to move to not such a nice place, like maybe even Accra. Are you saying that you wouldn’t go with him? That is what marriage is, sacrifice and compromise.’

‘Yes, I understand, Mummy, but I’m not married to him so the sacrifice thing doesn’t come up. I have the choice right now. You know what I’m saying?’

I looked at my mother’s slowly greying hair, elegantly swept off her smooth and unlined face, the prize feature of which was her regal, haughty nose. She was wearing a polyester kaftan, similar to one of those 1970s-style Gucci djellabas from a few seasons ago, but this one had been made by the family tailor. It was my mother’s preferred choice of stay-at-home clothing.

‘Anju, you can’t have everything in life. You can’t be too hoity-toity. Didn’t Maharaj tell you so many years ago that you have to learn to compromise? Where will you find everything you want in one boy? It’s not possible, beti. You’re already almost thirty-four. Soon, no one will ask for you any more. You must think carefully.’

I was thinking carefully. About waking up to Matt Lauer every morning, about the paraffin manicures and oxygen facials at Bliss, and Saturday afternoons shopping in Nolita. And the parties and fund-raisers. And waiting to see if Paris Hilton and Aerin Lauder would turn up, and what the fabulous ex-Miller girls would wear. And trying every different flavour of Martini, every new designer shoe, and giggling with my girlfriends as I listened to the stories of the boys in their lives. It had taken me some years, but now it was a life I had grown intimately familiar with and happily accustomed to. And, like so many women in my situation, I wanted a man to fit in neatly with it. I wanted him to live the same life, enjoy the same things, look the part. And, simultaneously, I wanted him to be chosen by my parents, sanctioned by the rest of the family. It wasn’t much to ask for, was it?

But I also knew that in the view of my society, a woman was never much of anything until the day she got married. She was always a guest in her parents’ home, they were her temporary caretakers. When the right man came, regardless of where or how he lived, this young, single woman would wrap her life around his. It was not about what she wanted, it was about what he wanted for both of them. Given that view, I remembered how my mother was baffled one time, watching an American TV movie, where a woman left her perfectly nice husband because she said she wanted to ‘find herself’.

‘Such nonsense,’ Mummy had said. ‘He’s not beating her, he’s not doing anything wrong. She wants to leave, for what? Stupid woman.’

My mother just didn’t get it, but there was no reason she should. Her life had been all about sacrifice and compromise, the same virtues she plugged to me every day. My parents met once, and were engaged within five hours, married after two weeks. Together, they created a life that they had helped ease one another into. But they were both twenty when they met, and the word ‘option’ didn’t exist for them. As my mother never failed to remind me, by the time she was my current age, she had been married thirteen years and had had all three of her children.

Yes, I deeply wanted to get married. I associated it with love and commitment and security – plus all the parties and new saris and a trousseau full of pretty dresses. But a family wedding in Bombay was one thing; a lifetime in Accra something else entirely.

‘Mummy, I decided a long time ago that it was going to be G Eight only. You know, developed nations or nothing. Plus, there is the issue of compatibility here. We don’t look compatible.’

My father interjected.

‘What? Is he too short for you?

‘No!’ I said emphatically. ‘Look, there’s got to be a vibe that happens between two people; you know, kind of a connection. You just get it – either it’s there, or it’s not.’

‘Aarey, I don’t know what you’re saying,’ my mother replied.

‘I just want to be happy, Mummy.’

‘Beti,’ she replied, ‘I don’t want you to be happy. I want you to be married.’