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
