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 my mother had called a few days earlier. I listened as my ‘details’ were divulged: age – ‘twenty-nine’, a further reduction; height (five feet four), build (average), complexion (medium). So far, I hardly sounded scintillating or vibrant. No talk was made of preferences, hobbies, interests. Just how old, how tall, how slim, how fair.
‘Is she very Umrican-type?’ the matchmaker asked, when my mother reluctantly let on that I had been ‘working in New York, temporarily, in an office’. ‘I mean to say, can she adjust?’ Rita clarified.
‘She’s a very good girl,’ my mother said. ‘Smart, but homely-type.’ By that, my mother was wanting to drive home the point that I was a stay-at-home kind of girl, the gentle and subservient sort who would subjugate her own needs for the sake of a peaceful household. My mother wasn’t far wrong, either. I was fairly sure my club-hopping, plane-changing days would stop the day I found a groom.
‘She’s living for a short while in Umrica now, but she’s Indian at heart,’ she continued, aware that my ‘living in Umrica’ thing was not just a fall from grace, it was a huge, almighty thud. Men who came to India to find wives generally didn’t want women who had carved out independent lives for themselves away from their families. Mr Accra had chosen to ignore all that because it didn’t seem too important, in the scheme of things. What he had wanted was someone who would marry him, move to his country, and above all spend the rest of her days memorizing the vacuum cleaner manual.
‘We’re looking for a good boy,’ my mother continued. ‘No bad habits.’ That was an oblique reference to cigarettes, over-indulgence in alcohol, extravagant spending and womanizing – a proviso that basically eliminated everyone in my New York circle of friends.
She started scribbling some notes down again, in a small red notebook that had ‘Boys’ marked on the front. Sitting next to her, I saw her write ‘Dubai, 36, own clothing shops, well educated’, Lalit-something-or-another. A father’s name, a mother’s name.
Rita said: ‘He’s a very good boy, I’ve checked everything thoroughly. The boy is not in Bombay now, but if there is someone interesting, he’ll fly down.’
This time, my mother didn’t even consult me. Within an hour, she was on the phone with a friend who had lived in Dubai.
‘Can you make some inquiries, find out if the boy is good? It’s for matrimonial purposes,’ she asserted.
Poor fellow, I thought. He’s probably out having a perfectly nice day, doing whatever they do for fun in the United Arab Emirates. Little did he know that before the end of the day, my family would know enough about him to do a Kitty Kelley.
As it turned out, Lalit had spent six months in jail for forging cheques. My father curtly said, ‘Drop it. We don’t want a criminal son-in-law.’ But my mother thought he was acting too rashly.
‘So? It’s not like he murdered anyone. Plus, after marriage, he’ll change.’
Another week passed. Sunday morning, and I joined my parents in leafing through The Times of India matrimonial pages. My father circled a couple of interesting prospects: ‘Overseas Indian (Sindhi) male in mid-thirties seeking overseas Indian female of same caste. Must be at least 5′3″, slim, medium complexion, good nature.’
My mother called the number on the bottom of the ad. ‘Er, yes, hello, I’m calling about the boy in today’s paper.’
A fleeting pang of guilt struck me. Going on thirty-four, I couldn’t even find a mate on my own, and my mother was spending her Sunday mornings in the twilight of her life on the phone with the families of strange men.
‘Yes, the girl is now here … We’re local people, but she’s living temporarily in New York, working in an office there … Yes, she’s the right height … How old is the boy? … Hah, thirty-five, very good. And where does the boy live?’ And so continued a barrage of questions to the woman on the other end, the sister of the boy in question.
‘Hah, OK, yes,’ she said, starting to scribble. Suddenly, she stopped writing, and quickly said: ‘Hah, OK, OK, thank you, I’ll talk to my daughter and phone you back,’ before hanging up.
‘So?’ my father asked, looking up from the paper.
‘He lives in Indonesia,’ my mother said. ‘He owns a small videotape copying shop, you know, people bring in their tapes and he has a lot of VCRs and he copies them.’ She looked over at me. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested.’
But then came something far more promising. A prospect from Spain. Madrid actually. Mmm, I thought. Romantic and cosmopolitan. The home of Loewe, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and a stately King and Queen, and tapas and sangria. And at least a place where an electricity generator was not a mandatory household appliance.
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