being a delightfully charming dream-date. And walking next to me was a man who only wanted to marry me because he needed to supplement his domestic task force.
‘My mummy tells me your work in Umrica is to do with fashion,’ he continued. ‘Do you like my trousers?’ He stopped, lifted up one leg like he was a pooch about to pee, and pointed out the little embossed flowers. ‘They are the latest thing,’ he said proudly.
At some point, I phased out of the conversation, I’ll admit.
‘… and then on Sundays I take my mother to the market … we have three maids and a cook, but they have to be supervised, so it’s better we do the vegetable shopping ourselves … you can’t trust the natives, you give them money to buy aubergine, and they buy cigarettes instead and then say the money was stolen. Ridiculous! My mother sometimes doesn’t feel like going to the market, you know, she’s getting a little old now, so of course that will be a job for you. Then, every four Mondays, there’s a picnic with all their friends, and I take them there. Do you like picnics? But sometimes it’s too hot so we have to hold it in somebody’s house. We play bingo. Do you play bingo?’
‘When I’m not at a Tae-bo class, sure,’ I replied. Puran just looked puzzled, and continued nattering on about his life in Accra – how he came home for lunch, but on the days he didn’t, a ‘tiffin’ had to be sent to him at his office. His father was more or less retired now, so he had to run the business by himself, and it could be stressful, so it was time he found a wife. He needed someone he could come home to and who would pour him a whisky soda – although she wasn’t allowed to drink with him, because he thought it was very bad for a woman to consume alcohol.
‘And I like getting massage, do you know how to give massage?’
And on and on he went, not once asking me what I saw for my own life. Even if he had, I still wouldn’t have wanted to marry him, but at least he wouldn’t have come across as so ridiculously archaic. I didn’t expect him to peer into my soul, but a smidgen of polite interest would have been nice. At least I hadn’t deluded myself, as I had done so many times before, into thinking this could be Mr Right. If nothing else, this was just another story to regale the girls with when I finally got home. And they thought they had had bad dates.
‘We’d better go back now, no?’ I said to him, as we made our fifteenth circuit around the Taj lobby. He looked happy and satisfied, that perhaps after years of interviewing, he might just have found the right candidate.
‘Oh my God!’ I said to my parents, as soon as we were safely back in our car. ‘What was that? Who was that? What were you thinking?’
‘So that means you didn’t like him, Anju?’ my mother asked, innocently.
‘Like him? Like him? What was there to like?’
‘He didn’t seem that bad,’ said my father. ‘And they’re interested.’
Anil, who was sitting in the front passenger seat grinning, finally spoke.
‘Yeah, they were already talking wedding dates while you guys went off for your romantic stroll,’ he said. ‘They want to do it before they fly back to Accra, so I guess in the next couple of weeks. You’d better start getting your stuff together, didi, you’re going to be married!’ he said.
‘Mum!’ I pleaded. ‘Come on!’
‘If you’re not interested, you’re not interested,’ she said, resignedly. ‘I’ll just tell them when they phone tomorrow. Of course, they’ll tell Maharaj Girdhar that you’re fussy, and then he won’t call us if there are other boys, because he’ll think you’ve become too hoity-toity, but what can we do? You’re saying no, we have to say no.’
‘Yes but, Mum, you know me. Did you honestly think that I’d be into someone like that. Honestly?’
‘But, beti, look at your age! You’re not twenty-two any more. You’re not going to get proposals like Nina and Namrata. There aren’t so many boys still unmarried who are older than you. Maybe he’s not perfect, but at least he’s like you. Elderly-type.’
As we all anticipated, the call came the next day. Maharaj Girdhar phoned to inform us that ‘the boy’s side says yes’. It was a triumphant pronouncement – he had already no doubt decided on how he would spend his finder’s fee. But more than that, he thought himself brilliant and clever for at last having found someone for me, that wayward girl who had left her family in Bombay and gone to live in Umrica, all alone. This would no doubt elevate his status within the religious-social circles in which he slithered.
It fell upon my mother to tell him otherwise. ‘Sorry, Maharaj, but he’s not for us,’ she said quietly.
‘But why?’ the priest retaliated, sounding horrified, as if I had just turned down the hand of George Clooney. ‘The boy is so good, everything is so good. So many girls were interested in him. See, they chose your daughter! How can you say no?’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said after she had put the phone down. ‘But you know it would never have worked.’
‘Really Anju,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t know what you’re looking for.’
Later that afternoon, Aunt Jyoti sent over a jar of cream. Someone at the wedding had pointed out that I ‘had nice features, but was a little on the dark side’. Being fair-skinned was as important a criterion as having all one’s limbs intact. Ordinarily, my complexion could be described as ‘milky chai’. But perhaps I hadn’t been using my sunscreen very faithfully: I had to concede it was now more like a double espresso. Fairness indicated fragility, docility, prettiness. A girl could be cock-eyed, buck-toothed and have had a botched rhinoplasty, but if she were fair, she was considered a beauty in the league of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
So I sat on my bed, holding a jumbo-sized tube of ‘Promise of Fairness’. There were no ingredients listed on the container, but I had read somewhere about how the product was found to contain a high concentration of mercury. I called my aunt to inform her of this, and to tell her that if I used it, I would probably contract some ghastly skin disease like melanoma.
Aunt Jyoti quickly agreed. ‘Yes, better not,’ she said. ‘If something goes wrong with your face, who will marry you?’
A slight depression fell over me as evening descended. It was another scorching night, and I was lying on my bed listening to vintage Toni Braxton on my CD player. I felt an odd mélange of melancholy and confusion. No return date finalized for New York, and not a lot to do here in the aftermath of the chaos of Nina’s wedding. It was just a lot of waiting around, hoping – or at least my mother was – that the phone would ring with another offer.
So I hopped across the street to the neighbourhood internet café – in reality a bunch of computers and a coffee-maker stuck into an old garage. I passed a trio of fifteen-year-old boys downloading porn, and settled in front of an Acer to check my emails. There were thirty-five messages, mostly from my friends in New York who were filling me in on their holiday plans. Sheryl was going down the Amazon. Marion was thinking the Pyramids. Erin was going to stay close, in the Hamptons.
‘But you, sweetie, are having the most unique experience of all!’ Sheryl wrote. ‘A literal, far-reaching, no-stones-unturned quest for a husband! So brave! So Indiana Jones!’
At home an hour later, the phone rang. It was Rita Mehta, a professional matchmaker whom
