Arranged Marriage
Back around the time that I had completed my MA, I had finished reading all the books I could possibly lay my hands on, and had watched most of the movies in the eight cinema theatres helpfully located around Maharaja’s College, where I was a student. We didn’t have compulsory attendance, and our literature teachers were both compassionate and understanding: and all the movie theatres were within walking distance of the college. Bunking classes was a universal and discreetly encouraged phenomenon.
So then I thought it would be a good thing to get married. You never know, you know.
I told my mother and she was shocked to the depths of her being, not to mention scandalised and speechless. She looked at me speechlessly and then austerely and it was a teacher’s look. We all know what that means, don’t we? But well, I was used to that, too, and she felt that maybe I was in earnest after all, and she scanned my face carefully to see whether I had, you know, someone IN MIND. I looked back at her with limpid innocence, and she knew that I probably didn’t.
So then, things began rolling, and this gentleman is in the Gulf, and sends us a picture someone took of him, in which he looks like a very tiny midget, and a very complacent one at that. I expressed my dissatisfaction at his lack of inches to my very vocal aunt, my mother’s eldest sister. She stared at me, fury gathering on her face, and uttered, ‘So?’ Then she told me a lot of things in very colourful language that I wouldn’t care to repeat here. It felt like I was being buffeted by a storm, but I stood there, and listened very meekly to her tirade, then gave her a big hug, which silenced her.
So this man’s mother came to meet me, and she liked me, and thought her son would like me, too. Later, whenever she was mad at me, she would claim that I had hypnotised her with my smile, otherwise she would have looked for someone more amenable and meek. I told her I was amenable and meek, but for some reason she didn’t believe me.
Then the date was fixed and stuff, and three days before the date of the marriage, the man I was to live with, touches down in Kerala: my father goes to the airport to receive him, and then comes back alone, grinning from ear to ear.
I am standing at the door with bated breath. “He is tall,” he says, ‘very tall,” and he was actually smiling. My father didn’t smile much in those days, he was both hot tempered and quick tempered, and when he was angry, the hair on his head, thick and wavy, also stood up in wrath, which was not a very comforting sight when he used to sit down to teach me Math. He also walked very, very fast: my grandmother, his mother, used to say, “ We know when Sukumaran is coming: all the hens and chicken in the yard begin to flap around and run.”
I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.
The rest, as they say, is history, and matter for another day.
