‘You go, Mum,’ I chimed in, smiling. I felt better now, knowing that my mother didn’t chastise me – not in public, at least. At that moment, the phone rang. It was Sheryl, calling from New York.
‘How’s it all going over there? Married yet? Should I be booking airline tickets, buying the dress? Will you seat me next to someone cute?’ she asked. She always spoke this way, always sounding breathless, rushed and enthused.
‘Some guy from Spain who seemed interesting turned out to be a flake because he thought I was too independent. Me! I can’t even find a man without my parents helping me. How independent is that?’
‘Look,’ said Sheryl. ‘He probably just wants some submissive twelve-year-old. It’s his prerogative, you know. It’s like he went into Henri Bendel, saw a nice sweater, but it’s been there for a while, marked down, on sale. So maybe he takes a look at it, puts it down, moves on to something else. Something in the new arrivals section. It’s nothing personal. He just doesn’t want that particular sweater.’
I could always trust Sheryl to reduce everything to a shopping expedition.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘you think you’ve got problems. I had a blind date last night, a fellow called Jerome my cousin set me up with. The date was fine, but when he dropped me home, he wanted to come up and use the toilet. After he left, I went in there and he had peed all over the place, on the floor, splashed around the toilet bowl. What do you think is the likelihood of me wanting to go out with someone who can’t even pee straight?’
‘I don’t know, Sheryl,’ I said. ‘But I still think my dilemma is far worse than yours. I was rejected by a man before he even met me. Beat that.’
The scriptures forbid the sacrifice of female animals, but in the case of human beings, sacrificing females gives the greatest satisfaction.
Chaturanga by Rabindranath Tagore
‘I’m not understanding it,’ my father said, putting down his newspaper and turning to look at my mother. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Anju. She’s a pleasant enough girl, quite attractive. I’m not understanding how she’s so unable to find a good boy.’
My mother turned her attention away from the Hindi comedy show – a rip-off of The Brady Bunch – that she was watching on Zee TV.
‘It’s God’s way. We have done our best, and all now is in God’s hand.’
I was in my bedroom, half reading an old Wodehouse book I had found lying around, in a failed bid to distract myself. All day long, I had only been able to think of my life in New York. The free concerts in Central Park would be starting soon, and the men’s shows for fashion week would be under way in a few weeks. I had called Marion this morning and asked for an indefinite leave of absence. Professionally, it was the most illogical thing to do. But I really did feel as if I had little choice if I was going to see this thing through.
‘I need to show my parents that I’m making an effort,’ I had told my boss. Yes, I was tearful, anxious, bored, desperate – a lethal combination sure to drive all the boys away. And yes, I wanted to return to my little apartment on the Upper West Side, to my girlie dinners alfresco, to finding clever ways to describe a new handbag collection in a press release, to my Sex and the City existence – minus the sex.
I loved my life there.
But I loved my parents more.
‘Look, Marion, I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I think I need to give it a fair shot. I had no idea when I left New York to come here for my cousin’s wedding that I’d end up staying longer than two weeks, but that’s what’s happened, so I have to deal with it.’
‘Are you sure you’re OK with what you’re doing?’ Marion asked, a concerned tone in her voice. Fortunately for me, my boss was a sympathetic sort, and the complete antithesis of a fashion doyenne. She was a former rebirther turned PR guru who spent most of her time counselling the six neurotic female publicists and one hyper-neurotic gay male one she employed. She served us camomile tea and vegan cookies when we were having a bad day, hair-related or otherwise.
‘Marion, I really appreciate you being this understanding. Not a lot of bosses would let their staff have some time off to find a husband.’
She laughed. ‘Honey, I’m not that altruistic. I’m just dying to come to an Indian wedding. So hurry up and get on with it. And by the way, I’m not that great a boss. I’m giving you leave, all right, but it’s unpaid – we’re not exactly Fortune Five Hundred.’
In August, I was turning thirty-four. As far as my community was concerned, I was already a write-off. As far as everyone else saw it, I was always going to be there, still single. There were some girls that all the boys wanted to marry, but I, sadly, wasn’t one of them. Marion told me once that it was better to be divorced at thirty-five than never married at all. At least that one failed marriage proved some capacity for entering the union, if not actually the ability to sustain it.
‘What do you mean?’ I had responded to Sheryl, my first real friend in New York, during our first real lunch together. Sheryl had asked what ‘defined’ me. We were both twenty-seven.
‘I mean just that. What defines you? What makes you you? What’s your contribution to the world? How do you see yourself?’
These were very Sheryl questions. She was a kick-boxing devotee who, in her time away from her financial analyst job, studied the Kabbalah and took opera-singing and rock-climbing lessons. She saw life as one giant lab experiment that could explode at any time, but felt that was half the fun of it.
‘Nothing defines me, Sheryl. I’m a very ordinary Indian girl. The only way I managed to get to this country was because my father thought it would be a good way for me to meet boys. So maybe that’s what defines me. That was what it was always about, what it’s still about. Getting married. You know, from the time I was seven or so, my aunt Jyoti insisted that my mother slap a homemade concoction on my face, chickpea flour mixed with lemon juice. It makes you white, you know.’
Sheryl narrowed her eyes.
‘So, what went wrong?’ she asked, taking in my brown complexion.
‘Oh, I stopped using it. It just got to be a drag, a bit smelly and it stung. My aunt blames that for my lack of proposals. She says nobody wants a dark wife.
‘You know how little girls dream of what they want to be when they grow up – an air-hostess, a movie star, a queen?’ I continued. ‘I used to tell my mother what my dreams were. I wanted to be a social worker, or a manicurist, I couldn’t decide. I saw them both as helping people. But my mother only said, “First get married, then do what you want.” I think I was twelve.
‘It wasn’t just me though. There was a big bunch of us girls, cousins and friends and neighbours’ children, all the same age, and we went to birthday parties and ate jam sandwiches and we used to only talk about the kind of men we would marry. My best friend from school, Indu, she even had a name for her dream husband. Suresh. She liked that name. She said he would have his hair parted down the middle, and that he would be taller than her, and that she would get lots of diamonds on her wedding day, and also a big house and a fancy car. That’s how she saw her life.’
‘Did she get that?’
‘Yup. At seventeen. A proposal that came through her aunt. They got engaged after talking for an hour in the lobby of the President Hotel, surrounded by both sets of parents. He was everything Indu said she would find, except his name was